Passersby 1

Drypoint scratches the image directly into a metal plate with a steel or diamond point; the burr thrown up at the edge of each line holds extra ink and prints with a soft, velvety bloom that wears down quickly across an edition. Forty-six prints are held together as a suite that Lee then composes into stop-motion animation, so each sheet functions as a single frame of a longer moving sequence. The subject — passersby — is consistent with her long-running observation of New York street rhythm, in which figures enter, cross, and leave the field of view. Sequential drypoint registers slight changes between frames as small variations in line weight, position, and burr decay, so the animation reads as drawn rather than photographed. The work is the first of two 2022 Passersby suites, paired with a hundred-monotype companion that translates the same problem into a different printmaking system.