Fifteen Preludes to Lyonia

Photography: 2009 - 2010

This body of work was created at the Lyonia Preserve in Deltona, Florida. It is a prelude to a larger body of work to be presented at the Southeast Museum of Photography in October of 2012.

The Lyonia Preserve is a 360-acre joint project of Volusia County's Land Acquisition and Management Division and the Volusia County School Board to restore and maintain a scrub habitat. Since 1994, restoration efforts have been made to remove overgrown sand pines and open up the understory, creating bare sand areas with low-growing vegetation preferred by scrub species.

Lyonia is what is called an "upland" landscape, meaning that it is high and dry. There are not many areas such as this left in Florida. Lee describes her work in Lyonia:

The austere landscape at Lyonia is almost a Zen experience, with it's pure white sand and sparse vegetation. At first I thought there was not a lot to photograph, because, as a whole, it looked more forbidding than enticing. But the more I returned to it, the more I saw. I worked with the changing light, weather, and seasons, finding beautiful details in the plants and terrain.

The more I spent time there, the more I grew to love the sparseness, simplicity, and expansiveness of Lyonia, and it reminded me of photographing in the Badlands of North Dakota in the 1990s. After many years of creating photographic portfolios focused on the wetlands of Florida, this dry upland presented a visually and artistically challenging project for me that I truly enjoyed.