Jan Meissner

Jan Meissner, a New York Photographer. Her photographs are simply painterly. They’re contemporary homages to early Renaissance paintings and frescoes albeit with the aid of a very modern, mechanical and electronic instrument rather than brushes, oils and tincture. They are very often simple flat-on images. Much like many early Renaissance paintings. Yet each person or facade or object is lovingly painted with light or shadow. As a result, her colors are rich, full of texture, making you want to take it all in. Jan terms it the special balance between ‘luminosity’ and ‘density’. However, there is a great difference between Jan’s inspiration from early Renaissance art and her ‘photographic paintings’. While the old masters often worked with allegory and metaphors, Jan’s work is about capturing a slice of life. It’s like comparing traditional writing that has a beginning, middle and end to alternative modern writing where you start from any chapter and not necessarily from the beginning. She emphasizes the ‘slice of life’ by the way many of her subjects are framed. People and animals often purposefully sit at the edge of the frame or are cut in action, as if to say, they are part of a continuum of life.

While starting in the confines of traditional street photography, Jan has since branched out into the world of fine art. Like a true artist, her complex and multiple exposure work push far beyond the specific boundaries of street photography by establishing new interpretations and new ideas of what it means to shoot the street.