Home » Interviews » Lynne Buchanan: Photographer, Writer, Environmental Activist

Lynne Buchanan: Photographer, Writer, Environmental Activist

Introduction to Lynne Buchanan. 0:41 sec. Interview: Raymond Elman. Camera: Lee Skye. Videoography & Production: Melanie Prieto. Recorded: 11/23/2019, Miami Book Fair.

LYNNE BUCHANAN, a former longtime Florida resident, is a photographer and writer currently based in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work is focused on raising awareness about changing ecologies due to human impact and climate change. Her passion for water began as a child growing up in Sarasota, where she frequented the beaches and swam and boated in Sarasota Bay. The waterways of her youth were teeming with life and seemed to possess the magical properties of Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth that she learned about in school. After a 22-year hiatus during which she lived, worked and raised a family in the northeast, she returned to Florida and discovered that the waterways she remembered had been altered and were suffering. With a camera as her tool, she recorded these changes and her emotional response to the depredation and the fragile beauty still remaining in many areas. Thus this project was born. A large body of this work was shown at the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, Florida in 2016. The exhibition title was Changing Waters: The Human Impact on Florida’s Aquatic Systems. Her work is both artistic and scientifically oriented.

Lynne Buchanan’s award-winning photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Brickworks Gallery, Atlanta, CENTER, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, 516 Arts, Albuquerque, The Griffin Museum, Winchester, the Robert Anderson Gallery, Denver, CO, the South Florida Museum, Bradenton, and South x Southeast Photo Gallery, Molina, Georgia, among others. Lynne holds an M. A. in art history/museum studies from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., a B. A. in art history from New College in Sarasota, Florida, and an M. A. in creative writing from the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her website, www.lynnebuchanan.com, features her photographs and environmental writing. Lynne is available for speaking engagements and prints of many images from the book are available for exhibition. A large body of this work was shown at the South Florida Museum in 2016. An exhibition PDF is available upon request.

The videos below are organized by topic and run between 30 seconds and 4 minutes. Click on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.

EXPOSURE TO BROAD INFLUENCES: 0:39 sec.

Where did you grow up and what was your first awareness of art of any discipline?

SEIZES OPPORTUNITIES: 0:29 sec.

What was your motivation for getting into photography?

SELF-CONFIDENCE: 0:50 sec.

What year did you start to seriously pursue photography?

EXPOSURE TO BROAD INFLUENCES: 1:04 min.

How do you balance your environmental mission with being artistically creative?

UNDERSTANDS THE AUDIENCE’S PERSPECTIVE: 1:37 min.

How do you engage Climate Change deniers with your content and try to change minds?

CRITICAL THINKING: 1:20 min.

There are many specific water related issues — micro plastics, aquifer intrusion, algae blooms, sea level rise, etc. Does your work encompass all issues, or are you focused on a few?

EMPATHY: 1:00 min.