Photo Exhibitions

Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography celebrates an intrepid group of photographers, led by preeminent photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who fought to establish photography as fine art, coequal with painting and sculpture at the turn of the 20th century. The Photo-Secession movement took cues from European modernists–who seceded from centuries-old academic traditions–to demonstrate photographic pictures' aesthetic, creative, and skillful value as art. An homage to Stieglitz, Photo-Secession includes some of the very images that established the appreciation of photography's artistic merits. The UMFA will present this exhibition concurrently with Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to draw attention to the cyclical dialogue between painting and photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, photographers manipulated their images at various stages of production to imitate painterly effects, while painters worked and reworked their oils to imitate the immediacy of photography, demonstrating a remarkable reciprocity between these two art forms.

The Center for Photographic Art (CPA) is excited to announce the 2024 International Juried Exhibition with over $5,000 in awards! Forty-five juror-selected photographs will be exhibited from November 23, 2024 through December 29, 2024 in our historic gallery in Carmel, California, and vie for eight cash awards totaling more than $5,000. These photographs will also be featured in an online gallery on the CPA website along with an additional forty-five juror selected images. 2024 IJE Juror: CPA is pleased to announce this year’s International Juried Exhibition juror: Elizabeth Avedon. Elizabeth Avedon is an independent curator, and photography book and exhibition designer. She is a sought after consultant for photographers; editing, sequencing, and advising towards their exhibition, book, and portfolio projects. Former Director of Photo-Eye Gallery, Santa Fe; Creative Director for The Gere Foundation; Art Director for Polo Ralph Lauren national advertising; and Photo Editor for Ralph Lauren Media’s RL Magazine, Elizabeth has received awards and recognition for her curatorial work, exhibition design and publishing projects, including the retrospective exhibition and book "Avedon: 1949-1979" for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and High Museum, Atlanta; "Avedon: In the American West" for the Amon Carter Museum, Corcoran Gallery, and Art Institute of Chicago. Also from the Leica Gallery, New York; the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; and for the Estate of Diane Arbus, among others. She is an instructor in the prestigious Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts, New York and proud to have received a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Griffin Museum of Photography. Elizabeth brings a deep understanding of photography and a broad appreciation of diverse photographic styles, genres and mediums to CPA's 2024 International Juried Exhibition. Congratulations to the artists chosen for both our gallery and online exhibition!

All About Photo presents an exclusive online exhibition featuring the work of the American photographer Ghawam Kouchaki. On view throughout December 2024, this captivating showcase includes twenty street photographs from his acclaimed series ‘Tokyo No- No’ "Tokyo No-No" by Ghawam Kouchaki: A Striking Exploration of Modern Alienation Tokyo No-No examines modern alienation through the family unit in Tokyo, Japan—a phenomenon that transcends cultural boundaries and affects societies worldwide. Everywhere you look, people are struggling to meet expectations that feel increasingly out of reach. When we try to fit into the narrow margins set by others, we often find ourselves profoundly lonely, even among those closest to us. These moments weren’t unique to Tokyo, but something about the city’s relentless energy made them stand out. Hustle culture has infected everything—this constant pressure to capitalize on every second of your time, to never stop moving. I felt it too. I never once thought I should slow down and take in my surroundings. Instead, my mind was always searching for the next photo, always moving, just like the city around me. This isn’t just about Tokyo or America; it’s everywhere. People are told to follow a certain script: work hard, get a stable job, settle down, have kids. But for so many, that script is broken. Economic instability and the rising cost of living have turned milestones like starting a family or owning a home into luxuries most can’t afford. I’ve seen what happens when people try to live up to these expectations. They keep going through the motions, not because they want to, but because it’s all they know. They stay in jobs that drain them, relationships that don’t fulfill them, lives that feel like they belong to someone else. We know it’s not working, but we’re too afraid to try something new. We fall back on tradition, clinging to it because it feels safer than the unknown. Looking closer at the images, there’s a tension that’s hard to ignore—a sense of people teetering on the edge. Whether it’s in the haze of public drunkenness, the defiant stares of commuters heading to work, or the raw, unfiltered emotions spilling out onto the street when someone can no longer keep up appearances, these moments reveal people at their breaking points. These photos capture what happens when we ignore our reality for too long, as people search for release in ways that feel explosive, desperate, or self-destructive. These aren’t isolated incidents but symptoms of a deeper, systemic problem. A great photographer once said that to capture an effective photograph, you need to be a human being first. While I can’t make a direct, one-to-one comparison between my life and the lives of my subjects, their energy reflected my own feelings back at me. That’s what Tokyo No-No is about: creating space for reflection. I hope these photos act as a mirror for some, reaching those who feel trapped by the same pressures. Even for those who can’t quite articulate why they’re dissatisfied, I hope these images inspire a moment of pause—a chance to make small changes toward something better, no matter how insignificant those changes might seem.

As the George Eastman Museum approaches and celebrates its 75th anniversary, we are featuring a group of exhibitions that highlight a wide range of holdings from the museum’s collection. With this selection of objects in the Collection Gallery, we continue our broad survey of works to draw parallels and connections between photography, history, and culture. The objects chosen for this exhibition will chart a course through this history, identifying notable movements and trends while giving context to a breadth of photographic practices, technologies, communities, and traditions. In this exhibition, direct comparisons are made between early photographic print processes, such as the daguerreotypes produced by Southworth & Hawes in the United States and the salted paper prints of Hill & Adamson in Scotland. These objects showcase the resources and technologies that were present at the time of their making, as well as the competing interests that propelled their development in the 19th century. Other pairings in this exhibition examine the development of photographic styles and aesthetics, each a response to specific cultural or artistic trends that emerged throughout the 20th century: Pictorialism, Group f/64, photojournalism and reportage, abstraction and experimentation, and the influence of postmodern practices in contemporary art. The response to these photographic traditions has been varied and complex, and not without critical discourse and debate. These evolutions, however, have increased access to photographic tools and technologies while expanding our understanding of photography and its wider cultural implications. The history of photography has grown to encompass a multitude of voices and diverse perspectives, each of them bringing forth new challenges and provocative assessments of that which came before. This selection includes works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, László Moholy-Nagy, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Robert Frank, Imogen Cunningham, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, and many others. Certain photographs in the exhibition will be alternated over the course of the next year, when the exhibition will coincide with the George Eastman Museum’s 75th Anniversary exhibition in the main galleries. Image: Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman stands firm as rioters push toward the Senate chamber during the Jan. 6 siege in the United States Capitol © Ashley Gilbertson

Berkeley-based photographer Jenny Sampson has spent many years photographing the Bay Area skater community. Skaters have long been seen as rebellious, marked by their fashion, the noise they make rolling down the streets, and their unconventional use of urban spaces. This non-conformist image reflects the depth and determination of skate culture, where skaters fall, rise, and persevere with resilience. Working with the 173-year-old photographic process of wet collodion or tintype, Sampson captures the beauty and spirit of the thoroughly contemporary culture of skating. Creating these intimate portraits requires time, interaction, and collaboration, mirroring the inclusive nature of skater culture. Each portrait reveals a unique honesty, offering a glimpse into the skater or sitter’s true character. Sampson was born and raised in San Francisco. She earned a B.A. in Psychobiology at Pitzer College and has since dedicated her time to her photographic endeavors. She teaches high school darkroom photography, writes and photographs for WithitGirl, is a Rolls and Tubes Collective member, and is the Board President of the East Bay Photo Collective. Daylight Books published her monographs, Skaters and Skater Girls, in 2017 and 2020, respectively. A History of Photography, by Rolls and Tubes, was published in 2021.

M+B is pleased to present Rearview, an exhibition of new works by Matthew Brandt. This is the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens November 23, 2024 and will run through January 4, 2025 with an opening reception on Saturday, November 23 from 6 to 9 pm. Matthew Brandt’s artistic practice bridges historical traditions with contemporary innovation, drawing inspiration from 19th-century American landscape photography while reviving time-honored techniques. Brandt’s unique approach integrates physical elements sourced directly from his subjects—lake water, tree-derived charcoal, and even unconventional materials like tar or cocaine—transforming his works into a dynamic interplay between art and nature. This process imbues his photography with a sense of organic unpredictability, allowing natural forces to shape the outcome and revealing the tension between human control and entropy. His work, whether focused on landscapes or human-made structures, highlights the poetic and tactile qualities of his materials, creating images where the subjects themselves actively contribute to their depiction. Brandt’s latest exhibition focuses on Los Angeles, capturing the city as a realm of stark contrasts, where timeless landscapes meet the relentless sprawl of freeways and smog-filled horizons. Employing a variation of the ancient fresco technique, he translates LA’s iconic freeway systems, palm trees, and saturated sunsets into layered compositions that are as rugged and weathered as the city itself. Each fresco, created with pigment and plaster is formed through a meticulous process. Layers of plaster are applied to a cement board, serving as a base for transferring the pigment from his photographic inkjet prints onto the wet surface. Each layer corresponds to a different image, with the process demanding careful application and adjustment. The material properties of the plaster result in cracks, breaks, and bends, echoing the entropy and impermanence of the city Brandt seeks to depict. Each piece in the series resonates with personal memory, recalling Brandt’s childhood spent gazing out of a car window at the city’s labyrinthine highways. Monumental in scale and spirit, these frescoes underscore the raw physicality of LA’s sprawling structures. The ancient medium of fresco, tied to architecture and endurance, serves as an apt vessel for his exploration of the city’s dual nature—its simultaneous permanence and decay. In Brandt’s hands, the freeways become symbols of both movement and stagnation, encapsulating the allure and despair that define Los Angeles. The weathered textures mimic the passage of time, with cracks and abrasions suggesting the city’s enduring struggle against nature’s forces. Rendered in soft, faded hues, the palm trees and sunsets evoke a poignant nostalgia, tethering the viewer to a shared memory of place. Brandt’s frescoes honor Los Angeles not merely as a physical environment but as an emotional and historical landscape, embedding the city’s complexity into every layer of plaster. His work is a hauntingly tactile tribute to LA, merging history, memory, and material into an enduring dialogue with the city he calls home. Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from UCLA. The artist has been the subject of numerous institutional solo shows, including Light & Matter: The Art of Matthew Brandt at the Forest Lawn Museum, CA; Orphic Forest, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Rocks and Eagles at the Newark Museum, NJ, Sticky/Dusty/Wet at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus OH, which travelled to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Recent museum group exhibitions include Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (traveling); Ansel Adams in Our Time, de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA (traveling); New Territory: Landscape Photography Today at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; The Magic Medium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Second Chances at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; What is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; and Land Marks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Brandt recently received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award in the discipline of Photography. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Denver Art Museum; High Museum, Atlanta; Detroit Institute of Arts; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Matthew Brandt lives and works in Los Angeles.

M+B is pleased to present Bright Sun Sours, an exhibition of new works by Matthew Porter. This is the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens on November 23, 2024 and will run through January 4, 2025 with an opening reception at the gallery on Saturday, November 23 from 6 to 8 pm. Bright Sun Sours is a collection of eight photographs, printed on an adhesive and mounted directly to the wall. The individual pictures are like chapters in a book of essays, connected by their visual style and recurring themes of cinematic romanticism. The medium’s inherent flexibility, along with the incorporation of techniques such as appropriation, digital montage, studio models, and AI tools, allows the artist to add to and manipulate photographs made in the studio or field. The result is less a coherent narrative than a series of glimpses into possible storylines, tempered by the realities of our time, and an underlying mood of concern. A man stands under a tree wearing a thong, a gas can in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. Perhaps he’s consolidating his resources, dressed for life under a blistering sun and a warming climate. The image seems absurd at first glance, yet the reality it posits is a future that’s one-part possible reality, the other a ridiculous post-apocalyptic genre piece. A young woman, wearing a sailor costume, checks her phone before stepping into her car, while her mother loads something into the trunk. Her outfit matches the one worn by Dasha Nekrasova, who first became internet famous for fending off a right-wing commentator by weaponizing the bored affectation of an acerbic teenager. Later, during the pandemic, she became a leading voice in the downtown right-leaning Manhattan cultural scene made famous for its roster of edge-lord artists and writers. Black Moon, Louis Malle’s mostly tedious 1975 fantasy horror film, contains a scene where the protagonist, a young woman frayed from a series of violent and dialectical conflicts, encounters a Unicorn. The brief conversation that ensues in probably the sanest thing that happens in the movie, and it wraps up with the Unicorn wandering off and proclaiming “I won’t be back for another hundred and fifty-four years.” The rest of us are stuck at the chateau for the remainder of the movie. Death Valley is famous for its cracked, parched look—a thick crust of salt baking in the sun, like snow that never melts. But during a recent storm, unprecedented rains flooded the basin with a few inches of water, turning the scorched desert into a placid lake. At sunrise and sunset, the water is still enough to reflect the mountains that surround the valley, mirroring the colors of the desert sky. The rest of it can be summed up quickly: An inverted truck, a tractor without its trailer, looms at the crest of a hill. The image is intended to feel like an 80s movie poster—a possessed piece of machinery that stalks a quiet neighborhood. Crumbling ruins, Greek columns, a tiny model placed next to the real thing. A figure in silhouette stands on a balcony, shielding their eyes from the ozone haze, like an insect fixed in amber. The balcony juts from the upper floor of a skyscraper, the tower modeled on the angular modernism of late 20th century science fiction. Butterflies clustered together for warmth, their wings opening in the dappled, late afternoon sunlight of a California winter. Matthew Porter (b. 1975, State College, PA) received his BA from Bard College and his MFA from Bard-ICP. Recent solo exhibitions include This Is How It Ends, Danzinger Gallery, New York, NY; The Sheen, The Shine, Gallery Xippas, Geneva, Switzerland, and Skyline Vista, M+B, Los Angeles, CA. His work has also been included in the thematic exhibitions Autophoto at the Fondation Cartier, Paris; Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Polaroids: The Disappearing at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, After Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Perspectives at the International Center of Photography Museum, New York. Porter's curatorial projects include Soft Target, organized with Phil Chang at M+B, Los Angeles; Seven Summits at Mount Tremper Arts, New York; and The Crystal Chain at Invisible Exports, New York. He is the co-editor of Blind Spot magazine Issue 45 and his writings and interviews have been featured in Triple Canopy, Blind Spot, Artforum and Canteen. The artist’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; and the UBS Art Collection, New York, among others. Matthew Porter lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Casemore Gallery is pleased to present "Mercy, Give and Take", a group exhibition that explores the idea of opposition in the photographic works of John Gossage, Raymond Meeks, Awoiska van der Molen, Sean McFarland, and Aspen Mays. The show pairs works from each of the included artists, with each pairing sharing common visual elements—buildings, landscapes, photographic tools—but in markedly juxtaposed states, whether life or death, turmoil or serenity, idyll or menace, pushing up or giving way, or even transposal of space. In doing so, the viewer has the opportunity to look beyond the idea of opposition as having two parts, and ponder all that lies between. John Gossage (b. 1946) Staten Island, New York is an artist who has, more than most contemporary photographers, become noted for his intellectually engaging, subversive and well-crafted artist books and other publications. In them, the artist utilizes under-recognized elements of the urban environment—unused and abandoned patches of land, refuse and detritus, barbed wire, graffiti, and other disruptions—to explore themes as disparate as surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power. Gossage was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past 45 years. His many one-person exhibitions have included The Better Neighborhoods of Greater Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1976); Photographs of Berlin, Cleveland Museum of Art, (1989); LAMF, Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1990); One Work in 39 Parts, The Saint Louis Museum of Art, (1994); There and Gone, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, (1998); The Romance Industry, Comune di Venezia, Venice (2003); Berlin in the Time of the Wall, Gallerie Zulauf, Freinsheim (2005); The Pond, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC (2001); and Three Routines, Art Institute of Chicago (2014). Aspen Mays (b. 1980) received her MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Light Work, Syracuse; and the Center for Ongoing Projects and Research, Columbus. Mays was recently included in the exhibition Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works at the New York Public Library (2019). Mays was the recipient of a 2006 Rotary Fellowship and was a 2009 Fulbright Fellow. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, where she is Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence. Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Exhibitions from this commission were presented in New York (ICP September, 2023) and currently in Paris (Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson September, 2024). The Inhabitants, a book made in collaboration with writer George Weld, was published in August 2023 by MACK Awoiska van der Molen (1972) is a Dutch photographer known for her monumental black-and-white analogue images that represent her experience of the primordial and psychological space in the world she photographs. In 2019 van der Molen was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, the global award in photography and sustainability. In 2017 she was both shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the recipient of the Larry Sultan Photography Award. Van der Molens' work has been shown at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; Kousei-Inn, Kyoto; Les Rencontres d’Arles, France; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; FoMu, Antwerp; and Fotomuseum, Den Haag. Sean McFarland (b. California, 1976) creates work that explores the relationship between photography and the history and representation of landscape, particularly western landscapes and the skies above. With a focus on experimentation, the artist joins aspects of other mediums with photography to uncover the experience of seeing, the passing of time, and the knowledge that we and what we know cannot live forever. McFarland received a MFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland (2004) and a BS from Humboldt State University, Arcata, California (2002). His solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2017); Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York (2015); San Francisco Camerawork, San Francisco (2009), and White Columns, New York (2004). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2018); George Eastman Museum, Rochester (2016); Aperture, New York (2014-15); and Bay Area Now 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2011). His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; George Eastman Museum; and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Francisco, and teaches at San Francisco State University. Image: Raymond Meeks, Halfstory #955 Canajaharie NY 2016, 2019

he work of the Philadelphia-born photographer and activist Harvey Finkle offers an intimate view of the hardships, sacrifices, and joys experienced by members of the diverse communities and political movements he has engaged with over the course of his career. In the Moment explores photography’s ability to interrogate social inequities, arouse empathy, and inspire political action. Consisting of photographs that Finkle has taken over the past half-decade, the show surveys the multiple and sophisticated ways in which his work forges meaningful connections with its audiences. Guest-curated by Antongiulio Sorgini, categorical groupings take us through Finkle's journey, chronicling the stories that shape our collective consciousness.

Widely acclaimed when it was published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects has come to be regarded as one of the important early monuments of color photography. Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was one of a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, and Stephen Shore, who in the 1960s and 1970s began exploring the potential of color photography as a fine art. Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of color and a distinctive personal vision. Inspired by the photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he embarked on an ambitious quest to document America, traversing the continent from 1978 to 1983 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. American Prospects is the result. Although Sternfeld saw deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he also went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery. His goal was not to document the failure of the American Dream, but to record what was great, vital, and regenerative about this nation. On one hand, Sternfeld’s imagery includes damaged landscapes and industry in decline. He delights in the curious, bizarre, and accidental in the everyday. Scenes of an elephant collapsed on the road or a firefighter buying a pumpkin while a fire rages in the background convey a sense of absurdity. And yet underlying the series is a vision of a beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, and of the variety and resiliency of the American people. Even today, Sternfeld is optimistic about the American prospect: “America has a tremendous capacity to right itself,” he noted recently. Sternfeld’s vision is as complicated as the nation. His images are deep, rich, and powerful specifically because they are complex and conflicted, at once both critical and affectionate. Guest curated by Robert Wolterstorff, Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects will mount more than forty large scale color prints, among them many of the most iconic images from the series, along with others that have never before been exhibited. It coincides with a new edition of American Prospects published by Steidl Press.

Native America: In Translation, curated by artist Wendy Red Star, assembles the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists who offer contemporary perspectives on memory, identity, and the history of photography. “I was thinking about young Native artists and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map,” said Red Star. This road map spans intergenerational image makers representing various Native nations and affiliations, and working in photography, installation, multimedia assemblage, and video. Among them, the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais investigates landscape and language through his evocative Polaroids. And the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez pose as fashion ads and question conceptions of ideal beauty. Together, their work confronts the historic, and often fraught relationship between photography and the representation of Native Americans, while also reimagining what it means to be a citizen in North America today.

Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations) presents a solo exhibition of her large-scale, backlit, color transparency photography, which she terms “fireboxes.” Works from her Lasso and Headdress series, including a newly commissioned Headdress portrait, draw together contemporary Native subjects with regalia and items from the subject’s own cultures. The exhibition situates many of the objects depicted in the firebox images alongside objects from the BMA’s historic Native art collection. Together, they recognize cultural belongings as extensions of the people who made them, provoking a consideration of personal and institutional care. .

Debuting at the High this fall and co-organized with the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography and the Cleveland Museum of Art, this groundbreaking exhibition will feature a powerful body of work by Kelli Connell (American, born 1974) that reconsiders the complicated relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston from a contemporary queer and feminist perspective. Through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s photographs, Connell enriches our understanding of the couple and weaves their stories together with her own artistic practice. Using their publications and archives as a guide, Connell and her former partner, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together. Along the way, Connell collaboratively made photographs of Odom that upend conventional notions of photographer and muse. She also photographed, in a raw and less idealized manner, the grand Western landscapes that Weston made iconic seventy-five years before. The exhibition will include more than forty of Connell’s recent large-format portrait and landscape photographs, along with dozens of Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. Four of Connell’s photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the High’s collection, exemplifying the museum’s recent commitment to growing its holdings of work by queer artists. Image: Kelli Connell (American, born 1974), April, 2008 © Kelli Connell

Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation takes an unprecedented look at German art since 1980. Featuring artists from different generations and diverse backgrounds, the exhibition complicates notions of German identity, especially the idea of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. In fact, the country is second only to the United States as a destination for immigrants from around the world. The exhibition offers a range of reflections on German national identity, which was shaped by labor migration following World War II, the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, and the influx of asylum seekers to the country since 2015. As the pointedly interrogative title suggests, Made in Germany? asks, rather than offers ready answers to, the question of who or what represents Germany today. Race, migration, labor, history, and memory are at the forefront of this inquiry into German identity. The works on view often focus attention not solely on racial, ethnic, or religious diversity, but on marginalized groups at the very edges of German society: recent refugees and asylum seekers as well as the aging, the economically disadvantaged, and the unhoused. The exhibition contributes to wide-ranging debates on diversity, nationalism, and social change in the face of migration and globalization; it frames discussions on racial violence, right-wing populism, and ethnically defined national identity—issues that are resonating not only in Germany but also in the United States today. The artists featured in the exhibition span several generations, and their works—often made and remade over an extended period—address German history and identity through film, video, photography, painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, and installation. Women, East Germans, long-term residents, recent citizens, and individuals with a “migration background” are represented among the 23 artists in the exhibition: Nevin Aladağ, Sibylle Bergemann, Cana Bilir-Meier, Marc Brandenburg, Kota Ezawa, Isa Genzken, Hans Haacke, Candida Höfer, Yngve Holen, Henrike Naumann, Pınar Öğrenci, Hans-Christian Schink, Cornelia Schleime, Ngozi Schommers, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Katharina Sieverding, Hito Steyerl, Gabriele Stötzer, Sung Tieu, Rosemarie Trockel, Corinne Wasmuht, Ulrich Wüst, and Želimir Žilnik. Uniquely positioned as the only museum in North America devoted to the art of German-speaking Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day, the Busch-Reisinger Museum is one of three museums that comprise the Harvard Art Museums. Established at Harvard in 1903, the holdings continue to grow and expand to reflect the diversity of modern Germany. An accompanying print catalogue, the first of its kind published in English, includes contributions from curators and scholars who examine the circumstances that have shaped notions of identity in modern-day Germany as well as the diverse artists who are challenging ideas of what it means to be “German.” Image: 50 U Heinrich-Heine-Str., 2009 © Corinne Wasmuht

Josh Kline’s Climate Change is both an exhibition and a total work of art—an ambitious, immersive suite of science-fiction installations that imagines a future sculpted by ruinous climate crisis and the ordinary people destined to inhabit it. Begun in 2018 and produced in sections over the last five years, Kline’s eponymous project will be brought together for the first time for this exhibition, mobilizing sculpture, moving image work, photography, and ephemeral materials to completely transform the galleries of MOCA Grand Avenue. Climate Change is a visceral, charged work of 21st-century expanded cinema. In this vision, which could be called dystopian but in truth is terrifyingly near, a catastrophic sea-level rise has inundated the world’s coasts, unleashing a flood of hundreds of millions traumatized refugees. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global hegemony melt down their own foundations? Kline opens the door to such a future, inviting us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view. Josh Kline: Climate Change is organized by Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) developed a photographic practice that refused categorization, cutting across cultural codes, gender norms, and artistic traditions. Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to London in the 1960s, seeking political refuge during civil war. As an art student in the United States, he came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes, balancing his family heritage and immigration status alongside his own queer sexuality and exposure to underground subcultures. Channeling these multiple facets of his identity into photography, Fani-Kayode generated a remarkable body of images over the course of a career cut tragically short by his death in 1989. Organized in partnership with Autograph (London), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode’s work and archives. This major exhibition brings together key series of color and black-and-white photographs along with archival prints and never-before-exhibited works from Fani-Kayode’s student years. Often created in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst (1951–1992), Fani-Kayode’s photographs treat romantic love with spiritual reverence, translating the emotional intensity of same-sex, multiracial desire into richly evocative symbolic language. Today, his art remains a potent source of inspiration, presciently anticipating contemporary photographic approaches to identity, sexuality, and race.

The Western landscape is a place where the transformation of physical space involves both visualization and manipulation, where the connections between what can be physically seen and how it is visually represented are not always clear; technologies originally designed to render places visible often became instruments of invisibility and surveillance, severing western lands from the populations that depend on them. Out of Site focuses on three technological revolutions to examine how visual technologies, artistic interventions, and the workings of state power have evolved in tandem with the Western landscape: wet-plate photography, used to theorize geological processes; the rise of aerial photography and pattern recognition; and the increasing use of drones, satellites, and other long-range photographic technologies to image secretive sites, military installations, and other technologically-mediated locales. The exhibition features 90 artworks, archival materials, and devices ranging from mammoth plate cameras to drones. Carleton Watkins’ Nevada mining photographs,19th-century geological reports, and stereoviews, and Margaret Bourke-White’s aerial surveys published in LIFE magazine in 1936 are juxtaposed with contemporary photographic and video pieces by David Maisel, Michael Light, and Steven Yazzie, among other artists. Image: Blue with Exceptions, B16576 from George Air Force Base, John Divola, 2020. © John Divola

Visitors will experience Smith’s reflective approach throughout the galleries. The works on display also expand beyond photography. The centerpiece, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs using projection, marks an entirely new direction in her practice. Also on view are recent collages and color photographs—all set to an ambient soundscape created by Smith’s son, Mingus Murray. The exhibition also includes nearly 30 photographs from Smith’s Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt over the span of three decades. The series began in 1972 on Smith’s first trip to Africa, when she traveled to Dakar, Senegal, on a modeling assignment. The expansive series of photography documents everyday scenes from across the continent as they happened and shares a narrative of the places she visited from her perspective as a Black woman. As Smith has stated: “I was affected by the spirituality of the people. Somehow it seemed that our cultures are very different, but we are very much connected.”. Ming Smith: Wind Chime is part of the FotoFocus Biennial: backstories

Widely regarded as the preeminent Hollywood portrait photographer of the 1930s and 1940s, George Hurrell (1904–1992) created definitive, timeless images of many of the most glamorous figures of filmdom’s golden era. Hurrell began his Hollywood career in 1930 as a photographer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio (founded in 1924) that claimed to have “more stars than there are in heaven.” With a keen eye for lighting effects and artful posing, he developed a style of presentation that magnified the stars and influenced popular standards of glamour. Advancing rapidly to become MGM’s in-house portraitist, he produced memorable images of film royalty, from Joan Crawford and Clark Gable to Spencer Tracy and Greta Garbo. He established his own studio on Sunset Boulevard in 1933, where he continued to photograph actors for MGM as well as those under contract with other major studios. After closing his studio in 1938, Hurrell concluded the decade as the head of photography for Warner Bros. Selected from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection by senior curator of photographs Ann Shumard, this exhibition features golden-era portraits that reveal Hurrell’s skill in shaping the images of Hollywood’s brightest stars.

Just over twenty years ago, scientists introduced a term to denote a new geological epoch in which human activity has had a marked impact on the global climate: the Anthropocene. Since that time, the concept of the Anthropocene has been exposed to a wider public audience through expanding environmental studies and scholarship, increasing coverage in the popular press, widespread and fervent activism, and a variety of artistic responses. Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene is the first major exhibition to examine the Anthropocene through the lens of contemporary photography. Comprised of forty-five photo-based artists working in a variety of artistic methods from studios and sites across the globe, Second Nature explores the complexities of this proposed new age. Collectively, these artists offer compelling visual imagery necessary for picturing the Anthropocene: aerial views of beautiful but toxic sites, collages that incorporate archival photographs to counter colonial narratives, depictions of urbanism on an unimaginable scale, and imagined yet precarious futures. In doing so, they address urgent issues such as vanishing ice, rising waters, and increasing resource extraction, as well as the deeply rooted and painful legacies of colonialism, forced climate migration, and socio-environmental trauma. Since its emergence, the term “Anthropocene” has entered the common lexicon and has been adopted by disciplines outside of the sciences including philosophy, economics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, effectively linking the Anthropocene to nearly every aspect of post-industrial life. Organized around four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the exhibition proposes that the Anthropocene is not one singular narrative, but rather a diverse and complex web of relationships between and among humanity, industry, and ecology—the depths and effects of which are continually being discovered. Image: Gideon Mendel, Anchalee Koyama, Taweewattana District, Bangkok, Thailand, November 2011 from the series Drowning World: Submerged Portraits, 2011. Laser print on fabric, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Axis Gallery, New York & New Jersey. © Gideon Mendel.

The International Center of Photography (ICP) will present We Are Here: Scenes from the Streets, an in-depth exploration into 50 years of contemporary public life documented through the lens of over 30 street photographers from around the world, beginning in the 1970s. Guest curated by Isolde Brielmaier, PhD, with Noa Wynn, Independent Curatorial Assistant, We Are Here opens at ICP on September 25, 2024 and runs through January 6, 2025. Featuring works by photographers from Algeria, China, Egypt, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, the USA, and beyond, We Are Here reframes our understanding of “the street” and the activities and exchanges that occur in diverse public and community spaces. In a world fraught with misunderstanding and societal tension, the exhibition highlights street photography’s unique viewpoints on local culture and unfolding events. Documenting both dramatic and everyday moments—from street style to protests—the works in We Are Here testify to the resilience and similarities of the human experience. “We Are Here invites viewers to confront the richness and complexities of our modern, multifaceted life, emphasizing our shared humanity beyond geographic and cultural divides,” Brielmaier said of the exhibition. “Today’s world moves fleetingly, but these images prove that though circumstances might change, humanity is not going anywhere; the stories of our lives will remain.” “Street photographers often navigate the complexities of power dynamics and privilege,” Elisabeth Sherman, ICP Senior Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections said. “We hope this exhibition sparks reflection and conversation about the historical and current dynamics of public spaces that are shaped and mediated by gender, race, and socio-economic status, and how we critically understand the ways they govern our lives.” “As we end ICP’s 50th anniversary celebration with We Are Here, we are reaffirming our mission to educate the public on the power of visual storytelling and to foster international dialogue about what it means to be a concerned photographer today,” said Bob Jeffrey, ICP CEO. “As we look toward the future of ICP and imagemaking, We Are Here offers insight into how integral street photographers are to our understanding of the culture, politics, and day-to-day life of communities across the world. ” We Are Here, while not exhaustive, is expansive, highlighting many fresh and previously underrepresented voices in street photography as a genre, art, and photographic discipline.

Kicking off ICP's 50th anniversary year, ICP at 50: From the Collection, 1845–2019 is a thematic exploration of the many photographic processes that comprise the medium’s history, presenting works from ICP’s deep holdings of photography collected over 50 years since ICP was established in 1974. As a renowned NYC historical museum and one of the top photography galleries in NYC, the exhibition includes work from the 19th century to the present, featuring photographs by well-known artists that ICP has in-depth holdings of—such as Robert Capa, Weegee, Francesco Scavullo, and Gerda Taro among many others—as well as lesser-known and vernacular works and recent acquisitions including images by Jess T. Dugan, Nona Faustine, Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Guanyu Xu. Other photographers featured include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Samuel Fosso, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Meiselas, Louise Lawler, Gordon Parks, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and more. The exhibition will also offer insight into the breadth and depth of ICP’s collection with historically critical images and media that include images taken of the surface of the moon by NASA in 1966, as well as activist posters from the 1980s and ‘90s groups ACT UP, Gran Fury, and fierce pussy. ICP’s founder Cornell Capa created ICP in 1974 in honor of his brother Robert Capa, a preeminent photojournalist of his day, who died in 1954. Robert's archive became a key early piece of ICP’s collection, alongside work by other important photojournalists and documentarians. In the ensuing five decades, the collection has expanded to include early photographic works, vernacular images, fashion photography, and fine art photography among many other types of photographic production, leading ICP to become one of the many famous museums in NYC. Dissolving and challenging boundaries between categories—technological, aesthetic, conceptual, and beyond—the collection is a celebration of image culture and the medium’s ability to reflect the values and interests of its time. ICP at 50 is not only a significant milestone for the institution but also stands as a must-see art exhibit in NYC. It's the first overview collections show since the institution’s move to 79 Essex Street in January 2020. The exhibition will reintroduce the depth and breadth of the ICP holdings to audiences, celebrating 50 years of photography’s evolution.

As one of the most multicultural countries in the world, Australia has inspired many artists to reexamine and navigate the country’s troubled colonial history in the context of questions about identity, belonging, and the continent’s increasingly fragile ecosystems. Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography showcases the work of twelve contemporary Australian artists together with earlier, iconic photographs related to Australia’s history. The juxtaposition of photographs across time illustrates changing views of cultural and national identity—most notably, the primacy of Aboriginal culture in the Australian experience. Comprising works employing a wide array of visually arresting photographic techniques— including Lumachrome glass printing and AI animation—the exhibition traces photography’s evolution as it explores themes such as migration, settler colonialism, landscape, environmental degradation, and portraiture. Art on Hulfish is made possible by the leadership support of Annette Merle-Smith and Princeton University. Generous support is also provided by William S. Fisher, Class of 1979, and Sakurako Fisher; J. Bryan King, Class of 1993; John Diekman, Class of 1965, and Susan Diekman; Julie and Kevin Callaghan, Class of 1983; Annie Robinson Woods, Class of 1988; Barbara and Gerald Essig; Rachelle Belfer Malkin, Class of 1986, and Anthony E. Malkin; the Curtis W. McGraw Foundation; Tom Tuttle, Class of 1988, and Mila Tuttle; Nancy A. Nasher, Class of 1976, and David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976; the Len & Laura Berlik Foundation; Gene Locks, Class of 1959, and Sueyun Locks; and Palmer Square Management. Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography is curated by Deborah Klochko, former executive director and chief curator, Museum of Photographic Arts at San Diego Museum of Art; and Graham Howe, founder and CEO, Curatorial Exhibitions; with Ashley Lumb, independent curator. This exhibition was originated by the Museum of Photographic Arts at San Diego Museum of Art, with generous support from the Farrell Family Foundation and is toured by Curatorial Exhibitions, Pasadena, California. Image: Something More No. 1, 1989. Collection of the Museum of Photographic Arts. Gift of Olivia and Peter Farrell. © Tracey Moffatt

Gitterman Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of early work (1989-1997), from the secondary market, by the Guatemalan artist Luis González Palma (b. 1957). The exhibition will open on Saturday, November 16, 2024, from 11 a.m. till 6 p.m. and run through Saturday, January 11, 2025. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m. till 6 p.m. and by appointment. Please check the website for updated hours since the gallery will be closed certain days around the holidays. During his early career, Luis González Palma made portraits of Guatemalan people of Mayan or mixed Mayan descent to honor their heritage and bring attention to the discrimination and exclusion they faced. In the process, he gained a greater understanding of his own mestizo ancestry. González Palma explains that “…having lived in a country ravaged by more than thirty years of armed conflict…[t]he subject of fear, loneliness, emptiness and absence are deeply embedded in my work.” (see interview with Alasdair Forester) González Palma uses Christian iconography as well as social and cultural symbolism to create his own lexicon which alludes to universal themes of life and death, fate, spirituality, and mysticism. Through the poignant gaze of his subjects, especially present in these works, González Palma engages the viewer as he honors Mayan identity and acknowledges the complex social history of Guatemala. He also implies that this is one history of many in which humans trespass against their fellow humans. Though González Palma photographed with black and white film and printed these images as gelatin silver prints, he used various additional processes and techniques including toning, collage, and painting with bitumen and asphaltum. Some are collaged with red ribbons to symbolize a bloodline; others have pages from biblical texts. Some have handling marks, and sometimes scratches, cuts and folds. The collage and handwork emphasize the physical dimension of each piece. They are not pristine photographic prints that suture us into a specific narrative but rather objects with textures from human touch that engage us as poetic evidence. Luis González Palma’s primary representative in the United States is JDC Fine Art. His work is included innumerous museum collections internationally and he has three monographs to date.

“I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still,” the artist Robert Frank once wrote. “I’m still in there fighting, alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.” Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue—the artist’s first solo exhibition at MoMA—provides a new perspective on his expansive body of work by exploring the six vibrant decades of Frank’s career following the 1958 publication of his landmark photobook, The Americans. Coinciding with the centennial of Frank’s birth, the exhibition will explore his restless experimentation across mediums including photography, film, and books, as well as his dialogues with other artists and his communities. It will include some 200 works made over 60 years until the artist’s death in 2019, many drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection, as well as materials that have never before been exhibited.. The exhibition borrows its title from Frank’s poignant 1980 film, in which the artist reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook. Like much of his work, the film is set in New York City and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. In the film, Leaf looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.”. Organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, with Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, and Casey Li, 12 Month Intern, Department of Photography

The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is honored to present About Face, a journey into the soul of portraiture. In this group exhibition, 23 artists capture the delicate space between presence and absence, revealing the unspoken dialogue that unfolds in the quiet exchange of a glance. About Face explores the profound nature of the human gaze—an ordinary moment made extraordinary through the lens of Leica photographers. Each portrait, like a fleeting breath, holds stillness and intensity, bearing witness to the lives lived in the span of a single frame. Here, faces tell stories beyond words, where the personal becomes universal, and the subject invites us to pause, reflect, and see them in their essence. In this collection, time stretches, emotions deepen, and cultural landscapes emerge. The photographers transform everyday encounters into moments of truth, where vulnerability and strength coexist, and the camera becomes a tool for understanding, empathy, and revelation. About Face is an invitation to reflect on the intimacy of portraiture and the quiet power it holds in connecting us to one another, beyond the surface. Featured artists: Ash Alexander • Devin Allen • Nelson Chan • Jeremy Chiu Geloy Concepcion • DeAndre Forks • Shane Hallinan Virginia Hines • Austin Leong • Auston Marek • Adrian Martinez Barrett Moore • Mark Murrmann • Andrew Paynter • Tofe Salako Philip Sawyer • Brennan Smart • Patrick Stevens • Michael Soto Pablo Unzueta • Felix Uribe Jr. • Andrés Felipe Vargas • Katie Walsh

A voracious photographer who shot hundreds of thousands of pictures over his lifetime, Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) was a pivotal figure in twentieth-century American photography. Winogrand used his lightweight Leica camera athletically, moving in and out of crowds—from Manhattan streets to Texas football fields—as he honed an impulsive yet sophisticated sense of composition. With their wide-angle views and off-kilter perspectives, his photographs convey the energy and upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, bringing disparate figures, glances, and incidents together within the frame. The photographs in this gallery come from some of Winogrand’s most significant projects, from pictures made on road trips across the US and in New York City’s zoos, to scenes of protest, and an abiding (and controversial) interest in photographing women. While Winogrand was criticized for his preoccupation with the female form during the height of the women’s movement, he also celebrated the newfound freedoms women enjoyed in the public sphere, even as they were subjected to male gazes like his own.

Photography has dramatically altered our access to, understanding of, and impact on the natural world. Through programming that includes the exhibition Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, a podcast series, and publication, Widening the Lens examines inherited narratives about people and ecology to offer audiences multiple points of entry into landscape photography. Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography, with Keenan Saiz, Hillman Photography Initiative project curatorial assistant.

Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits looks at a celebrated American photographer and how he forged a new mode of portraiture after World War II. Parks blended a documentary photographer’s desire to place his subjects where they lived and worked with a studio photographer’s attention to dress, character, and expression. In doing so, he believed he could create portraits of individuals that addressed their cultural significance. He applied this approach to such American icons as boxer Muhammad Ali and conductor Leonard Bernstein, as well as to a Harlem gang leader and to a Detroit couple, revealing the humanity and cultural dignity of each person. This exhibition, drawn primarily from the Corcoran Collection, presents some 25 portraits Parks made between 1941 and 1970. Explore Parks's innovations in portraiture through some of his best-known photographs. Learn how his portraits speak to larger stories of the civil rights movement, the African American experience, and American culture. Image: Gordon Parks, Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan (Bert Collins and Pauline Terry), 1950, printed later, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection), 2016.117.150

Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to present the United States premiere of Animitas (Chili), 2014, a video installation by the late French artist Christian Boltanski, who the gallery began working with in 1987. The video notably documents the first incarnation of Boltanski’s Animitas series, which began as a conceptual monument installed in the Atacama Desert in 2014. This original installation featured 800 small bronze bells on individual stems that were arranged to represent the position of the stars on the night of the artist’s birth. The location of Chile was chosen by Boltanski as he originally drew inspiration from the local animitas or “little souls”—small, makeshift altars created to worship the departed along roadsides throughout the country; Boltanski also uses the form to commemorate those killed under the Pinochet regime. As the bells chime with the desert winds, Boltanski envisioned that we could hear “the music of the stars and the voices of the floating souls,” a moving, ancestral soundtrack of lost spirits, which continues to play on in the remote location of Talabre, Chile today. The video Animitas (Chili) was filmed on-site in a single shot from sunrise to sunset and is presented along a large bed of living hay, petals, and flowers that will naturally decay throughout the exhibition. Viewers are invited to meditate on the ghostly “voices” heard in the original work that contemplate the universal themes of the brevity of human life, the passage of time, and the intimate experience of loss. Widely considered to be one of France’s most influential contemporary artists, Boltanski endeavored to create borderless works of art that could be understood by individuals of every global context. In line with this, Boltanski, who considered himself a “sentimental minimalist,” created for Animitas a landscape of delicate bells destined to succumb to their natural surroundings, which will eventually be memorialized in the video alone, further allowing them to live on as a symbol of the precarious nature of human existence. Christian Boltanski (1944-2021) was born in Paris during World War II to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He spent his childhood hearing stories of the Holocaust, which deeply influenced him. A self-taught artist, he began modeling clay and painting before developing his more conceptual work in the late 1960s. Since his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1968, his oeuvre has been widely shown internationally. In 2011 he represented France at the 54th Venice Biennale. This exhibition of Animitas (Chili) was organized with the Christian Boltanski Endowment Fund, founded in September 2023 with the aim of conserving, promoting and presenting the artist's work. Recent solo shows have been held at Busan Museum of Art, Korea (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019); Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, Japan (2019); The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan and the National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan (2019); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2018); The Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2018); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy (2017); The Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Mexico (2016); Instituto Valenciano Arte Moderno (IVAM), Spain (2016); Mac's Grand Hornu, Belgium (2015); and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile (2014). Boltanski was honored with several awards over his lifetime, including the Praemium Imperiale Award (2006) and the Kaiser Ring Award (2001). He participated in Documenta (1977 and 1972) and numerous Venice Biennales (2015, 1995, 1993, 1980 and 1975). In October 2021, a few months after he passed away, three prestigious French institutions in Paris; the Palace of Versailles, the Musée du Louvre; the Centre Pompidou, with the Opéra Comique, organized a joint homage to the artist.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery proudly presents Sound & Sight: Pete Turner’s Jazz Album Covers, an exhibition celebrating Turner’s profound impact on the visual culture of Jazz. Pete Turner’s vibrant colors and dreamlike compositions have graced the pages of magazines, including Esquire, Look, and Sports Illustrated; however, his work may be most recognizable to a different audience—those with a passion for jazz. Spanning five decades and over seventy covers, Turner’s pioneering approach infused jazz album covers with conceptual depth and dynamic energy. By mirroring the improvisational and emotive nature of jazz, Turner bridged sound and vision. His Surrealist predilection and unparalleled ability to translate the essence of music into striking visual compositions redefined the role of the album cover in the art world and reshaped how music is experienced. Sound & Sight: Pete Turner’s Jazz Album Covers invites audiences to immerse themselves in the fusion of sound and sight that characterized his work. As you explore his work, ask yourself: can you see the sound? Can you feel the color of jazz? Before the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a lack of visual identity in record covers, which reflected how the music industry operated. Vinyl covers were formulaic, with record labels taking precedence over artistic expression; most covers merely showcased the label’s name, logo, or insignia. Regardless of genre— jazz, classical, or pop- this uniformity across record covers was a direct consequence of mass production techniques and an industry-wide disregard for the potential synergy between visuals and music. The album covers would look nearly identical from release to release. Simply put, people did not yet see album covers as a medium for artistic or creative expression. Pete Turner’s approach broke this mold. By translating the essence of sound into striking visual narratives, Turner made album covers an integral part of the listening experience. Pete Turner’s photography transcended simple portraiture or landscape photography, moving into the realm of conceptual art. His vibrant use of color and abstract forms pushed the boundaries of color to create otherworldly scenes and introduced new dimensions to the visual representation of music. He approached his work with a meticulous yet experimental eye, often manipulating color and light using filters, solarization, and multiple exposures alongside postproduction. When working on the cover for Studio Trieste by Chet Baker, Jim Hall, and Hubert Laws, Turner experimented with Plexiglas, creating a spectrometric, colored lightbox to photograph a bubble. The result is as fleeting and evocative as Chet Baker’s tone could be: the bubble becomes a Surrealist object, resembling the vinyl enclosed, and its marbling, polychromatic colors become a symbol for the mixing of creative energy. His work on albums like A Day in the Life by Wes Montgomery and Night Train by the Oscar Peterson Trio did more than simply capture attention—it shaped the mood and narrative of the records themselves. For example, in his iconic image Blue Horse, 1961, a silhouetted horse stands against a vast cobalt desertscape, embodying serenity and solitude. In perfect harmony with the syncopated rhythms of Hubert Laws’ Crying Song, the photograph evokes a profound sense of grandeur and adventure, enriching the listener’s journey and introducing a new visual identity to the music. Similarly, Turner’s collaboration with legendary record producer Creed Taylor on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Wave marked a shift in album art. Instead of opting for a literal interpretation, like a traditional depiction of waves (one immediately recalls Hokusai’s Great Wave, 1831), Turner’s surreal image of a giraffe running across a desert created an unexpected but fitting metaphor for the music’s undulating, fluid rhythms. With Pete Turner, each album cover became a statement, a collaboration between artist and musician.. Pete Turner’s unparalleled ability to translate the essence of music into striking visual compositions redefined the role of the album cover in the art world. Turner’s legacy lives on through his countless iconic images that helped shape the visual identity of jazz music, making him not only a key figure in photography but also an essential collaborator in the history of modern jazz.. Image: Eye to Eye 1968 © Pete Turner / Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Drawn from the Allen’s collection, this exhibition spans more than 150 years. Although far from comprehensive, the loosely chronological presentation encompasses key practitioners and decisive moments in the history of photography. From the mid-19th century to the first decades of the 20th, there was widespread debate as to whether photography should be considered a fine art rather than a mechanical trade. The exhibition opens with practitioners who took advantage of this ambiguity to enter the field and make crucial discoveries, largely through portraiture. Works on view from the 1920s to the 1950s show how photographers used the unique characteristics of the medium to document the quintessentially modernist processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and scientific discovery. The second half of the exhibition focuses on strategies of appropriation and collage from the post-World War II period to the present, foregrounding the effects of mass media. Alongside these concerns, photographers developed conceptual modes of portraiture to address identity-based issues. This is the second installment of the multi-year series Femme ’n isms, which highlights women-identified artists in the Allen’s collection and expands art-historical notions of the feminine through the intersections of gender, race, and class. The exhibition includes works by Berenice Abbott, Laura Aguilar, Margaret Bourke-White, Claude Cahun, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Norfleet, Cindy Sherman, Iiu Susiraja, Carrie Mae Weems, and others.

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm is an unprecedented exhibition, revealing extraordinary photographs taken by the beloved musical icon. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London, the exhibition will open at the Portland Art Museum on September 14, 2024, and run through January 19, 2025. Comprising recently rediscovered photographs from Paul McCartney’s personal archive, more than 250 pictures invite visitors to intimately experience The Beatles’ meteoric rise from British sensation to international stardom. At a time when so many camera lenses were turned toward them, McCartney’s perspective from the inside out brings fresh insight into the band, their experiences, the fans, and the Beatlemania phenomenon. Through these photographs, along with video clips and archival material, visitors can witness the dawn of the “British Invasion” that fundamentally transformed rock and roll music and global culture. Captured by McCartney during a pivotal three-month period for The Beatles in late 1963 and early 1964, the photographs evoke an affectionate family album, picturing his fellow band members, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, at a time when their lives were changing irrevocably. The exhibition gives visitors a highly personal glimpse into an extraordinary time with one of music’s enduring legends. The exhibition also captures McCartney’s interest in the visual arts, with his photos reflecting the aesthetics and popular culture of the period. The range of work, from portraiture and landscape photos to documentary images, reveals McCartney’s familiarity with the formal styles of early 1960s photography. References to New Wave, documentary filmmaking, and photojournalism can be found across the exhibition. Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm is curated by Paul McCartney with Sarah Brown on behalf of MPL Communications Limited and Rosie Broadley for the National Portrait Gallery, London, and organized for the Portland Art Museum by Julia Dolan, Ph.D., the Minor White Senior Curator of Photography. Image: Paul McCartney, Self-portrait. London, 1963. © 1963 Paul McCartney under exclusive license to MPL Archive LLP.

Premiering at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Discovering Ansel Adams provides an unprecedented exploration of the early career of Ansel Adams (1902–1984), demonstrating how, between 1916 and the 1940s, Adams developed from a 14-year-old tourist with a camera into America’s most celebrated photographer. Drawn from the definitive Adams collection at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, the exhibition brings together approximately 80 virtuosic photographs with unique ephemera including the artist’s handwritten correspondence, snapshots, personal possessions, and photographic working materials. Featured works range from small, one-of-a-kind photographs from Adams’s teenage years to jaw-dropping mural-sized prints of his most iconic mature views. Join the artist on his journey from teenage musician to young mountaineer, as he makes his first pictures at Yosemite, experiences the American Southwest, learns how to communicate with a broad national audience, and undertakes an epic quest to photograph America’s national parks. Along the way, discover how Ansel Adams became Ansel Adams. Image: The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942 © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Mary Ellen Mark, one of the great American photojournalists, frequently turned her lens to those who had been pushed to the margins of society. This fall, the Gardner Museum brings the story of Mark and one of her long-time personal and artistic partnerships to the Fenway Gallery from October 10, 2024 – January 20, 2025. In 1983, Erin Blackwell, known as “Tiny,” was a 13-year-old girl escaping a difficult home life and living on the streets of Seattle, Washington. At the time, Mark was working on a story for LIFE about unhoused runaway teenagers in what was considered America’s “most livable city.” Mary Ellen Mark’s chance meeting with Erin in a discotheque parking lot would be the catalyst for a remarkable, deeply personal relationship. Over the next 30 years, Erin let Mark document her life. Through pregnancies and addictions, hardships and love, Mark chronicled Erin’s growing, changing family with unflinching empathy, making visible the tangled nature of human connections and the reality of poverty in the United States. The exhibition Mary Ellen Mark: A Seattle Family, 1983–2014 invites visitors to empathize with the struggles and triumphs of a multi-racial American family, and to feel the trust and inspiration that blossomed between Erin Blackwell and Mary Ellen Mark—a relationship that transcended that of artist and collaborator.

Take an epic journey through the American South from 1845 to today. In A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, encounter the everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity and its critical impact on the development of photography. This is the first major exhibition in more than 25 years to explore the full history of photography in and about the South. A Long Arc explores the American South’s distinct, evolving, and contradictory character through an examination of photography and how photographers working in the region have reckoned with the South’s fraught history and posed urgent questions about American identity. Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces the South’s shifting identity in more than two hundred photographs made over more than 175 years. The exhibition’s individual sections delve into the themes of photography before, during, and after the Civil War; documentary photography of the 1930s and ’40s; images of a post–World War II South in economic, racial, and psychic dissonance with the nation; photography as catalyst for change during the civil rights movement; reflective narrative photography of the late 20th century; and contemporary photography examining social, environmental, and economic issues. A Long Arc presents a richly layered archive that captures the region’s beauty and complexity. Offering a full visual accounting of the South’s role in shaping American history, identity and culture, the exhibition includes photographs by Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, P.H. Polk, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby, Ernest Withers, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Baldwin Lee, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Worsham, Carolyn Drake, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross, and others. Image: The March from Selma, 1965, Matt Herron © Matt Herron

Marvel at the poetic street scenes, Hollywood portraits, fashion photos, and images of war produced by more than 30 Hungarian-born artists who transformed photography in the 20th-century. Curated by Alex Nyerges, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Director and CEO, with Károly Kincses, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, American, born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy examines the pioneering artistry that often emerged out of backdrops of persecution and perseverance. American, born Hungary follows a remarkable number of émigrés and exiles from Hungary to Berlin and Paris and then on to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where they reinvented themselves and American photography. This exhibition is the first full examination of their circuitous journeys to the United States—in the aftermaths of two world wars and Hungary’s student-led revolt in 1956—and the wondrous artistic legacy that developed along the way. More than 170 stunning, mesmerizing, and surreal photographs capture the unexpected beauty of fleeting shadows, gritty urban life, glamorous celebrities, and the broken promises of America. Included are works by notables such as André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, Martin Munkácsi, and György Kepes, along with less familiar names whose photos are instantly recognizable. One example is Robert Capa, a pioneer of modern photojournalism whose photos of Omaha Beach on D-Day are among the most famous of World War II. Providing a missing chapter in art history, the exhibition’s focus is the astounding impact of Hungarian-born artists on photography in the United States, especially in urban centers. Highlights include photos by Moholy-Nagy, whose avant-garde beginnings in Dessau, Germany, inspired a “New Bauhaus” that sought to establish the Windy City as a design incubator; work by tailor and photographer John Albok, whose photographs were praised by the New York Times; and André de Dienes, whose portraits of cinema’s icons, including Marilyn Monroe, helped fuel Hollywood’s Golden Age. Before opening at VMFA on October 5, American, born Hungary opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, on April 5, 2024, marking the grand opening of a newly renovated exhibition space at the museum. After its run at VMFA, the exhibition will travel to the George Eastman Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film and the George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, where it will open September 26, 2025. Image: Virginia Bruce, ca. 1938–39, László Josef Willinger, (American, born Hungary 1909–1989) © Estate of Laszlo Willinger, courtesy The John Kobal Foundation

The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) is proud to present Ming Smith: August Moon, an exhibition where the essence of everyday Black life unfolds with breathtaking honesty and reverence. Smith embarks on a poignant journey through the streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, intimately familiarizing herself with the landscape that inspired playwright August Wilson’s iconic “Century Cycle” plays. Smith captures the essence of Wilson’s characters, immortalizing their struggles, triumphs, and the quiet resilience that defines their existence. Smith’s upbringing in a literary family fostered an immediate affinity for Wilson’s subtle metaphors and characters, many of whom mirrored the people she knew from her own childhood. With her deliberate use of blurred imagery and obscured details, Smith creates a visual language that reflects the complexities of Black life in America, inviting viewers to see beyond the surface. Through her photographs, Smith documents the fortitude and fragility of Black communities, built amidst the challenges of Jim Crow laws, redlining, and everyday racism. As Smith traverses the streets of the Hill District, she captures moments of daily life that resonate with the themes of Wilson’s plays. From the camaraderie of pool players to the solitude of Aunt Ester in her fur and knitted hats, Smith’s photographs speak volumes about the resilience and humanity of Black community. August Moon is a visual journey that celebrates the richness of Black life and the enduring legacy of August Wilson’s storytelling. Through Smith’s lens, viewers are invited to immerse themselves in the beauty, complexity, and resilience of ordinary Black existence. Image: Ming Smith, Greyhound Bus, from the series August Moon, 1991 © Ming Smith

The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) is proud to present Ming Smith: Transcendence, featuring the entirety of this remarkable series for the first time. Through this exhibition, CMA offers a rare opportunity to delve into Ming Smith’s identity as an artist deeply rooted in the diverse fabric of Columbus, Ohio. Smith’s lens intricately threads together the cultural tapestry of Columbus, showcasing the influences of luminaries such as Nancy Wilson, Aminah Robinson, Toyce Anderson, Toni Morrison, and Linda Goode Bryant. Ming’s narrative unfolds against familiar backdrops, from Carl Brown’s IGA on Mt Vernon Avenue to Dr. Tyler’s drugstore on the east side, resonating with personal memories of her father’s pharmacy. The halls of The Ohio State University reflect familial achievements, while S. Wheatland Avenue bears witness to pivotal moments in the Hilltop’s history. Transcendence surpasses the confines of traditional photography; it is a deeply intimate exploration of Ming’s reconciliation with her hometown. Inspired by Alice Coltrane’s transformative music, Ming’s series confronts the injustices of her racially divided upbringing in Columbus with compassion and insight. Ming’s narrative invites viewers to engage with the images as a public discourse, with much of Transcendence remaining unseen and unprinted, offering endless opportunities for exploration and interpretation. Join us in celebrating Ming Smith’s artistic legacy and reconnecting with her profound vision as we welcome the artist back to the city that shaped her. Through Transcendence, Ming invites us on a journey of rediscovery, where the past merges with the present, and the potential for understanding knows no bounds. Image: Ming Smith, Black Girl Dreaming (detail), from the series Transcendence, 1990 © Ming Smith

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In its more than ten years, Pier 24 Photography has exhibited many thousands of photographs, and thus hundreds of thousands of hypothetical words. Up until now, every show has begun with the Pilara Foundation Collection and expanded from there. Turning the Page is the first exhibition that does not feature works from our collection. Instead, it looks at and celebrates the photobook, a medium that has undergone its own renaissance parallel to our years in operation. Each of the galleries presents works from a distinct photobook, whether an iconic volume or a recent monograph. The content, sequence, and design of each selected book guided our approach to that particular installation, aiming for a thoughtful translation of its overall tone and intent. Ultimately, Turning the Page invites you to consider how the viewing context impacts our understanding of a photographic project. Among the classic works represented here are Robert Frank’s Les Américains (The Americans, 1958), Masahisa Fukase’s Karasu (Ravens, 1986), Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home (1992), and Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves (1995)—four photobooks that speak to the breadth of the medium across the second half of the twentieth century. Many consider The Americans so influential that every photobook since has been either in conversation with it or in rebellion against it. Ravens trades Frank’s restless questioning of the American dream for a dark, introspective processing of grief in the aftermath of Fukase’s divorce; both demonstrate how image sequencing can evoke feeling and narrative. Pictures from Home and Raised by Wolves build upon these precedents, combining image sequence, page layout, and text to tell powerful stories and reveal certain truths. Over the past twenty years, photobooks have become increasingly essential to many photographers, offering a distinctive medium for fully realizing their visions—often pushing the boundaries of the book form along the way. This approach to design and layout extends to how several of the featured photographers have installed works from their projects. Few artists have explored the photobook’s range as extensively as Rinko Kawauchi, whose Ametsuchi (2013) unifies book design with her project’s concept and visual content; her lyrical installation echoes the sequence and design within her book’s pages. Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls (2016–21) is a series of seven individual yet related photobooks, one for each chapter of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, upon which the project is loosely based. The design of Rose Marie Cromwell’s El Libro Supremo de la Suerte (2018) is based on Cuban charadas—small photocopied pamphlets that guide people in placing bets in Havana’s underground lottery by assigning numbers to everyday objects; Cromwell’s nonlinear approach to image sequencing is also informed by this random system. And in Wires Crossed (2023), Ed Templeton documents two decades of his life as a professional skateboarder in a dense, frenetic sequence evoking the look and feel of the skate world he helped create. These four photographers have conceived unique installations for Turning the Page that speak to the kind of engaging experiences they are known for creating when translating their works from page to wall. Pier 24 Photography has long believed in the photobook as an essential vehicle for both discovering new and exciting photographers, and looking deeply at the history of the medium. Additionally, we have contributed to the photobook community with our own publishing program. As with all of our shows, we hope you will see both familiar works that call out to you as old friends might, and unfamiliar photographers for you to encounter. It is this eye toward the future, with a humble respect for the past, that unifies the work on display. We hope you will join us as we turn the page together. PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Richard Avedon | Libby Black | Rose Marie Cromwell | Rineke Dijkstra | Robert Frank | Masahisa Fukase | Jim Goldberg | Curran Hatleberg | Rinko Kawauchi | Baldwin Lee | Helen Levitt | Zanele Muholi | Cindy Sherman | Donavon Smallwood | Alec Soth | Larry Sultan | Ed Templeton | Vasantha Yogananthan Image: Rose Marie Cromwell, Martica, 2009–16, from the book El Libro Supremo de la Suerte. © Rose Marie Cromwell, courtesy the artist

Selected Artists: Leah Abrahams, Asiya Al. Sharabi, Federica Armstrong, Darryl Baird, Lowell Baumunk, Steve Bennett, Bonnie Blake, Marisa Brown, Lindsay Buchman, Xtine Burrough, Susan Kaufer Carey, Rebecca Chappelear, Victoria Crayhon, Jane Waggoner Deschner, Brian Fouhy, Leah Frances, Beth Galton, Amy Gaskin, Maryam (Nilou) Ghasempour Siahgaldeh, Rima Grad, Sharon Lee Hart, Charlotta Hauksdottir, Adriene Hughes, Charles Ingham, Candace Jahn, Lauren Johnson, Michael Joseph, Sherry Karver, Valerie Kim, Melissa Kreider, Judith G Levy, Annie Lopez, Jena Love, Jenny Lynn, Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Ellen Mahaffy, Andy Mattern, Benita Mayo, Eric McCollum, Jenna Meacham, Julie Mihaly, Venessa Monokian, Kris Moore, Lisa Murray, Marni Myers, Lisa Nebenzahl, Cheryl Newman, Jackson Nichols, Charlotte Niel, Robert Nielsen, Rachel Nixon, Catherine Panebianco, Cyd Peroni, Mehregan Pezeshki, Jeff Phillips, Linda Plaisted, Wendy Ploger, Michael Pointer, Steve Prezant, Jennifer Pritchard, Michael Rainey, Brandon Ralph, Victor Ramos, David Richards, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Joel Rotenberg, Don Russell, Robin Salcido, Bill Saltzstein, Beth Sanders, Kris Sanford, Elizabeth Sanjuan, Deborah Saul, Angela Scardigno, Richard Schramm, Robert Schultz, Becca Screnock, Nicolo Sertorio, Rebecca Sexton Larson, Liz Albert and Shane VanOosterhout, Christine Siracusa, Paul Sisson, Jerry Takigawa, Dean Terasaki, Lacey Terrell, Cydney Topol, Hailey Trejo, Mark Troyer, Jim Turner, Brian Van de Wetering, Harry von Stark, Robert Weil, Francine Weiss, Andrea Wenglowskyj, Thomas Whitworth, Eric Williams, Jon Wollenhaupt, Ian Wright, Douglas Yates, Jennifer Zwick Jurors Statement The exhibition, Words & Pictures, is a fantastic representation of how artists are using two mediums to elevate their art making, The narratives featured in this exhibition range from personal and poignant to humorous and creative with words that accompany photographs and appear In and on photographs. Artists have incorporated text and symbols into their work since the beginning of time, but it was in the 1970’s when text and photography had a significant marriage and was at the forefront of visual culture and semiotic language. Artists such as Duane Michals, Sophie Calle, Jim Goldberg, and Carrie Mae Weems have used text to expand storytelling. Photography has returned to many of the methodologies created half a century ago, and it’s exciting to see the medium become so expansive. There are qualities that are universal to creating a compelling photograph. The work must have an intangible resonance and a sensitivity that links together images and ideas. The photographs have to be well crafted and have power, sometimes in their simplicity and sometimes in their complexity. Most importantly, the work must have authenticity—it has to convince the viewer that it has come from a genuine place, and it needs to persuade us that there is meaning and purpose behind the effort. The ubiquitousness of photography today requires creative approaches to all genres to shift the norms and reinvigorate the medium, as evidenced by the submissions to this exhibition. My Juror Selection Award goes to Charles Ingham. He submitted so many stellar images that it was hard to narrow it down. His work in both cinematic and intimate and he is a unique visual storyteller. For Honorable Mentions, I selected works by Angela Scardigno, Lindsay Buchman, Jackson Nichols – each artist elevating and expanding the visual experience with a particular visual persuasion. A big thank you to all who submitted—it was a pleasure to spent time with your work and though I selected a large number of images, there were still so many photographs that I wish I could have included. Aline Smithson

Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World is an ambitious exhibition spanning six decades (1962–2020s) that investigates the history and creative uses of digital imaging technology, from the genesis of digital imaging in Southern California research laboratories during the Cold War and space race of the 1960s to the ubiquity of digital media in our contemporary world. The exhibition and accompanying publication narrate the ideological shifts that occurred as digital technologies were adopted for artistic ends. Conceptually organized into themes exploring issues of agency, representation, culpability, and connection, Digital Capture features more than 40 artists working across several technological, computing, and imaging media. Participating artists: Rebecca Allen, Refik Anadol, Natalie Bookchin, micha cárdenas, Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Nonny de la Peña, John Divola, Dynasty Handbag, EPOCH, Elisa Giardina Papa, Goldin+Senneby, Valerie Green, Lucia Grossberger Morales, Maggie Hazen, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Huntrezz Janos, Eugene Lally, Brandon Lattu, Ahree Lee, David Maisel, Frank Malina, Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, Lynne Marsh, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mobile Image (Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz), Lee Mullican, A. Michael Noll, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Charles O’Rear, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Sheila Pinkel, Sonya Rapoport, Marton Robinson, Dean Sameshima, Julia Scher, Ilene Segalove, Sonia Landy Sheridan, Barbara T. Smith, Christine Tamblyn, Penelope Umbrico, Stan VanDerBeek, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Gerardo Velazquez, Andrew Norman Wilson, Amir Zaki. Image: Micha Cárdenas and the Critical Realities Studio, Sin Sol / No Sun, 2020, screenshot of augmented reality app

Flower blooms at night invite us to delve into enchanting gardens after dark. Gardens require attention and care, slowly growing and evolving. The gardener must listen and negotiate the vast will and system of its universe. Each plant carries histories, symbolisms, mysteries, and mutations, emerging in these collages as emblems of adaptation. Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present Night Gardens, a solo exhibition of works by Mary Mattingly on view from December 12, 2024 through February 7, 2025. Gardens produce food, medicine, fragrances of the earth—flowers, mulch, compost—textures, colors, and life. Birds, insects, and hidden movements stir in the dark, reminders that a garden is a world of its own. In this vibrant exhibition, Mattingly creates hyper-detailed images merging physical and digital realms into magical worlds. The twelve images in this exhibition are set in riparian zones where biological life responds to shifting water levels; the stories of these precious ecosystems go back to ancient times. In some myths, lotuses and water lilies rise from waters. Similarly, the thistle, both cursed and cherished, embodies resilience, even dispelling melancholy with its roots. Walking around Socrates Sculpture Park at twilight, the artist became inspired by the moonlit gardens. Mattingly took cuttings, scanned plants, painted and drew flowers, experimented with using fish tanks and mirrors, made flowers out of fabric, and used a digital program to further shape the subjects of her collages. Through these garden scenes, Mattingly “explores how disparate elements—ancient symbols, mythic blooms, evolving plants—come together to speak of survival, imagination, and transformation in a time of environmental upheaval. Night Gardens is an inquiry into the wild and shifting relationships between lifeforms, the self included.” In these images, Mattingly cultivates a garden that begins in reality and transforms into an ethereal myth of what could be. “The garden becomes a miniature world, echoing Foucault’s idea of a symbolic and even sacred enclosure—a universe in-between, where time and space, nature and artifice, history and future all overlap.” Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at locations including the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Bronx Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Museo National de Belles Artes de la Habana, and the Palais de Tokyo among other venues. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series. She is a recipient of support from the Guggenheim Foundation, A Blade of Grass, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Art Matters Foundation.

Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit presents the first West Coast retrospective on the work of this critical yet overlooked figure in the history of modern photography. A bicoastal artist between San Francisco and New York, Consuelo Kanaga was one of the first women to become a staff photojournalist at a major newspaper — The San Francisco Chronicle — in the 1910s. Over the course of six decades, Kanaga championed the artistic value of photography and documented urgent social issues, from urban poverty and labor rights to racial terror and inequality. Her work remains as relevant today as it was during her own lifetime. Organized from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, this exhibition charts the artist’s vision, which spans pathbreaking photojournalism, modernist still lifes, and celebrated portraits of Black Americans. Image: Consuelo Kanaga, Kenneth Spencer, 1933 © Brooklyn Museum

Photographs by Roy DeCarava and Danny Lyon from the Sandor Family Collection As part of a generous gift of photographs to The Ringling from Richard and Ellen Sandor, we’ve received two significant portfolios: Twelve Photogravures by Roy DeCarava (American, 1919-2009) and Danny Lyon’s (American, born 1942) Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. These bodies of work by two of America’s most consequential photographers offer distinct but complementary expressions of Black life and the struggle for civil rights in the U.S. This exhibition is curated by Christopher Jones, Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Natalia Benavides, The Ringling's Coville Photography Intern and Jevon Brown, The Ringling's Eleanor Merritt Fellow. Image: Danny Lyon, American, born 1942, Cairo, IL, 1962: SNCC field secretary, later SNCC Chairman, now Congressman John Lewis, and others pray during a demonstration. from the portfolio Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement,1962-1964, printed 1996, Gelatin silver print, Gift of the Richard & Ellen Sandor Family Collection, 2023, 2023.36.3

Please join us for this retrospective exhibition of works by internationally exhibited photographer, archivist, curator and Professor Emeritus, Lewis Watts. With a keen interest in both historical and contemporary representations of people in the African diaspora, this exhibition includes portraits of artists, activists, authors, and musicians along with his photographs of historical, archival objects, images from his best-selling book, Harlem of the West, as well as his documentary street photography. For more than fifty years, Watts' photography practice and research has been grounded by an interest in the culture, history, and migration of people of the African diaspora, beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area and the nation, but also in Europe and abroad. On opening night we'll have the pleasure of hearing Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Judy Walgren in conversation with renowned photographer Lewis Watts. Not to be missed! Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz where he taught for 14 years. Before that he taught in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. His research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in communities in the African Diaspora. He is a documentary photographer and he also examines the archive of 19th and 20th Century African American Literature and ephemera. He is the co- author of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (Heyday Books Berkeley 2020), New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture inTransition (UC Press 2013) and Portraits (Edition One Press, Berkeley 2020). His work has been exhibited at and/or is in the collections of The Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University (Seize the Time), Staatiche Kunstammiunger, Dresden Germany, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art: University of Oregon, Autograph London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Citè de La Musique, Paris France, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Neuberger museum of Art, Purchase NY, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn, Light Work, Syracuse NY, The Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco, The McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco among others. He is currently working on the following photographic projects: “Charleston and the LowCountry” for the International African American Museum in Charleston South Carolina, as well as the long-term projects “Portraits of Black Creatives," and "Effects of Migration throughout America, Europe,the Middle East and Africa." Judy Walgren is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, photographer, photo editor, curator and chair of the Photography Department at Foothill College in Los Altos, California. Walgren teaches courses that range from introduction to photography through the capstone portfolio class. She also curates six exhibitions for two galleries located on the Foothill campus and produces 15 artist talks each academic year. Before coming to Foothill, she served as the associate director for the Michigan State University School of Journalism, teaching courses in beginning and advanced visual storytelling, documentary photography, 360-degree video, among others. During her professional career, she led the photography team at the San Francisco Chronicle and was a member of visual teams at The Dallas Morning News, The Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, where she focused on documenting human rights abuses against minoritized communities. Walgren's creative research unpacks the semiotics found within visual archives and explores methods for collaborative and community-engaged visual storytelling.

Chicana Photographers LA! features the work of five Chicana artists from Los Angeles who share common concerns about families, neighborhoods, sacred spaces, and body and identity politics. Featuring 41 photographs produced from the early 1980s to 2024, this exhibition considers domestic and environmental transformations occurring across the artists’ home turf, some cultural, demographic, and diasporic, others directly confronting the impact of gentrification on Chicanx communities. From Christina Fernandez’ suburban landscapes to Sandra de la Loza’s archaeological ruins of a beloved neighborhood to the situated biographical and autobiographical portraits by Laura Aguilar (1959–2018), Amina Cruz, and Star Montana, the vast cultural terrain of Southern California, is depicted and infused with family narratives, memory, and belonging. Image: Suburban Nightscape (Theo and Diego) #4, ​2023

On Saturday, November 23, 2024, PDNB Gallery will open a new exhibition celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the release of Neal Slavin’s book and photography series from the 1970’s, When Two or More are Gathered Together. The expanded edition includes an essay by Kevin Moore, along with new portraits. Neal started his series in the 1970’s, traveling around the United States in search of any organizations, clubs, and societies. Groups include Trekkies at a Star Trek convention, bodybuilders, Delorean car collectors, Sabrett Hot dog vendors and Miss America contestants lined up in their one-piece swimsuits. Slavin’s vibrant color photographs mark a shift in the art world of the 70’s. Previously, photography was mostly viewed as the classic black and white prints done by the masters. Color photography was popularized by the young artists of the 70’s like William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Larry Sultan and more. Color became part of the subject and photographs became more conceptual, adding more dimension than the typical beautiful landscape. Bold primary colors shine through in Neal’s photograph of the Sabrett Hot Dog Vendors. A quartet of men stand by their respective carts, in front of the K & P Distributor’s Sign. They are about to roll out into the streets of New York City, serving up the classic hot dog that tourists crave and business men grab for a quick lunch. Conventions provide the optimal opportunity for interesting groups, as seen in this 1970’s Star Trek Convention. Today this has morphed into a ComicCon convention. Slavin's mismatched group of young adults in handmade costumes is sure to charm even the non-Trekkie and will transport serious fans into the Captain Kirk time zone. Channel Swimmers depicts an eclectic group of all ages, still wearing their swim caps and goggles from their grueling swim. The photograph featured in this exhibition was taken with the 20 x 24 inch Polaroid camera. Slavin used this camera to document groups in Great Britain. A book was published on this project, The Britons, but not included in the new edition of When Two or More are Gathered Together. Slavin always asks the subjects to arrange themselves, allowing the group dynamics and natural hierarchies to become the main subject. This process creates a typology of sorts, like August Sander’s document of Germans in the early 20th century. Slavin’s portraits celebrate these found communities of shared interests, while provoking questions of the groups’ dynamic. Do they all look alike? Do they share similar beliefs? Which chose to blend into the group, and who is commanding attention? These portraits serve as a visual sociological study, presenting unity and individuality in one photograph. Neal Slavin will be in attendance on opening night, Saturday, November 23rd from 5 – 8pm. His book, When Two or More are Gathered Together, can be purchased in gallery or on the gallery’s website.

When one thinks of American landscape photography, the first region of the country that comes to mind is usually the West. The iconic photographs made in the late 19th century by Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, captured the majestic views of the West’s endless wide-open expanses and formed the visualization of manifest destiny. In the 20th century, America’s most important and famous landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, visually defined the dramatic scenery of Western landscape in art and popular culture through the Half Dome in California’s Yosemite National Park and the moon rise over Hernandez, New Mexico. Unlike the West, the American South is not well known as a subject of landscape photography. Perhaps, this is due to the Southern landscape not being as visually dramatic or as photogenic as the West. The Appalachian and Ozark mountains of the South are beautiful, but cannot compete visually with the much more rugged and higher peaks of the West’s Rockies, Tetons and Sierra-Nevada mountains. The sandy dunes of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico beaches that ring the South are much more sublime when compared to the roaring waves, rocky beaches and jagged cliffs of the Pacific Ocean. The landscape in Southern art is much more about the romantic idealization of a place. Place along with time, are the central components of Southern art, music and literature. Within Southern art, place can be actual, imaged or metaphysical. When O’Sullivan and Watkins were documenting the virgin Western landscape, the lands of the American South (east of the Mississippi River) had been almost entirely tamed for hundreds of years through European settlement. The settlement came with European romantic ideas of art and literature. The 18th century European concept of Romanticism in art and literature (which had an emphasis on imagination, idealization and emotion) were first infused into Southern landscape painting and later into photography. Southland examines the role photographs have played in the visualization of the natural landscape of the American South. The exhibition explores the many technical and aesthetic methods photographers have employed in approaching the subject of the Southern Landscape. Highlighting the marshlands in Louisiana, the beaches of Florida, the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta and the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, the exhibition shows the landscape of the American South is as diverse as the people and culture of the region. Southland not only investigates the topographical physical characteristics of the land of the American South, but the metaphysical and emotional role romanticism plays in the understanding of landscape photographs made of and about the American South. Image: Mississippi River from the Bluffs (Near Port Hudson, LA.), 1962 © Elemore Morgan, Sr.

Baldwin Lee was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York and was raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown. He studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) with American photographer Minor White and received an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art, where he studied with photojournalist Walker Evans. After becoming the first Director of the Photography Department at the University of Tennessee in 1982, Lee set out from Knoxville the following year with a 4 x 5 view camera on a 2,000 mile journey of self-discovery, photographing his adopted homeland – the American South. Lee’s artistic goal for the trip was to partially re-trace and re-photograph the 1930s-40s routes made across the South by his teacher and mentor Walker Evans. Unlike Evans’ iconic depression-era photographs, Lee would eventually focus on documenting Black Americans, many of whom were living in poverty on the fringes of society. As a Chinese-American, Lee described having a semi-pass to enter into Black spaces, allowing him to make intimate portraits of Black life. Over the next seven years Lee traveled thousands of miles on the back roads of the South, taking over 10,000 photographs – producing one of the most important visual documents of and about the American South in the past half century. With this work, Lee had found his primary subject, and credits his many years of working within Black communities throughout the South as having a “political” effect on his life and art. The compassion Lee felt for those he photographed resonates within his work. Although Lee’s 1980s photographs documenting the human condition of Southern Blacks were known and respected by his fellow photographers and collectors; until recently this work has remained largely unknown and under appreciated by the larger public. In the fall of 2022, Hunter’s Point Press published “Baldwin Lee,” a book of the artist’s 1980s Southern photographs. The book became an instant classic and the first edition sold out in less than a month. The book’s success led to solo exhibitions at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City and Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California. After nearly 40 years, Baldwin Lee is finally being recognized for his groundbreaking work. Baldwin Lee will feature a selection of over 40 gelatin silver prints culled from thousands of images Lee made across the South in the 1980s. Many of these photographs will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition will include compelling portraits of Black Americans, as well as a collection of landscape and cityscape images that visually encapsulate the Reagan-era American South. Baldwin Lee will be on view at Ogden Museum of Southern Art October 5, 2024 through February 16, 2025. The exhibition is curated by Richard McCabe, Curator of Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Image: Untitled, ca. mid 1980s. © Baldwin Lee

Ghanaian photographer Gerald Annan-Forson portrays both political transformation and daily life in the African city during the last decades of the 20th century. This exhibition is only the second time his work has been shown in North America. His photographs tell the visual story of Ghana after it won independence from British imperial rule on March 6, 1957. Annan-Forson documents the changing landscape of Accra, the nation’s capital, with its subtle moods and evolving cosmopolitanisms. His compositional style, playful focus, and formal repetitions challenge photographic conventions and disrupt viewer expectations by centering quirky figures and offbeat moments. His commitment to both spectacular occasions and the quiet intimacies of Ghanaian life places his images in dialogue with the previous generation of independence-era African photographers such as Felicia Abban, James Barnor, and Malick Sidibé and anticipates the recent explosion of photographers across the continent who are experimenting with documentary storytelling.

Through portraiture and biography, “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939” illuminates the accomplishments of sixty convention-defying women who crossed the Atlantic to pursue personal and professional aspirations in the vibrant cultural milieu of Paris. As foreigners in a cosmopolitan city, these “exiles” escaped the constraints that limited them at home. Many used their newfound freedom to pursue culture-shifting experiments in a variety of fields, including art, literature, design, publishing, music, fashion, journalism, theater and dance. An impressive number rose to preeminence as cultural arbiters, not merely participating in important modernist initiatives but orchestrating them. The progressive ventures they undertook while living abroad profoundly influenced American culture and opened up new possibilities for women. “Brilliant Exiles” highlights the dynamic role of portraiture in articulating the new identities that American women were at liberty to develop in Paris. “Brilliant Exiles” is the first exhibition to focus on the impact of American women on Paris – and of Paris on American women – from the turn of the 20th century until the outbreak of World War II. Included will be portraits of cultural influencers, such as Josephine Baker, Isadora Duncan, Zelda Fitzgerald, Loïs Mailou Jones, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Ethel Waters, and Anna May Wong. The exhibition is curated by Robyn Asleson, curator of prints and drawings, and will be accompanied by a major catalogue, published by the National Portrait Gallery and Yale University Press. Image: Josephine Baker by Stanislaus Julian Walery, Gelatin silver print, 1926 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

St. Louis-based contemporary artist Jess T. Dugan explores facets of identity through their photography, video, and writing. Grounded in their own experience as a queer, nonbinary person, Dugan’s work addresses the universal human need to understand, express oneself, and connect with others. Dugan’s previous body of work, To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (2018), a series of portraits and in-depth interviews collected in collaboration with scholar Vanessa Fabbre, received acclaim for providing visibility to a community whose lives and struggles have largely gone unrepresented in a nuanced or thoughtful way. This exhibition is curated by Christopher Jones, Stanton B.and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Arts.

Peter Fetterman Gallery is excited to announce "Woof Woof: The Dog in Photography," an exhibition celebrating the special bond between humans and dogs through the lens of some of the most iconic photographers in history. Opening on December 7, 2024, this exhibition will feature a captivating collection of images that explore the deep connection, joy, and companionship shared with our canine friends. Woof Woof: The Dog in Photography will include works by renowned artists such as Kristoffer Albrecht, Sid Avery, Dorothy Bohm, Wynn Bullock, Giacomo Brunelli, Susan Burnstine, Mark Citret, John Cohen,Georges Dambier, John Divola, Robert Doisneau, Elliott Erwitt, René Groebli, Cig Harvey, William Helburn, Thurston Hopkins, Horst P. Horst, Jamie Johnson, Herman Leonard, Jacques Lowe, Kurt Markus, David Montgomery, Daido Moriyama, Sebastião Salgado, Pentti Sammallahti, Traer Scott, George H. Seeley, Sabine Weiss and more. Each photograph in this exhibition offers a unique perspective on the dog’s role in human life, from playful street scenes to intimate moments of quiet companionship. With both historic and contemporary images, this show invites viewers to reflect on the emotional richness that dogs bring to our lives, captured in unforgettable moments. Woof Woof is a must-see for photography enthusiasts and dog lovers alike, highlighting the universal and timeless bond between humans and their furry companions. Image: Dog - The Animals 2010 © Giacomo Brunelli

This ongoing exhibition celebrates the diverse perspectives artists have brought to the medium of photography, featuring a varied presentation of works from the Museum’s holdings. The latest selection of photographs, on view through spring 2025, focuses on music, from community bands to Tina Turner. Works by Ernest Withers offer a glimpse of the vibrant Memphis music scene of the 1950s and 1960s, while Henry Horenstein captures country music performers and fans alike. With works by seven artists that range across five decades, this installation attests to music’s power to offer us joy, community, and catharsis.

Born in 1947 in Douglas, Arizona, and based in Tucson, Louis Carlos Bernal was a pioneering Chicano photographer, among the very first to envision his work in the medium not as documentation, but as an art form. He began his career in the early 1970s in the wake of the Chicano civil rights movement, articulating a quietly political approach to photography with the aim of heralding the strength, spiritual and cultural values, and profound family ties that marked the lives of Mexican Americans who were marginalized and little seen. Initially focusing on the people of modest means he encountered in the barrios of Tucson, the city where he lived and taught, Bernal eventually traveled to small towns throughout the Southwest, where he portrayed individuals and families in outdoor settings or in their homes surrounded by belongings, tabletops filled with religious statuary and curios, and at times, rooms absent of people that nevertheless express the tenor of the lives lived within them. In a relatively short career that spanned the 1970s and 1980s, Bernal demonstrated his profound gift for magnifying the lives of his subjects and for capturing the essence of their character in a single image. In addition to the photographs made in Southwestern barrio communities, the exhibition will also include examples of Bernal’s early experimental work, photographs he made during his frequent trips to Mexico, and a selection of never-seen images he produced in Cuba. It is curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, a specialist in the history of Latinx photography, and will be accompanied by a catalog to be co-published by the Center for Creative Photography and Aperture. Image: ​​Louis Carlos Bernal, El Gato, Canutillo, New Mexico, ​1979, Gift of Morrie Camhi, ​© Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Bernal

NMWA presents evocative documentary and studio-based photographs by Bronx-based artist Samantha Box (b. 1977, Kingston, Jamaica) in her inaugural solo exhibition in Washington, DC. Seen together for the first time, Box’s two major bodies of work “Invisible” and “Caribbean Dreams” reveal layered conversations around the intersectionality of nationality, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. In her breakthrough body of work, “Invisible” (2005 to 18), Box photographed a community of New York City’s LGBTQIA+ youth of color living at Sylvia’s Place, the city’s only homeless emergency shelter. She went on to document at-risk transgender and nonbinary youth participating in Kiki ballroom pageants and performances. Her images depict grief, joy, inner conflict, and resolve, signifying the intense bonds between these young people, who often lost their homes and faced discrimination after revealing their sexual identities to relatives and loved ones. In 2018, Box shifted from documentary photography to a studio-based practice in her ongoing series “Caribbean Dreams.” As the child of a Black Jamaican father and South Asian Trinidadian mother, Box explores her own experiences around her diasporic cultural identity. Staging color still lifes that recall the lush tableaus of 17th-century Dutch painting, Box connects the exploits and long-lasting impacts of colonialism through images of sumptuous, ripened fruit, family heirlooms, self-portraits, and vintage photographs. This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC). NMWA and DMAC are staging concurrent exhibitions of Box’s work in fall 2024, each highlighting a different facet of her practice. Image: Kristen, on 34th Street, on her way to work on the stroll, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2008 © Samantha Box

Can a photographic portrait inspire political imagination? Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination examines how photographers and their sitters contributed to the proliferation of Pan-African solidarity during the mid-20th century. Embracing the international spirit of the time, the exhibition gathers striking pictures by photographers working in Central and West African cities. They created images of everyday citizens, dazzling music scenes, and potent manifestations of youth culture that reflected emerging political realities. Photographs by Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Sanlé Sory portray residents across Bamako, Bobo-Dioulasso, and Kinshasa at a time when the winds of decolonial change swept the African continent in tandem with the burgeoning US Civil Rights movement. The exhibition also spotlights James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite—photographers living in Europe and North America who contributed to the construction of Africa as a political idea. Contemporary works by artists such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby show the enduring relevance of these themes. Brimming with possibility, Ideas of Africa: Portraits and Political Imagination embraces the creative potential of the photographic portrait and its political resonance across the globe. Image: Sanlé Sory. Traveller (Le Voyageur). 1970–85.

See how documentary photography transformed during the 1970s. The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the United States. Americans witnessed soaring inflation, energy crises, and the Watergate scandal, as well as protests about pressing issues such as the Vietnam War, women’s rights, gay liberation, and the environment. The country’s profound upheaval formed the backdrop for a revolution in documentary photography. Activism and a growing awareness and acceptance of diversity opened the field to underrepresented voices. At the same time, artistic experimentation fueled the reimagining of what documentary photographs could look like. Featuring some 100 works by more than 80 artists, The ʼ70s Lens examines how photographers reinvented documentary practice during this radical shift in American life. Mikki Ferrill and Frank Espada used the camera to create complex portraits of their communities. Tseng Kwong Chi and Susan Hiller demonstrated photography’s role in the development of performance and conceptual art. With pictures of suburban sprawl, artists like Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal challenged popular ideas of nature as pristine. And Michael Jang and Joanne Leonard made interior views that examine the social landscape of domestic spaces. The questions these artists explored—about photography’s ethics, truth, and power—continue to be considered today. Image: Helen Levitt, New York, 1972, dye imbibition print , Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1995.36.99

Abelardo Morell’s unconventional photographs provoke curiosity and wonder. Using optical science as well as illusion, he reimagines the world around us. Morell (American, b. Cuba, 1948) is best known for his use of the camera obscura process. A camera obscura is an ancient technology—a darkened room that admits light through a pinhole, projecting an image of the view outside onto the opposite wall. Morell’s innovation is in transforming everyday spaces into camera obscura: his projections interact with the room’s furniture and décor, and he photographs the results. Intermingling past and present, indoors and outside, these works encourage reflection on our relationship with memory, nature, and place. New Realities features sixteen of Morell’s inventive photographs, drawn from the Museum’s holdings. In addition to his camera obscura works, this exhibition will also highlight a selection of photographs from Flowers for Lisa. This varied series of floral still lifes alludes to philosophy, art history, and mortality through both physical and digital manipulations. Morell’s complex images subvert our expectations, uncovering new interest and beauty in familiar subjects. As he explains, “It’s encouraging to see strangeness come out of what we all know.”

Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits is the first standalone museum show to explore a transformational phase of the celebrated photographer and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey's work. The show features 38 portraits he took between 1988 and 1991, when he collaborated with Black Americans of all ages whom he met on the streets of various American cities. He asked a cross section of people in these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments. Bey used a large format tripod-mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative. Bey considers photography an ethical practice that requires collaboration with his subjects. As part of every encounter, he gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print as a way of reciprocating and returning something to the people who allowed him to make their portrait.. Street Portraits is organized by the community the photographs were taken in: Brooklyn; Washington, D.C.; Rochester; Amityville; and Harlem. Defying racial stereotypes, the resulting photographs reveal the Black subjects in all of their psychologically rich complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world. Image: Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike, Amityville, NY, from the series Street Portraits, 1988. Pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago. © Dawoud Bey

In 1955, two photographers received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation for U.S. survey projects: Robert Frank and Todd Webb. Frank’s cross-country trip by car would result in the celebrated book “The Americans.” Webb was awarded a grant to walk, boat, and bike across the United States to depict “vanishing Americana, and the way of life that is taking its place.” Though the men had no knowledge of each other during the application process, both secured a recommendation from famed photographer Walker Evans, and both completed their cross-country surveys—though in radically different ways. Frank’s resulting work became a landmark text in the history of photography, and Webb’s project remains almost entirely unknown. Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955 brings together both 1955 projects for the first time. In some instances, Frank’s and Webb’s images are strikingly similar—both men took photographs of the highway and dim, smoky barrooms. Because each was unaware of the other’s work, these similarities can be traced to popular cultural trends and shared ideologies. Both men, after all, engaged in projects that challenged the idealistic purity of the “American Roadtrip.” Radically different photographs made in the same location reveal the photographers’ diverse perspectives and approaches. Frank’s grainy, off-kilter style was matched with his harsh examination of the darker side of American life. An immigrant born in Switzerland, Frank (1924–2019) harnessed his outsider perspective. The tender, carefully composed images created by Detroit-born Webb (1905–2000) celebrated the individual oddities of the American way of life. Ultimately, comparing the work of these photographers reveals the complexity of their projects and the impossibility of capturing a singular vision of “America.” Image: Between Lovelock and Fernley, NV 1956 © Todd Webb Archives

Long before the term “power couple” found its way into English lexicon, dynamic duos had been making their mark on U.S. history. “Powerful Partnerships: Civil War-Era Couples” sheds light on the stories and faces of five couples whose work and lives shaped the nation around them during tumultuous times. Featuring photography by the iconic Mathew Brady Studio, the exhibition introduces visitors to the exploits of Nathaniel and Mary Banks, John and Jessie Frémont, Ulysses and Julia Grant, George and Ellen McClellan, and Charles and Lavinia Stratton (better known to the public as Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb).

Emerging from Micah Cash’s photography series and photo book of the same name, this exhibition focuses on the built and natural environments as seen through the windows of Waffle House restaurants. Captured from locations across the southeastern United States, these images contemplate the physical and social environments and commerce that surround each location of the southern cultural icon. The natural landscapes beyond the windowpanes are as diverse as the perspectives and stories of each guest at the tables. Yet the similarities of the restaurants’ interiors echo across states and time zones. The images look out from the restaurant’s iconic booths, past the signature midcentury pendant lamps and make viewers newly conscious of buildings so commonplace they often go unseen. Each guest, waiting for their hashbrowns, becomes witness to the intertwined narratives of economic stability, transience and politics. The familiar, well-worn interiors make us think about what we have in common. Yet the differences in environment call to mind the different ways we experience structures built and felt. This exhibition will premiere a newly commissioned time-based media component of the series. This video realizes Cash’s directive to “look up” through prolonged footage of views and sounds from three Waffle Houses. The video and its soundscape disrupt the nostalgia of the still photographs, which the audience animates with actual or imagined memories of a Waffle House meal. Instead, they emphasize a long, time-based vision of the surrounding landscape and architecture.

“While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.” – Edward Burtynsky "I wanted to understand water: what it is, and what it leaves behind when we're gone. I wanted to understand our use and misuse of it. I wanted to trace the evidence of global thirst and threatened sources. Water is part of a pattern I've watched unfold throughout my career. I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world." – Edward Burtynsky (Walrus, October 2013) "The project takes us over gouged landscapes, fractal patterned delta regions, ominously coloured biomorphic shapes, rigid and rectilinear stepwells, massive circular pivot irrigation plots, aquaculture and social, cultural and ritual gatherings. Water is intermittently introduced as a victim, a partner, a protagonist, a lure, a source, an end, a threat and a pleasure. Water is also often completely absent from the pictures. Burtynsky instead focusses on the visual and physical effects of the lack of water, giving its absence an even more powerful presence." — Russell Lord, Curator of Photographs, NOMA

Nearly 60 years after The Beatles performed their final concert at Candlestick Park, Beatlemania is back in the Bay. Featuring more than 250 personal photographs by Paul McCartney, along with video clips and archival materials, this exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes look at the meteoric rise of the world’s most celebrated band. The images capture the period from December 1963 through February 1964 and the band’s journey to superstardom, from local venues in Liverpool to The Ed Sullivan Show and worldwide acclaim. Photographs of screaming crowds and paparazzi show the sheer magnitude of the group’s fame and the cultural change they represented. More intimate images of the band on their days off highlight the humor and individuality of McCartney and bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Rediscovered in the artist’s personal archive in 2020, these images offer new perspectives on the band, their fans, and the early 1960s, as seen through the eyes of Paul McCartney. Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–1964: Eyes of the Storm is organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in collaboration with Paul McCartney. It is curated by Paul McCartney with Sarah Brown for MPL Communications and Rosie Broadley for the National Portrait Gallery, London. The presentation at the de Young museum is organized by Sally Martin Katz.

Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. The nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers in Digital Witness illuminate today's visual culture where digital editing tools are easier to access than ever before.

Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the evolution of photography in Cuba from the 1960s to the 2010s. The exhibition looks at contemporary Cuban photography from its role in promoting the Cuban Revolution after Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government to engaging in social and political critique following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In subsequent years, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the changing prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy. Showcasing 100 images, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography celebrates the Museum's acquisition of some 300 photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker. Image: Alberto Korda, Heroic Guerrilla (Guerillero heroico), 1960, printed 1995, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Dan and Mary Solomon. © Estate Alberto Korda

The Hood Museum of Art will present the first major solo museum exhibition of photographs by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero, titled Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light). The exhibition will be on view at the Hood Museum from January 18 through August 10, 2025, and will feature over 50 works, including several never-before-seen photographs, and site-specific installations that will invite the viewer behind the scenes to experience the sets of Romero's most iconic photographs. An exhibition catalogue co-published by the Hood Museum of Art and Radius Books will be released in June 2025. The exhibition is curated by Jami Powell, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art. Says Romero, "The Hood Museum of Art under the leadership of curator Jami Powell and director John Stomberg is an excellent example of how an American museum can create meaningful and positive impacts on Native community, representation, and living artists. When offered my first major solo show to commence at the Hood, I cried because I never imagined this was possible for a Native woman photographer in her 40s. I am so honored to collaborate with this institution and the people making it a major force in sidelining preconceived notions about Native American art." Adds Powell, "Cara Romero is an immensely generous storyteller, and her images invite people into complex and transformative dialogues about the histories and lives of Indigenous peoples. Romero's photographs provide opportunities for audiences to recognize the humanity of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples and ask questions they might otherwise be afraid to ask." Image: Cara Romero, Zenith, 2022 © Cara Romero

“Life without photographs is no longer imaginable. They pass before our eyes and awaken our interest; they pass through the atmosphere, unseen and unheard, over distances of thousands of miles. They are in our lives, as our lives are in them.” – Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839–1939 After opening its doors to the public in 1949, the George Eastman Museum quickly became known as one of the most important venues dedicated to the collection and care of photographs. At the time of its opening, it was one of only two American museums to establish a photography department, and this early commitment to the medium has inextricably bound the institution to the history of photography itself. Life with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum explores the many ways in which photographic objects have come to shape our everyday lives. The exhibition encompasses broad cultural histories and image-making practices, from pre- photographic experimentation to critical advances that challenge our conceptions of the medium. While the objects on view highlight certain strengths in the museum’s holdings, lesser-known works are included to illuminate unexpected pathways into this rich and diverse collection. The museum’s holdings have been formulated through decades of gifts and purchases, and its distinguished exhibition history reflects the varied interests of its curators over the past seventy-five years. This presentation nods to this history while offering distinct perspectives on the medium from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. Curated by Jamie M. Allen, Phil Taylor, Daniel Peacock, and Louis Chavez, Department of Photography. Major support for 75th Anniversary exhibitions provided by the Rubens Family Foundation. Image: Acid Rain © Ming Smith

In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis (pronounced CARE-iss) Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with her own and enriches our understanding of the couple from her contemporary Queer and feminist perspective. This exhibition features recent portrait and landscape photographs by Connell along with classic figure studies and landscapes by Weston from 1934–1945 one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. Using Weston and Wilson publications as a guide, Connell and her partner at the time, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together creating new artworks in the process. Image: ​Betsy, Lake Ediza, ​2015, ​© Kelli Connell

When Langston Hughes Came to Town explores the history and legacy of Langston Hughes through the lens of his largely unknown travels to Nevada and highlights the vital role Hughes played in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes studied at Columbia University in 1921 for one year and would eventually become one of leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance. A writer with a distinctive style inspired by jazz rhythms, Hughes documented all facets of Black culture but became renowned for his incisive poetry. The exhibition begins by examining the relationship of this literary giant to the state of Nevada through a unique presentation of archival photographs, ephemera, and short stories he wrote that were informed by his visit to the area. The writer’s first trip to Nevada took place in 1932, when he investigated the working conditions at the Hoover Dam Project. He returned to the state in 1934, at the height of his career, making an unexpected trip to Reno, and found solace and a great night life in the city. The presentation continues with work created by leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance who had close ties to Hughes, including sculptures by Augusta Savage and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, and paintings by Beauford Delaney, Aaron Douglas, Norman Lewis, and Archibald Motley, Jr., among others. The range of work on display foregrounds the rich expressions of dance, music, and fashion prevalent during the influential movement. The final section of the exhibition features contemporary artists who were inspired by Hughes and made work about his life. Excerpts from Hughes’s poems and short stories are juxtaposed with related works of art, demonstrating how his legacy endures in the twenty-first century. Isaac Julien, Kwame Brathwaite, Glenn Ligon, and Deborah Willis are among the artists whose works are included. Julien, for example, in his renowned series Looking for Langston Hughes reimagines scenarios of Hughes’s life in Harlem during the 1920s. His black-and-white pictures are paired with Hughes poem No Regrets. Similarly, Brathwaite’s impactful photographs highlight the continuation of the Harlem Renaissance through the Black pride movement of the 1960s and are coupled with the poem My People. Finally, Glenn Ligon’s black neon sculpture relates to Hughes’s poignant poem Let America Be America Again, which both leave viewers to ponder the question of belonging in America.