Samantha Box: Confluences

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

Endicott College is excited to host Fran Forman – Suspended Realities: A 20-Year Journey through Whimsy to Noir, an exhibition showcasing two decades of the artist’s imaginative work. The exhibition will run from January 21 to March 14, 2025, at the Heftler Visiting Artist Gallery in the Walter J. Manninen Center for the Arts. Closing Reception: Join us on March 12, 2025, from 4:00–6:00 PM for a closing reception to meet the artist and explore her work. Fran Forman combines photography, digital painting, and AI techniques to create stunning, layered visual narratives that explore themes of longing, disconnection, and hidden emotions. With 25 years of experience in graphic design and an MFA, Fran’s work blends technical skill with emotional depth. The exhibition highlights her evolution from whimsical imagery to darker, noir-inspired themes, drawing inspiration from Caravaggio, Edward Hopper, Hammerschøi, and Gregory Crewdson. Over 35 images are on display, plus some recent short experimental videos.

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

An exhibition of photography by the acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders will be on view from January 28 through March 15, 2025 at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Written Once will showcase images made in the 1970s and 1980s when Wenders was researching locations for his films in the American West or traveling the country for film events. A key element of the exhibition is text written by Wenders to accompany a number of the photographs, which will be featured together with the images in the gallery. Wenders’ poetic stories surrounding the images give the viewer an extraordinary window into his filmmaking as well as his day-to-day life in the film world. The title of the exhibition, Written Once, is a nod to the two photographic series on view: Written in the West (1983-1987) and Once (1977-1984). Written in the West In 1983, Wenders set out on a road trip of the American West, photographing the unique light and desolate landscape in preparation for his iconic film Paris, Texas (1984). Wenders’ images from Texas, Arizonia, New Mexico and California are transformed by the filmmaker’s cinematic vision as he searches for the mythology of the frontier in the vast landscape. The trip resulted in the series, Written in the West, which was first exhibited in 1986 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. “It was another way of preparing for the film, too, a different kind of research that had less to do with locations than with the light in the West. I had never made a film in that landscape and was hoping that taking photographs would sharpen my understanding of the light and landscape, my sense of empathy with it. So although these photos were taken in connection with the film we made in that part of the country, they are quite independent of it, despite the fact that a lot of the photos were taken in Houston, Los Angeles, and other locations in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico where we did in fact shoot the film. But these large-format photos were my own personal, private way of preparing for the film,” Wenders noted in an interview in his 2015 photography book, Written in the West Revisited (Schirmer/Mosel & D.A.P.) Once In the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, Wenders photographed his travels and encounters in Hollywood. Using the same command of the art of storytelling found in his films, Wenders presents a written anecdote with each image that often starts out with “Once, I…..” These behind-the-scenes accounts feature stories about his travel experiences often with the extraordinary group of actors and directors that have crossed his path including John Lurie, Jim Jarmusch, Dennis Hopper, Claire Denis, Elia Kazan, Isabella Rossellini, and Harry Dean Stanton. Among the highlights is a 1977 photograph, When Martin Scorsese had a flat tire II. Wenders is both the imagemaker and the narrator of an unpredictable moment: while traveling in the remote landscape of the Valley of the Gods in Utah, he encountered a car pulled over by the side of the road with a flat tire. The man underneath the car was Martin Scorsese, who subsequently discovered that the rental car did not have a spare tire! Autobiographical in scope with a literary tradition found in his filmmaking, the narrated texts and photographic trajectories provide an intimate look at the making of picture stills and their relationship to moving images. About Wim Wenders Wim Wenders (born 1945 in Düsseldorf) became internationally known as one of the protagonists of the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Today, he is considered as one of the most important figures of contemporary world cinema. The work of the screenwriter, director, producer, photographer and author includes multiple award-winning feature and documentary films, photo exhibitions presented worldwide, as well as numerous photo books, film books and text collections. He lives and works in Berlin with his wife Donata Wenders. His films Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987) are today part of the international canon of film heritage, as are his innovative documentaries Pina, Buena Vista Social Club and The Salt of the Earth. His two most recent films had their world premiere at the Festival de Cannes in 2023: Anselm, his documentary film in 3D about Anselm Kiefer, and his Japanese feature film Perfect Days, for which lead actor Kōji Yakusho received the award for Best Actor in Cannes. Perfect Days, became his internationally most successful film and was nominated for an Oscar in the “Best International Feature Film” category in 2024. In 2012, Wim and Donata Wenders established the Wenders Foundation in Wenders' native city Düsseldorf. The non-profit foundation brings together the artist's cinematic, photographic and literary lifework and makes it permanently accessible to the public. In the process, the films are restored to state-of-the-art digital masters. The Wim Wenders Foundation is also engaged in film education for schools and supports (in cooperation with the Film und Medienstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen) the promotion of young talent in the field of innovative cinematic storytelling with the Wim Wenders Scholarship. Image: Sun Dries, Las Vegas, New Mexico from the series 'Writen in the West' 1983 © Win Wenders

Haines Gallery proudly presents State Shift, our second solo exhibition with artist MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF. Opening in tandem with SF Art Week 2025, this highly anticipated show debuts a poetic, visceral, and personal body of work that expands Riepenhoff’s collaboration with both the cyanotype and the environment. Riepenhoff creates her cyanotypes directly within the landscape, allowing the elements to leave physical inscriptions on paper coated with photographic materials. Marking an important breakthrough in her practice, State Shift sees the introduction of new pigments and gestures into Riepenhoff’s process. The signature inky indigos and glacial blues of her cyanotypes are transformed with vivid flashes of green, coral, magenta, and shimmering metallic hues, the result of organic materials (mica, mushroom ink, and ginkgo chlorophyll) and manufactured pigments (a nod to the human presence in the landscape). The title State Shift, which names both the exhibition and the series on view, is a geological term describing dramatic and sudden changes to ecosystems — often when critical thresholds are crossed. “The physical nature of my work, where photography-based media come in contact with rain, waves, wind, and wintry environments, is a call to be in closer contact with our environment, in a time of deep separation between humans and our ecosystems,” Riepenhoff has said. In issuing this call — both to herself and to viewers — the artist invites us all to consider the personal and collective shifts we might make to preserve our shared home. State Shift emerged from difficulty and explores sites of climate devastation, but is rooted in the possibilities of transformation and hope. “Hope,” the author and activist Rebecca Solnit has written, “is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written.” State Shift coincides with Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene, a major group exhibition opening at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in February 2025 that features Riepenhoff's work. Originating at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, Second Nature will travel to the Anchorage Museum, AK following its presentation at the Cantor.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the apexart Fellowship Program, we're presenting 30 Days of Culture Shock, a group exhibition of photography and video works by current and former Fellows from the U.S. and abroad. The apexart Fellowship is an alternative educational program that invites creative individuals to step far outside their comfort zones and engage with unfamiliar cultures, ideas, people and experiences. Differing from residencies that focus on production, the apexart fellowship asks artists to pause their creative endeavors and immerse themselves for thirty days in a city they have never been to. Instead of networking and art tourism, Fellows engage in a rigorous itinerary of activities including: hands-on workshops, lectures, dance classes, and community focused volunteering. Unlike most artist residency programs, the apexart Fellowship provides a rich, 30-day schedule of non-art activities, while requiring Fellows to refrain from producing creative works. The apexart Fellowship schedule prioritizes educational experiences that are outside of the Fellow's stated interests. This diversity of activities leaves Fellows with new ideas, approaches, and content to incorporate into their creative practices. Our NYC fellowship is for internationally based artists to travel to New York City, and our INTL fellowship is for NYC-based artists to travel outside of the USA. In doing new and interesting things, and having time away from their usual responsibilities, apexart Fellows can reflect on what they do with greater perspective. apexart Fellows keep a public journal for the duration of their program, and participate in a recorded exit interview at the end of their Fellowship, which can be found online. By providing a space for contemplation and exposure to new experiences, the apexart Fellowship is designed to be a catalyst for creativity. 30 Days of Culture Shock is a reflection on the transformative power of the program, showcasing how these diverse experiences influence and inspire the Fellows' work. For some of the artists in the exhibition it has been years while for others it has only been months, but all of the work featured is in some way in response to their time in the fellowship. Join us.

The Norton is proud to welcome Mexican artist Fabiola Menchelli as the 2024-25 Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence. Her solo exhibition, certain silence, features photographs through which Menchelli questions how risk and risk-taking impacts our understanding of photography and representation. Created in complete darkness and without the use of a camera, Menchelli relies upon touch and sound to guide her gestures. Each atmospheric work is not only the result of Menchelli’s physical movements, but also her total embrace of chance and accident, allowing streams of color-filtered light to reach each piece of light-sensitive paper.

he Center for Photographic Art is proud to present Sky Country, a solo exhibition by award winning photographer, Bob Kolbrener. In celebration of the artist's new monograph of the same name, CPA partnered with Nazraeli Press to create this beautiful exhibition of silver gelatin prints of Kolbrener's iconic images of the West. This special show includes some of the artist’s most recognizable images as well as some that publisher Chris Pichler discovered in Kolbrener's vast archive! We’re excited that both the artist and publisher will be in Carmel in person to launch Kolbrener's latest book project and share copies of this beautiful new monograph, Sky Country (Nazraeli Press, February 2025). A native of Missouri, American artist Bob Kolbrener was born in 1942 and began his career in St. Louis. He established a commercial photography business there in 1969 that was structured to give him and his wife, Sharon, time to photograph the American West. “We would work for five months and then head out for a month of fine art photography…living as nomads for two months of the year for over forty years,” said Kolbrener. A life-long devotion to California landscapes began when he saw six large-format Ansel Adams photographs in a gallery in Yosemite National Park in 1968. A transformational experience, it resulted in Kolbrener meeting, studying under, and ultimately working with Adams throughout the 1970s as he continued to build his own reputation as a superb landscape photographer. Kolbrener’s technical method, which remains grounded in the “old fashioned way,” as the artist describes it, uses fiber-based silver gelatin paper, tray processing and selenium toner. His photographs are made on film, using medium and large format cameras. Kolbrener’s photographs have been exhibited in museums, art galleries and libraries across the country and in Austria, Great Britain, China, Indonesia, and Japan. His images are in collections at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Monterey Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, and Washington University. In 2019, following a retrospective of his work, the Booth Museum acquired nearly two dozen of his works for their permanent collection. The Kolbreners moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1996, closer to the iconic western landscapes that define his work. Bob Kolbrener has a recent monograph published by Nazraeli Press: California (2022) which features 60 plates of black-and-white photographs taken between 1968 and 2019. Kolbrener's upcoming book, Sky Country (Nazraeli Press, February 2025) is a masterpiece of Western landscapes and includes an essay by CPA's executive director, Ann Jastrab. Both of these beautiful monographs are limited to 1,000 copies.

Jeff Larason’s Boston and Lynn Saville’s New York is a captivating exploration of quiet moments within two bustling urban environments. This exhibition combines the powerful and evocative urban imagery of Boston photographer Jeff Larason and New York City photographer Lynn Saville. Both artists delve deep into the visual language of cities, capturing moments of solitude and reflection that are often overshadowed by the energy and chaos of urban life. Larason and Saville reveal a serene, reflective, and unexpectedly beautiful side of city life through their unique lenses.

Artists: Nancy Baron, Matt Henry, Cynthia Johnston Taking its name from Rosecrans Baldwin’s 2021 book about Los Angeles, Everything Now, this exhibition considers the meeting points between fiction and reality, narrative and fragmentary visions, illusions, fantasies and concrete presences, as these are revealed in how artists capture Americana and its presence in visual culture of the recent decades. Against the backdrop of the hot, vast, fiery, lonely American deserts, or lush distant mountains touched by unreachable horizon lines, the works on view chronicle glimpses into the terrains that became synonyms with a cultural experience, connecting abandoned geographies, towering palm trees, ominous interiors, endless roads and bright lights with creative and collective ancestors, personal histories, and a desire to return to nature that always represents more than what meets the eye. Taking place at the Laemmle Theaters, an iconic location in and of itself for film and film enthusiasts in Southern California, this exhibition has pop culture in mind. It is particularly interested in how vast landscapes are imagined and re-imagined and imagined yet again by artists who might work at a great geographical distance from this place, yet in surprisingly close proximity. In many ways, these works exist in the unexpected gaps between the concrete sites and how they were written into popular culture, between the environment and the textured ways in which it came to define a worldview and a desire to belong and remain distant, all at once. Image: Cynthia Johnston, Wyoming III, 2018

The epic historical and artistic photographs of O. Winston Link (1914-2001) celebrate the wonder of the now obsolete steam-powered locomotive. With the exhibition Hot Shot, Robert Mann Gallery presents a selection of classic images from Linkʼs body of work produced in the 1950s. When the Norfolk & Western Railway began to convert its operations from steam to diesel, Link spent five years documenting the trains and the towns along the line in Virginia. A longtime hero of railfans, Link received overdue art world recognition for the prescience of his photographic vision in the decades before his death. His flare for cinematic mise-en-scène and for staging images is now acknowledged to have paved the way for the dramatic tableaux of luminaries such as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall, while his interest in the socio-historical infrastructure of the railroad has inspired another vein of photographers such as Jeff Brouws and Mark Ruwede A consummate craftsman, Link yielded an array of artificial lighting innovations to produce exactly the atmosphere he desired, resulting in images that are uncanny and magical. A plane, a train and some automobiles are all aspects of high-speed American imagery in the iconic Hotshot Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956. Here the dramatic nature of Linkʼs production thematized by the eroticism-tinged space of the drive-in movie theater. Carefree summer nights continue for the children splashing playfully at the Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole as a locomotive barrels by overhead. That his works have variously been described as surrealist, futurist, Norman Rockwell-ian, filmic, an (constructed) historical documents, is testament to their profound appeal as images. Indeed, for all their artful construction, his railroad photographs do not merely fetishize the sumptuous effects of smoke and light, but contextualize the trains within human narratives. Linkʼs works brilliantly animate the iconic steam railroad as a fantastical aspect of a bygone, everyday American life. Having worked directly with the artist in the last decade of his life, Robert Mann Gallery remains the premier source for and expert on the photographs of O. Winston Link. His legacy is honored in the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia. Linkʼs photographs are held in numerous prominent museum collections internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Permanent Collections at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition by Charles Johnstone, In Search of the Perfect Palm. The exhibition will run February 22nd through March 28th in the gallery’s atrium space, with an opening reception with the artist on Saturday the 22nd of February, from 5-7pm. The exhibition presents Johnstone’s homage to the 19th Century explorer and photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey. In 1842, Girault de Prangey set out on a three-year expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean equipped with a camera and a newfound knowledge of the Daguerreotype process. On this journey he came across a palm tree near the Church of Saints Theodore in Athens that would prove to be a subject worthy of his camera. The view captured by Girault de Prangey in one of photography’s earliest processes was very modern and unusual for its time, depicting a close-up view of the palm’s fronds against the sky. In 2019, upon seeing this full plate daguerreotype image made by Girault de Prangey in the exhibition, A Monumental Journey held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Johnstone was inspired to search for the perfect palm. In Search of the Perfect Palm will feature small-scale direct positive Polaroid prints. These unique Polaroid prints created by Johnstone on expired batches of Polaroid film stock render his selected palms small in scale, and with the intimacy of viewing akin to the solidarity of beholding a Daguerreotype. In Johnstone’s photographs, the palm tree is held against the same cerulean sky that the artist encountered in Girault de Prangey’s photograph, and rendered with the inherent artifacts and image inconsistencies that are characteristic of the unpredictable nature of expired film, recalling results indicative to early Daguerreotype images. With this, Johnstone’s work forms a link to the medium’s past, while suggesting the immediacy of the present through the photographer’s quest to capture a fleeting sense of the beauty and symbolism his subject conveys. Charles Johnstone is a self-taught photographer, whose works feature his immediate surroundings and environments encountered during travel. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin. Johnstone’s books and photographs are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of the City of New York, and the International Center of Photography. He was the subject of the 2022 documentary, Remnants of Memory, a film that celebrates beauty in the overlooked, anonymous objects we pass every day, in which Johnstone explores the vivid canals and ancient passageways of Venice, Italy in search of a new book project.