Contemporary Photography: Highlights from the Collection

Dina Mitrani Gallery is pleased to present a pop-up exhibition of photographs by Peggy Levison Nolan as part of the Miami Design District's Art in the District cultural program. This exhibition features color as well as black and white photographs from the 80s to the present and commemorates the 2nd edition of her book Juggling Is Easy published by TBW Books. Nolan’s first monograph Real Pictures: Tales of a Badass Grandma, published by Daylight Books in 2018 will also be available. This exhibition coincides with Nolan’s participation in the exhibition Shared Documentary Narratives at the History Miami Museum curated by Aldeide Delgado. A second reception and book signing will take place on Saturday October 26th at 4 pm during the WOPHA Congress (Women Photographers International Archive), which, this year is entitled How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now. With her constant and conscious act of looking, Nolan makes pictures that reveal the beauty in everyday scenes, capturing life’s ordinary details in her photographs. Quotidian stills that normally go unnoticed are brought to light by Nolan’s frame, highlighting the home and members of her family in daily activities, whether sleeping, hanging out or making out. The black and white work mostly features her teenage kids, their friends and activities. Nolan began using color film in the early 2000s and depict images of her grown children with their spouses and grandchildren. Nolan's work is in collections such as the MOMA in New York, the San Francisco MOMA, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, the MOCA in North Miami and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, the Margulies Collection, the Girls Club Collection and the Norton Museum to name a few. Her work has been reviewed and published in the New York Magazine, Vogue, The Guardian, Juxtapose, Lenscratch and Art Forum. Nolan has received numerous grants and awards including the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship and taught photography at Florida International University for over 15 years. She claims her students were the ones teaching her. She raised seven children and now has eight grandchildren. Dina Mitrani opened her gallery in Wynwood in 2008 specializing in international contemporary photography representing emerging and mid-career artists, offering artists talks and lectures as well as photo-based objects and books. The gallery’s mission is not only to exhibit, promote and sell photo-based art but to also serve as an educational resource for the community. Dina has been working in the art world for 30 years, spending the first years of her career in New York, after studying art history at the University of Michigan. Moving back to Miami in 2002, together with her sister Rhonda, they were pioneers in creating the Wynwood Art District by organically converting their parent’s clothing factory into art galleries and studios for artists, designers, and architects. They are currently designing and building a center for photography, film and video art in Little River which will open in 2025.

For 30 years, the photographs of artist An-My Lê have engaged the complex fictions that inform how we justify, represent, and mythologize warfare and other forms of conflict. Lê does not take a straightforward photojournalistic approach to depicting combat. Rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora. “Being a landscape photographer,” she has said, “means creating a relationship between various categories—the individual within a larger construct such as the military, history, and culture.” An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières is the first exhibition to present Lê’s powerful photographs alongside her forays into film, video, textiles, and sculpture. Never-before-seen embroideries—some large scale, others the size of a laptop screen—and rarely shown photographs from her Delta and Gabinetto series explore the relationship between mass media, gender, labor, and violence. And an immersive installation created especially for the exhibition attests to the artist’s long-standing consideration of the cinematic dimensions of photography and war. Born in Vietnam in 1960, Lê came to the United States in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, as a political refugee. The two rivers in the exhibition’s title refer to the Mekong and Mississippi river deltas, to Vietnam and the United States. The phrase also gestures toward other subjects that Lê has inflected with her own experiences of war and displacement, from the Seine, to the Hudson River, to the Mexican-American border along the Rio Grande. It is a metaphor that invites viewers to reflect on the circularity of time and history, the layering of disparate geographies, and the intimacies that paradoxically grow out of conflict.

Iconic front-page news photography from the 20th century will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from September 12 through November 16, 2024. Extra! Extra!: News Photographs from 1903-1975 presents unforgettable images from a wide range of historical events including the arrival of the first Ford car, voting rights protests by the suffragists, the detonation of the atom bomb, baseball highlights, Civil Rights activities, political assassinations, Woodstock, and the Vietnam War. Together the photographs form an extraordinary visual history of the United States during the last century. In most cases, the works on view represent the earliest known published prints, with each print featuring detailed provenance meticulously inked and stamped, documenting its historical journey from newsroom to printed page. This careful record provides invaluable insight into the print's origins, including its initial publication, subsequent ownership, and any historical events it has been associated with. Such thorough documentation enriches our understanding of its significance and the context in which it has been preserved over time. The exhibition will feature the notations on the backs of the images as well. Extra! Extra!: News Photographs from 1903-1975 features more than 60 photographs and draws on a collection of nearly 250 prints assembled by Dan Solomon and Howard Greenberg. A number of the prints are by well-known photographers including Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith; many of the photographers are unknown. Major news makers of the 20th century are shown including Muhammad Ali, Neil Armstrong, The Beatles, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King Jr., Patricia Hearst, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, and the Wright Brothers. Solomon began collecting the images more than 20 years ago by working with media outlets who were digitizing their archives, including The New York Times, Time-Life, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He was initially inspired by the shocking 1963 image of a self-immolating monk in Saigon by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Malcolm Browne. Solomon turned over a print of the iconic image and noticed numerous stamps and information on the back. “The print had a presence and the aura of a powerful object connected to history and the dissemination of information. I immediately asked how I could see more,” he said. “This collection of iconic images includes many rare and important prints and is distinguished from all others,” said Howard Greenberg. “We had the good fortune to be able to acquire important first and second generation ‘press’ prints at a time when certain archives were beginning to sell photos from their files.” Far from pristine, each photograph in the exhibition has been handled and exhibits a rich history on the front and back including crop lines, grease pencil markings, date stamps of when the photograph was run, captions used by the newspaper, credit information, and other background notes. Together the prints in the exhibition show photojournalism in action. For example, a 1968 photograph by the Associated Press’s Eddie Adams of a South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner has numerous credits and notations including a clipping from a newspaper noting “TOO VIOLENT? The question of whether scenes such as this, showing the execution in Saigon of a Vietcong prisoner, should be shown on television was deleted at the hearing.” Similar prints in Extra! Extra!: News Photographs from 1903-1975 were included in Pictures of the Times: A Century of Photography from The New York Times, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1996 based on a gift of news photography from The New York Times to MoMA. New York Times writer Wiliam Safire wrote an essay in the catalogue noting, “Photojournalism confronts an unfolding drama and freezes the frame, refusing to let the fleeting instant flee. It stops the world at that moment of history and lets us get on.” Image: Saigon February 1, 1968 © Eddie Adams

The Hulett Collection in collaboration with FAS44 Gallery in Las Vegas and Michael Frey are pleased to present Pieter Henket's series, Congo Tales, September 26 - November 16, 2024. This series embodies the stories passed down from generation to generation, magnificently personifying fable and myth through portraits of people from the Mbomo District residing deep in the Congolese rainforest. These boldly authentic photographs transform the subjects into painterly creations filled with raw emotions and character depictions. Pieter Henket is a Dutch photographer living and working in New York City. Known for a photographic style inspired by the 17th century Dutch Golden Age of painting, his work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum de Fundatie in The Netherlands, and the Museum Barberini in Germany. A mastermind of integrating people and place, Henket has an innate storytelling ability that provides an authentically emotional experience for all who view his work.

Ken Light | American Stories:1969-1995 showcases three decades of work by photographer Ken Light, highlighting significant moments in American history from 1969 to 1995. Light’s images focus on social issues, human rights, and the lives of overlooked communities, providing a powerful look at the stories of this period. The exhibition includes work from some of Light’s twelve published books, with selections from Report to the Shareholders, Course of the Empire; Midnight La Frontera; What’s Going On? 1969-1974; Valley of Shadows and Dreams; Coal Hollow, Delta Time; Texas Death Row; To The Promised Land; and With These Hands. A booklet accompanies the exhibition, featuring works by Ken Light and a text by Brian Wallis, Executive Director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Image: DeWitt Clinton High School, Bronx, 1972 © Ken Light

Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature showcases photographic works by a groundbreaking yet underrecognized artist who challenged perceptions of beauty by examining the female body in dialogue with the natural world. Born and raised in California’s San Gabriel Valley, Laura Aguilar created photographic representations of historically excluded and marginalized groups of women from various communities across Los Angeles. She eventually turned the camera on herself to consider the multitude of factors that defined her own identity as a Chicana and a lesbian who lived in poverty and with depression and learning disabilities. Later in her career, Aguilar began to capture intimate portraits of nude, large-bodied women in natural settings. She created various series within this framework to highlight the inherent connections between nature and the female form. Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature brings together nearly 60 photographic works from the most-recognized of those series, including Nature Self-Portrait (1996) Stillness (1999) Motion (1999) Center (2000–2001) and Grounded (2006–2007). Featured works either directly explore the relationship between physical features of the body and the landscape or adopt an abstract approach. Exhibited in conversation, they encourage reflection on the ways female bodies are perceived within the natural world in comparison to how they are viewed in social and cultural spaces. All of the images in Nudes in Nature were made in the Southwestern region of the United States. With this particular backdrop, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to consider Aguilar’s trailblazing work within the context of our desert region. Image: Motion #59, 1999 © Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016

For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality.” ― Daido Moriyama Please join us for a rare and special exhibition of works by renowned photographer Daido Moriyama. The Center for Photographic Art is honored to present 33 images from this master photographer spanning five decades, 1966 - 2007. From his early series such as Japan: A Photo Theater and Karyūdo (A Hunter) to more recent projects and prints, we'll get to view the progression of this legendary artist's work. A selection of Moriyama's books will also be on view. On opening night we have the pleasure of hearing Asako Shimazaki, one of Moriyama's students, speak about his long career and his influence. Not to be missed! Daido Moriyama was born in 1938 in Ikeda City, Osaka, Japan. Switching from designer to photographer, he worked as an assistant for Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe, before embarking on his career as a freelance photographer in 1964. For series such as “Japan: A Photo Theater,” which appeared in Camera Mainichi in 1967, he received the New Artist Award from the Japan Photo-Critics Association. Large-scale exhibitions of Moriyama’s work have been held at a number of major institutions including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1999; traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Japan Society, New York), the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011), and London’s Tate Modern (two person exhibition with William Klein 2012-13). In 2012, Moriyama received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography (New York), was ordered Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2018 by the French government, and he was also the winner of The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2019 which cemented his international reputation. Moriyama has also produced more than 150 photobooks since 1968.

By cutting out, reshuffling, and layering multiple photographs, artists create composite artworks called photomontages and collages. First coined by Berlin Dada artists John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann at the beginning of the First World War, the photomontage was originally conceived as a form of social and political critique. With further developments from Cubist and Surrealist artists, both techniques gained widespread appeal for their capacity for abstraction, experimentation, and narrative building. Photomontages and collages can create both seamless compositions, as well as generate new relationships and dialogues between individual pictures. Cut Up/Cut Out: Photomontage and Collage explores these photographic techniques as enduring forms of artistic engagement, highlighting several new acquisitions and contemporary examples from the Norton’s Collection, as well as a selection of special loans. These hybrid forms can even point us to the foundations of our contemporary digital experience, as such widespread and rapid access to information continues to change and accelerate our ability to cut, mix, and paste each day. Image: Pittsburg Memory 1964 © Romare Bearden

The allure of analog and historical photographic processes lies in their tangible and tactile nature, contrasting with the digital precision of modern photography. Enthusiasts and artists drawn to these methods are captivated by the hands-on approach and the unique, unpredictable results they yield. For them, each step—from loading film to developing prints—is a deliberate, intimate act that imbues their work with a sense of craftsmanship and authenticity. Beyond mere nostalgia, these processes offer a deeper connection to the art form’s roots, where patience, skill, and experimentation are valued over instant gratification. Photographers who embrace analog and historical processes often form a passionate community bonded by their dedication to preserving traditional techniques. They revel in the rich history and idiosyncrasies of older cameras, films, and darkroom practices, cherishing the nuanced textures and imperfections that digital methods often smooth over. This community includes both seasoned veterans who have honed their skills over decades and a new generation captivated by the evocative charm and artistic freedom that film and alternative processes offer. Analog photography methods have been a source of solace for many through the decades and a new and vibrant discovery for those just learning of these endearing methods. The photographs created through these methods are not just images, but personal and emotional narratives woven into physical media. They celebrate not only the technical mastery required but also the slower pace and a deeper appreciation for the art of capturing light and shadow. This celebration invites you to connect with the stories behind the photographs and appreciate the art of photography. After six years of Analog Forever Magazine, Michael Behlen and Michael Kirchoff consider a common refrain made by photographic artists who have appeared online or in print. The dominant digital era of photography has resulted in many feeling disconnected or lost in their visual findings. For many, the soul had left the body. It was the pull from these historical processes that brought them back into the fold of “making” once again. Revealing the artist’s hand evident within these works has given them a far more compelling voice. A passionate analog resurgence has strengthened their core beliefs and allowed them the means to create art that fulfills their innermost desires. Image: Tulips and my hand on black glass, © Mark Sink

Peter Fetterman Gallery is delighted to announce the upcoming exhibition, "Her: The Great Women Photographers," celebrating the extraordinary talents of women in photography. Opening on August 17th, 2024, this exhibition promises to illuminate the gallery with the diverse and powerful works of some of the most influential female photographers. "Her: The Great Women Photographers" will feature the remarkable works of artists such as Lillian Bassman, Sarah Moon, Ruth Bernhard, Julia Margaret Cameron, Cig Harvey, Bernice Abbott, Judy Dater, Eve Arnold, Doris Ullmann, Martine Franck, Flor Garduno, Judy Glickman Lauder, Ilona Langbroek, Grace Robertson, Anastasia Samoylova, and Sabine Weiss, amongst others. With each carefully curated work, a testament to the unique vision and artistic prowess of these pioneering women. The exhibition will include a selection of iconic images, as well as some unseen gems. "Her: The Great Women Photographers" is a must-see event for art lovers and photography enthusiasts alike. The exhibition will be on view from August 17th to November 23rd at Peter Fetterman Gallery, located in Santa Monica, CA. Image: La Robe Rouge 2010 © Sarah Moon

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to open the fall season with the work of Bevan Davies. Bevan Davies: New York Typologies will feature vintage black and white photographs of lower Manhattan made in the mid-1970s. Davies utilized a large-format view camera to generate images of great depth and clarity, pursuing an approach to documenting the urban landscape of the Empire City that the late photographer Lewis Baltz described as “rigorously contemporary while acknowledging a use of the camera which dates from the inception of the medium.” This exhibition will showcase varying aspects of the city’s architecture, presenting serial images devoted to these cast-iron edifices. Bevan Davies’ large-scale ferrotyped* prints flawlessly mirror the illuminated surfaces of Gotham’s doorways, storefronts, and facades. Davies writes of his approach as “an effort being made to let the camera almost see by itself.” These New York facades, taken in the early morning hours, describe the architectural subjects frontally and are defined by the chiaroscuro of the building. In his introduction to Davies’ book, New York 1975, published by Nazraeli Press, Joshua Chuang, (then, the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints and Photographs, and The Robert B. Menschel, Senior Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library), observed: “When first exhibited in 1976, their formal austerity and apparently neutral stance invited comparison with the contemporaneous work of Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and other photographers featured in the seminal 'New Topographics' exhibition. Distance, however, has revealed their concerns and temperament to be more akin to those of Marville or Atget, both of whom had a special feeling for the life and death of buildings (and thus of place), or Walker Evans, whose pictures Lincoln Kirstein praised for their “clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur.” Davies’ sense of the urban landscape is furthered by his astute and rhythmic organization of his subject within the ground glass of his camera. His photographs both survey and celebrate the urban landscape, allowing traces of its inhabitants to inform the architecture and metropolitan spaces, revealing an everyday poetry of the city. Bevan Davies (American, 1941 - ) studied humanities at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. After moving to New York, he continued his studies with Bruce Davidson in his New York studio, where he met Mary Ellen Mark, Diane Arbus, Ralph Gibson, and Danny Lyon. Davies' first New York exhibition was held at Witkin Gallery in 1969. Sonnabend Gallery featured Davies' work in solo and group exhibitions in their SoHo gallery in the mid-and late 1970s. During this period, Davies' work was also exhibited at Larry Gagosian’s Broxton Gallery in Westwood, CA and internationally at Galerie Wilde, Cologne, at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh and in group exhibitions of American contemporary photography at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; George Eastman House: Ringling Museum of Art: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; and the La Jolla Art Museum. Bevan Davies’ work can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the New York Public Library, J. Paul Getty Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Black Dog Collection, among others. Monographs on Davies’ work include Los Angeles, 1976 (Nazraeli Press, 2014), and New York 1975 (Nazraeli Press, 2017). His work was included in the survey exhibition catalog, Ed Rusha and Some Los Angeles Apartments (Getty, 2013). Recently his work was featured in Geoff Dyer’s collection of essays on photography entitled, See/Saw (Graywolf Press, 2021).

pina Americana, my study of a very narrow corridor of the central United States, was born with violence on the mind and trepidation in the heart. In reaction to the gaining momentum of a fractious American identity, and what it means for our future as a nation going forward, ‘Spina Americana’ (American Spine) attempts to understand a critical and often misunderstood area of the United States, in a time of political division not seen here since the 1850s. I decided to focus my attention on a 100-mile-wide path of land, 50 miles east/west of the geographic center. It runs vertically from Mexico to Canada, traversing the spine of the United States, as an independent and unique feature that deserves its own examination, where most of its occupants have been ignored politically, socially, and culturally for many decades. The commonly used expression for this area is “flyover country”, which denotes a land of banality and unimportance, culturally and otherwise. This series reflects my general philosophy towards photography as an anvil for activism, as well as my opening argument for a new direction in the hope for a more collective and persistent empathy. As Americans, our duty, I believe, is to always remember that in the end, the only thing holding the line between our honour and the windblown dust of a collapsed empire, is us. My hope is that this work and the work that is to come, will serve as a call to action for individuals convinced they are powerless against the forces actively opposing this very kind of national cohesiveness. Love (without prerequisite) has been endlessly shown as a powerful force; it only requires a sense of duty, proper action and the will to initiate it.