All About Photo has selected the best photo exhibitions on show right now, special events and must-see photography exhibits. To focus your search, you can make your own selection of events by states, cities and venues.
Featuring work by:
Man Ray, György Kepes, André Kertész, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Oliver Gagliani, Jaromír Funke, Florence Henri, Josef Sudek, Ruth Bernhard, Bill Brandt, Josef Bartuška, Josef Ehm, Foto Ada, Ferenc Haar, Miroslav Hák, Philippe Halsman, Tibor Honty, István Kerny, Jiří Lehovec, Nathan Lerner, Emila Medková, László Osoha, Vilém Reichmann, Jan Saudek, Jindřich Štyrský, Drahotín Šulla, Karel Teige, Geza Vandor, František Vobecký, and Eugen Wiškovský.
The Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to present an homage to Surrealism with an exhibition of surrealist photographs created between the years 1924 -1989. Drawn from the gallery’s holdings, this exhibition celebrates the centenary of Surrealism and its broad, historical influence on art. Surrealism revolutionized art and visual culture. Emerging in the aftermath of World War I, Surrealism responded to the disillusionment and trauma of the time, seeking to unlock the unconscious mind and explore alternate realities. Its influence endures, continuing to inspire contemporary artists and their exploration of the subconscious. This curated exhibition brings together works by American, British, Czech, French, Hungarian and Mexican photographers, examining how surrealism has shaped and intersected with artistic traditions over the past century.
This exhibition illuminates Surrealism’s lasting legacy in photography, offering an insightful exploration of how artists from diverse backgrounds redefined the boundaries of visual art over the past century. Surrealism challenged conventional perspectives and continues to influence contemporary art, pushing the boundaries of how we perceive the world and our subconscious. This exhibition underscores the movement’s pivotal role in reshaping visual language and expanding the possibilities of photographic expression.
Paul Cupido, Cig Harvey, Jeffrey Conley, and Pentti Sammallahti
The intricate connection between humanity and nature is as timeless as it is profound: a delicate interplay of observation, reverence, and shared existence. Presented by Peter Fetterman Gallery and Leica Store San Francisco, Interwoven brings together the evocative works of Paul Cupido, Cig Harvey, Jeffrey Conley, and Pentti Sammallahti, each artist offering a unique perspective on our relationship with the natural world.
Paul Cupido’s ethereal compositions blur boundaries, inviting us to experience nature as an emotional and spiritual realm. His images, suspended between memory and reality, embody the fleeting and ephemeral beauty of life itself.
Cig Harvey’s vivid and poetic imagery bridges the sensory and the symbolic. Through her lens, nature becomes a richly textured canvas, intertwining human presence with landscapes that feel both intimate and otherworldly.
Jeffrey Conley’s black-and-white landscapes honor the serene and timeless rhythms of nature. With a mastery of light and shadow, Conley transforms ordinary moments into meditative spaces that quietly remind us of the earth’s enduring beauty.
Pentti Sammallahti’s storytelling captures the harmony and humor of life in the natural world. His monochromatic works reveal fleeting moments of connection between humans, animals, and their shared environment, underscoring the unity of all living beings.
Together, these artists weave a visual narrative that explores the fragile yet enduring bond between humans and nature. Their works ask us to reflect on our place within this intricate web and inspire us to see the natural world with renewed awe, gratitude, and respect.
Interwoven is a celebration of this vital relationship, urging us to recognize nature not only as a backdrop to our lives but as an inseparable part of who we are.
This February and March, Pictura Gallery is showing My Weather Diary by Finnish artist Jari Silomäki. Since 2001, Silomäki has made and catalogued one photograph for each day, starting with the idea that world events, personal events, and the weather will always repeat themselves.Silomäki examines our access to world news and the effect it can have on our emotional states. The series shares the artist’s private moments on any given day, and also a shared experience of history, despite our geographic locations.
ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present The Language of Form, a presentation of
works by Chiron Duong, Karl Blossfeldt, Manfred Müller, and Rinko Kawauchi
that examines the roles that stillness and movement play in artistic endeavors.
Viewers are invited to reflect on the enduring beauty of natural forms that
illustrate the potential of organic shapes through
photographs and collages.
Through a blend of meticulously composed still-
life photography and evocative collage works,
the exhibition bridges the worlds of stillness and
motion. Photography captures fleeting moments
of exquisite detail, freezing the delicate textures
and intricate patterns of flora, fauna, and organic
materials. The collages, on the other hand,
translate these natural inspirations into tactile,
three-dimensional forms that celebrate
movement, balance, and structure.
The exhibition highlights the works of Manfred
Müller, whose sculptures fuse geometric
precision with organic inspiration, creating forms that evoke both strength and
fragility. Chiron Duong’s still-life photography reimagines traditional aesthetics
with modern narratives, celebrating the beauty
of flowers and cultural motifs in intricate,
layered compositions. Rinko Kawauchi’s
serene photographic meditations capture
ephemeral moments in nature, blending soft
light and subtle textures to evoke a sense of
quiet wonder.
These contemporary works are presented
alongside the pioneering photographs of Karl
Blossfeldt, whose striking black-and-white close-ups of plants revealed the
architectural elegance of nature and influenced generations of artists with
their unique blend of aesthetic and scientific significance.
The Language of Form underscores the timeless relationship between art
and nature, stillness and vitality, form and flow, and celebrates the artistry of
the natural world reimagined through the unique visions of these creators.
A substantial amount of the proceeds from this exhibition will be donated to the Photographic Arts
Council Los Angeles (PAC LA). PAC LA creates unique collaborative programming that engages and
educates the community in an evolving public conversation about photography and photo-based art.
Image: Chiron Duong
Imagine a world where it doesn’t matter who you love, just that you love.
An Impossibly Normal Life is an artifact from another world, a more loving, inclusive one where who you love is of little societal importance. This fictional story, centered on my imagined uncle’s idealized life, is created from collected vintage snapshots from around the world.
Four years ago, my mother offhandedly mentioned that I had an uncle who may have been gay, but he died not long after I was born. Hearing this revelation for the first time, nearly thirty years after I had struggled to come out to my disapproving family, sent my mind spinning. The thought of a family member so close to me going through some of the same things I did inspired me to create this story.
Instead of returning to the hiding or shame of most pre-1970’s queer stories, a reality of how our world was (and in some cases, still is), I have created an alternate history where fluidity in gender and sexuality is the societal norm. Re-contexualizing found photographs and creating a new narrative, my Uncle Ken’s life becomes full of acceptance, friends and love, and shows anyone struggling with identity today the joy of what could have been and can still be.
Influenced by my own queer experience and ideals of mid-century American culture, my work investigates a familiar environment that alludes to something more enigmatic. Creating vignettes of this space and time allows for the images to exist in reality or remain fictitious.
Initially making work about control of the environment, I am able to create a safe space for the narrative to unfold; purposely diverting from what we may consider conventional. The characters become distant protagonists as the work allows the viewer to respond as a voyeur.
“Meditations in an Emergency” explores quiet amongst chaos. By focusing on themes of disaster and tragedy I am able to address the human condition; attempting to thrive in times of turmoil.
Stephen, as the founder and editor of The Photo Review and editor of The Photograph Collector, has a deep understanding of both the artistic and technical aspects of photography. In his body of work, he leverages this expertise to create photographic vignettes that re-imagine the artwork of Baroque, Rococo, and Romantic masters. Using the digital darkroom as his modern-day canvas, Stephen translates the meanings and themes of these 17th- to early 19th-century masterpieces into a contemporary context, bridging the gap between historical and modern visual art. His work reflects a synthesis of classical aesthetics with modern technology, offering a fresh perspective on timeless themes.
This approach not only pays homage to the original works but also invites viewers to consider how the meanings and messages of these Baroque, Rococo, and Romantic pieces might change or expand when viewed through the lens of today's world.
Stephen is a distinguished figure in the world of photography, known for his role as the founder and editor of The Photo Review, a critical journal that has been exploring the international photography scene since 1976. Additionally, he serves as the editor of The Photograph Collector, a premier publication that provides in-depth insights into the photography art market.
His photographs reside in many museum and private collections, including those of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the James A. Michener Art Museum, Lehigh University, Haverford College, and the University of North Dakota.
Leica Store & Gallery Los Angeles presents a landmark exhibition celebrating a century of innovation in photography: 100 YEARS OF LEICA. This iconic exhibit will feature the work of two renowned artists, Joel Meyerowitz and Barbara Davidson, honoring Leica's transformative role in shaping the world of photography. The exhibition kicks off a year-long celebration of Leica's centennial, with inspiring events, cultural highlights, and exclusive releases throughout 2025.
For 100 years, Leica has been at the forefront of photographic technology and artistry, empowering photographers to capture defining moments that have shaped our visual culture. In celebrate this milestone, Leica Store & Gallery Los Angeles invites visitors to experience a diverse range of photographs that reflect the evolution of the medium— from the streets of the 20th century to today's contemporary landscapes.
''When I first began making photographs, my focus was often on capturing an action or event at the center of the frame,'' Joel Meyerowitz explained. ''But as I grew and began questioning my methods, influences, and photography itself, I realized it was time to move beyond what I already did well and aim for more challenging, engaging images. This shift led me to move away from the ‘incident-based photograph' and toward a broader, ‘deep space, field photograph,' where every element in the frame carries meaning. Rather than relying on a single ‘hook' to draw the viewer in, I aimed to capture the essence of the entire frame as a cohesive, meaningful space.''
In her collection of intimate images, Barbara Davidson explores the current American landscape through the lens of social injustice. She delves into the complexities of inequality, empowerment, and hope, capturing the intersections of these themes in contemporary culture. Through her Leica 100 collaboration, Davidson, alongside Meyerowitz, reveals how the American panorama has evolved and devolved since the golden era of street photography in the 1960's and 70's. Her work reflects the stunning persistence of America's complex social fabric, examining how people coexist in a radically changed yet enduring country.
This exhibit kicks off the exciting year-long celebration for Leica's 100th anniversary. Throughout 2025, Leica will host a series of events, exhibitions, and exclusive product releases to commemorate its century of photographic excellence. Visitors to Leica Store & Gallery Los Angeles will have the opportunity to experience the enduring legacy of Leica through the works of legendary photographers like Meyerowitz and Davidson, whose contributions continue to shape the visual landscape of today.
We are delighted to invite lens-based artists, 18 and older, to submit their work for Winter Light, an exhibition celebrating the season’s luminous glow in all its forms: the golden rays of a low winter sun, the shimmering reflections on snow and ice, and the soft glow of candles on long, quiet nights.
This exhibition will be presented at the Jenks Center in Winchester, MA, from February 1 to April 4, 2025. We seek photographic works that interpret Winter Light, capturing its interplay of brightness and shadow, warmth and chill, hope and reflection. This is an opportunity to showcase light as both a physical phenomenon and a symbol of resilience, creativity, and connection during the winter season.
Share your vision of Winter Light and join us in celebrating the beauty that radiates in winter’s stillness. Submission details and deadlines are provided below. Let your work inspire reflection and connection in this special community exhibition.
Image: The Sound of Snow #26 by Xuan Hui Ng
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce “Catherine Wagner: Reel to Real,” the San Francisco-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view February 27 to April 5, 2025. The exhibition features two bodies of work that restage physical sites of our collective imaginations. These include Wagner’s new series Moving Pictures, exploring the film archive at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), alongside never-before-seen photographs from Architecture of Reassurance, her historic 1995 series capturing Disney theme parks in Anaheim, Orlando, Paris, and Tokyo. These curious and often humorous images confront enchantments promised by the twentieth century’s most iconic visual landscapes. Through Wagner’s lens, “Reel to Real” takes us behind the scenes, lifting the curtain on cinematic smoke and mirrors.
Image: Catherine Wagner, Do the Right Thing, 2024,
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
Filter Photo is pleased to present Context 2025, our eleventh annual survey exhibition of contemporary photography. This year's exhibition was juried by Shana Lopes, PhD, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA, and features the work of 27 artists.
"We make sense of the world through images. At its very best, a photograph doesn’t just show us what’s there—it reveals what we’ve overlooked. It reframes the familiar and gives the ordinary a touch of the uncanny. The photographs in Context 2025 do precisely that. They aren’t grand pronouncements or spectacles. They do not demand attention with force. Instead, they operate at a lower frequency, inviting us in with a quieter kind of resonance—the kind that lingers, reshaping how we experience the everyday.
The artists in this exhibition train their lenses on living rooms, cars, kitchens, and porches—those in-between spaces where life accumulates in strange ways. Through their eyes, the absurd and the poetic intermingle, and the most unassuming moments become laced with pathos. Because if we are what we celebrate, we are also what we discard, what we pass by, and what we fail to notice.
In a time oversaturated with images, these photographs remind us why we still need to look at the world around us. They reveal that meaning isn’t just found in the monumental but in the way light falls on a hand at the kitchen table, in the jagged, surreal silhouette of a tree trunk, and in the humor of a lone gate leading to nowhere. These photographs on view show us who we are, one quiet, absurd, beautiful frame at a time."
—Shana Lopes
About the Juror
Shana Lopes, PhD, is an Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA. Born and raised in San Francisco, she has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Sea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming 2024 SECA Art Award. Over the past sixteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Featured Artists
Mark Almanza, Michelle Arcila, Filippo Barbero, Tracy Chandler**, Eli Craven, Anastasia Davis, Nykelle DeVivo*, Callum Diffey, Claudio Eshun, Jamil Fatti, Jane Flynn, Robin Glass, Luna Hao, Sharon Hart & Izel Vargas, Gabriela Hasbun, Alexander Iglesias, Zachary Kolden, Auston Marek, Andrew McClees, Mariana Mendoza, Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein, Jacob Wachal, Ian White, Rana Young, and Tako Young.
*Juror's Choice, ** Honorable Mention
Image: Luna Hao
Twenty years ago, in the South Bay region of San Francisco, the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project was established to address the impact of human activity on the diminished marshes of the Bay and the role wetlands play in protecting vulnerable communities from sea level rise. This expansive environmental project is the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast and is dedicated to converting over 15,000 acres of commercial salt ponds at the south end of San Francisco Bay to a mix of tidal marsh, mudflat, and other wetland habitats.
Since the 1800s, the ecosystems of the tidal marshes have been replaced by salt ponds, and in her new book, Salt of the Earth: A Visual Odyssey of a Transforming Landscape (Kehrer), California-based photographer Barbara Boissevain documents the efforts being made to return these spaces to their natural state. She thinks of her book, which explores the nexus of art, science and environmental activism, as a “love letter” to the San Francisco Bay where she grew up and raised her two daughters. In Salt of the Earth Boissevain set out to document humanity’s impact on the environment and raise awareness of the need for preservation of pristine spaces. In addition to the salt industry’s impact on the biodiversity in these regions, the natural systems of the wetlands are a barrier to the encroaching sea level and work much better than the man-made levees that existed to trap the salt water and harvest the salt for the salt industry.
Boissevain began the project in 2010 with aerial photography taken from a helicopter. After several years of documenting the salt ponds in this way, she began grouping the images in grids based on palette to present another angle of transformation to the landscape. The high salinity environment resulted in color schemes she has called ‘apocalyptic.’ Then in 2020 she began photographing from the ground at the region’s national wildlife refuge created in the 1970s, and at the Ravenswood salt ponds bordering the Meta/Facebook headquarters. On her website, the artist points out, “These images hint at the vast technology sector that protrudes from the horizon looming just on the other side of the ponds. The cracked surface of the earth looks almost like an alien planet juxtaposed next to the opulent, manufactured structures cocooning the social media headquarters. The dystopian nature of these images reflects the dissonance between man and nature that I see threatening our planet and the disproportionate influence these companies have on our future.”
Barbara Boissevain is a contemporary visual artist and photographer, based in Palm Springs, California, whose work focuses on the impact of human activity on the environment. Nature’s ability to regenerate and reclaim human altered landscapes is a central theme in her work. Boissevain was born in Cleveland, Ohio and raised in Silicon Valley. She studied painting at Parsons School of Design in New York before immersing herself in photography, earning a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from San Jose State University. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including Mémoire De L’Avenir, Paris; the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Galerie Numero Cinq, Arles, France; the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland; and the David Brower Institute in Berkeley, CA. In 2009 Boissevain published her first book, titled Children of the Rainbow, which documented the humanitarian challenges facing Quechua communities in Peru due to climate change. In 2021 her work was featured on NPR’s “The Picture Show” in conjunction with the UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow, Scotland. She was also featured on the PBS News show Something Beautiful In 2022. Boissevain’s photographs are in public and private collections, including the Google Corporate Art Collection, Sunnyvale, CA; De Pietri Artphilein Foundation, Lugano, Switzerland; and Galerie Huit, Arles, France.
he BDC's upcoming exhibition on celebrated photographer Jamel Shabazz offers a comprehensive look at his work from the 1970s to the early 2000s, including iconic photo albums, early images of his junior high classmates, and photography spanning fashion, street, and documentary styles. It highlights Shabazz's talent for capturing powerful stories of identity, resilience, and community from the streets of New York and beyond.
"I embarked on my photographic journey 50 years ago as a curious 15-year-old kid coming out of Brooklyn, using my mother's Kodak Instamatic 126 camera.
From 1975 to 2024 I have amassed quite a number of photo albums showing a wide range of images–from my original prints from the 1970's, to some of the very first black and white prints I developed in my makeshift darkroom. There are fashion, street and documentary work featured in all of the albums. "
—Jamel Shabazz
The exhibition Seconds of My Life: Photographs from 1975-2024, by Brooklyn-based photographer Jamel Shabazz, offers a comprehensive look at his work, including iconic photo albums, early images of junior high classmates and photography spanning fashion, street and documentary styles. It highlights Shabazz’s talent for capturing powerful stories of identity, resilience, and community from the streets of New York and beyond.
“I embarked on my photographic journey 50 years ago as a curious 15-year-old kid coming out of Brooklyn, using my mother's Kodak Instamatic 126 camera. My primary subjects during that time were my junior high school classmates, who were more than willing to pose for me. Back then, I would take the finished film to the local drugstore for processing, and return about a week later to see the results of my efforts. To my surprise, I made some pretty decent prints that I would then put into small photo albums and share with my friends. From that moment on, I developed a profound love for photography and preserving memories.
From 1975 to 2025 I have amassed quite a number of photo albums showing a wide range of images–from my original prints from the 1970's, to some of the very first black and white prints I developed in my makeshift darkroom. There are fashion, street and documentary work featured in all of the albums”. — Jamel Shabazz
Exhibition curated by Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera
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.”
Athens, GA based artist Mo Costello will present a new body of work considering issues of accessibility in homes, communities, and institutions. Her practice considers the social lives of objects and the traces they leave as their uses and contexts shift and evolve. The exhibition will feature photography, ready-made sculpture, and a permanent accessibility intervention in our building’s architecture.
Mo Costello (b. 1989) is an artist and educator drawn to the social life of objects. Costello’s working practice revolves around the maintenance of small-scale, community-supported infrastructure for the visual and performing arts. Curatorial and studio-based efforts emerge - and often converge - from within this ongoing commitment to place-based inquiry and infrastructures of care. Mo is a recent recipient of residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2024).
Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years is a historical reflection on the prolific decade that established one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. The exhibition emphasizes the radical foundation of Nauman’s practice while he lived in Los Angeles between 1969-1979. Across the entire gallery and garden, works on view will include sculptures, installations, sound works, videos, works on paper, and editions. Pasadena Years notably marks Nauman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles in over 30 years and will include a text for a room that the artist is recreating for the first time since its debut at the earliest retrospective of his work, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972.
Haverford College presents Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton: The Poetics of High-Speed Motion Photography, an exhibition of forty-eight photographic objects selected from the Fine Art Photography Collection. The exhibition’s centerpiece is works by Edward Muybridge (1830-1904) born in England and Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) born in Fremont, Nebraska. Both made important contributions to the art and science of photography that changed our fundamental understanding of reality.
Photography means writing or drawing with light; the ability to create memetic images solely by the action of light. This process -part science and part art- was greeted with much enthusiasm and wonder upon its introduction in 1839 by its co-inventors, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) in France and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) in England.
The Daguerreotype named after its inventor was a one-of-a-kind image produced on a copper plate. The Talbotype or Collotype was a paper positive made from a paper negative. Neither of these photographic methods had the ability to stop motion or to capture the unseen. Both were impeded by the slowness of the emulsion to interact with light resulting in exposures of many seconds in the creation of the first photographs. This slowness limited early photographic subject matter to still-lives made in the studio or to scenes of nature or architecture made outdoors. After much experimentation both the Daguerreotype and the Collotype where able to capture the likeness of a person by the mid – 1840s.
Muybridge’s corresponding use of the following photographic technological innovations in the 19th century included the invention of shutters, anastigmatic lenses, light meters and the standardization of the manufacture of this equipment and material made it possible for him to invent a 12-camera setup in 1872 that made sequential photographs of animals and people moving in rapid succession at the University of Pennsylvania from 1883-1887. Sequential photography was the precursor to Thomas Edison’s invention of the Kinetograph camera in 1890 and the Kinetoscope, which projected moving images, in 1892.
Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) continued the evolution of highspeed motion photography in the 20th century. His principal contribution was the use of the stroboscope to study the movement of electric motors while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology beginning in 1925 and culminating in his doctorate in 1931. The stroboscope generates brief, repeated bursts of light, which allow an observer to view ultra-fast, moving objects in a series of static, images, rather than a single continuous blur. By synchronizing strobe flashes with the motion being examined then taking a series of photos through an open shutter at the rate of many flashes per second, Edgerton invented ultra-high-speed and stop-action photography in 1931. His film Quicker’n a Wink won an Oscar in 1940 for Best Short Subject. The film about Edgerton’s work in stroboscopic photography was one of the ways that the public was introduced to this new method of photography.
The publication of Flash in 1939 by Edgerton was another instance of introducing stroboscopic photography to a wider public during the centenary of the invention of photography. It was a how to book as well as a theoretical book about the use of this new tool. Between 1933 and 1966, Edgerton applied for forty-five patents for various strobe and electrical engineering devices. He obtained a patent for the stroboscope- a high-powered repeatable flash device- in 1949. By harnessing the speed of light to make ultra-high-speed and stop-action photography, Edgerton was able to photograph the speed of a bullet at mid-flight.
Both Edgerton and Muybridge made possible photography’s ability to capture the unseen at the spur of a moment, which became the ethos of photography for much of the 20th century. Photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Larry Fink and Lisette Model photographs are based on this way of seeing. Key images by the photographers mentioned above and books, manuscripts and pamphlets by Muybridge are included in the exhibition to provide insights into this most important transition in the technology and esthetics of contemporary photography.
This exhibition of photographs by Denis Piel is an overview of his varied career. It includes his sensual and cinematic photographs for VOGUE and designers such as Donna Karan in the 1980s, and his abstract Padièscapes works, which are inspired by his organic sustainable farm in southwest France.
Denis Piel was born in France in 1944 and his family moved to Australia at the end of the war. After beginning his career in Brisbane and Melbourne, he was encouraged to move to Europe and then New York where he began to concentrate on fashion. His photographs were brought to the attention of Condé Nast and his rise began.
Immediately recognizable for their cinematic quality, his images were a sensational departure from the posed models of his predecessors. His always-sensual photographs tell a story which must be guessed at as several interpretations are possible. Often featuring reclining models lost in thought or engaged in mysterious narratives, Piel's photographs were more influenced by filmmakers such as François Truffaut and Stanley Kubrick than photographers. His star rose swiftly and he was soon the fashion photographer of the 1980s, shooting many celebrity portraits along the way.
After a decade, Piel moved on to advertising and filmmaking and in 2002 he moved his family to the Château de Padiès in southwest France where he became seriously interested in sustainable agriculture. This newfound passion resulted in his colorful and abstracted Padièscapes photographs; work which celebrates nature in flowers and gardens. These images are a departure from the fashion pictures of Piel’s early career, but reflect his continued interest in the environment and humanity.
In addition to his photography, Denis Piel has created film advertisements for Donna Karan and Anne Klein. In 1993, he directed his first feature-length documentary, Love is Blind. Piel's monographs include Moments (Rizzoli, 2012), Down to Earth (2016), Filmscapes (2020), and the upcoming Rosemary (2025). He was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for Commercial Photography in 1987 and his photographs are included in the permanent collections of The Victoria & Albert Museum and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Image: Denis Piel, Joan & Nancy (Reading Time), Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, UK, US VOGUE, 1982
Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by photographer Richard Learoyd at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from March 7 to April 26, the exhibition will feature a selection of photographs Learoyd produced with his custom-built camera obscura between 2018 and 2025. Deeply inspired by Dutch Golden Age painting, Learoyd’s latest works take viewers on a journey through intimate moments and intricate details, examining the relationship between subject, light, and space. The photographs on display explore a range of subjects, from hauntingly evocative portraits to still-life compositions that breathe life into the simplest of objects.
Learoyd’s unique photographic processes require an immense degree of technical precision, resulting in incredibly detailed, luminous prints with a tactile richness rarely seen in contemporary photography. Reflecting on the delicate interplay between light, shadow, and form, Learoyd’s work is imbued with a surreal, auratic presence that speaks to his enduring interest in the notion of collective photographic memory—the idea that a picture can be felt and understood on a subconscious level. The artist is renowned for his masterful use of light and his ability to capture the profound depth and stillness of the human experience..
“Light and space have always been central to my work," Learoyd explains. "I want to capture more than just an image; I want to convey a sense of time, intimacy, and presence—things that transcend the immediate and evoke a more timeless feeling.".
Highlights in the exhibition, carefully curated by Learoyd, include a photograph of clasped hands, an ode to Alfred Stieglitz’s images of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands from the first half of the 20th century. Also on view will be the artist’s most recent body of work, a series of photographs created using a new and transformative process of multiple impression printing layered with hand coated gesso on canvas. These multi-dimensional works showcase the artist’s exploration of depth, texture, time, and the relationship between photography and materiality..
In recent years, Learoyd has mounted solo exhibitions at the Fundación Mapfre Casa Garriga Nogués in Barcelona, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. His upcoming presentation at Pace in New York will coincide with AIPAD’s 2025 Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory, where the gallery will organize a special program with the artist—further details will be announced in due course.
Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs is pleased to present Artists’ Studies: Photographs Made for Painters by Vallou de Villeneuve and Others 31 January through 30 April 2025. The exhibition opens in conjunction with Master Drawings New York and reflects the sometimes complex relationship between photography and painting with works by Vallou de Villeneuve, Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin, Bruno Braquehais, Sydney Richard Percy, Gustave Le Gray, and others. The photographs on display date from the 1850s when painters were still wary of the recently invented medium which was perceived as a threat to their livelihoods. Featured are several important works by Vallou, including a standing nude Courbet is thought to have used as the source for his muse in the monumental canvas “L’Atelier du Peintre” in the Musée d’Orsay.
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1795-1866) was a French painter, lithographer and photographer. A member of the Société héliographique, in 1854 he helped found the Société française de photographie. Vallou created a rich photographic catalog of costumes and poses to make his pictures more marketable to painters. His photographic works are most closely associated with the painter Gustave Courbet who during the 1850s used some of Vallou's photographs as source material for his paintings. The formal affinities between Vallou’s photographs and the central nude figures in Courbet’s Bathers (1853) and The Painter’s Studio (1854-55) are notable. Recent scholarship by Dominique de Font-Réaulx has revealed that Vallou and Courbet shared a sitter, Henriette Bonnion.
Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin (1802-1875) first trained as a painter with Ingres. By 1849 he was selling daguerreotypes of nudes from his Paris studio before he began making photographic prints. He listed himself as a specialist in academies, or artist’s studies—a polite term for nude studies that often bordered on the pornographic—that were intended for artists to use as substitutes for live models. The vase in this albumen print of “Emma” is by Jules-Claude Ziegler, an accomplished ceramicist, painter, and photographer.
Gustave Le Gray’s (1820-1884) fine seascape, L’escadre française en rade de Cherbourg, was made with a single large glass negative. The photograph documents the official visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to celebrate the opening of the greatly expanded port of Cherbourg. On the invitation of Napoleon III, the royal couple and their retinue observed the French fleet’s maneuvers from the safety of their steam-powered yacht. This view depicts the French ships greeting the royal couple. Upon closer inspection, the ships aren’t the only element in formation. Behind the royal yacht is a three-mast French vessel, its upper rigging packed with dozens of standing sailors preparing to cheer and wave their hats in the air on signal. These agile sailors waving boisterously from the rigging of the fleet’s ships was what the artist Jules-Achille Noël recorded in his 1859 painting commemorating the event, Napoleon III Receiving Queen Victoria at Cherbourg, 5 August 1858, in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Sydney Richard Percy (1821-1886), born into a family of notable painters, made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1842. Percy is a choice example of the interaction of painting and photography. During the 1850s he took up photography to produce source material for his own paintings. Percy was unapologetic in his use of the medium, a highly unusual stance during a period when most artists went to great lengths to hide the fact that they used photographs as a method of organizing their canvases. On view is Percy’s fine albumen print from a collodion negative, Gypsy girls, as well as three albums of 66 of his additional artist studies.
Created in the mid-nineteenth century with barely a nod to conventional practice, the photographs of nudes, branches of apples, and trees in L'Album Simart are filled with a great sense of purpose. Assembled circa 1856-1860, the album is the work of an unidentified photographer attributed to the circle of French sculptor Pierre Charles Simart (1806-1857). Large in format, this study of a male nude posed in a torqued gesture of dramatic action is charged with the same energy as a quick pencil drawing in an artist's sketchbook. With arms outstretched, head raised with eyes rolling heavenward, the model enacts a drama of physical and emotional strife, theatrics not uncommon in history painting.
Image: Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) Reclining nude, 1853
CLAMP is honored to present Flowers Drink the River, a solo exhibition by Pia Paulina Guilmoth—her first with the gallery. In this deeply personal body of work, Guilmoth documents the first two years of her gender transition while living in a rural, predominantly right-wing town in Maine. Her large-format photographs reflect beauty and terror in a world where queer existence can be at turns both euphoric and deeply perilous. Haunting nocturnes replete with moths, snakes, and owls, are animated by raw, animistic rituals, representing Guilmoth’s search for beauty, sanctuary, and resistance amid the wild landscapes and intimate relationships that define her life.
Spanning themes of transformation, belonging, and defiance, Flowers Drink the River is an ode to trans women, queer kinship, and working-class survival in the backwoods of central Maine. Guilmoth’s photographs reject easy categorization—mud-drenched bodies intertwine in the dark of night, spider silk drifts across glowing landscapes, and nocturnal creatures move through the frame like quiet witnesses. A burning house rages in the distance with a calm white horse seemingly unawares. Friends piss from tree branches like a warm summer rain. These photographs inhabit the space between land and body, pleasure and threat, inviting viewers into a world where boundaries are blurred, and survival is a necessary act of creation.
Guilmoth’s photographic practice is rooted in collaboration—both with her human subjects and the natural world. She constructs delicate sculptures from spiderwebs, flowers, and other found materials, then waits as the environment intervenes, letting wind, water, and light reshape her compositions. This meditative approach extends to her relationship with the animals she photographs, earning their trust over weeks and months before capturing their presence on film.
“Each night for a week in August, I would sit in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard, covered in Scent Killer Gold, wearing a ghillie suit, holding a tray full of crushed apples in one hand and a 30-foot makeshift shutter release cable attached to my 4 × 5 camera in the other,” Guilmoth recalls. “The same family of deer would get more comfortable with my presence each night. Eventually, they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. The following Tuesday, I would have my first HRT consultation. I was keeping it a secret, knowing there was no way I could safely transition in this place, but also no way I could hide my changing body over the following months and years.”
Guilmoth’s use of large-format photography is both a technical and emotional choice, emphasizing patience, precision, and physical engagement with the medium. “I have always embraced slowness in my life,” Guilmoth states. “Both in the place I live and the way I aspire to be. Art and being with people I love are the things that allow me to really exist in a moment.” The intricate process of setting up each shot, from building trust with wild creatures to manipulating natural elements, reflects the broader themes of her work: resilience, adaptation, and the search for beauty in unlikely places.
At its core, Flowers Drink the River challenges the conventions of documentary photography. Rather than approaching her subjects as an outsider, Guilmoth photographs her own community—trans and queer people navigating life in a region that often denies their existence. The result is a body of work that resists voyeurism, instead offering an intimate, deeply felt portrait of chosen family, survival, and joy. “Resistance for me is saying: ‘You can try and take everything from me—healthcare, safety, affordable housing—but you can’t take away my joy and the ability to find beauty in my life,’” she explains.
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph of the same title published by Stanley Barker.
CLAMP is pleased to present “West,” an exhibition of recent photographs by Zack Seckler, continuing his signature aerial perspective, transforming vast landscapes into painterly compositions where land, water, and sky dissolve into near-abstractions.
Seckler’s ability to distill the essence of immense terrains into fluid, almost dreamlike visuals, challenges traditional representations of the American landscape. His lens captures the interplay of organic forms and natural forces, revealing a world where the familiar dissolves into the unexpected, and scale becomes elusive.
Like Alfred Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Carleton Watkins, and other painters and photographers of the later part of the 19th century who ventured west to depict and explore America’s vast and uncharted landscapes, Seckler documents the Rocky Mountains, the arid Southwest, and more lush scenes in California. But unlike his predecessors, Seckler is equipped with imaging technologies and means of travel allowing him to record the same landscapes from vantage points and in details incomprehensible in centuries past.
The artist’s approach bridges past and present, acknowledging the historical impulse to chronicle and celebrate the wilderness while employing a contemporary, almost abstract sensibility that shifts the focus from romantic documentation to commentary and interpretation. Seckler’s images reveal rhythmic patterns and unexpected color harmonies across various sprawling western terrains now touched by man’s footprint.
The images embrace a surrealism of scale—where minute details, like the bend of a river or a lone animal’s tracks, become the focal points of vast, minimalist canvases. The textures of the land, shaped by erosion, water flow, and human intervention, take on a lyrical quality, transforming rugged topographies into soft, painterly gestures. Challenging the viewer’s sense of perspective, Seckler encourages an experience of the landscape as both intimate and infinite, structured yet ephemeral.
The aerial vantage offers a view transcending the limitations of the human eye, inviting a reconsideration of the land’s scale and vulnerability. His compositions, at once serene and dynamic, speak to the power of nature and the imprint of time, making visible the otherwise imperceptible rhythms that define these remote and majestic expanses.
Zack Seckler was born in Boston and studied psychology at Syracuse University. Then, traveling solo with a point-and-shoot camera in northern India, his mind opened to the visual world. Upon returning to Syracuse, he took coursework in photography at the renowned Newhouse School. With an internship in a Hong Kong photo studio and editorial work in New York City, he developed his vision for image-making. “West” is the artist’s third solo show at CLAMP.
During the 1970s and ‘80s, photographers Colleen Kenyon (American, 1951-2022) and Kathleen Kenyon (American, 1951-2023) were part of the movement of female artists who challenged the photographic establishment with innovative approaches to the medium. Colleen Kenyon was a pioneer in using hand coloring to enhance her portraits of herself and her sister in domestic settings; Kathleen Kenyon was adept at appropriating gender-specfic images of women from the mass media to create ironic photomontages. Beginning in 1981, the two sisters also served as directors of the Center for Photography at Woodstock, where they continued to advocate for the advancement of women in the arts and for artists of color. My Sister, My Self is curated by art historians Tom Wolf and Laurie Dahlberg. Organized by CPW, this retrospective features the Kenyons’ most iconic works, and is presented both at CPW in Kingston, NY, and at the Kleinert/James Art Center in Woodstock, NY. The exhibition materials are drawn from the archives of their works now held by CPW.
This exhibition is accompanied by a hardcover catalog, My Sister, My Self: Photographs by Colleen Kenyon and Kathleen Kenyon with text by Wolf and Dahlberg, and CPW Curator Adam Giles Ryan
This exhibition, titled Recess, features the work of 2024 Saltzman Prize winner Keisha Scarville (American, born 1975). Scarville makes photographs that consider her personal experience of in-betweenness, exploring notions of diaspora, transformation, belonging, and loss. In her photographs, she creates spaces, stages, and still lives, often using clothing and textiles belonging to her late mother. When Scarville invokes her mother’s presence in her works, she creates alternate, liminal places that engage both memory and the possibilities of abstraction.
In Recess, Scarville refers both to the hollow space beneath a flat plane and to any temporary pause or suspension. In this way, Scarville continues her exploration of thresholds. Neither here nor there, thresholds are spaces of becoming; they mark moments of “passing through,” suspended instants that are full of potential and prospects of the unknown. For Scarville, shadows function as these types of spaces. They are not only dark shapes that lack light and clarity, but also deep, productive zones where alternative temporalities and in-between narratives reside. In her photographs and installations, Scarville activates the shadow as a form in ways that require closer looking, deeper feeling, and the active negotiation of being.
Recess is accompanied by a limited edition artist’s book by Keisha Scarville (published by CPW in collaboration with 1080PRESS).
In 1976, photographer MEM embarked on an arduous, self-assigned project with sociologist Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs to document the lives of women living in the high-security, all-female wing of the Oregon State Hospital in the city of Salem. The year before, Mark had photographed there on the set of the Milǒs Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and she had met several women who lived on Ward 81 of the hospital. Hoping to better understand and represent their life experiences, Mark and Jacobs arranged to spend a month living alongside the women in Ward 81. The duration of their stay, and their extraordinary access to patients and staff, enabled the collaborators to produce a nuanced and compelling record of female psychiatric treatment in the United States during the mid-1970s. In 1978, Mark and Jacobs published the seminal book Ward 81, which revealed the often-porous line between sanity and mental illness for women relegated to the margins of society. In the words of Jacobs, “They are the women we might have been or one day become.”
Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 greatly amplifies that earlier study. Most exciting are the newly discovered audio narratives that the women recorded with Jacobs, which have been integrated into a short film, Moonlight Heaven Black, made for the exhibition by Martin Bell, Mark’s husband. As well, the exhibition brings together never-before-seen prints, contact sheets, and rare archival materials.
The original exhibition was organized by curators Gaëlle Morel and Kaitlin Booher for the Image Centre, Toronto, in collaboration with the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation, New York. It is accompanied by the publication Ward 81: Voices by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs, edited by Martin Bell, Julia Bezgin, and Meredith Lue (Steidl, 2023).
Higher Pictures presents more than 300 images from Keisha Scarville’s ongoing Passports portraits. This is the most comprehensive exhibition of the series since its inception in 2012.
Working with reproductions of her Guyanese immigrant father’s earliest passport photograph at age 16, Scarville moves beyond their conversations to visually explore what it means to become American. The quotidian identification or ID photograph is a cultural calling card that becomes a powerful seed for understanding the complex strata of a life uprooted, replicated, and replanted a world away from where it began.
Again and again, Scarville transforms his youthful likeness into enigmatic, almost sacred icons of a boy, a man, and a spirit. Alternately playful, unsettling, loving, and irreverent, these haptic, palm-sized objects are memento mori of imagined identities, harkening back to 19th century vernacular methods of hand-coloring and assemblage to turn simple photographic prints into elaborated talismanic pictures. Historically rooted in form but grounded in contemporary meaning, Scarville’s interventions on her father’s image evoke disparate personal modes of remembrance, everything from the physically intimate contact of photographic jewelry to playfully scribbled love doodles on an adolescent’s Pee Chee folder.
The Passports move beyond sight into multidimensional sensory perception which calls to mind historian Geoffrey Batchen’s description of the daguerreotype in its case, “an object that continuously collapses sight and touch...into the same perceptual experience.” While her markings both obfuscate and enhance the image, “the [resulting] portrait we witness continues to be supported by the truth-value of its photographic base,” Batchen writes, “the epistemological presence of the photograph is strengthened by its perceptual absence.”
Scarville’s application of pigment and collage elements does more than transform the appearance of the photograph. Her temporal handwork—at times minimal, at others painstakingly detailed—results in sensory-charged objects which require the viewer to spend more time with them in order to access meaning beyond the surface. As novelist Milan Kundera has written, “The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
In this moment when the immigrant experience is a divisively contested space, Scarville’s Passports are both poignant and political, foregrounding the individual experience and self-definition within a world of possibilities.
-Carla Williams, 2025
DORF proudly presents new work by multidisciplinary artist Táhila Moss in her solo exhibition, Without Borders / Sin Fronteras. Through this powerful exhibition, Táhila explores the intricate dynamics of land sovereignty and the enduring impact of colonial frameworks on ecosystems, Indigenous communities, and relationships with the natural world.
Táhila’s work transcends human narratives by weaving together the interconnected lives of animals, plants, water, air, and land. Her photographs document life surrounding various locations along the United States/Mexico colonial border and includes scenes of the landscape, community gatherings, acts of care, and environmental resistance. Also depicted, the jarring presence of fences, borders, and other human-made structures emphasizes the profound disruption of ecosystems by exploitative entities who prioritize profit over the sacredness of the natural world.
The imposition of human-made borders, both as a conceptual model and a physical barrier, reflects a colonial worldview that enables commodification of the natural world by fragmenting habitats, obstructing wildlife migration, and creating imagined hierarchies between humans and nature. These boundaries sever ancient ecological and migration pathways, weaken biodiversity, and undermine the delicate balance required for ecosystems to thrive.
In her photographs, Táhila highlights sacred sites of the Esto’k Gna Nation (Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe) in the region widely known as Brownsville, Texas, and brings attention to their fight for sovereignty. This work is an expansion of Táhila’s ongoing project, created with support from World Monument Fund and Magnum Foundation as part of the 2022 World Monuments Watch, to document the lifeways and political actions of the Esto’k Gna people around Garcia Pasture. The World Monuments Watch is a proven tool for raising awareness about heritage places in need of protection while galvanizing action and support for their preservation.
As guardians and stewards of Turtle Island, Indigenous practices center on reciprocal relationships with Mother Earth. Care, respect, and reciprocity are offered in exchange for what the land provides, fostering a sense of mutual responsibility. Without Borders / Sin Fronteras invites viewers to reimagine and heal their relationship with the natural world, and to honor the deep, sacred ties between Indigenous communities and the land.
1000 Dreams seeks to change harmful refugee narratives through a storytelling project that tells the stories of 1000 refugees across the world. 1000 Dreams is entirely authored by storytellers with a refugee background. Witness Change, the organization behind 1000 Dreams believes that for the narrative to change, the lives of refugees have to be authentically represented – their voices must be heard. They have hosted a series of intensive storytelling workshops, training people with refugee backgrounds on how to make portraits and conduct interviews. With these new skills, the refugee storytellers collect testimonies from other refugees. Their stories amplify the voices of refugees and provide insights into their individual lives and the emotional impact of current policies and attitudes.
About Witness Change:
Witness Change (@witness_change) produces highly visual storytelling on seldom-addressed human rights abuses. The non-profit organization exists to improve life for marginalized groups by amplifying their stories. Their projects have reached more than 250 million people worldwide and have been on the cover of National Geographic and Time magazine. Witness Change’s current projects include Where Love Is Illegal, stories of discrimination and survival from the LGBTQI+ community, and In My World, a campaign to amplify stories of people living with mental health, psychosocial, intellectual, and cognitive disabilities.
Penumbra Foundation proudly presents The Puppet Master, a solo exhibition by Diana Michener. This evocative series delves into the complex dynamics between a father and daughter, exploring themes of control, intimacy, and silent understanding.
Michener describes the project as a mysterious collaboration between the two figures: “The daughter became the puppet, the father the puppeteer. They worked in silence, each following an unspoken script. They had their own intentions—just as I had mine.” These enigmatic photographs invite viewers to reflect on the unseen forces shaping relationships, leaving space for personal interpretation. “Photography thrives on open narratives,” Michener explains. “You may not see my story, but perhaps you will see your own—and that excites me.”
The Puppet Master will be on view from February 27 through May 15, 2025.
About the Artist
Diana Michener (b. 1940, Boston) is an acclaimed photographer known for her introspective and poetic imagery. Based in Paris and Walla Walla, Washington, she studied at Barnard College in New York before refining her craft under the mentorship of Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the retrospective Silence Me at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris (2001), Morning After Morning at the Photo Museum of Ireland (2001), Dogs, Fires, Me at Pace/MacGill in New York (2005), Figure Studies at Nature Morte in Berlin (2010), and Anima, Animals at MEP (2016–2017). Michener’s photographs are held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
She has published extensively with Steidl, producing numerous books such as Silence Me (2001), Dogs, Fires, Me (2005), Figure Studies (2011), A Song of Life (2018), Trance (2020), Bones (2022), Mortes (2023), and Mirror (2024).
For Shore|Lines, Chicago-based artist Regina Agu (b. Houston, Texas) presents a large-scale panoramic installation at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as part of an exploration of placemaking and community memory—tracing sites and legacies of historical Black North American migration through an expansive tradition of the panoramic form. This Joyce Foundation Award (2023) special project and collaboration, focuses on connecting the landscapes, materiality, and human histories of the Gulf South region to the Great Lakes.
Drawing on methods of field work and landscape photography, Shore|Lines examines waterways and natural environments as defining sites of Black life and belonging.
This investigation grounds itself in close conversation with Chicago-area land and Great Lakes region environmental advocates and ecologists of color—community historians and academics, members of sailing clubs, librarians, archivists, geographers, and families that live and work along these long-storied bodies of water. The exhibition includes an artist book” documentation that Agu refers to as a “field guide,” connecting her Midwest and Gulf South experiences of the landscapes.
Shore|Lines is proud to bring together discourses of Black geographies, landscape photography, and site-specific land histories, using the methodology of landscape panorama as a format for relating ideas and themes of Black cultural memory connected to place.
This project uniquely explores and documents a nuanced assemblage of sociocultural geographies and cultures that connect to the Great Migration of the 20th century, in a way that is rarely considered within the wider visual lore or heritage narrative of the Great Lakes.
Asha Iman Veal, MoCP Associate Curator.
Regina Agu (American, b. Houston) is a visual artist, writer, and researcher based in Chicago, IL. Agu was raised between the United States, the Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland. Her interdisciplinary practice includes conceptual and material inquiries into memory, history, representation, and Black geographies. Her work has been exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Museum, The Drawing Center, the High Line, Project Row Houses, FotoFest, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, among other venues. Agu is a 2023 Joyce Award winner with the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Agu has received an Artadia Houston award, grants from Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, a SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts and Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research project Friends of Emancipation Park. Agu holds a BS from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Luke Oppenheimer is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller from rural Oklahoma, with a background in agroforestry and sustainable farming. His work explores the relationships between rural communities, the landscapes they inhabit, and the wildlife they coexist with, revealing how these forces shape each other’s destinies. Having lived and worked extensively across Latin America, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, Luke’s photography is deeply rooted in personal connections and immersive storytelling.
Ottuk chronicles life in a small shepherding village in the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan. What began as a month-long project in 2020 grew into a five-year immersion, during which Luke was welcomed into the community and adopted by a local family. The series captures the villagers’ struggles and joys, shaped by their dependence on livestock, resilience against unforgiving winters, and the enduring traditions that guide their way of life.
Sebastião Salgado, reflecting on his experience with the Nenets during his Genesis project, said, "There is so much love in their lives: wife to husband, husband to wife, for their children. Everything around them makes their life very rich, and they tell each other such nice stories." This captures his deep admiration for their connection to nature and to each other, reinforcing the spiritual and essential nature of their existence.
Sebastião Salgado’s passion for the Nenets stems from his broader quest to reconnect with untouched territories and communities deeply rooted in nature. After witnessing profound human suffering in his previous projects, such as Exodus, Salgado embarked on Genesis to restore his faith in humanity and nature. The Nenets, a nomadic people of northern Siberia, live in harmony with their environment, dependent on reindeer for survival and maintaining traditions despite the harsh Arctic climate. Their life, defined by reindeer herding, is one of simplicity but rich with love, spirituality, and connection to the land—elements that deeply resonated with Salgado.
During his time with the Nenets, Salgado was struck by their resilience, adaptability, and intelligence, particularly the symbiotic relationship between them and their reindeer. He admired how they endured extreme cold, managed to navigate vast white landscapes, and preserved their culture in a rapidly modernizing world. Through his lens, Salgado captured the beauty of their way of life, which he saw as a powerful reminder of humanity's lost connection to nature and the land.
This project renewed his sense of hope and purpose, showcasing the importance of preserving the world's untouched cultures and ecosystems, while highlighting the Nenets’ deep spiritual ties to the natural world, something Salgado believes is essential for our own survival.
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).
Daniel Cooney Fine Art is beyond thrilled to announce our third solo exhibition (our first in Santa Fe) by Christopher Makos titled PARTY. The exhibition features unseen vintage work from the artist’s early career. PARTY features a selection of over 40 unique vintage photographs, that celebrate the artist’s ethos: daring, climactic and outrageous.
Makos has spent the past five decades in the company of legendary cultural icons, most famously as confidant to Andy Warhol and as a key member of the Factory from 1976-86. His position in this notorious circle gained him access to everyone that was anyone including models, celebrities and underground royalty. The likes of Divine, Steven Tyler, Debbie Harry, Peter Berlin, Richard Gallo, Georgia O’Keefe and other tantalizing figures mingle on the gallery walls.
Never satisfied as just an observer Makos brazenly includes multiple self-portraits in this exhibition. Young surfer boy Makos can be seen in languid repose with long blonde hair, loyal dog “Snake” at his side, sporting a pair of cowboy boots and nothing else. In another image, the photographer is positioned bare-assed between two mirrors, camera in hand, admiring himself from behind. In a photograph titled Self-Portrait I, 1970s, a nude Makos, seen from the chest down “tucks” exploring his androgynous side in a mirrored hotel room.
Perhaps even more exciting are numerous one of a kind darkroom compositions including double portraits of hustlers, artists, drag queens, nude muscle boys and more. Equally compelling is the original contact sheet from Makos’s infamous “Andy in Drag” photoshoot revealing the Father of Pop Art in a curly wig and white bedsheet complete with Makos’s mark ups in grease pencil.
Makos is the author of 18 books including White Trash (1977), Warhol/Makos In Context (2007), Christopher Makos Polaroids (2009) and Everything: The Black and White Monograph (2014). His work has been published in Interview, Rolling Stone, House & Garden, Connoisseur, New York Magazine, Esquire, Genre and People. His works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery and The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
Banu Cennetoğlu (Turkey, b. 1970) is known for her cross-disciplinary practice that delves into the collection, circulation, and presentation of data, images, and information. By focusing on the smallest details, she brings a humanizing lens to global geopolitical issues that might otherwise be reduced to mere statistics.
In her work 1 January 1970 – 21 March 2018 · H O W B E I T · Guilty feet have got no rhythm · Keçiboynuzu · AS IS · MurMur · I measure every grief I meet · Taq u Raq · A piercing Comfort it affords · Stitch · Made in Fall · Yes. But. We had a golden heart. · One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game (2018), Cennetoğlu explores the interplay between personal memory and historical narrative. The video installation H O W B E I T compiles a decade's worth of visual archives, spanning from June 10, 2006, to March 21, 2018. It weaves together stills and moving images sourced from her cell phones, computers, cameras, and hard drives, resulting in what Cennetoğlu describes as an “intro-spective.”
The earliest files in the work document the year before Cennetoğlu first shared The List, an ongoing project by UNITED for Intercultural Action, which tracks the deaths of over 60,620 migrants seeking refuge in Europe since 1993. The final files in the series coincide with the lead-up to Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which also marks the production deadline for her first exhibition of this work. Throughout the installation, political themes coexist with everyday moments and vibrant encounters, rejecting boundaries and hierarchies. In doing so, Cennetoğlu invites viewers to reflect on their own experiences of navigating complex realities.
HOWBEIT spans more than 127 hours of footage, encompassing 46,685 digital files, presented chronologically. The immersive nature of the work encourages visitors to return multiple times, each time encountering a different segment of the narrative.
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
The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Art in City Hall program, in partnership with PhotoAlliance, are proud to present Metaphors of Recent Times: A Dialogue of the Personal, the Political and the Cultural, an exhibition that features artwork from PhotoAlliance’s INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 portfolio, alongside works by 24 artists who have created work in response to the portfolio.
Metaphors of Recent Times will be on display on the Ground Floor and North Light Court at City Hall through June 20, 2025. The exhibition features a wide range of incisive visual perspectives from artists of diverse identities and backgrounds, each responding to the issues of our times..
A public reception to celebrate the opening of the exhibition will be held on the Ground Floor of City Hall on Thursday, January 16, 2025, from 5 – 7 p.m..
“PhotoAlliance has been a vital force in the local arts community for over 20 years, providing a platform for photographers to engage with and reflect on the world around them,” said Ralph Remington, Director of Cultural Affairs. “The Arts Commission is proud to collaborate with PhotoAlliance to present this timely and thought-provoking exhibition at City Hall. Metaphors of Recent Times highlights how art can serve as both a mirror to our current socio-political landscape and a powerful catalyst for activism and change.”.
The exhibition’s themes are rooted in PhotoAlliance’s 20th Anniversary portfolio of limited edition prints by local, regional, and international photographers. Curated by PhotoAlliance founder and creative director Linda Connor, the set of 20 prints was conceived as a distillation of the creative responses artists have made to the upheaval seen in our political, cultural, environmental, and personal spheres in recent years. INSIGHT/INCITE captured images of hope, challenges, resilience, and humanity and included work from renowned photographers such as Binh Danh, Mercedes Dorame, Lewis Watts, J. John Priola, Amanda Marchand, Adrian Burrell, among many others..
Metaphors of Recent Times expands on the themes of INSIGHT/INCITE and includes new work that respond to the themes explored in the portfolio. The artists included were juried by photographers Linda Connor, Lewis Watts, and exhibition curator Beth Davila Waldman from a pool of 128 artists who responded to a call for artists held in the fall of 2024. Artists were asked to submit a trio of images that would expand and deepen the dialogues provoked in INSIGHT/INCITE..
“The inspiration behind Metaphors of Recent Times was compelled by the desire to provide an extended platform for the various themes and concerns voiced by the INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 portfolio,” says exhibition curator Beth Davila Waldman. “The call for artists really showed how resonant these themes are, and we are excited to highlight the spirit of our city’s inclusivity with a group of emerging and established artists, combined with the impact of presenting this selection of work in San Francisco’s City Hall.”.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with PhotoAlliance on this exhibition,” states Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, SFAC Director of Galleries and Public Programs. “Metaphors of Recent Times provides a lens into the complexities of our time, capturing the turbulence of recent years while simultaneously highlighting hope and resilience. Through the camera, eyes of local, regional, and international artists, the work reminds us of the importance of capturing these stories.”.
The exhibition will feature work by Pablo Tapay Bautista, Renee Billingslea, Barbara Boissevain, Kennedi Carter, Mima Cataldo, Yu-Chen Chiu, Katie Cofer, Mark Coggins, Izzy Cosentino, Kelly Fogel, David Gardner, Stuart Goldstein, Christine Huhn, Judi Iranyi, Strele Laurin, Anni Lopponen, Darcy Padilla, Eric Robertson, Lance Shields, Nina Sidneva, William Mark Sommer, Liz Steketee, Rusty Weston, and Harry Williams..
Works from the INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 folio are by Wesaam Al-Badry, Lisa K. Blatt, Leon Borensztein, Adrian Burrell, Jessica Chen, Sarah Christianson, Marna Clarke, Linda Connor, Binh Danh, Mercedes Dorame, Ed Drew, Germán Herrera, Marie-Luise Klotz, Wayne Levin, Amak Mahmoodian, Amanda Marchand, Paccarik Orue, J. John Priola, Zack Schomp, and Lewis Watts.
Peter Fetterman Gallery is proud to present "The World of Sebastião Salgado," a large-scale exhibition of prints by the master photographer Sebastião Salgado (Brazil, b. 1944). Opening on Saturday, March 15, 2025, and running through June 21st, this exhibition will offer an extraordinary retrospective of Salgado’s unparalleled career. A special opening reception will be held on March 15 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM.
Utilizing the entire gallery space, this extensive exhibition will feature photographs, spanning over four decades of Salgado’s dedicated photographic work. Iconic images from his major bodies of work will be presented as hand crafted gelatin silver prints alongside his special, highly coveted platinum palladium prints. Curated to present Salgado’s powerful visual storytelling within a retrospective context, "The World of Sebastião Salgado" will provide a compelling insight into the depth and breadth of his documentary and artistic practice.
Sebastião Salgado is widely recognized as one of the most influential photographers of our time. His humanistic approach to documentary photography has illuminated pressing global issues, from labor and migration to environmental conservation. The exhibition will highlight key works from his most renowned series, including the Serra Pelada Gold Mines, his documentation of conflict and displacement in Africa, his haunting portrayals of environmental destruction in the Oil Fields of Kuwait during the Gulf War, and his latest body of work from Brazil titled, Amazonia. Additionally, the exhibition will showcase works from his environmental magnum opus, "GENESIS," a project that explores untouched landscapes, wildlife, and indigenous cultures.
The relationship between Peter Fetterman Gallery and Sebastião Salgado is rooted in a deep mutual respect and a shared commitment to photography as a force for storytelling and change. Introduced to Salgado through master photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Martine Franck (1938-2012), Peter Fetterman has been a key figure in bringing Salgado's work to a fine art audience for over 30 years. Born in Aimorés, Brazil, in 1944, Sebastião Salgado initially trained as an economist before turning to photography, a path that has since shaped the field of visual storytelling. Salgado resides in Paris with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has played an integral role in curating and publishing his works.
"The World of Sebastião Salgado" at Peter Fetterman Gallery will be an unmissable opportunity to see the photographs of one of the greatest documentary photographers of our time.
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.
Conversations at a party in Oakland in 1932 changed the history of photography. At that gathering, several now-iconic Bay Area figures — including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston — banded together to form Group f.64, a collective dedicated to “true” photography and the rejection of the prevailing style of Pictorialism, which mimicked painting. The group’s name was technical, referring to the camera lens setting that permits the greatest depth of field, but their mission was creative: to make photographs of startling clarity and beauty that rivaled art made in other mediums. Although Group f.64 lasted for less than a year, its legacy endured, marking the Bay Area as an epicenter for modernist photography.
Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography takes the work of this influential collective as a nexus from which to examine other local developments in the medium. The exhibition begins with a selection of pictures in the gauzy Pictorialist style, which every member of Group f.64 practiced before turning to the crisp, sharply focused compositions for which they are best known. The second gallery includes work by all eleven members of the collective made around the time they joined together. Beyond that, the exhibition branches off in related but varied directions, including an exploration of the link between Group f.64 members and the poet Langston Hughes and a presentation of contemporary artist Tarrah Krajnak’s work in dialogue with that of Weston and Adams. The final gallery serves as a visual and thematic counterpoint to those that precede it, featuring street photography from the 1970s to the present that reveals the wilder side of San Francisco.
Image: Jim Jocoy, Muriel with bruised knees, 1980, courtesy of the artist and Casemore Gallery
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.
This exhibition reimagines the history of American photography, tracing its evolution from its inception in 1839 through the early 20th century. Showcasing works from The Met’s William L. Schaeffer Collection, it places celebrated photographers—including Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen—alongside remarkable yet lesser-known practitioners from towns and cities across the nation.
Through a diverse array of photographic formats, from daguerreotypes and cartes de visite to stereographs and cyanotypes, the exhibition highlights how photography swiftly shaped America’s cultural, artistic, and psychological landscape. More than a technological breakthrough, photography became a defining lens through which the nation saw itself, reflecting its transformation and identity. Even before the formal announcement of the medium’s invention, American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson astutely observed in 1835, “Our Age is Ocular,” foreshadowing photography’s profound impact on visual culture.
Image: Unknown Maker, Young Man with Rooster, 1850s
Featuring works from the Addison’s extensive photography collection, this exhibition considers the dynamics of two beings sharing space, whether they be romantic partners, family members, close friends, rivals, strangers, or interspecies companions. Each image invites viewers to delve into the stories behind the expressions, prompting questions about the relationship, the context of the encounter, and the emotions at play.
It takes two flints to make a fire.
—Louisa May Alcott
Drawn from the Addison Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition explores the dynamics of two beings sharing space. Whether they be romantic partners, family members, close friends, rivals, strangers, or interspecies companions, the joining of two creates an inevitable charge. This spark can manifest in many forms: a shared laugh between friends, the electric tension of rivals, the sudden eruption of violence among antagonists, a wary glance exchanged by strangers, or even the mysterious interpersonal interactions generated by staged scenarios. Each encounter is laden with unspoken narratives, as body language, facial expressions, and subtle social and psychological cues convey a world of emotions, thoughts, and stories.
Photographs of these paired encounters—these instants of intersection—serve as powerful windows into narratives of shared experiences. Captured in a flash, they freeze time and encapsulate the essence of that conjoined moment. Each image invites viewers to delve deeper into the stories behind the expressions—legible and illegible, ingenuous and masked—prompting questions about the relationship, the context of the encounter, and the emotions at play. They remind us that behind every interaction—whether planned and momentous or seemingly random and negligible—lie myriad stories waiting to be explored, ultimately weaving a larger narrative of connection that transcends any single interaction of two bodies.
Image: Wayne F. Miller, Father and Son at Lake Michigan, 1947
This selection of works from the Addison’s collection explores performance both as visual spectacle and as a way of investigating identity.
Acrobats tumble and dancers leap across the first two galleries, revealing how the extravaganza of the circus, the drama of the theater, and the energy of dance have inspired artists across media. These ephemeral performances—from the breathtaking feats of trapeze artists to gestural movements of dancers—prompted creative strategies to preserve their dynamism in painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking. The emergence of modern dance and other performance-based art forms fueled parallel developments in visual media, particularly photography, as artists grappled with capturing the interplay between performer and audience, spectacle and spectators.
In the second half of the exhibition, the focus shifts from public stages to private ones, examining the performance of the self. Through costume, roleplay, and shifting personas, the works reveal identity as fluid—an ongoing process of self-definition rather than a fixed state. In this section, artists embrace the freedom of performance to explore new identities and modes of expression, as well as challenge stereotypes and societal norms. Through their use of theatricality and artifice, these works underscore the constructed nature of all identities, inviting viewers to reflect on the roles we perform in everyday life.
On and Off Stage includes works by Ida Applebroog, Charles Atlas, Gifford Beal, George Bellows, Nick Cave, Harold Edgerton, Hal Fischer, Glenn Ligon, George Platt Lynes, Barbara Morgan, Laurel Nakadate, Hunter Reynolds, Cara Romero, Cindy Sherman, and Lorna Simpson, among many others.
Image: Sally Mann, New Mothers, 1989
Rebellion has long fueled resilience, igniting the courage to challenge norms and reimagine the standards of society. This exhibition explores how creativity becomes an act of defiance, questioning power structures and reshaping narratives. Rebellion describes deliberate acts of resistance that disrupt the status quo. Resilience is the strength to endure and rebuild in the face of adversity.
This exhibition captures the interplay between art and resistance in two different ways: art as a form of resistance and the artistic documentation of rebellion. On one hand, there are works born from rebellion—pieces that challenge norms or confront injustice. On the other, there are images that capture the energy of rebellion and youth, reflecting the enduring spirit of defiance.
The Art of Opposition was curated by Phillips Academy students enrolled in Art 400 Visual Culture: Curating the Addison Collection. The exhibition is on view in the gallery’s Museum Learning Center; as an active teaching space, it may sometimes be occupied by a class.
Image: Bruce Davidson, New York City, USA, 1959. Gelatin silver print, 6 x 8 7/8 inches. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, purchased as the gift of Katherine D. and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971, and P 2005, 2007, 2010), 2012.71.46
Guest curated by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler, along with Kristin Taylor, MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections
This exhibition will feature works in the MoCP permanent collection that are included in the recent and groundbreaking publication titled Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. The book was created by a group of artists, art historians, activists, and scholars—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler—and published by Thames and Hudson in 2024. It is an extension of a project that these five authors have collaborated on for over ten years, in which they reassess a range of photographs and projects that portray stories of humanity and social movements to decenter the photographer as the only author of the image, and to emphasize the act of photographing as an inherently collaborative process in which many parties are involved. By sharing both artists’ statements and excerpts from interviews with people depicted in photographs, they question whether memories align: Did both sides remember the moment in the same way? How did the photographed feel about the photograph’s life after it circulated through art markets, print media, and online? And what role might the photograph have played in perpetuating harmful or liberatory narratives about specific histories, places, or individuals?
The works—both historical and contemporary—are presented in clusters focused on topics, to highlight and propose questions about photographed moments of coercion, friendship, exploitation, community, and violence. The exhibition will also feature a reflection space for the audience engagement, as part of the project’s ongoing effort to consider the history of photography as a living and evolving entity that is unfixed and expanding as we learn more about the people, communities, and histories that images depict.
MoCP is supported by Columbia College Chicago, MoCP Advisory Board, Museum Council, individuals, private and corporate foundations, and government grants.
The 2024–2025 exhibition season is sponsored in part by the Efroymson Family Fund, Henry Nias Foundation, The Rowan Foundation, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, Pritzker Traubert Foundation, Comer Family Foundation, and Venable Foundation.
This project is partially supported by a CityArts grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. MoCP acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
Image: Wendy Ewald, Self-portrait reaching for the Red Star sky –Denise Dixon, from the “Portraits and Dreams” series, 1975-1982
In 1962, Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938, The Bronx, New York; lives and works in London, England) made a life-changing decision to become a photographer. His unwavering commitment was perfectly suited to the camera, an instrument that captures fleeting moments of time and space with precision, freezing them into a permanent frame. This exhibition celebrates the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s dedication to photography, spotlighting its recent acquisition of over 1,800 works from Meyerowitz’s archive. The artist is renowned for his early adoption of color photography in 1962, a move that helped pave the way for the medium’s acceptance in the art world.
Meyerowitz’s expertise is evident in both the vibrant, immersive qualities of his color photographs and the subtle yet powerful nuances in his black-and-white prints. His true significance, however, lies in his exceptional ability to capture the perfect moment when shifting patterns, expressions, and light converge to form a complete image. His first major recognition came in 1964, when MoMA’s Director of Photography, John Szarkowski, included Meyerowitz in the influential exhibition *The Photographer’s Eye*, which also featured pioneers like Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Frank. Meyerowitz was placed in the section titled “Time Exposure,” a nod to his masterful handling of time within his work.
Now, nearly six decades later, Meyerowitz’s work continues to resonate through its exploration of what Cartier-Bresson referred to as “the decisive moment.” This exhibition offers a chronological and thematic exploration of Meyerowitz’s oeuvre, allowing viewers to experience how his visual language has evolved over time, reflecting the fluidity of the present moment. This evolution builds on Szarkowski’s insight that a photograph captures only the time in which it was taken, referencing the past and future through its presence in the present.
Additionally, the exhibition includes a selection of 'work prints' that highlight the temporal nature of photographic prints themselves. These prints reveal the impermanence of the medium, showcasing how some colors fade over time while others endure. The inclusion of prints bearing Meyerowitz’s personal annotations, along with multiple iterations of the same image, provides an intimate glimpse into the artist’s studio process, allowing viewers to trace his journey toward perfecting each image.
Image: Joel Meyerowitz, Florida, 1978, 1978, Vintage RC print, 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.5 cm), NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; Gift of an anonymous donor.
This exhibition is the first US survey of the work of Kunié Sugiura, an artist whose boundary-defying engagement with the photographic medium spans over sixty years. Born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942, Sugiura came to the United States in 1963 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she majored in photography. After graduation, she relocated to New York and has lived there ever since.
Sugiura’s practice embraces a hybrid approach, blending various mediums and expressing her bicultural identity. The balancing of dualisms —Japanese/American, organic/human-made, and painting/photography — defines her work. Sugiura has stated that her cross-fertilization of photography with painting and sculpture partly stems from her desire that photography be taken seriously as an art form.
The exhibition charts the arc of Sugiura’s long career, beginning with undergraduate work from her Cko series that reflects her sense of isolation as a foreign student in Chicago. Prints made after her move to New York in 1967 demonstrate her use of canvas as a support and new process of working on a large scale. Her Photopaintings from the 1970s take on multidimensional, sculptural qualities, pairing painted and photographic panels with wooden elements. Photograms — images made without a camera on light-sensitive material — that she first created in 1980, capture a wide range of subjects, including flowers and portraits of other artists. Sugiura’s compositions made from X-ray negatives in the 1990s and 2000s combine unrelated pieces from various sources that were cut and pasted together to create unique configurations.
Throughout her career, Sugiura has willfully made artworks that “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.” Despite this inherent rebelliousness, such gestures do not overwhelm Sugiura’s vision to create dynamic and original hybrid forms in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Image: Kunié Sugiura, Azalea, 1970
Ansel Adams stood at the pinnacle of his career—revered, celebrated, and firmly entrenched as America’s preeminent landscape photographer. But as the 1960s unfolded, everything around him—and within photography itself—began to shift. The civil rights movement, counterculture rebellion, free love, psychedelics, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War protests reshaped the nation. Meanwhile, a younger generation of photographers rejected the grandeur of nature and the meticulous precision of Adams' Zone System, instead embracing raw, unsettling, and often provocative imagery. As photo historian Jonathan Green put it: “The obsessions of sixties photography were ruthless: alienation, deformity, sterility, insanity, sexuality, bestial and mechanical violence, and obscenity.”
Against this backdrop, Adams embarked on Fiat Lux, the most extensive photographic commission of his life. Between 1963 and 1968, he captured over 7,500 images for the University of California, documenting the institution’s vast and evolving landscape. But beneath the surface, Fiat Lux reveals something more: an artist struggling to find his place in a rapidly transforming world. His once unwavering photographic vision seemed untethered, his artistic compass unsettled. Lost in the Wilderness exposes this tension, showcasing Adams not as the master of the natural world, but as a photographer navigating the shifting tides of change.
Image: Image: Ansel Adams, Untitled, n.d. Scan from original negative. Collection of the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS, 1987.0027.6.UCB.63.3.
LACP is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition by Matthew Finley, whose work imagines the world as it should have been: A world where no queer person feels ashamed for who they love, who they are and how they want to present themselves.
In this moment, when people in power insist on marginalizing, isolating and denouncing queer communities, LACP insists on elevating love and acceptance.
Matthew Finley’s work imagines the world as it should have been: A world where no queer person feels ashamed for who they love, who they are and how they want to present themselves. In this universe, family support of one’s love is a given, rather than a possibility, or, we could say, an impossibility.
In his poetic photographic projects, Finley provides coordinates for how life in this world would be. This solo exhibition, which depicts several series from the past decade, chronicles how Finley reimagines found images and objects, encouraging his staged subjects to discover the joy of nature, as well as a self-consciousness that never seeks to conceal or mask itself, visualizing how we package ourselves for others and the emotional states that result. Whether in fictive family albums or expansive analog projects, his photographic perspective remains intimate and vulnerable. Finley positions male bodies in compositions that echo photographic histories, in which the male subjects become a focal point of the viewing eye, a source of fascination and desire–and that desire quietly comes to the fore to insist on its rightful place. The emotional burden at the core of these works informs their shapes, perspectives, light and configurations. They are both haunting and haunted, charting a path from rejection to liberation by way of friendship and love.
Desire, in these works, becomes a core element of vision; whether it is the desire to be close to another body or the desire to be fully accepted. In that sense, Finley’s work negotiates lived experiences and offers them as an invitation for the viewer, to become an active participant; re-imagine relationships and their histories alongside those captured in the frame, and insist on joy and love as an antidote for judgment, exclusion and isolation in our current world.
Image: hoto by Matthew Finley, We couldn’t stop kissing on our wedding day. 2024, glitter and varnish on archival pigment print from vintage found photograph.
Lines of Belonging marks the 40th anniversary of New Photography with an exhibition featuring 13 artists and collectives who delve into the complexities of identity, community, and interconnectedness. As artist Sabelo Mlangeni eloquently stated, "Love is the key that takes cultures from oppression to joy," reflecting how, in his work, the concept of love serves as a powerful force for liberation and political unity. Through their varied practices, these artists explore places of belonging and trace connections that transcend generations, histories, and geographies. Some use their personal experiences to connect with broader political narratives, while others challenge historical archives and reimagine future communities through their art.
Lines of Belonging focuses on four cities—Kathmandu, New Orleans, Johannesburg, and Mexico City—each of which has long been a hub for life, creativity, and cultural exchange, often predating the modern nation-states in which they now reside. The work presented here offers a stark contrast to the rapid, profit-driven pace of contemporary image production, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence. Instead, these artists advocate for slowness, persistence, and care as a response to the overwhelming speed and commodification of the modern world.
This exhibition marks the first time these artists and collectives are being presented at MoMA, and it includes Sandra Blow, Tania Franco Klein, and Lake Verea (Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea) from Mexico City; Gabrielle Goliath, Lebohang Kganye, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Lindokuhle Sobekwa from Johannesburg; Nepal Picture Library, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, and Prasiit Sthapit from Kathmandu; and L. Kasimu Harris, Renee Royale, and Gabrielle Garcia Steib from New Orleans. Together, these artists offer fresh perspectives on the intersection of place, memory, and identity.
Image: L. Kasimu Harris. Come Tuesday (Marwan Pleasant at Sportsman’s Corner), New Orleans. 2020. Inkjet print, 24 × 36" (61 × 91 cm). Courtesy the artist
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.
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.
AUTOFOTO is marking the booth’s 100 year anniversary with a series of globally connected events, profiles and celebrations including major exhibitions and interventions across London and New York, projects with community groups, artists and designers, plus special events centered around their London and Barcelona based booths and in partnership with colleagues across the Globe.
Curated by Melanie Pocock, Ikon Artistic Director (Exhibitions), this show presents a selection of photography by London-based Japanese artist Tomoko Yoneda, produced over the past thirty years.
Photographer Nick Brandt presents his monumental series The Echo of Our Voices around the world this spring, including with Waddington Custot at Art Dubai (April 18 – 20, 2025), followed by a group exhibition at Waddington Custot (April – May, 2025) in Dubai, and a solo exhibition with Gilman Contemporary at AIPAD Photography Fair (April 23 – 27, 2025) at Park Avenue Armory in New York.
MASI Lugano presents the first museum exhibition dedicated to the photographer Eugenio Schmidhauser (Seon, 1876 - Astano, 1952). With a selection of around 90 vintage photographs and new prints from original glass plate negatives, the show in Palazzo Reali is an opportunity to rediscover a photographer who has always been viewed as playing a key role in shaping the image of tourism in the Ticino area. The exhibition is the result of lengthy research and cataloguing work on the Schmidhauser archive, deposited by the Brentano-Motta di Brugg family at the State Archive of the Canton of Ticino, which has brought to light a series of previously unpublished, little-known works.
Derby QUAD, in partnership with the University of Derby, presents FORMAT International
Photography Festival 2025, the latest edition is under the theme ‘Conflicted’. FORMAT25
returns to Derby City Centre from 13 – 30 March 2025 to showcase the very best
photography and lens-based media being created today alongside thought-provoking
archive material from across the globe. Set more as a guide rather than a rule, ‘Conflicted’
prompts responses from artists across the globe, via the FORMAT25 Open Call, to propose
work that reflects multiple facets, factions, hopes and fears of our world today. Exhibitions
continue until 31 May 2025 at all major venues and some until June 15 2025.
The International Center of Photography (ICP) is pleased to announce the award recipients for the 41st Annual Infinity Awards Gala, to be held on April 1, 2025, at Tisch Skylights at The Shed.
Leica, one of the most legendary names in photography, is celebrating its 100th anniversary—a milestone that highlights its unparalleled influence on the art and craft of image-making. From revolutionizing photojournalism to becoming a symbol of precision engineering and timeless design, Leica cameras have shaped the way we see and capture the world.
Don't miss out on the grand opening of FOTO ARSENAL WIEN on March 21, 2025, showcasing the iconic exhibition Magnum: A World of Photography. After an 18-month renovation, Vienna’s premier exhibition center for international photography and lens-based media unveils its new space at the Arsenal, bringing groundbreaking exhibitions each year. The inaugural Magnum exhibition offers a rare insight into the agency’s 70-year history with over 300 iconic images and archival treasures by legends like Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, and Martin Parr. Step behind the scenes and explore the stories and processes that shaped these unforgettable photographs. Join us for a unique celebration of photography and visual storytelling!
Stills are delighted to host the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 - 2024. The group exhibition brings together working class artists who use photography to explore the nuances of life in all its diversity today, turning their gaze towards both their communities and out to the wider world. The exhibition takes place from 21 March - 28 June 2025 (preview 20 March, 6pm-8pm). After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 - 2024 is curated by Johny Pitts who has previously exhibited at Stills in 2023. The exhibition will also be the first to open at the gallery under the new Directorship at Stills of Vivienne Gamble, who takes up her role in early 2025.
