Widening the Lens explores how we look at images and how images look back at us. Each week, I dig into photography, gender, visual literacy, and visual culture with essays that sharpen how we see the world, plus artist highlights that remind us why pictures matter.
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YOU’RE INVITED:
On Friday, March 6, 2026 at 1pm EST I am hosting a VIRTUAL Widening the Lens gallery walkthrough with Lydia Panas, live from Soft Machine Gallery in Allentown, PA. These events are intended to engage with exhibition spaces and artists in real time. The talks are 45 minutes, informal and bite sized, bring lunch if you want! Link to RSVP here.
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear directly from the artist about her process and the unique solutions she found for exhibiting this multimedia work. Read on to learn more about Panas. See you there!
When Lydia Panas arrived in Rome for a residency in 2019, she was already feeling adrift. Residencies do that to her, she says; it takes weeks to find a direction, to figure out how to be and how to work. Feeling disconnected from home, from her studio practice, from family, her mother’s recent death added a kind of flame to an already uprooted sense of self. What followed wasn’t a photographic project. It was something rawer and less deliberate: pages covered in looping script that dissolved into drawing, punctuated by the pressed imprint of lipstick on paper. Letters to My Mother, now on view at Soft Machine Gallery in Allentown, PA through March 7th, marks the first time this work has been publicly exhibited.
The show is a departure and, as Panas has come to realize, also a homecoming.
Lydia Panas is a first-generation American visual artist, raised between Greece and the United States who works primarily with photography and video. I first met Lydia over a decade ago online, and although we have only met once in person, at her 2024 artist talk at CPW, I have thought of her pictures often. They are lush and sensual, holding something back in a way that keeps drawing me in. The work stays with me because of its surface and colors but captivates return because it trusts me to sit with the not-knowing. I believe Panas has me (the viewer), exactly where she wants us, and that confidence is part of what makes the work so compelling.
Working primarily with women, her images are attentive to the psyche and what she refers to as “what lies below the surface, investigating questions about who we are and what we want to become.” Her career spans three decades and three monographs: The Mark of Abel (Kehrer Verlag, 2012), Falling from Grace (Conveyor Arts, 2016), and Sleeping Beauty (MW Editions, 2021).
On Grief and The Letter / Drawings
“Feeling unmoored after my mother died, I began writing letters to her in the form of drawings, things I had been unable to put into words.” The process started as pure necessity. Her hand couldn’t keep up with her thoughts, so the writing loosened into mark-making: freeform, urgent, the specificity of language giving way to something else. “Every line, scribble, loop, swoosh, curve, and imprint was loaded with words and feelings,” she told me. “Although I’m always conscious of what is going on in my head and heart while I work, I am not generally this literal about the thoughts. Usually, they float around while I concentrate on making an image. With the drawings, I was clear and precise. It felt like I was speaking through my hands.”
The lipstick impressions came instinctively; she doesn’t remember exactly what prompted them. But the moment she pressed them to the page, a memory surfaced: watching her mother dress as a child, enchanted. “I remember a particular yellow knit that was tight and delightful. She worked meticulously on her hair, curled her eyelashes with the back of a knife, always practical.” The lipstick was the final touch. “In my mind she went from mother to movie star.” Pressing lips to the paper, Panas was reaching backward through time, toward someone no longer there.
Private Work Made Public
All of Panas’s work feels intimate in the making, she says, but this felt different. Making it was like speaking directly to her mother, to their past together. She never expected to show it. It looked so unlike her photographs that it seemed to belong to a separate world entirely. But she would return to it, looking at it from time to time, and found she loved the way it looked.
“I think it might have been harder to share a few years ago, but it was time.” When she finally showed the drawings to people in her studio, the response surprised her. What struck her most was that everyone read them differently. “Maybe it feels harder to speak about because it is so direct, so much less ambiguous than my other work.”
There’s an interesting echo here of an influence Panas has cited before: Sophie Calle’s willingness to expose what most people would keep hidden. But where Calle’s exposure often feels strategic, architectural, Panas arrived at this vulnerability sideways, through grief, through a residency abroad, through a hand moving faster than thought. The work wasn’t made to be seen. That it now is changes something about how it lands.
So when I saw an announcement for her latest exhibition, a series of drawings, and none of the photographs I have come to admire, I knew I had to know more. What I have found is that this work functions as a kind of bridge, connecting her earlier series Chocolate, Hair and Lint to her most recent (in progress) photographic project (she didn’t say) Let Them Eat Cake. Panas herself has described as “Until recently, my portraits and still-life photographs have been subtle and restrained explorations of those tensions. My new project uses a more dramatic language: the lush delights and decadence of confectionery.”
To understand why these drawings feel like such a natural, if unexpected, extension of Panas’s practice, it helps to go back. Her early Chocolate, Hair and Lint (2000 - 2002) series emerged from the particular pressures of being a young mother adjunct-teaching at multiple institutions, running a household and a farm, and trying to carve out minutes to make art while children napped or practiced sports. “I would steal a few minutes to make a picture when I could.”
Those materials weren’t chosen conceptually so much as lived. Lint from the dryer, literally from her kids’ clothing. Chocolate as desire and indulgence, something that has returned repeatedly across her career. “It’s about desire, aspiration, my wanting to feel good.” Hair as time moving forward. “It’s all so unconscious,” she said. “I don’t think these things through ahead of time. I just decide to make an image of something and if it works, I’ll try it again. And then I do it until I don’t want to anymore.” Her practice, she says, has always been rooted in her experience as a woman, the domestic as a system that mirrors larger power structures. “How girls and women are treated, how power is used, how we treat people, notions of justice, and the consequences they bring about.” Food keeps returning because of what it represents: “what we take in, how we are nurtured and taken care of early in life. How love is offered to us and how we learn it.” The lipstick fits squarely in that lineage, another material she followed rather than planned, freighted with memory, femininity, and the specific way love gets expressed through gesture. “Initially, I became an artist to prove to myself that what I saw existed. That my reality was real, that I could see.”
Her current exhibition, Letters to My Mother also includes video work, what Panas calls “video portraits.” They are moving, sustained versions of the process behind her still photographs, and what they reveal is the intimacy of the encounter itself: two people looking at one another, neither asked to perform. “I don’t ask the models to do anything, or to please me with an exciting picture. I want us to just be there, to look at one another. I want us both to feel seen, feel calm, relaxed, and good.”
The durational quality matters because it makes visible something her photographs compress into a single frame: the sustained looking, the trust, the negotiation of who holds the power and how it gets used. “As author, I use the power, deliberately, to make us both feel good. So we both win. It’s about power and trust, the power is used democratically.” In the context of grief work, duration takes on another register that seems echo the tension experienced in the learning to live inside an absence.
Panas’s photographs have always held beauty and discomfort in careful balance, images that attract and alienate simultaneously, that make you want to look and feel slightly like you shouldn’t. The grief drawings feel almost opposite in their origins: unplanned, private, made without an audience in mind. And yet, she shared that viewers tend to respond to them in much the same way, that same pull and hesitation. Panas doesn’t think this is a coincidence. “Yes, it comes from the same place. The images don’t feel complete if that tension isn’t there.”
“I think we all have one story to tell, and we find many different ways to tell it. That’s the beauty of being an artist. The freedom to feel it and work it, to play with it and tell it.”
Letters to My Mother is on view at Soft Machine Gallery, Allentown, PA through March 7th. A closing party and artist talk takes place Saturday, March 7th beginning at 5pm, with Panas speaking at 5:30.
On Friday, March 6, 2026 at 1pm EST I am hosting a virtual Widening the Lens gallery walkthrough with Lydia Panas, live from Soft Machine Gallery in Allentown, PA. These events are intended to engage with exhibition spaces and artists in real time. The talks are informal and bite sized, bring lunch if you want! Link to RSVP here
