Lynn Davis American, b. born 1944

Lynn Davis is an acclaimed American photographer known for her monumental, meditative black-and-white images that explore themes of scale, time, and spiritual presence. A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Davis began her career in portraiture and was closely associated with Robert Mapplethorpe early on, but shifted her focus in the 1980s to large-format landscape and architectural photography.

Her work captures austere, timeless subjects—icebergs in Greenland, ancient monuments in Asia, and sacred sites around the world—with a minimalist precision and clarity that evokes both the sublime and the eternal. Davis’s stark, serene compositions often emphasize human absence, inviting quiet reflection on history, nature, and permanence.

Davis has exhibited internationally, and her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, among others. She lives and works in Hudson, New York, and remains one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary photography.