Julian Lennon: Timeless — Photography Exhibition at Art Basel Miami 2011

There is a particular burden that comes with being the son of a genius. Every creative act is measured against an impossible standard, every work of art evaluated not on its own terms but in relation to a legacy that casts a very long shadow. Julian Lennon has spent his adult life navigating that shadow, and at Art Basel Miami Beach 2011, he stepped fully into his own light.

Timeless, his photography exhibition, was presented during Art Basel Miami Beach week to considerable acclaim. The images — landscapes, portraits, moments of stillness captured in places as varied as the Australian outback and the streets of Havana — reveal a photographer with a genuine eye, a man who sees the world with the particular intensity of someone who has learned to look carefully at everything.

Julian came to photography the way many artists come to their truest medium — sideways, through a door he hadn't expected to open. He had been a musician, of course, had released albums and toured and lived the life of a rock musician's son who became a rock musician himself. But photography offered something different: a solitary practice, a direct relationship between the artist and the world, no band, no producer, no industry.

The images in Timeless are marked by a quality of attention that is rare. Julian photographs the way his father wrote songs — with an ear, or in this case an eye, for the detail that contains the whole. A child's face in a doorway. The geometry of shadows on a white wall. The particular quality of light on water at a specific hour of a specific day.

Art Basel Miami Beach provided the ideal context for the exhibition. The fair, which transforms Miami into the art capital of the Western Hemisphere for one week each December, attracts collectors and curators and artists from around the world. To show work here is to show it to the most discerning audience in contemporary art.

Speaking at the opening, Julian was thoughtful and precise about his relationship to photography. He spoke about the discipline of waiting — waiting for the light, waiting for the moment, waiting for the image to reveal itself rather than forcing it. It is a philosophy that sounds simple and is, in practice, extraordinarily difficult.

John Lennon gave the world Imagine. Julian Lennon, it turns out, has been imagining all along — just through a different lens. Timeless is the proof.

By Daedrian McNaughton for Premier Guide Miami