Maggie Steber’s “The Secret Garden of Lily LaPalma” is on view at Leica Gallery Los Angeles from September 12 through October 21, 2019.
“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.”
