Photo Exhibitions

The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is delighted to present Summertime // Love, a solo exhibition by renowned photographer Mark Steinmetz, on view from September 1 through October 31, 2025. With an eye attuned to fleeting gestures and the quiet theater of everyday life, Steinmetz has spent decades creating photographs that feel both intimate and timeless. This exhibition brings together selections from his celebrated Summertime series, with tender portraits and languid moments steeped in the haze of youth, alongside images made during his travels across the globe. From sun-dappled afternoons in American suburbs to shadow-lined streets in faraway cities, his photographs speak in a language of patience and empathy, capturing both the universal and the particular, the unrepeatable moment and the enduring essence of place.

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition, Kate Breakey: In Pursuit of Light, with an opening reception on September 20th, from 6-8pm. The exhibition will feature a salon-style installation of Breakey’s color photographs of moths. Each pigment print on display is uniquely framed by the artist, drawing out the subtle details of the nocturnal creatures with pastel and pencil, and continuing the artist’s established tradition of hand-painting the surface of her photographic prints. In her monumental moth portraits, the exquisite form and pattern of these seemingly caped insects are showcased by enlarging their features to hundreds or even thousands of times their size, celebrating the unique details and elegant shapes. Moths are in the insect Order Lepidoptera, and share this Order with Butterflies. There are some 160,000 species of moths in the world, compared to 17,500 species of butterflies. In the United States, there are nearly 11,000 species of moths. The artist states, “My fascination with moths began long ago, perhaps because they go unnoticed and are somewhat unloved. They are primarily nocturnal and often drab—not as colorful or iconic as butterflies—but they are staggeringly beautiful if you look closely enough”. Her depictions follow a lineage of natural history and scientific illustration, and art photography, with an affinity for the work of naturalist illustrators Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), John James Audubon (1785-1851), and botanical photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). A passionate advocate for conservation, Kate Breakey invites us to reflect on the unseen splendor of the living world and the dire need to protect it before it vanishes. Her work reminds us to recognize how inextricably interconnected and dependent we are on the natural world. Kate Breakey's work is held in many public collections, including The Australian National Gallery in Canberra, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Austin Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography. Monographs by the artist include: Small Deaths, Flowers/Birds, Painted Light (a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of image making), and Las Sombras / The Shadows.

All About Photo presents ''Blueprint' by Benita Mayo, on view throughout October 2025. BLUEPRINT Memory is unreliable, and time has a way of bending the truth. I have always been on ajourney to unearth and examine the stories that live within me—some through my own experience, but most through inheritance. When Daddy suddenly passed in 2020, the tectonic plates of my life forever shifted. In an instant, I knew life would never be the same. As I find myself longing to understand the past, the impermanence of memory is palpable. I feel as if I’m racing toward an invisible finish line. My parents were born in Virginia, a state with an indelible imprint on America’s most painful and pivotal chapters: the rise of slavery, the Civil War, and the long struggle for civil rights.Over 350,000 men, women, and children were sold from Richmond’s auction block. Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy, and the Fall of Richmond marked the end of the CivilWar. Later, during a time of “massive resistance,” a neighboring county chose to close its public schools rather than integrate them. This was the Virginia into which my father was born. History and politics shaped my family’s story. They directly influenced how we were raised.The most pervasive feelings I remember from childhood were fear and loneliness. We lived with trauma, sorrow, silence, and deep wounding. But at the heart of it all, there was love—and a steadfast hope that tomorrow could be better than today. Toni Morrison, in The Bluest Eye, urges us not to “forgive and forget,” but to “remember and do better.” Too often, shame and embarrassment silence truth. But only through declaration and revelation can truth and insight rise. Only then can the cracks begin to mend, and healing begin. Much of what I have struggled with throughout my life has roots in collective trauma. In mysearch to understand what happened to me, I’ve spent 1,571 hours in therapy. It has takendecades to identify the cycles, to stop the bleeding, to clean the wound, and to begin thework of healing. For any wound to heal, this must come first. Then, in time, new tissueforms—a foundation for new skin that is stronger, more resilient. Through words and pictures, I recount the fierce determination of a man caught in the web of history. The deck was stacked against him. But he made a way out of no way. The calmness of the landscape conceals the quiet outrage, the mourning, and the sacred commemoration.

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.

Geoglyphs are ancestral symbolic forms, etched into the ground with dry-stone lines, cleared furrows, and tamped soil. Created by Indigenous communities as ritual acts, they embody communal cosmologies across the landscape—a shared vision of the Cosmos. Often aligned with constellations or natural features—and most legible from above—they weave culture, Land, and the heavens.” This photographic investigation is a personal reflection on human values and how they are carved into the Earth’s body. I have traversed South America’s mining territories for fifteen months in search of meaning. As an architect expanding my practice into the realm of the visual arts, I have sought to engage with the spiritual dimensions of our epoch, immersing myself in monumental voids that descend into the Earth’s depths. From the air and from the ground, what emerged transcended the commodification of minerals for the energy transition: these voids exist as testaments to humanity’s aspirations. The chronicles of modernity are inscribed across the Planet’s surface. Sacred Lands have become kingdoms of accumulation, empires of extraction. These new cosmotechnic terrains are the geoglyphs of our time—monuments to the values we pursue. - Lorenzo Poli

This exhibition brings together work of three seminal photographers: Harry Callahan, Kenneth Josephson, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Each explored the expressive potential of in-camera multiple exposures to evoke the energy and complexity of nature. Harry Callahan (1912–1999) was a pioneering figure who taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago (1946–1961) and later at the Rhode Island School of Design (1961–1977). His work has influenced generations of photographers and helped further the art of photography. Included in the exhibition are two innovative works: Royal Oak, Michigan (1945), made by moving the camera horizontally between exposures on the same negative of a willow tree. Multiple Exposure Tree, Chicago (1956), made by rotating the camera in a circular motion between exposures of on the same negative. Callahan once reflected, “I was doing photography to find something—which is different.” He also explained, “What I have observed is that when a student or a person makes a picture which really surprises you, it is because that person has found something out about himself.” Kenneth Josephson (b. 1932) studied under Callahan and Aaron Siskind as a graduate student at the Institute of Design (1958–1960) after getting his undergraduate degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied under Minor White. After graduating in 1960, Josephson taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for almost forty years and influenced generations of artists. Josephson was an early figure in conceptual photography. His innovative explorations often used photography to comment on itself and our perception. Inspired by Callahan’s multiple exposure work and encouraged by the atmosphere of experimentation at the Institute of Design, Josephson titled his graduate thesis An Exploration of the Multiple Image. He cited that the harmonic polyphony in music and streams of consciousness in literature excited him to the possibilities of expression with “…multiple images on a single sheet of film exposed within the camera.” He sought to expand “the expressive vocabulary of photography.” Though he utilized some of Callahan’s techniques of camera position movement, Josephson also made exposures with varying degrees of focus while maintaining a fixed film-plane, creating ethereal images that seem to reveal dimensions beyond human sight. This exhibition features four rare vintage prints from this early period of his career (1959–1961). Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) was an optometrist and an artist. Initially working in Chicago, Meatyard moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he became involved with the Lexington Camera Club. There, he was mentored by photographer (and later curator) Van Deren Coke who introduced Meatyard to the concept that “the camera sees even beyond the visual consciousness.” In 1956, Coke encouraged him to attend a two-week photography seminar organized by Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University. Meatyard found inspiration in the work and ideas of the presenters, Smith and Aaron Siskind and especially Minor White, who introduced him to Zen philosophy. Meatyard’s growing engagement with Zen merged with his knowledge of optometry and optics, and shaped much of his work, notably the series No-Focus, Light on Water, Zen Twigs, and Motion-Sound. It is noteworthy that Meatyard had expertise in strabismus, a condition that can cause double vision, when considering his Motion-Sound series, which involves horizontal, vertical, or circular camera movements between exposures on the same negative. Meatyard began his Motion-Sound series in 1967, the same year he met Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, writer, poet, theologian, and activist. Merton, known for his advocacy of interfaith dialogue and Eastern philosophies, including Zen, became a close friend of Meatyard until Merton’s untimely death in December 1968. In 1967, Meatyard also met writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry and began collaborating on a project on the Red River Gorge, which resulted in the publication of The Unforeseen Wilderness in 1971. Another literary friend of Meatyard’s, Guy Davenport, refereed to the Red River Gorge as a “primeval forest” and which was also the place where Meatyard’s ashes were scattered after his death from cancer in 1972. The exhibition features a 15-print sequence from the Motion-Sound series titled Common Open Spaces and Footpath Preservation Society (1969). Meatyard was introduced to sequencing by Minor White and intuitively understood the importance of narrative in images. The title is nonsensical and thus encourages the viewer to use their imagination to interpret the meaning of the work. Though made during the time Meatyard was photographing in the Red River Gorge, it is unclear if these images were made there as well. They are dark and haunting and vibrate with energy even though the photographs were made late in the year when much of the foliage had died. In the forward of Ralph Eugene Meatyard: A Fourfold Vision (Nazraeli Press, 2005), photographer Emmet Gowin recalls meeting Meatyard in 1968 and being introduced to the Motion-Sound series: “…Gene instructed me that it would be more useful to think in terms of Vibration, or Visible Sound.” Gowin later reflected, “Everything in these photographs reminds us that all of nature depends on its proper pulse.” For the finest overview of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s artistic career, I highly recommend Barbara Tannenbaum’s Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary (Akron Art Museum/Rizzoli, 1991). Additionally, Cynthia Young’s interview with Guy Davenport in Ralph Eugene Meatyard (International Center of Photography/Steidl, 2004) has great first-hand accounts of Meatyard. Also, Emmet Gowin’s introduction in Ralph Eugene Meatyard: A Fourfold Vision (Nazraeli Press, 2005), provides a personal perspective by a great artist on the Motion-Sound series. For a wonderful dive into some of Meatyard’s other work, I highly recommend Episode 33 of The Expert Eye podcast, Twist Endings by Aimee Pflieger. I will forever remain grateful to James Rhem whose collegiality and his scholarly work on Meatyard (Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and Other Figurative Photographs, DAP 2002 and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Nathan, Collection Photo Poche, 2000) has contributed significantly to the understanding of one of my favorite artists. Image: Kenneth Josephson, Chicago, 1961

James Cohan is pleased to present Portrait, an exhibition of new work by Teresa Margolles, on view from October 10 through November 1, 2025, at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Margolles’ third solo exhibition with James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, October 10, from 6-8 PM. Portrait features a monumental installation comprising 735 photographs of individuals from the trans+ community in Mexico and the United Kingdom. Margolles cast the participants’ faces in plaster to create individual improntas, imprints or masks. Photographed at a 1:1 scale, the casts often bear traces of makeup, facial hair, or skin serving as poignant reminders of each subject’s physical presence. Through this act of preservation, Portrait honors the individuality of every participant, unveiling a deeply human archive, forever immortalized. Created with the participants of the artist’s Fourth Plinth commission Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant) in Trafalgar Square, London, Portrait uses a minimalist, grid-like format reminiscent of Margolles’ earlier works to create a serial rhythm that both unifies and differentiates the many faces. The structure echoes the language of architecture and order, yet within this, each face interrupts the possibility of repetition. This visual tension between sameness and specificity, anonymity and self, drives the emotional force of the installation. The grid does not flatten the identities it holds; instead it frames them in a space where they can be seen clearly, powerfully, side by side, not as statistics or symbols, but as people. In Margolles’ words, “Every face has a story attached.” Portrait serves as a tribute to Karla, a singer who was one of the artist’s dear friends. In December 2015, Karla was murdered in Juárez, Mexico, and her murder remains unsolved today. She was a fixture of the trans community. While casting the improntas, Margolles created a suite of Polaroid photographs that serve as both physical artifacts and visual testaments to the profound exchanges she had with the sitters. Each session unfolded as a space for testimony beginning with Margolles speaking of her friend Karla, to whom the project is dedicated, and opening a space for the participant’s own story to emerge. The Polaroids, intentionally manipulated by the artist to reveal glitches, multiplications and distortions, hold aura not only as singular physical objects but as vessels that capture the full presence, life, and spirit of each individual.

EUQINOM Gallery presents Blue Women, the first solo exhibition by Brea Souders with the gallery, offering a compelling exploration of identity, technology, and image. The exhibition brings together Blue Women and Another Online Pervert, two distinct yet intertwined bodies of work that probe how human subjects are shaped, mediated, and transformed by both artificial and natural forces. Another Online Pervert (2021–2023) emerges from years of dialogue between Souders and an early female AI chatbot, predating the mainstream adoption of AI companionship. These conversations are interwoven with entries from Souders’ personal diary spanning two decades and paired with photographs from her archive. The work navigates intimate questions of love, desire, mortality, perception, and the body, revealing how human and machine can construct a shared narrative. Its diaristic and image-driven perspective creates a space where technology and human experience intersect, reflecting on connection, identity, and the transformation of meaning through artificial interfaces. Blue Women (2024–2025) turns its focus to storefront beauty posters gradually sun-bleached to shades of blue. Rephotographed in public spaces across four continents, the series examines the eroded expressions of women and the faded motifs surrounding them. These images, altered by time, light, and weather, shed their commercial intent and assume a new ambiguity. Drawing on references from Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes to 19th-century spirit photography, Blue Women evokes visual haunting, exploring the afterlife of consumer imagery and the impermanence of beauty and desire. Both projects investigate the fragile interplay of memory, image, and mediation. Where Another Online Pervert engages the intimacy of human–machine dialogue, Blue Women examines the material and symbolic traces left by time on images once imbued with commercial fantasy. Together, they suspend viewers between past and future, artificial and organic, presence and absence. The exhibition captures the tensions of contemporary life, probing how technology, environment, and emotion shape perception and the endurance of meaning across time and interface. Image: BREA SOUDERS, Blue Woman #05, 2024 from the series Blue Women Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 16 in (50.80 x 40.64 cm), Edition of 3 +1AP @ Brea Souders

Foto Féminas: 10-Year Anniversary marks a significant milestone in the ongoing effort to amplify the voices of Latin American and Caribbean women and non-binary photographers. Founded by Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, Foto Féminas has spent the past decade building a bridge between regions, generations, and visual languages—creating a space where underrepresented artists can share their perspectives on identity, memory, and belonging. This anniversary exhibition stands as both a celebration and a reflection on ten years of creative exchange, resilience, and community. Bringing together multiple artists from the Foto Féminas network, the exhibition showcases a wide range of photographic styles and stories that span continents and cultures. From intimate portrayals of everyday life to bold documentary projects, the featured works embody the diversity of experience that defines Latin America and the Caribbean today. Accompanying the exhibition is a reading library of publications that further contextualize the artists’ practices and the evolving dialogue around gender and visual representation in contemporary photography. Since its founding in 2015, Foto Féminas has hosted monthly online features and organized exhibitions across the globe—in Argentina, China, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, and Mexico—demonstrating the platform’s far-reaching influence. Curated by Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, this special anniversary exhibition honors not only the artists themselves but also the collective effort to challenge visibility barriers within the art world. Supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Office of the Governor, the New York State Legislature, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Foto Féminas: 10-Year Anniversary serves as a testament to the power of photography as an agent of connection and change. It invites viewers to look beyond borders and discover how women and non-binary image-makers continue to reshape the visual narratives of the Americas. Image: In January 2017, at the Poli-Valencia detention facility in Venezuela, a transgender woman reveals her wounds and scars through the bars of her cell. © Ana María Arévalo Gosen

Greetings from Niagara at Leica Gallery reframes the familiar postcard image of Niagara Falls into a landscape of memory and consequence. Natalia Neuhaus combines documentary investigation and archival research to reveal how wartime industry transformed parts of Niagara Falls, NY, into sites contaminated by uranium refining during the Manhattan Project. Her photographs trace radioactive byproducts embedded in sidewalks, buildings, and homes—everyday surfaces that quietly record a history of secrecy and environmental neglect. A graduate of the Leica x VII Agency Mentorship Program, Neuhaus fuses journalistic rigor with visual sensitivity. Her images shift between intimate domestic scenes and evidence of industrial harm, showing children at play, neighborhood streets, and the misted grandeur of the falls alongside the less visible traces of contamination. The result is a body of work that resists easy binaries: beauty and danger coexist, memory and erasure overlap, and photography serves as both witness and accusation. Neuhaus insists that these are not distant footnotes of history but living conditions that demand attention and redress. Greetings from Niagara embodies Leica’s commitment to photography as civic inquiry. By bringing archival documents, scientific context, and carefully observed images into one project, Neuhaus asks viewers to reckon with the long shadows of technological progress. Her work calls for awareness and justice for residents whose lives have been shaped by industrial decisions beyond their control. In these photographs, a celebrated landscape becomes a layered record—beautiful, haunted, and impossible to ignore. Image: © Natalia Neuhaus

Leica Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to present Moonstruck, a compelling solo exhibition by Mona Kuhn, opening September 3 through November 2, 2025. The evening’s vernissage, held from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM, will introduce visitors to a new body of work commissioned in collaboration with Leica. Moonstruck evolves Mona Kuhn’s enduring exploration of the human form by merging it with abstraction, inspired directly by musical improvisation and atmospheric light conditions in Southern California and beyond Artist Mona Kuhn reflects, “Madly in love and partially insane, I fell for a glimmer, a gesture, a vanishing trace. I had been struck by the moon.” In Moonstruck, Kuhn continues her twenty-five-year practice of intimate photographic approaches to the nude, but takes a more abstract and painterly direction. Through refined techniques and collaborative improvisations, she dissolves distinctions between figure, landscape, and abstraction, crafting dream‑like compositions that evoke both the ethereal and the corporeal Born in São Paulo in 1969, Mona Kuhn has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2005. She has exhibited widely, including retrospective exhibitions titled Works (Los Angeles, New York, London, and Shanghai in 2021), Kings Road (Paris, 2023), and Between Modernism and Surrealism (New York, 2024) Kuhn’s work is known for its deeply expressive representation of the body and subtle interplay of light, form, and atmosphere. In Moonstruck, she harnesses the precision and sensitivity of the Leica SL3 to explore new horizons in abstraction and gesture

Featuring: Katina Zentz • Amy Toensing • Maansi Srivastava • Erin Schaff • Ana Elisa Sotelo van Oordt • Allison Robbert • Astrid Riecken • Amanda Andrade-Rhoades • Valerie Plesch • Rosa Pineda • Leah Millis • Jacquelyn Martin • Melina Mara • Anna Rose Layden • Olga Jaramillo • Evelyn Hockstein • Carol Guzy • Tierney Cross • Arwen Clemans • Bonnie Cash • Allison Bailey • Jocelyn Augustino • Céline Apollon Women Photojournalists of Washington (WPOW) is a volunteer-run non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about the role of women, and those who identify as women, in visual journalism and fostering their professional success. Each year, WPOW curates a traveling exhibition consisting of the work done by its members over the past year.. Image: © Carol Guzy

In the Apsáalooke (Crow) language, the word Áakiwilaxpaake (People of the Earth) describes Indigenous people living in North America, pointing to a time before colonial borders were established. In this exhibition, curated by the Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star, artists from throughout what is now called North America—representing various Native nations and affiliations—offer diverse visions, building on histories of image-making. Some of the artists presented in Native America: In Translation are propelled by what the historian Philip J. Deloria describes as “Indigenous indignation”—a demand to reckon with eviction from ancestral lands—while others translate varied inflections of gender and language, as well as the impacts of climate change, into inventive performance-based imagery or investigations into personal and public archives. “The ultimate form of decolonization is through how Native languages form a view of the world,” Red Star notes. “These artists provide sharp perceptions, rooted in their own cultures.” Wendy Red Star (born 1981, Billings, Montana) is a Portland, Oregon–based artist raised on the Apsáalooke reservation. Her work is informed both by her Native American cultural heritage and by her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives that are inquisitive, witty, and unsettling. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Red Star’s first major monograph, Delegation, is copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts. This exhibition is adapted from “Native America,” the Fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine, guest edited by Wendy Red Star. It is organized by Aperture and made possible, in part, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Image: Rebecca Belmore, "matriarch," 2018, from the series "nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations)." Photograph by Henri Robideau. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Rice Gallery presents HOME, a heartfelt group exhibition by John Dolan, Michele O’Hana, and Jack Dolan—an artistic family whose collaboration transforms personal history into a shared creative expression. The show, running this fall, invites visitors into an intimate world where fine art photography, design, ceramics, textiles, and metalwork intertwine to explore the essence of belonging and the meaning of home. Inspired by the family’s barn studio in Chatham, New York, HOME reimagines the gallery as a warm and tactile domestic space. Michele O’Hana’s design transforms the interior into a layered environment of hand-stained wooden walls, glowing porcelain lights, and woven textiles. John Dolan’s photographs rest quietly within this setting—capturing the serenity of landscapes and the intimacy of lived spaces—while Jack Dolan’s hand-forged knives stand as sculptural reminders of labor, craftsmanship, and lineage. Together, their works evoke both memory and materiality, creating a sensory experience that feels deeply grounded and profoundly human. The exhibition poses a timeless question: what makes a home? Is it built from the materials we touch, the memories we share, or the acts of creation that connect us? For this family, home is all of these—an evolving place shaped by collaboration, movement, and love. Through wool, wood, porcelain, and steel, each artist contributes a distinct voice to a collective narrative rooted in care and authenticity. John Dolan’s meditative photographs reflect decades spent observing life’s quiet moments, while Michele O’Hana’s handcrafted objects reveal her reverence for natural materials and enduring design. Jack Dolan, trained in blacksmithing in Ireland, forges steel into elegant forms that bridge the functional and the poetic. Together, their works form a living dialogue—a portrait of family, craft, and connection. In HOME, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the handmade becomes the heartbeat of art itself. Image: John Dolan, Dunlough, West Cork, Ireland, 1996 @ John Dolan

Luke Shannon’s Replacement Character explores the intersection of surveillance, identity, and technology through a strikingly physical yet digital installation: the plotter-scanner. This custom-built device merges a large-scale plotter with a traditional document scanner to form a life-sized scanner bed. Within this hybrid machine, Shannon reimagines how the act of recording and observing the self is transformed in the digital age, turning documentation into both performance and reflection. The plotter-scanner functions as an instrument of duality—both surveillance and witness. The scanner’s mechanical precision evokes detachment, yet the process it enables demands closeness, intimacy, and bodily presence. Each image produced holds the human form at life scale, fragmented and reassembled across lines and grids. Shannon likens this experience to the online self: dispersed across screens, profiles, and feeds, perpetually updated yet never whole. In engaging directly with his machine, the artist performs a kind of living self-portrait—one that is processual, time-based, and inherently unstable. The title Replacement Character refers to the symbol “?” the digital placeholder that appears when a system cannot recognize a character. This symbol becomes a metaphor for contemporary identity—a reminder of how our representations are constantly breaking, reloading, and reforming in a landscape dominated by data and visibility. Shannon’s installation reflects on the fragility of selfhood in an era where constant documentation leads not to permanence but to replacement. Through this merging of body, image, and code, Shannon prompts viewers to consider what it means to be perceived by machines. His work exposes the paradox of a world in which technologies see us everywhere, yet never fully understand us, offering a meditation on presence, absence, and the evolving shape of the human image in digital life. Image: Luke Shannon, Sunday, August 31, 2025 at 1:42 PM (Sleeping) Unique print (+1 AP) Archival pigment print, signed on verso + Ethereum token. 
58.5 × 34 in. · 148.6 × 86.4 cm © Luke Shannon

Pamela Hanson’s photography captures a world where fashion feels natural, personal, and full of life. Unlike the staged glamour often found in glossy magazines, her images reveal genuine emotion and friendship between photographer and model. Laughter, play, and spontaneity define her work, reflecting a time when beauty felt effortless. Beginning her career in Paris during the 1980s, Hanson lived among models and absorbed their world—their ambitions, daily routines, and creative energy. This closeness helped her develop a unique visual language, one that celebrated authenticity at a moment when fashion photography was dominated by carefully constructed ideals. Her exhibition and the release of her book The ’90s (Rizzoli) pay tribute to a decade that transformed the fashion industry. Many of the images featured have never been seen before, offering an intimate look into a time defined by freedom and self-expression. Hanson describes the collection as “a love letter to the decade that changed everything,” a reflection of an era when style was spirited, relaxed, and human—qualities that continue to resonate in today’s cultural landscape. Born in London and raised in Switzerland, Hanson’s cosmopolitan background shaped her vision early on. After attending the American School in Lugano and the University of Colorado, she began her professional journey assisting the celebrated photographer Arthur Elgort. Her rise was swift, with photographs of emerging supermodels such as Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Kate Moss appearing in leading magazines including VOGUE, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, and Vanity Fair. Beyond editorial work, she created campaigns for major brands like Dior, Ralph Lauren, and Estée Lauder, and directed public service films supporting causes such as juvenile diabetes research and drug prevention. Today, Pamela Hanson’s photographs stand as both cultural icons and personal narratives—testaments to an artist who captured fashion’s most human side. Image: Pamela Hanson, Nadja Auermann, Paris, 1994 © Pamela Hanson

Gallery Luisotti presents the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Arlene Mejorado, a body of work that intertwines memory, geography, and identity into a poetic reflection on belonging. The exhibition gathers eleven framed photographs, a sculptural installation of grass, and a luminous hanging made of printed film strips. Together, these works trace the artist’s evolving relationship with the landscapes and layered histories of Los Angeles—a city that is both origin and ongoing subject. The exhibition opens with a diptych that sets the tone for what follows. A fabric backdrop, positioned on a grassy median along a busy street, functions as both stage and screen. Against it, the city flickers between presence and illusion, while the artist’s shadow appears and fades like a memory suspended in motion. By situating this cinematic device within an everyday urban site, Mejorado bridges the artificial and the lived, the interior and the exterior, offering a meditation on visibility and place. Throughout the series, curtains, mirrors, and familial portraits recur as symbols of connection and distance. Mejorado rephotographs worn images from her father’s archive directly on the skin—her own and her partner’s—folding generations into a single frame. This act of re-inscription turns photography into an embodied ritual, merging private lineage with the broader topography of the city. The domestic and the public collide, blurring where home begins and where it dissolves. In her black-and-white silver prints, Mejorado deepens this spatial interplay through reflective glass and layered imagery. The mirrored surfaces collapse time and perspective, implicating both artist and viewer in the reconstruction of memory. Arlene Mejorado’s work is ultimately a form of cultural restoration—a delicate weaving of absence, inheritance, and renewal within the ever-changing landscape of Los Angeles. Image: Crista and Fenix at the Median in North Hills, 2023 Archival color pigment print 35 x 28 in. Edition of 5 + 2 AP © Arlene Mejorado

The photo-based work of Louviere+Vanessa draws on Southern Gothic traditions. They have developed a style innovatively using mixed media and photography. Their latest work, Dust of the Stars, delves into the delicate interplay between earthly life and the cosmos. Each piece is finished with a gilt varnish and homemade bioplastics, infusing the work with a subtle luminosity that is a reminder of the divine spark within all matter, connecting the mundane with the transcendent Our latest series “Dust of the Stars” explores the intrinsic connection between the celestial and the earthly. We have created a unique medium by combining bone and water to form handmade bio plastics, symbolizing the organic and the intangible. These images represent what the natural world is made of: bone, water, cartilage, the essence of life and a symbol of fluidity and change. Bone and water then come together again to fuse these images into a state of permanence, something the living world is not afforded. L+V 2025 This collection delves into the delicate interplay between human life and the Cosmos; with Carl Sagan’s poetic assertion that we are all make of “Star Stuff” as inspiration. These photographs came to be from a time of intense personal transformation, V’s ongoing struggles with major spinal surgeries and the continuous challenges and changes she faces. Vanessa and her father handmade the frames of all our past work and with his passing, we chose to leave the art unframed but still include him by adding a trace of his ashes into each piece… star stuff. Instead the pieces are floating off the wall with magnets, giving them room to change their form as if they were alive. - L+V 2025 Louviere + Vanessa (Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown) make their home and art in New Orleans. Their work combines the mediums and nuances of film, photography, painting and printmaking. They use Holgas, scanners, 8mm film, destroyed negatives, wax and blood. Since they began showing professionally in 2004, they have been in over 50 exhibits and film festivals in America and abroad. They are included in the collections of the Museum of Art | Houston, the Photomedia Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as the film archive for Globians International Film in Potsdam Germany, Microcinema in San Francisco, and the George Eastman House. In addition to producing their innovative still images, Louviere + Vanessa experiment in moving pictures. They have created the first movie, consisting of 1,900 frames, shot with a plastic Holga camera. Based on that film, they shot the animation sequence for Rosanne Cash’s short film, “Mariners & Musicians”, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. They were included in the Australian Photography Biennale. Image: Rime, 2025, 14 x 20”, homemade bio plastic and gold paint, unique variant edition of 3

Hauser & Wirth is honored to present its first New York City exhibition devoted to the work of Sir Don McCullin CBE, lauded internationally as one of the most significant photojournalists of our time. Coinciding with his 90th birthday, McCullin’s most comprehensive US presentation to date brings together over fifty works, as well as seldom seen archival materials and historical ephemera. ‘A Desecrated Serenity’ offers a deep look at both the beauty and brutality of McCullin’s expansive archive. From the gritty unfiltered images taken on the battlefield and in postwar Britain to painterly European vistas and meticulously crafted still lifes, the exhibition reveals the twin forces that course through and characterize McCullin’s oeuvre: an innate and profound compassion for humanity and exceptional mastery of composition and process. ‘A Desecrated Serenity’ chronicles McCullin’s remarkable seven-decade career, including his seventeen-year tenure as special contract photographer for The Sunday Times, when his assignments took him to the frontlines of war across Greece, Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland and Beirut. It was during this time that he captured searing images such as ‘A shell-shocked US Marine, Hué’ (1968). This widely circulated photograph shows an American soldier gripped by quiet distress during the brutal battle to retake Hue City—one of the Vietnam War’s fiercest conflicts—his intense expression capturing the war’s deep personal toll. ‘A Desecrated Serenity’ presents these harrowing images alongside personal objects that speak to the extraordinary risks McCullin faced in the field, most notably his Nikon F camera that absorbed a bullet during combat. McCullin’s deep, hard-won sense of empathy, shaped by his youth living through poverty and violence in East London, is evident in these images and objects. Examples of photographs taken during McCullin’s formative years, portraits such as ‘The Guvnors in their Sunday Suits, Finsbury Park, London’ (1958) and stark industrial landscapes––reflecting the grim realities of crime and unemployment in Northern England in the 1950s and 1960s––serve to demonstrate the photographer’s innate ability to capture sorrow and dignity in equal measure, finding poetry within bleakness, serenity within desecration. The exhibition also delves into the work McCullin made during his personal travels across India, Indonesia and the Sudan, where he often turned his lens to local communities, everyday rituals, celebrations and architecture. Intimate compositions such as ‘India, The Great Elephant Festival, The River Gandak’ (1965) transcend a straightforward documentary practice and engage the viewer through their emotional charge, a result of McCullin’s empathetic exchange with his subjects. In the late 1980’s, McCullin turned his lens toward more peaceful subjects—the landscapes of France, Scotland and England, in Somerset, where he had been evacuated to as a child during the Blitz and where he now makes his home. Rendered in richly tonal black and white, these painterly depictions of the English countryside—the place the artist himself has described as his greatest refuge—offer an exquisitely personal and poignant meditation on solitude, memory and the longing for stillness. They capture wild, windswept vistas that echo the emotional resonance of McCullin’s earlier reportage, revealing nature not merely as an idyllic escape but as a site of quiet reckoning. The same chromatic and emotional gravity carries over to a selection of still lifes inspired by the work of Flemish and Dutch Renaissance masters, as well as images of Roman statuary evolving from his ‘Southern Frontiers’ series, McCullin’s 25-year survey of the cultural and architectural remains of the Roman Empire. Imbued with both awe and unease, these images, like much of McCullin’s oeuvre, inhabit a space between beauty and brutality, evoking the psychological weight of history seen through the photographer’s unflinching eye and compassionate gaze. Image: Don McCullin, Catholic youths escaping from CS gas, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1971, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Samuel Fosso’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, which opens to the public on Wednesday, September 3, 2025, with a reception from 6-8 PM. This is Fosso’s first solo exhibition in New York in more than two decades, and spans more than thirty years of his practice, showcasing works from his series 70s Lifestyle and African Spirits. The exhibition follows the unveiling of an installation of the artist’s photographs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing earlier this year; the exhibition also precedes the artist’s inclusion in Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, a survey of African studio photography at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Oluremi Onabanjo and opening on December 14, 2025. Over his decades-long career, Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso (b. 1962; Kumba, Cameroon) has deployed self-portraiture to innovate on storied traditions of studio photography from West Africa and beyond. Since the debut of Fosso’s work on a global stage when he was awarded First Prize at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali in 1994, the artist has used his practice as a conduit for questions central to identity: How can self-representation reclaim African identity from colonial imagery? How is Fosso’s personal history reflected in collective history? And, critically, how does photography assist in resisting erasure? Collector and author Artur Walther writes in his foreword for AUTOPORTRAIT, a 2020 monograph of the artist’s work: “Since the days of his experimental self-portraits, made as a teenager in the 1970s in a commercial studio in Bangui, the Central African Republic, [Fosso] has constantly explored the mythmaking potential of the camera. In his self-portraits, he amplifies himself and yet becomes someone else entirely.” Across all his work, and beginning with his earliest series 70s Lifestyle (1975-78), Fosso intuitively pulls back the curtain, collapsing subject and subjectivity by depicting himself, the photographer. 70s Lifestyle was incepted in 1975 at Photo Studio Nationale, the photography venture the artist opened at just thirteen, three years after fleeing from Nigeria’s civil war to Bangui, the Central African Republic. After hours busy with customers taking headshots, portraits, and passport photos, Fosso would photograph himself with the last few frames in a roll of film to send to his grandmother in Nigeria. Over time, the practice took on the capricious qualities of a true artist’s process. In an interview with the late Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 56th Venice Biennale, Fosso shared: “Sometimes when I made photographs I was not satisfied with, where I didn’t feel beautiful inside, I would cut up the negatives instead of printing them… I did not know I was making art photography. What I did know is I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become.” Fosso’s early interest in photography was driven by his own exclusion from photographic record: as a child, Fosso, partially paralyzed, disabled, and displaced, was not pictured until he was ten years old. Eventually, this erasure would spell out the social value of representation to the artist, and self-portraiture would show a way to enter himself into an archive with agency. In the vintage black-and-white self-portraits of 70s Lifestyle, Fosso shows his keen understanding of the fashion of the time, of his body, and of the formal qualities of the photographs themselves. Every image varies despite their consistent elements: figure, outfit, backdrop, lights. The trappings of the studio are transfigured by Fosso into shapes influenced by imported magazines and popular African singers. The artist screens himself behind dividers, dresses up and down, holds props, and, most critically, looks directly into his camera’s lens. This produces a gestalt that reflects a pop sensibility and uses the commercial as a site of metamorphosis. 70s Lifestyle makes the processes inherent to studio photography self-aware and selfreferential, and brings Fosso and the viewer into a mutual contract of observation. Fosso would continue this reflexive notion of spectatorship would continue in the following decades, which over time would continue to expand in the scope of its inquiry. The artist’s landmark series African Spirits (2008) orients his practice of self-depiction towards a politically-minded act of channeling. Across fourteen stark monochrome images, Fosso casts himself as figures key to African and diasporic histories. By inhabiting visages like Angela Davis, Miles Davis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela, Tommie Smith, Malcolm X, and more, the artist connects a web of historical movements into a unified arc of Black liberation on a global scale. The series was initially conceived as an investigation into the global impact of slavery, and grew into an inspirational review of figures committed to human dignity and the reclamation of culture. Ultimately, it sought to correct a problem of institutional underrepresentation. Though concerned with history, each of these images is only a partial restaging of its source, a détournement from icon into iconography. Fosso strips away the backgrounds behind each subject, lending each composition a graphic quality. Streamlined and simplified, these figures become the symbolic forms they take in collective memory. Fosso’s oeuvre becomes an evaluation of the deep significance of photography in the modern era, from the historic to the contemporary; from the documentary to the constructed. A thread emerges in tracing the evolution from 70s Lifestyle through African Spirits: an emergence of the self-portrait as something more, an advancement of concern from the personal to the historical. In an almost atavistic process, Fosso harnesses this essential power of photography to show collective and historic truths. Works by Samuel Fosso are held in permanent collections around the globe, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; as well as the Musée des Beaux-Arts; Tate Modern; Victoria & Albert Museum; Musée National d’Art Moderne; Centre Pompidou; Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Deutsche Bank, among others. Fosso has mounted solo exhibitions at institutions including the Walther Collection; National Portrait Gallery; Princeton University Art Museum; Museum der Moderne; Museo de Canal, and Jack Shainman Gallery, among others. In 2023, the Menil Collection, presented a solo exhibition of Fosso’s entire African Spirits series. Fosso has exhibited work in prominent group exhibitions internationally, including at the International Center of Photography; Art Institute of Chicago; Fotomuseum; Barbican Art Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary Art; Stephen Friedman Gallery, and Gagosian Gallery. The artist has been awarded prizes such as the Prix Afrique en Creations in 1995; First Prize for photography at the Dak’Art Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, Dakar, Senegal in 2000, and Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2023. Fosso lives and works between Bangui, Central African Republic and Paris, France. Image: Samuel Fosso, Autoportrait, From the series 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–1978 © the artist and courtesy Yossi Milo, New York

Casemore Gallery presents Daido Moriyama: Dog and Man, a new exhibition of iconic and more recent images by legendary Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. This exhibition focuses the city of Tokyo as seen through the constantly sprinting Moriyama’s lens in his latest color and black-and-white works, in addition to some of his iconic images from the 60s and 70s. Known as a master of snapshots, Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s preeminent photographers, began his career in the 1960s, and achieved initial notoriety as one of the members of Provoke photomagazine. Their style, which came to be described as “are, bure, boke” (rough, blurry, out of focus), sent shockwaves through the photography world and created nothing less than a new lingua franca of photography, with its grainy, high-contrast, kinetically composed snapshots of a post-war Japan rapidly transforming itself. Moriyama described their work in simple terms—“Japan was moving fast, and we wanted to reflect that in our work.” Dog and Man presents a selection of Moriyama’s early Provoke-era pictures. They depict Tokyo’s bustling and gritty streets and alleys, women’s legs in fishnet tights photographed in closeups that approach abstraction, and people young and old, adapting in the aftermath of a war that irrecoverably opened and changed their society in ways shocking and thrilling. Centering the show is a mural-size gelatin silver print of what is perhaps Moriyama’s most famous and enigmatic image, “Stray Dog,” In the decades following his early notoriety, Moriyama has never stopped working, never stopped exploring and pushing boundaries of what the camera can show and say, and never stopped documenting his restless journey in envelope-pushing photobooks. The more recent images are represented in the show in black-and-white gelatin silver prints and rarely seen color pigment prints. They reflect Tokyo as an ever-alluring subject for Moriyama, a city where history and modernity both collide and coexist in ceaseless transformation. Taken together, the fullness of these works show a revolutionary photographer who became a master photographer, still stirred by a city that fuels his revolutionary spirit as he continues his effort to reach, in his words, “the end of photography.”

Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present Paul Outerbridge: Photographs, a landmark exhibition celebrating the visionary work of Paul Outerbridge (1896–1958), one of the most resourceful and provocative photographers of the twentieth century. This exhibition brings together a rare selection of Carbro prints, Silver Gelatin Photographs, and Platinum Prints, tracing the evolution of a modernist whose daring vision helped redefine the possibilities of photography through Cubist experimentation and radical abstraction. Outerbridge emerged in the 1920s as a bold innovator, transforming ordinary objects, such as milk bottles, collars, eggs, into fractured Cubist constructions of light and form. His platinum and silver gelatin prints reduced subjects to intersecting planes and geometric rhythms, revealing a structural beauty aligned with the avant-garde movements of his time. These works positioned him among artists and contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Edward Steichen, and demonstrate his embrace of Cubism’s challenge: to fracture reality and reassemble it as pure abstraction. In the 1930s, Outerbridge turned to the technically demanding Carbro process, creating some of the most vibrant and enduring color photographs of the era. Here too, abstraction was his guiding principle. Color became a tool not just for description, but for reimagining form, flattening, faceting, and animating planes into startling compositions that rival the abstract canvases of Picasso and Kandinsky. His photographs were hailed as both artistic and technical sensations. As Outerbridge observed: “One very important difference between monochromatic and color photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state.” Outerbridge’s practice blurred the boundaries between fine art and commercial photography. His Ide Collar (1922), published in Vanity Fair, was more than an advertisement. It was celebrated as both functional and formally radical. A chessboard of fractured black-and-white squares disrupted by the crisp curve of a collar. Duchamp himself hung the photograph in his Paris studio, recognizing its affinity with the readymade and its radical modernist edge. Throughout his career, Outerbridge pursued abstraction as both a visual language and an artistic philosophy. His still lifes, nudes, and commercial commissions all demonstrate his preoccupation with fractured planes, geometric tension, and the transformation of the commonplace into the extraordinary. Paul Outerbridge’s work appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful, and McCall’s, and in exhibitions worldwide. After relocating to Southern California in 1943, he continued to write about and practice photography until his death in 1958. Today, his technical virtuosity, daring subject matter, and relentless pursuit of beauty secure his place as a pioneer who expanded the medium’s expressive range. Image: Girl with Fan, c. 1936 Vintage Color Carbo Photograph 17 x 13 inches © Paul Outerbridge

Photographer and artist Matthew Rolston, in partnership with Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, ArtCenter College of Design, Daido Moriyama Museum / Daido Star Space, and Leica Gallery, Los Angeles, present a multi-venue Los Angeles exhibition of his latest series Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, alongside the release of a special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press. In production for well over a decade, Vanitas represents a cumulative effort by Rolston to aesthetically capture the fraught human relationship to death through the medium of photography, a profound narrative, as seen through the decaying faces of mummified individuals in Palermo, Sicily’s Catacombe dei Cappuccini. These vivid, painterly compositions bring forth an interwoven meditation on beauty, mortality and art through Rolston’s uniquely photographic lens. The monumentally scaled, richly hued Vanitas prints will be framed in patinated gold leaf, in a manner suggestive of and in tribute to the works of Francis Bacon, and, in a significant departure from typical edition practice, they will be offered as unique objects, more in the tradition of painting than photography. Four individual works will be on view in a solo exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will display the most extensive presentation of the Vanitas series, including the monograph’s cover photograph. At ArtCenter College of Design, Rolston will further present a triptych of the Vanitas work as a wall-sized installation at the College’s South Campus, curated by Julie Joyce, Director, ArtCenter Galleries and Vice President, Exhibitions. This presentation will be the only triptych on exhibition; the central panel appears on the clamshell cover of the forthcoming Vanitas monograph, a signature of the series. These three works, hung in ArtCenter’s Mullin Transportation Design Center, comprise two images of mummified children flanking one of an elderly adult, brought together in the style of an altarpiece, where the sacred and mundane, youth and elder age, collide. A single work will be shown at a solo exhibition that will open with a book launch and artist signing at Daido Star Space in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 2025. Organized in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation in Tokyo, the presentation echoes the institution’s interest in cross-cultural approaches to photography. Leica Gallery, Los Angeles, will present another solo exhibition of an additional single work from Vanitas, accompanied by a public artist talk and book signing. At a venue rooted in the technical and material traditions of photography, this presentation will highlight the painterly, craft-driven aspects of Rolston’s Vanitas project. Together, these four distinct presentations introduce Vanitas as a ‘mostra diffusa’, an exhibition intentionally distributed among multiple venues. This multi-venue presentation across Los Angeles reflects a conscious departure from the contemporary conventions of exhibition production, recalling art historical traditions in which singular works were presented in isolation. All works, regardless of exhibition venue, will be available exclusively through Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will also offer an artist-signed edition of the exhibition’s accompanying monograph. For more information about Matthew Rolston and Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, please visit: www.vanitasproject.com. Image: Untitled (Scream), Palermo, 2013 (From the series Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits) Archival Pigment Print, Ed. of 1 Signed, titled, dated, numbered on label verso 46 1/4 x 61 3/4 inches If framed: 50 3/4 inches x 66 1/4 inches x 3 inches On exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery as of September 25, 2025 © Matthew Rolston

Zig Jackson: The Journey of Rising Buffalo brings together the performative and documentary approaches of photographer Zig Jackson, whose work sheds light on the everyday realities of Native American life. With a focus on community, sovereignty, and environmental respect, Jackson challenges misconceptions and reclaims Indigenous narratives through his lens. A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, Jackson grew up on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota and attended several boarding schools, including the Intermountain Indian School in Utah. There, he forged lasting connections with peers from various tribes, realizing the shared struggles Indigenous communities face across the country. Jackson’s photography often engages with stereotypes to critique them. In some works, he dons a feathered headdress, performing exaggerated “Indian” tropes to expose their absurdity. In another series, he disrupts Western notions of land ownership by placing signs reading *“Entering Zig’s Reservation”* in public spaces, reclaiming landscapes that have long been sites of Indigenous displacement. His practice is deeply personal, serving as a visual archive of travels across North America, visits with friends, and everyday life on reservations. Through quiet yet powerful images, he explores complex social realities, including family structures, homelessness, veterans’ experiences, substance abuse, and access to natural resources. Blending humor with profound social critique, Jackson’s work offers an authentic and dynamic portrayal of contemporary Indigenous life. His photographs challenge marginalization while celebrating resilience, documenting both the hardships and the joys of Native communities with honesty and depth. Image: Zig Jackson (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, b. 1957), Indian Man on Bus, 1994, from Indian Man in San Francisco. Inkjet print. Loan courtesy the artist, © 2025 Zig Jackson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In January 1944, at the height of World War II, Gordon Parks photographed Herklas Brown, owner of the general store and Esso gas station in Somerville, Maine. Parks traveled to the state under the auspices of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) to record its contributions to the war effort and to document the home front. His photographs chronicled oil and gas facilities and those who operated them, Esso gas station owners in small towns, and people whose work depended on fuel and other Standard Oil products. Consistent with his work before and after, Parks made it his mission to get to know his subjects and show their humanity. He photographed Brown at his Esso station, in his store, and with his family at the dinner table. Parks spent a month in Maine that winter and then returned in August to resume his work in the state. At a time when transportation, food, and lodging were a challenge, and notably as a Black man traveling alone, Parks nonetheless created a compelling documentary record of rural America that offers insight into this historic moment. These 65 photographs, which are being exhibited at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation, highlight an important early chapter in Parks’ career—before he joined Life magazine in 1948 and began to achieve wider recognition. Gordon Parks: Herklas Brown and Maine, 1944 is presented in conjunction with East-Northeast: Charting Moments in Maine, four exhibitions in summer of 2025 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art featuring artists who drew inspiration from Maine. This exhibition is curated by Frank Goodyear, co-director, and is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title published by Steidl. Generous funding support for this exhibition provided by Peter J. Grua ’76 and Mary G. O'Connell ’76, Robert A. Freson, Steven P. Marrow ’83, P ’21 and Dianne Allison Pappas P’21, the Roy A. Hunt Foundation, and the Elizabeth B.G. Hamlin Fund. Image: Gordon Parks. Untitled, Augusta, Maine. 1944

In 1966, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art presented an exhibition of photographs by John McKee, then a Romance Languages instructor at the College with an interest in photography. Titled As Maine Goes, the exhibition featured a series of black-and-white photographs that starkly depicted the environmental degradation of Maine’s coastal landscapes, highlighting issues such as pollution, seaside dumps, and the impact of unchecked development. What began as a sidelight became the defining part of McKee’s career—and these works served as a catalyst for environmental awareness and legislative action in Maine, contributing to the burgeoning environmental movement of the time. The exhibition was accompanied by a limited-edition catalog, with an introduction by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Almost 60 years later, the Museum is refreshing McKee’s original exhibition in a new presentation that is no less relevant in the face of the changing climate and its impact on Maine. McKee, who died in 2023, bequeathed 54 photographs from the As Maine Goes series to the Museum, as well as 31 additional images from other later series. This exhibition is a rare opportunity to look backwards and forwards at the same time. John McKee: As Maine Goes is presented in conjunction with East-Northeast: Charting Moments in Maine, four exhibitions in summer of 2025 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art featuring artists who drew inspiration from Maine. This exhibition is curated by Chris Zhang ’25 and Frank Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Major support has been provided by the Estate of John H. McKee and the Stevens L. Frost Endowment Fund for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Image: John McKee. Tourist Accommodations, Old Orchard Beach. 1965

Medium Photo presents the inaugural group exhibition of the Medium Photo Collective, a gathering of contemporary artists who use photography to examine the threads of identity, place, and human connection. This exhibition brings together a range of lens-based practices that explore how images can reveal and question our sense of belonging in an ever-changing world. Each artist engages with photography as both a personal and social language—one capable of reflecting the intimate and the universal at once. Photography, by its very nature, holds contradictions. It captures both presence and absence, reality and imagination, self and society. The works on view delve into these tensions, revealing how the medium can become a space of transformation and discovery. Through portraits, landscapes, and experimental imagery, the artists explore subjects such as aging, gender, environment, and resilience. Their photographs echo shared experiences while also expressing deeply individual perspectives, offering a layered view of what it means to live, remember, and connect in the present moment. Rather than serving as a simple mirror of reality, the exhibition positions photography as an act of relation—a dialogue between artist and subject, viewer and image, community and world. The Medium Photo Collective embodies this spirit of exchange, creating a platform where personal stories and collective identities intertwine. Rooted in the creative energy of San Diego yet resonating far beyond its borders, the exhibition celebrates photography’s power to question, to listen, and to unite. In these works, we find not fixed answers but an ongoing conversation about how we see ourselves and one another through the lens of time and experience. Opening Reception: Friday, November 7 | 5:30–8:30 PM Location: 5343 Banks St, San Diego, CA 92110 Image: Riley Arthur | Forgotten Sweethearts © Riley Arthur

On Everest is a poignant photographic series by Sasha Bezzubov, created between 2016 and 2024 during multiple treks through Nepal’s Everest region. The project focuses on the unseen labor force behind Himalayan tourism—the porters who carry the immense weight of the trekking industry, both literally and metaphorically. Through portraits and landscapes, Bezzubov honors these men and women who traverse steep, perilous terrain under extraordinary conditions, their resilience etched into every frame. Far from romanticized depictions of mountaineering heroism, Bezzubov’s work turns its lens toward the realities of those sustaining it. The porters’ loads, often exceeding 130 pounds, consist of everything from beer crates to construction materials. They are paid by weight and must cover their own meals and lodging, sharing beds and skipping food to save money. These photographs reveal a system of endurance and inequity—where physical strength meets social invisibility, and survival depends on shouldering impossible burdens. The landscapes are as commanding as the subjects. Sweeping Himalayan vistas appear as both majestic and menacing, capturing the sublime beauty of nature and the fragility of human presence within it. In Bridge, a lone porter crosses a suspended rope bridge, dwarfed by the vastness around him—a metaphor for human perseverance amid overwhelming forces. In Porters with Mattresses, two figures stand atop rocky slopes beneath stacks of vivid mattresses, their colorful cargo contrasting the muted tones of the land. These juxtapositions evoke both dignity and absurdity, underscoring the tension between labor and landscape. Bezzubov’s sensitivity and respect for his subjects are palpable. His images do not pity; they bear witness. Through On Everest, he extends his ongoing inquiry into the intersections of tourism, labor, and global inequality, inviting viewers to confront what is too often unseen. The result is a moving meditation on endurance, humility, and the human cost of beauty. Image: Sasha Bezzubov, Porters with mattresses, 2018 (25”x30” $3000 unframed, $3400 framed, also available as 20”x24” and 30”x40”) © Sasha Bezzubov

BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York presents Where would we find you if we need to find you?, a solo exhibition by Mongolian photographer and 2025 BAXTER ST Resident, Suniko Bazargarid. On view from September 10 to November 12, 2025, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on migration, belonging, and the fragile structures that define how we move through the world. Bazargarid brings together personal photographs, archival material, and bureaucratic documents to trace the intersections between movement, memory, and identity, creating an intricate visual map of displacement and return. Having spent her formative years between Boston, Singapore, Bangkok, and Mongolia, Bazargarid’s work reflects an ongoing dialogue between intimacy and distance. Her photographs juxtapose the vast, open horizons of the Mongolian steppe with the coded textures of global transit—passports, identification photos, and border stamps. In this delicate layering of analog and digital imagery, the artist reveals the tension between emotional belonging and administrative categorization. Each image becomes both a record and a question, probing how individuals navigate systems of visibility and control while carrying their sense of home across shifting geographies. The exhibition’s title originates from a border officer’s inquiry: Where would we find you if we need to find you?—a question that echoes throughout Bazargarid’s practice as both a bureaucratic demand and a philosophical prompt. Through her lens, the viewer encounters the blurred lines between personal identity and state documentation, between the internal landscape of memory and the physical terrain of migration. Expansive Mongolian vistas serve as moments of calm reflection amid the fragmented realities of travel. Bazargarid’s images invite viewers to consider what remains constant amid movement—the traces of belonging that persist even when one is perpetually in transit. Image: © Suniko Bazargarid

The Hulett Collection presents Cowboys & Queens, a striking new exhibition by British photographer Jane Hilton, on view from September 19 to November 15, 2025. This vibrant series explores the collision and coexistence of two quintessentially American archetypes—the cowboy and the drag queen—each embodying freedom, individuality, and self-expression in their own dazzling way. Through Hilton’s lens, Cowboys & Queens becomes a portrait of a reimagined American Dream: one that embraces both tradition and transformation. The open skies and rugged landscapes of the West blend seamlessly with the glittering lights of nightclubs and cabarets, revealing unexpected parallels between the stoic cowboy’s endurance and the drag queen’s flamboyant artistry. Both figures challenge conventions, standing proudly as symbols of authenticity and liberation. Hilton’s inspiration spans from the cinematic visions of Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino to cultural icons like RuPaul, creating an aesthetic that is both timeless and daringly contemporary. Her photographs—at once raw, tender, and cinematic—capture the spirit of a “new Americana,” where diversity and defiance coexist in harmony. Renowned for her deep engagement with American culture, Jane Hilton has spent more than twenty-five years documenting the complexities of the American West. Her work reveals the extraordinary within ordinary lives, portraying individuals with honesty and empathy. Previous solo exhibitions include LA Gun Club at Eleven Gallery, London (2016); American Cowboy at Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York (2015); and Jane Hilton’s America at Schilt Gallery, Amsterdam (2014). Hilton’s work has been featured in major international publications, including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Telegraph Magazine, and the Financial Times Magazine. In 2014, she was honored with an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society and named one of the Hundred Heroines celebrating women’s impact on global photography. Hilton lives and works in London. Image: Pate Meinzer, Cowboy, Benjamin, Texas, 2009 Archival Digital C-Type 23 x 28" © Jane Hilton

The Grove Foundation for the Arts is proud to announce The Dialectical Third, its inaugural exhibition and lending program bringing together intimate and subversive Polaroids made by Andy Warhol in the 1970s and 1980s and collected and generously donated by Dr. Jeffrey S. Grove, founder of The Grove Foundation for the Arts. Owing to the persistence of both social and sexual taboos along with the explicitness of the images themselves and their celebration of marginalized identities and gender performance, the vast majority of these works have remained largely unknown to the broader public. In showcasing this collection now, The Dialectical Third represents The Grove Foundation for the Arts’ core mission of advocating for silenced communities and freedom of expression, while also providing a vital forum for engaging with Warhol’s challenging yet prescient work. “The Dialectical Third invites visitors into a liminal territory—not as passive observers, but as active participants in the alchemical process of meaning-making,” said Dina Giordano, Curator and Executive Director of The Grove Foundation for the Arts. “This exhibition takes as its philosophical foundation the notion that truth doesn’t reside in singular, fixed positions, but rather materializes in the dynamic tension between seemingly oppositional forces. Andy Warhol’s Polaroid series—which confront duality, representation, identity and embodiment—serve as a guide through this conceptual landscape.” Critically reconsidering the importance of Polaroid photography within Warhol’s art, The Dialectical Third consists of 148 Polaroids from key series such as Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), Sex Parts (1976), Torso (1977), and Querelle (1982), in addition to other key self-portraits and Polaroids as well. Accompanying these works will be two Sex Parts screen prints, a Querelle screen print, and two drawings, one from the Torso series. By bringing these works together, the exhibition demonstrates the varied importance that each medium maintained within Warhol’s art, from his early days of creating illustrations for fashion advertisements to the later function that photographs played in informing larger works such as the screen prints. In Ladies and Gentlemen, Warhol both confronts and celebrates the constructed nature of identity, performance, and the blurred lines between authenticity and artifice in a series of unguarded and candid portraits of transgender individuals and drag performers. Sex Parts evolved out of what would become the Torso series, where Victor Hugo Rojas—a former hustler—periodically brought men to Warhol’s Factory to have their torsos tenderly yet provocatively photographed, with each person remaining anonymous despite their body being vividly described. These visits gradually resulted in Rojas and the men engaging in sexual acts that Warhol then photographed. The Polaroids in Querelle—the result of a commission to create a poster for the film of the same name by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982, his film adapted from Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest—show Warhol transforming his photographs of sexual encounters through aesthetic experimentation, complicating the photographic binary between document and fiction. Though Polaroids have typically been understood as a reference point or source material for Warhol’s future works, these images also function as forms of aesthetic expression in their own right—ones that document intimate moments and explicit acts in equal measure. Rather than reinforce long-established theories and historical interpretations, The Dialectical Third aims to establish a new space for encountering Warhol’s work, one that embraces ambiguity and the possibility of contemporary meaning. The relationship between visibility and concealment structures the exhibition just as much as the collection itself, which is housed in a custom-crafted Louis Vuitton Malle steamer trunk designed to store and exhibit the Polaroids. The ability of the trunk to both hide the images within a luxury object and display them as aesthetic objects set against a visibly commercial background underscores the recurring tension in Warhol’s work between art and commerce, between high art and popular culture. The Dialectical Third will recreate the original function of the trunk while simultaneously breaking from its method of display. By isolating specific Polaroids on the wall and encouraging close viewing and patient reflection, the exhibition emphasizes the formal qualities of the Polaroids and their unapologetic documentation of queer intimacy, sexual performance, and gender experimentation. To further underscore the historical significance of this collection, along with the educational mission of The Grove Foundation, a new documentary film directed by Diane Crespo will screen within the exhibition space. The film features interviews with Dr. Grove and Dina Giordano that delve into the personal resonance of this work, an interview with leading Polaroid conservator J. Luca Ackerman, and interviews with Vincent Fremont, former studio manager for Andy Warhol and co-founder of the Andy Warhol Foundation, as well as with Jessica Beck, former Chief Curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, and a leading scholar on Warhol’s work. When viewed in tandem with the Polaroids, these differently connected perspectives reaffirm the sense of discovery and invention that resides in Warhol’s art. Image: Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait in Fright Wig, 1986 © Andy Warhol

Archive 192, founded in 2015 by photographers Louie Palu and Chloe Coleman, is a not-for-profit research archive dedicated to abstractionist photography by women. Conceived as both a creative and educational endeavor, the archive seeks to collect, preserve, and share works that redefine the boundaries of photographic abstraction. Its mission extends beyond preservation—aiming to eventually place its holdings within a host institution capable of caring for and expanding public access to this important body of work. The collection includes original prints, publications, artist books, audio recordings, and political ephemera that document women’s contributions to photography across generations. Since its inception, Archive 192 has operated as an independent, unconventional counterpoint to traditional museums and academic institutions. The archive’s name, a reversal of Alfred Stieglitz’s historic Gallery 291, symbolizes a conscious reimagining of photographic history—one that challenges established hierarchies and reconsiders who is represented in the canon. The founders’ philosophy emphasizes continual re-evaluation of art practices and the systems that shape them, calling for a more inclusive understanding of photography’s evolution. At its core, Archive 192 addresses the long-standing underrepresentation of women in the field of photography. By assembling a focused collection of both historical and contemporary works, the archive invites scholars, artists, and the public to reexamine how gender and creativity intersect in visual culture. With over 300 works and counting, the collection includes pioneering artists such as Florence Henri, Dorothy Norman, and members of the Guerrilla Girls, alongside contemporary figures like Claire A. Warden. Through rare prints, artist books, and cultural artifacts, Archive 192 offers a century-spanning journey into the world of experimental abstraction by women photographers—revealing the visionary artistry, social engagement, and cultural shifts that have defined this often-overlooked movement. Image: From series Habitus, 46-02-7, Sodium Chloride, © Claudia Fährenkemper

Ed Kashi has spent nearly five decades documenting the pulse of the modern world—its struggles, hopes, and transformations. A pioneering photojournalist and filmmaker, Kashi’s career embodies a deep commitment to storytelling as an act of empathy and responsibility. His latest book, A Period in Time: Looking Back while Moving Forward: 1977–2022, gathers over two hundred photographs that trace his lifelong pursuit to witness history as it unfolds. More than a visual record, the book offers a reflection on how photography can both reveal and preserve the fragile connections between people and place. From his earliest assignments in the late 1970s to his long-term projects in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, Kashi’s work captures not just events, but the human emotions that define them. His images of the Kurdish struggle, his exploration of identity in the Middle East—rooted in his own Iraqi heritage—and his portraits of aging in America all demonstrate a profound sensitivity to the resilience of the human spirit. Each photograph is an act of witnessing, a meditation on endurance and dignity amid upheaval. The book also unveils Kashi’s inner world. Through excerpts from personal “dispatches” sent to his wife, Julie Winokur, readers gain access to the solitude, ethical weight, and emotional cost of a life spent on the frontlines of global storytelling. These intimate moments remind us that behind every image lies the experience of the photographer—his doubts, discoveries, and devotion to truth. Published by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, A Period in Time stands as both archive and testament. It invites readers to see photography not simply as documentation, but as a living dialogue between past and present—a tool for understanding humanity and, ultimately, ourselves. Image: Ed Kashi Youth gather around a makeshift bonfire in The Fountain, a Loyalist housing estate in a Protestant enclave of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1989 © Ed Kashi

From 1949 to 1978, photography in the People’s Republic of China was reserved for governmental propaganda: Its function was to present an idealized image of life under Chairman Mao and communist rule. In 1978, as China opened to global trade and Western societies, photography as documentation, art, and personal expression experienced a sudden awakening. Personal photographic societies formed, art schools began teaching photography, and information on Western contemporary art became available. In the late 1990s, a new generation of Chinese artists, many initially trained as painters, revolted against traditional academic definitions of photography. Building on the work done in the previous decades by Western artists, they dissolved the boundaries between photography, performance art, conceptual art, and installation. In so doing, they brought photography into the foreground in Chinese contemporary art. This exhibition presents works from the museum’s collection by eight key artists from that generation. Born between 1962 and 1969, these artists grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when conformity was required and past intellectual and artistic products—whether artistic, family history, or documentary—were banned and destroyed. They also experienced the cultural vacuum that followed this erasure. As adults, these artists lived in a radically different China—newly prosperous, individualistic, and consumerist. They helped develop a new visual idiom, producing artworks that addressed their country’s recent history, its swift societal transformation, and their own resultant shift in identity as Chinese. Image: 1/2 Series, 1998. Zhang Huan (Chinese, b. 1965)

Edition ONE Gallery will host renowned photographer David Michael Kennedy for a special exhibition on Friday, October 17th, 5 - 7 PM. The show coincides with the release of Bruce Springsteen's highly anticipated Nebraska '82: Expanded Edition, a five-disc box set featuring the legendary Electric Nebraska sessions, and the theatrical release of his biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. David’s photograph for Springsteen's Nebraska album cover is among the most recognizable images in rock history. The image was originally captured in winter 1975, depicting a desolate road seen through a car windshield during a snowstorm.br> "The cover shot was taken from the window of an old pickup truck in the dead of winter," Kennedy recalls. The photo encapsulates the stark, reflective mood of Springsteen's acoustic album, becoming a lasting symbol of American loneliness and resilience.br> The exhibition will feature prints from Kennedy's photoshoot with Springsteen, which also appear on the album covers in the box set. Visitors will have a rare chance to see and acquire the images that define the visual identity of one of America's most influential albums.br> Kennedy is also renowned for his mastery of platinum/palladium printing, creating work that extends beyond music photography to evocative Southwest landscapes and portraiture, including striking images of Native American ceremonial dance. His early work documents a wide range of iconic musicians, among them Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Muddy Waters, Yo-Yo Ma, and Debbie Harry.

The Hunter College Art Galleries will present Last Art School, an exhibition and programming series curated by Lindsey White, Arthur & Carol Kaufman Goldberg Visiting Curator and Artist in Residence. Last Art School offers a platform for investigating and documenting the current crisis moment within higher arts education. As educators, researchers, and students across the United States have been silenced, reprimanded, fired, and even deported, this project emphasizes the power of personal networks and structures of connectivity, calling upon socio-cultural histories of activism and mutual aid in a search for community empowerment and fellowship. In Hunter College’s 205 Hudson Gallery, White creates a theatrical environment for the presentation of her own artworks, alongside those of her peers, which implicate art schools and their internal dynamics as a formidable and complex subject. Participating artists and collections: Mario Ayala, Alex Bradley Cohen, Dewey Crumpler, Henry Fey, Whitney Hubbs, Alicia McCarthy, Sandra Ono, Ralph Pugay, Jon Rubin, Maryam Yousif, Rhoda Kellogg Children’s Art Collection, and the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation and Archive. In addition to artworks by White’s friends and colleagues, Last Art School features a collection of finger paintings from the Rhoda Kellogg Children’s Art Collection and materials from the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation and Archive (SFAI LF+A). The lower gallery of 205 Hudson will host a community gathering space modeled after a cozy local restaurant. An integral part of White’s residency will be dynamic collaborations with student fellows and the development of free public programming, including lectures, screenings, conversations, performances, and other unusual and unexpected events. This space is also available for the MFA and MA community for class meetings, events, and hangouts. White will serve lunch one day a week for Hunter students, faculty, and staff throughout the run of the exhibition. Last Art School also contains a recording studio and interview archive. In response to the active erasure of records and archives by the United States government, White will conduct interviews with arts educators in and around the New York City area to document the complex and critical moment facing higher education. Gallery visitors will have the chance to hear these interviews in the space.

The term mono no aware (the pathos of things) expresses the Japanese concept of appreciating the transient beauty of life and objects. The project focuses on three subjects: 14th-century Japanese Noh masks; the stones and trees that surround the remains of ancient shrines; and the wildflowers and grasses that bloom briefly near Izu’s home. Izu invites viewers to encounter the depth of his subjects through lustrous images that explore impermanence and refined aesthetic through three ideas: yugen (mystical and profound), sabi (beauty with aging), and wabi (austere beauty). The gelatin silver and platinum palladium prints on view are uniquely matted using antique silverleaf recovered from historic folding screens and trimmed with fabrics taken from vintage kimonos, making every work a one-of-a-kind fusion of photographic artistry and Japanese heritage.

n Japanese, utsuroi refers to the gradual and inevitable transformation from one state to another. It suggests that nothing is reliable and everything is ephemeral. Produced between spring and autumn of 2020, “Utsuroi” is a series reflecting the internal and external states experienced during the height of the pandemic, when I lived in isolation at my home in upstate New York. With minimal outside interaction, my loneliness forced me to introspect and face my inner self. Weighed down by the heaviness of the deaths and sorrows around the world, yet unable to do anything or go anywhere, I was engulfed by feelings of helplessness and blockage. I found some reprieve in solitary walks down to the lake, during which I became keenly aware of the cyclical nature of the water lilies that appear year after year.

DC Moore Gallery presents Duane Michals: The Nature of Desire, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s poetic and psychological exploration of desire, particularly his fascination with the male form. Through his distinctive combination of photography and handwritten text, Michals creates a dialogue between image and language that examines the emotional and spiritual dimensions of longing. The exhibition includes works inspired by the writings of Walt Whitman and Constantine Cavafy, both of whom profoundly influenced Michals’s reflections on beauty, intimacy, and the human connection. Michals’s photographs often unfold in sequences, each frame a fragment of thought, gesture, or revelation. By inscribing his images with personal reflections, he transforms photography into a form of visual poetry—a meditation on what it means to yearn, to imagine, and to love. He once wrote, “In photography I tried to reveal to myself the exact point of desire.” This pursuit moves beyond physical attraction toward the metaphysical, uncovering how desire binds us to one another through memory, imagination, and the longing for transcendence. In works such as The Nature of Desire (1986), Michals approaches eros as both revelation and mystery, echoing the lyrical humanism of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the tender melancholy of Cavafy’s verse. His scenes—men bathing, touching, or lost in contemplation—suggest moments suspended between dream and reality. The everyday gestures he captures become symbols of grace, vulnerability, and fleeting beauty. These images, infused with nostalgia and introspection, remind us that desire is not merely a force of attraction but a profound expression of being alive. In preserving such ephemeral moments, Michals offers an invitation to share in his vision: that to desire is to recognize both our isolation and our deepest longing for communion. Image: A Man Dreaming In The City, 1969 Gelatin silver print 4 3/4 X 7 inches (image); 8 x 10 inches (paper) Edition 16/25 © Duane Michals

Galerie XII Los Angeles presents Moving Still, an intimate journey into the lives of filmmakers as seen through the lens of photographer Lauri Gaffin. Blending evocative imagery with personal narrative, Gaffin offers a rare, behind-the-scenes exploration of cinema’s creative heartbeat. With more than four decades of experience, her work captures both the spectacle and the quiet humanity that unfold beyond the camera’s gaze. From independent treasures like Fargo and Land of the Lost to blockbuster productions such as Iron Man, Gaffin’s photographs chronicle the diversity and unpredictability of the film world. Her camera has followed crews through the icy expanse of Edmonton and across the sun-scorched deserts of the Mojave, revealing a visual rhythm shaped by persistence, humor, and curiosity. Each frame testifies to her unrelenting search for beauty in the controlled chaos of filmmaking. Through candid images and reflective writing, Gaffin illuminates the collaborative essence of cinema. Her portraits of directors, actors, and technicians uncover the shared trust and improvisation that sustain production life. In revisiting Fargo, she captures the brilliant precision of cinematographer Roger Deakins and the mischievous energy of the Coen brothers—moments where vision and spontaneity converge. Yet, Gaffin’s story reaches beyond the set. Interwoven with memories of personal hardship, family pressures, and the delicate balance between professional devotion and private struggle, her work resonates with authenticity. Her photographs become more than documentation—they are meditations on endurance, creativity, and belonging. As curator Britt Salvesen notes, Moving Still is “so much more than an illustrated filmography.” It stands as a luminous tribute to the artistry of filmmaking and the transformative gaze of photography, reminding viewers that the motion behind every still image is, ultimately, the pulse of life itself. Image: Motel, Land of the Lost, 2009 Archival pigment print. 40.64 x 60.96 cm / 16.0 x 24.0 in Edition of 5 © Lauri Gaffin

Influence and Identity: Twentieth Century Portrait Photography from the Bank of America Collection invites viewers to explore how photography has shaped the public image of some of the most influential figures of the modern age. Presented at The National Arts Club’s historic Gramercy Park building, the exhibition spans the transformative decades from the 1920s through the 1960s, a period when portrait photography flourished as both documentation and art. Through 83 masterful works by renowned international photographers, visitors encounter the likenesses of icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, and Miles Davis—each portrait revealing as much about its subject as it does about the evolving cultural spirit of the time. Drawn from the prestigious Bank of America Collection, the exhibition highlights photography’s power to define identity, influence perception, and shape collective memory. Whether through the lens of glamour, leadership, or rebellion, these images offer an intimate study of fame, character, and creativity. They remind us that portraiture is never merely about appearance—it is about presence, legacy, and the invisible dialogue between artist and sitter. This exhibition is made possible through the Bank of America Art in our Communities® program, an initiative that shares the bank’s extensive art holdings with museums and nonprofit institutions around the world. By offering these curated exhibitions at no cost, the program helps sustain cultural organizations while enriching local communities with access to exceptional art. Since its inception in 2008, the program has lent exhibitions more than 175 times, fostering engagement, education, and inspiration across generations. Influence and Identity stands as both a visual chronicle of the twentieth century and a reflection on the enduring power of the photographic portrait to reveal, conceal, and ultimately define what it means to be seen. Image: Yousuf Karsh (Canadian, b. Armenia, 1908–2002). Georgia O’Keeffe, 1956. Gelatin silver print. Bank of America Collection. © Yousuf Karsh

Hans P. Kraus JR. Gallery presents Form Follows Function in Early Photographs, on view through November 26, 2025. The exhibition gathers a remarkable selection of early works that reflect architect Louis Sullivan’s enduring principle that “form ever follows function.” Through the lenses of pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Victor Regnault, Félix Teynard, Henri Le Secq, and Frederick H. Evans, the show explores how photography captured architecture not merely as structure, but as living expression—each form molded by its use and purpose. William Henry Fox Talbot, the father of the calotype, found artistic pleasure in documenting the ancient architecture of Oxford. His salt print of the Radcliffe Camera, taken from the High Street, stands as one of his most poetic compositions—a balance of structure and light that transforms stone into image. Talbot’s work embodies the dialogue between form, material, and emerging photographic vision. French physicist and photographer Henri-Victor Regnault captured the harmony between science and aesthetics in his 1852 salt print of a carpenter’s house in Sèvres. The play of shadow and geometry turns a simple domestic scene into an abstract meditation on design. Félix Teynard, a civil engineer and one of the earliest photographers of Egypt, brought technical precision and poetic sensitivity to his 1850s image of the Pyramid of Cheops. His work remains among the most comprehensive visual documents of the Nile Valley’s monumental past. American photographer George Barker expanded this tradition across the Atlantic, transforming scenes of Niagara Falls and later Florida’s developing towns into narratives of modern growth. Finally, Frederick H. Evans, celebrated for his spiritual studies of cathedrals, reveals architecture as a vessel of light and devotion. His 1912 image of Durham Cathedral epitomizes his belief that photography could render the sacred geometry of space with almost mystical fidelity. Image: Félix Teynard (French, 1817-1892) "Pyramide de Chéops (Grande Pyramide), Égypte," 1853-1854 Salt print from a paper negative made ca. 1851-1852

Stephen Daiter Gallery presents Dawoud Bey: Syracuse 1985, an exhibition that revisits a pivotal moment in the photographer’s early career. On view through November 28, the show features work created during Bey’s first artist residency at Light Work in Syracuse, New York. Invited in 1985, just after the acclaim of his Harlem, U.S.A. series, Bey was given the rare opportunity to live and work without distraction for an entire month. Immersed in the rhythm of city life, he spent his days wandering Syracuse with his camera, capturing the quiet poetry of ordinary moments from dawn to dusk. The images that emerged from this period reveal an artist refining his vision, finding meaning in the gestures and faces of everyday people. Commuters waiting for buses, workers hurrying through morning light, students crossing busy intersections—all appear bathed in a luminosity that feels both spontaneous and deliberate. Bey described this time as a return to the streets, a renewed search for those fleeting instants when the world aligns and becomes a powerful visual statement. His Syracuse photographs mark a shift toward a deeper engagement with the human presence in urban space, emphasizing empathy, observation, and rhythm. The exhibition features the original twenty-six prints produced during Bey’s residency, along with a selection of additional early works from Syracuse. Together, they offer insight into a defining chapter of his artistic development—an exploration of light, form, and community that would continue to shape his practice for decades. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated catalog, Dawoud Bey: Syracuse 1985, which celebrates the lasting impact of this formative project and the enduring spirit of an artist who continues to find profound beauty in the everyday. Image: A Woman Alone at the Bus Stop, Syracuse, NY, 1985 © Dawoud Bey

Duncan Miller Gallery is proud to announce Icons of Fashion, an extraordinary exhibition celebrating the visionaries who shaped the global fashion landscape. Featuring portraits of over 40 of the world’s most renowned designers and couturiers, this exhibition offers an intimate look at the creative forces behind the industry’s most iconic styles. Design legends such as Coco Chanel, Salvatore Ferragamo, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino Garavani, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Lily Dache, Gianni Versace, and many others are captured through the lenses of the world’s greatest photographers. The collection includes the work of Herb Ritts, Harry Benson, Irving Penn, Bruce Weber, Cecil Beaton, Jean-Loup Sieff, Horst P. Horst, Yousuf Karsh, Peter Hujar, David Bailey, Dorothy Wilding, and more. Image: Salvatore Ferragamo, 1957 by James Jarche

Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to announce Edward Burtynsky: Transformation, featuring monumental color photographs that examine landscapes altered by resource extraction, manufacturing, rapid development, and the ecological changes that follow. These works continue Burtynsky’s ongoing exploration of how human intervention has reshaped natural environments worldwide, revealing both their vulnerability and magnificence. Edward Burtynsky: Transformation opens concurrent to The Great Acceleration, Burtynsky’s exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, presently on view through September 28, 2025. Timed to coincide with Climate Week NYC in September 2025, this landmark presentation, curated by David Campany, marks Burtynsky’s first major institutional exhibition in New York City in over twenty years. It is accompanied by a monograph by the ICP / Steidl. The exhibition embodies Burtynsky’s decades-long pursuit of capturing the profound and often permanent changes human industry brings to the earth’s surface. Each project remains intrinsically linked, showing how local environmental changes reflect broader global patterns, documenting the visible effects on the land brought on by demographic expansion, water consumption, carbon emissions, and mineral extraction. “At such a critical moment in time, I hope this work sparks meaningful dialogue about our relationship with the planet and brings more people to this awareness,” reflects Burtynsky on his mission to document our changing world. Images included in the exhibition range from retreating glaciers in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, which reflect the impact of climate change on ice caps, to cobalt mining operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, illustrating the lasting marks of human resource extraction on the land. Burtynsky’s image of Lake Mead, Nevada depicts receding waterways brought on by prolonged drought and increasing water demand, highlighting the strain on vital resources in the American West. Burtynsky’s recent 2024 photographs of Olympic National Park, Washington capture the effects of increased rainfall in the region’s remote wilderness areas. His work depicting Thjorsá River, Iceland captures the intricate patterns formed by glacial meltwater as it meanders through Iceland’s volcanic landscape, caused by climate change. Collectively, these images form a powerful visual narrative of our planet’s rapid transformation. Burtynsky’s work was the subject of the award-winning documentary trilogy Manufactured Landscapes (dir. Jennifer Baichwal, 2006), Watermark (dir. Baichwal and Burtynsky, 2013), and ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch (dir. Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Burtynsky, 2018). Burtynsky has dedicated over 40 years to documenting human impact on the planet. His works are held in the collections of over eighty museums worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim, New York; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the National Gallery of Canada, among other notable international institutions. Major institutional exhibitions include BURTYNSKY: Extraction/Abstraction (2024), premiered at Saatchi Gallery, London, before touring to M9, Mestre, Italy; Anthropocene (2018), Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada (international tour); Water (2013), New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Art Center, Louisiana (international tour); Oil (2009), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (five-year international tour); China (2005–2008, international tour); Manufactured Landscapes (2003–2005), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (toured to Art Gallery of Ontario and Brooklyn Museum); and Breaking Ground (1988–1992), produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (international tour). His accolades include the inaugural TED Prize (2005); the ICP Infinity Award (2008); the Kraszna Krausz Book Award (2010); the Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary Photography (2011); the Outreach Award at Rencontres d’Arles (2011); the Photo London Master of Photography Award (2018); the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation (2022); and his induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame (2022), among others. Burtynsky was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006 and currently holds nine honorary doctorate degrees. Image: Rainforest #2, Olympic National Park, Washington, USA, 2024 © Edward Burtynsky

SF Camerawork proudly presents The Tellings We Keep, the first solo exhibition of Choctaw artist Tricia Rainwater, spanning over four years of work and including four newly commissioned pieces. Rainwater’s multimedia practice—encompassing installation, sound, sculpture, and self-portraiture—examines displacement, grief, and the intersections of body, memory, and land. Her work acts as both a meditation and a form of remembrance, inviting visitors to witness histories that are often overlooked or erased. Upon entering the exhibition, viewers are enveloped by a field recording captured near Nanih Waiya, a sacred Choctaw mound central to creation stories and spiritual practice. The ambient sounds of footsteps and nature thread the installations together, underscoring Rainwater’s focus on embodied recollection. In works such as Holisso Holitpa (Bible) (2021) and A Series of Weapons (2021–2025), she transforms Bibles into sculptural vessels, embedding them with hair, razor blades, barbed wire, and glass shards. These altered texts confront the trauma of forced assimilation at U.S. and church-run boarding schools, where Native children were punished for their language and culture, turning instruments of faith into symbols of harm and resilience. In Ardmore Has a Secret (2022) and Emily Says the Gators Are Friendly (2024), Rainwater revisits sites of ancestral and personal significance. She positions herself within landscapes marked by historical violence and estrangement, creating images that explore visibility, dislocation, and the ongoing impact of generational trauma. Chuka Achafa (One House) (2025) incorporates altered childhood wallpaper and family photographs, merging memory, environment, and ritual into a deeply personal tableau. Collaborations, such as Tikba Ihiya (to keep going) (2025) with photographer Rich Lomibao, focus on hands holding threads, documents, and earth, symbolizing kinship and interdependence. The monumental Our Own Snake Dance (2025) suspends hundreds of digitally printed fabrics brushed with bay water and earth, evoking Mississippian and Caddo pottery motifs and reimagining emergence from trauma. Through these interwoven works, Rainwater constructs a narrative of memory, survival, and home as both place and concept. Her art transforms grief into enduring presence, offering spaces for reflection, remembrance, and the reclamation of Choctaw histories. Image: Tricia Rainwater, Ardmore Has a Secret © Tricia Rainwater

A century after André Breton’s *Surrealist Manifesto* ignited a revolution of the imagination, Throckmorton Fine Art celebrates the enduring power of Surrealism through an exhibition tracing its profound influence on photography. Bringing together works created across Europe, the United States, and Mexico, the show reveals how the Surrealist impulse reshaped both the form and spirit of photographic practice over the past hundred years. Emerging from the psychological and cultural wreckage of World War I, Surrealism offered artists a means of liberation from rationality and the mechanized violence of modern life. Guided by Freudian theory and the anarchic spirit of Dada, its adherents sought to channel the unconscious, the dreamlike, and the forbidden. Photography became a key instrument in this pursuit—an alchemical medium capable of transforming reality into illusion. Through techniques such as photomontage, solarization, and multiple exposure, photographers rendered the invisible visible, collapsing distinctions between body and object, waking life and dream. The exhibition features masterworks by figures such as Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna, and Dora Maar, alongside experimental visions by Edward Weston, André Kertész, and Tina Modotti. Their images reveal a fascination with the uncanny and the erotic—reflections of a world where ordinary objects take on otherworldly charge. Portraits of Jean Cocteau by Berenice Abbott, Lucien Clergue, and Germaine Krull convey the Surrealist attraction to transformation, disguise, and the theatrical self. The movement’s migration beyond Europe is also vividly represented. Mexico, a country steeped in myth and ritual, became a fertile ground for Surrealist experimentation. Works by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and María García bridge Breton’s dreamlike aesthetics with the poetic realism of Latin America. A century later, Surrealism’s legacy continues to blur the line between fantasy and truth—reminding us that imagination remains one of humanity’s most radical acts of resistance. Image: Lucien Clergue, Jean Cocteau, Le Testament d'orphee, 1959 © Lucien Clergue

The Griffin Museum proudly presents A Yellow Rose Project, a compelling photographic exploration of women’s voices, rights, and resilience in America. Co-founded and curated by Frances Jakubek and Meg Griffiths, this collaborative exhibition brings together work from over one hundred women across the United States, responding to, reflecting on, and reacting to the centennial of the 19th Amendment. The project transforms historical memory into a living conversation about equality, activism, and artistic expression. Over a century ago, women in Tennessee stood shoulder to shoulder wearing yellow roses, symbols of courage and determination, as men cast their votes for or against women’s right to participate in government. That single act represented the culmination of decades of struggle, risk, and sacrifice—facing oppression, imprisonment, and even hunger—to demand inclusion in the democratic process. While the 19th Amendment secured voting rights for many women, full enfranchisement was delayed for women of color due to systemic barriers and state-imposed restrictions. A Yellow Rose Project aims to honor these histories while fostering contemporary dialogue. Participating artists examine the intersections of past and present, using photography to interrogate the meaning of civic participation, social justice, and the continuing fight for equality. Their works reflect a range of approaches—some contemplative, some critical, and others celebratory—offering a nuanced lens on women’s evolving roles in society. The exhibition underscores the power of women to shape public perception and the ongoing necessity of advocacy. By connecting historical acts of courage with modern interpretations, A Yellow Rose Project invites viewers to consider both how far society has come and how much work remains. Through these images, the artists bridge generations, using their perspectives to honor legacy, challenge complacency, and inspire continued vigilance in the pursuit of justice and equality. This exhibition is not just a reflection on history; it is a living testament to women’s resilience, creativity, and the enduring significance of their voices in shaping the cultural and political landscape of America. The artists featured in this show are: Keliy Anderson-Staley, Kalee Appleton, Tami Bahat, Deedra Baker, Nancy Baron, Lindsey Beal, Sheri Lynn Behr, Katie Benjamin, Julia Bennett, Sara Bennett, Anne J Berry, Christa Bowden, Edie Bresler, Lily Brooks, Ellen Carey, Patty Carroll, Tracy L Chandler, Elizabeth M Claffey, Ashleigh Coleman, Tara Cronin, Frances F Denny, K.K. DePaul, Rebecca Drolen, Yael Eban & Brea Souders, Odette England, Carol Erb, Tsar Fedorsky, Ellen Feldman, Marina Font, Preston Gannaway, Anna George, Susan Kae Grant, Meg Griffiths, Sarah Hadley, Alice Hargrave, Carla Jay Harris, Chehalis Deane Hegner, Ileana Doble Hernandez, Bootsy Holler, Sarah Hoskins, Letitia Huckaby, Cindy Hwang, Megan Jacobs, Frances Jakubek, Ina Jang, Farah Janjua, Jordana Kalman, Priya Kambli, Marky Kauffmann, Ashley Kauschinger, Kat Kiernan, Heidi Kirkpatrick, Sandra Klein, Katelyn Kopenhaver, Molly Lamb, Kathya Maria Landeros, Rachel Loischild, Sara Macel, S. Billie Mandle, Rania Matar, Lisa McCarty, Noelle McCleaf, Jennifer McClure, Mary Beth Meehan, Yvette Meltzer, Leigh Merrill, Diane Meyer, Jeanine Michna-Bales, Laura E Migliorino, Hye-Ryoung Min, Alyssa Minahan, Greer Muldowney, Colleen Mullins, Carolyn Mcintyre Norton & Betty Press, Emily Peacock, Toni Pepe, Rachel Pillips, Sarah Pollman, Greta Pratt, Thalassa Raasch, Larissa Ramey, Astrid Reischwitz, Tamara Reynolds, Paula Riff, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Claudia Ruiz Gustafson, Serrah Russell, Gail Samuelson, Kris Sanford, Kyra Schmidt, Maude Schuyler Clay, Manjari Sharma, Emily Sheffer, Aline Smithson, Joni Sternbach, Kristine Thompson, Amy Thompson Avishai, Sasha Tivetsky, Maria Triller, Malanie Walker, Claire A Warden, Rana Young, Cassandra Zampini, and Karen Zusman. Image: Kayla, Roxbury, Massachusetts @ Rania Matar

Constructing Mexico: Photography and National Identity traces the remarkable journey of photography in Mexico and its profound role in shaping the nation’s image. Drawn from the Chrysler Museum of Art’s collection and private lenders, the exhibition presents more than fifty-five works that chart how Mexican identity has been expressed, negotiated, and transformed through the photographic lens. From early 19th-century studio portraits and commercial scenes to powerful 20th-century depictions of revolution and culture, the exhibition captures the evolving dialogue between image and nationhood. Photography arrived in Mexico soon after its invention in 1839, and it quickly became a tool for both documentation and persuasion. Under Emperor Maximilian I, during the brief reign of the Second Mexican Empire, photographs served as instruments of imperial propaganda. Later, foreign photographers such as Claude-Joseph-Désiré Charnay, Abel Briquet, Charles Betts Waite, and Hugo Brehme were captivated by Mexico’s dramatic landscapes and growing modernity. Their images shaped how the world perceived the country—beautiful yet often romanticized through an outsider’s gaze. At the same time, Mexican photographers were building their own vision, one that would gain momentum in the 20th century. The outbreak of the Mexican Civil War transformed photography into a powerful medium of political and cultural expression. Artists like Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, and Lola Álvarez Bravo captured scenes of daily life, struggle, and resilience, revealing the spirit of a nation in flux. Their images bridged past and present, merging artistic experimentation with social commentary. Through their work, Mexico was no longer a subject of foreign fascination but a country defining itself through its own eyes. Spanning more than a century of creativity, Constructing Mexico reveals photography’s vital role in constructing the nation’s collective identity and cultural memory. Image: Photograph of a sleeping child surrounded by shoes and sandals. Lola Álvarez Bravo, The Dream of the Poor (El sueño de los pobres), 1949 (printed 1980's), Silver print, Museum purchase, 2024.34.1

This exhibition explores the "hidden mother" in 19th-century portraits of children, where long exposure times required mothers or caretakers to keep children still, often concealed behind props or beneath textiles to an unsettling degree. Contemporary artist Sara VanDerBeek responds to these examples of hidden labor by highlighting photography’s power as a form of mediation between past and present, original and reproduction. Addressing themes of motherhood, labor, and grief, VanDerBeek reflects upon the collective memory of women beneath the veil, both then and now. Image: Artist Unknown (American, 19th century), Untitled, 1860s

Visual Kinship explores how photography defines, challenges, and reimagines the concept of family. Across diverse historical and contemporary works, the exhibition examines how images reflect and disrupt family structures shaped by colonialism, migration, transnational adoption, and queer intimacies. Photography plays a pivotal role in bridging the personal and political, offering a lens through which kinship can be recognized, claimed, and contested. The exhibition also considers how visual culture fosters alternative networks of belonging and care, expanding the notion of family beyond biological or traditional frameworks. This exhibition is organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, and generously supported by the Charles Gilman Family Endowment. Image: Rania Matar, Alae (with the mirror), Beirut, Lebanon

This exhibition is generously supported by Jacki June Horton. The Center for Photographic Art is proud to present Easy Days, a solo exhibition by acclaimed photographer Sage Sohier. In celebration of Sage's latest monograph, CPA partnered with Nazraeli Press to create this retrospective exhibition which includes a selection of the artist's photographs from her series Americans Seen, Passing Time, and Easy Days, which is also the title of Sage's new book (Nazraeli, 2025). We’re honored that Sage will be here in person to discuss her long career and sign copies of her latest beautiful monograph. Come early to hear Sage in conversation with SFMOMA curator of photography, Shana Lopes. Artist Statement: “These photographs were made between 1979 - 1986 when I was a young photographer living in Boston. In that pre-digital and less paranoid era, families––and especially children and teenagers––used to hang out in their neighborhoods. A kind of theater of the streets emerged from the boredom of hot summer days and it was a great time to photograph people outside. Undoubtedly my own childhood afternoons, often spent in my neighbor’s basement creating theatrical productions with the four kids who lived there, helped to form my vision of the play of children as a kind of rite or performance. That our audience was comprised of our dogs never discouraged us. Over the seven years I made these pictures, I grew familiar with Boston’s many working class and ethnic neighborhoods and became visually addicted to the triple deckers, porches, vacant lots, clothes lines, and tree stumps that created striking stage-sets for the complex portraits I seemed compelled to make. On the hottest days, I headed to beach towns, and each summer I took a road trip: one through small-town Pennsylvania via dilapidated Newburgh, New York, another to mining areas in rural West Virginia, and once to Mormon enclaves in Utah and Idaho. During long Boston winters, I would head south for a week or two: to the citrus-producing regions of inland Florida, or through the Florida panhandle to New Orleans and Cajun country. My rather grandiose ambition was to create a portrait of contemporary America by photographing people in their environments. I was obsessed with making the best complex pictures that I could of people hanging out in neighborhoods, in their homes, and on their porches. It was exciting when I came upon an interesting situation, and I loved the challenge of collaborating with strangers until something compelling emerged from the interaction. I had to work quite quickly, so that I could let people get back to whatever they were doing when I first asked if I could photograph them. Though asking permission usually changed the dynamic of the situation, interesting things would often emerge when I was allowed to stay for longer than a picture or two. Intruding on people’s personal space could feel awkward, and was never easy to do, but most of the time it seemed that my enthusiasm was contagious and people were able to relax and be themselves. During the isolation of the pandemic, I had the opportunity to revisit my archive of negatives and contact sheets from the 1980s, and discovered a number of interesting images that I had never printed. This prompted the publication of my second and third books with Nazraeli Press, Passing Time, and Easy Days. A lot of time has passed since these wanderings, and though much is still vivid in my mind, I wish I had kept a journal about the people I met, the conversations I had, and the strange and wonderful things that I noticed along the way. In my twenties, I began to see the world and understand more about people from a variety of different backgrounds. Meeting people (in order to photograph them) was thrilling, and it changed me. Being a photographer has been a wonderful excuse to wander and to be inquisitive about others’ lives and experiences. I will always be grateful to the people pictured here––not just for allowing me to spend time making pictures of them––but also for how these interactions informed and enriched my life.

Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist who captured the 20th century through intimate and powerful images. Her work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression made her a prominent photo-documentarian of migrant workers and farmers. Lange’s photographs humanized the Depression’s impact and influenced the development of documentary photography. Along with Lange’s photographs, additional artists of the period and known acquaintances of Lange works are being exhibited, Pirkel Jones, Imogen Cunningham, Margaret Bourke-White, Ruth Bernhard, Max Yavno, John Gutmann, Oliver Gagliani Wine Country Harvest shows the bounty of wine and harvest in California. Featuring the works of Ansel Adams, Johan Hagemeyer, Wilber Wright, J.H. Bratt, Jonathan Clark, Pirkel Jones, Jock MacDonald, Alan Ross, Max Yavno, Nicolo Setorio, Jim Banks, Philip Lorca diCorcia Image: Dorothea Lange, Mid-Continent Small Cotton Farm on US 62, Oklahoma, 1938

Scott Offen’s series Grace is a sustained photographic collaboration that interrogates authorship, gender, aging, and representation. Created alongside his partner and co-author, Grace, the work unfolds as a dialogue between subject and artist, where each image is constructed through a process of mutual creation and negotiation. Scenes in the series operate at the intersection of reality, symbolism, and psychology, blending everyday experience with archetypal resonance. The rural landscapes of New England serve not merely as backdrops but as active participants in the narrative. Fields, forests, and waterways interact with Grace’s presence, blurring distinctions between interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, figure and ground. Within these spaces, Grace embodies roles that are often solitary and enigmatic, challenging conventional notions of femininity, visibility, and domesticity. Her presence transforms ordinary environments into sites of contemplation and narrative complexity. Central to Grace is Offen’s commitment to collaboration and repetition. Over time, the artist and Grace have cultivated a shared visual language that subverts traditional hierarchies between photographer and muse. Through this lens, the aging female body—frequently marginalized in both art and popular culture—emerges as a locus of authority, mystery, and creative agency. Each photograph becomes an exploration of co-presence, transformation, and the interplay of identity and environment. Drawing from mythology, psychoanalysis, and landscape theory, the series integrates material traces of daily life with poetic staging. Indoors, Grace’s touch lingers in shadows, objects, and the subtle impressions of her body. Outdoors, she inhabits spaces shaped by light, season, and terrain, inviting reflection on how human identity forms in dialogue with nature. Grace stands as a meditation on collaboration, experimentation, and the relationship between life, place, and photographic form. Offen’s work immerses viewers in a liminal world—where the rural landscapes of New England evoke both enchantment and uncanny resonance, and where human presence transforms the ordinary into the profoundly symbolic. Image: © Scott Offen

Behind the Curtain: Vulnerabilities Exposed brings together the work of recipients from CENTER’s annual awards and grants, offering a profound reflection on the urgent social, political, and environmental challenges shaping our world today. The exhibition spans deeply personal narratives and global crises, engaging with issues such as school violence, immigration detention, and the fragility of our planet’s ecosystems. Among the featured projects, Chloé.A’s Yellow Tiger on Blue Background examines the complex process of coming of age in Taiwan, a nation marked by both natural and political turbulence. Following the devastating earthquake of April 2024 and its countless aftershocks, the photographer turns her lens toward a generation navigating instability and identity under geopolitical pressure. Through quiet portraits and nuanced storytelling, she captures how young Taiwanese reconcile personal dreams with the shifting ground of national belonging. Greg Constantine’s Seven Doors: An American Gulag confronts the human cost of the U.S. immigration detention system, where more than 46,000 people are held daily across an expanding network of facilities. After seven years of research and travel through nine countries, Constantine builds a visual and auditory record of these places—combining panoramic photographs, oral testimonies, and data to reveal the psychological and social toll of mass detention. His work invites viewers to step inside an unseen world of endurance and injustice, amplifying the voices of those too often silenced. Alongside these powerful narratives, projects by Mitsu Maeda, Debmalya Ray Choudhuri, Sarah Sudhoff, and Alex Welsh extend the exhibition’s reach, from explorations of memory and trauma to reflections on landscape and loss. Together, they unveil the vulnerabilities that lie just beyond the surface of modern life—reminding us that art remains one of the most vital means of witnessing and understanding the human condition. Image: “Untitled” from the series Yellow tiger on blue background © Chloé.A, 2025 Project Development Grant

Lanoue Gallery proudly presents Martha Graham Dance Company: 100 Years, a world premiere exhibition featuring a curated selection of large-format photographs by Ken Browar and Deborah Ory. The exhibition coincides with the release of their new book of the same name, celebrating a century of the Martha Graham Dance Company—the oldest dance company in the United States. The artists will meet collectors at the gallery on Friday, November 7, from 6 to 8 PM, and signed copies of the book will be available while supplies last. Ken Browar and Deborah Ory, known collectively as NYC Dance Project, first gained international recognition with their 2016 publication The Art of Movement, which portrayed elite dancers from institutions such as the New York City Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Royal Danish Ballet. Their subsequent book, The Style of Movement: Fashion & Dance, expanded their vision, merging couture and choreography, capturing the world’s greatest dancers adorned in garments by Dior, Valentino, and Oscar de la Renta, among others. Their latest collaboration, Martha Graham Dance Company: 100 Years, pays homage to Graham’s enduring influence on modern dance. Often compared to innovators like Picasso and Stravinsky, Graham redefined performance through the expressive power of movement. TIME magazine named her “Dancer of the Century,” a title reflecting her deep impact on art and culture. As Artistic Director Janet Eilber notes, Graham believed in the power of stillness—a concept Browar and Ory translate into photography, suspending motion in moments of pure grace. Through meticulous collaboration, the photographers approach each session as a choreographed production, attending to gesture, light, and emotion. Their images transform dance into visual poetry, bridging the physical and the eternal. Based in Brooklyn, Browar and Ory continue to honor the language of movement, preserving its spirit one frame at a time. Image: © Ken Browar & Deborah Ory

At the height of the Weimar Republic, two visionary artists dared to challenge convention. Known as ringl + pit, Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach redefined the language of commercial photography in a society fascinated by glamour and modernity. Their photographs of wigs, mannequins, and merchandise transformed advertising into a field of experimentation, infused with humor, sensuality, and surrealism. Working in Berlin, they captured the restless energy of the avant-garde, where art and commerce collided in unexpected ways. Robert Mann Gallery presents *ringl + pit*, an exhibition running from October 23 through December 6, 2025. Featuring rare studio photographs and an exclusive limited-edition portfolio, the show brings together works that have remained unseen for decades. The duo’s practice, rooted in collaboration, was marked by constant role-switching—each artist moving fluidly between directing, photographing, and modeling. This method gave their images a striking sense of unity and play, reflecting a shared artistic vision. Trained under Bauhaus master Walter Peterhans, Stern and Auerbach absorbed his emphasis on precision and form while injecting their own wit and irony. Their photographs, such as *Komol Haircoloring Advertisement* and *Güldenring Cigarettes*, subvert traditional advertising tropes—eschewing glamour for abstraction, replacing models with objects, and suggesting touch and texture over desire. These works quietly question how femininity and consumerism were represented in a rapidly modernizing world. The exhibition also highlights two rare self-portraits that capture their mutual fascination with identity and disguise. In *pit with Veil*, Auerbach’s sidelong gaze evokes mystery, while Stern’s intense close-up radiates self-assurance and introspection. Together, their portraits reveal an intimate dialogue about art, gender, and individuality. Although forced into exile by the rise of Nazism, their friendship and creative kinship endured across continents. *ringl + pit* remains a powerful testament to the freedom and innovation that flourished in the brief yet brilliant years of Weimar modernism. Image: pit with Veil, 1931

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

Bruce Davidson was born on September 5, 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois, and studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York from 1951 to 1954, and Graphic Design at the School of Art, Yale University in 1955. During military service in Paris, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and in 1958 became a full member. He worked as a freelance photographer for Life from 1958 to 1961. Davidson created such seminal bodies of work as Circus, Brooklyn Gang, and Freedom Riders. During this period of professional growth, the late Henry Geldzahler, former Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, said of this work, “The ability to enter so sympathetically into what seems superficially an alien environment remains Bruce Davidson’s sustained triumph; in his investigation he becomes the friendly recorder of tenderness and tragedy.” This survey of thirty-six of Bruce Davidson’s seminal black and white silver gelatin photographic prints is supplemented with works by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, August Sander, and Lewis Hine for comparison and contrast purposes and to demonstrate Davidson’s historical connection and affinity with these photographers’ works. Davidson’s photographs were produced in the mid-twentieth century as cultural phenomena like big top tent circuses in America were dying out, and as profound social and political changes were being ushered in by the civil rights movement. These changes were to affect American society for generations to come. In a 2015 interview, with critic Arthur Lubow, Davidson named some photographers he thought had taken the medium to “a new departure point”: Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. Frank, who was probably Davidson’s greatest stylistic influence, sought to portray scenes and people new to him. Davidson, on the other hand, spent months or years getting so close to what is portrayed in his photograph that it is seen and felt by the viewer as an insider would have experienced it. The photographer received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document the American civil rights movement, later published as Time of Change. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo exhibition. The first photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was awarded to Davidson in 1967. He spent two years witnessing the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem, New York City. The resulting book, East 100th Street, was published by Harvard University Press in 1970. This work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Danny Lyons’ photograph, Greenwood, Mississippi, is a photo of Bob Dylan performing at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Concert on July 6, 1963. It provides insight into a song that was to define an era and Davidson’s photographs. A few months after the concert in Mississippi, Dylan composed The Times They Are a-Changin in September of that same year. The song and the album with the same name were released in 1964 by Columbia Records and became an anthem of change. The song, like Bruce Davidson’s photographs, is humanistic art of the highest order. Davidson’s photographs are documents of grand and intimate moments of history from 1958 to 1992 and like Dylan’s song have become essential for an appreciation of what was lost and what was gained as we approach the end to the first quarter of the 21st century. Image: © Bruce Davidson, American, born 1933, Two Women at Lunch Counter, New York, 1962, From the series Time of Change

What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape is a unique selection of photographs from the museum's collection that have never been shown to the public. Featuring acquisitions from the past 17 years since the Photography department was established in 2008, the exhibition represents the variety of ways landscape photographs help us see and appreciate other times and places and consider where the world has been and what it is becoming. Photographs are informally organized by theme or subject matter, such as Meghann Riepenhoff’s large camera-less image of water and ice, flanked by photographs of rivers and oceans by artist Masao Yamamoto and others. Intimate photographs of nature include works by Linda Conner and Terri Weifenbach as well as a hypnotically detailed tableau by Tanya Marcuse. Landscapes by Christina Fernandez, Patrick Nagatani and Zora J. Murff confront troubling conflicts in our collective history. America’s scenic beauty is celebrated in works by Marion Post Wolcott, William Henry Jackson, Mary Peck, and Abelardo Morell. Steve Fitch’s photograph of a radio tower announces the near-universal presence of technology. Challenges of living in a changing, unpredictable world are the subject of photographs by John Ganis, Frank Gohlke and others, while Henry Wessel, Jr. evokes the easy pleasures of road trips. Other pictures show more troubling aspects of the North American landscape, from the effects of natural disasters to dark moments in the history of slavery and conflicts with Indigenous people. All are bound together by the idea that landscape can serve as an autobiography of the people, societies, and natural forces that shape the world over time. Image: © Steve Fitch

Power & Light: Russell Lee's Coal Survey is an exhibition of photographs of coal communities by American documentary photographer Russell Lee. These images tell the story of laborers who helped build the nation, of a moment when the government took stock of their health and safety, and of a photographer who recognized their humanity. About the Exhibit Power & Light is free and open to the public. The exhibition features more than 200 of Russell Lee’s photographs of coal miners and their families in the form of large-scale prints, projections, and digital interactives from a nationwide survey of housing and medical and community facilities of bituminous coal mining communities. The survey was conducted by Navy personnel in 1946 as part of a strike-ending agreement negotiated between the Department of the Interior and the United Mine Workers of America. The full series of photographs, which numbers in the thousands, can only be found in the holdings of the National Archives. These images document inhumane living and working conditions but also depict the joy, strength, and resilience of the miners' families and communities.

The Soldier’s Lens is a curated exhibition showcasing the original perspectives of active-duty service members, veterans, and their families. This powerful exhibition will explore the diverse experiences of military life, from moments of intensity and duty to the quiet rhythms of everyday routines. Chosen submissions will be carefully selected by a panel of judges with deep knowledge in both art and military service. These selected works will be featured in a group exhibition at FMoPA in October 2025. This ambitious project is planned in multiple phases, including an online exhibition, live programming, and curriculum development. The exhibition’s core aim is to honor the profound intersection of photographic arts and military service, while simultaneously raising awareness of veterans’ experiences and generating support for both FMoPA and vital veterans’ causes. This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Tom and Dixie Arthur and the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners.

Tideland presents a hauntingly beautiful series of black-and-white photographs by Savannah-based artist Parker Stewart (b. 1992), taken between 2020 and 2024. Through his lens, Stewart captures the raw essence of Georgia’s coastline—a region where the natural world feels both ancient and alive. His images transport viewers into an environment where sea and land intertwine endlessly, creating a dialogue between stillness and motion. With fog-draped marshes, weathered docks, and timeworn shrimp boats, these photographs immerse us in a landscape that hums with memory and quiet transformation. The Georgia coast, with its barrier islands and tidal estuaries, becomes in Stewart’s vision a place of mystery and reverence. Each photograph balances delicacy and strength: sunlight filtered through mist, reflections trembling on dark water, the texture of salt-stained wood. There is a sense that the landscape itself breathes—that history, climate, and human presence have all left invisible traces. Stewart’s camera becomes an instrument of listening, attuned to the rhythms of tide and wind, to the murmurs of an old world that continues to endure. A native of North Carolina, Parker Stewart arrived in Savannah in 2011 to study photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His work centers on the concept of Place, using the camera not simply to observe, but to engage deeply with the spirit of a landscape. Alongside his ongoing study of Georgia’s wild coast and the Savannah River Basin, Stewart has photographed in diverse regions such as Coastal Maine, Western North Carolina, the Oregon Coast, and the Mojave Desert. Across these terrains, he seeks the moments when nature and emotion intersect—where the ordinary becomes transcendent, and time feels suspended within the frame. Image: Parker Stewart; Boardwalk and Pilings, Valona, 2020; archival pigment print; courtesy of the artist. © Parker Stewart

Since 2007, Pixy Liao (廖逸君) has collaborated with her partner, Takahiro Morooka (諸岡高裕, nicknamed Moro), on a series of staged, often humorous self-portraits. These works wryly examine the power dynamics between artist and muse, prod at conservative gender roles, and document the evolution of their relationship. Pixy (born 1979 in Shanghai, China), an artist working in photography, installation, and performance, met Japanese-born artist and musician Moro in 2006 when both were international students in Memphis, Tennessee. Their creative partnership has grown and evolved over the years to include many projects including their music group, PIMO, which has released six albums to date. Pixy began the photographic series, known as Experimental Relationship, shortly after she and Moro met, with many of the works playfully referencing art history, film, music, and other artifacts of popular culture. She plans to continue it so long as they remain together. Presenting approximately 45 works that span the duration of this ongoing series, Pixy Liao: Relationship Material—the artist’s first exhibition in Chicago—celebrates the couple’s many ways of being and working together. As the title suggests, the show frames Pixy’s relationship with Moro as artistic material in itself, showing how this manifests not only in photographs but also in sculptures, videos, and PIMO. Through these works, Pixy chronicles and enacts efforts to “reach a new equilibrium” in a partnership that is both artistic and romantic, examining questions of fantasy, desire, and control. Image: How to build a relationship with layered meanings, 2008, Pixy Liao, Courtesy of the artist. © Pixy Liao

When the Veil is Thin opens at Galerie XII Los Angeles from October 4 through December 9, 2025, bringing together four artists whose work explores the liminal, the hidden, and the ephemeral. The exhibition unfolds in the season of autumn, when the shadows grow long and the boundaries between seen and unseen feel most fragile, inviting visitors into a space of reflection and wonder. Charlotte Mano’s luminous self-portraits capture a body at once human and celestial. Bathed in the glow of full moonlight, her figure shimmers with pearlescent light, appearing to float weightlessly into the night. In some images, she transforms into the moon itself, a radiant presence suspended in serene solitude, evoking the mystical power of stillness and introspection. Quentin Shih interrogates memory as a spectral, unstable force. His images, often drenched in red light or suffused with eerie interiors, conjure recollection as an act of summoning. Figures emerge and dissolve within shadow, caught between what is remembered and imagined, creating a haunting sense of presence that hovers at the edges of consciousness. Siri Kaur weaves intimate family moments with archetypal myth, revealing the intersection of home, ritual, and transformation. Her work examines how familial bonds can be both nurturing and uncanny, binding the personal to larger, symbolic narratives that shape identity in subtle, often occult ways. Anja Niemi explores identity’s fracturing through playful and unsettling performance. Donning wigs, costumes, and elaborate disguises, she presents a series of döpplegangers—alternate selves that erupt, collide, and evolve. Her work blurs the line between roles and realities, creating a visual meditation on multiplicity and metamorphosis. Together, these artists construct a twilight realm where perception wavers and thresholds shift. When the Veil is Thin captures the moment when the familiar world dissolves into the unknown, revealing spaces of wonder, reflection, and the hidden energies that stir just beyond ordinary sight. Image: RJ17.WB21.29, 2017 Digital Chromogenic print 43.3 x 43.3 in / 110 x 110 cm 59.1 x 59.1 in / 150 x 150 cm Edition limited to 3 prints + 1 AP © Quentin Shih

Salve Regina University’s Department of Art and Art History presents Infancia, an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Newport-based nonprofit Fundación Magdalena, showcasing 42 silver gelatin prints by renowned Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. This significant presentation includes previously unpublished works that explore themes of childhood and rural life across various corners of the world. Thanks to Iturbide’s longstanding relationship with Fundación Magdalena, this marks the first exhibition dedicated solely to her photographs of children. The exhibition is accompanied by a beautifully designed catalog published by Editorial RM in Barcelona, featuring reproductions of the works alongside an insightful essay by Colombian curator María Wills. This publication, which deepens the conversation around Iturbide’s artistic vision, will be available later this year through Editorial RM and select independent booksellers worldwide. Infancia also launches a new cultural partnership between Salve Regina University and Fundación Magdalena, intended to foster dialogue and connection through the arts. As part of this initiative, the university will host weekly after-school workshops that bring together native English-speaking students and English language learners from Rhode Island public schools. These creative encounters will use art as a tool for empathy, reflection, and shared understanding, encouraging participants to see both themselves and others in new ways. Born in Mexico City in 1942, Graciela Iturbide has long used photography as a means of exploring her country’s identity, rituals, and contradictions. Her black-and-white images—poetic yet grounded in reality—have been exhibited in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Over her distinguished career, she has received numerous international honors, confirming her place among the most influential voices in contemporary photography. Image: © Graciela Iturbide

The Day of the Dead, or Día de Muertos, stands as one of Mexico’s most profound and poetic traditions—a celebration that honors the memory of those who have passed while affirming the unbroken bond between the living and the dead. Rooted in the ancient Mesoamerican belief in life after death and later intertwined with Catholic rituals of remembrance, this observance evolved over centuries into a unique expression of Mexico’s cultural identity. After the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, Indigenous spirituality and European faith merged, giving rise to ceremonies rich in symbolism, color, and devotion. Each region of Mexico has since shaped its own way of honoring this sacred time, weaving local customs into a shared national ritual of love and memory. Across the country, families prepare ofrendas—altars filled with marigolds, candles, photographs, and the favorite dishes of departed relatives—to welcome souls home for a brief visit. Cemeteries come alive with music, prayer, and light, transforming grief into celebration. It is a time not of mourning, but of reunion and gratitude—a living dialogue between generations that transcends the limits of time and loss. This year’s thirty-ninth annual exhibition is dedicated to the memory of the many lives lost in the devastating floods that struck Texas and New Mexico, transforming collective sorrow into a space of reflection and renewal. Visitors are invited to step into the museum’s Courtyard, where an immersive installation created by the youth artists of Yollocalli Arts Reach reimagines the traditional nicho box through vibrant, contemporary forms. At the heart of the space, a community ofrenda invites all to contribute notes, drawings, or tokens of remembrance, building together a tapestry of shared humanity. Curated by Elisa Soto, Dolores Mercado, and Cesáreo Moreno, the exhibition honors the timeless cycle of life and death—celebrating memory as both inheritance and hope. Image: Grave Decorating in Tzintzuntzan (Decoración de tumbas en Tzintzuntzan), 2010, digital photograph / fotografía digital, NMMA Permanent Collection, 2014.258.79, Gift of the artist

Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba, 1948–1985) remains one of the most evocative voices of 20th-century art, known for merging body, nature, and spirit in profoundly poetic gestures. Her work Grass Breathing (c. 1974) stands as a haunting meditation on the connection between human life and the living earth. In this short film, Mendieta uses the rhythm of her own breath to animate a small patch of grass, transforming it into a pulsing, anthropomorphic form—alive, intimate, and momentary. The piece blurs the line between performance and sculpture, suggesting that the earth itself participates in the act of living and dying alongside the human body. Although often associated with the New York art scene, Mendieta’s creative roots run deep in Iowa. She spent much of her life in the state and produced over sixty-five films there between 1971 and 1981, many exploring what she called “earth-body” work—a term that captures her search for unity between the physical self and the natural world. Grass Breathing exemplifies this vision, embodying both personal ritual and universal renewal. The gentle rise and fall of the soil echo Mendieta’s breath, suggesting cycles of presence and absence, creation and decay. Recently acquired by the Art Center, Grass Breathing expands the institution’s commitment to collecting works that bridge the personal and the elemental, the ephemeral and the eternal. Ana Mendieta: Grass Breathing is organized by Associate Curator Ashton Cooper and invites viewers to experience art not as a static object, but as a living pulse shared between artist, earth, and time itself. Image: Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba, 1948-1985) Grass Breathing, c.1974 Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Purchased with funds from the Stanley and Gail Richards Art Acquisition Endowment; the Sharon Simmons Art Acquisitions Fund; and the Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc., 2025.11 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artists Right Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Jamel Shabazz’s photography offers a vivid chronicle of urban life, friendship, and resilience from the 1980s to today. His lens captures the essence of community—moments of laughter among friends, the quiet pride of families, and the expressive power of style and self-presentation. Deeply rooted in the culture of the streets, his images reflect the rise of hip-hop as both a musical and visual movement, revealing how fashion, rhythm, and attitude became intertwined forms of identity and empowerment. Whether in black-and-white or color, Shabazz’s photographs radiate warmth and humanity, transforming ordinary encounters into timeless celebrations of connection. The exhibition Love Is the Message marks the fiftieth anniversary of Shabazz’s career and showcases a remarkable selection from his personal archive—prints, cameras, and memorabilia that trace the evolution of his artistic journey. Each image, whether of a Brooklyn block or a moment shared between strangers, testifies to his belief that photography can heal, uplift, and build understanding. His work embodies love not as sentimentality but as a force of dignity and collective memory. Curated in partnership with “Team Love,” the exhibition brings together Jamel Shabazz, Robert “Dupreme” Eatman, Dr. Bilal Polson, Erik Sumner, and the Hofstra University Museum of Art. The presentation is further enriched by the inclusion of Terry Adkins’s Native Son (Circus) (2006) and Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s Bronzeville at Night (1949), works that resonate with the themes of rhythm, visibility, and community pride that define Shabazz’s vision. Accompanied by a series of public programs supported by state arts funding, Love Is the Message invites visitors to reflect on the unifying strength of love, art, and shared experience—affirming photography’s power to connect people across generations and geographies. Image: Jamel Shabazz (American, born 1960) A Time of Innocence Series. East Flatbush. 1980 C-Print 16 x 20 inches Courtesy of the artist © Jamel Shabazz

Stevenson Library at Bard College presents Melissa Shook: Freedom to Create, curated by Fiona Laugharn, an independent curator and Bard alumna. On view from September 18 through December 19, 2025, the exhibition celebrates the enduring influence of Bard on the artistic and intellectual life of Melissa Shook, who studied at the college between 1959 and 1961. The opening reception will take place on September 25, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM. At just seventeen, Shook wrote in her Bard application, “I have begun to realize how important freedom is for the person who desires to create in any way.” This early insight into the nature of creativity becomes the guiding thread of the exhibition. Drawn from a recent gift by her daughter, Krissy Shook, the presentation gathers an extraordinary array of personal materials—letters, essays, photographs, and ceramics—alongside a rich selection of handmade artist books and camera equipment. Highlights include prints and contact sheets from Shook’s iconic series Daily Self-Portraits 1972–1973 and Wellfleet (1973), which together capture her lifelong exploration of identity, discipline, and the passage of time. Through correspondence, annotated drafts, and early works, Freedom to Create maps the evolution of a young woman who came to Bard as an English major and left on a path toward becoming one of the most reflective and independent voices in American photography. The exhibition reveals how the environment of freedom and curiosity that Bard fostered served as both inspiration and foundation for Shook’s later work as an artist and educator at the University of Massachusetts Boston. By pairing archival fragments with completed artworks, the exhibition encourages visitors to reflect on their own creative beginnings. It asks a question that Shook herself might have posed: What do we require—internally and externally—to create freely? Image: Kemper Peacock Melissa Shook, ca. 1960s Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches © Kristina Shook & The Estate of M. Melissa Shook

Daniel Cooney is pleased to present Shirttail Kin – New Work, the first solo exhibition with Texas-born artist Chivas Clem. Opening one year after his solo museum survey at the Dallas Contemporary, this exhibition features 14 never-before-seen photographs from Clem’s ongoing series Shirttail Kin, a project that began in 2012. The series’ title draws from Southern vernacular, referring to someone considered family through affection rather than blood, setting the tone for a body of work steeped in intimacy, connection, and observation. Shirttail Kin documents young white men living in and around Northeast Texas and Southeast Oklahoma, near Clem’s hometown of Paris, Texas. The photographs present the subjects mostly unclothed, captured within the private and public spaces of motels, trailer parks, abandoned houses, and Clem’s own studio. Some figures pose deliberately, while others are recorded in candid moments, creating a fluid tension between performance and authenticity. Through these depictions, Clem examines themes of masculinity, class, power, and eroticism, while also highlighting the visibility and self-presentation of this marginalized community. Clem has described his models as actors in an unscripted film, emphasizing the improvisational quality of each image. Beyond individual portrayal, the series reflects broader societal concerns, exploring the vulnerabilities of rural working-class life and the shifting notions of masculinity within contemporary culture. The photographs subtly interrogate the larger cultural and political pressures faced by these communities, offering both critique and empathy. Born in 1971 in Paris, Texas, and currently based there, Chivas Clem is a multimedia artist working across photography, film, sculpture, and painting. A graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Clem is also the founder of the influential New York artist space The Fifth International. Shirttail Kin – New Work underscores Clem’s ongoing exploration of identity, community, and the cinematic potential of everyday life, presenting a deeply personal yet socially resonant vision of contemporary rural America. Image: Chivas Clem Chris on the Red River, 2025 Archival inkjet print 40 x 30" © Chivas Clem

Richard Misrach: Rewind at Fraenkel Gallery offers an expansive view of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, presenting a journey backward through five decades of artistic evolution. Organized in reverse chronology, the exhibition moves from Misrach’s recent series Cargo—a meditation on global trade and its environmental and human costs—to his early 1970s project Telegraph 3 A.M., which captured Berkeley’s street culture in the aftermath of the counterculture movement. Together, the works form a compelling portrait of an artist who has continually balanced social engagement with formal and aesthetic inquiry. Across film, digital, and large-scale prints, Misrach’s photography embraces both technical experimentation and emotional resonance. His images of freighter ships illuminated by sunrise hues of pink and violet in San Francisco Bay reflect a fascination with beauty as a vehicle for deeper reflection. As Misrach has stated, beauty can compel viewers to confront issues they might otherwise turn away from. This balance between allure and unease runs throughout his practice—from his haunting documentation of the U.S.–Mexico border wall and Louisiana’s polluted Cancer Alley to his meditative seascapes and desert landscapes. Each image captures a world suspended between stillness and consequence. Since his early experiments with night photography in the American West, Misrach has pursued the intersection of the sublime and the political. Series such as Desert Cantos explore humanity’s complex relationship with nature, while later works like Golden Gate and On the Beach translate natural phenomena into near-abstractions of light, color, and form. His ongoing engagement with abstraction reaches a new dimension in Notations, where inverted negatives reveal ethereal patterns and textures otherwise unseen. Through five decades, Misrach has remained steadfast in his exploration of photography’s capacity to illuminate both the beauty and the fragility of the world we inhabit. Image: Self Portrait, 1975 gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches (sheet) [40.6 x 50.8 cm] © Richard Misrach

303 Gallery presents Stephen Shore: Early Work, an exhibition highlighting the formative years of one of photography’s most influential figures. Spanning the period from 1960 to 1965, the show showcases a selection of largely unpublished photographs taken during Shore’s teenage years in New York City. Coinciding with the release of his book Early Work, published by MACK, this presentation provides a rare glimpse into the artist’s early creative explorations and the beginnings of a vision that would later reshape contemporary photography. The works on view capture a young Shore experimenting with the medium in both technical and conceptual ways. These black and white photographs reveal an artist eager to explore film types, developers, and printing techniques, laying the groundwork for his precise attention to light, composition, and color that would define his mature work. Each image reflects a curiosity about urban life, objects, and everyday moments, offering an intimate portrait of a city in transition as seen through the eyes of a keen observer still discovering his artistic voice. Taken before his famed series The Velvet Years, shot at Warhol’s Factory, these early works provide an alternate view of New York in the early 1960s, one that is both personal and socially resonant. They show Shore’s early interest in sequencing, framing, and the visual narrative—a foundation that would later inform his celebrated series Conceptual Sequences, American Surfaces, and Uncommon Places. The exhibition traces the evolution of a young photographer developing his technical fluency while also probing the texture of everyday life. Stephen Shore: Early Work invites viewers to witness the nascent stages of a remarkable photographic career, offering insights into the experimentation, observation, and perceptive sensibilities that would later make Shore a defining voice in the documentation of contemporary America. Image: Stephen Shore New York, New York, 1964 1964 Gelatin Silver Print 9 3/8 x 14 inches (23.8 x 35.6 cm) image size 11 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches (29.8 x 41.9 cm) paper size Edition of 5, with 2 AP SS 3662 © Stephen Shore

Anxiety of Amnesia brings together the intertwined visions of Andrea Wenglowskyj and her late father, Bohdan, through a dialogue that spans more than six decades. Combining original imagery, found archival photographs, and text, the exhibition explores how memory and photography overlap to shape identity, belonging, and grief. The project delves into the quiet power of vernacular photography—those intimate, everyday images that often outlast their creators—and questions who owns the stories they preserve. Through this layered conversation between past and present, Wenglowskyj reimagines her father’s absence as a space for connection, creating a tender exchange that bridges generations. The genesis of the project lies in a trunk her father left behind after his death in 2000—filled with photographs, negatives, and their worn packaging. Once an attorney and a young Ukrainian immigrant, Bohdan photographed his surroundings with curiosity and care, documenting a life of adaptation and memory. By juxtaposing his images with her own, Andrea constructs an imagined dialogue, written directly on the gallery walls, where she and her father converse as peers—as artists, parents, and companions in loss. The result is both personal and universal, inviting viewers to reflect on how photography transforms recollection into presence. Andrea Wenglowskyj, based in Buffalo, New York, is a photo-based artist and commercial photographer. A Fulbright Grant recipient, she spent time in Ukraine exploring the country’s cultural identity through its artists and institutions. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times and NPR, and exhibited at venues including Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, Galerie Amu in Prague, and The Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver. Anxiety of Amnesia is supported by Arts Services Inc., the New York State Council on the Arts, and Erie County. Image: Anxiety of Amnesia By Andrea Wenglowskyj © Andrea Wenglowskyj

Jenkins Johnson Gallery announces its exciting return to Manhattan through a collaborative alliance with Marian Goodman Gallery. Over the next twelve months, Jenkins Johnson will present a series of exhibitions on the third floor of Marian Goodman Gallery at 385 Broadway in New York. This partnership between two members of the Art Dealers Association of America reflects the cooperative and forward-thinking ethos that defines the city’s vibrant art community. While both galleries will continue to operate independently, this shared endeavor offers audiences a rare opportunity to experience two distinct programs in conversation. For Jenkins Johnson, the return to Manhattan marks a full-circle moment. Founded in San Francisco in 1996, the gallery established its presence in Chelsea in 2005 before relocating to Brooklyn in 2017 to open Jenkins Johnson Projects. The new chapter in Tribeca reaffirms its commitment to fostering dynamic artistic dialogues across neighborhoods and generations. The debut exhibition in this renewed Manhattan space will be Believable, a solo presentation by acclaimed New York artist Lola Flash. Opening on November 8th, with a public conversation between Flash and Rhea L. Combs of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition revisits four decades of Flash’s groundbreaking practice. From the iconic Cross Colour series of the 1980s and 1990s—created in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis—to recent works exploring gender, race, and identity, Flash’s photographs stand at the intersection of activism and art. Widely recognized for challenging cultural norms through a genderqueer lens, Flash’s work is represented in major museum collections, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Through Believable, Jenkins Johnson Gallery celebrates an artist whose visual and political legacy continues to shape contemporary photographic discourse. Image: Lola Flash, Cow Girl (Cross Colour Series), c. 1994, chromogenic print 24 x 20 in © Lola Flash

Yancey Richardson is proud to present Resident Aliens, a new body of work by Guanyu Xu, marking the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Xu’s practice, which fuses photography, installation, and social engagement, investigates the intersection of personal identity and state-imposed structures. Building on earlier work exploring the tension between his queer identity and familial expectations, Xu’s latest series turns toward the intimate domestic lives of immigrants navigating complex political and bureaucratic landscapes. On view from October 30 through December 20, 2025, the exhibition illuminates the intricate ways individual experience is shaped by legal and social frameworks. Since 2019, Xu has visited homes across the United States and China—including Chicago, New York, Beijing, and Shanghai—meeting participants whose lives are entangled with immigration procedures. Within these private spaces, he engages with subjects to understand their stories and document their environments. Participants select personal photographs from their archives, which Xu incorporates alongside his own imagery to construct layered installations. These arrangements are then photographed to create complex collage-like images, merging perspectives and questioning notions of authorship, intimacy, and social documentation. The resulting works juxtapose personal memories with broader sociopolitical conditions. Cityscapes, fleeting portraits, and snapshots of everyday life coexist with meticulously arranged archival images, revealing both vulnerability and resilience. Xu emphasizes the impossibility of fully capturing or asserting one’s identity under the scrutiny of bureaucratic systems, where visa applications and documentation often reduce human experience to quantifiable proof. In Resident Aliens, the personal and political are inseparable. Within the home—a space traditionally considered safe—the works expose the fragility of security, the weight of external pressures, and the ongoing negotiation of presence and belonging. Xu’s immersive approach transforms private narratives into poignant reflections on displacement, identity, and the precariousness of life in a globalized, regulated world. Guanyu Xu (b. 1993, Beijing) lives and works between Chicago and Beijing. His multi-disciplinary practice investigates the dynamics of personal freedom, queer identity, and the politics of power across transnational contexts, employing photography, new media, and installation to explore the complexities of contemporary life. Image: Guanyu Xu, AK-08102008-05032021, 2021 © Guanyu Xu

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Homeland, an exhibition featuring Larry Sultan’s series of the same name, marking the artist’s third collaboration with the gallery. In this body of work, Sultan turns his lens to Latino day laborers positioned within the suburban landscapes of California, capturing moments suspended between movement and stillness. Drawing inspiration from the tradition of landscape painting, his images evoke order while simultaneously emphasizing ambiguity and uncertainty, revealing the latent possibilities that emerge in quiet intervals. The exhibition will be on view in the project gallery from October 30 through December 20, 2025, with an opening reception on Thursday, October 30 from 6–8PM. Over two years, Sultan visited lumber yards and hardware stores in the Bay Area and Simi Valley, where men congregated daily seeking temporary work. Rather than photographing them simply as laborers, he invited them to perform within the landscape, choreographing their postures and expressions across suburban margins. The resulting tableaux are neither dramatic nor dynamic but deliberate, capturing the tension of waiting and the rhythms of daily life. Each image explores the interplay between longing, melancholy, and possibility, suggesting that even the mundane holds unexpected potential. Sultan’s attention to overlooked spaces—fields behind strip malls, borderlands along the LA River—reflects a lifelong fascination with the places that shaped his childhood in the San Fernando Valley. By revisiting these environments, Homeland interrogates notions of suburban identity, blending the ordinary with subtle layers of anticipation and quiet reflection. The series challenges assumptions about domesticity, labor, and the landscapes we inhabit, creating images that feel both specific and universal. Throughout his career, Sultan merged documentary and staged photography to examine the psychological and physical contours of suburban life. From Pictures From Home to The Valley and Katherine Avenue, his work interrogated reality, fantasy, and desire, embedding cultural meaning within everyday spaces. Homeland continues this exploration, offering a poetic vision of people, place, and the subtle interplay between presence and possibility in the Californian landscape. Image: Larry Sultan, Antioch Creek, 2008. © Larry Sultan

Channeling: body viewer features works by eleven international artists who communicate through and with the body. The featured artists draw on diverse approaches and means to deliberately activate direct connections with the viewer. These communications position the viewer to experience a heightened awareness of their self and body, or to explore how bodies channel and confront societal malaise and oppression. Varied gestures—crawling, lying, climbing, kneeling, pointing, running, walking backwards—evoke memory, history, and rhetoric. These actions also call attention to the senses and physicality of skin, touch, voice, hearing, and sight. Situating the body politic and ways in which histories imprint upon us, and as a counter to the disembodiment of remote screen culture, these works remind us that we humans are both in, and of, the body. Channeling: body viewer includes photography, video, and installations that memorialize, witness, and bear tribute to our humanity. Curated by Joan Giroux (US) and Alice Maude-Roxby (UK), Channeling: body viewer includes works from the 1970s to the present by Laura Aguilar, Pia Arke, EJ Hill, Susan Hiller, Ketty La Rocca, Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, Gustav Metzger, Paulo Nazareth, Anna Oppermann, Gina Pane, and Bridget Smith. 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

The first issue of Provoke magazine, published in Tokyo in November 1968, declared that “we as photographers must capture with our own eyes the fragments of reality that can no longer be grasped through existing language.” With this manifesto, Provoke encapsulated the energy of a time in which established conventions were discarded, and a new generation experimented with fresh outlooks and new technologies that shattered assumptions of what a photograph could be. Photobooks became the primary vehicle for transmitting radical approaches to visuality, and photographers transformed the fields of design, sculpture, installation, and film. This exhibition focuses on three innovations developed in Japan in the 1970s—are-bure-boke (grainy-blurry-out of focus), konpora (contemporary), and I-photography (first-person). These intertwined concepts profoundly impacted late-twentieth-century Japanese culture and art around the world.    Photographers featured include Shōtarō Akiyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Shigeo Gocho, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Kosuke Kimura, Jun Morinaga, Daido Moriyama, Masatoshi Naito, Takuma Nakahira, Tamiko Nishimura, Yutaka Takanashi, and Shomei Tomatsu. Special thanks to Hirsch Library and the Manfred Heiting Book Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Anton Kern Gallery, and Alison Bradley Projects for generously loaning artworks for this exhibition, which is presented in conjunction with the 2025 Louisville Photo Biennial.  Image: Masatoshi Naito, [a street performer swallowing a snake], in Ken, no. 2 (pp. 22-23), October 1970, magazine, 9 x 7 ½ x 1/2 inches (23 x 18.9 x 1.3 cm). Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Manfred Heiting Book Collection. Photo: Paul Hester, Hester + Hardaway Photographers. .

The Hemispheric Institute at New York University presents Huracán Architectures, a new exhibition by Puerto Rican photographer Ruben Natal-San Miguel. For almost a decade, Natal-San Miguel has situated his practice at the intersection of the island’s devastating financial crisis and the deterioration and disappearance of its vernacular architecture as a result of neglect, mass migration, and the catastrophic weather events that define climate change in the region. Beginning with his photographic series Paradise Ruined (2016), the artist has sought to capture the process through which Puerto Rico, in his own words, “already strained to the breaking point by financial woes, population exodus, widespread addiction, and two natural disasters, is entering a pivotal time in its history.” In Huracán Architectures, Natal-San Miguel, a trained architect, captures this pivotal moment through his focus on the island’s vernacular architecture as both a hallowed marker of nationhood and an amalgam of traditions brought together through adaptations to the island’s environment and weather. The island’s vulnerability to climate events—hurricanes, floods, landslides, and the encroaching rising seas—is captured by Natal-San Miguel, whose photographs document the devastating effects of a misplaced economic austerity that has subjected the Puerto Rican population, as well as the built environment through which its cultural history has been expressed, to acute dislocation and loss. His images juxtapose the island’s luminous beauty, exuberant nature, and riotous colors, with the destruction wrought by a climate change generated in a first-world elsewhere. The exhibition is part of “Hurricane Worlds,” a multi-year initiative led by Institute Director Ana Dopico that seeks to gather the epistemologies, world-making, and art-making of people who live and have lived in hurricane worlds. We look beyond environmental and climatological surveillance, state emergency management, and crisis capitalism to consider the ways of life and ways of knowing that hurricanes inaugurate. We consider how hurricanes build modes of sovereignty and care, and we seek to preserve the vernacular histories and communal archives that survive in hurricane time.

Arthur and Anne Goldstein’s passion for photography marked the beginning of a remarkable collecting journey that has enriched the cultural landscape of the Zimmerli Art Museum. Their generous donation of nearly one hundred photographs offers an intimate glimpse into the evolving language of twentieth-century art, where photography emerged not merely as documentation, but as a medium of experimentation, performance, and personal expression. The exhibition presents thirty black-and-white works that capture the bold creativity of the late twentieth century. Among the highlights is a rare early self-portrait by Robert Rauschenberg, revealing the artist’s fascination with self-construction and visual play long before his groundbreaking mixed-media works. Equally striking is Hannah Wilke’s performalist self-portrait with Donald Goddard from her series So Help Me Hannah, in which she explored identity, vulnerability, and the performative nature of femininity through the lens of her camera. Beyond these iconic figures, the exhibition unfolds through an array of portraits, landscapes, and urban vignettes that portray both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Each photograph reflects a moment of tension between reality and invention—whether in the stark geometry of a cityscape, the intimacy of a human gesture, or the subtle choreography of light and shadow. Together, these works trace photography’s transformation into an avant-garde tool that questions perception, challenges conventions, and redefines artistic truth. By situating these photographs within the broader dialogue of contemporary art, the Zimmerli Art Museum celebrates not only the Goldsteins’ discerning eye but also the enduring power of photography to shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. This collection, rich in history and imagination, honors a moment when the camera became a means of both introspection and invention, bridging art and life in lasting ways. Image: Robert Riger, "Willie Mays Steals Third Base, Brooklyn, NY", 1955. Gelatin silver print on paper. Gift of Anne and Arthur Goldstein. © Robert Riger

In conjunction with the long-awaited unveiling of STORIES: The AIDS Monument in West Hollywood, the Herb Ritts Foundation, in partnership with Fahey/Klein Gallery, and ONE Gallery, is proud to present Herb Ritts: Allies & Icons – an intimate exhibition of Herb Ritts’ photographs that honor the activists, artists, and cultural leaders who helped transform the global fight against AIDS. Herb Ritts (1952–2002) is one of the most celebrated photographers of the late 20th century and early 21st century. His approach to the medium was always fresh and bold, while simultaneously capturing the strength and vulnerability of his subjects. With his clean modernist style, bold contrasts, and sculptural forms, Ritts transformed his subjects into enduring icons. In the spirit of the AIDS Monument itself, the photographs on view remember, celebrate, and educate with portraits of those that confronted one of history’s greatest crises. This exhibition, Herb Ritts: Allies & Icons, brings together striking black & white portraits of the cultural figures who stood at the forefront of AIDS activism — including Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John, Magic Johnson, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Sharon Stone, Tina Turner, Keith Haring, and many others. Each subject used their voice, fame, and influence to fight stigma, support research, and bring compassion to a world gripped by fear. “Herb photographed the icons of his time. The notorious, the edgy, the culturally significant, and in doing so, gave us a visual record of an era marked by both beauty and profound loss. He sought not just to portray but to reveal, coaxing from his subjects a vulnerability that could disarm and a power that could inspire.” David Fahey, founder of Fahey/Klein Gallery and co-curator of Herb Ritts: Allies & Icons. The exhibition coincides with the dedication of STORIES: The AIDS Monument, a collaboration between the City of West Hollywood and the Foundation for the AIDS Monument (FAM). The Monument, designed by artist Daniel Tobin, honors the lives lost, the survivors, and the communities and caregivers who fought tirelessly for dignity, treatment, and remembrance. Ritts himself lived with AIDS and was a steadfast supporter of amfAR, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Project Angel Food, APLA, and was a charter member for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. He used his platform to shift the narrative from silence to compassion, contributing books such as Duo and Notorious to raise significant funds for AIDS research and awareness. The exhibition is presented in partnership with the Herb Ritts Foundation and coincides with the public dedication of STORIES: The AIDS Monument on November 16, 2025, at West Hollywood Park, followed by a community celebration at The Abbey. For more information about STORIES | The Foundation for the AIDS Monument, please visit: aidsmonument.org. Image: Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Hollywood, 1992 Silver Gelatin Photograph 20 x 16 inches Signed, titled, dated, numbered verso Signed by Herb Ritts © Herb Ritts

This exhibition celebrates the six-decade-long photographic practice of Kunié Sugiura, highlighting her relentless experimentation and her capacity to merge scientific curiosity with artistic vision. Born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942, Sugiura was among the first students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to focus on photography during the 1960s. Since moving to New York City in 1974, she has maintained a studio practice that consistently challenges conventional boundaries, producing works that exist independently of the prevailing trends and discourses that have shaped photography over the decades. Sugiura’s oeuvre spans sculptural assemblages that integrate photography with painting, large-scale photographic canvases, and inventive photograms exploring botanical, human, and animal forms. Her approach often emphasizes process and experimentation, allowing chance, transformation, and the inherent properties of materials to guide her visual explorations. Through this lens, photography becomes not merely a tool for documentation but a medium for discovery, reflection, and poetic resonance. Despite her long-standing life and career in the United States, Sugiura retains deep connections to her Japanese heritage, which subtly informs her work. These influences surface in both the delicate sensibilities and conceptual rigor of her imagery, revealing an attentiveness to nature, temporality, and cultural memory. Flowers, animals, human gestures, and geological formations appear across her works, each element revealing both playful observation and meditative inquiry. Across every phase of her practice, Sugiura has explored the intersections of place, time, and identity, producing works that invite viewers to reconsider the possibilities of photographic expression. By embracing experimentation, hybridity, and discovery, her images offer a distinctive vision of the medium, where observation, imagination, and process converge. This exhibition traces the innovative trajectory of her career, providing insight into a lifetime of exploration and the unique ways in which she continues to expand the language of photography. Image: © Kunié Sugiura

Mónica de Miranda, born in Portugal to Angolan parents in 1976, belongs to a generation shaped by both liberation and aftermath. Emerging just after Portugal’s withdrawal from its African colonies and the fall of dictatorship, her work probes the lingering marks of colonialism—those etched not only onto landscapes but also into memory and identity. Across photography, film, and installation, de Miranda constructs poetic spaces where history and imagination merge. Her images—abandoned colonial structures overtaken by foliage, solitary Black figures wandering through radiant terrains, and the intertwining of text and image—offer meditations on freedom, loss, and the cyclical renewal of nature. Path to the Stars follows the journey of a woman veteran of Angola’s War of Independence as she travels along the Kwanza River, a site burdened with historical resonance. Once a route of both conquest and enslavement, the river becomes, through de Miranda’s lens, a realm of renewal and reflection. The film blurs the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical—the natural pulse of life along the river intertwines with spectral presences and ancestral echoes. Birds, insects, and flowing water merge with voices from the past, suggesting a world where the living and the departed coexist in fragile harmony. Drawing inspiration from Portuguese and Angolan literary traditions, de Miranda invokes the poem Path to the Stars by Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first president and a key figure in its struggle for independence. The film’s title and imagery echo both his vision of hope and the monumental mausoleum built in his honor. Through her work, de Miranda reimagines the intersections of politics, ecology, and spirituality, transforming sites of historical trauma into places of restoration and transcendence. This exhibition, curated by Gemma Rodrigues with Sofia Liv Iagnemma ’28, honors de Miranda’s poetic reclamation of landscape, history, and self. Image: © Mónica de Miranda

Between Seeing and Feeling explores the profound relationship between vision and touch, revealing how photography can capture the essence of human emotion through more than sight alone. Drawing from the California Museum of Photography’s permanent collection, the exhibition presents over thirty photographs by artists such as Graciela Iturbide, Vivian Maier, Kenji Nakahashi, and Catherine Opie. Together, their works trace a tactile history of the medium, where the act of seeing becomes inseparable from the act of feeling. Though photography is often considered a visual art, the selected works challenge this assumption by emphasizing the sensory depth inherent in images. Textures, gestures, and physical presence echo through each frame, suggesting warmth, vulnerability, and connection. The exhibition is inspired by the idea of the haptic turn—a growing awareness of how art engages all the senses, not only the eyes. Here, photographs become almost tangible, inviting the viewer to sense the weight of a hand, the softness of skin, or the quiet energy of a shared space. In this context, touch emerges as both subject and metaphor. It represents the intimacy between photographer and subject, as well as the emotional contact forged between image and audience. Through this lens, the works in Between Seeing and Feeling evoke movement, sound, and empathy, extending photography’s boundaries beyond its flat surface. Organized in the wake of a global pandemic—a time when physical connection became limited—the exhibition offers a meditation on distance and closeness, absence and presence. It invites viewers to reconsider the emotional capacity of photography, reminding us that images can reach us not only through our eyes but also through our sense of touch. In bridging the gap between vision and sensation, these photographs reveal what it truly means to feel an image. Image: Kenji Nakahashi, Memory (Saye’s Memory), 1985. Collection of the California Museum of Photography/UCR ARTS, anonymous gift in memory of Kenji Nakahashi. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.

Erik Madigan Heck is one of the most sought-after photographers working today, attracting collaborations and commissions from fashion and cultural icons such as Comme des Garçons, Gucci, Nike, and The Metropolitan Opera. He is praised for his talent to use color as a poetic medium, transforming each image into a vivid narrative that speaks to the emotional resonance of photography. The Tapestry marks a creative evolution in Heck’s artistic journey. This body of work infuses his love of painting and textile arts into his fashion sensibility. Inspired by the ambient light of Edgar Degas, patterned interiors of Edouard Vuillard and Gustav Klimt, and rich textures of antique tapestries, this series is a romantic exploration of color and form. Widely collected in both private and public collections, his work is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The flowing, lyrical design in Heck’s newest monograph, The Tapestry (2024), presents more than one hundred and eighty photographs in a richly colorful and immersive new collection that spans photography, fashion and broader spectrum of visual art. This will be Heck’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Image: Vogue Italia Reconstructed, The Tapestry, 2023, Erik Madigan Heck

Saïdou Dicko’s work is deeply personal, drawing inspiration from his home in West Africa, Burkina Faso, incorporating textiles and the rich tradition of African studio photography. Each of Dicko’s works is a unique object, no two are the same. On view in the gallery will be two, new bodies of work: vibrant photographs with digital textile backgrounds from the Shadowed People, and a brand-new series entitled Fragile. In Fragile, Dicko reveals his hand as a painter, enveloping his subject with washes of color, floral vines and tendrils, and along the border has adhered ‘fragile tape’ used in transporting precious objects and works of art — perhaps a comment on the fragility of the environment, human life, or childhood. For the Shadowed People, Dicko hand-paints each subject thereby creating a silhouetted form; the backgrounds are vivid patterns and colors from Fulani cloth—an homage to the resilience of traditional West African craftsmanship in the face of global industrialization. Dicko is both an artist and humanitarian: 50% of his sales benefit the artist’s non-profit organization, Nafoore Cellal, which has built a health center, pharmacy, and organic vegetable garden in a pastoral zone in Burkina Faso. Dicko has been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions and been honored with significant photography prizes in Europe and Africa. He lives and works in both Burkina Faso and Paris. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Image: Untitled, 2025, Hand-painted archival pigment print; digital collage without retouching © Saïdou Dicko

Over his nearly six-decade career, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) continually captured the zeitgeist of his time, from moon landings to the globalization of contemporary art. For his paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and performances he mined cultural detritus, imagery, and objects. Through stacking, layering, and transferring elements into nonlinear narratives, Rauschenberg achieved what he believed was a true representation of the twentieth century: “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines, by the excesses of the world . . . I thought an honest work should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality.” The term “flatbed picture plane” in this show’s title refers to the flatbed printing press, a horizontal bed in which a surface to be printed rests. Art historian Leo Steinberg coined the phrase during a lecture in 1968, claiming it denoted a monumental perspectival shift that took place in artmaking in the early 1950s: from the vertical to horizontal. Steinberg believed this change began with artists including Rauschenberg who, rather than continue to employ the “window to the world” approach—one that “affirms verticality” and had dominated painting since the Renaissance—began treating artwork surfaces as if they were horizontal tabletops or studio floors. They also shifted their subject matter from nature to culture: “The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.” This exhibition examines Rauschenberg’s work through the concept of Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane. Created with a variety of printmaking techniques, each of the works presented here was conceived with horizontality in mind and reveals new images and meanings as the beholder meanders through the composition. Acquired for Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection between 1970 and 2018, the nine editioned works in this exhibition are presented together for the very first time. Robert Rauschenberg and the Flatbed Picture Plane is organized by Christian Wurst, associate curator for exhibitions.

The Griffin Museum is excited to present Gathering Place | A Family Album, an exhibition exploring the rituals, warmth, and complexities of coming together. From holiday dinners and everyday meals to quiet corners and inherited objects, the photographers featured in the show reflect on how we gather, remember, and connect. On view at the Jenks Center in Winchester, MA, from October 1 to January 3, 2026, Gathering Place | A Family Album brings together photographic works that celebrate the intimate spaces and shared traditions that define family—chosen or inherited—through still-lifes, portraits, domestic scenes, or elsewhere. Featured artists: Aga Luczakowska, Alexandra Frangiosa, Alina Balseiro, Ankita Singh, Ashley Smith, Betsy Woldman, Catie Keane, Chris Ireland, Christopher Perez, Cynthia Smith, Dana Matthews, David Manski, Diane Bush, Elizabeth Calderone, Faith Ninivaggi, Francine Weiss, Hannah Latham, Heather Pillar, Iaritza Menjivar, Isaac Glimka, John Benton, Julia Arstorp, Justin Carney, Kathy M. Manley, Ken Rothman, Xenia Nikolskaya, Kim-Sarah I, Laura Kirsch, Linda Moses, Magdalena Oliveros, Mona Sartoveh, Naomi Shon, Natia Ser, Peter Balentine, Sarah Malakoff, Shea Baasch, Steven Edson, Susan Lapides, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Talya Arbisser, Tristan Partridge and Virginia Nash. Image: Kayla, Roxbury, Massachusetts @ Linda Moses

Peter Fetterman Gallery presents Nouvelle Vague, an evocative survey celebrating the essence of French photography through the eyes of some of the twentieth century’s most admired artists. Bringing together works by Edouard Boubat, Raymond Cauchetier, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Sabine Weiss, and others, the exhibition pays tribute to a generation that forever transformed the language of visual storytelling in postwar France. Emerging from the ideals of the French Humanist movement of the 1930s, these photographers created a visual style that balanced documentary realism with poetic sensibility. Their images captured fleeting moments of tenderness, humor, and quiet beauty within the rhythms of everyday life. Whether depicting lovers in a Parisian street, children at play, or workers returning home at dusk, their work sought to reveal the universal dignity and emotional depth of human experience. Positioned between journalism and fine art, these photographs offered an empathetic lens through which to view a world rebuilding itself after the devastation of war. The Humanist spirit that animated these artists extended beyond photography, influencing film, literature, and visual art throughout the mid-twentieth century. Their collaborations with publications such as LIFE, Paris Match, and Vogue helped disseminate this lyrical realism to a global audience, shaping the visual identity of modern France. Today, these images endure as timeless meditations on connection, resilience, and the quiet poetry of the ordinary. Nouvelle Vague invites viewers to revisit the golden age of French photography while reflecting on its continuing relevance in a fractured contemporary world. The exhibition reaffirms photography’s enduring power to convey empathy and to remind us, across generations and borders, of our shared humanity. Image: Robert Doisneau 1912-1994 Le Baiser Blotto, 1950/Printed Later Signed in ink on recto; titled and dated in ink on verso Gelatin Silver Print Image: 14-1/8" x 11-3/4", Paper: 20" x 16", Mat 24" x 20"

Dawoud Bey: Elegy brings together three powerful photographic series—Stony the Road (2023), In This Here Place (2019), and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017)—to explore how the landscapes of Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio continue to hold the echoes of America’s past. Through these deeply reflective works, Bey reconsiders sites marked by slavery and resistance, transforming them into spaces where memory, imagination, and history converge. The exhibition also features two films, Evergreen (2019) and 350,000 (2023), expanding the dialogue between still and moving images while delving into the emotional resonance of these charged locations. In Stony the Road, Bey retraces the steps of more than 350,000 enslaved Africans who were forced to march to holding pens in Richmond, Virginia. The accompanying film, created with cinematographer Bron Moyi and choreographer Dr. E. Gaynelle Sherrod, reimagines this passage through a haunting visual and sonic meditation. With In This Here Place, the artist turns his lens to former plantations near New Orleans, focusing on architecture and land as silent witnesses to human suffering and endurance. The film Evergreen, paired with this series, heightens the emotional atmosphere through the voice and music of composer Imani Uzuri. The third series, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, evokes the perilous journey of those who sought freedom along the Underground Railroad. Bey’s black-and-white prints are enveloped in deep tonal shadows, allowing viewers to sense both the fear and hope of that nocturnal passage. Across all three bodies of work, Bey’s art becomes a meditation on presence—how the earth itself remembers. Dawoud Bey: Elegy asks us to confront the enduring legacies of slavery and to recognize the landscapes of the American South and North as living vessels of collective memory. Image: Untitled (Tangled Branches) 2023 Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) Gelatin silver print Image: 44 x 55 in., Paper: 48 x 59 in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Mrs. Alfred duPont, by exchange, 2020.168.4. © Dawoud Bey

The View From Here: Women Photographers of the American Landscape brings together a remarkable range of artists who have shaped, challenged, and redefined the way we see the natural world. The exhibition includes works by internationally recognized figures such as Laura Gilpin and Lilian De Cocke Morgan, alongside regional voices like Stephanie Dinkins and Suzanne Camp Crosby. For photographers Marion Post Wolcott and Berenice Abbott—celebrated for their depictions of urban life—these images reveal another side of their artistry, showcasing their skill in capturing the subtleties of landscape and light. Imogen Cunningham and Ellen Land-Weber expand the very notion of what a landscape can be, merging poetic composition with surreal or experimental techniques. In contrast, contemporary artists like Dionne Lee and Sally Mann turn their gaze inward, using the landscape as a means of reflection on identity, ancestry, and belonging. Their images situate personal histories within larger terrains, allowing nature to serve as both witness and participant in the shaping of human experience. The year 2025 marks the fortieth anniversary of Deborah Bright’s groundbreaking essay “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry in the Cultural Meanings of Photography.” Bright called for a deeper understanding of photography—one that considers the historical and cultural context of every image while highlighting the crucial yet often overlooked role of women photographers in defining the landscape tradition. Presented in this spirit, The View From Here invites viewers to look closely and think broadly about the American landscape, not just as a physical place but as a space of memory, imagination, and cultural meaning. Drawn entirely from NOMA’s collection, these photographs chart more than a century of artistic vision, revealing how women have continually reimagined the view from here. Image: Advertisement Near Black Mountain North Carolina 1939, printed later Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Gelatin silver print Museum purchase, General Acquisition Fund

Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive celebrates the vibrant histories and enduring spirit of New York City’s public housing residents through the lens of photographer Destiny Mata. What began as Mata’s personal effort to document her community has evolved into a collective act of memory, drawing from the photographs and personal archives of residents including Camille Napoleon, Promise Jimenez, Cheryl Kirwan, Aicha Cherif, and TC Rosario. Together, their contributions form a visual tapestry that captures the resilience, creativity, and intergenerational bonds that define the Lower East Side. Curated by Ali Rosa-Salas, Vice President of Visual and Performing Arts at Abrons Arts Center, with exhibition design by Anzia Anderson, the project situates photography as both testimony and tribute. Each image reflects not only the changing face of a neighborhood but also the deeper story of belonging—a story carried in gestures, gatherings, and the walls that have sheltered countless families. The archive lives and breathes, expanding as new voices join in the act of remembering. Destiny Mata, a Mexican American photographer and filmmaker born and raised in New York City, continues a familial legacy of image-making. With roots in wedding, fashion, and family photography, she inherited an understanding of photography as a means of connection. Mata’s lens focuses on the everyday beauty of her surroundings, exploring themes of gentrification, housing rights, and cultural survival. From documenting NYC’s punks of color to her ongoing commitment to the Lower East Side, her work honors the unseen and the overlooked. Through Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive, Mata invites viewers to look closely and remember deeply. The exhibition stands as a living document of a community’s shared past and a declaration that its stories, like its people, remain very much alive. Image: © Destiny Mata

Since 2002, Kelli Connell has been developing Double Life, a photographic series that examines the intimate dialogue we maintain with ourselves. At first glance, the images appear to depict two women in moments of shared affection, tension, or reflection. Yet each scene is a carefully composed illusion—every figure portrayed by a single model, Kiba Jacobson, who embodies both characters through Connell’s digital manipulation. This merging of identities transforms Double Life into a quiet study of the human psyche, revealing the contradictions that shape selfhood: desire and restraint, doubt and acceptance, solitude and connection. Connell’s work transcends portraiture, probing the emotional negotiations that define how we live with ourselves and, by extension, how we relate to others. In this mirror of the self, empathy becomes both subject and method. Her images evoke the private gestures of care, forgiveness, and conflict that form the architecture of emotional growth. Each photograph invites viewers to reflect on their own dualities and on the continuous dialogue between inner and outer worlds. In 2024, Connell was commissioned by The Progressive Corporation to extend her Double Life series around the theme of “Empathy” for the company’s annual report. These new works, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland from June 28, 2025, through January 4, 2026, join Progressive’s distinguished contemporary art collection. Through these pieces, Connell expands her exploration of self and other, using photography to visualize emotional intelligence and mutual understanding. Connell’s photographs are held in major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A professor at Columbia College Chicago, she continues to shape the dialogue between identity, representation, and the unseen emotional labor of being human. Image: Kelli Connell, Negotiation, 2025 © Kelli Connell

The exhibition Family Portrait gathers photographs from the Addison’s collection to explore how artists have represented the idea of family across nearly two centuries. From the earliest daguerreotypes to contemporary color prints, the exhibition traces the evolution of one of photography’s most enduring subjects. Through these works, the notion of family emerges not as a static construct but as a living, shifting web of relationships, emotions, and memories. Since photography’s beginnings in the nineteenth century, artists have used the camera to capture both the familiar and the extraordinary moments that define domestic life. Some have turned their lenses inward, documenting their own families in scenes that reveal tenderness, humor, and vulnerability. These images often expose the quiet rituals and fleeting gestures that shape everyday existence—the embrace of a child, the glance of a parent, the shared silence of grief or joy. In this way, photography becomes an intimate language of belonging and connection. Other photographers have approached the family portrait as a broader meditation on time, change, and memory. Their works extend beyond the personal to consider the social and cultural meanings attached to kinship. Through their compositions, we see how generations influence one another, how traditions endure or fade, and how images themselves act as vessels of remembrance. Whether solemn or exuberant, private or public, each photograph tells a story of continuity and loss, of affection and transformation. Family Portrait ultimately reveals how photography holds within it the paradox of family life—its constancy and its impermanence. As faces age and moments pass, the photograph endures, preserving traces of our shared humanity and reminding us that the act of looking is itself a form of connection across time. Image: Eugene Richards, Family Album, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 8 1/4 x 12 inches. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, museum purchase, 1977.134

Since its invention in 1826, photography has transformed the way we see, record, and interpret the world. What began as a scientific curiosity quickly evolved into one of the most influential art forms of modern times. This exhibition traces the remarkable journey of photography as both a documentary tool and a fine art practice, reflecting its growing prominence in museum collections. At the Telfair Museums, the photography collection has expanded impressively—from 400 works in 2015 to more than 1,100 today—marking a renewed commitment to the medium’s artistic and historical significance. The exhibition brings together a range of photographers whose work has shaped the trajectory of the field. Among them is Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938), a pioneer of large-format color photography whose vivid, nuanced images helped legitimize color as a serious artistic language in the 1970s. Equally important is Helen Levitt (1913–2009), whose lyrical street scenes of New York captured the spontaneity of urban life. Working in a male-dominated field, Levitt’s photographs reveal both empathy and humor, giving voice to the ordinary moments that define human experience. The exhibition also honors the South’s deep relationship with the photographic image. Historic works such as George Barnard’s (1819–1902) post–Civil War views of Savannah’s River Street provide a striking record of change and endurance. Contemporary artists continue this dialogue with the region, including Savannah-based photojournalist Jason Miccolo Johnson (b. 1956). His moving image of a pastor standing before a burned church speaks to the intertwined forces of tragedy and faith, capturing both loss and resilience. Ultimately, this exhibition is a celebration of photography’s ability to shape memory, culture, and imagination. It reminds us that photographs are not merely reflections of reality—they are acts of vision, interpretation, and art. Image: Helen Levitt (1913-2009); New York, c. 1942; vintage gelatin silver print; gift of Mimi Muray Levitt, 2019.35. © Helen Levitt

Seven Days: The Still Lifes of Chuck Ramirez brings to light a vivid and heartfelt exploration of community, memory, and cultural identity through the lens of one of Texas’s most beloved contemporary artists. Centered on Ramirez’s celebrated series Seven Days, the exhibition gathers seven large-scale photographs that transform scenes of everyday life into poignant meditations on time, celebration, and transience. Each image captures the remnants of a meal—a cup, a plate, a bottle—objects left behind after gatherings that speak to shared moments of joy and remembrance. Ramirez’s compositions recall the elegance and symbolism of 17th-century Dutch and Spanish still-life painting, yet they are rooted unmistakably in the vernacular of Texas and Tejano culture. In his frames appear familiar touchstones of regional identity: a cup from Bill Miller Bar-B-Q, a bottle of Topo Chico, a can of Lone Star Beer. These objects, ordinary yet deeply personal, carry with them the spirit of community—signs of togetherness, cultural continuity, and the passage of time. Through his use of vibrant color, careful lighting, and monumental scale, Ramirez elevates the overlooked details of daily life into universal reflections on celebration and loss. The exhibition also includes a three-dimensional ofrenda, or altar, inspired by Ramirez’s favorite holiday, Día de los Muertos. Modeled after an altar the artist built in 2004 around a vintage stove in memory of his grandmother, this installation invites visitors to participate in the act of remembrance. Guests are encouraged to write messages on paper petals and add them to the altar, transforming the work into a living, communal space of reflection. Through Seven Days, Chuck Ramirez honors the cycles of life and memory that shape our shared experience, inviting viewers to find meaning in what remains after celebration ends. Image: Seven Days: Rancher Plate Chuck Ramirez inkjet print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas © Chuck Ramirez

During the 1930s and early 1940s, George Hurrell (1904–1992) reigned as Hollywood’s preeminent portrait photographer. Hired by the Publicity Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) when he was only twenty-five, Hurrell advanced rapidly to become the studio’s principal portraitist. With a keen eye for artful posing, innovative lighting effects, and skillful retouching, he produced timeless portraits that burnished the luster of many of the “Golden Age’s” greatest stars. “They were truly glamorous people,” he recalled, “and that was the image I wanted to portray.” In 1933, Hurrell left MGM to open a photography studio on Sunset Boulevard. There, he created some of his most iconic portraits of MGM stars as well as memorable images of leading actors from the other major studios. After closing his Sunset studio in 1938, Hurrell worked briefly for Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures before serving with a military film production unit during World War II. Following the war, candid photographs, made with portable, small-format cameras, rose to replace the meticulously crafted, large-format studio portraits that epitomized Hurrell’s style. For George Hurrell, Hollywood’s “Golden Age” had come to an end. “When we stopped using those 8 x 10 cameras,” he declared, “the glamour was gone.” This exhibition has been made possible in part through the generous support of Mark and Cindy Aron. Image: Clark Gable and Joan Crawford by George Hurrell / 1936, Gelatin silver print / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired in part through the generosity of an anonymous donor

Spanning nearly the entire history of the medium, Funny Business: Photography and Humor offers a compelling view into the ways artists have utilized visual humor not only to provoke laughter and delight, but also as a means of resistance, an antidote to the heaviness of the world, and a way to interrogate and subvert norms and hierarchies. Drawn primarily from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the exhibition presents 70 photographs that showcase the mechanics of photographic humor, while examining the reasons for which artists throughout time have employed it as a strategy in their work. Featured artists include Liz Cohen, Steffi Faircloth, Jeff Mermelstein, Bucky Miller, Reynier Leyva Novo, among others. Funny Business is arranged in four thematic sections. All the World’s a Stage highlights slapstick and observational comedy through a constellation of early 20th-century gelatin silver prints and snapshots displayed in conversation with examples of canonical mid-20th century street photography. Inside Jokes charts the medium’s evolution in the 1970s, when art institutions began accepting and exhibiting photography as a legitimate art form. Featured works highlight photographers’ adoption of a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward their predecessors and the conventions and aesthetics of the medium itself. Context is Everything explores how subjects and photographic images can become absurd, ironic, and nonsensical when shown outside of their original contexts or in unexpected juxtaposition with one another. Comic Relief features the work of contemporary artists who use humor in a critical or subversive manner to explore issues of identity and belonging, politics, and general dimensions of contemporary life. Humor operates in their work as a means of resistance, a coping mechanism, a refusal to become cynical, or a way to subvert power structures and challenge stereotypes. Image: Jo Ann Callis, Parrot and Sailboat, 1980, 1980. Dye transfer print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Purchase, 86.16.5. © Jo Ann Callis

Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America, and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterized by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favored extreme angles and unusual viewpoints. This exhibition, uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s robust photography collection, will trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham, and Moholy-Nagy will be complemented by a multitude of works by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations. Image: Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), Agave Design I, ca. 1920

The museum’s photography collection originated in 1972, when Duke University Museum of Art purchased a portrait of artist Barbara S. Thompson by noted North Carolina photographer and educator John Menapace. Twenty years later, Duke University purchased its second photograph: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #140, depicting a human-pig hybrid creature and part of the celebrated artist’s portrayal of female characters in classic fairy tales. The opening of the Nasher Museum in 2005 initiated a more focused approach to collecting photography building upon these two earlier acquisitions. Within its first decade, the museum acquired significant groups of works by Andy Warhol, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Mike Disfarmer, among many others, as it built a robust collection of national, international, and regional photography. More recently the Nasher has added over 2,000 photographs to its collection that allow us, for the first time, to chronicle a broad historical sweep of the medium from its dawn in the 1830s and 40s to more recent innovative, experimental approaches. A five-year donation of over 1,500 photographs by Linda and Charles Googe (A.B. ’84) has more than doubled the museum’s photography holdings and included works by the best-known practitioners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Edouard Baldus, Ilse Bing, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Arthur Rothstein, Nadar, and Edward Weston. Coming into Focus: A Snapshot of Photography at the Nasher celebrates these gifts and other acquisitions, highlighting a sampling of gems and illuminating a bright future of continued collecting and presenting of photography in innovative and ambitious ways. Coming into Focus: A Snapshot of Photography at the Nasher was organized by Ellen C. Raimond, Associate Curator of Academic Initiatives and Marshall N. Price, Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art., with assistance from Nasher interns, Charles Blocksidge, III (’25) and Jordan Moyd (Robertson Scholar ’26, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Ghita Basurto-Covarrubias (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, ‘26). This exhibition is made possible by The Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; the Frank Edward Hanscom Endowment; the Janine and J. Tomilson Hill Family; the Neely Family Fund; the E.T. Rollins Jr. and Frances P. Rollins Fund; the J. Horst and Ruth Mary Meyer Fund; and the K. Brantley and Maxine E. Watson Endowment Fund. Image: Genevieve Gaignard, The Quietest Room in the House, 2018. © Genevieve Gaignard. Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

The Ruth and Seymour Landfield Atrium, Xcel Energy Gallery, and Starion Bank Gallery Fifty Years of Photography and Design is a retrospective exhibition celebrating Murray Lemley’s artistic career. The exhibit features a wide range of imagery, including extensive black-and-white analogue street photography from Europe in the 1970s and 80s, documentary portrait studies of people from his hometown of Hope, powerful portraits of Native Americans on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and a radical transition in later years to creating modern Polaroid images he calls “STREET COLLAGE GRAFFITI.” With this more recent work, he has, in one sense, returned to the streets he haunted in Europe in the 1970s, but in vivid color and with a new point of view and style. After leaving his home on the family farm near Hope, Lemley studied architecture at North Dakota State University, but after disagreements with his design professor, he shifted his focus to photography, journalism, graphic design, and anti-establishment activism. This journey inspired him to launch three independent magazines, work in radio, and edit the controversial yearbook The Last Picture Book, which famously omitted the name of the university from its cover and led to a temporary discontinuation of yearbooks at NDSU. Despite amassing double the required credits for a degree, his political activism resulted in the administration, in an act of petty revenge, from granting him a degree. Lemley’s photography career took off after two pivotal experiences in the early 70s: photographing for the Concordia College May Seminars Abroad and attending the Apeiron Photo Workshops in New York, which deepened his creative vision and marked a shift from photojournalism to more artistic photography. His design career flourished as well, working at Atomic Press in Seattle and later in Amsterdam, where he designed books for artists and photographers. After the years in Seattle and San Francisco Lemley moved to Amsterdam in the early 90s and has lived primarily in Europe ever since. During his early years there, Lemley worked at many things from construction to graphic design and art. He managed an art gallery for a prolific painter and designed eight books for artists and photographers, many of which are featured in this retrospective exhibition at Plains Art Museum. Lemley has had several exhibitions of this photography at the Plains as well at Suzanne Biederberg Gallery, Ververs Gallery and the Zamen Art Gallery.

Kinship & Community presents approximately 50 photographs from the Texas African American Photography Archive that span a period from the 1940s to the 1980s. Co-curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, the exhibition provides an overview of African American photography in rural and urban areas of Texas, underscoring the community photographer’s role in shaping and bolstering self-esteem by documenting local life and culture. Kinship & Community includes studio portraits, school photos, parades, protests and other gatherings. It brings the ordinary world of Black Texans–their social and political doings–out of the shadows and onto the center stage of daily life. The Texas African American Photography Archive was founded by Alan Govenar and artist Kaleta Doolin in 1995 with collections assembled by Documentary Arts over the last forty years. The Archive provides a broad overview of African American photography in rural and urban areas of Texas, spanning the period from the 1870s to the present, and representing a variety of processes and makers. The Archive is unique in its comprehensiveness and consists of over 60,000 images and more than 20 oral histories collected from African American photographers. Nicole R. Fleetwood is a renowned writer, curator, art critic, New York University Professor, and MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of the award-winning Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and has curated numerous groundbreaking exhibitions that center Black cultural production, incarceration, and vernacular photography. Curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood and CPW Executive Director Brian Wallis, Kinship & Community will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Aperture. Image: Josie Washington, [Social Tea, Dallas, Texas], 1955. Hand-colored gelatin silver print. Collection Texas African American Photography Archive, Dallas, TX.

Everyday Culture presents seven key projects by Documentary Arts over the past forty years that focus on tattooing, blues music in Texas, Black cowboys and rodeos, folk artists, Texas-Mexico border culture, urban street life in Dallas, and vernacular photography. Represented through photographs, films, music, and folk art, the materials in Everyday Culture point to previously marginalized or ostracized cultural forms that have largely gone mainstream and are now part of America’s vibrant cultural heritage. The exhibition’s presentation of these creative expressions, once seen as the purview of “outsiders,” preserves materials and practices from the 1970s and 80s. And it demonstrates how the past four decades have brought a sea-change to art that is considered worthy of attention and serious consideration. The non-profit organization Documentary Arts was founded in 1985 by Alan Govenar, a Guggenheim Fellow and interdisciplinary artist, historian, and folklorist whose expansive career has been at the edge of advancing public dialogue about a kaleidoscope of overlooked voices across America. In a multitude of ways, Govenar and his work with Documentary Arts has unearthed America’s grassroots stories in cities, sprawling suburbs, and out-of-the way rural towns. Over the past 50+ years, Govenar has authored more than 40 books, directed 20+ documentary films, created Off-Broadway musicals, and had his photographs and artist books featured in numerous exhibitions and public collections Documentary Arts is a network of like-minded collaborators, from a cross-section of academic disciplines and creatives, in Dallas and New York City, focused on advancing essential perspectives on art revolving around themes of change and the interconnectedness of diverse people and the potential for finding harmony in unexpected places. Curated by CPW Executive Director Brian Wallis, Everyday Culture will be accompanied by a book of the same title, published by CPW, co-authored by Wallis and Govenar. Image: Alan Govenar, Valle Nuevo, Mexico, 1994. Courtesy the photographer.

The National Gallery of Art presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, an exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers in developing and fostering a distinctly Black visual culture and identity. The first presentation to investigate photography's role in the Black Arts Movement, a creative initiative comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in its scope and impact, which evolved concurrently to the civil rights and international freedom movements, the exhibition reveals how artists developed strategies to engage communities and encourage self-representation in media, laying a foundation for socially engaged art practices that continue today. Photography and the Black Arts Movement will be on view in the West Building from September 21, 2025, to January 11, 2026, before traveling to California and Mississippi. Photography and the Black Arts Movement brings together approximately 150 works spanning photography, video, collage, painting, installation, and other photo-based media, some of which have rarely or never been on view. Among the over 100 artists included in the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems. This expansive selection of work showcases the broad cultural exchange between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists of many backgrounds, who came together during the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century to grapple with social and political changes, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African movement through art. The exhibition also includes art from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize the global engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement. "Working on many fronts—literature, poetry, jazz and new music, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography—African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed and exchanged their ideas through publications, organizations, museums, galleries, community centers, theaters, murals, street art, and emerging academic programs. While focusing on African American photography in the United States, the exhibition also includes works by artists from many communities to consider the extensive interchange between North American artists and the African diaspora. The exhibition looks at the important connections between America's focus on civil rights and the emerging cultural movements that enriched the dialog," said Philip Brookman, cocurator of the exhibition and consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. "Photography and photographic images were crucial in defining and giving expression to the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement. By merging the social concerns and aesthetics of the period, Black artists and photographers were defining a Black aesthetic while expanding conversations around community building and public history," said Deborah Willis, visiting cocurator, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. "The artists and their subjects helped to preserve compelling visual responses to this turbulent time and their images reflect their pride and determination." Image: James Barnor "Drum" Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London, 1966, printed 2023 chromogenic print image/sheet: 50 x 60 cm (19 11/16 x 23 5/8 in.) mat: 25 x 25 in. frame: 25 7/8 x 25 7/8 in. National Gallery of Art, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2025.26.3 © James Barnor / Courtesy Galerie Clementine de la Feronnière

Language and Image: Conceptual and Performance-based Photography from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection brings together more than 100 works by over 50 international artists. In line with our mission and vision—one that is shared by our patrons’ passion for collecting—the artists come from all over the planet but artists from Latin America and the African diaspora play a significant role. Celebrated artists who have made innovative works of art for decades, such as Marina Abramović, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, and Thomas Struth are featured alongside artists like Jonathas de Andrade, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ana Mendieta, and Vik Muniz, among others who have been presented at the museum frequently in the past. Since the 1960s, photography has been used as an important medium for contemporary artists to tell stories and create narratives — a language. Photography became the paramount way artists created art, documenting time-based works like performances and moving-image works, such as video installations, into still objects. Photography has been an integral part of PAMM’s collection and its growth since we became a collecting institution almost thirty years ago, in 1996. The first major show to present the medium as its central subject took place in 2005. Organized with museum patron Charles Cowles and then director Terrence Riley, The Machine, the Body and the City: Selections from the Charles Cowles Collection celebrated a large donation of 100+ photographs. In 2013, when we opened in our new building, curator Diana Nawi organized Image Search: Photography from the Collection. In 2019, on the occasion of the museum’s 35th Anniversary, Ford Foundation Fellow Ade Omotosho organized a significant selection of photographs with new research and many works that had recently been acquired. Language and Image celebrates that history while paving a new path. PAMM’s collection is heavy in works of 20th-century art prior to 1960, and this exhibition aims to create a bridge between our collections and celebrate new works coming into PAMM’s collection from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection. Image: Thomas Struth. Grab von Lu Xun, Shanghai, 1997 (Tomb of Lu Xun, Shanghai, 1997). Chromogenic print, face-mounted to plexiglass, in artist’s frame. Edition 3/10. 71 1/4 x 85 15/16 inches. Jorge M. Pérez Collection. © Thomas Struth

A Subllime Obsession: Photographs from the Hazlitt Collection showcases a bold mix of black & white and color photographs drawn from one collector’s deeply personal archive. Featuring standout works by Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Justine Kurland, and many more, the exhibition captures everything from sweeping landscapes to offbeat street scenes and striking portraits. Whether in the tonal precision of silver gelatin prints or the saturated hues of dye transfers, these photographs reveal a collector’s eye attuned to beauty, complexity, and the unexpected moments that make photography unforgettable. This is not just a collection, it is a passion illustrated through the lens. This exhibition is made possible through the support of Trenam Law and the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners. Image: William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled, 1971, printed later, dye transfer print, Hazlitt Collection

Between a Memory and Me features the work of Rahim Fortune (b. 1994). Born in Austin, Texas and raised in the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Fortune uses photography to interrogate American identity, exploring the connections between the families and communities he photographs and the land they inhabit, the histories embedded in the landscape of the American South, and the traditions they carry forward. Fortune’s black-and-white photographs from his Hardtack project weave together tender and reverent portraits, vast landscapes, and close-detail studies. Through a focus on Black American life, these words both draw from the history of photography and reframe the history of photographic representation of the South. The work is also deeply personal: it emerged from the artist seeking connection, kinship, and home following the loss of both of his parents. Fortune’s new color photographs, created in response to the Texas African American Photography archive, are exhibited here for the first time. His short film takes us through the fields and roads of rural Texas, lingering lovingly on quiet, exquisite details. This presentation includes new photographs originally commissioned by Aperture and Documentary Arts.

El Museo del Barrio presents the first major U.S. survey dedicated to the work of Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco, one of the most incisive voices in contemporary art. On view under the title *Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island*, the exhibition spans more than thirty years of creative practice, revealing the evolution of an artist whose work probes the intersections of politics, identity, and power. Through film, photography, performance, and writing, Fusco has long examined how cultural narratives are constructed and who controls the means of representation. Since the 1990s, Fusco has forged a distinctive path through conceptual and performance art, often confronting themes of race, gender, and postcolonial history. Her seminal performance *Two Undiscovered Amerindians Discover the West*, created with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, remains a landmark critique of Western ethnography and cultural exhibition. In more recent years, she has turned her attention to post-revolutionary Cuba, exploring censorship, exile, and the shifting realities of freedom. The exhibition brings together installations, videos, and photographs that trace these ongoing concerns, offering a panoramic view of her intellectual and aesthetic journey. Fusco’s contributions extend beyond the visual arts. An accomplished author and critic, she has published widely and regularly contributes to major publications such as The New York Review of Books. Her most recent monograph, also titled *Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island*, serves as both a companion and a reflection of her enduring engagement with questions of identity, resistance, and belonging. Recognized with numerous fellowships and awards, Fusco’s influence is felt across generations of artists and thinkers. Organized by Susanna V. Temkin and Rodrigo Moura, this exhibition affirms her position as a vital force in contemporary art and cultural discourse. Image: Coco Fusco, A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America , 2006-2008. Performance documentation. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM. © Coco Fusco

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents an exhibition centered on Youssef Nabil’s evocative video I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015), now part of the museum’s collection. Designed to recall the golden era of mid-century Egyptian cinema, the presentation immerses viewers in the atmosphere of the theaters where Nabil’s artistic imagination first took shape. Alongside the film, eleven related photographs extend the narrative through still images, complemented by vintage Egyptian movie posters that anchor the work within its cultural and cinematic lineage. Born and raised in Cairo, Nabil grew up captivated by the glamorous, melancholy world of classic Egyptian films. His art revisits that lost era, blending nostalgia with personal reflection. In I Saved My Belly Dancer, actor Tahar Rahim embodies the artist’s alter ego, while Salma Hayek portrays the dancer—an archetype both celebrated and misunderstood. Together they navigate a surreal landscape that oscillates between memory and reverie, love and loss, illusion and truth. Through their haunting performances, Nabil pays homage to the sensual grace of the belly dancer, once an emblem of freedom and artistry in Arab culture but later constrained by social and political shifts. The visual language of the work heightens this tension between beauty and disappearance. Each frame and photograph is hand-painted by Nabil, using delicate layers of color that infuse the imagery with warmth and unreality. His process recalls early photographic techniques while transforming them into something distinctly contemporary—a cinematic dream suspended in time. Through his meticulous craft, Nabil reclaims a fading cultural identity, merging film, photography, and memory into a poetic meditation on heritage, exile, and desire. The result is a deeply personal elegy to both a vanished art form and the timeless power of imagination. Image: Youssef Nabil, I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXIV, 2015, Courtesy of the artist, © Youssef Nabil

John Gutmann and Max Yavno were two photographers whose work captured the pulse of modern American life through distinctly different yet complementary visions. Both found inspiration in California’s evolving urban landscapes during the mid-twentieth century—a period marked by transformation, optimism, and growing cultural complexity. Gutmann, who escaped Nazi persecution in Germany in 1933, settled in San Francisco, while Yavno, originally from New York, moved west in 1945 to live and work between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Their photographs reflect a fascination with the character of American cities, from car-filled streets and commercial signage to the rhythms of everyday life and leisure. Gutmann brought a European sensibility to his new surroundings, translating the visual energy of Expressionism into photography. His compositions often employ dramatic diagonals, bold contrasts, and unexpected angles that make the familiar appear strange. Trained as a painter, he used the camera as a tool of reinvention—documenting not just what he saw, but how it felt to encounter a new world through fresh eyes. In his images, California emerges as a place of modern dynamism and visual surprise, its ordinary details transformed into poetic symbols of change. Yavno, on the other hand, approached the city with a more measured and sociological lens. His photographs present clear, structured observations of urban life—street scenes, architecture, and the people who animated them. Where Gutmann found expressive distortion, Yavno sought clarity and social resonance. His images reveal the complexity of postwar America, balancing human individuality with the collective patterns of modern society. Together, Gutmann and Yavno chart two distinct but intersecting paths in twentieth-century photography, revealing California as both a stage for modern experience and a mirror of broader American ideals. Their works remain enduring studies of how vision, culture, and place shape one another. Image: Max Yavno, Cable Car, San Francisco, 1947. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art; Bequest of Max Yavno Estate, M.1988.029.014. © Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation.

The International Center of Photography presents a landmark retrospective dedicated to the visionary Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, celebrating more than five decades of her profound and poetic exploration of the human experience. This major exhibition, organized in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, gathers nearly two hundred photographs that trace the evolution of an artist whose lens has continually bridged the realms of documentation and imagination. Born in Mexico City in 1942, Iturbide first pursued film studies before turning to photography under the mentorship of Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Her early years accompanying Bravo across Mexico became a formative journey—one that revealed to her the camera’s power to observe, translate, and transform. What followed was a lifetime of travel through the landscapes of Latin America and beyond, from the deserts of Sonora to the streets of Havana and the rituals of Juchitán. Everywhere she went, Iturbide sought the meeting point between tradition and transformation, between what is seen and what is felt. Her celebrated series on the Seri Indians and the women of Juchitán exemplify this pursuit. In these works, the ordinary becomes sacred; gestures of daily life take on mythic resonance. Her black-and-white photographs are marked by luminous contrasts and deliberate quiet, balancing the precision of ethnography with the dreamlike pull of poetry. Through her lens, nature and culture converge into symbolic terrain—a living archive of collective memory and personal revelation. This retrospective also reflects the long-standing commitment of Fundación MAPFRE and ICP to socially engaged photography. By gathering Iturbide’s most iconic images alongside lesser-known works and recent self-portraits, the exhibition reveals a practice that continues to question how photography can both witness and create reality. Graciela Iturbide’s art, timeless yet urgent, reminds us that to photograph is to learn—again and again—what it means to be human. Image: Graciela Iturbide, Mujer ángel, desierto de Sonora, México, 1979. Collection Fundación MAPFRE © Graciela Iturbide

The International Center of Photography presents Instead, I spin fantasies, a new exhibition by Naima Green that reimagines the visual language of pregnancy through self-portraiture, landscape, and still life. Moving fluidly between documentation and performance, Green constructs images that question how society defines motherhood and the pregnant body while proposing a more expansive and personal view of its possibilities. Curated by Elisabeth Sherman, the exhibition features dozens of new works that employ both historical and contemporary photographic processes, including albumen and lumen printing. A site-specific vinyl installation transforms the museum’s third-floor gallery, enveloping visitors in Green’s visual world. Sherman notes that the exhibition is a forward-looking meditation on how photography can open up new ways of imagining identity and experience, rather than simply recording what has been. Through fragmented narratives and overlapping scenes, Green’s photographs construct a layered vision of pregnancy as both intimate and collective. Her images depict moments of domestic routine—taking out the trash, resting, self-care—alongside gestures that challenge societal expectations, such as smoking or drinking. These acts become reflections on how notions of respectability shape the visibility of pregnant bodies, particularly in media and art. Friends, lovers, and chosen family populate Green’s photographs, weaving a sense of community into her imagined worlds. The images oscillate between tenderness and defiance, humor and gravity, acknowledging the emotional complexity of creating and sustaining life. Embedded references to medical systems and institutional pressures remind viewers of the broader contexts that frame these personal moments. In Instead, I spin fantasies, Green’s work resists linear storytelling, inviting viewers to move between realities, emotions, and identities. What emerges is not a single story of pregnancy, but a constellation of possible lives—each charged with beauty, uncertainty, and the quiet power of reinvention. Image: Naima Green, Half on a baby (DonChristian), 2025 © Naima Green

The International Center of Photography presents Sergio Larrain: Wanderings, a rare retrospective drawn entirely from the Magnum Photos archive, celebrating the visionary work of one of Chile’s most enigmatic photographers. Curated by Agnès Sire, former Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, the exhibition revisits the first two decades of Larrain’s career through images made in Valparaíso, Santiago, Paris, and London. These photographs, full of movement and mystery, reveal Larrain’s distinct blend of humanism and formal daring—his ability to find poetry in the everyday and transcendence in the ordinary. A member of Magnum Photos for over fifty years, Larrain saw photography as a spiritual pursuit. He believed that the best images arrived in moments of revelation, describing the process as entering a state of grace. His photographs often defy conventional composition—figures drift beyond the frame, shadows envelop entire streets, and light fractures the scene into fragments of time. The result is a body of work that feels both spontaneous and meditative, alive with the rhythm of the world yet removed from it. From his early series on the children of Santiago to his later portraits of the port city of Valparaíso, Larrain’s camera observed resilience and fragility with equal clarity. His lens traced the tension between poverty and joy, stillness and motion, architecture and the human spirit. The children who wander through his frames seem to exist outside time, emblems of a freedom untouched by material constraint. As the exhibition unfolds, Wanderings offers a new understanding of Larrain’s vision—a photography of restlessness and revelation. His images continue to resonate as quiet miracles: fleeting encounters that bridge the distance between the visible and the invisible, the real and the imagined. Image: Sergio Larrain, Cuzco, Peru, 1960 © Sergio Larrain / Magnum Photos

The Williamsburg Biannual, in collaboration with Sean Kelly, presents James Casebere: The Spatial Unconscious, a sweeping exhibition that spans four decades of the artist’s practice. Occupying three floors, the show gathers rarely seen works across a range of media, many of which have never before been exhibited in New York. Visitors will encounter early black-and-white images, color photographs, Polaroids, waterless lithographs, and new sculptural works that trace the evolution of Casebere’s exploration of constructed space and imagined architecture. Casebere’s artistic language bridges sculpture, photography, and architecture, positioning him as a seminal figure within the Pictures Generation. For him, photography is not merely a means of representation—it is a process of invention, a way to examine how perception and memory shape our shared realities. Through his meticulously crafted models, Casebere constructs worlds that balance between the real and the imagined, addressing themes of solitude, social structure, and the fragile equilibrium between permanence and decay. His compositions, often devoid of human presence, evoke a haunting psychological charge while questioning the systems that define our built environments. The exhibition also introduces Casebere’s Shou Sugi Ban sculptures, a new series inspired by the Japanese technique of wood preservation through charring. Using sustainable bamboo plywood, these geometric forms reveal both strength and vulnerability. Their textured, darkened surfaces speak to renewal through fire—a poetic meditation on the cycles of creation and loss that underpin architectural and human existence alike. Deeply influenced by literature, politics, and cultural history, Casebere continues to redefine the visual dialogue between space and meaning. The Spatial Unconscious offers a rare opportunity to experience an artist’s sustained inquiry into the architecture of the mind and the structures that hold, shape, and sometimes unsettle our collective imagination.

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

Fahey/Klein Gallery presents Julia Fullerton-Batten: Tableaux, a captivating exhibition that highlights two of the artist’s most ambitious projects, Old Father Thames and Frida – A Singular Vision of Beauty and Pain. Internationally recognized for her meticulously constructed, cinematic photographs, Fullerton-Batten merges the precision of film direction with the atmosphere of painting. Each image exists between fact and fantasy, transforming historical fragments and emotional truths into rich visual storytelling. In Old Father Thames, Fullerton-Batten explores London’s defining river, the lifeline that has shaped the city’s fortunes and myths for centuries. Living near its banks in West London, she was drawn to its ever-changing nature—its tides, moods, and the human dramas that have unfolded along its course. From jubilant Frost Fairs to moments of tragedy and renewal, her series reconstructs scenes from the Thames’ layered past. Each tableau feels like a moment frozen in time, illuminated with cinematic lighting and historical authenticity, revealing the river not just as a geographical feature, but as a living chronicle of London’s spirit. The Frida series pays tribute to the legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose life and work embodied courage, creativity, and cultural pride. Inspired by Kahlo’s fearless individuality and deep love of Mexico, Fullerton-Batten reimagines her essence through strikingly stylized portraits and settings. Collaborating with Mexican artisans and costumers, she photographed her subjects in vibrant Tehuana garments within evocative locations—abandoned mansions, historic haciendas, and the haunting “doll island” of Xochimilco. These works bridge homage and invention, celebrating Kahlo’s enduring influence and the transformative power of art. Born in Bremen in 1970, Julia Fullerton-Batten has become a leading figure in contemporary fine-art photography. Her works are held in major international collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London and Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, affirming her status as a master of visual storytelling. Image: The Princess Alice Disaster of 1978 Archival Pigment Print Signed, titled, dated, numbered on label verso © Julia Fullerton-Batten

Obscura Gallery presents its third annual winter holiday exhibition, One-of-a-Kind III, a celebration of originality and craftsmanship that brings together a diverse group of contemporary photo-based artists. The exhibition showcases unique artworks priced under $1,500, offering collectors and art lovers the opportunity to discover pieces available exclusively at the Santa Fe gallery. This year’s show features ten artists, among them Michael Berman, Susan Burnstine, Gordon Coons, Lou Peralta, Sara Silks, Aline Smithson, Eddie Soloway, Lynn Stern, Robert Stivers, and Bryan Whitney. In addition, the gallery introduces Santa Fe jewelry artist Karin Worden, whose handcrafted pieces embody the same spirit of individuality that defines the exhibition. The open house event will take place on Saturday, November 28, from 1–4 pm, with many of the artists in attendance. While photography today is most often associated with reproducibility, One-of-a-Kind III invites viewers to reconsider the medium through the lens of singular creation. In the early days of photography, many techniques inherently produced unique images—prints that could never be exactly replicated. This exhibition honors that lineage while embracing modern experimentation, highlighting how artists continue to reinvent photographic traditions in innovative ways. The works on view span a range of historical and contemporary techniques, including gelatin silver prints enhanced with mixed media, cyanotypes, collages, and gold leaf applications. Some pieces explore texture through hand-applied surfaces or the integration of organic materials, while others incorporate digital processes and even cedar-smoked relief printing. The inclusion of handcrafted jewelry extends the conversation beyond the photographic image, celebrating artistry in all its forms. Together, these works embody the tactile, personal, and unrepeatable nature of true craftsmanship—a reminder that in an era of mass production, there remains profound beauty in the singular and handmade. Image: Japonisme: Fireworks and Cherry Blossoms © Aline Smithson

The dramatic landscape of California’s coastline has long stood as a source of wonder, reflection, and artistic renewal. Towering cliffs, shifting mists, and the vast expanse of the Pacific have inspired countless painters, writers, and photographers to interpret the meeting of land and sea in their own distinct ways. This exhibition centers on the years following the completion of Highway 1, when the once-remote reaches of Big Sur became more accessible, inviting artists to explore its rugged terrain and intimate communities. Through photography, they sought to translate not only its natural grandeur but also its elusive spirit—a place where solitude and inspiration intertwine. The photographs on view capture a range of perspectives on Big Sur’s untamed beauty. Some images evoke a quiet intimacy with the landscape, focusing on fleeting patterns of light or the rhythm of ocean waves, while others reflect the human stories embedded within this stretch of coast—of those who came seeking escape, renewal, or belonging. Together, these works reveal Big Sur not merely as a destination but as a state of mind, a space of artistic and emotional encounter that continues to resonate deeply within California’s creative legacy. Curated by Rexine, whose extensive experience includes positions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Rose Art Museum, and the Everson Museum of Art, the exhibition draws upon her passion for the intersection of place, memory, and artistic vision. Her sensitive approach allows the photographs to speak across time, linking mid-century perspectives with the enduring fascination the region holds today. Support for the Mid-century Big Sur Season has been generously provided by the Emile Norman Charitable Trust, Bill and Jeanne Landreth, Post Ranch Inn, and Bob and Kathleen Seibel, whose contributions help preserve and share the artistic spirit born from California’s coastal edge. Image: Henry Gilpin (1922–2011), Highway One, 1965, gelatin silver print. MPMA Acquisition Fund purchase in honor of Richard Garrod. 1984.081. © Estate of Henry Gilpin.

Eternal Construction: Photographic Perspectives on Southern California’s Built Environment examines a region perpetually under transformation—a place where expansion and decay coexist, and reinvention is woven into the very fabric of daily life. Drawn from the Laguna Art Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition unites artists who have grappled with the shifting realities of urbanization, infrastructure, and environmental change. Rather than offering a sweeping overview, it invites viewers into an intimate, layered encounter with artists whose multiple works trace evolving conversations about the uses—and misuses—of land. The exhibition reveals a complex dialogue between differing approaches to the built landscape. Some artists document the physical world with an unflinching realism, chronicling freeways, construction sites, and abandoned spaces as testaments to human ambition and neglect. Others approach these environments conceptually, abstracting architectural forms or reimagining familiar urban spaces through manipulation, staging, or intervention. Each perspective sheds light on Southern California as both a site and a symbol—where dreams of progress and the realities of environmental strain continually collide. Featured artists include Lewis Baltz, Jeff Brouws, Laurie Brown, Luke Erickson, Jacques Garnier, Marcia Hafif, John Humble, Barbara Kasten, Jeremy Kidd, Tom Lamb, The Legacy Group, Deborah Oropallo, Julius Shulman, and Robert von Sternberg. Together, their works form a visual narrative of impermanence—capturing the tension between natural beauty and human construction, between idealism and entropy. Through their varied interpretations, these artists prompt reflection on what it means to build, to erase, and to rebuild again in a region defined by constant motion. Organized by Laguna Art Museum and guest curated by Tyler Stallings, the exhibition is supported by Mike Johnson and Taka Oiwa, underscoring the museum’s commitment to exploring the dynamic interplay between art, place, and transformation. Image: Jacques Garnier, At the Crossroad, 2015. Gelatin silver print. 20 x 30 in. 2018.018. Gift of the artist © Jacques Garnier

Soft Spaces presents a compelling series of installations featuring the work of alumni from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellowship, an international and intergenerational program dedicated to nurturing LGBTQIA+ artists of color. Since its founding in 2017, the Fellowship has provided a space for mentorship, collective learning, and professional development, guiding artists in the creation of sustainable practices while fostering radical affirmation of identity through liberatory pedagogy. The exhibition’s title, Soft Spaces, reflects the environment of care, experimentation, and vulnerability that the Fellowship cultivates. Participants describe the program as a sanctuary for exploration, where artistic risks can be taken and personal expression is nurtured. Within this context, the notion of softness becomes both a literal and metaphorical framework, shaping how the works on view engage with process, identity, and community. Soft Spaces brings together recent work by thirty-eight artists from the 2019–20, 2020–21, and 2021–22 Fellowship cohorts. The range of practices represented is expansive, encompassing digital and media art, painting, photography, filmmaking, performance, and installation. Each work embodies the artist’s exploration of self, history, and societal structures, highlighting the diversity of voices and perspectives cultivated by the program. By presenting these works collectively, Soft Spaces emphasizes the intersection of individual creativity and shared experience. The exhibition not only showcases the technical skill and conceptual depth of the artists but also illuminates the ways in which a supportive community can empower innovation and sustain artistic growth. Through these installations, viewers are invited to witness the transformative power of mentorship and the vital contributions of LGBTQIA+ artists of color to contemporary art today. Image: Alison Viana, Felix, 2024. Digital print, 24" x 36". Courtesy of the artist.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Collaborations explores the profound role that connection, dialogue, and shared vision played in shaping one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century photography. Featuring more than one hundred photographs and pieces of ephemera, the exhibition reveals how collaboration was not simply an occasional aspect of Álvarez Bravo’s practice but a defining element of his artistic identity. Often celebrated as the father of Mexican photography, Álvarez Bravo’s achievements emerged from a dynamic creative ecosystem. Beginning his career in the 1920s, in the vibrant aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, he became part of a flourishing art scene in Mexico City that brought together painters, writers, and intellectuals. Over seven decades, he formed creative partnerships with some of the most important cultural figures of his time, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, André Breton, Luis Buñuel, and Octavio Paz. These collaborations nurtured an aesthetic that blended surrealism, symbolism, and realism, while reflecting Mexico’s evolving identity in the modern era. The exhibition examines the layered nature of authorship in photography—how choices around subject, framing, exposure, printing, and display can be shared or influenced by others. Álvarez Bravo often blurred these boundaries, working closely with mentors, lovers, and peers to shape images that transcend the notion of individual creation. His photographs become visual dialogues, each bearing the imprint of collective imagination and emotional exchange. Curated by Mia Laufer, former Associate Curator at the Des Moines Art Center, Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Collaborations invites visitors to reconsider the myth of the solitary artist. Instead, it presents Álvarez Bravo as part of a vital artistic network—one that transformed photography into a deeply collaborative art form rooted in friendship, exchange, and the shared pursuit of meaning. Image: Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902 – 2002) Caja de visiones (Box of Visions), 1931 Gelatin silver print Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Purchased with funds from Craig and Kimberly Shadur, 2024.11 Photo: Rich Sanders

The West in Focus: Women brings together an evocative selection of 30 to 40 photographs drawn from the Booth’s permanent collection, offering a fresh perspective on the history and mythos of the American West. The exhibition highlights the strength, spirit, and complexity of women who have shaped and been shaped by this vast landscape, both in front of and behind the lens. Through a combination of intimate portraits, sweeping vistas, and everyday scenes, the show reveals the enduring power of photography to tell women’s stories across generations. Among the featured works are the deeply human portraits of Dorothea Lange, whose compassionate eye captured the resilience of women during the Great Depression, and the refined yet bold compositions of Imogen Cunningham, whose modernist sensibility redefined the possibilities of the medium. Cara Weston’s photographs of California’s coastal terrain introduce a quieter, more contemplative view of the West—one grounded in light, solitude, and reflection—while Barbara Van Cleve’s classic depictions of Western women celebrate grit, independence, and an unshakable connection to the land. The exhibition does not limit itself to a single narrative. Instead, it brings together voices from different times and traditions, presenting women as pioneers, artists, mothers, ranchers, and dreamers. The photographs—created by both women and men—capture the layered realities of life in the West, from its wild open spaces to its intimate domestic moments. Together, they form a visual chronicle of perseverance and transformation, where myth and memory meet. The West in Focus: Women is a tribute to the women who helped define the Western experience, not as supporting figures in a familiar legend but as central characters whose presence continues to shape the story of America’s frontier—past, present, and future. Image: Jay Dusard, Rose Mary Mack, Artist, Prescott Arizona, 1969, 7.5 x 9.5″, gelatin silver print, Booth Western Art Museum permanent collection, Cartersville, Georgia, ph2018.005.050

Captive Lands, an exhibition presented in conversation with Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters, invites visitors to reconsider how artists have represented and reimagined the American landscape. Drawn primarily from the Addison Gallery’s distinguished permanent collection, the exhibition unfolds through five thematic sections that trace the evolution of the land as subject, symbol, and possession. Through these works, the exhibition questions the ways in which the landscape has been idealized, exploited, transformed, and reclaimed over time. Rather than presenting a single, unified narrative, Captive Lands encourages reflection on the diverse and often conflicting histories embedded in the terrain of the United States. The first section, rich in nineteenth-century paintings, reveals how early artists constructed romantic visions of wilderness and frontier—images that continue to shape our national imagination. The second gallery turns to depictions of cultivated fields and industrial sites, illustrating the land’s conversion into an engine of productivity and profit. The third examines places such as Niagara Falls and Florida, whose natural splendor became intertwined with mass tourism and commerce, transforming the sublime into spectacle. In contrast, the fourth section engages with landscapes marked by memory and loss, exploring how the land bears witness to historical trauma. Here, nature becomes both a repository and a record, holding traces of human struggle and resilience. The final gallery focuses on the American West—a region long mythologized as both promise and battleground—and reflects on its enduring significance as a measure of America’s shifting relationship with nature and progress. Ultimately, Captive Lands asks what it truly means to “capture” a landscape: to depict it, to possess it, or to understand it. As Willa Cather once wrote, “The land belongs to the future.” This exhibition reminds us that how we see and shape it today determines what that future will hold. Image: Walker Evans, Resort Photographer at Work, 1941. Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 x 6 inches. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, gift of Arnold H. Crane, 1985.46.50 © Walker Evans

On view through January 18, 2026, this exhibition presents fifty powerful photographs by Danny Lyon, one of the most influential documentary photographers to emerge in the 1960s. Known for his immersive approach to storytelling, Lyon captured the lives of those existing on the margins of mainstream America with unflinching honesty and compassion. This series, focused on the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club between 1963 and 1967, remains one of his most iconic bodies of work. Shot in black and white, the images transport viewers into a world of loyalty, freedom, and defiance. Lyon did not stand apart from his subjects—he rode with them, lived among them, and recorded their lives from within the brotherhood. His photographs are accompanied by excerpts from interviews and text written by Lyon himself, adding a deeply personal voice that complements the raw immediacy of his visual storytelling. Each frame reflects both the exhilaration and the solitude of those who chose to live by their own rules. While Lyon’s lens reveals the harsh realities of life on the road and within the club, it also captures fleeting moments of tenderness and humanity—friends laughing, lovers embracing, and quiet glances filled with unspoken understanding. This balance of grit and grace defines Lyon’s work and continues to influence generations of photographers seeking truth through the camera. The exhibition celebrates Lyon’s ability to blend artistic vision with journalistic integrity, crafting images that are both documentary records and timeless works of art. His portrayal of the Outlaws offers not only a glimpse into a subculture but also a meditation on freedom, identity, and the complexities of belonging in postwar America. Image: Danny Lyon, Route 12 – Wisconsin, 1966, 16 x 20” modern gelatin silver print, Copyright Danny Lyon / Magnum Photos, www.instagram.com/dannylyonphotos, www.bleakbeauty.com, Courtesy of Etherton Gallery

How does learning from cultures different from our own shift our perspectives and understanding of the world? Africa Past, Present, and Future: Celebrating 65 Years of the MSU African Studies Center marks this major anniversary year while also forwarding important questions about the role of collections and object-based learning to expand our knowledge and understanding of the world around us—and our place therein. In 2025, the MSU African Studies Center (ASC) celebrates its 65th anniversary, a remarkable achievement with so many impactful years of service to the university community and across the African continent. Composed of works from the collections of the MSU Broad Art Museum and MSU Museum, the works on view present a wide range of African art and cultural objects that help narrate the relationship of MSU to Africa and its many countries, ethnic groups, and peoples. The museums’ collections of African art grew in significance at the same time that MSU became more deeply involved with the founding of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka—a partnership forged between then-MSU president John Hannah and the Nigerian government. At this same moment, in 1960, Hannah initiated the formalization of the ASC, the second such organization to be inaugurated in the United States at that time. Through this shared history and building upon the incredible work of the ASC today, this exhibition offers experiential opportunities for visitors to learn about the ASC’s captivating work and how university collections continue to advance teaching and learning about and from the many cultures of Africa—past, present, and future. Africa Past, Present, and Future: Celebrating 65 Years of the MSU African Studies Center is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and co-curated by Steven L. Bridges, senior curator and director of curatorial affairs at the MSU Broad Art Museum; Kurt Dewhurst, professor and curator at the MSU Museum, and director of arts and cultural partnerships at University Outreach & Engagement; Leo Zulu, director of the MSU African Studies Center; and Erik Ponder, African Studies Librarian; with additional curatorial advisors: Candace Keller, associate professor of art history and visual culture at MSU; Marsha MacDowell, professor and curator at the MSU Museum, and director of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program; Ray Silverman, former professor of art history and visual culture, curator of African Arts, and director of museum studies at MSU; Lynne Swanson, cultural collections manager at the MSU Museum; and Chris Worland, textile artist and former guest curator at the MSU Museum. Support for this series is provided by the MSU Federal Credit Union. This exhibition is the result of a partnership between the MSU African Studies Center, International Studies and Programs; MSU Broad Art Museum; MSU Museum; and MSU Libraries.

More Is More: Reinventing Photography Beyond the Frame presents singular works of art created from multiple photographs. Set in the experimental time of the mid-1960s to 1980s, the exhibition features artists who deconstructed, reconstructed, and multiplied photographs, playfully pushing photography’s physical boundaries and conceptual limits. By the 1970s photography had clawed its way from the margins of the art world, gaining greater acceptance in museums, galleries, and university classrooms. A new generation of artists began integrating photography into their artistic practice, working alongside photographers who were already fully engaged in the medium. With this newfound adoption—particularly among Conceptual and Performance artists—photography found itself at the vanguard of creativity. More Is More features 43 photographs by 25 artists, many of which are on view for the first time at the Nelson-Atkins. Artists in the exhibition include David Hockney, Gordon Matta-Clark, Andy Warhol, Barbara Crane, Nancy Burson, Jan Groover, John Baldessari, Lew Thomas, Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Barbara Blondeau, and Ray Metzker, among many others. More Is More is accompanied by a selection of photographs in gallery L10, featuring works by Eadweard Muybridge, Ilse Bing, Irving Penn, Edward Weston, Doris Ulmann, Clarence White, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Louis-Rémy Robert, and William Henry Jackson among others. Organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Generous support provided by the Hall Family Foundation.

With a diversifying population, rapidly evolving cities, and transforming ecology, North Carolina has undergone immense change, especially in recent years. This exhibition features works by artists who are reckoning with the inevitability of the passage of time across our state. While some artists reflect on deeply personal memories of their home and their relationship with the land and built environment, others highlight the consequences of climate change and the legacy of social injustice. Then and There, Here and Now challenges viewers to consider their own relationship to the past—however nostalgic, mournful, disorienting, or hopeful—and its impact on the present. Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources; the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions. Research for this exhibition was made possible by Ann and Jim Goodnight/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund for Curatorial and Conservation Research and Travel. Image: Elizabeth Matheson, Pinecrest Pool, 2004

Photojournalism is work and it is livelihood, it is craft and it is documentation, it is a way to be in the world and to share the world, it is a way to resist oppression while insisting on the fullness of life. Black Photojournalism presents work by more than 40 photographers chronicling historic events and daily life in the United States from the conclusion of World War II in 1945 to the presidential campaigns of 1984, including the civil rights movements through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Drawn from archives and collections in the care of journalists, libraries, museums, newspapers, photographers, and universities, the original work prints in the exhibition were circulated and reviewed in publishing offices before anything went to print. Each one represents the energy of many dedicated individuals who worked to get out the news every single day. One picture leads to another, making visible multiple experiences of history while proposing ways of understanding today as tomorrow is being created. Responding to a dearth of stories about Black lives told from the perspectives of Black people, Black publishers and their staff created groundbreaking editorial and photojournalistic methods and news networks. During a period of urgent social change and civil rights advocacy, newspapers and magazines, including the Afro American News, Atlanta Daily World, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, and Ebony, transformed how people were able to access seeing themselves and their communities. Their impact on the media landscape continues into the digital present. The exhibition, designed by artist David Hartt, is co-organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography, and Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Charles “Teenie” Harris community archivist, in dialogue with an expanded network of scholars, archivists, curators, and historians.

Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson brings together eighteen contemporary artists in conversation with the visionary mind of Robert Smithson, whose radical rethinking of art’s relationship with the Earth continues to shape generations. Taking its title from Smithson’s declaration that “a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance,” the exhibition invites artists to move alongside his legacy—resisting, improvising, and extending his restless rhythm. From his early drawings that questioned the ideals of European Modernism to his later meditations on entropy and geology, Smithson remains a pivotal figure whose ideas transcend time and form. Anchored by Mirror Displacement Indoors (1969)—an uprooted tree intertwined with mirrors that reflects both decay and endurance—the exhibition underscores Smithson’s enduring fascination with transformation. Around this central work orbit pieces that echo, counter, and expand his vision. Leonor Antunes and Álvaro Urbano explore the mirrored lives of trees; Delcy Morelos and An-My Lê engage with earth and landscape as living memory; and Ana Mendieta’s ephemeral earthworks resonate with Smithson’s Hypothetical Continents. Giuseppe Penone, Tony Cragg, Pierre Huyghe, and James Welling each reimagine the natural and the artificial in dialogue with Smithson’s sculptural poetics. Further exchanges unfold between Nairy Baghramian’s suspended forms and Smithson’s hand-built minimalism, between Daniel Boyd’s layered imagery and Smithson’s explorations of myth and body. Works by Julie Mehretu and Steve McQueen deepen the meditation on time, matter, and memory, while Tacita Dean’s salt studies echo the crystalline landscapes of Spiral Jetty. Three film collaborations between Smithson and Nancy Holt—East/Coast West Coast, Swamp, and Spiral Jetty—enrich this dialogue, offering a moving reflection on process, place, and perception. In Casting a Glance, Smithson’s inquiries into entropy, permanence, and the poetics of decay unfold as a living conversation—an ever-evolving dance between artist, earth, and time. Image: Robert Smithson gathering material for Nonsite “Line of Wreckage” Bayonne, New Jersey (1968) Photograph: Nancy Holt © Nancy Holt

Casa Susanna brings together a remarkable collection of photographs and printed materials created by and for a discreet community of cross-dressers who gathered in New York City and the Catskill Mountains during the 1960s. At a time when gender expression was heavily policed and misunderstood, two small resorts operated by Susanna Valenti and her wife, Marie Tornell, offered a rare refuge. Within these walls, guests could safely dress en femme, share stories, and experience moments of acceptance. The camera played a central role in these encounters, serving as both a tool of affirmation and a medium of self-discovery. These photographs—ranging from casual snapshots to carefully staged portraits—were exchanged at gatherings or sent through the mail, preserving a private world of identity and friendship that defied social norms. Rediscovered at a Manhattan flea market in 2004, the images became known as the Casa Susanna photographs, now recognized as a landmark record of pre-Stonewall queer history. The exhibition also includes rare issues of *Transvestia*, an underground magazine that circulated among cross-dressers during the same era. Combining fiction, poetry, personal essays, and practical advice on makeup and clothing, the publication helped build a sense of belonging for individuals who otherwise lived in secrecy. Together, the photographs and printed materials illuminate a network that was both intimate and quietly revolutionary. Casa Susanna reveals the tension between conformity and liberation that shaped the community’s expression of femininity. Many of the participants portrayed themselves as respectable housewives or elegant ladies, embodying ideals of middle-class womanhood that reflected both aspiration and constraint. The exhibition invites visitors to consider these complex acts of self-fashioning within the broader history of gender and identity, tracing a poignant connection between the hidden lives of the past and the ongoing struggles for visibility and acceptance today. Image: Andrea Susan (American, 1939–2015). Photo shoot with Lili, Wilma, and friends, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY, 1964–1968. Chromogenic print, 3 5/16 x 4 1/4 in. (8.4 x 10.8 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015

The collection of Ken and Jacki Widder, now shared with The San Diego Museum of Art, offers a remarkable journey through the central movements of mid-twentieth-century American photography. As pioneers in biotechnology and passionate collectors, the Widders assembled a body of work that captures the diversity and vitality of an era defined by experimentation, social change, and artistic inquiry. Their collection spans a broad spectrum—from documentary realism and portraiture to architectural studies and compositions that edge toward abstraction—revealing how photography evolved as both a craft and a language of modern life. The exhibition highlights how photographers across generations explored the shifting contours of urban experience. Images of cities, buildings, and streets become meditations on geometry and human presence, often blurring the line between representation and abstraction. Alongside these works, selections from the golden age of the illustrated press—roughly the 1930s through the 1980s—demonstrate how photography shaped public understanding, from news coverage to visual storytelling. Through the lens of these photojournalists, one can trace how photography served as both document and interpretation, turning moments of daily life into enduring symbols of their time. Equally compelling are the environmental portraits that situate their subjects within the flow of the world around them. Rather than isolating sitters in the studio, these photographs embrace the textures of place—street corners, interiors, landscapes—revealing how identity and setting intertwine. Across the exhibition, a shared impulse emerges: to challenge perception, to expand what photography could show, and to invite viewers into new ways of seeing. Presented at the Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art’s Nash Gallery, this exhibition celebrates not only the Widders’ vision as collectors but also the enduring power of photography to mirror, question, and reimagine the modern world. Image: Ray Metzker, 80 H-Y5, 1980. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Ken and Jacki Widder. © Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery.

The Addison Gallery of American Art presents Other Things Uttered, the first museum solo exhibition by Tommy Kha, recipient of the Bartlett H. Hayes JR. Prize. Through his distinctive approach to photography, Kha explores how identity, belonging, and difference are shaped and perceived. His work questions the conventions of self-portraiture, responding to the long history of exclusion and invisibility within the photographic medium. Describing photography as a form of language, Kha constructs his own visual grammar—one that speaks to the complexities of representation, translation, and selfhood. The exhibition’s title pays homage to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1978 performance Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard, acknowledging a shared artistic engagement with language, memory, and fragmented identity. For Kha, the act of photographing becomes a means of navigating his multiple inheritances and the spaces in between. Born in Memphis’s Whitehaven neighborhood to a family whose journey spanned China, Vietnam, and the American South, Kha brings together these cultural threads in a body of work that is both personal and political. His images reveal the tension between visibility and invisibility, intimacy and distance, humor and melancholy. Kha’s photographs frequently feature masks, cutouts, or surrogates of his own face and body, creating tableaux that blur the line between self and other. These visual doubles inhabit domestic and public spaces, evoking the feeling of being present yet detached—a reflection on what it means to see and be seen. The effect is at once uncanny and tender, a meditation on the porous boundaries of identity. Awarded every two years, the Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. Prize continues the Addison’s legacy of supporting contemporary artists. In honoring Tommy Kha, the museum extends its tradition of fostering new voices who challenge, reinterpret, and expand the language of American art. Image: Tommy Kha, Constellations XVIII, Whitehaven, Memphis, 2019. Archival pigment print. © Tommy Kha

On view at the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Gallery from August 9, 2025, through January 25, 2026, this exhibition honors both the history and the evolving landscape of Cuyahoga Valley National Park. For more than 12,000 years, humans have inhabited the lands that now form the park, leaving traces of shifting relationships between people, land, and time. Today, the park’s boundaries encompass not only preserved wilderness but also small towns, farms, and industries that reflect the complexity of shared stewardship. Through large-format color photographs captured across changing seasons, Robert Glenn Ketchum reveals this intersection of natural beauty and human intervention—where gas wells punctuate farmlands, graffiti marks the remains of industry, and wild growth reclaims what was once shaped by labor. Ketchum’s work has long stood at the crossroads of art and environmental activism. Using his camera as both instrument and conscience, he documents the realities of landscape management and the moral dimensions of preservation. In his book Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management, Ketchum reflects on the ways photographic culture has elevated the spectacular while neglecting the ordinary. He warns of a collective blindness: a society that travels great distances in search of untouched beauty yet overlooks the natural vitality just beyond its highways. His photographs challenge that hierarchy, urging viewers to reconsider what it means to value the land. Presented as part of the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, this exhibition calls for renewed attention to the everyday environments that sustain life and memory. Through Ketchum’s lens, the park becomes not merely a scenic preserve but a living archive—a record of resilience, responsibility, and the enduring dialogue between people and place. Image: Robert Glenn Ketchum CVNRA #705 from the Federal Land Series, 1988. Cibachrome print. 30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 101.6 cm). Purchased with funds from Stephen and Celeste Myers 1989.7 © Robert Glenn Ketchum

Since the 1990s, photographer Peter Moriarty has traveled to greenhouses, orangeries, conservatories, and arboretums to capture the characteristics of these “warm rooms” constructed to preserve and propagate prized plants. From the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in England to Longwood Gardens in nearby Kennett Square, Moriarty documents the unique structures and specimens as encountered through his personal, graphic sensibility. He produces traditional gelatin-silver prints that convey the light-filled, atmospheric spaces of historic greenhouses.

Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, this exhibition is an intimate and historic opportunity to see the extraordinary archive of recently discovered photographs taken by Paul McCartney between December 1963 and February 1964. Over the course of these three short months, the Beatles—Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—were propelled from being the most popular band in Britain to an unprecedented international cultural phenomenon.. The photographs in this exhibition, taken by McCartney with his own camera, provide a uniquely personal perspective on what it was like to be a Beatle at the start of Beatlemania—from gigs in Liverpool and London to performing on the Ed Sullivan show in New York for an unparalleled television audience of 73 million people.. Drawn from McCartney’s own personal archive, the majority of these images have never been seen before. They allow us to experience the Beatles’ extraordinarily rapid rise from a successful regional band to global stardom through McCartney’s eyes. At a time when so many camera lenses were on them, this perspective—from the inside—brings fresh insight to the band, their experiences, the fans, and the early 1960s.. Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm has been organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, England, in collaboration with Paul McCartney. It is curated by Sir Paul McCartney with Sarah Brown for MPL Communications and Rosie Broadley for the National Portrait Gallery. Image: Paul McCartney. Self-portrait. London, 1963. © 1963-1964 Paul McCartney under exclusive license to MPL Archives LLP

BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York presents Phantom Sun, a solo exhibition by Swiss-American artist and filmmaker Ohan Breiding, curated by Mathilde Walker-Billaud, the 2025–2026 Guest Curatorial recipient. On view from November 20, 2025, to January 28, 2026, the exhibition brings together photography, video, and archival material to examine how landscapes bear witness to histories of erasure, displacement, and resilience. Breiding’s lens-based approach transforms the natural world into a space of testimony—one that reveals both ecological fragility and enduring forms of care. At the center of Phantom Sun is Breiding’s engagement with the Killed Negatives, a collection of images originally created under the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression. These photographs, once deemed unsuitable for publication and physically punctured to mark their rejection, expose the selective narratives that shaped America’s visual record of that era. By reanimating these discarded negatives, Breiding challenges the authority of the archive and its power to define whose stories are told and whose are omitted. The resulting installation overlays the ghosts of the past with present-day questions about belonging, stewardship, and visibility. Through the recurring motif of the black hole—floating above the rejected images—Breiding transforms absence into a site of inquiry. This circular void becomes both a wound and a portal, inviting viewers to look through the gaps of history and imagine what might emerge from them. In collaboration with Walker-Billaud, the artist expands the documentary tradition pioneered by Roy Stryker and his FSA team, pushing it toward a trans-feminist reimagining of care, ecology, and collective memory. Phantom Sun ultimately proposes a new kind of seeing—one that acknowledges loss while illuminating the persistence of life and meaning in the spaces once cast aside. Image: © Ohan Breiding

BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York presents Spark of a Nail, an exhibition of new and recent works by photographer Morgan Levy, on view from November 20, 2025, to January 28, 2026. This body of work foregrounds women and non-binary individuals within the intersections of photography, labor, and architecture. Through collaborative, participatory practice, Levy explores the overlooked gestures of craft and construction, reimagining how acts of making can shape both physical environments and social relationships. Her images invite reflection on the power of creative labor to forge communities of care and resistance in spaces historically dominated by patriarchal structures. In Spark of a Nail, Levy works alongside tradespeople from apprenticeship programs and professional workshops, creating photographs that blend documentary, performance, and staged composition. Each image becomes a site of collaboration and conversation—between gesture and material, between artist and worker. The resulting scenes convey a sense of quiet strength, where moments of exertion and repose coexist, revealing the tenderness embedded within the act of building. Through deliberate framing, Levy positions cis-men at the edges of her compositions, constructing a world primarily inhabited by women and non-binary figures engaged in their own systems of creation and solidarity. Drawing inspiration from early twentieth-century labor photography and the feminist art practices of the 1970s and 1980s, Levy extends this lineage with a contemporary sensitivity. Echoes of Betty Medsger’s investigative photography and Lynda Benglis’ sculptural subversions of industrial materials resonate through her work. By merging visual research, field observation, and reenactment, Levy reclaims and redefines the visual language of labor. Spark of a Nail ultimately proposes a reimagined landscape of work—one where collaboration, artistry, and agency intersect, illuminating new possibilities for representation and belonging in both art and society. Image: © Morgan Levy

For the Ngurrara people of Western Australia, Country represents far more than geography—it is the living essence of kinship, connection, and identity. Within the vast expanse of the Great Sandy Desert, the Aboriginal communities of the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala, and Juwaliny language groups have long understood Country as a network uniting land, water, and sky. This relationship, maintained through stories and ceremony, has shaped their way of life for countless generations. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film We Were Lost in Our Country reflects on this enduring bond while tracing the Ngurrara people’s historic struggle to reclaim their ancestral lands. At the heart of Nguyen’s film lies the extraordinary Ngurrara Canvas II, a monumental artwork created in 1997 by forty-four Ngurrara artists. Painted entirely from memory and oral tradition, the canvas maps 29,000 square miles of desert—each line and color encoding ancestral knowledge passed down through generations. More than a representation of territory, it served as tangible proof of belonging, a visual affirmation of the community’s unbroken relationship with the land. Its creation became a landmark event, blending artistry and advocacy to secure legal recognition of Indigenous land rights. Through a combination of archival recordings and newly filmed material, Nguyen revisits this story of resilience and reclamation. He includes the voices of surviving artists and younger generations who, having grown up distant from their ancestral lands, are now rediscovering what Country means. We Were Lost in Our Country becomes a meditation on displacement and remembrance, showing how collective creativity can bridge the past and present. Nguyen’s film suggests that to remember Country is to heal—to reclaim not only place but identity itself. In doing so, it honors the Ngurrara people’s conviction that art and storytelling remain vital acts of resistance and renewal. Image: Still from We Were Lost in Our Country, 2019 Tuan Andrew Nguyen The Art Institute of Chicago, Benefactors of Architecture, Samuel A. Marx, and Major Acquisitions Centennial funds

The Harn at 35 marks a milestone in the history of the Harn Museum of Art, celebrating thirty-five years of dedication to visual culture through a vibrant presentation of newly acquired photographs. Over the past three decades, the museum has grown into a vital cultural space, nurturing curiosity, creativity, and connection through its exhibitions and educational programs. This anniversary exhibition honors that legacy while looking forward, showcasing the transformative power of photography to reflect both change and continuity. In the past two years alone, the Harn has welcomed more than 150 photographs into its permanent collection—an expansion fueled by the generosity of collectors, artists, and museum supporters across the country. The Harn at 35 presents around seventy of these new works to the public for the first time, featuring renowned photographers including Arnold Newman, Aaron Siskind, Jamel Shabazz, James Nachtwey, and Sarah Sense. Their images explore the vast spectrum of human experience—addressing memory, identity, innovation, and the natural world, as well as the shared emotions of conflict, family, and joy. Two intertwined themes guide the exhibition: gratitude for the patrons and visionaries who have sustained the museum’s vitality, and an exploration of the many roles photography plays in shaping how artists perceive and represent the world. Alongside the curator’s reflections, eight photography enthusiasts from the University of Florida community have contributed their own written responses, each selecting a photographer from the show who speaks to their personal vision or curiosity. Through these collective voices and images, The Harn at 35 stands as both a celebration and a renewal—a testament to the museum’s enduring commitment to the photographic medium and to the ever-evolving dialogue between art and life. Image: Brian Branch-Price, "Kortnee’s Race," 2019, Museum purchase, funds provided by the Phil and Barbara Emmer Art Acquisition Endowment, © 2019 Brian Branch-Price

Planned to complement the exhibition of Peter Moriarity’s photographs, this show draws from the Museum’s photography collection and features plant pictures from the 20th and 21st centuries. Represented artists include Tom Baril, Paul Caponigro, Imogen Cunningham, Alida Fish, and Erica Lennard.

Since the 1970s, artist Charles Gaines has worked with numeric systems and repeating visual structures to investigate representation. His subjects have ranged from race theory and language theory to objects in the natural world. This exhibition focuses on Night/Crimes, a series Gaines created from 1994 to 1997, in which he paired archival photographs of violent crime scenes, victims, and indicted murderers with images of constellations that could have been seen in the night sky when the crimes occurred. Written onto the Plexiglas covering each pair of photographs are the location and date of the crime, the astronomical position of the pictured constellation, and lastly, a date 50 years after the first one. While the paired photographs of Night/Crimes suggest narrative cycles of violence, justice, astrology, and fate, there is no causal connection between the artworks’ various elements. “The murderers pictured in the mug shot-type photographs are not the ones who have committed the crimes you see in the crime scene,” says Gaines. “Nevertheless, it seems compelling to people to override the fact that this relationship is completely made up.” As viewers, our instinct is to assume the role of detective: What is the relationship between the chaos of violence and the tranquility of the night sky? How does the injustice of the past influence the present? Are our fates written in the stars? This will be the first museum exhibition of Night/Crimes since it was first shown in 1995. The future dates Gaines etched into each of the works have all passed, inviting a new consideration of the 50-year arc of history that the series addresses. Gaines is also revisiting the series and has made two new Night/Crimes works for this presentation. On September 18, in conjunction with this exhibition, the performance version of Gaines’s Manifestos 4 will be presented by an ensemble of seven musicians—a woodwind quintet, a pianist, and a tenor—in the museum’s Rubloff Auditorium. For his Manifestos series, which comprises both gallery installations and performances, Gaines took the text of the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision that proclaimed Black people, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens, and translated each letter into a note or rest according to a set of rules. In Manifestos 4 as in Night/Crimes, Gaines has created a systematic construction that invites visceral response while also questioning their validity.

American artist Man Ray (1890–1976) was a visionary known for his radical experiments that pushed the limits of photography, painting, sculpture, and film. In the winter of 1921, he pioneered the rayograph, a new twist on a technique used to make photographs without a camera. By placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he exposed to light and developed, Man Ray turned recognizable subjects into wonderfully mysterious compositions. Introduced in the period between Dada and Surrealism, the rayographs’ transformative, magical qualities led the poet Tristan Tzara to describe them as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” The exhibition will be the first to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to Man Ray’s larger body of work of the 1910s and 1920s. Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the exhibition will feature approximately 60 rayographs and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs—including some of the artist’s most iconic works—to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice. “Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the Rayographs—as I decided to call them—on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” — Man Ray The exhibition is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation. Major funding is provided by Linda Macklowe, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation, The International Council of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrea Krantz and Harvey Sawikin, and Schiaparelli. Additional support is provided by the Vanguard Council. The catalogue is made possible by the Mellon Foundation. Additional support is provided by James Park, the Carol Shuster-Polakoff Family Foundation, and Sharon Wee and Tracy Fu.

Drawing together photographs and installations from both his celebrated and lesser-known series, Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love charts new connections across the artistic practice of Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, NY). The exhibition explores Harris’s critical examination of identity and self-portraiture while tracing central themes and formal approaches in his work of the last 35 years. The artist’s recently-completed Shadow Works anchor the exhibition. In these meticulous constructions, photographic prints are set within geometric frames of stretched Ghanaian funerary textiles, along with shells, shards of pottery, and cuttings of the artist’s own hair. Our first and last love follows the cues of the Shadow Works’ collaged and pictured elements—which include earlier artworks and reference materials, personal snapshots, and handwritten notes—to shed light on Harris’s layered approach to his practice. Harris’s work engages with broad social and political dialogues while also speaking with revelatory tenderness to his own communities, and to personal struggles, sorrows, and self-illuminations. Groupings centered around singular Shadow Works will expand upon these multiple throughlines, including Harris’s continued examination of otherness and belonging; the framing and self-presentation of Black and queer individuals; violence as a dark undercurrent of intimacy and desire; tenderness and vulnerability; and notions of legacy—both inherited and self-defined. Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love is co-organized by the Queens Museum and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, and is co-curated by Lauren Haynes, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs, Queens Museum and Caitlin Julia Rubin, Associate Curator, Rose Art Museum. Image: Shane Weeks, "Retention", 2024. Photograph. Courtesy the artist. © Shane Weeks

In 1966, the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, New York, hosted a pivotal exhibition curated by Nathan Lyons called Toward a Social Landscape. The slim, accompanying catalog was shared amongst photographers who were especially encouraged by Duane Michals’s observation that “when a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.” The UK Art Museum has a robust collection of photographers included in and inspired by this exhibition including Ruth Bernhard, Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, Alen MacWeeney, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, Peter Turnley, and Garry Winogrand. Their photographs are not merely records of scenes they observed, rather they are charged emotional moments formed in the relationship between the person behind and the world in front of the camera.     This exhibition of photography from the United States is installed on the floor above Self and Others: Japanese Photography after 1968 so visitors can compare and contrast two parallel discourses on opposite shores of the Pacific Ocean. Shared concepts and processes indicate a growing sense of international contemporaneity in the 1970s. Both exhibitions are presented in conjunction with the 2025 Louisville Photo Biennial.   Image: Duane Michals, Untitled from Alice’s Mirror, 1974, gelatin silver print. Collection of the UK Art Museum, purchase: The Robert C. May Photography Fund.

This focus exhibition explores artistic engagement with the natural environment as a source of creative inspiration worth celebrating and protecting. Approximately 25 photographs, prints, drawings, and textiles illustrate the elements of air, water, earth, and fire against broader themes of ecological awareness and preservation. These range from how artists have used visual language to convey the act of locating oneself in nature; works that depict natural forms through the physical integration of environmental components; and artists’ commentary on sites of environmental disaster, the socio-political ramifications of human impact, and the potential of symbiotic healing for this planet and its occupants. Presented as part of the Turn Again to the Earth environmental initiative. Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

In 1974, photographer Ken Ohara embarked on an experiment that transformed the act of image-making into a collective gesture of trust and chance. Living in New York City but born in Tokyo in 1942, Ohara began what he called a photographic chain letter—an invitation sent to strangers chosen randomly from the phone book. Each received a preloaded camera with simple instructions: take photographs of yourself, your family, and your surroundings, then return the camera along with the name of the next participant. Over two years, this modest device passed through a hundred hands across thirty-six states, traveling from Hawai’i to the Bronx, carrying with it fragments of countless unseen lives. The resulting project, titled CONTACTS, emerged amid the turbulence of 1970s America—an era marked by both disillusionment and transformation. Through this process, Ohara relinquished authorship, replacing the single photographer’s gaze with the plural vision of a nation in flux. What he gathered was not a documentary in the traditional sense, but a collective self-portrait of intimacy and distance, chaos and connection. Each roll of film became a diary of a moment in time, revealing the textures of domestic life, friendship, and solitude across vastly different geographies. The title CONTACTS resonates on multiple levels. It recalls the photographic contact sheet—a sequence of small images that reveal the rhythm and accidents of seeing—while also invoking the human touch at the project’s core. The selected enlarged contact sheets displayed in chronological order form a visual map of encounter and exchange. Through repetition, simplicity, and surrender, Ohara created what he described as a photography of possibility—an image of America shaped not by its surface unity, but by the unpredictable beauty found in its multiplicity of voices. Image: Ken Ohara, CONTACTS 47, Carr, San Francisco, California, 1974–1976. Gelatin silver print, 19 13/16 × 23 3/4 in. (50.3 × 60.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2025.37.47. © Ken Ohara

Tengo Lincoln Park en mi Corazón: Young Lords in Chicago revisits a pivotal moment in the city’s history, tracing the transformation of the Young Lords Organization (YLO) from a local street gang into a powerful force for social justice. Set against the backdrop of Lincoln Park’s gentrification and urban renewal during the 1950s and 1960s, the exhibition captures the resilience of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community as it confronted displacement and fought for recognition, dignity, and self-determination. Through an array of archival materials, photographs, murals, and prints, the exhibition reveals how activism took shape within everyday life. The works of Carlos Flores, Ricardo Levins Morales, and John Pitman Weber—alongside newly commissioned pieces by Sam Kirk—trace a visual history of collective resistance. At the heart of the presentation, a multimedia installation by Arif Smith with Rebel Betty invites visitors to experience the emotional and cultural landscape of the movement, transforming memory into an immersive act of witness. A central concept explored throughout is counter-mapping: the act of redrawing the city through the eyes of those who lived its hidden histories. These maps reclaim space and voice, charting a geography of belonging that challenges the erasures of official narratives. They serve as tools of empowerment, reminding audiences that place, culture, and struggle are intertwined. One of the most defining moments in this story came in May 1969, when the Young Lords occupied the Stone Administration Building at McCormick Seminary—now part of DePaul University. This act of defiance became a lasting symbol of protest and community action. Today, a public plaque marks the site, anchoring the exhibition’s reflection on memory, justice, and legacy. Curated by DePaul University Professor Jacqueline Lazú and organized by the DePaul Art Museum, Tengo Lincoln Park en mi Corazón stands as both tribute and testimony—an enduring reminder of how collective resistance can reshape the city’s heart. Image: Young Lords members protesting the Vietnam War in a march from Lincoln Park to Humboldt Park, 1969. ST-70004742-0005, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum.

Gregory Crewdson has long stood at the crossroads of photography and cinema, crafting images that are at once meticulously staged and hauntingly ambiguous. Over the past three decades, he has created a distinct visual language rooted in mystery, emotion, and the subtle drama of the everyday. Through elaborate sets, hand-built interiors, and carefully controlled lighting, Crewdson transforms ordinary American settings—often small towns in the Northeast—into dreamlike spaces where the familiar becomes strange and the mundane turns mythic. His recent series, Eveningside (2021–2022), marks a striking evolution in his work. Rendered entirely in black and white, these photographs evoke a cinematic melancholy, recalling both the shadows of film noir and the rich tonal traditions of classic photography. Each image is created with the precision of a film production, involving large crews, complex lighting, and deliberate choreography. Yet the result is a single frozen moment—a still that suggests an untold story, leaving viewers to imagine what exists beyond the frame. Presented at the Taubman Museum of Art, Eveningside invites audiences into a quiet, surreal world of solitude and beauty. The figures who inhabit these scenes seem both grounded and otherworldly, suspended in moments of introspection or longing. Crewdson’s art asks us to slow down, to feel the emotional weight of stillness, and to consider how light itself can tell a story. Born in Brooklyn and now based in western Massachusetts, Crewdson is a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale School of Art. His influential career—spanning works such as Twilight, Beneath the Roses, and Cathedral of the Pines—has redefined what a photograph can be: a fragment of fiction that captures the quiet intensity of life’s most elusive moments. Image: Madeline’s Beauty Salon, 2021-22, digital pigment print, © Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy of the Artist

Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) stands among the most influential figures in postwar Italian photography, a self-taught artist whose vision reshaped the boundaries of the medium. Born in the small Adriatic town of Senigallia, Giacomelli left school at the age of thirteen to work as a typesetter, later serving briefly in the Italian army. His path to art was far from conventional: in 1950, he opened a small printshop in his hometown, and three years later, he purchased his first camera. What began as a curiosity quickly evolved into a lifelong exploration of image-making, where the darkroom became a place of invention and transformation. Giacomelli approached photography as a field of experimentation, manipulating film and paper to create stark contrasts and bold compositions that captured the psychological texture of postwar Italy. His landscapes of the Marche region—rolling hills, furrowed vineyards, and solitary figures—became metaphors for resilience and renewal. The rural terrain, seen through his lens, transforms into near-abstract compositions, echoing the emotional power of contemporary painting while remaining deeply rooted in the land and its people. His portraits and scenes of everyday life, gathered under the series La Gente (The People), reveal an unvarnished intimacy with his subjects. Whether depicting farmers, priests, or children at play, Giacomelli’s photographs blend compassion and melancholy, reflecting the contradictions of a society emerging from war into a period of rapid modernization known as il miracolo economico italiano. The exhibition Mario Giacomelli: La Gente, La Terra presents 36 photographs spanning from 1955 to 1980, drawn entirely from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s collection. Together, the portfolios La Gente and Paesaggio (Landscape) form a poetic dialogue between humanity and nature, offering a timeless vision of Italy’s enduring spirit. The Paesaggio portfolio is a recent gift from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin, enriching the museum’s collection with Giacomelli’s singular vision of light, shadow, and life. Image: Mario Giacomelli, Storie di terra from the portfolio "Paesaggio," 1955, printed 1981. Gelatin silver print. SBMA, Gift of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin in Memory of Marjorie and Leonard Vernon, 2025.10.1. © Mario Giacomelli

Norman Rockwell: From Camera to Canvas reveals an intimate and little-known side of one of America’s most beloved artists. For over forty years, photography served as the foundation of Rockwell’s creative process—his bridge between imagination and the finished painting. After producing initial sketches, Rockwell turned to the camera to stage his ideas, choreographing every detail of gesture, light, costume, and expression to bring his vision vividly to life before he ever touched a brush to canvas. During the early and mid-twentieth century, photography was a common tool among illustrators seeking accuracy and efficiency. Yet Rockwell’s use of the medium far exceeded mere documentation. A perfectionist with an unwavering eye for detail, he transformed his reference photographs into fully realized works of art. He scouted locations, directed amateur models, and meticulously arranged props, ensuring that each photograph conveyed the story, warmth, and humanity that would later define his paintings. Each camera study became a rehearsal for his final act on canvas—a performance both technical and deeply emotional. These photographs offer a rare glimpse into Rockwell’s method, revealing how he translated reality into the timeless scenes that shaped American visual culture. His photographic compositions capture the same charm, humor, and empathy that animate his finished illustrations, while also exposing the layers of planning and artistry behind their creation. They stand as more than mere references; they are visual stories in their own right, echoing the painter’s narrative genius in another form. Featuring more than 150 photographs, tear sheets, paintings, and drawings, this exhibition traces Rockwell’s creative evolution and the essential role photography played in it. Curated by Ron Schick and Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, and organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, it invites visitors to rediscover Rockwell’s art through the lens of the camera that shaped his vision. Image: Gene Pelham, Photographs for Going and Coming, 1947, Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, August 30, 1947, Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, ST1976_2992; ST1976_2993 © Norman Rockwell Family Agency

Museums are living collections—constantly evolving gatherings of objects, ideas, and stories shaped by time, curiosity, and generosity. Each piece within their walls carries both a history and a sense of presence, connecting past intentions with present meaning. This Is a Thing brings together more than forty works on paper, created between 1774 and 2022, to explore the nature of objects and the many ways they occupy our imagination. Drawn from recent acquisitions by the RISD Museum’s Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, these works reflect an ongoing dialogue between artists and the material world. From precise studies of natural forms to abstract explorations of texture and space, the exhibition embraces a wide spectrum of thing-ness. Some pieces approach the object as a subject of affection—a cherished item rendered with tenderness—while others critique or question the role of objects in shaping human identity. Figures pose alongside tools, fragments, and inventions; landscapes dissolve into arrangements of forms that blur the line between living and made things. The result is a meditation on how artists perceive, reconstruct, and give life to the inanimate. Equally, This Is a Thing highlights the act of collecting itself—the processes, decisions, and collaborations that determine what becomes part of the museum’s story. Each acquisition tells of an encounter between artist, curator, donor, and institution, affirming the museum as a community of shared vision. Ultimately, this exhibition invites visitors to reconsider what makes a “thing” worth preserving. Whether humble or monumental, familiar or strange, every work in this collection testifies to the endless interplay between human creativity and the world of objects—reminding us that to make, to keep, and to look closely are among the most enduring things we do. Image: Edward Grazda, Mycroyan Apartments, Kabul, Afghanistan (housing projects built by the Soviets), 1992, gelatin silver print © Edward Grazda

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.

During her long, prolific, and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People reframes Lange’s work through the lens of portraiture, highlighting her unique ability to discover and reveal the character and resilience of those she photographed. Featuring 100 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism. This exhibition debuted at the National Gallery of Art in 2023 and is curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. The Nevada Museum of Art’s presentation of Dorothea Lange: Seeing People will be the only West Coast venue for this exhibition. This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, and is part of its Across the Nation program to share the nation’s collection with museums around the country.

This exhibition brings together works by Roni Horn in a range of mediums—sculpture, photography, drawing, and bookmaking—offering the first presentation devoted entirely to her exploration of water. Among the featured works are You are the Weather, Part 2 (2010–11), a series of one hundred photographs depicting a woman immersed in Iceland’s geothermal pools; a group of newly unveiled cast glass sculptures whose luminous surfaces suggest the stillness and depth of liquid; and volumes from To Place, Horn’s ongoing series of artist books begun in 1989, which probe the intricate ties between self, landscape, and perception. For Horn, water is both subject and metaphor—a material through which she examines the mutable nature of identity and emotion. In her writing, she describes water as shifting endlessly between states: calm and turbulent, pure and opaque, soft and hard. This language of paradox underscores her larger inquiry into how something that appears constant is, in fact, perpetually in flux. The qualities she attributes to water—its weight, transparency, and volatility—mirror the contradictions inherent in human experience, where clarity and uncertainty often coexist. In the context of the American West, this focus acquires a deeper resonance. Water has long been regarded as a dependable and abundant element, yet climate change and population growth are revealing its fragility. Horn’s meditations on water, therefore, speak not only to inner transformation but also to ecological vulnerability. Her art becomes an invitation to look more closely at what sustains us—materially and spiritually—and to recognize the precarious balance between stability and change. Through these works, Horn transforms water into a lens for understanding both our environment and the shifting contours of identity itself. Image: Installation view, Roni Horn: Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, September 12, 2025 — February 15, 2026. Photos by Wes Magyar.

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection invites viewers to journey through photography’s rich and evolving history, exploring how images can transport us across time, place, and imagination. Each photograph on view functions as both a document and a dream—an open doorway into the moments, ideas, and emotions that have defined the medium since its inception. From its earliest experiments to contemporary visions, the exhibition offers a meditation on photography’s enduring power to connect us to worlds both real and imagined. Spanning nearly two centuries, the selection traces photography’s transformation from scientific innovation to expressive art form. William Henry Fox Talbot’s pioneering studies of light and shadow meet the ethereal portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron, while Edward Steichen’s atmospheric compositions reveal the painterly potential of the camera. Works by László Moholy-Nagy and Jan Groover push the boundaries of perception, using abstraction to question how we see and what we know. Meanwhile, JoAnn Verburg’s immersive landscapes invite viewers into spaces where time seems to expand and dissolve, offering quiet moments of reflection within nature’s rhythm. The photographs presented here—ranging from portraits and landscapes to experimental and documentary works—demonstrate the many ways artists have used the camera to observe, interpret, and invent the world around them. Each image holds a conversation between the past and the present, between the photographer’s vision and the viewer’s imagination. Honoring a generous gift from Robert F. Greenhill to The Museum of Modern Art in memory of his wife, Gayle Greenhill, Time Travelers celebrates a life lived through art and the enduring human desire to reach beyond the moment. As photographer Emmet Gowin once reflected, “For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.” Image: Tod Papageorge. Central Park. 1989. Gelatin silver print, 15 5/16 × 22 13/16" (38.9 x 57.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gayle Greenhill Collection. © 2025 Tod Papageorge

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is one of the most extensive retrospectives ever devoted to Yoko Ono—an artist, musician, and activist whose influence has reshaped the boundaries of art and thought for over seven decades. Presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the exhibition offers a singular opportunity for American audiences to experience Ono’s creative universe, where poetry, humor, and philosophy intertwine with a lifelong call for peace. Tracing her extraordinary journey from the 1950s to today, the exhibition brings together more than 200 works across performance, film, photography, sound, installation, and archival materials. Central to Ono’s practice are her participatory pieces—artworks that invite the viewer to complete the work through imagination or direct engagement. Visitors are encouraged to take part in these interactive experiences, reflecting the artist’s belief that art can be both a private meditation and a collective act. From her early years in New York’s avant-garde scene, where she became a leading figure in conceptual art and the Fluxus movement, Ono developed an innovative artistic language grounded in instructions and actions. Music of the Mind revisits landmark works such as Cut Piece (1964), her provocative performance exploring vulnerability and trust; Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67), conceived as a “petition for peace”; and her lyrical films Fly (1970–71). Collaborations with John Cage, Ornette Coleman, and John Lennon reveal her role as a bridge between art and music. The exhibition also highlights ongoing works such as Wish Tree (1996–present), inviting visitors to share hopes for peace, and installations like My Mommy is Beautiful (2004), which encourages reflections on memory and love. Together, these works reveal Ono’s enduring commitment to the transformative power of participation. Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is a celebration of imagination as an act of resistance and a timeless invitation to envision a more peaceful world. Image: Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer, 1967, from Half-A-Wind Show, Lisson Gallery, London. © Yoko Ono. Photo by and © Clay Perry.

Pao Houa Her’s photographic practice delves into the intertwined histories and possibilities of landscape and portrait traditions, exploring how desire, memory, and displacement shape the idea of homeland. Her work draws deeply from the Hmong community’s lived experiences and oral histories, positioning women as the primary transmitters of cultural knowledge and continuity. Through her carefully composed images, Her examines how belonging and identity are constructed, using photography to navigate the layered relationship between place, imagination, and inherited memory. Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape spans more than two decades of the artist’s career, offering a fluid and unconventional survey of her evolving vision. Seen through the lens of the titular series, the exhibition weaves together connections between earlier projects, recent works, and pieces still in progress. Her photographs move seamlessly between geographies—California’s agricultural valleys, the dense jungles of Laos, and the poppy fields of Minnesota—each location transformed into a symbolic terrain that reflects both personal and collective narratives of migration and resilience. In San José, Her’s images extend beyond the museum walls, appearing throughout the downtown area in both outdoor and indoor settings, on walls and digital screens. This spatial dispersion echoes the resilience and adaptability of diasporic communities, suggesting that cultural identity is not confined to one place but continually reimagined across shifting landscapes. Her’s approach to photography—both grounded and poetic—invites viewers to reconsider how homeland can be simultaneously real and imagined, distant yet intimate. Co-organized by Lauren Schell Dickens of the San José Museum of Art and Jodi Throckmorton of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, this dual presentation embodies the spirit of collaboration and continuity that defines Her’s practice and the enduring vitality of the stories she brings to light. Image: Pao Houa Her, untitled (Erik laying outside with ziplock bags) from “The Imaginative Landscape” series, 2018. Archival pigment print, 32 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.

French photographer and visual artist Nicolas Floc’h’s Fleuves-Océan project traces the movement of water across our planet, exploring its flow through varied habitats and representing the ways we are all connected by water cycles and systems. This exhibition pairs vibrant monochromatic photographs of the color of water made under the surface with dramatic black-and-white landscape photographs made along the banks of the Mississippi and its tributaries—from Louisiana and across the country. Nicolas Floc’h documented the entire span of the Mississippi during a 2022 artist residency in the United States with Villa Albertine in collaboration with the Camargo Foundation and Artconnexion. This exhibition, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, is a clarion call illustrating illustrating the importance of a network of water that links people across the entire continent. Floc’h’s photography translates important scientific concerns—like climate change and the looming water crisis—into an overwhelming aesthetic experience, without sacrificing any urgency or insistence. A monumental arrangement of Floc’h’s “water color” photographs constitutes a central element of the exhibition. Floc’h made each image by lowering the camera underwater to the same prescribed depths, repeating the process at different locations in the Mississippi and its source waters. Light passing through the water appears as an unbelievable range of colors and shades, influenced by factors like plant and animal life, mineral run-off, and other determinants of the river’s chemical content. NOMA’s presentation combines nearly 300 individual photographs into a monumental grid of vibrant color, a new kind of polychromatic map plotting the health of the Mississippi between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. In tandem with this wall of color, the exhibition includes compelling landscape photographs that illustrate the full span of the watershed, from Minnesota and the Dakotas, through Illinois, West Virginia, Missouri, Texas, and more. Floc’h traces the movement of water through the many tributaries that combine to make the Mississippi, chronicles human efforts to harness and direct the power of the river, and the alarming absence from dry reservoirs and creek beds. Floch’s striking landscapes are presented in tandem with water color photographs specific to that place, making a visual connection between what we can see happening on the land and the quality of the water that surrounds us. Image: The Color of Water, Mississippi River, Ohio River Confluence 2022

MoMA PS1 presents the first solo exhibition in the United States by photographer Inuuteq Storch, titled Soon Will Summer Be Over, on view from October 9, 2025, through February 23, 2026. The exhibition traces more than a decade of Storch’s work, capturing the emotional and physical landscapes of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Centered on his hometown of Sisimiut, a small Arctic community north of the polar circle, his photographs explore moments of tenderness, daily routine, and quiet grandeur. Using analog cameras passed down by friends and family, Storch creates a deeply personal visual language that reflects the complexities of Greenlandic life—where ancient Inuit traditions intersect with colonial histories and the effects of a rapidly changing climate. The natural world, ever-present in its extremes, shapes Storch’s vision. His early series Keepers of the Ocean (2019) captures the essence of life in Sisimiut over four years, juxtaposing the intimacy of domestic scenes with the immensity of the surrounding sea and sky. Later works, including Soon Will Summer Be Over (2023), evoke the fragile rhythms of life in Qaanaaq, one of the northernmost towns on Earth, while What If You Were My Sabine? (2025) reveals the emotional resonance of a personal relationship. Through each project, Storch’s camera becomes both a witness and participant, preserving the fleeting interplay between people, memory, and landscape. A deep engagement with Greenland’s photographic past runs through Storch’s practice. In Porcelain Souls, he revisits family photographs from the 1960s to 1980s, uncovering tender records of everyday life. His video installation Anachronism (2015–2020) layers archival footage of Inuit modernization, questioning how identity is constructed and remembered. By merging historical fragments with contemporary imagery, Storch restores agency to his community’s self-representation, crafting a vision of Greenland that is as poetic as it is political. Image: Inuuteq Storch. Keepers of the Ocean. 2019. Photograph. Courtesy the artist and Wilson Saplana Gallery, Copenhagen © Inuuteq Storch

American, Born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy traces the extraordinary artistic journeys of Hungarian-born photographers who shaped the visual landscape of the 20th century. Against backdrops of war, exile, and reinvention, these artists migrated from Hungary to Berlin and Paris, and ultimately to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where they redefined American photography. This exhibition offers the first comprehensive exploration of their odyssey—spanning two world wars and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—and the remarkable artistic contributions that emerged along the way. Featuring over 150 striking and surreal photographs, the exhibition captures the poetic interplay of light and shadow, the grit of urban life, the allure of celebrity, and the ever-present promise of America. Included are works by renowned photographers such as André Kertész, Nickolas Muray, Martin Munkácsi, and György Kepes, alongside lesser-known artists whose images have become iconic. Among them is Robert Capa, a pioneer of modern photojournalism, whose harrowing images of D-Day at Omaha Beach remain among the most defining photographs of World War II. This exhibition fills a missing chapter in art history, revealing the profound impact of Hungarian émigrés on American photography, particularly in major urban centers. László Moholy-Nagy, whose avant-garde experiments at the Bauhaus in Germany laid the foundation for Chicago’s “New Bauhaus,” emerges as a key figure in this transatlantic movement. Meanwhile, John Albok’s Depression-era street photography captured New York life with raw emotion, and on the West Coast, André de Dienes’ portraits of Hollywood icons, including Marilyn Monroe, played a pivotal role in shaping the Golden Age of cinema. From evocative street scenes and high-fashion imagery to haunting war photography and cinematic portraiture, the exhibition showcases the work of more than thirty Hungarian-born artists who transformed photography in the 20th century. American, Born Hungary is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Alex Nyerges, VMFA Director and CEO, in collaboration with Károly Kincses, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography. The exhibition premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest on April 5, 2024, to inaugurate its newly renovated galleries, before traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in October 2024. The George Eastman Museum serves as the final stop for this landmark exhibition. Image: Nickolas Muray (American, b. Hungary, 1892–1965), Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Santa Monica, California, 1929. Gelatin silver print. George Eastman Museum, gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast presents a striking new series in which the artist reexamines the layered realities of American identity through the photographic lens. Drawing inspiration from Berenice Abbott’s 1954 documentation of U.S. Route 1, Samoylova retraces this historic roadway from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent, Maine, creating a contemporary visual dialogue between past and present. Her journey explores how the American landscape continues to serve as a stage for dreams, contradictions, and cultural transformation. Combining vivid color and contemplative black-and-white imagery, Samoylova’s photographs navigate the tension between the natural world and human invention. Signs of urban sprawl, consumer desire, and political ideology blend with the quiet persistence of nature, suggesting both harmony and dissonance. Rather than simply mapping the geography of the Atlantic coast, she builds a poetic sequence of recurring motifs—billboards, cars, waterways, and monuments—that evoke a shared visual memory of the nation. Through these symbols, she examines how nostalgia shapes our perception of authenticity and belonging. Atlantic Coast resonates deeply as a meditation on the American condition: a place where beauty and decay coexist, and where the pursuit of identity is constantly rewritten against the backdrop of commerce, ideology, and time. Samoylova’s photographs ask us to see the landscape as more than scenery—they reveal it as a mirror of collective ideals and disillusionments, a reflection of who Americans believe themselves to be. The exhibition holds particular significance for the Norton Museum of Art, situated along U.S. Route 1—known locally as Dixie Highway—since 1941. In presenting Samoylova’s work, the museum continues its engagement with the evolving story of this storied road and proudly welcomes her as one of its 2025–26 Artists-in-Residence. Image: Anastasia Samoylova (American, born Russia, 1984), Abandoned School Under Highway, Jacksonville, Florida, 2024 © Anastasia Samoylova

Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain explores the intertwined narratives of displacement, resilience, and renewal within Black American communities of Oakland and the East Bay. This exhibition unfolds as both a testament and a dialogue—revealing how generations have reimagined belonging amid the shifting landscapes of urban change. Through newly commissioned works in art, architecture, and archival storytelling, it honors the ingenuity and persistence that have shaped these communities’ pursuit of home and identity. Drawing from the histories of West Oakland and Russell City, Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain reflects on neighborhoods once rich in cultural life yet scarred by cycles of erasure and renewal. The exhibition interlaces pieces from the Oakland Museum of California’s collection with loans from local archives to trace the rise, displacement, and reclamation of these spaces. Through the eyes of artist Adrian Burrell, architect June Grant of blinkLAB architecture, and the Archive of Urban Futures in collaboration with Moms 4 Housing, the show examines the many ways Black residents have resisted systemic forces and reshaped their environments into acts of defiance and creation. Developed alongside East Bay residents who have directly experienced the weight of displacement, the exhibition becomes more than a reflection—it is an act of collective remembering. Each installation speaks to the power of reclaiming space, not only in a physical sense but also within the cultural and emotional landscapes that sustain a community. Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain stands as both an homage and a promise: a recognition of the creativity and strength that continue to define Black life in the Bay Area and beyond. It reminds viewers that even amid loss, the act of remaining can itself be a radical form of resistance and renewal. Image: Keith Dennison, Untitled [Sherman tank prepares to destroy homes for post office site], 1960, Gelatin silver print, The Oakland Tribune Collection, Oakland Museum of California, Gift of ANG Newspapers

Made in L.A. 2025 marks the seventh edition of the Hammer Museum’s celebrated biennial, a vital survey of contemporary art shaped by the vast and varied landscape of Los Angeles. Featuring twenty-eight artists, the exhibition reflects a city in constant transformation—its contradictions, diversity, and layered histories shaping the creative pulse of each work. Far from the mythic or monolithic visions often cast upon it, Los Angeles emerges here as a living organism, defined by movement, multiplicity, and dissonance. Each participating artist draws upon this urban terrain—its neighborhoods, languages, politics, and light—to reveal the many ways a city can hold meaning. The works on view span a rich range of disciplines, including film, painting, theater, choreography, photography, sculpture, sound, and video. What binds them is attitude: a shared insistence on presence and place. Whether through abstraction, documentation, or performance, each artist engages Los Angeles both as muse and as medium. The result is a portrait of the city as a state of mind—restless, layered, and irreducibly complex. Curated by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow as curatorial assistant, the biennial extends the Hammer’s long-standing commitment to supporting artistic experimentation and local voices. Made in L.A. 2025 offers not only a reflection of the city’s creative landscape but also a meditation on belonging and identity in a place perpetually reinventing itself. This year’s edition is made possible through the generosity of the Mohn Family Foundation, the Hammer Circle, and numerous foundations and patrons whose continued support sustains the museum’s mission. Through their collaboration, the exhibition invites audiences to experience Los Angeles anew—as both a site of artistic invention and a mirror of the contemporary world. Image: Black-and-white image of a light-colored car with its front crashed into the ground in front of a palm tree Pat O’Neill, Los Angeles, from the series Cars and Other Problems, ca. 1960s © Pat O’Neill

Icons In Hand: Masterworks from Local Collections invites visitors to rediscover the power of black-and-white photography through an intimate encounter with some of the medium’s most enduring images. Presented in Brattleboro’s Main Gallery from January to March 2026, the exhibition gathers museum-quality prints by legendary photographers, drawn from a remarkable local collection. Each photograph offers an opportunity to look closely—to notice the texture of the paper, the subtle grain, and the edges of the negative—and to feel how time, craft, and memory intersect within these masterworks. The exhibition encourages visitors to experience iconic images not as digital reproductions, but as physical objects with their own histories. The way a print is made, toned, or preserved becomes part of its emotional language, shaping what we perceive and how we connect to it. In this setting, works such as Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA, 1936 regain their tactile immediacy, reminding us of photography’s profound ability to bear witness and to endure. Co-curated by Josh Farr and Mitch Weiss, Icons In Hand also explores the quiet passion behind collecting photography. It invites reflection on why individuals choose to live with these works, how the story of a print’s creation and care enriches its meaning, and how private collections play a role in sustaining a shared cultural heritage. The exhibition is both a celebration of photographic artistry and a gesture of gratitude toward those who preserve it for future generations. At its heart, Icons In Hand embodies the spirit of the Vermont Center for Photography—a place where art lives in dialogue with its community, where artists and audiences meet in person, and where each photograph reminds us that seeing is not only about vision, but about presence. Image: Migrant Mother, Nipomo CA, 1936 © Dorothea Lange

Selections from the Photography Collection offers a continuing reflection on the rich diversity of vision that artists bring to the photographic medium. This latest installation from the Museum’s holdings turns its gaze toward a universal subject—food—and the myriad ways it shapes our lives. Through still lifes, portraits of farmers, intimate dining scenes, and bustling markets, the exhibition explores how sustenance is never merely physical but also deeply cultural, emotional, and social. Spanning nine decades and featuring nineteen artists, the photographs reveal how food binds people together across geography and generations. An image of hands harvesting fruit or a family gathered around a shared meal becomes a meditation on connection and continuity. The works evoke both the dignity of labor and the rituals of daily life, celebrating the beauty in what is often overlooked. Whether through the formal precision of a composed still life or the spontaneous rhythm of a street market, each artist finds poetry in the everyday act of nourishment. Among the highlights is Edward Henry Weston’s 1930 gelatin silver print Eggs, a study in simplicity and form that transforms the ordinary into the sublime. In Weston’s hands, the quiet geometry of eggshells becomes a meditation on balance and light—an emblem of how photography can turn sustenance into art. This iteration of Selections from the Photography Collection underscores how the act of eating, growing, and sharing food continues to define human experience. Supported by the Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation and the Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment, the exhibition invites viewers to see food not only as a necessity but as a mirror of community, creativity, and care. A new selection of works will open in the Fuller Gallery on March 14, 2026. Image: H. Donald Bortz (American, 1908–1962), Brenda Bortz, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1951 (printed 1995), Kodachrome dye transfer print. Allentown Art Museum: Gift of Mary Rose Oldt, 2024. @H. Donald Bortz

The exhibition of Tawny Chatmon’s work at NMWA marks a new and profound chapter in the artist’s evolving creative journey. Bringing together selections from her most recent series, The Restoration (2021–present) and The Reconciliation (2024–present), this presentation expands the boundaries of her photography-based practice into assemblage, embroidery, film, and sound. These recent works build upon the luminous visual vocabulary established in earlier series such as If I’m no longer here, I wanted you to know… (2020–2021), Remnants (2021–2023), and Iconography (2023–present), which are also represented in the exhibition. Characterized by ornate patterns, radiant colors, and symbolic layering, Chatmon’s portraits—often of children—draw inspiration from Gustav Klimt’s opulent compositions and the golden mosaics of Byzantine art. Material choices play a vital role in Chatmon’s creative language. Her decision to move away from genuine gold reflects her awareness of the ethical and environmental issues surrounding the extraction of precious materials such as gold and cobalt, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In response, her latest works embrace embroidery and textiles as alternative mediums, weaving new narratives of care, resilience, and reverence. In The Reconciliation, Chatmon addresses stereotypes about the food traditions of the African diaspora, reclaiming recipes and rituals that have sustained generations while celebrating their deep cultural and spiritual significance. The Restoration emerged from Chatmon’s commitment to confronting racist imagery found in antique dolls and figurines. By repainting and redressing these objects and placing them in the hands of children, she symbolically transforms symbols of harm into emblems of dignity and renewal. Across her practice, Chatmon calls upon viewers to recognize the sacredness and intrinsic worth of Black identity, illuminating stories of beauty, strength, and humanity that have long been overlooked or misrepresented. Image: Tawny Chatmon, Economic Heritage, from the series “The Reconciliation,” 2024; Embroidery and acrylic paint on archival pigment print, 47 x 32 in. (unframed) ©Tawny Chatmon, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis

Postcards from Nowhere presents an intimate installation of 42 photographs of people at work and play by South Florida humanist photographer Eduardo Chacon. This is a combined special exhibition that also features a selection of iconic street photographers from the Museum collection that inspire Chacon’s practice. Eduardo Chacon shoots straight photography with no cropping, no auto-focus, and all manual settings. By maintaining the integrity of the original scene, Chacon captures his surroundings rife with that thing most fleeting: human emotion. As a counter to a society obsessed with peering into our phones’ black mirrors, Chacon turns his camera’s eye ever outward and up and, in the blink of a lens, creates visual chronicles of human interaction, from a bartender mid-pour to a family fishing trip, to an embrace while gazing at the stars. Postcards from Nowhere, using only Chacon’s masterful control of timing, contrast, and composition in black-and-white, transports the viewer on a trip to their own personal realm. As the exhibition reveals, this could be anywhere worldwide, as long as it avoids modern technology in favor of a simpler time. Image: Eduardo Chacon, Hangover Bros, 2022 (printed 2023), archival print. Courtesy of the Artist

Explore the vibrant and dazzling world of Harlem’s gay Black community during the 1920s and 30s. To mark the centennial of The New Negro, Alain Locke’s groundbreaking edited volume of literature and art, The Gay Harlem Renaissance invites visitors to immerse themselves in the richness of LGBTQ+ Black life during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The exhibition makes the case that the influx of ideas and people into the neighborhood during the Great Migration, on a scale never before seen, enabled a vibrant, visible LBGTQ+ Black culture and network to flourish in Harlem. Facing racist practices and homophobic laws yet drawn by promise and possibility, these individuals created a space where they could gather, build community, and produce art that forever changed American culture. Uniting painting, sculpture, artifacts, documents, photographs, and music from collections across the country, The Gay Harlem Renaissance celebrates the creativity, innovation, and resilience of Black LGBTQ+ Harlemites. Curated by Allison Robinson, associate curator of history exhibitions and Anne Lessy, assistant curator of history exhibitions and academic engagement, with contributions from Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture and decorative arts, and George Chauncey, author of Gay New York and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History and Director of the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities at Columbia University as chief historian. Lead support for The Gay Harlem Renaissance is provided by the Mellon Foundation.

Encounter an artist who changed the face of portrait photography. Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens is the most expansive North American exhibition of the legendary Malian photographer’s work to date. Nearly 275 works include iconic prints, never-before-seen portraits, textiles, and Keïta’s personal artifacts, all brought to life with unique insights from his family.. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition brings us to Bamako from the late 1940s to early 1960s, an era of profound political and social transformation. Collaborating closely with his sitters, Keïta recorded Mali’s evolution through their choices of backdrops, accessories, and apparel, from traditional finery to European suits. These bold yet sensitive photographs began to circulate in West Africa nearly 80 years ago. In the early 1990s, they reached Western viewers, rocking the art world and cementing Keïta as the premier studio photographer of 20th-century Africa—a peer of August Sander, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon.. Witness the power of photography through these richly layered images, which reveal not only Malians’ emotional landscapes but also the textures of life in a rapidly changing country.. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, offering new insights into the photographer, his work, and Malian material culture. The publication features a biography by Catherine E. McKinley based on extensive interviews with Keïta’s heirs, as well as essays by prominent scholars and curators including Drew Sawyer, Howard W. French, Duncan Clarke, Awa Konate, Sana Ginwalla, and Jennifer Bajorek. Image: Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1952–55 © SKPEAC/the estate of Seydou Keïta and courtesy The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection

Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is the first major museum survey in the United States of work by British European visual artist Tacita Dean (b. 1965). The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with Dean, spotlights her career-defining approach to creating art through unmediated and chance-based drawing processes across a variety of mediums, from film to printmaking. Blind Folly, the show’s title, reflects Dean’s desire to let the behavior of her mediums dictate the results of her work. For the artist, the playful and old-fashioned phrase connoting foolishness, “blind folly,” represents the role chance and fate play in the creative act. Blind Folly brings together several of Dean’s monumental blackboard drawings along with rarely shown drawings from her studio on paper, found postcards, albumen photographs, and 16mm films. This selection includes several newly created works, some of which were inspired by Dean’s residency at the Menil Collection’s Cy Twombly Gallery, a Renzo Piano-designed building devoted to the work of late American artist Cy Twombly (1928–2011). Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is curated by Michelle White, Senior Curator, The Menil Collection, Houston, and presented at the Columbus Museum of Art in collaboration with Daniel Marcus, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, and Rae Root, Roy Lichtenstein Curatorial Fellow. The exhibition is accompanied by the book Blind Folly or How Tacita Dean Draws, written by Michelle White (co-published by the Menil and MACK). The text, illustrated with more than forty images, is based on seven years of conversation between the author and the artist.

Milk/Wine explores the fascinating relationship between art and time, asking what it means for a work of art to age. Whether through visible signs of decay—yellowed paper, cracking pigment, fading tones—or through the gradual shift in cultural values, every artwork carries the marks of its passage through history. Some images honor people or ideals that have since vanished; others reveal truths that resonate even more strongly today. Like milk or wine, art can spoil or mature, its meaning transforming as generations change their gaze. Composed primarily of prints, photographs, and works on paper, Milk/Wine reflects on the fragile and enduring nature of artistic expression. Certain pieces confront moments in collective memory that society may have chosen to forget or suppress. Others illustrate how the creative process itself embodies time—through material deterioration, archival scarcity, or deliberate layering that captures the tension between presence and loss. Each work holds within it both its original intention and the echo of every viewer who encounters it anew. By inviting contemporary audiences to interpret these works, the exhibition encourages a dialogue between past and present. It suggests that meaning is never fixed, but constantly reframed through cultural perspective and the lived experience of time. Labels written by members of the Weisman Art Museum staff and the WAM Collective bring modern reflections into direct conversation with the historical context of each piece, highlighting how perception evolves with each generation. In the end, Milk/Wine reminds us that all art, like life itself, exists in motion—subject to change, reinterpretation, and decay. Yet within that inevitable transformation lies beauty and truth: the understanding that time, in its slow and impartial way, reveals as much as it erodes. Image: Composite of Laura Crosby, Time Take (Sophie, 2 weeks), 2001, gelatin silver print, mat size: 31 5/8 × 31 5/8 in. Collection of the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Gift of the artist. 2015.34.1 and Laura Crosby, Time Take (Margaret, 100 years), 1999, gelatin silver print, mat size: 31 5/8 × 31 5/8 in. Collection of the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Gift of the artist. 2015.34.25

Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South seeks to change how we envision the Great Depression and its ‘other Southern half.’ Between 1935 and 1944, a group of photographers working for the Farm Security Administration created a massive photo-documentation portrait of the living conditions of American agricultural workers in the rural South. The images that were selected for mass publication, many of which have become icons of this period of American history, offered a narrow view of these Southern regions and their inhabitants. Spanning the work of Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn; and six Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida Mississippi, and Missouri), this exhibition foregrounds photos of private dwellings and public gathering spaces of Black Southerners. Crafting Sanctuaries reveals how these Depression-era Black Southerners worked to construct and reflect a sense of home and self by imagining, designing, and adorning their interior worlds and communal spaces. Farming houses, humble shacks, churches, schoolhouses, and barbershops are refashioned into havens of expression, comfort, and refuge. Organized by Art Bridges. Curated by Tamir Williams, Curatorial Associate, with support from Ashley Holland, Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, Isabel Ouweleen, Curatorial Research Assistant, and Javier Rivero Ramos, Assistant Curator. Image: Russell Lee (1903-1986), Southeast Missouri Farms. Sharecropper’s child combing hair in bedroom of shack home near La Forge project, Missouri, 1938, printed 2024, silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8b20258

The Unending Stream is a two-part exhibition that showcases the thriving community of photographers living and working in New Orleans. The title of the exhibition pays homage to a Clarence John Laughlin photograph of the same title, which is a part of the permanent collection at Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Considered “the Father of American Surrealism,” Laughlin was perhaps the most important Southern photographer of the mid-twentieth century. His seminal work, created between the 1935 and 1965, is an important chapter in the long-storied relationship between New Orleans and photography. Following in Laughlin’s visionary footsteps, this exhibition focuses on contemporary photographers who are visually defining the Crescent City in the twenty-first century. The Unending Stream celebrates of the city of New Orleans’ continuing role as one of America’s most important cultural capitals while also highlighting the role the arts have played in revitalizing the region over the past twenty years since Hurricane Katrina. The Unending Stream highlights the work of six photographers who investigate themes similar to Laughlin’s of memory, place, time and identity while capturing the mysterious beauty of America’s most unique city. Each photographer brings a contemporary twist to the exhibition, creating work that provokes thought and conjures emotion. The Unending Stream: Chapter II features photographers (Casey Joiner, Eric Waters, Virginia Hanusik, Giancarlo D’Agostaro, Steve Pyke and Clint Maedgen) who work in both analogue and digital photography. Casey Joiner uses the camera to explore themes of family and grief; Eric Waters documents the complex culture of New Orleans’ Black masking traditions; Virginia Hanusik captures Louisiana’s disappearing coastline in a time of climate change; Giancarlo D’Agostaro makes moody nocturnal photographs of Mardi Gras parades; Steve Pyke records the lush urban forest contained within City Park; and Clint Maedgen fuses multiple images and self-portraiture to create scroll-like collages informed by his musical background. New Orleans has been both muse and home to some of the most important and celebrated photographers of the ninetieth and twentieth century. The Unending Stream sheds light on the current trajectory of photography being created in New Orleans today. Image: Eric Waters, Victor Harris “Mandingo Warriors” FiYiYi, 2015, Pigment Print, 30 x 24 inches, Collection of the Artist

Full Circle brings together the lifelong photographic exploration of Shellburne Thurber, an artist whose work probes the subtle connection between human presence and the spaces we inhabit. For decades, Thurber has been captivated by the ways architecture absorbs emotion, history, and memory—how rooms can become extensions of the body and repositories of lived experience. From her earliest portraits of family and friends in their homes to later series featuring roadside motels, abandoned hospitals, and sacred interiors, her camera reveals the traces of life imprinted upon built environments that exist somewhere between public and private realms. The works presented in Full Circle trace this ongoing meditation on interiority, intimacy, and psychological space. The exhibition reaches back to Thurber’s first photographs in the 1970s—images of her grandmother’s home in southern Indiana—and extends to her recent series documenting psychoanalytic offices, published as a monograph by Kehrer Verlag in 2023. For Thurber, these interiors function as portraits in another form, representing both the visible and unseen dimensions of those who once occupied them. Through her lens, light filtering through a window, a worn chair, or the quiet geometry of a room becomes a witness to time and emotional residue. Conceived in collaboration with the Bates Museum of Art and curated by Samantha Sigmon, Full Circle serves as a focused retrospective that connects recurring themes across Thurber’s practice—from domestic to institutional, sacred to derelict spaces. Each photograph stands as a silent monument to lives once lived, to the unseen narratives embedded within walls and objects. By revisiting these spaces across her career, Thurber not only documents the passage of time but also reflects her own evolving circle of relationships, memory, and artistic inquiry. Shellburne Thurber’s work is held in major collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Addison Gallery of American Art; and the Worcester Art Museum. She has taught widely across New England and has received numerous honors, including a Radcliffe Institute fellowship and an Anonymous Was a Woman grant. Image: Aunt Anna Sitting in Her Study, archival pigment print, 1978, 20 x 20 in., courtesy of the artist. © Shellburne Thurber

The Center for Photographic Art presents Belonging in the National Parks, a solo exhibition by acclaimed artist Binh Danh that reflects on identity, inclusion, and shared stewardship of America’s most treasured landscapes. Using the luminous and reflective medium of the daguerreotype, Danh turns the viewer’s gaze inward, merging their image with that of the natural world. Each polished plate becomes both window and mirror, reminding us that these protected spaces—often symbols of collective heritage—are also deeply personal sites of belonging and exclusion. Through this interplay of image and reflection, the series reconsiders who has historically been invited into the narrative of the American landscape and who has been left outside its frame. Reviving a 19th-century process to engage with 21st-century questions, Danh bridges past and present through the meditative act of photographic creation. The daguerreotype’s silver surface, delicate yet enduring, embodies the tension between fragility and permanence that defines our relationship with nature. In this work, history and memory are inseparable from light and time; as viewers move before each piece, their shifting reflections animate the image, echoing the constant transformation of both land and identity. The result is an invitation to see ourselves not as observers of nature but as participants within it, responsible for its preservation and inclusivity. Binh Danh, known for his innovative blending of historical techniques with contemporary concerns, explores themes of home, displacement, and remembrance throughout his practice. His works are held in major collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, the de Young, and the Asian Art Museum. His 2023 book, Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging, was awarded the inaugural Minami Book Grant for Asian American Visual Artists. Danh currently serves as an associate professor of art at San José State University. Image: unique daguerreotype © Binh Danh

Invented in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in the 1830s, the daguerreotype rapidly became the first widely practiced photographic process worldwide. By 1853, photographers in the United States produced an estimated three million a year, mostly portraits. But between 1840 and 1860, an innovative language of scenic outdoor daguerreotypes developed despite the technical challenges of the process. Surviving examples of these jewel-like scenic daguerreotypes number in the few thousands. This exhibition looks at eighty three, most selected from an important private collection. Included are two of the earliest American landscape photographs, extraordinary full-plate daguerreotypes made in 1840-41 by Samuel Bemis (1789–1881) and never before exhibited in public, and a street scene in Cincinnati made around 1851 by James Presley Ball (1825–1904). Gain an incredible view into mid-nineteenth-century American life and the beginnings of American landscape photography that emerged concurrently with the Hudson River School of painters. These forgotten but pioneering daguerreotypes laid the foundation for the scenic and urban landscape tradition that would dominate American photography in the twentieth century. Image: St. Anthony Falls, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Attributed to Alexander Hesler (1823-1895) and Joel Whitney (1822-1886). Sixth plate daguerreotype. Greg French Collection.

In celebration of the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), and in partnership with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) presents Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World, a major exhibition opening on September 12, 2025. This dynamic show explores Rauschenberg’s innovative integration of photography and found objects into his art, reflecting his deep engagement with “the real world” and his complex relationship with New York City. Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of postwar New York, Rauschenberg’s irreverent approach to art-making pushed the envelope for an entire generation, reshaping the art world in New York and around the world. At the heart of his practice was a desire to incorporate the tangible world around him into his art. Gathering materials and inspiration from his surroundings, he often brought found objects and images sourced or reproduced from magazines and newspapers into his paintings and sculptures. But Rauschenberg was not merely a user of found imagery; he was also a photographer with a bold creative vision— an essential aspect of his artistic practice that is the focus of the exhibition. The show is organized into three sections—Early Photographs, In + Out City Limits, and Photography in Painting—tracing the evolution of Rauschenberg’s photographic practice and its interplay with painting, sculpture, and assemblage. His earliest images are largely intimate portraits and experiments with formal elements such as framing, light and shadow, and flattening the picture plane. The centerpiece of the exhibition is In + Out City Limits, a three-year (1979–81) photographic survey conducted across the United States—a project Rauschenberg had originally conceived decades earlier as a student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. His New York photographs from this project reveal his fascination with the signs and symbols of human culture, even in the most humble or discarded remnants of the city. Together, these photographs emphasize his observational rigor and his constant effort to channel the fleeting, ineffable moments of life into his work—revealing a deep sensitivity to the social landscape. In addition, the exhibition presents a selection of works created between 1963 and 1994 that combine Rauschenberg’s New York City photographs with images taken around the world, illustrating how he re-contextualized his photographic imagery through his innovative creative process. Image: Robert Rauschenberg, Wet Flirt (Urban Bourbon), 1994. Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist duo Elliot & Erick Jiménez. The photographers, identical twin brothers, present an entirely new body of work inspired by the spiritual tradition of Lucumí—a syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion that emerged in late nineteenth-century Cuba bringing together elements of Yoruba, Catholicism, and Spiritism—and by Lydia Cabrera’s seminal text El Monte. First published in Cuba in 1954, El Monte is a foundational study of Afro-Cuban religions that was translated into English for the first time in 2023, significantly broadening access to its insights on Caribbean spiritual practices. This exhibition highlights the Jiménez twins’ bicultural upbringing as Cuban Americans raised in the Lucumí tradition. At the center of the exhibition is a large structure that dominates the gallery space, its interior evoking both a chapel and a forest. The installation references syncretic Caribbean religions, their Catholic counterparts, and the Cuban monte (forest or wilderness)—a site associated with mystery, transformations, and spiritual encounters. Various works explore the artists’ relationship as identical twins, the structure itself symbolizing the shared space of the womb. Other works reimagine well-known art historical compositions through the lens of Lucumí, examining its intersections with colonialism and the Western art historical canon. While the exhibition primarily features photographs, it also includes sculptural elements interspersed throughout the gallery. Together, these works invite visitors to engage with themes of wonder, mystery, self-reflection, and discovery. Image: Elliot & Erick. El Monte (Ibejí), 2024. Archival pigment print

Internationally renowned artist Ann Hamilton is best known for large-scale ephemeral installations, performances, and civic monuments, but the use of photography and video runs throughout her 35-year career and has become increasingly important to her practice over the past decade. This exhibition juxtaposes past works with new creations, including some related to the museum and its collections. Explored in all this work is the relationship between touch, sight, and language. Hamilton’s interest in tactility recalls her origins as a textile artist. A central theme of her practice is the connection between feeling, understanding, and sensory experience, especially touch. Born in Lima, Ohio, and living in Columbus, Hamilton is Ohio’s most influential and best-known living visual artist. Among her many honors are the National Medal of the Arts, Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Hamilton represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal and the 1999 Venice Biennale and has exhibited extensively around the world. Image: sense • stone, 2022. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956). Archival pigment print on Japanese gampi paper

Belonging in Transit is a photography exhibition by Carlos Muñoz that examines the intimate realities of migration through a deeply personal lens. Centered on Redland, a vibrant migrant market on the outskirts of Miami, the series captures the daily intersections of diverse communities while reflecting the artist’s own experiences as a migrant. For Muñoz, Redland is more than a backdrop; it is a space that mirrors his journey, recalling memories of separation, evolving family connections, and the ongoing search for a sense of home. Muñoz’s approach goes beyond simple documentation. Rather than freezing a single moment, his images explore migration as a fluid, continuous experience shaped by movement, memory, and the pursuit of connection. The individuals in his photographs are not distant subjects—they resonate with echoes of the artist’s own life, conveying the resilience, vulnerability, and quiet determination that accompany the migrant experience. Each frame invites viewers to linger with the emotional complexity of displacement, acknowledging both loss and hope without offering tidy explanations. At its core, Belonging in Transit reframes belonging itself as a dynamic process. It is not a static destination but a condition constantly negotiated through lived experience. Through the juxtaposition of faces, gestures, and spaces, the exhibition emphasizes the universality of the search for home, community, and understanding, highlighting the shared human need for continuity and recognition. Muñoz’s work fosters empathy by revealing the intimate, often invisible, emotional landscape of migration. His photographs balance tenderness and honesty, capturing moments of quiet resilience, fleeting joy, and reflective contemplation. By situating personal narrative within a broader social context, Belonging in Transit offers a meditation on identity, place, and the ongoing effort to claim space in a world defined by movement and change. The exhibition is both a testimony to individual journeys and a reminder of our collective capacity for empathy and connection. Image: © Carlos Muñoz

From the years of the Second World War through the 1970s, photojournalist Ruth Orkin dedicated her lens to capturing women who were reshaping their roles in a rapidly changing society. This exhibition of 21 vintage photographs from the National Museum of Women in the Arts collection reveals Orkin’s deep curiosity about women forging their own paths—as artists, mothers, service members, and travelers. Born in Boston in 1921, the daughter of a silent film actress, Orkin grew up surrounded by storytelling and image-making. Her career would span both glamour and grit, from photographing Hollywood stars to documenting women’s everyday triumphs in classrooms, parks, and city streets across America. Orkin’s photography offers a rare blend of empathy and strength. Whether capturing members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, tourists wandering through postwar Europe, or Broadway performers caught between rehearsals, she sought authenticity above all. Her portraits convey confidence and individuality, revealing women who were not simply being observed but seen on their own terms. Through her collaborative approach, Orkin deliberately reversed the traditional dynamics of the male gaze, transforming photography into an exchange between equals rather than a spectacle of power. Although Orkin initially dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, her ambitions were curtailed when the cinematographers’ union barred women from joining. Undeterred, she brought a cinematic sensibility to her still images—each photograph feels like a fragment of a larger story. Later in life, she would work alongside her husband in film, but photography remained her truest medium for narrative expression. Whether portraying children at play, celebrities at work, or neighbors on the streets of New York, Ruth Orkin imbued every frame with vitality, dignity, and a sense of wonder for the everyday stories that shape human experience. Image: Ruth Orkin, American Girl in Italy, 1951 (printed 1980 by Ruth Orkin Estate); Gelatin silver print, 23 x 28 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Promised gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling

The exhibition Alvin Lester: Portraits of Jackson Ward and Beyond presents twenty compelling portraits taken by photographer Alvin Lester in the late 1980s and early 1990s, capturing the heart and humanity of Richmond’s historic neighborhoods. With a keen eye for character and community, Lester turned his lens toward the people and businesses that defined Jackson Ward—once known as the “Harlem of the South”—as well as the surrounding areas of Northside and Church Hill. Through his portraits, Lester documented beauticians, bakers, real estate brokers, and journalists—individuals whose daily work sustained Richmond’s Black business and cultural life. His images reveal the vibrancy and resilience of the city’s Second Street business district, a place that, in the decades following the Civil War, became a cornerstone of Black entrepreneurship and civic pride. Lester’s approach was both personal and historical: he understood that a city’s essence is reflected in those who build, serve, and nurture it. Each portrait is more than a likeness; it is an act of preservation. Lester’s work honors not only the individuals he photographed but also the collective memory of a community that has faced—and transcended—economic, political, and social challenges. His subjects are presented with dignity and intimacy, standing as symbols of endurance and continuity within Richmond’s evolving landscape. Now part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection, these photographs form a visual archive of a crucial period in the city’s history. Curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on how photography can both record and celebrate cultural heritage. In capturing the soul of Jackson Ward and beyond, Alvin Lester leaves a lasting tribute to the spirit of Black Richmond—a reminder that community, rooted in history, continues to define the life of a city. Image: Robert Wagstaff, Shoe Cobbler (detail), 1989–91, Alvin Lester (American, born 1947), gelatin silver print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts Fund, 2025.96. © Alvin Lester

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.

This exhibition celebrates the remarkable creative potential of the cell phone as a tool for artistic expression, featuring the poetic and deeply human work of award-winning Indian photographer Dimpy Bhalotia. Known internationally for her black-and-white street photography, Bhalotia captures fleeting gestures, emotional resonance, and the beauty of the everyday with cinematic intensity. Her photographs remind us that compelling storytelling does not depend on complex equipment—it arises from intuition, timing, and a keen sensitivity to life’s spontaneous choreography. Born and raised in Mumbai and now based in London, Dimpy Bhalotia initially pursued fashion design at the London College of Fashion before finding her true voice through photography. Her elegant and dynamic compositions have earned her recognition from the International Photography Awards (IPA), the Prix de la Photographie Paris (Px3), and the iPhone Photography Awards, where she was named Photographer of the Year in 2020. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, BBC, and L’Officiel, and exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. More than a traditional exhibition, this presentation is a celebration of accessibility and creativity—a space where art meets everyday experience. Visitors are invited to see the world through Bhalotia’s lens and to recognize their own capacity for visual storytelling. In a time when nearly everyone carries a camera, her work stands as an inspiring testament to the idea that artistry begins not with technology, but with vision, courage, and awareness. Image: Dimpy Bhalotia (Indian, b. 1987) Shoulder Birds, November 2018 © Dimpy Bhalotia

Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene is a sweeping exploration of how contemporary photographers interpret humanity’s profound and often irreversible impact on the planet. Bringing together the work of forty-three artists from across the globe, the exhibition reveals a generation of image-makers who have redefined the possibilities of photography in response to the environmental realities of our time. Their work captures not only the altered landscapes of Earth but also the evolving relationship between humans, technology, and nature itself. Emerging alongside the rise of digital technologies in the early 2000s—and the growing recognition of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch—these artists transformed the medium into a tool of reflection and critique. Through experimental techniques, digital manipulation, and conceptual rigor, they document the consequences of human industry, urbanization, and climate disruption, while also uncovering unexpected beauty and resilience within damaged ecosystems. In their images, glaciers glow with unnatural colors, forests fragment into pixels, and oceans shimmer under the weight of unseen change. Second Nature examines this dual vision: the wonder of creation and the gravity of loss. The photographs on view question the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, asking how we might see the Earth anew when so much of it bears the trace of human touch. The exhibition thus becomes both a mirror and a warning—a meditation on how images shape our understanding of the world we are reshaping. Organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in partnership with the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Second Nature is curated by Jessica May and Marshall N. Price. Together, they illuminate a crucial dialogue about art’s role in witnessing and responding to a planet in flux. Image: Gohar Dashti, Untitled #2 from the series Home, 2017. Archival digital pigment print, artist’s proof 1/2, 313/8 x 47 3/16 inches (80 x 120 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery. © Gohar Dashti.

How to Be a Guerrilla Girl offers an unprecedented look inside one of the most influential and enduring feminist art collectives of the past four decades. Presented by the Getty Research Institute, the exhibition reveals both the process and the purpose behind the Guerrilla Girls’ unmistakable blend of activism, humor, and design. Drawing from the group’s extensive archive, it reconstructs the behind-the-scenes methods that fueled their iconic posters and public campaigns—works that continue to challenge gender and racial inequality across the cultural landscape. Founded in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls emerged at a moment of deep frustration within the art world, when women and artists of color were systematically excluded from exhibitions, collections, and critical discourse. By adopting anonymity and gorilla masks, the collective transformed protest into performance, blending wit and statistics to expose the biases of major institutions. This exhibition situates their most recognizable works—posters, billboards, and flyers—within the broader ecosystem of their practice: data gathering, direct action, and inventive modes of distribution that redefined how art could intervene in public life. The archival materials on view trace the evolution of the group’s voice from early campaigns targeting museum inequities to their later engagements with global politics, media culture, and theater. Drafts, notes, and correspondence reveal a complex collaborative process marked by debate, dissent, and solidarity. Each poster was not only a statement but also the outcome of collective authorship and shared conviction. Coinciding with the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, How to Be a Guerrilla Girl celebrates their enduring commitment to truth-telling through satire and resistance. It illuminates how their work, born in protest, has become part of the very history it critiques—reminding viewers that art can still be a mask, a weapon, and a call to action all at once. Image: Overleaf, foreground: Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met Museum? (detail), 1989, Offset print; background: Contact Sheets (details), ca. 1987, Gelatin silver prints. Guerrilla Girls (American, active since 1985). Getty Research Institute, 2008.M.14. Courtesy Guerrilla Girls. © Guerrilla Girls. Design © 2025 J. Paul Getty Trust

Every photograph carries with it a decision—what to include, what to exclude, and how to shape what is seen. In their first solo museum exhibition in Seattle, Duwamish artist Camille Trautman reclaims that act of framing as a tool of resistance. Through photography and video, Trautman interrogates the ways colonial narratives have obscured Indigenous presence, offering instead images that assert identity, memory, and visibility. The exhibition centers on selections from Trautman’s ongoing series The North American LCD, a haunting body of work that merges the personal and the political. Each photograph presents a spectral self-portrait of the artist set within varied natural landscapes. Their form—partially hidden behind luminous LCD screens—speaks to the tension between self-revelation and concealment, a reflection of the artist’s journey through gender transition and self-recognition. In these works, the screen becomes both barrier and mirror, a metaphor for how technology and representation can simultaneously empower and distort. Trautman’s images challenge the conventions of landscape photography, exposing how the genre has long served as a colonial tool while offering new ways to envision connection with land and self. Part of the Frye Art Museum’s Boren Banner Series, this exhibition extends Trautman’s practice beyond the gallery walls. A monumental 16-by-20-foot vinyl banner faces Boren Avenue, transforming public space into a site of encounter and reflection. This gesture, emblematic of the museum’s ongoing support for Pacific Northwest artists, brings Trautman’s work into dialogue with the urban landscape of their hometown. In The North American LCD, the act of framing becomes a form of reclamation—a way to rewrite visibility on one’s own terms. Through layered imagery and embodied presence, Camille Trautman invites viewers to consider how identity, land, and history intertwine within the ever-shifting lens of representation. Image: Camille Trautman. The North American LCD no. 26, 2025. Archival pigment print. 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist

Bill Bamberger: Boys Will Be Men offers an intimate and thought-provoking look into the lives of young men standing at the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. Through a series of powerful portraits by Durham-based photographer Bill Bamberger (born 1956), the exhibition captures the uncertainty, vulnerability, and quiet strength of male-identifying high school students as they navigate identity, expectation, and belonging in a rapidly changing world. Complementing the photographs is an audio program featuring the students’ own reflections on the pressures they face, allowing their voices to deepen the visual narrative with honesty and nuance. The project began in 1984 at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and continued in 2000 during Bamberger’s residency at Flint Central High School in Michigan. In 2023, the Ackland Art Museum invited the artist to expand the series at the Durham School of the Arts (DSA), marking a significant new chapter in this decades-long exploration. Over two years, Bamberger immersed himself in the school community—photographing students in classrooms, hallways, and extracurricular spaces—building trust and collaboration that shaped the spirit of the project. The resulting portraits are both direct and tender, offering glimpses into the complexities of youth at a time when societal definitions of masculinity are being reexamined. Some subjects appear confident and defiant; others seem introspective, even uncertain—but all are united by an unfiltered authenticity that characterizes Bamberger’s documentary approach. The inclusion of the students’ recorded voices invites visitors to encounter their thoughts and experiences firsthand, transforming the gallery into a space of dialogue and empathy. Bill Bamberger: Boys Will Be Men is not merely a portrait series—it is a meditation on growing up, on what it means to become, and on how photography can help us see one another more clearly in moments of change. Image: Bill Bamberger, American, born 1956, Jorden, 2023, digital photograph. © Bill Bamberger

Photography has long served as a bridge between place and memory, offering a way to both record and interpret the spaces that define human history. When capturing a landmark, a photographer might move in close to isolate a single detail—the texture of a wall, the curve of a column—or step back to encompass the vastness of a landscape. Sometimes a figure is included, giving scale and human presence to the monumental. Each choice reflects a way of seeing, a dialogue between the photographer, the subject, and the viewer. Site Lines: Photographing Historic Spaces draws entirely from Mia’s collection and traces how artists from the 19th century to the present have approached the documentation of historical sites. Through a range of techniques, from early albumen prints to contemporary digital compositions, these works reveal how photographers have shaped our understanding of built environments—those spaces that carry the weight of time, culture, and memory. The exhibition underscores how photography does more than preserve a site; it interprets it. A photograph can emphasize grandeur or decay, permanence or transformation. It can highlight human craftsmanship or the slow reclaiming power of nature. Across regions and eras, certain visual languages emerge—shared ways of framing, composing, and revealing—that transcend borders. These images, taken together, suggest that the act of photographing historic spaces is as much about perception as preservation. By inviting viewers to look closely at these images, Site Lines offers an opportunity to reconsider how photography participates in shaping the stories we tell about place and history. Each photograph stands not only as a record of architecture or geography, but as a meditation on time itself—how we remember, reinterpret, and remain connected to the traces of our shared past. Image: Francis Frith, British, 1822–1898. The Great Pyramid and the Great Sphinx, Egypt, 1858. Mammoth albumen print. Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Alfred and Ingrid Lenz Harrison Fund. 2004.24

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is the first major retrospective of the acclaimed photographer, bringing together over two decades of his work through an expansive multi-series presentation. Born in the Dominican Republic and based in Monterrey, Mexico, Cartagena explores pressing social and environmental issues through a striking range of photographic practices that includes documentary images, collage, appropriated vernacular photographs, and AI-generated video. His work captures the complexities of suburban sprawl, the US-Mexico border, and increasing economic inequality. As visually dynamic as they are politically incisive, his photographs prompt viewers to question the systems that shape our world. Though rooted in Mexico, Cartagena’s photographic series speak to shared global conditions of migration, environmental crisis, and unchecked development, offering a powerful reflection on the broader forces defining life in the 21st century.

Focal Point: The David Hall Photography Collection brings together forty remarkable works from the extensive holdings of Tampa-based photographer and collector David Hall. Comprising more than four hundred pieces, the collection reflects a lifelong fascination with the art and history of photography. The selection on view traces the medium’s transformation throughout the twentieth century—from its early documentary purpose to its recognition as a vital and expressive art form. Hall’s particular passion for photographs made between World War I and World War II, a period of immense artistic experimentation, is evident throughout the exhibition. The presentation unfolds through themes that recur across Hall’s collection, featuring iconic works such as Ruth Orkin’s American Girl in Italy, August Sander’s Young Farmers, and Ansel Adams’s celebrated view of Half Dome in Yosemite. These images, once circulated in influential publications like LIFE, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, highlight a generation of photographers—among them Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Philippe Halsman—whose work shaped modern visual culture. The exhibition also honors the pioneering spirit of Group f/64, whose members including Adams, Ruth Bernhard, and Edward Weston pursued a vision of “pure photography” that rejected pictorialism in favor of sharp focus and formal precision. Women play a defining role within Hall’s collection, both behind and in front of the camera. The works of Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, and Lillian Bassman exemplify a generation of women who redefined the possibilities of the medium despite limited recognition in their time. Their portraits of women—muses, artists, sisters—embody strength, elegance, and humanity. Focal Point also includes pieces by Hall’s contemporaries and friends from California, a nod to his years in the Bay Area. More than an exhibition, this presentation stands as a heartfelt tribute to David Hall’s enduring legacy as a collector, photographer, and champion of the arts in Tampa and beyond. Image: Judy Dater (American, b. 1941), Self-Portrait at Salt Flats, 1981. Gelatin silver print. David Hall Collection.

Bill Owens: Work and Leisure offers a witty and affectionate glimpse into the everyday lives of Americans in the 1970s, a period caught between the social revolutions of the previous decade and the technological dawn of the 1980s. Owens’ photographs open doors into private worlds—living rooms, backyards, offices, and parties—where leisure, labor, and aspiration blend into a portrait of middle-class life both ordinary and extraordinary. Drawn from Owens’ celebrated series Leisure (1972), Our Kind of People (1975), and Working: I Do It for the Money (1977), the works on view capture a specific slice of America—prosperous, suburban, and largely white—rooted in California and the Midwest. Yet, beneath their regional focus, these images reflect a broader cultural rhythm: the optimism and contradictions of postwar domesticity. Owens’ lens balances humor and empathy, gently poking fun at the rituals of modern comfort while finding sincerity in its subjects’ dreams and routines. His photographs suggest that the suburban ideal, so often mythologized, is as fragile and human as the people who inhabit it. Each image is accompanied by a quote from the subject, a detail that gives voice and agency to the photographed, turning the viewer into both witness and participant. These captions preserve the rhythms of conversation and self-perception from a half-century ago, reminding us how people wanted to be seen in a time of shifting identity and expectation. To some, the scenes may appear quaint or nostalgic; to others, they remain sharply familiar, reflecting enduring themes of community, conformity, and self-expression. Organized by Senior Curator Laura Burkhalter, this exhibition features works generously gifted to the collection by Dr. Steven and Yasemin Miller and Jeff Perry in honor of Jacqueline and Myron Blank. Owens’ photographs invite us all to pause, smile, and step back into a time when the American dream was both celebrated and quietly questioned. Image: Bill Owens (American, born 1938) We really enjoy getting together with our friends to drink and dance. It’s a wild party and we’re having a great time., from the “Suburbia” series, 1971 (printed 1999) Gelatin silver print Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections: The Jeff Perry Photography Collection given in honor of Myron and Jacqueline Blank, 2024.119

At the heart of the exhibition As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic lies a deep belief in community, connection, and shared legacy. Drawn from the celebrated Wedge Collection, founded in 1997 by Dr. Kenneth Montague, this exhibition reflects Canada’s most significant privately held collection dedicated to championing Black artists. Its title, inspired by a phrase often spoken by Montague’s father—“lifting as we rise”—embodies an ethic of collective advancement. It calls for individual success to serve as a foundation for broader empowerment, extending generosity and pride beyond family to an ever-expanding circle of kinship and belonging. In this spirit, As We Rise celebrates both the intimate and the communal. The photographs within are acts of representation and recognition—images in which Black subjects, seen through the eyes of Black photographers, appear on their own terms. Their gazes meet the viewer’s not as subjects of study, but as collaborators in the act of seeing. This mutuality of vision—honest, elegant, and unforced—infuses the works with warmth and immediacy. Each frame becomes part of a collective portrait, a living archive of experience and emotion. The results are as diverse and unexpected as the communities from which they emerge, echoing the vibrant multiplicity of the Black Atlantic. Themes of identity, heritage, and empowerment intertwine throughout, not as isolated concerns but as natural expressions of life’s complexity. These images carry within them the textures of joy and resistance, beauty and endurance. As curator Liz Ikiriko notes, they “foreground the experience of Black life, in all its myriad forms”—a testament to resilience and connection that transcends geography. Together, they form a declaration of presence, a visual affirmation of home across the global diaspora. Image: James Barnor, Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London, 1966, from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy Autograph ABP © James Barnor

In an age where photographs drift seamlessly through digital space—appearing on screens, detached from any sense of material presence—it is easy to forget that photographs were once tangible things. They were objects to be held, exchanged, and cherished, carrying the physical weight of memory. Early photographs were not only images but also artifacts: mounted on card stock, encased in lockets, or assembled in albums that told personal histories. This tactile connection between image and object shaped how people experienced photography, granting it intimacy and permanence. The exhibition What Photographs Look Like revisits this layered understanding of the medium, taking inspiration from the words of Peter Bunnell, a pioneering historian of photography and longtime Princeton scholar. In the 1970s, Bunnell used the phrase to challenge his students’ assumptions about photography as flat or purely visual. For him, photographs could take on unexpected forms—drawings, collages, assemblages, or sculptural constructions—each expanding the definition of what a photograph could be. His teaching and curatorial work invited a more playful, exploratory relationship with the medium, one that celebrated its elasticity and inventiveness. Today, photography continues to evolve in ways Bunnell might have admired. Artists manipulate light-sensitive materials, experiment with chemical reactions, or build three-dimensional installations that bridge the physical and digital. Even in a time dominated by screens, many photographers return to the physical print as a way to restore presence and touch. Through a rich selection of works drawn from Princeton’s collection, What Photographs Look Like reveals photography’s enduring capacity to surprise. Whether fragile or monumental, ephemeral or lasting, each work invites viewers to look again—beyond the image—to the photograph as an object shaped by time, process, and imagination. Image: Dora Maar, Photogram of woman in profile, ca. 1935. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, gift of Robert J. Fisher, Class of 1975, and Mrs. Fisher. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

(Re)Constructing History invites viewers to consider how photographs do more than capture fleeting moments—they also carry the weight of histories that continue to shape the present. Taking its title from Carrie Mae Weems’s powerful series Constructing History, the exhibition encourages reflection on how images can both document and reinterpret the narratives that define our collective memory. Through the lens of contemporary photography, the show reveals how the past remains alive within every frame, layered into the visual and emotional fabric of today’s world. Spread across three galleries, the exhibition unfolds as a journey through time, power, and representation. The first gallery turns its gaze toward Wall Street, a longstanding emblem of American ambition and authority. Here, photographs old and new reveal how the imagery of finance and architecture has served to both glorify and critique national ideals. The second gallery presents artists who reimagine and reclaim visual traditions, transforming inherited imagery through acts of reference, appropriation, and subversion. Their work asks how the repetition of images—when reworked with intention—can shift meaning and open new spaces for cultural dialogue. The final gallery explores the capacity of photography to uncover the invisible forces that shape landscapes and social environments. From the erosion of natural sites to the evolution of urban structures, these works make visible the continuous process of change and reconstruction. At the heart of this installation are contemporary Black artists such as Nona Faustine, Carla Williams, Dawoud Bey, and Carrie Mae Weems, whose practices challenge the boundaries between history and imagination. Their images transcend the role of mere documentation, offering poetic and political reinterpretations of the past. Through their vision, (Re)Constructing History becomes an invitation to see photography not as static memory, but as an ongoing act of reimagining what has been and what might yet be. Image: Carla Williams, Side (detail), from the series How to Read Character, 1990, printed 2024; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; © Carla Williams

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces a significant promised gift from Artur Walther and the Walther Family Foundation, recognized worldwide for their commitment to advancing the study of photography. This extraordinary collection of approximately 6,500 works includes photographs, albums, and time-based media spanning continents and centuries. It encompasses modern and contemporary art from Africa, China, Japan, and Germany, as well as vernacular photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries taken in the United States, Europe, Colombia, and Mexico. Together, these works trace the evolution of photography as both an artistic language and a cultural mirror, revealing how image-making shapes our understanding of the world. Selections from the collection will debut in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing when it reopens in May 2025, featuring iconic African photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Samuel Fosso. A subsequent exhibition in fall 2025 will present a broader international overview, while a comprehensive survey of the collection is planned for 2028. The Met also intends to integrate photographs and video works from the gift into future installations in the Tang Wing, the museum’s new home for modern and contemporary art opening in 2030. These presentations will explore how artists use the camera to capture changing social, cultural, and physical landscapes—moments where observation becomes both record and reflection. Artur Walther’s vision was to challenge and expand the boundaries of photographic practice. Over more than three decades, he assembled a collection that brings together celebrated masters and lesser-known voices, forming a dialogue across geography and history. The exhibition View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection introduces this transformative gift, celebrating the diversity of global perspectives. From city streets to intimate interiors, these images reveal photography’s enduring ability to question, connect, and redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. Image: Luo Yongjin (Chinese, born 1960), Oriental Plaza, Beijing (detail), 1998–2002. Inkjet print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised gift of The Walther Family Foundation © Luo Yongjin

Over the past five decades, photographer Mimi Plumb has constructed a striking and deeply personal record of the American West, capturing both its enduring beauty and its quiet disquiet. Her images reveal the intricate relationship between people and the landscapes they inhabit—spaces marked by change, resilience, and the shifting tides of modern life. In her first solo museum exhibition, the High Museum of Art presents three major bodies of her work, bringing together over one hundred photographs taken in and around San Francisco and throughout the Western United States. Plumb’s work chronicles an evolving America—one shaped by environmental transformation, political upheaval, and economic uncertainty. From the vast, open deserts to the fringes of suburban sprawl, her photographs reflect the contradictions of a region defined by both opportunity and decline. Her lens captures the quiet drama of everyday existence: teenagers gathered at the edge of town, dust settling over a parched field, the melancholic glow of a neon sign flickering against the twilight. These moments, though ordinary, convey a profound sense of fragility and endurance. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how the Western landscape has mirrored the changing hopes and fears of American life since the 1970s. Through Plumb’s precise compositions and empathetic eye, the familiar becomes mysterious, and the distant past feels eerily present. Her photographs are less about nostalgia than about reckoning—an attempt to understand how humans move through, alter, and are shaped by their environments. Following its debut at the High, the exhibition will travel to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, the Norton Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, extending Plumb’s meditative exploration of place and time to new audiences across the country. Image: Mimi Plumb (American, born 1953), Boys and Tires, Sears Point, 1976, pigmented inkjet print, Gift of Lucas Foglia, 2025.87. © Mimi Plumb.

Gerald Incandela has long stood apart as an artist who reshaped the boundaries between photography and painting. From the beginning of his career in the early 1970s, he rejected the prevailing ideals of straight photography—a movement that celebrated clarity and unaltered representation—and instead pursued an approach rooted in gesture, emotion, and transformation. Working within the darkroom as if it were a painter’s studio, Incandela created what he calls photographic drawings, images that blur the line between the mechanical and the handmade. His prints carry the marks of his process, filled with movement, energy, and a distinct sense of authorship. Before settling in the United States in 1977, Incandela lived and worked in Berlin and London, cities that shaped his early artistic vision. His rise to recognition came swiftly when the visionary curator Sam Wagstaff invited him to exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1978, giving him a dedicated room alongside Robert Mapplethorpe—a rare honor that underscored his singular approach to the medium. Around the same time, his exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York’s influential avant-garde space, further solidified his position as a creative force pushing the limits of photographic form. Even today, Incandela continues to explore the expressive potential of photography from his studios in Connecticut and California. Each print he creates remains a one-of-a-kind object, alive with texture and intuition. The exhibition traces his artistic evolution through three distinct series: the poetic landscapes and portraits of the 1970s and 1980s; the monumental figurative works of the following decades; and the intimate photographs taken on the set of Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio (1986), marking forty years of their extraordinary collaboration. Together, these works reaffirm Incandela’s lifelong belief that photography is, above all, an act of creation. Image: © Gerald Incandela

A largely self-taught photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925–1972) was a pioneering and inventive artist who created some of the most original images of the mid-twentieth century. His work defies easy categorization as he experimented across various genres and subjects, and throughout his career, he maintained the ethos of an amateur, approaching photography with a sense of affection, discovery, and surprise. He is best known for his staged scenes that suggest an absurd fantasy set in the dilapidated houses and banal suburban environs near his home in Lexington, Kentucky. These scenes, often featuring his family as actors and using props such as masks and dolls, reveal Meatyard’s search for inner truths amid the ordinary. This exhibition, coinciding with the artist’s centenary, will feature the thirty-six prints that comprise the artist’s first monograph (Gnomon Press, 1970)—one of only two books he published in his lifetime—which Meatyard intended to stand as his definitive artistic statement. Through his idiosyncratic selection of images, this exhibition will explore how Meatyard’s singular approach and voracious curiosity expanded photography’s expressive and conceptual potential. Image: Self-Portrait (Frontispiece), ca. 1964–1966

In the turbulent atmosphere of the 1960s, Ansel Adams found himself at a crossroads. Once revered as the master of American landscape photography, he was suddenly faced with a world in upheaval—socially, politically, and artistically. The civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and the rise of counterculture reshaped the cultural landscape, while a new generation of photographers turned their lenses away from mountains and forests to confront the raw realities of the human condition. Against this shifting backdrop, Adams embarked on his most ambitious and revealing endeavor: the Fiat Lux project. Commissioned by the University of California between 1963 and 1968, Fiat Lux became both an expansive documentation of a great academic institution and a personal odyssey through a changing America. Comprising more than 7,500 photographs, the series captured campuses, laboratories, and students at a time of intellectual and social revolution. Yet within its images lies a quiet tension—a sense of an artist questioning his place in a world that no longer mirrored his ideals. The precision and clarity that defined Adams’ earlier landscapes seem, at times, to give way to uncertainty, reflecting both his struggle and his resilience in the face of transformation. In Fiat Lux, Adams’s camera becomes a vessel of introspection. While others sought to dismantle photographic tradition, he continued to chase light—the eternal symbol of revelation and truth. The project’s title, meaning “Let there be light,” suggests both faith and renewal, a hope that photography could still illuminate meaning amid chaos. Through Fiat Lux, we encounter not just the legendary technician of the Zone System, but a man wrestling with change, trying to reconcile his mastery of form with the new emotional and political urgency of the age. In doing so, Ansel Adams reminds us that even in disorientation, there can be clarity—and in struggle, creation. 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.

Why Am I Sad explores mental health and depression through still life photography. It’s estimated that almost 280 million people worldwide live with depression. Among this staggering number, this book unveils the personal narrative of just one of them—me. As a child of immigrants, I found myself living in a duality that often left me feeling like an outsider in both worlds. I was a cultural chameleon, navigating the ever-shifting boundaries of identity. Amidst the cacophony of conflicting cultures, there was a profound sense of isolation, a feeling of not quite belonging to either place. Photography emerged as my sanctuary, a medium through which I could articulate the unspoken turmoil within. However, even as my lens captured moments of beauty, the weight of sadness lingered, a constant companion hovering at the edge of every frame. Why Am I Sad is a personal exploration through the shadows of melancholy, unfolded in vivid still life photography that celebrates and challenges the notion of beauty and sadness. I extend an invitation to delve into this narrative—a narrative woven with threads of family legacy of mental health, cultural identity, and the relentless pursuit of self-understanding. Each photograph serves as a mirror reflecting the complexities of human emotion—a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Behind each photograph lies a story, a silent echo of my mother's struggle with clinical depression—a battle fought in the shadows, unseen yet deeply felt. Her pain became intertwined with my own, shaping the contours of my journey through sadness. Through the lens of my camera, I invite you to join me on this introspective odyssey, where every image is a step closer to understanding the enigma of sadness.

Formal/ Informal explores the definition of portraiture, comparing that formal term to the compositions created by photographers. During the 19th century, formal studio or posed portraits flourished as a way to capture a vision of a person, whether known or unknown to the photographer. The artist, in turn utilized their craft to tell the story of the sitter. Images from the 20th and 21st century evolved into both formal and informal views of people, as their environs began to play as much of a role in their portrait as their face did. The result is a collection of portraits that could be serious, playful, have social or political ramifications, or whose purpose is to celebrate the people, famous or infamous, ultimately telling the story of our society as a whole. Image: Brancusi in his Studio, Paris. Artist: Edward Steichen

*Shaping the Imperialist Imagination* invites visitors to explore the captivating world of early stereographic photography—a 19th-century innovation that offered viewers a vivid, three-dimensional glimpse of the world long before cinema or television. These immersive images transported audiences across continents, allowing them to “travel” from the comfort of their parlors. Yet beneath their wonder and novelty, they subtly conveyed ideas of cultural hierarchy, reinforcing a distinctly Western vision of power and progress. Drawing from the California Museum of Photography’s rich holdings, this exhibition traces how stereographic imagery shaped the American imagination during a period of expansion and empire. With each paired image and lens, viewers were presented with scenes from American territories, Native lands, and European colonies—scenes that reflected not only distant geographies but also the biases and ambitions of those behind the camera. Through these photographs, a visual language of superiority and otherness was constructed, one that quietly informed how Americans perceived the wider world and their place within it. Curated by a team of UCR undergraduates as part of their capstone seminar in the History of Art, the exhibition offers a contemporary perspective on how images once meant for entertainment became tools of ideology. By reexamining these artifacts today, the students illuminate the ways “armchair travel” both fascinated and conditioned its audiences, revealing how photography’s early promise of access and understanding was intertwined with exclusion and control. Under the guidance of Associate Professor Susan Laxton and coordinating curator Alyse Yeargan, *Shaping the Imperialist Imagination* reflects a new generation’s critical engagement with the past. It encourages viewers to look closely—not only at what these photographs depict, but at what they teach us about vision, power, and the enduring influence of the images that shaped a nation’s worldview. Image: Unknown Photographer, Underwood & Underwood Co. A Cuban Family, Havana, Cuba not dated Gelatin Silver Print, Keystone-Mast Collection at UCR ARTS 1996.0009.X6514

For a century, Lehigh University Art Galleries has stood at the intersection of creativity and innovation, reflecting the rich artistic and industrial heritage of the Lehigh Valley. From the ingenuity of the Lenape people to the region’s steel and railroad industries, and now its high-tech manufacturing, the area has long been a site of experimentation and craftsmanship, a spirit embraced by both artists and engineers alike. This creative ethos has been embedded in Lehigh University since its founding by Asa Packer, a carpenter and boat-builder who valued a comprehensive education. Built on this foundation, LUAG has championed the transformative power of art since 1926, the year the first art exhibition was held on campus. Over the decades, the galleries have offered visitors access to artworks from internationally recognized institutions and the university’s own collection of over 20,000 pieces, providing a space where art, education, and community converge. To celebrate its centennial, LUAG presents Here and Now: 100 Years of LUAG, 100 Local Artists, a juried exhibition showcasing one hundred artists from the region. On view from September 2, 2025, through May 22, 2026, the exhibition highlights the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary artistic practice in the Lehigh Valley. Selected from nearly 300 applicants and 800 submitted works, these pieces will activate the galleries while serving as a catalyst for receptions, lectures, workshops, and special events, connecting audiences with the local art ecosystem. The exhibition also coincides with an initiative to acquire significant works by local artists for LUAG’s permanent collection, further cementing the institution’s dedication to regional creativity. Featuring artists such as Lydia Panas, Francisco Aguilar, Katie Arnold, Rain Black, Amy Burke, Dylan Collazo, Angela Fraleigh, Julia Lundy, and many others, Here and Now celebrates a century of artistic engagement while looking forward to the next hundred years of innovation, community, and inspiration through art. Image: Red Still Life with Tatiana's Hand and Blood Oranges, 40 x 40" 2020 © Lydia Panas

Tara Sellios, a Boston-based artist, creates hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the fragile tension between life and death. Working with organic materials such as animal bones, insect specimens, and dried flowers, she constructs elaborate still-life scenes that evoke both reverence and unease. Captured with a large-format 8 x 10 camera, her compositions reveal a meticulous attention to texture and form, where every feather, petal, and fragment becomes a meditation on impermanence and the natural cycle of decay. Sellios draws deeply from the visual language of Christian devotional art, echoing the spiritual intensity of illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and stained-glass windows. Her work also resonates with the vanitas tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, in which symbols of mortality remind viewers of the fleeting nature of existence. Yet, rather than moralizing, her images invite contemplation—transforming decay into something transcendent, even sacred. The grotesque becomes luminous, the ruined becomes reborn. Her latest series, Ask Now the Beasts, takes its title from the Book of Job, a biblical text that contemplates the mysteries of suffering, nature, and divine order. Through this body of work, Sellios examines the harvest and the apocalypse as intertwined forces, suggesting that death and renewal are inseparable. Within these intricate compositions, the earth’s cycles unfold—a quiet revelation of endurance, regeneration, and the eternal dialogue between destruction and creation. Opening January 18, 2025, at the Fitchburg Art Museum, Ask Now the Beasts will remain on view through the end of the year. The exhibition offers an immersive encounter with Sellios’s vision—a world where beauty blooms amid ruin, and where the boundaries between devotion, mortality, and art dissolve into one continuous breath of life and loss. Image: Tara Sellios, Abundantia, ink jet print, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist. © Tara Sellios

Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy revisits a groundbreaking collaboration that forever altered the relationship between dance and visual art. In 1979, choreographer Trisha Brown—renowned for her site-specific works performed on rooftops, walls, and in city parks—invited her longtime friend and collaborator Robert Rauschenberg to join her in creating Glacial Decoy. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center, this piece marked Brown’s first choreography for a traditional proscenium stage and opened a new dialogue between movement, space, and image. The exhibition brings together Rauschenberg’s original décor and costumes with archival photographs, prints, and film documenting both the original and more recent performances. His projected backdrop of black-and-white photographs—featuring images of tires, melting ice, and freight trains—moves steadily across the stage, echoing the fluid motion of Brown’s choreography, in which dancers continually enter and exit without pause. The result is a hypnotic rhythm between image and body, between stillness and motion. Rauschenberg’s diaphanous costumes, designed to reveal and conceal the dancers as they move, further blur the boundaries between presence and absence, reality and illusion. Glacial Decoy stands as a poetic meditation on perception and transformation, a reflection of two artists’ shared fascination with the fleeting nature of experience. The exhibition not only honors their pioneering collaboration but also situates it within a broader conversation about interdisciplinary creation at the close of the twentieth century. Opening a yearlong celebration of Rauschenberg’s centennial, the presentation launches the program Rauschenberg\@100: Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Kyle Abraham. Throughout November 2025, live performances and a residency with the Trisha Brown Dance Company will explore the enduring influence of these visionary figures and the continuing resonance of their work at the intersection of movement and art. Image: Trisha Brown Dance Company, Glacial Decoy, 1979. Photo: Boyd Hagen. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

Femme ’n isms is a multi-year series of exhibitions celebrating intersectional feminist artmaking in the Allen’s collection. Inspired by a recent gift of prints and photographs by German artists Käthe Kollwitz and Lotte Jacobi, the third installment of Femme ’n isms features portraits of girls and women, almost entirely by women and femme-identifying artists.. Some works depict artists, musicians, and actors in self-conscious poses, while others capture an exchange of casualness and honesty between women artists and subjects. Nearly half the works are self-portraits in artists’ studios or other intimate spaces, highlighting the overlooked labor of women artists. Spanning more than a century, changing attitudes toward self-fashioning in these works demonstrate that making one’s own image is a crucial means of asserting agency over one’s representation and ultimately oneself.. The exhibition includes works by Emma Amos, Cecilia Beaux, Martine Gutierrez, Lotte Jacobi, Käthe Kollwitz, Marie Laurencin, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, and others.

Erica Baum: The Bite in the Ribbon—A Paper Show invites viewers into a world where text and image converge in unexpected ways. Through the careful selection, transformation, and reinterpretation of printed materials, Baum constructs a poetic interplay of language and form, encouraging both deep looking and reading. This exhibition presents a dynamic juxtaposition of her early and ongoing projects alongside her latest work, including never-before-seen pieces. At the heart of the show, Dog Ear, displayed in the Potter Peristyle, exemplifies Baum’s signature method of repurposing found books. By folding pages at precise angles, she creates surprising interactions between words and images, generating new narratives and abstract compositions from existing texts. This simple yet radical intervention challenges traditional notions of reading, inviting fresh interpretations with every fold. In the Project Gallery, Baum’s recent series, Patterns and Fabrications, explore the aesthetics of fashion and craft through printed media. Patterns focuses on the striking geometries, colors, and textual fragments found in mid-century sewing pattern designs, while Fabrications expands this investigation to include materials from magazines, catalogs, and books on fashion and craft. By incorporating advertisements and coupons, Baum reframes the domestic and commercial imagery embedded in these everyday objects, offering a meditation on material culture and visual storytelling. Through these interwoven series, The Bite in the Ribbon—A Paper Show highlights Baum’s ongoing fascination with the interplay between print, language, and image, revealing the hidden beauty and meaning within overlooked materials. Image: Erica Baum (American, b. 1961), Wrought Iron, from Fabrications, 2024. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York. © Erica Baum

Photographers seeking customers during the medium’s early years often urged the public to “Secure the shadow, ere the substance fade.” Hinting at life’s fragility, this tagline underscored photography’s ability to capture a fleeting likeness and preserve it for posterity. Portraits in the impressive whole-plate format—measuring 8 ½ × 6 ½ inches—were among the premier offerings of the nation’s leading photographic studios. Drawing on the National Portrait Gallery’s extensive early photography collection, this exhibition traces the evolution of the grand-scale, whole-plate format from the high-end daguerreotype to the mid-range ambrotype to the more affordable tintype. Examples of whole plates in each of these mediums illustrate how the format evolved as new photographic processes were introduced. Featured works include daguerreotypes representing U.S. senators Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, as well as papal nuncio Gaetano Bedini; an ambrotype portrait of American landscape artist John Frederick Kensett; and a tintype likeness of an unidentified African American woman.

California has long been considered a land of opportunity, offering a promise of prosperity that drove westward expansion from the Gold Rush era to its transformation into an epicenter of technological innovation. Since the 19th century, photographers have used the camera to bear witness to the continual construction of the California landscape as well as the destructive environmental forces that threaten its habitability. The photographs in this exhibition chronicle these cycles of urban settlement, including the building and renewal of San Francisco before and after the 1906 earthquake and fire, the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge, and the development of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Above all, the works reveal how periods of growth and decline have always been part of the story of Northern California, and attest to the continued resilience of this land and its inhabitants. Image: Untitled (Howard Street, now South Van Ness, between 17th and 18th Streets, San Francisco), 1906 © Arnold Genthe

Graciela Iturbide, one of Latin America’s most celebrated photographers, has spent more than fifty years capturing the essence of human life through a lens that merges poetry, observation, and emotion. Born in Mexico City in 1942, she developed a visual language rooted in curiosity—a desire to understand how tradition, ritual, and belief continue to shape modern existence. This exhibition offers a sweeping view of her career, featuring her most iconic works created in Mexico as well as photographs taken in India, Italy, Panama, and the United States. Iturbide began her artistic journey in the late 1960s while studying film at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her apprenticeship with the legendary Manuel Álvarez Bravo profoundly influenced her early vision, instilling a respect for the interplay between the everyday and the mystical. Like her mentor, she explored Mexico’s diverse cultural landscape but infused her imagery with a deeply personal symbolism. Her photographs often focus on women—powerful, enigmatic figures who embody strength and continuity within Indigenous and rural communities. Through her lens, cultural identity becomes a dialogue between past and present, resilience and change. In later decades, Iturbide’s work evolved toward greater abstraction. Her attention shifted from portraiture and ritual to landscapes, objects, and the silent presence of the natural world. These images—spare yet evocative—reflect her ongoing fascination with transformation, mortality, and the traces of human existence within the environment. Organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with The San Diego Museum of Art, the exhibition presents approximately 150 photographs spanning the full breadth of Iturbide’s career. Together, they reveal an artist whose vision transcends borders and decades, offering a lyrical meditation on the enduring beauty and complexity of life. Image: Graciela Iturbide, La Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán, Oaxaca, México (Our Lady of the Iguanas, Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico) (detail), 1979. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art; Gift of Walter Pomeroy, M.2018.003.003. © Graciela Iturbide.

Shadows and Traces brings together a compelling selection of women artists from the Pérez Art Museum Miami collection, highlighting photography and printmaking as mediums that capture the subtle imprints of lived experience. The exhibition’s title evokes the duality of these practices: shadows as ephemeral echoes captured through the camera, and traces as physical marks rendered through printmaking, both bearing witness to the passage of time and memory. Through carefully staged photographs and intricately layered prints, these artists investigate the ways personal and collective histories leave enduring yet often unseen marks. Their work explores absence, identity, and the emotional landscapes that quietly persist in daily life, revealing nuances that might otherwise go unnoticed. Each image or print functions as a visual meditation, prompting viewers to consider how memory and experience manifest in tangible form, and how artistic practice can give presence to what is intangible. The exhibition emphasizes the interplay between documentation and interpretation, showing how photography and printmaking allow for both the recording of lived moments and the construction of deeply reflective narratives. Shadows and Traces demonstrates the ability of these mediums to uncover layers of meaning, whether through a photograph’s fleeting gesture or the deliberate, tactile process of printmaking. In this sense, the exhibition is both intimate and expansive, bridging private recollection with broader cultural memory. Featuring works by Belkis Ayón, Consuelo Castañeda, Naomi Fisher, María Martínez-Cañas, Ana Mendieta, and Joiri Minaya, Shadows and Traces invites viewers into a contemplative space where images and impressions converge. Through their combined approaches, the artists create a resonant dialogue about presence, absence, and the persistent echoes of human experience, reminding us that even the most delicate marks can carry profound meaning. Image: Joiri Minaya. Container #5 , 2020. Archival pigment print. 36 x 24 inches. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in Honor of Darlene Boytell – Pérez. © Joiri Minaya

This exhibition presents an extraordinary selection of paintings and photographs from the collection of Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer, highlighting the multifaceted legacy of industrial art in the early twentieth century. Spanning from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, the works reflect a period when art and industry were deeply intertwined—each influencing how modern life, labor, and progress were imagined and represented. Through this lens, the exhibition reveals how artists found poetry in the machinery of modern existence, even amid uncertainty and transformation. At a time defined by economic struggle and rapid technological change, artists such as Harry Gottlieb, Edmund Lewandowski, and Ben Shahn depicted factories, construction sites, and workers with both critical and aesthetic precision. Their paintings capture the tension between human effort and mechanical power, offering images that are as much about endurance and adaptation as they are about innovation. Alongside these painters, photographers including Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange documented the industrial and social landscapes of the era with stark honesty and empathy, transforming real-life scenes into visual chronicles of modern America. Together, these works form a dialogue between two artistic mediums—painting and photography—that sought to interpret the same world from different vantage points. Whether through the stylized geometry of industrial forms or the unflinching realism of documentary imagery, each piece contributes to a deeper understanding of how artists responded to the shifting balance between human labor and mechanized production. The collection celebrates a pivotal moment in history when creativity became both a mirror and a critique of industrial progress, reminding us that art has always been a means to confront, interpret, and humanize the forces that shape our world. Image: Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975), Graveyard, Houses, and Steel Mills, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935, gelatin silver print, The Shogren-Meyer Collection. © Walker Evans

Face Value invites us to take a close look at the celebrity-making machinery of the 20th-century Hollywood star system. For decades, film studios produced photographic portraits to promote the glamour of the actors they had under contract. This exhibition examines how these images were manipulated for public consumption in the decades before digital tools, AI technology, and social media revolutionized the process. For MoMA’s founding film curator, Iris Barry, building an archive of images that documented the history of motion pictures was second only to collecting films. Barry’s initiative eventually led to the acquisition of editorial archives of two leading fan magazines, Photoplay (1911–80) and Dell (1921–76). More than 60 photographers and filmmakers—from studio staffers to Andy Warhol—are represented in the exhibition, which combines untouched images with those that show evidence of the hands-on alterations that readied them for the press. Silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage were applied not only to photographs of entertainers but also to those of sports figures, socialites, and politicians. Highlighting the radical editing practices, stylized motifs, and gender stereotypes inherent in the studio system, this exhibition offers a demystifying look at the early constructions of celebrity. Organized by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, with Katie Trainor, Senior Collections Manager, and Cara Shatzman, Collection Specialist, Department of Film. Image: Jean Harlow, c. 1933. Photographer unidentified. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art film stills collection

A Surreal Lens invites viewers into a world where photography becomes a bridge between reality and imagination. Since the invention of the medium, artists have resisted the notion of photography as a purely documentary tool, instead transforming it into a language of dreams, memories, and illusions. By experimenting with techniques such as montage, double exposure, retouching, and digital manipulation, these photographers blur the line between what is seen and what is felt, crafting images that question our understanding of truth and perception. The exhibition gathers artists who use both technical precision and poetic vision to explore the hidden corners of the mind. Whether through staged compositions or post-production transformations, their works evoke the surreal and the uncanny. These photographs may resemble fragments of dreams or echoes of alternate realities, inviting the viewer to step into a dimension where logic bends and emotion reigns. While not all of these artists align directly with Surrealism, they embody its essence—an exploration of the subconscious and a fascination with the beauty of the strange. Featuring the works of Alan Cohen, György Kepes, Olivia Parker, Kenda North, Michael Stone, Linda Connor, Emmet Gowin, Barbara Morgan, Otmar Thormann, Hans Breder, and others, A Surreal Lens showcases how diverse artistic voices can converge through a shared pursuit of mystery and transformation. Each image reveals the photographer’s hand as both creator and dreamer, manipulating light and time to build impossible worlds that feel intimately familiar. Through this collective vision, the exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider what a photograph can be—not merely a mirror of reality, but a portal into imagination itself. Here, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the camera becomes a tool not for recording the world, but for reimagining it. Image: Michael Stone (American, born 1945), Whitehouse Products, 2015, archival pigment print on hahnemuhle photo rag paper, 8 x 12 inches, Gift of the artist, 2016.32.2

For more than five decades, Harry Gamboa Jr. has defied artistic boundaries, merging photography, performance, and literature into a body of work that is as provocative as it is visionary. Fearless in his critique and sharp in his humor, Gamboa’s art emerges from the charged social and political atmosphere of East Los Angeles, where activism and creativity have long intertwined. His voice—irreverent, poetic, and deeply engaged with issues of representation—has consistently pushed against mainstream narratives, carving out space for Chicano identity and cultural resistance in contemporary art. From the 1970s onward, Gamboa has been at the center of several influential artistic collectives, most notably the legendary group Asco (1972–1985), whose performances and conceptual interventions challenged art-world hierarchies and redefined what it meant to make art in the streets. More recently, his ongoing project Troupe Non Grata (2022–present) continues this spirit of collaboration, experimentation, and critique, blending photography, video, and live performance to confront contemporary social realities. The exhibition presents an expansive view of Gamboa’s creative evolution, combining selections from his photographic archives with excerpts from his prose, poetry, and performance scripts. Fragments of his many projects—ephemeral gestures, staged images, and biting texts—come together to reveal an artist who has never ceased questioning the systems of power that shape both art and society. Each work embodies his signature combination of wit, defiance, and philosophical reflection. More than a retrospective, this presentation serves as a celebration of Gamboa’s ongoing inquiry into art’s potential to provoke and transform. His upcoming Robert C. May Photography Lecture in Spring 2026 will offer a rare opportunity to hear directly from an artist who has, for over fifty years, challenged audiences to see, think, and laugh differently. Image: Harry Gamboa Jr., Clique Laughter #2, 2019. Performers: Aarum Alatorre, Lila-Zoe Krauss, Ruth Murillo, Frank Washington, Barbie Gamboa, Orly Perl, and Henry Quiron. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches. © Harry Gamboa Jr.

Born in Inglewood, California in 1977, Cara Romero is known for dramatic fine art photography that examines Indigenous life in contemporary contexts. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, California, and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas. Informed by her identity, Romero’s visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory—both collective history and lived experiences—results in a blending of fine art and editorial styles. Her visual storytelling brilliantly challenges dominant narratives of Indigenous decline and erasure and disrupts preconceived notions about what it means to be a Native American, showing the diversity within Indigenous nations and communities. Organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light) is the first major solo exhibition exploring the narrative artistic practice of the Chemehuevi photographer and presents more than 50 works Romero created between 2013 and 2024. The exhibition features new and never-before-seen photographs, site-specific installations, large scale photographs, and iconic views across five thematic sections. Image: Cara Romero, Devil’s Claw No. 1, 2025, archival pigment print. © Cara Romero. Image courtesy of the artist.

Exploring moments from the rich history of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) — before its closure, the West Coast’s oldest fine art school — this exhibition spotlights works by more than 50 SFAI alumni and former faculty included in the museum’s collection. The presentation underscores the school’s crucial role in fostering creativity and experimentation, featuring works across media since the post–World War II era by artists like Ansel Adams, Joan Brown, Miguel Calderón, Imogen Cunningham, Mike Henderson, Candice Lin, and Carlos Villa, among others. The exhibition also includes a dynamic and quirky range of archival materials drawn from the SFMOMA Library and the SFAI Archive. These encompass ephemera from the founding of the school’s photography department, posters for 1950s Beat-era galleries run by artist alumni, student newspapers, and flyers from the punk and new wave music scenes of the 1970s. Taking its title from a line in the final 2022 commencement speech by faculty member and alumnus Dewey Crumpler, People Make This Place is a collaborative effort across the museum in partnership with the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive.

Black Photojournalism celebrates the vision, courage, and artistry of more than sixty Black photographers who transformed American visual culture between 1945 and the mid-1980s. Bringing together over 250 images, the exhibition illuminates the essential role of Black photojournalists in chronicling not only the nation’s pivotal social and political changes but also the quiet, profound moments of everyday life. Through their lenses, they captured the depth, dignity, and diversity of Black experience—stories often overlooked or misrepresented in mainstream narratives. Organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the exhibition draws from a wide network of archives and collections across the United States, including the museum’s own Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive. These photographs highlight the power and creativity of Black-owned and operated media outlets such as the Afro American News, Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, Ebony, and Pittsburgh Courier. In their pages, photojournalists gave visibility to the triumphs and challenges of their communities, using photography as a form of resistance, pride, and cultural preservation. Black Photojournalism honors the photographers who documented the civil rights movement, public celebrations, neighborhood gatherings, and moments of personal strength. Their work reveals a profound understanding of photography not just as documentation but as storytelling—an art that shapes collective memory and reclaims authorship over representation. Designed by artist David Hartt and co-organized by Dan Leers and Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the exhibition embodies a collaborative spirit that bridges past and present voices. Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the National Endowment for the Humanities, this landmark exhibition affirms that the legacy of Black photojournalism is not confined to history—it continues to inspire how we see, remember, and imagine the world today. Image: Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908–1998), A Pittsburgh Courier press operator, possibly William Brown, printing newspapers, possibly for a Midwestern edition, 1954, inkjet print, Carnegie Museum of Art, Heinz Family Fund, 2001.35.3136, © Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Moments in Time: Defining Moments in the History of Photography invites viewers to explore the evolution of photography through highlights from the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville’s permanent collection. This rotating exhibition reveals the depth and diversity of MOCA’s photographic holdings, which now encompass more than 250 works. Tracing key shifts across more than a century, the exhibition celebrates how photography has continually redefined itself—moving from documentary tool to expressive art form, and ultimately to a dynamic language of image-making that reflects our digital age. The exhibition begins in the early twentieth century, when visionaries such as Imogen Cunningham, Edward Curtis, André Kertész, and Edward Weston expanded the possibilities of the medium. Their experiments with light, form, and subject matter helped establish photography as a fine art, bridging realism and abstraction. Their work captures both the texture of daily life and the timeless beauty of composition, marking photography’s first great turning point. The journey continues through the 1970s, a decade of profound transformation when artists embraced photography as a conceptual practice. This period witnessed bold experimentation, challenging the idea of what a photograph could be and how it might communicate. The camera became not just an instrument of observation but a means of personal and political expression. The narrative then extends to the present, where digital technologies, manipulated imagery, and stylistic plurality dominate contemporary practice, reflecting the boundless visual culture of the 21st century. Complementing the museum’s collection are works on loan from local collectors and from the distinguished Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection. Together, these pieces form a vibrant dialogue across generations, revealing how photography continues to shape—and be shaped by—the ever-changing ways we see, remember, and define our world. Image: Lauren Jack, 'The Colonial Era (the Age of Plastic Series)', 2008, Digital C print, ed. of 20. Gift of Michael and Michele Cavendish, 2013.04.02 © Lauren Jack

In an age when nearly everyone carries a camera in their pocket, the act of photographing daily life has become both universal and deeply personal. The world itself has turned into a vast stage, where people are at once spectators and performers. No longer limited to secret observation, many photographers now collaborate directly with their subjects, transforming the once candid act of street photography into a shared expression. Through this shift, the camera becomes a means of storytelling, capable of elevating the everyday into something poetic, mysterious, or even unsettling. Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography traces this evolution across five decades, exploring how artists have sought to capture the pulse of life in urban environments. From the crowded avenues of New York and Los Angeles to the vibrant streets of Tokyo and Istanbul, the exhibition reveals how the city itself has always been both stage and subject. Works from the 1970s through the 1990s by photographers such as Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, Stephen Shore, and Yolanda Andrade are presented in dialogue with more contemporary voices, including Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, Zoe Strauss, and Martin Parr. Together, these artists offer a multifaceted portrait of humanity in motion—curious, expressive, and unguarded. Their photographs record fleeting gestures, shifting social dynamics, and the changing texture of city life. Viewed collectively, they remind us that street photography is less about observation than participation, less about anonymity than connection. Faces in the Crowd invites viewers to reflect on how both photography and the modern city continue to evolve, and how, in capturing others, we inevitably reveal something about ourselves. Image: Dawoud Bey, A Man and Two Women After a Church Service, 1976. Gelatin silver print. Gift of David W. Williams and Eric Ceputis. © Dawoud Bey.

Jan Tichy: Darkness invites visitors to rediscover their connection to one of nature’s most profound and elusive elements—the dark. Since the earliest moments of Earth’s creation, the steady rhythm of sunrise and sunset has shaped the planet’s cycles of life. Within each human being, this ancient pulse continues to resonate, written into our very biology through the circadian rhythms that align us with the movements of light and shadow. Yet, in an age of constant illumination, this harmony has been disrupted. Artificial light has obscured the night sky, altering not only ecosystems but also our own sense of balance and belonging. In this newly commissioned, site-responsive installation, artist Jan Tichy reimagines the museum as a space of transformation. Collaborating with MSU researchers across disciplines, Tichy turns the architecture of the museum—its windows, corridors, and thresholds—into a field of sensory exploration. Through the interplay of light and absence, he encourages visitors to slow down, to listen, and to feel how darkness can become a site of renewal rather than fear. The work invites contemplation on how we might once again live in rhythm with natural cycles, recognizing darkness not as void, but as a vital presence that shapes life itself. Darkness marks the second presentation in the museum’s Signature Commission Series at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. As part of this forward-looking initiative, the series seeks to engage artists whose works transform the museum into a space for dialogue between art, science, and the natural world. Curated by Steven L. Bridges, senior curator and director of curatorial affairs, Tichy’s project illuminates how art can help us reorient ourselves within a world that too often forgets the quiet power of the night. Image: Jan Tichy, Installation no. 40 (House of Tomorrow), 2021. Courtesy the artist.

For more than two centuries, the United States has built its identity on the ideal of plurality—of many voices, cultures, and experiences coexisting within one collective narrative. The phrase e pluribus unum—“out of many, one”—embodies this ongoing dialogue between unity and diversity, between the individual and the shared. This exhibition draws on that founding principle to explore how photography, as both an art form and a historical record, captures the complex and layered story of America. Through the lens of photographers past and present, the exhibition reveals an evolving portrait of the nation—one that embraces contradiction, resilience, and reinvention. These images reflect the vastness of American life: its triumphs and tensions, its communities and divides, its everyday moments and monumental changes. From portraits that honor personal identity to landscapes that evoke both beauty and loss, each photograph contributes to a wider vision of what it means to belong to a country defined by difference. Drawing inspiration from the words of Walt Whitman, who famously claimed to “contain multitudes,” the exhibition invites viewers to consider how photography holds within it countless perspectives, layered meanings, and emotional truths. The medium becomes a democratic space in itself—open, inclusive, and ever-expanding. Together, these works form an intricate visual ecosystem that mirrors the nation’s own complexity, revealing that the American experience is not singular or fixed, but a living, shifting tapestry woven from countless stories. In bringing these images together, the exhibition celebrates both the individuality and the interconnectedness that have shaped—and continue to shape—the spirit of the United States. Image: Xavier Tavera (American [born Mexico], born 1971), Domadora de Caballos (Woman on White Horse [detail]), c. 2010. Color inkjet print. Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Sharon and Bill Richardson Endowment for Art Acquisition. 2011.44.3. © Xavier Tavera. All rights reserved.

American Prospects and Landscape Photography, 1839 to Today brings together eighty remarkable works that trace the evolving relationship between humanity and the natural world. At its center stands Joel Sternfeld’s landmark series American Prospects, a vivid chronicle of 1980s America that forever altered the course of color photography. Surrounding this body of work, the exhibition unfolds as a visual dialogue between past and present, exploring how generations of photographers have captured, interpreted, and questioned the landscape since photography’s earliest days. Between 1978 and 1983, Sternfeld traveled across the United States with his large-format 8 x 10-inch camera, creating images that blend irony, empathy, and quiet observation. Published in 1987, American Prospects revealed a vision of America at once majestic and unsettling. His photographs juxtapose the beauty of open spaces and shifting seasons with signs of human intervention—industrial decay, suburban expansion, and environmental strain. Each scene offers a moment of revelation, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the familiar landscape becomes a mirror of cultural change. By pairing Sternfeld’s images with works by key figures in the history of landscape photography, the exhibition situates his vision within a lineage of artistic exploration that spans nearly two centuries. Photographers such as Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Barbara Bosworth appear alongside contemporary voices like Victoria Sambunaris and David Taylor. Together, their works map an enduring fascination with the land—its beauty, its fragility, and its role in shaping collective identity. This exhibition marks the debut presentation of Sternfeld’s photographs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, generously gifted by Peggy and Bill Lyons. Organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, it is supported by the Hall Family Foundation. Image: Joel Sternfeld, American (b. 1944). McLean, Virginia, December 4, 1978; printed 2005. Dye transfer print, 14 3/4 × 19 1/8 inches (37.47 × 48.58 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Peggy and William Lyons, 2022.25.7. © Joel Sternfeld

In the Rhonda and Anthony Moravec Gallery, the work of Lebanese-American photographer Rania Matar unfolds as an intimate testament to resilience and identity. Her ongoing series, Where Do I Go? (2020–present), captures young women in Lebanon navigating a world marked by conflict, collapse, and the lingering echoes of civil war. Yet rather than emphasizing destruction, Matar’s lens seeks grace amid ruin—moments where fragility and strength coexist within the same frame. Born in Beirut in 1964, Matar left Lebanon during the civil war to study in the United States. Decades later, she returns through her art to engage with a new generation of women who remain in the country, forging their lives within uncertainty. Her portraits are collaborative acts: her subjects select their settings—abandoned homes, sunlit coastlines, or verdant mountainsides—each location serving as both metaphor and mirror for the state of the nation. Through these compositions, Matar weaves together the beauty of the Lebanese landscape and the emotional terrain of its youth. Her photograph Aya (Draping), taken in Gemmayze, Beirut in 2022, captures a young woman reclining across a worn chair in a decaying room. Light streams through tall windows, suggesting hope and continuity amid decay. This image, like others in the series, transcends documentary and enters the realm of poetic reflection—an exploration of how personal presence and national identity intertwine. Matar’s portraits stand as quiet defiance against narratives of despair. In a nation still marked by instability and mass emigration, her work honors those who stay, endure, and imagine renewal. Through empathy and artistry, she offers a vision of Lebanon’s women as both witnesses and architects of the future—embodying strength, vulnerability, and an unyielding will to belong. Image: Rania Matar, Aya (Draping). Gemmayze, Beirut, Lebanon, 2022 © Rania Matar

Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance) marks the first solo museum exhibition in the United States for artist Widline Cadet, presenting her ambitious 2025 project in full. Drawing from her own migration from Haiti to the United States, Cadet explores themes of Black diasporic life, survival, and cultural memory. Her multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, sound, sculpture, performance, and installation, creating immersive experiences that interrogate personal and collective histories. Cadet’s work is deeply rooted in the experiences of her family, using intimate narratives as the foundation for broader reflections on displacement, identity, and resilience. Through her lens, ordinary moments and rituals become sites for exploring survival, memory, and the often invisible threads that connect diasporic communities across time and geography. The exhibition invites viewers to engage with these layered narratives, offering both visual and sensory encounters that illuminate the persistence and adaptability of Black life in the diaspora. Educated at the City College of New York (BA, Studio Art) and Syracuse University (MFA), Cadet has been recognized with numerous fellowships and residencies, including the Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency, and The Studio Museum in Harlem artist-in-residence program. Her work has been widely published in Aperture Magazine, FOAM, The New Yorker, TIME, The New York Times Magazine, and Wallpaper*, among others, and has been exhibited both in the United States and internationally. Cadet’s works are held in prominent public and private collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, LACMA, PAMM, Huis Marseille, The Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Princeton University Art Museum. Seremoni Disparisyon solidifies Cadet’s exploration of Black diasporic identity as both a deeply personal and universally resonant inquiry, using art to illuminate the complex interplay of memory, migration, and survival. Image: Yon etranje ki pa sanble youn #2 (A Stranger Who Doesn't Look Like One #2), 2019

From the earliest civilizations, portraiture has stood as one of art’s most enduring traditions. Originating in painting and sculpture, it sought to render the human form with realism and dignity, preserving individuals across time. For centuries, portraits were symbols of power and privilege, their creation limited to the wealthy who commissioned likenesses as affirmations of prestige, lineage, and influence. The invention of photography transformed this tradition, giving rise to a new, democratic era of portraiture. With the emergence of accessible cameras in the late nineteenth century—most notably the first Kodak models—ordinary people could now capture their own image and identity. What had once been an exclusive luxury became a shared human experience. From the humble tintypes of the nineteenth century to the immediacy of today’s smartphone selfies, photography reshaped how we represent ourselves and others, granting permanence to fleeting expressions and intimate emotions. The exhibition I Am the Face, drawn entirely from the permanent collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, traces this evolution through the lens of Southern photography. Spanning the early twentieth century to the present, it explores shifting artistic approaches, technical innovations, and cultural contexts that continue to redefine the photographic portrait. Within this survey, each image becomes both a reflection and a revelation—a record of individuality and a dialogue between photographer and subject. The exhibition examines how perception, identity, and social presence intertwine, offering insight into the human condition as seen through the camera’s unblinking eye. I Am the Face invites viewers to consider the power of the photographic portrait not merely as documentation, but as an act of connection, recognition, and understanding—one that continues to shape how we see ourselves and one another in an ever-changing world. Image: Mauro Antonio Barreto, Blake and Lacy, 2021, Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Gift of the Artist, 2023.17.1 © Mauro Antonio Barreto

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery unveils The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, an exhibition that captures the pulse of contemporary portraiture through 35 extraordinary works by 36 artists. Selected from over 3,300 submissions to the museum’s seventh triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, these portraits reflect the diversity, depth, and complexity of American identity in the twenty-first century. Artists from across 14 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico bring forward a compelling range of perspectives and techniques—from painting and photography to video and mixed media. The 2025 competition is directed by Taína Caragol, senior curator of painting and sculpture, and co-organized with Charlotte Ickes, curator of time-based media art and special projects at the Portrait Gallery. Founded in 2006, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition has become one of the most anticipated platforms for portrait artists in the United States and its territories. Open to all artists aged 18 and older, the competition invites submissions of portraits created within the past three years. The first-prize winner receives $25,000 and a commission to portray a living American of distinction for the museum’s permanent collection. Second- and third-place winners are awarded $10,000 and $7,500 respectively. Previous winners include celebrated artists such as Amy Sherald, Hugo Crosthwaite, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor, each of whom has redefined how portraiture engages with history, representation, and the human condition. For 2025, the prizewinners are David Antonio Cruz of New York, Kameron Neal of Brooklyn, and Jared Soares of Washington, D.C. Their work, alongside that of their peers, demonstrates how portraiture continues to evolve as a medium of truth, imagination, and social commentary. Guest jurors for this edition included Carla Acevedo-Yates, Huey Copeland, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Daniel Lind-Ramos, working alongside the museum’s curatorial team. Supported by the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Endowment, the exhibition stands as a living testament to the enduring power of the portrait to illuminate the American experience. Image: The Gallegos Twins from Belen, NM (From the series “Barrios de Nuevo México: Southwest Stories of Vindication”) Artist: Frank Blazquez Inkjet print 2019 Collection of the artist © Frank Blazquez

Living Indigenously celebrates the richness and resilience of contemporary Indigenous life, revealing how deeply rooted traditions continue to shape identities in a constantly changing world. The exhibition brings together a vibrant group of artists, including Yesenia Vanessa Ayala, Rogelio Zavala-Purepecha, and Lauren Siyowin Peters, whose works reflect personal experiences that together form a shared narrative of Indigenous presence and renewal. Through photography, painting, and mixed media, these artists bridge ancestral heritage with modern realities, offering insight into the ways Indigenous identity adapts and thrives across generations. The exhibition is presented in the library lobby, inviting visitors to encounter the living stories woven into each artwork. In dialogue with this presentation, the Jefferson lobby features a companion exhibition by Indigenous photographer Teko Alejo. His work captures moments of ceremony, community, and resistance from an insider’s point of view. Through his lens, Alejo documents not only the visual beauty of cultural expression but also the strength of collective voice in the face of ongoing struggles for recognition and sovereignty. His images portray both celebration and defiance, emphasizing that Indigenous life is not confined to history but continues to evolve, protest, and affirm its presence in today’s world. Together, these exhibitions offer a powerful testament to the endurance and creativity of Indigenous cultures. Living Indigenously is not merely a reflection of the past—it is a living dialogue that honors ancestral knowledge while embracing contemporary experience. Through art, these creators affirm that Indigenous identity is an active, dynamic force, grounded in tradition yet open to transformation. Visitors are invited to look, listen, and engage with voices that continue to shape the cultural landscape of our time. Image: Raritan Native American Pow Wow, 2023. Teko Alejo. Digital print, 11 × 14 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Teko Alejo.

Coinciding with the Semiquincentennial in 2026, Citizen Artist will meet a moment of national reflection with a celebration of artist workers in America. Beginning in 1933, artists painted, photographed, wrote, acted, and taught for New Deal programs including the Public Works of Art Project, the Works Progress Administration, Farm Security Administration, and the Treasury Section on Fine Arts. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiated dedicated arts and cultural support at the national level. Four decades later, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) funded unemployment relief and jobs training programs through local Department of Labor offices. Across the United States, artists and their allies adapted, designing programs that mobilized the skills of out-of-work professional artists in service of their local communities. CETA wasn’t designed to support artists – it was designed to create jobs. Yet in the 1970s, the Department of Labor did both. With CETA support, the creative sector saw professionalization of the field, the founding of new arts organizations, and an expansion of community-based arts programs. Artists used CETA to fund community connections, and in Delaware, it ignited energy that helped shape programs at the Delaware Art Museum and develop the foundation for The Delaware Contemporary. By reactivating CETA’s legacy of creative ingenuity, we thread the lines of creativity, innovation, and collaboration across generations. Citizen Artist brings artworks from the interconnected eras of the New Deal and CETA together, alongside original commissions that document, amplify and imagine new possibilities for artists’ roles today.

Second Nature is the first major exhibition to explore the concept of the Anthropocene through contemporary photography, bringing together the work of forty-five artists from around the world. Through diverse artistic approaches—ranging from large-scale aerial imagery to digital collage and conceptual installations—the exhibition confronts the profound transformations shaping our planet. Each artist offers a distinct visual interpretation of this proposed geological epoch, illustrating both its beauty and its devastation. The photographs presented in Second Nature challenge viewers to see the Earth anew. Sweeping aerial views reveal toxic yet mesmerizing industrial landscapes, while manipulated archives expose the colonial roots of environmental exploitation. Other works depict sprawling urban environments that mirror humanity’s relentless expansion, alongside speculative visions of uncertain futures. Together, these images speak to the complexity of our current era—an age defined by vanishing glaciers, rising seas, displaced populations, and ecological imbalance. Yet the exhibition goes beyond environmental alarm to consider the intertwined social and historical dimensions of the Anthropocene. It acknowledges the inherited scars of colonialism, forced migration, and extractive economies, revealing how human histories are embedded in the physical landscapes we inhabit and transform. Through their images, the artists invite reflection on responsibility, resilience, and the possibility of renewal within this altered world. Organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts, Second Nature is curated by Jessica May and Marshall N. Price. As a traveling exhibition, it connects institutions across the United States, from Durham to Stanford to Anchorage, symbolizing the global reach of its themes. Ultimately, Second Nature asks us to confront our shared condition and to imagine a more thoughtful coexistence with the planet that sustains us. Image: An image of Sim Chi Yin's "Shifting Sands #1," depicting a sandy shoreline and the development of skyscrapers in the background. A child and two other figures crawl in the sand. Artwork Info Sim Chi Yin, Shifting Sands #1, 2017. Archival pigment on paper, 16 x20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Sim Chi Yin.

Since 2005, Mexico City–based artists Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea have worked together under the name Lake Verea, blending their personal identities and creative visions to explore the boundaries between architecture, emotion, and image-making. Their collaboration weaves intimacy, queerness, and experimentation into photography, transforming built spaces into living presences that hold memory, tenderness, and time. In their series Dark Rooms and Other Games, Lake Verea turn their attention to the modernist landmarks of Palm Springs, including Richard Neutra’s celebrated Kaufmann House and the iconic designs of Albert Frey—the Aluminaire House and Frey House II. By photographing these architectural treasures under the subtle light of a full moon, they uncover a side of modernism often unseen. The structures, bathed in nocturnal stillness, seem to breathe in the desert air, their forms softened by shadow and infused with mystery. Their approach to photography is both methodical and poetic. Working with analog techniques, Lake Verea spend long hours observing, waiting, and listening before capturing an image. This patience allows the familiar to become strange, and the monumental to turn delicate. The results are photographs that evoke not only the physical beauty of these buildings but also the emotional resonance of presence and absence. Often inserting themselves into their compositions, the artists transform architectural study into a kind of self-portraiture—an act of play and affection. Their use of frottage, or what they call frottragraphy, involves rubbing paper against the textures of the buildings themselves, creating tactile impressions that extend the photographic image into touch. Through these layered gestures, Lake Verea invite viewers to reconsider how architecture and photography, performance and intimacy, can converge to tell stories of place, identity, and time’s quiet passage. Image: Lake Verea, Dark Rooms: Frey House II, Us As Eyes, 2024 © Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea

To mark the reopening of the Portland Art Museum and the renewed joy of gathering within shared spaces, Together celebrates the enduring human need for connection. This exhibition brings forward a selection of photographs that depict people in relation—family members, friends, neighbors, and strangers—united by moments of presence. Drawn from the museum’s extensive photography collection of more than 10,000 works, the images range from the nineteenth century to the present day. Many are recent acquisitions, appearing before the public for the first time, offering fresh perspectives on the meaning of community across time. From its earliest days, photography has served as a deeply social medium. Portraiture quickly became one of its most cherished forms, allowing people to see and preserve likenesses of loved ones. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of daguerreotypes, tintypes, and cabinet cards—small, portable mementos that traveled across distances, keeping relationships alive through image. As cameras became more accessible, photography left the studio and entered everyday life. Snapshots of families, celebrations, and gatherings captured the rhythms of ordinary existence and the subtle bonds that hold people together. In the twentieth century, photographers began to explore how modernization reshaped human relationships. Some documented the isolation of urban life and the anonymity of crowds, while others turned their lenses toward movements of collective action—protests, festivals, and public demonstrations that expressed unity and hope. These visual records reflect both the fragility and resilience of community. In the contemporary era, the concept of togetherness carries new weight. Amid the paradox of digital connectivity and social isolation, the images in Together remind viewers of photography’s power to affirm our shared humanity. Each photograph—whether intimate or monumental—invites us to recognize ourselves within others, reaffirming the timeless truth that to be human is to be connected. Image: Ray McSavaney (American, 1938-2014), Broadway Portraits - Couple, Mannequin with Scarf, ca. 1983, gelatin silver print, image/sheet: 15 in x 18 15/16 in; board: 22 in x 28 in, Gift of the Ray McSavaney Archive, © Ray McSavaney Archives, 2018.56.9

The Photographic Reflex marks a defining moment in the history of the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. Presented in the Featured Exhibitions Gallery, the exhibition celebrates an extraordinary gift of more than one hundred photographs from the distinguished collectors Lee Marks and John C. DePrez JR. Spanning over a century and a half—from 1856 to 2017—the works of eighty artists illuminate the breadth of photography as both a document of reality and a boundless field for creative expression. The exhibition traces photography’s enduring dialogue with nature and the built world. From Alfred Stieglitz’s lyrical studies of grass to Richard Misrach’s cosmic vistas, the natural environment emerges as a mirror of human perception and wonder. The urban landscape, too, finds its voice through Berenice Abbott’s dynamic portrayals of 1920s New York and Edward Burtynsky’s monumental views of industrial transformation, revealing the interplay between human ambition and the evolving face of the planet. The Photographic Reflex also confronts photography’s role as witness to conflict and change. From Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s stark Civil War images to haunting scenes from later global conflicts, the camera becomes both participant and observer—a silent recorder of humanity’s triumphs and tragedies. Yet the medium’s capacity extends beyond documentation; it invites experimentation, abstraction, and dreamlike invention. Artists manipulate exposure, light, and process to reveal unseen dimensions of the visible world. More than a survey, The Photographic Reflex: The Lee Marks and John C. DePrez Jr. Collection is a meditation on photography’s dual nature—its power to capture what exists and to imagine what lies beyond perception. Across time, space, and subject, these images remind us that photography remains both a reflection and a revelation of how we see ourselves and the world around us. Image: Susan Derges (English, born 1955). Untitled (eye no. 7), 1991. Gelatin silver print, 11 7/16 × 14 1/8 in. (29.1 × 35.9 cm). Gift of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez Jr., Shelbyville, Indiana, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2022.281 @ Susan Derges

Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee brings together two artists separated by generations yet deeply united in their vision of the American landscape as a site of both memory and mystery. Through their work, the land becomes a living archive—bearing the weight of history, displacement, and endurance. Organized by Senior Curator Rebecca Matalon, the exhibition continues a series that explores intergenerational dialogues, following the acclaimed Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves in 2021. Here, the conversation between Buchanan and Lee reveals the complex relationships between Black identity, environment, and survival. The exhibition juxtaposes materials from Beverly Buchanan’s archives—photographs, journals, and self-published works—with Dionne Lee’s contemporary videos, photographs, and sculptures. Though Buchanan (1940–2015) and Lee (b. 1988) lived in different times and contexts, both artists interrogate the land as a space of paradox: a refuge and a wound, a source of sustenance and a record of loss. Their practices are grounded in acts of resilience—Buchanan’s through her sculptural tributes to Southern architecture, and Lee’s through her exploration of navigation, survivalism, and the body’s place in nature. Buchanan’s concrete “frustulas” and her small “shack sculptures” memorialize forgotten lives and histories, while her lesser-known interventions—placing cast works in graveyards of enslaved peoples and documenting them in photographs—expose the quiet power of remembrance. Lee’s work, in turn, extends this dialogue, using film and photography to trace the invisible histories that haunt contemporary landscapes. Together, their works evoke divination—a process of seeking what lies beneath the surface, making visible what history has obscured. Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee invites viewers to reconsider the land not simply as scenery, but as a living testament to survival, transformation, and the enduring presence of those who came before. Image: (L to R): Dionne Lee, Castings (detail), 2022. Gelatin silver prints, 5 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist and Petra Bibeau, New York; Beverly Buchanan, photographs of cast concrete works left by the artist on the grounds of JOB AME Church, Juliette, GA, August 27, 1982. Box 3, Beverly Buchanan papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Much Here is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial presents a sweeping visual chronicle of America in transition, capturing the spirit, contradictions, and quiet beauty of the nation during the 1970s and early 1980s. From the windswept shores of California to the farmlands of Kansas and the crowded avenues of New York City, these photographs reveal a country redefining itself two centuries after its founding. In 1976, to commemorate the U.S. Bicentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) initiated a groundbreaking program supporting regional photography surveys across the country. Drawing inspiration from the Farm Security Administration photographers of the 1930s, this project invited artists to document the lives, landscapes, and communities that shaped the American experience. Over six years, more than 200 photographers participated, producing tens of thousands of images that together form an extraordinary portrait of the nation’s people and places. In 1981, the NEA transferred nearly 1,000 of these photographs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where they remained largely unseen for decades. Much Here is Beautiful now reunites this remarkable archive, offering viewers a chance to rediscover an era defined by economic shifts, environmental awareness, and renewed cultural identity. Through these works, one witnesses both the persistence of tradition and the emergence of modernity across the varied landscapes of America. The exhibition also traces the broader history of federal support for photography, beginning in the 19th century and culminating in the Bicentennial surveys that spanned the nation’s four major regions: Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from Robert Hayden’s poem American Journal, captures the essence of the project—a recognition that beauty and meaning reside not only in grandeur, but in the everyday textures of life across America. Image: Ted Wathen, Former Company Houses, Jenkins, Letcher County, Kentucky, 1975, gelatin silver print, sheet: 11 × 13 1/2 in. (27.9 × 34.3 cm) image: 10 × 10 3/4 in. (25.4 × 27.3 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1983.63.1614, © 1975, Ted Wathen

The Museum of the City of New York’s photography collection is a cornerstone of our mission to document and celebrate the dynamic story of New York City. Spanning from 1840 to the present day, the collection is housed in a state-of-the-art facility and serves as an unparalleled visual record of the city’s transformation across nearly two centuries. In 2023, the Museum launched the Photography Triennial, a bold and forward-looking initiative dedicated to showcasing the best of contemporary photography. The Triennial amplifies the voices of photographers who are capturing the vibrancy and complexity of New York today—its people, streetscapes, cultures, and contradictions. Through the lens of photography, the Triennial explores the city’s present while engaging with its rich history and imagining its future. Each iteration invites the public to see New York anew, sparking dialogue around the social, political, and aesthetic issues that shape urban life. Scheduled to open to the public on November 20, 2026, New York Now: After Dark will explore the vibrant and multifaceted nightlife of New York City through the lens of contemporary photography. The Museum invites amateur and professional photographers to submit images or videos made since 2000 for consideration for inclusion. Image: Night view south from RCA Building, Samuel H. Gottscho (1875–1971), 1933. Museum of the City of New York. 88.1.1.3027.

Storytelling: Photographers Making Meaning explores the power of narrative in photography and how artists construct meaning through the careful sequencing of images and, at times, the interplay between pictures and text. Drawing from the collection of the Wellin Museum of Art, the exhibition reflects on how photographers use visual storytelling to reveal complex ideas, emotions, and perspectives on the human experience. While a single photograph can suggest a moment or a mood, a series of images—especially when combined with words—can challenge perceptions, deepen interpretation, and open new ways of understanding the world. The exhibition highlights how American photographers have embraced the language of storytelling to express both personal and collective realities. Some works were originally conceived for photobooks or magazines, where the dialogue between image and text is essential. In these contexts, the written word can confirm, contradict, or expand the meaning of a photograph, creating a dynamic tension between what is seen and what is said. Even seemingly small design choices—typography, layout, paper texture, or scale—become part of the storytelling process, shaping how audiences encounter and interpret visual information. By assembling diverse voices and approaches, the exhibition demonstrates the enduring power of photography as a narrative art form. The featured photographers—including Danny Lyon, Wright Morris, Bill Owens, Gordon Parks, Milton Rogovin, Silvia Saunders, Lorna Simpson, and Garry Winogrand—each bring distinct methods and sensibilities to the act of visual storytelling. Whether documenting social change, exploring identity, or capturing fleeting moments of everyday life, their works reveal how photography continues to construct, question, and reshape our shared stories. Storytelling: Photographers Making Meaning invites viewers to consider how photographs speak—to each other, to texts, and to us—and how meaning itself is made in the spaces between images and words. Image: Garry Winogrand, Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York, from the portfolio, “Women are Beautiful,” 1969, published 1981. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm). Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. Gift of James, Class of 1980, and Georganne Garfinkel. © Estate of Garry Winogrand. Image courtesy of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY.

Photographer George Platt Lynes enriched creative life in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s with his ambitious and multifaceted art. To be photographed by Lynes was to enter a world of refined style, liberated desire, and artistic possibility. A self-taught craftsman of the medium and an intuitive master of studio lighting, he created thousands of images both for commercial use and private consumption, imbuing each with love and candor. His image repertoire, which is long overdue for consideration in its fullness, has since exerted an undeniable influence on subsequent generations of artists and on various trajectories of American visual culture. This exhibition features some 120 photographs revealing the full scope of the artist’s work in the studio—from lavish fashion imagery for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and commercial work for luxury brands to his stylized portraits of celebrities, his dance photography for the New York City Ballet, and his inimitable male nudes. At their very best, Lynes’ images transcend genre and artfully disclose the intimacies of his life—from friends and lovers to artists, writers, poets, choreographers, and the many dynamic figures of the era who influenced Lynes and were influenced by him. Drawn from private and public collections, including the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, the show represents a rare opportunity for museum visitors to explore in depth the life and career of one of the most consequential photographers of the twentieth century. The exhibition is organized by Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Vice President, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. Image: George Platt Lynes, Surrealist Nude, ca. 1935, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Henry L. Hillman Fund, © Estate of George Platt Lynes

Photographer Mathew Brady (c. 1823 –1896) may be best remembered today for his role in producing a remarkable visual record of the Civil War (1861–65). Yet he initially gained fame as a portrait photographer more than a decade before the war began. Among Brady’s most popular offerings were small, card-mounted photographs known as cartes de visite. Modestly priced, they fueled the rapid growth of a mass market for photographic portraiture from the time of their introduction in the United States in 1859. Brady’s studios produced thousands of glass-plate negatives from which countless prints were made. In 1981, the National Portrait Gallery acquired more than 5,400 Brady studio negatives. Originally assembled as part of a larger collection by amateur historian Frederick Hill Meserve, they offer an extraordinary pictorial index of the prominent figures of the Civil War era. The exhibition includes nine modern prints from Brady’s original photographic negatives. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ulysses S. Grant, and Emma, Queen of Hawai‘i are featured, along with an original, glass-plate negative and one of Brady’s wooden storage boxes.