The Secret Garden of Lily Lapalma
About the Artist
Photographer Maggie Steber has worked in 64 countries focusing on humanitarian, cultural, and social stories. Her honors include the Leica Medal of Excellence, World Press Photo Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, Pictures of the Year, the Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri, the Alicia Patterson and Ernst Haas Grants, and a Knight Foundation grant for the New American Newspaper project.
For over three decades, Steber has worked in Haiti. Aperture published her monograph, DANCING ON FIRE. In 2013 Steber was named as one of eleven Women of Vision by National Geographic Magazine, publishing a book and touring an exhibition in five American cities. Steber has served as a Newsweek Magazinecontract photographer and as the Asst. Managing Editor of Photography and Features at The Miami Herald, overseeing staff projects that won the paper a Pulitzer and two finalist recognition. Her work is included in the Library of Congress, The Richter Library and in private collections. She has exhibited internationally. Clients include National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, AARP, The Guardian, and Geo Magazine among others. Steber teaches workshops internationally including at the World Press Joop Swart Master Classes, the International Center for Photography, Foundry Workshops and and the Obscura Photo Festival.
A over a lifetime, we accumulate experiences that end up being like wallpaper in a house where our subconscious resides. The Secret Garden of Lily LaPalma holds the photographs on that wallpaper, made in the shadows of a dark side of me that I have, as of late, begun to re-explore. Without meaning to make them so, these photographs reveal my fears and most private memories: my fear of knives, the dark figure that chased and often stabbed me in my dreams from early childhood to middle-age, my spiritual beliefs, my longings and love and all the other things that are wrapped up, not always so neatly, in someone’s life. In the Secret Garden there is danger but also beauty in a wild jungle that has been growing unfettered.
The photographs address every experience I have had in an exterior world but are now being re-interpreted in my interior landscape. I credit Lily, my alter ego, with taking the pictures.
What I might miss, Lily sees.
