Published by Radius Books. Introduction by Deborah Willis. Poem by Billy Collins. Text by Russell Lord.
Linda Foard Roberts: Passage is a compilation of five series, created over the past ten years, by North Carolina–based photographer Linda Foard Roberts. Roberts works in enduring genres—landscape, portrait and still life—and photographs her 21st-century surroundings using 4x5”, 5x7” and 8x10” cameras and vintage lenses, some over 100 years old. The result is seemingly eternal, timeless, black-and-white photography that exploits the peculiar ability of the camera to produce images that are both extremely present and yet suspended in time. Over the past decade, Roberts has been exploring the inevitable movement of time in life, focusing on memory and the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The photographs in this volume, Roberts’ first monograph, are meant to be read like visual lines in a poem, metaphorical and layered, with each photograph bestowing a deeper meaning upon the next.
Linda Foard Roberts has exhibited her work internationally from Australia to Guatemala, and throughout the United States. She began her love of photography with large-format cameras at the age of 15. A darkroom printer for over 35 years, she produces her images as gelatin silver and pigment prints on Hahnemuhle German Etching paper. Her work was recently shown in the exhibition Kindred at SOCO Gallery, and in the exhibition The Energy of Youth: Depicting Childhood at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her series Passage was exhibited at the Robert Koch Gallery, and photographs from this series have traveled to 34 venues through North Carolina in the exhibition Telling Our Stories, organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. She is a recipient of a North Carolina Visual Artist Fellowship Grant, and her work is in the permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, The Mint Museum, Bank of America, Harry Ransom Center, The Bechtler Collection, Gregg Museum of Art and Design, and many other private collections. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Intermont College.
