Bio

Geneva Brinton was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and raised in the Middle East and the United States by a family that encouraged self-expression through the arts. She was drawn to photography from a young age. At eleven, she learned developing and printing skills by working in an improvised darkroom in the family's mountain village home. Brinton went on to study Classical and Near Eastern archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. Following her education she pursued a professional career working as a freelance journalism photographer and a fine art photographic printer using both analog and digital processes. Her personal and professional projects explore diverse themes in a range of formats. She is based in western Massachusetts.

Artist Statement

For as far back as I can remember I’ve always had my camera. The first one was a ubiquitous and indestructible Kodak Instamatic 126. I learned to crack open the cartridge, extract the film and process it in a makeshift darkroom with no running water. Hooked by the possibilities of my modest camera, it quickly became the ideal tool for documenting a childhood that covered continents.

With time, I realized this camera was a bridge, a bridge between the observer and the observed, between insider and outsider, between the moment of capture and what follows, between mental moods and the moods of one’s physical environment: atmosphere, space, surface, luminance and shadow. All these elements coalesce into a conscious, but as often as not, subconscious narrative when the shutter is released.

I explore diverse themes in my professional and personal projects. The images I return to and find most notable are those that uniquely reveal place and time. They depend on an awareness of light -- its sources and qualities -- the first elements I grew to love as a photographer. It is this alchemy of light, surface and subject that sustains my creative process.