Experimental 1970s — Lynn and Friends

These photographs belong to a different register than Marsico's industrial and documentary work — and yet they share the same unflinching attentiveness to the people in front of his lens.

Made during the 1970s and printed in dye transfer, they are portraits of intimacy and liberation: his wife Lynn, and the friends who moved through their lives during those years, photographed with the openness that defined a generation shaped by the 1960s. That decade had loosened something in the culture, in the body, in the relationship between photographer and subject and these images carry that freedom without apology or self-consciousness. They are not provocations so much as honest records of how certain people chose to live and be seen.

Lynn has been Marsico's partner for 52 years. Her presence in these photographs is neither incidental nor decorative. She is a collaborator, a subject who met the camera on her own terms, and her willingness to be seen so directly gives the work its particular emotional weight.

Printed by hand in dye transfer, a process that renders skin tone and ambient light with a warmth no other medium matches, these images have an intimacy that the process itself seems to have been made for.

The archive is a partial representation of over 50 years of photography from early environmental observations and provocative curiosities in the 1970s to travel photo-journalism in the the 1980s and 1990s to social and political photo-essays from the start of the century. The actual photographs have all been self-printed starting in the 1970s with dye-transfer prints to present day archival pigmented prints.