Sally Mann: At Twelve

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is delighted to present Advice for Young Artists, an exhibition featuring fourteen new photographs by internationally acclaimed artist Alec Soth. The exhibition opens with a reception on Thursday, February 13th, from 6–8 PM, where the artist will be in attendance. Soth’s latest body of work, Advice for Young Artists, emerged from his visits to undergraduate art programs across the United States between 2022 and 2024. However, rather than dispensing direct guidance, Soth offers a contemplative meditation on the artistic journey, revealing the complexities of photography, time, and creative evolution. The images—ranging from structured classroom compositions to expressive, introspective moments—mark a significant evolution in Soth’s practice. Two decades after the release of his celebrated series Sleeping by the Mississippi, this new work revisits themes of artistic discovery and transformation with a fresh perspective. Renowned for his narrative-driven approach to photography, Alec Soth (b. 1969, Minneapolis, MN) has built a career rooted in curiosity, exploration, and an ever-evolving engagement with human connection. His work often captures moments of solitude, longing, and vulnerability, resonating deeply with viewers and fellow artists alike. With Advice for Young Artists, Soth continues to push boundaries, offering a nuanced reflection on the lifelong process of making art. Soth has published over twenty-five photobooks, beginning with his widely acclaimed monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004). Other notable titles include NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019), A Pound of Pictures (2022), and the most recent Advice for Young Artists (2024). In 2008, he founded Little Brown Mushroom, an independent publishing house based in Minnesota. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions worldwide, including at Jeu de Paume (Paris), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki), El Museo de Bogotá (Colombia), and Deichtorhallen (Hamburg). His photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), among others. With Advice for Young Artists, Alec Soth continues his legacy as one of contemporary photography’s most thought-provoking storytellers, exploring the intersections of creativity, education, and the passage of time. Image: © Alec Soth