Byra Zimmerman

People often say of talented representationalist painters that their works are photorealistic.  An inverse of that complement can be deservedly paid to Byra Zimmerman:  her photographs seem like paintings.  This has nothing to do with digital effects or filters—none of which she employs; rather, it all has to do with her framing choices, the natural light she captures and the way it illumines her subjects.  Zimmerman has mastered the ability to bring texture—wood grain, whorls of glass, the lay and fall of fabric—out of the picture, so much so that her images seem possessed of an impossible stillness, seemingly too steady and self-revealing to be "merely" pictures.  Her photos seem like paintings because they seem to show us something of the object that we would not see were the object itself literally in front of our eyes.

Byra Zimmerman's love of classic Dutch painters helped shape her approach to photographic imagery.  She is based in Virginia, where she has been an award-winner at the Alexandria Festival of the Arts.