Looking out the window of a skyscraper with the artist and photographer Lee Mary Manning is a lot like looking through the viewfinder of a point-and-shoot camera. I met up with Manning in New York in advance of their current exhibition at Lismore Castle, in County Waterford, Ireland. The image-maker served as the inaugural artist-in-residence for Lismore Castle Arts in 2023, and now returns to show a selection of some of the 800 photographs they made during their stay.
Last year, Manning’s photographs entered the collection of the Whitney Museum and featured there in the exhibition “Trust Me,” which ran through last February and also included work by the likes of Moyra Davey, Barbara Hammer, and Laura Aguilar. Several of their works were concurrently—and remain—on view in the Swiss Institute’s ecologically-conscious show “Spora.”
Manning has emerged as a beloved fixture within New York’s downtown art scene over the last decade, but they came late and almost reluctantly to their calling. Born in a factory town in Illinois, Manning spent their early adulthood in San Francisco, eventually working for The Gap in a role that involved frequently traveling for photoshoots. Though their job wasn’t a particular creative one, being around photographers fed Manning's interest in the medium. They increasingly turned to taking their own pictures, eventually starting the influential, pre-Instagram era photo-blog Unchanging Window.
"I would make work for people in my life all the time, as gifts, and people would be like, 'Why don't you do this?" the artist explains. "I had a weird sense of hiding," Manning continues, noting that they felt more comfortable identifying as a fan. But ultimately, embracing the life of the artist became a very conscious admission. When did Manning take the leap? "I was 42 years old, and I'll be 52 this year."
We met up on the 19th floor of a raw and gutted office space in the financial district of Manhattan, which was previously empty, until the artist Christopher Wool took it over to exhibit his work from the past decade. With Manning by my side, it was fitting that my attention was drawn from Wool’s works to both the views of the city through the windows—like the twin voids at the entrance to the Battery Tunnel down below—and the spray-painted notations left on the interior walls alongside other exposed elements of the deconstructed space.
Now living and making work in a studio on the Lower East Side, Manning radiates an almost childlike wonder for the visual splendor of the city, whether honing in on a batch of flowers emerging from concrete, a colorful detail of clothing worn by a passing pedestrian, or an echo of shapes across two objects in the landscape.
Manning makes companionable photographs. They pull the viewer in to notice and take pleasure in easy-to-overlook details. And their knack for combining multiple photos within single frames makes the viewer look to make connections across images with Manning often teasing harmony out of what would seem to be contradictions.
One such work is a large photographic print of a convenience store’s display of packaged snacks illuminated by a harsh rectangle of overhead fluorescent light, which Manning has placed above a small snapshot showing a regal arched window filtering natural light into a space otherwise illuminated by the warm glow of an orb-shaped ceiling lamp. This diptych, Our Daily Bread, 2024—mashing up discount and posh aesthetics—features in the most recent Lismore Castle series.
The artist is now preparing their third solo show with Canada in the fall, a process that has involved looking back at the earliest photos they took as a child. "In the first roll of film that I found, made when I was 10, I took a camera and got it as close as I could to a geranium," Manning recalls, in bemused recognition of an impulse still found in their work today. They still prefer the point-and-shoot 35mm film cameras common in their youth. And to get up close, Manning sometimes has to crouch or crawl to frame their subject. From that vantage point, their inquisitive and generous art can unfold.
