Current Solo Exhibition

I began documenting life on my grandparents’ cotton farm in 1978, when I was twenty-one years old. I developed close relationships with the people who worked on the farm. They welcomed me into their homes; I’d hang out with them at the juke joints where they relaxed at the end of a hard week of work. We’d share fried chicken and black-eyed peas. We’d sing “Sweet Jesus, Carry Me Home” at St. John Missionary Baptist Church. I have lived in many places, but my idea of home remains firmly rooted in the Arkansas land and people. After forty years, I have come to realize that all the photographs I made at Rotan are explorations of home. I’ve also come to realize that the place I

Nevertheless She Persisted A city girl and skeptic to my core, I feel an overwhelming sense of awe in the face of a desert spread before me or the expanse of the ocean. Within these magnificent landscapes, humanity seems small and insignificant. Geologic eras are etched into layers of rock and our time on earth seems short in contrast. So far there have been thirty-seven epochs in the history of this planet. Humans have been on Earth for less than two of these, though our impact on the shape of the planet has been tremendously outsized. What will the next epoch look like? I have mounted scenes of human habitation behind acrylic, plastic walls that we imagine can safely separate t

Over 300 cambodian families live in Phnom Penh's “Kilometer 6” commune, which is located alongside railway tracks that stretch from the districts of Tuol Kork to Daun Penh and Russey Keo (hence their name, the Railway Community). The families live in self-built shacks, usually consisting of a single room. The people here – some of the poorest people in the city – often run small businesses, in the form of mini-kiosks, in their community. They arrange individual products on cloths in front of their houses. Because of the lack of space, the residents spread out over the train tracks during the day. Every time they hear the train horns, they quickly gather up their cooking utensils, c

The photographs in this series are part of a long-term project that began in 2012 and was last updated with new pictures in March 2023. The aim is to provide a broader audience with an insight into an Islamic society that is in many ways very different from those commonly known from the Arab world. The series explores the spiritual practices and rituals of the Sufi brotherhoods and how they shape everyday life in Senegal. It also shows how they maintain peace and stability in the country, as well as their own power and wealth, by promoting a tolerant form of Islam rather than dogmatic rules and oppression. In Senegal, 95 percent of the population is Muslim and belongs to a Sufi brotherhoo

As a child, I had an unbearable fear of the dark. So terrified was I of imagined creatures hiding under my bed, or lurking within the dark recesses of the closet, that I frequently slept with the lights on. The irony is not lost on me that I now find myself inextricably drawn to late night explorations of pitch-dark alleys and fog shrouded streets of anonymous cities, my anxieties held in check by an obsessive inquisitiveness. This curiosity is rooted in a need to discover what lies just beneath the surface, unseen. Inspired by the visual esthetic of Film Noir, this body of work explores isolated fragments of subjects once there but now gone, as a means of shining a light on what is h

When Laurent Baheux photographs animals, he becomes a portrait photographer who seeks to capture the originality of his subject. ''I photograph instinctively, with my guts. For me, all that matters is the encounter'', says the man who has been traveling through wild territories for more than 20 years and as close as possible to wild animals in their own environment. With his dense and contrasted use of black and white, Laurent plays with shadow and light and centers his attention on posture, composition, material or texture. His settings are snapshots of life, simple and tender photographs of the daily lives of animals. ''I am not a naturalist or a behaviorist. I react on instinct and I

My project, Los Olvidados Guatemala, is a poignant examination of the communities that are marginalized and left behind by natural disasters. On November 5, 2020, the village of Queja was destroyed by a landslide caused by Hurricane Eta, leaving 58 people dead and the survivors with nothing. This tragedy is not unique to Queja, but it is a familiar story for many communities in Guatemala, particularly those in the highlands, where poor infrastructure and inadequate resources leave them highly vulnerable. The destruction of crops and homes leads many to migrate for survival, often at great risk. In 2018, I photographed the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico, where an

Bombay Beach is a place in Imperial County, California, USA. The population was 231 at the 2020 census. It is located on the Salton Sea, and is the lowest community in the United States, located 223 feet (68 m) below sea level. Once a popular getaway for beachgoers until the 1980s, when the draining and increasing salinity of the Salton Sea destroyed the lake's ecosystem and drove businesses and private landowners out of the area, rendering Bombay Beach a ghost town. Despite this, by 2018, a number of people had moved into the area, and the town's many abandoned structures and features from its past have drawn visitors back in. Bombay Beach was "enjoying a rebirth of sorts with an i

This Is Water explores self-awareness and its nemeses: blind certitude and unconsciousness. It is inspired by a story shared by David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'” I love this parable and its reminder that essential things are all around us, hidden in plain sight. This project examines what is above and below the surface, shifting mediums and bending light. It s

TECHNOLOGY AS A SOCIAL MARKER OF RACE, CLASS & ECONOMICS IN ROCHESTER, NY In the later 18th century, as the U.S. and French Revolutions captured the attention of Europe, reformer and Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) proposed an algorithm to help determine the moral rightness of an action by balancing the probable pleasures and pains that it would produce. Bentham recognized that neither individuals nor society could strictly follow the calculation he described, but he believed it could serve as a model of an ideal calculation – that the closer the decision-making involved in determining a policy or choice adhered to the calculation, the closer the resulting choice

''I suppose you have received many letters from desperate mothers. Here is mine.'' My sister wrote these words to a neurologist in 1997 when my nephew was two years old. one, one thousand... is an unconventional documentary exposing the impact a rare and incurable form of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, has on a mother and son's experience of life-long care. At 28, David is nonverbal, experiences daily seizures, has scoliosis, severe autism, and requires 24-hour care. After years of pursuing conventional approaches to stop my nephew's seizures, Lori turned to nonconventional healers, working in energetic and mystical realms. Her love for David and seeing beyond their circumsta

The hand-folded, burned, and stitched prints in my “Folding and Mending” series are a way of expressing “the world folding in on itself.” We are so focused on our daily tasks and routines that we are neglecting the environment on which our very survival depends. We have created an imbalance in which our world is collapsing. As record storms and wildfires wreak havoc on our forests and communities, our ecosystems are unraveling at an alarming rate. My hand-manipulated photographs allude to the results of our climate crisis. Coastlines erode and submerge as sea levels rise. Trees and forests, stressed from years of drought, succumb to disease and fire. Golden hills crack and crumble. A

Coney Island Beyond the boardwalk is the title of this project. I am a documentary photographer who has who spent the last dozen years working with and photographing the people that live the housing projects in Coney Island. I mainly like to record people in their homes and places of worship. I give each person a copy of their picture. When I started this project, I worked with film and would come on Saturday morning with a group of pictures and people would line at the basketball court on 24th street to see if I had their photo. Many times, a mother or a sister would say that's my brother or my grandma and I would give them the picture. The projects are like one enormous family. Everyon

Far from Thailand's iconic tourist destinations, Isan, the kingdom's largest region, reaches north and east to the borders of Laos and Cambodia. Poverty forces many residents to seek work in Bangkok, but fearing the temptations of city life (drugs, gangs, sex trade…), children are often left behind under the care of grandparents. To keep them out of trouble, and with the prospect of earning money to support the family, kids are enrolled in Muay Thai (the traditional martial art of Thai boxing that is the country's national sport) as early as 5, and can be competing by 6-7 years old. Training camps (2500 in Isaan and 1200 in Bangkok) are schools of life filled with deprivation, di

It is an apocalyptic landscape. There are huge man-made craters everywhere that make up the visible landscape, the ground is burning, and a vast area is oozing with toxic gases, fire and smoke. Amongst all of this, there are men, woman and children digging in the soil with their bare hands. Coal is mined everywhere in Jharkhand, India, and large parts of it is sorted by hand. The locals call it; Kalaheera; or ”Black Diamond”. Energy produced by the burning of coal is the single biggest contributor to the man-generated carbon dioxide emissions on this planet. Coal is a major part in the issue of global warming. In Jharkhand many people have been forced away from their lands when

The climate crisis is no longer just the future It takes place now and here. It demands human life and it destroys the future of children. South Sudan is experiencing severe floods in its fourth year, which is a direct consequence of climate change. 800,000 people have lost their homes to the water masses, and every day that number is getting bigger. The roads are washed away along with crops, cattle, clean water and toilets. Emergency aid in the form of food and medicine cannot emerge and people are fighting across the dry land against poisonous snakes and crocodiles. The stagnant water has caused the mosquito population to explode - and with them also the cases of malaria. South Sudan is a

We may tune out - or stop noticing - the infrastructure and systems that most deeply shape our lives as individuals and societies. As we go about our daily routines, do we consider the structures in place that put power in our electrical sockets, food in our grocery stores, plastic in our consumables, or salts in our batteries? As a photographer & visual anthropologist, when I started flying in small planes I was struck by how tiny our all-important lives looked from above, when moments ago the concerns of terrestrial life had seemed so all encompassing. Flying above my own town, I was shocked by how little I actually knew about the area that I had lived in for years - I drove around and

Since moving to New Orleans in 2008, I have documented and preserved a record of New Orleans' "second line" parades, thereby capturing for posterity images of a unique and vital part of New Orleans' Black cultural heritage. Although the term "second line" comes from the dancing and strutting followers of a parading brass band, it encompasses the entire parade—the brass band (the "first line," or "main line") and its followers (the "second line"). I have taken tens of thousands of color photographs of the second lines by following the weekly parades, which run most of the year, except for holidays, Jazz Fest, and the hottest part of summer—and whic

Surroundings play a dominant role in shaping experience. Each image in this series is a composite of three separate original images: one of someone enjoying leisure at the beach, a cityscape, and a photograph of dramatic weather as seen from my back porch. Separately, they are subjects I love to photograph for their beauty and the awe they inspire in me. Together they tell a story of city dwellers searching for moments of relief in a world shaped by climate change, and the struggle to find a balance between an environment in crisis and manmade structures. My work as a photographer is the culmination of a life-long investment in the power of art and visual culture to shape and influence

At the end of September 2020, Azerbaijan attacked the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, administered until then by Armenia. What had been a somewhat frozen conflict flared up again. I immediately went there with my colleague and friend Marketa Kutilova. We didn't know how we would get there, as Covid restrictions were stringent everywhere. But we knew we would somehow. The fighting broke out with incredible fierceness and cruelty. Azerbaijan was well prepared and armed for the war, enjoying support mainly from allied Turkey, which armed it with modern drones. The Armenians arrived in Karabakh with forty-year-old equipment. Though the young Armenian soldiers, who had spent only a few months in train

As a photographer, I use a camera lens to look at the world I see around me constructing images of everyday life in the social landscape that shape our collective identity. My subjects can be described as anonymous, yet it is in the total sense they are held in suspension. My typical subject matter is the humbled everyday person familiar to us all who happens to be walking along just as well as the rest of us. Through the exploration of contemporary life in all its variety my images reveal much about my journey through discovery. Everyone and everything has significance in itself and in relationship to its surroundings. My photographs are about the dignity, strength of character, and forti

Many years later now that I am 63 years old, I have learned that it was in my early 20's when I had found my voice. It was then that I realized that my point of view had value and that I had something important to say and share with the world. I was capturing poignant scenes in our communities that I felt were significant for how they described the American culture, moments that captured American as well as universal sensibilities. Scenes that captured essential truths about people's hopes and their successes, their challenges and despair, their individuality and their relationships, during their day to day lives in our American communities. Scenes that defined an American way of life for me

I have spent the last fifteen years capturing the lives of shepherds in the historical region of Transylvania in Central Romania. I am interested in the singular shepherd's lives and destinies, both in the plains and in the Carpathians Mountains. The region of Transylvania is known for the scenery of its Carpathian landscape and its rich history. The Western world commonly associates Transylvania with vampires because of the influence of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula" and the many films the tale inspired. This series focuses on shepherds in this region. When walking in some parts of Transylvania one would often feel that you have travelled back in time. There is hardly any

Since Seeing You Since Seeing You is an observation of the lingering experience of the final week of my mother's life. She rarely let me photograph her, except in those last days when she changed her mind and without any hesitation, gave her permission and blessing. During that time there was a quality of acceptance and ease within and around her. After she passed the nurses seemed in a rush to cover her body and take her away. I wondered why. It seemed so natural that I would want to stay with her for a while. Since that final time, I have taken a lot of photographs in nature; immersed in its aliveness, decay and wild beauty. I feel her spirit in the tilting trees or when there is a light

The Black Stories Project The wet plate collodion tintype process was first invented in the 1850s and became a primary photographic practice in the 1860s and 1870s, documenting much of the Civil War. The tintypes of the Black Stories Project embody the history of photography and the history of racial inequity in the United States and more specifically in the state of Utah. They draw a connection between the history of racism and the dialogue about race today. In a state where the black population is less than two percent and a dominant religious culture presents a unique and complicated narrative of the past and present, we can only address the current issues of systemic inequality while

In the Street: An Expression of FaithA humanist portrayal of New York City's social landscape of religious faith. Candid and without comment or sentimentality, unselfconscious in its theatricality and self-presentation. Displaying ourselves with grace and a sense of timelessness. Our lives, in a matter of seconds, are caught in the act...where the obvious and mundane transition into something more powerful and provocative. Though not from a religious background, I couldn't help but notice how much daily, informal faith-based expression took place in the street outside the strictures and formal confines of organized religion…churches, temples and mosques. Despite the inordinate stress

My series "Losing our minds" was taken at the beginning of the corona crisis 2020: a bizarre, but extremely fascinating period. Man loses his mind because a stormy situation presents itself that is new and challenging for him. Fear tries to overpower him, he freezes, starts to reflect on the world and on the punishment that Mother Nature seems to send us. We have treated our Mother Earth too lightly, demanded too much of her in our egoism. Reflection is necessary. I want this poetic-philosophical reflection to speak through my images in these corona times. In my series "Losing our minds" I consciously show only young people who are looking for themselves, for the meaning o

Slab City sits on the leftover infrastructure of Camp Dunlap, a WWII marine base activated in 1942 as a training camp for action in North Africa. The base also provided training areas for army troops under General Patton, a bombing range for planes from a nearby Marine Air Station, and a staging area for smaller Marine groups. It was deactivated in 1945. When the land was returned to the State, only the concrete slab foundations remained to float on the shifting sands. Slabbers have been shifting with these sand for decades; building, scrapping, repurposing, surviving, dying. They’re a motley crew, as varied as anywhere else. The year-round population is modest. Roughy fifty stay through J

Few photographers have captured (but no, let’s not use that word)—few photographers have communicated the depth and complexity of primate emotions as Berry has. - Collier Brown, Introduction to Primates, published by 21st Editions, 2017 Behind Glass is a series of portraits of primates made in small zoos throughout Europe. Alone, patient and silent, in these monkey houses I establish a more than passing connection with my subjects. I makes portraits that reveal the unique personality of each of these animals; it is clear that they are posing for me and that there exists a human-primate bond. My goal is to motivate people to feel compassion for primates and an obligation to protect them.

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - my mother grabbing my wrist pulling me across the intersection, my great-grandmother's fingers numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, Miriam's palms pouring water for the Hebrews in the desert - this is how a Jew understands action. Because no physical space is a given for the Jewish diaspora, time and the rituals that steep into it are centered as a mode of carrying on. The bloodline of a folktale, an object, a ritual, pulses through interpretation and enactment. In this work I explor

An exploration of memory I grew up in a small farming village in Northern Germany. A village that is bound to its history and that stands out through its traditions even today. Long ago, village women met regularly in "Spinneklumps" (Spin Clubs) to spin wool, embroider, and stitch fabrics for their homes. I imagine their conversations as they worked, the beautiful stories that lifted their spirits, as well as the stories of sadness, sorrow and loss. In modern times, village women continued to meet in this tradition, but shared stories over coffee and cake instead of needlework. These close-knit groups of women often stayed together until their death. In this series, my composite images t

Zaido (Dedicated to My Late Father...) Nothing had prepared me for my father's death. He was taken by a blood cancer before the family knew he was seriously ill. After his sudden death, I had a two big accidents and suffered serious injuries to my face and legs. They seemed fatal, but I somehow managed to escape death. The process of recovery was slow and just as me and my family were about to return to our daily lives, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck. The whole of Japan was shaken, feeling unimaginable despair. All hope seemed lost in one single moment. As if nightmares appearing one after the other, these new realities bruised my body and soul, leaving me feel

Pyongyang, North Korea. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains one of the most isolated and secretive nations in the world. Since its creation in 1948, the country has been ruled by three generations of the Kim dynasty descending from the country's founder Kim Il-sung, followed by his son, Kim Jong-il, and currently under the control of his grandson, Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un. It is a self-reliant socialist society based on an extreme interpretation of the cult of personality and devotion to the current and former leaders, fueled by a large dose of propaganda. The festivities honoring the 70th anniversary of the creation of North Korea on September 9, 1948, include