Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has created a landscape of found intimacy. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. A selection of photographs from her first monograph is presented below.

Mama Goma, 2014

Kingdom Come, 2014

Sons of Crush, 2016

Nation, 2018

Oath, 2013

Deana Lawson is a photographic artist based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art; MoMA PS1; Art Institute of Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Museum; Underground Museum, Los Angeles; Studio Museum of Harlem; and elsewhere. Lawson is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Images excerpted fromDeana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph. © 2018 Deana Lawson and courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York