Yuri Lev

I received my B.A. at the University of Rochester, followed by courses in photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an M.F.A at Pratt Institute in New York City. At Pratt, I studied with Arthur Freed and Phil Perkis, and have since exhibited widely throughout the New York area featuring urban landscapes, winter scenes, pictures of Ukraine and an assortment of vignettes from the Hudson Valley. My latest body of work includes a book on the rebirth of Newark, New Jersey titled Brick City, the 21st Century Rebirth of Newark, New Jersey.
I work commercially in portrait, travel, and special effects photography, as well as in graphic design. I have CD covers to my credit and my work has appeared on book covers and web sites, in corporate brochures, and in the major New York newspapers. I teach photography at St. John’s University in New York and at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online.
I’ve traditionally engaged the notion of what I call ‘The Divine Landscape.’ The term “landscape” is more of a figurative rather than literal description. I use the tools of abstraction, fantasy and imagination in order to point to something bigger, to show the sublime within the mundane, to record the beauty available to our ordinary daily vision which is so easy to overlook, or to imply a greater truth. I subscribe to a quote from John Keats’ marvelous poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, which goes as follows:
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' “


Portfolio:

Meditations on the Sacred and the Profane

“I’ve traditionally engaged the notion of what I call ‘The Divine Landscape.’ The term “landscape” is more of a figurative rather than literal description. This body of work also includes portraits. I use the tools of abstraction, fantasy and imagination in order to point to something bigger, to show the sublime within the mundane, to record the beauty available to our ordinary daily vision which is so easy to overlook, or to imply a greater truth. I subscribe to a quote from John Keats’ marvelous poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, which goes as follows: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.' “