Anna Thorne (American, b. 1994) is an award-winning artist currently living in New York City whose art monumentalizes moments of everyday life, often through the form of abstraction. Her work is strongly inspired by the light she witnessed during a near-death experience she survived in her early twenties. Thorne has most notably pioneered the use of lenticular technology with fine art photography in her series Luminous Visions (2021-), expanding both the theoretical nature and experiential relationship of photography. Thorne’s art and writing on photography has been published and exhibited both nationally and internationally.
I wish to speak without words, that is why I’m a photographer. There is a whole world of communication that happens non-linguistically: gut feelings, a strange sense of familiarity, the experience of presence, the eyes of love, so much goes unsaid than what is said. But words are concrete, words are digestible, while the nonverbal realm is abstract and gives you no promises. It is a way of feeling through life, becoming immersed within the invisible realm of life that surrounds each of us. It is in the realm of silent understandings that I feel most familiar with. - Anna Thorne
Her work has been published in See-Zeen, the Academic Journal of Postdigital Science and Education, Photographer’s Forum and Halation Magazine, among others. Thorne held a virtual solo show with Gallery Gray in the spring of 2022 and her photographs have been exhibited at the Snite Museum of Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Millepiani (Italy), Kaiser Gallery, the Orlando Public Library, the News Journal Center (Daytona Beach, Florida) and the Orlando Science Center, among others. Her work is in the collection of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Thorne received her M.F.A. in Studio Arts at the University of Notre Dame in 2021 on a full tuition waiver where she also worked as a Photography Instructor. Her thesis series Luminous Visions was exhibited at the Snite Museum of Art in 2021 and was awarded the Graduate Student Research Award through the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. Subsequently, Thorne’s thesis paper ‘Luminous Visions: Expanding Awareness Through the Undisclosed Lenticular Photograph’ was published by the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame.
The following is an excerpt from Thorne’s Master’s Thesis, Luminous Visions: Expanding Awareness through the Undisclosed Lenticular Photograph, 2021.
My decision to focus on natural light as my primary subject matter arose from a particular experience I had several years ago commonly referred to as a Near Death Experience. In this experience I lost awareness of my body, sense of identity and external surroundings. Time, meaning, thought and emotion all ceased. Surrounded by complete darkness, the only observable object was a single bright light. This light of absolute clarity consumed my awareness and crystallized my life's mission to imbue a meditative state of presence into daily life.
Presence is something we each experience and develop in different ways. Less dependent on a specific activity, presence is a state of full involvement with the moment; for the cook it is cooking, for the dancer it is dancing, for the reader it is reading. Presence is about becoming more mindful of the moment. While my work is about practicing presence through visual perception, we are by no means restricted to this singular activity. We can develop presence through an endless array of daily activities.
I discovered natural light to be the perfect subject matter for promoting presence through photography as light is one of the most ordinary yet elusive visuals. Working with natural light in my own interior space gave me room to discover the nuances of passing light I had not noticed before. The process of photographing helps me slow down and tune into the present moment, permitting me to re-see the world without the interference of thought to cloud my perception. Natural light is in a constant state of change, ever available as a visual aid to slow down our minds. While my work is also self aware of its historical implications in evolving the nature of the photographic object, my most sincere hope is for my work to bring us more fully into a present state of being.