Artist: Jethro Lyne

“I would place Jethro somewhere between a cheekier Cartier-Bresson and a more worldly James Ravilious — the tradition of the quiet English observer, but with a continental range and a sense of humour that keeps breaking through.” Benedict Shakespeare, curator of Chasing Light.

2001 – 2009: Teaching & Australia
A beloved father, husband, teacher, colleague, mentor, photographer, amateur comedian, art historian and lover of French cathedrals. He lectured in Art History at the National Art School from 2000 to 2008, taught at Australian Catholic University, tutored at Sydney University, and served as Coordinator of Public Programs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales between 2006 and 2008. His modest résumé doesn’t stop there: he appeared on ABC Radio, and wrote on art, religion and censorship for the Sydney Morning Herald.

2009 – 2020: United Kingdom & Photography
In 2009 Jethro returned to the UK, where he tutored in Art History at Oxford University and lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum, before taking up a full-time post teaching Art History and Photography at Bryanston School in 2011 — having graduated from there himself in 1990. He was, by every account, an exceptionally good teacher, and a rare communicator of scholarship. Only the few who knew him dearly were aware of his photographic gifts. It was after Jethro’s diagnosis in 2009 that he began photographing in earnest, and as his health declined, he went on photographing, never putting down his Leica camera.

On May 30th, 2020, at the height of Covid, Jethro passed away at home in Dorset after battling cancer for more than a decade. He was surrounded by loved ones. He was only 48.

To his photography students he passed on the two maxims he lived by: Weegee’s “f/8 and be there,” and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s reminder that “the first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” His infectious generosity lives on in his own image-making. An artist at heart, a loving husband, father, son and mentor.

From the Dorset plains to the French Alps, the piers of Bournemouth, London’s waterways & Museums, British sculpture, Welsh architecture, Sydney Harbour, Pisa, Florence and Barcelona, these images reveal Jethro’s instinctive understanding of light. A single ski track across a mountaintop, tractor marks in a field of hay, light seeping through Fontmell, a man unpacking his fishing rod — whatever the subject, Jethro had a gift for composing sensitive, discreet narratives.

Lyne thought himself an amateur. His eye for composition, in black and white and colour alike, tells another story. What hangs here, then, is a celebration of image & eye made public for the first time: the intimate pockets of life away from home. Jethro asked nothing of these photographs but the pleasure of taking them. Chasing Light brings to view an incredibly talented eye, offers a glimpse of the man behind it, and gives these images the audience they deserve for the first time.