Blimp, from the series Expeditions, 1980
Vintage toned gelatin silver print
4 × 5 in.
Signed on verso
December 15, 2025
This photograph seems to exist in a place where the the line between history and imagination blurs. Ruth Thorne-Thomsen’s images recall the romanticism of 19th-century travel photography, using that genre’s fascination with distant—and once-mysterious—locales as a springboard for creative flights of fancy. For this body of work, she employed a pinhole camera to capture softly focused and dreamlike scenes that she constructed from small, photo-based dioramas. The resulting images retain the charm and intimacy of a handmade process while also transcending it, yielding pictures that feel like half-remembered idylls, residing in the mind’s eye.
We fondly remember Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, who passed away this October at the age of 82.
