By Jesse Ellison
Photos by Tara Rice
From our April 2025 Home & Garden issue
Lynn Karlin seems to hardly ever sit down. On a late-fall afternoon in the whitewashed photography studio behind her Belfast home, she was up and down, making coffee and tea, offering crackers and cookies. She moved in and out of a prop room and the large sun-drenched space where she shoots still lifes. She darted between a table where she’d recently staged a portrait of pastel-colored pumpkins and striped squashes atop peeling wooden pedestals and the computer where she edits images. And she reached into shelves, pulling out portfolios, magazine boxes, and stacks and stacks of prints. It’s an impressive archive, amassed over more than a half century, that begins with shots of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and fashion models in New York, catalogs a farming stint down east and two decades spent immortalizing some of Maine’s most lavish gardens, diverges into aviation and line-dancing hobbies, and somehow all leads up to her current work: fine-art flower, fruit, and vegetable studies that recall the masterworks of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters.
Karlin’s portraits encompass Bruegelesque bouquets of poppies, tulips, and lilacs spilling from pitchers and urns as well as tables laden with halved pomegranates and melons, cracked-open nuts, and piles of flowers that conjure the sumptuous, old-world tableaus of Clara Peeters. Other images are starker: sinewy garlic scapes tracing loop-de-loops over an inky backdrop, a single plump pear glowing golden atop a graying wooden block. Some assume anthropomorphic qualities: squash blossoms drooping dramatically on a galvanized metal tray, as if exhausted, an ear of corn standing upright on a pedestal, its husk partially unfurled like arms trying to maintain balance, and tall clusters of oyster mushrooms springing from crude wooden perches like Medusa’s snaky hair.
Jana Halwick, owner of Camden’s Carver Hill Gallery, sees Karlin’s fashion background in her still lifes. “They’re almost animated,” says Halwick, who booked Karlin’s first solo show in 2010. “Like an arm bending a certain way, her flowers just lean in a certain way. Or there’s this beautiful petal that you can almost see through. She’s capturing translucence. It’s like a diaphanous dress.” One image, titled Radicchio Disrobing, depicts a bulbous, cream-colored vegetable splotched with deep purple. Its outermost leaves have wilted, draping in silk-like folds over the edges of a wooden pedestal. One leaf lies limp on the floor. The still life came together after Karlin walked away from it, having tried arranging the fresh radicchio in various poses, none of them seeming quite right. “It needed something to give it life,” Karlin says. “So I let it go and forgot about it for a day or two. When I went back, it looked like it was disrobing. And that one piece fell to the table and it was just perfect.”
Karlin produce shopping at Chase’s Daily and in her studio, in Belfast.
Karlin’s images have been exhibited all over the world, and she has racked up numerous accolades, including grants from the Maine Arts Commission and awards from the prestigious Prix de la Photographie, Paris. Halwick believes the response stems from Karlin’s approach to her subject matter. “Artists have painted still-life floral arrangements for centuries, but seeing a photographer doing it the way she’s doing it, she’s showing such reverence for her arrangements.”
“The way flowers look, the way vegetables look, she treats them like they’re treasures,” says Brooksville organic-gardening author Barbara Damrosch, who’s Karlin’s longtime friend and former neighbor. “The beauty of a vegetable has a lot of connection to its healthiness — how it’s grown and also how it’s treated. She’s bringing out the best in them.”
When we met last year, Karlin, who is 76 and sports a halo of wavy grayish-black hair and cherry-red cat-eye glasses, showed me a black-and-white snapshot of herself at age 10 or so, pinned to a bulletin board in her studio. Leaning against the trunk of an old Dodge in New York City’s Bayside neighborhood, where she grew up, her hair in two thick braids and her head tilted to the side, she stares straight at the camera and looks absolutely sure of herself. In her hands is a 1950s Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash camera that she also keeps in her studio. Neither Karlin nor her mother remembers where the camera came from, but both say Karlin was almost never without it or some other model from that point on.
Karlin studied photography in high school and at New York’s Pratt Institute, where she set up a darkroom in her dormitory closet. After graduating from Pratt, in 1970, she worked as a photography assistant, took on freelance assignments, and spent month-long stints picking fruit on a kibbutz in Israel. In 1975, she heard from a friend that Women’s Wear Daily was looking to hire its first female staff photographer. Karlin landed the job, which involved a lot of standing on street corners taking candid shots of fashionable New Yorkers. Two weeks in, she and a reporter from the publication were outside chatting about who would be the biggest celebrity get. Jackie Kennedy Onassis, they agreed. Shortly after, they popped into a burger joint for lunch and there was Kennedy Onassis at the counter, eating a hamburger and reading Rolling Stone. Karlin crawled behind the counter to get the shot and it ran on the cover the next day.
A week or so later, Newsweek published a story about the photograph. “In her second week as Women’s Wear Daily’s first woman photographer, 26-year-old Lynn Karlin scored a coup that any of her shutter-happy male colleagues might envy,” the piece begins. Indeed, one of her male colleagues was so envious, he misaligned the film in her camera before she headed off to shoot her first fashion show. Not a single image turned out. Still, Karlin says the years she spent at Women’s Wear Daily were invaluable. “Because of the variety of subjects I shot and because I had to be on my feet all day and come back with results, there were no excuses,” she says. “You had to get the picture and you had to be fast.”
In one of Karlin’s portfolios from those years are tear sheets from a feature on tall ships. “For that one, I had to climb to the top of the mast,” she says. Seeking to expand her photographic range, Karlin left Women’s Wear Daily in 1978 and began freelancing for New York, House Beautiful, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She shot a series on celebrities with their cats for New York and one on celebrities with their dogs for Ladies Home Journal. But when a writer approached her about collaborating on a book featuring her star-and-pet portraits, she declined, saying she didn’t want to be typecast.
Since her time on the kibbutz, Karlin had nursed fantasies about rural living. So in the summer of 1982, when a friend from the kibbutz invited her to join him on a visit to the Brooksville farm owned by pioneering back-to-the-landers Helen and Scott Nearing, she jumped at the chance. When they reached the Nearings’ road, they pulled over to purchase vegetables from a stand. “And there was this good-looking single man standing at the top of the driveway,” Karlin says. He was Stanley Joseph, owner of the Nearings’ 22-acre former property, Forest Farm. “He was looking for a New York woman,” Karlin says. “He wanted the sophistication of a city woman, but also a farm woman, and I fit the bill for both. He was about to put a personal ad in the Village Voice, then I showed up in his driveway.”
Karlin moved to the farm the following summer and married Joseph a few years later. The two grew vegetables and flowers that Karlin dried and turned into wreaths, built a thatched-roof sauna on an island in the middle of a hand-dug pond, baked bread, and made baskets and rhubarb wine. Karlin photographed their projects, took up line dancing, and got her pilot’s license. Sometimes, she borrowed a friend’s plane to deliver vegetables to the couple’s island clients. In 1991, Karlin and Joseph documented their rural adventures in Maine Farm: A Year of Country Life. In the foreword, Helen Nearing contrasted her and Scott’s “staid, systematic, scheduled” approach to farming, which included “little frolicking,” with Karlin and Joseph’s “flair for the fantastic and the photographic. They heartily enjoy life together on the farm and keep it flourishing in food and flower products.”
In 1992, though, Karlin and Joseph divorced. “Two strong personalities,” Karlin says. She moved to a camp on the Passagassawakeag River, in Belfast, near the two-seater plane she’d purchased and kept at a local hangar. Three years later, Joseph died by suicide. “Everybody said, ‘It looked like the ideal life on the farm,’ so they wondered why it happened,” Karlin told me. But Joseph was prone to depression, “and he was kind of in hiding.” She paused and shook her head. “Still, it was spring. He had so much to look forward to. He had plants that were doing well. He had a dog.” These days, Karlin returns to Brooksville frequently to visit the current owner of Forest Farm, who has become a friend, and her old friends Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman, famed back-to-the-landers in their own right, who operate a farm on former Nearing land.
While living on the farm, Karlin began photographing Maine gardens for magazines like Country Living, Coastal Living, and Better Homes and Gardens. She continued that work after relocating to Belfast, and her extensive garden photography is collected in a trio of coffee-table books published in the aughts. When she wasn’t out in the field or editing images, she taught line- and ballroom-dance classes and, in 1994, she met her current partner, Barry Way, who was one of her students. A photograph from their early courtship shows them grinning wildly in Western-style shirts and cowboy hats.
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Karlin’s magazine work dried up and she began contemplating a career shift. “I started thinking, I’m getting older, it’s time for me to do something for myself,” she says. One day at the Belfast Farmers’ Market, she picked up a cauliflower with twisty, uncut leaves that reminded her of the work of turn-of-the-century English photographer Charles Jones, who isolated vegetables, fruits, and flowers on neutral backdrops, like studio portraits. “I brought it home and thought, what am I going to do with it?” Karlin says. “I walked around the house, then I put it on a pedestal and the light was coming in from the east and I said, ‘I think I’m on to something. I’ll look for more vegetables.’”
She photographed still lifes in her kitchen for nearly a decade, cleaning everything up each evening so she and Way could make dinner. In 2019, they built a 600-square-foot studio with floor-to-ceiling glass doors, like the kitchen has. At one end, a prop room is stocked with paper, fabric, and metal backdrops, wooden and cement pedestals, battered wooden cutting boards, mottled metal trays, and peeling tin-ceiling tiles Karlin has picked up at junk and antiques shops over the years. She captures her subjects in natural light, often employing a reflector, and tries out different backdrops and props and makes minute adjustments until an arrangement feels just right. “Her technical skill is phenomenal,” gallery owner Halwick says.
From left: a selection of Karlin’s works featuring squash blossoms, a ripe pear, Tongue of Fire beans, and garlic scapes. Photos by Lynn Karlin
Karlin’s work follows the rhythm of the seasons, much like a farmer’s. She haunts the Belfast Farmers’ Market, the United Farmers Market of Maine, and Chase’s Daily produce shop, purchasing greenhouse tulips in February, then dandelions, fiddlehead ferns, asparagus, turnips, and radishes in the spring. Summer delivers her favorites: eggplants, cauliflowers, garlic scapes, peas, peonies, lilacs, and roses. When fall arrives, she shoots root vegetables and squashes for as long as she can. In winter, she turns to household objects, capturing, say, a jumble of antique spoons on a patinaed silver tray or a row of shapely ceramic vessels against a moody blue-gray metal backdrop.
Recently, Karlin placed the snapshot of herself as a child with her camera in a shallow porcelain cup and photographed it on the scratched wooden tabletop she’s been using for years. The snapshot tilts to the left in its ill-fitting container, like Karlin’s head in the old photo. She called the image “Portrait of a Lifelong Photographer.” It won the self-portrait category in this year’s Julia Margaret Cameron Awards for women photographers and will be on display in Barcelona for two weeks in December. But it was also just for herself.
