Anna Thorne (American, b. 1994) is an award-winning artist currently living in New York City. From abstractions of light to landscapes and city views, Thorne’s work is a visual homage to the silent beauty underpinning the fabric of daily life. Her work has been exhibited and published 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.”
Thorne’s art and writing on photography has been published and exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her work has been published in Vostok, 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.
“My decision to photograph natural light 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 the work also adds to the evolution of historical conventions in photography, my most sincere hope is for this work to bring us more fully into a present state of being.”
