Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography

First Exhibition to Explore Photography’s Relationship with Resource Extraction

May 23 - August 23, 2026

This summer, the National Gallery of Art unveils one of the most compelling photography exhibitions of 2026: Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography. On view from May 23 through August 23, 2026, the groundbreaking exhibition is the first major museum presentation dedicated exclusively to exploring the profound relationship between resource extraction and American photography across nearly two centuries.

Bringing together 150 photographs by more than 100 artists, Beneath the Surface offers a fascinating visual journey through the history of mining, fossil fuel production, and industrial development in the United States. From the California Gold Rush to contemporary environmental concerns, the exhibition reveals how photographers have documented, interpreted, and challenged the industries that have shaped modern life.

A Landmark Photography Exhibition
Featuring works by some of the most influential photographers in American history—including Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, Gordon Parks, LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Maisel, Mitch Epstein, Carleton Watkins, and Will Wilson—the exhibition highlights the evolving role of photography in portraying extraction industries and their impact on people, communities, and landscapes.

Drawing heavily from the National Gallery of Art’s renowned photography collection, visitors will encounter rare early daguerreotypes created during the Gold Rush era, powerful documentary photographs of industrial expansion, and contemporary large-scale works that address environmental transformation and social justice.

Malakoff Diggins, North Bloomfield, Nevada County [California],1871 © Carleton E. Watkins

South Plainfield Coal Storage, capacity 100,000 tons, c. 1890 © William H. Rau

Photography and Extraction: An Unexpected Connection
One of the exhibition’s most intriguing themes is the connection between photography itself and the mining industry. Early photographic processes depended on silver, while modern digital technologies rely on mined materials such as copper and rare earth elements. This relationship creates a unique lens through which to examine both the medium and the industries it has long documented.

According to co-curator Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition explores photography's dual role as both a product of extracted resources and a primary tool for visualizing extraction. The works on display range from commercial and promotional imagery to documentary projects and activist photography, presenting a balanced view of the rewards and consequences of resource development.

Exploring Two Centuries of Industrial Transformation
The exhibition unfolds through six chronological sections preceded by an introductory gallery featuring contemporary works that establish a critical framework for the themes ahead. Visitors will discover photographs by iconic figures such as Margaret Bourke-White, Marion Post Wolcott, and Bernd and Hilla Becher alongside lesser-known but equally compelling artists including Florence Kemmler, Alma Lavenson, and Mary Morris.

Contemporary voices such as Edward Burtynsky, Victoria Sambunaris, Terry Evans, Binh Danh, and Cara Romero further expand the conversation, examining how extraction continues to shape environments and communities today.

A lonely job. Willie Bryden, a nipper, 13 yrs old, Pittston, Pa., 1911 © Lewis Wickes Hine

Capturing the Scale of Extraction
At its core, Beneath the Surface investigates one of photography’s greatest challenges: how to represent industries whose scale often exceeds human comprehension. Through sweeping landscapes, intimate worker portraits, aerial imagery, photobooks, collages, historical processes, and experimental photographic techniques, artists have continually pushed the boundaries of the medium to communicate the magnitude of extraction and its far-reaching effects.

The exhibition demonstrates how photography has influenced public understanding of mining and resource development for nearly 200 years, helping audiences visualize activities that are often hidden beneath the earth’s surface yet fundamental to modern society.

Tom Stroud, oil field worker, Velma, Oklahoma, 6/12/80 © Richard Avedon, The Richard Avedon Foundation

Why You Should See It
As conversations around sustainability, energy production, environmental stewardship, and industrial history continue to evolve, Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography offers timely insight into the complex relationship between natural resources, technological progress, and visual culture. Combining historical depth, artistic innovation, and contemporary relevance, it stands as one of the most important photography exhibitions of 2026.

Whether you're a photography enthusiast, history lover, environmental advocate, or simply curious about the forces that have shaped America, this exhibition provides a thought-provoking and visually stunning experience.

Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia 2004, printed 2025 © Mitch Epstein

American Mine, Carlin, Nevada 1, 2007 © David Maisel

Exhibition Dates and Tour
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
May 23 – August 23, 2026
www.nga.gov

Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
October 23, 2026 – January 18, 2027
mam.org

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
February 14 – May 9, 2027
www.cartermuseum.org

Untitled (Coaldale, Pennsylvania), 2007 © Victoria Sambunaris

U.S.S. Edgar Thomson Steel Works & Monongahela, 2013 © LaToya Ruby Frazier

Shiprock Disposal Site, Shiprock, Navajo Nation,36. © Will Wilson (Diné)

Lee Friedlander: Life Still

By Lee Friedlander

Publisher : Aperture

2026 | 160 pages

Lee Friedlander: Life Still is a landmark monograph that brings together mostly unpublished photographs from one of America’s most influential photographers.

Spanning nearly seventy years, Friedlander’s career has been defined by a unique vision that finds poetry in the everyday. Life Still offers readers a rare glimpse into his expansive archive while introducing new work that underscores his continued relevance and insight. The book creates a compelling dialogue between past and present, showing how Friedlander’s eye consistently discovers humor, irony, and subtle complexity in the ordinary landscapes, urban spaces, and domestic environments he photographs.

Known for his compositional inventiveness and his ability to transform mundane scenes into layered visual narratives, Friedlander captures America in all its contradictions. Streets, signage, storefronts, fences, trees, and reflections become more than background—they become actors in his ongoing exploration of how we inhabit space and interact with culture. Often witty, occasionally surreal, and always meticulously observed, his photographs invite viewers to reconsider what they notice in the world around them.

Life Still features an insightful essay by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, which contextualizes Friedlander’s work within both historical and contemporary photographic practice. This combination of visual and written perspective illuminates the ways Friedlander’s images continue to challenge conventions and inspire new generations of photographers.

More than a retrospective, Life Still is both a summation of Friedlander’s decades-long career and a testament to his ongoing creative vitality. It is a celebration of observation, a meditation on American life, and a masterclass in seeing with clarity, humor, and empathy. For anyone interested in the art of photography, this monograph offers an intimate and expansive view into the work of a photographer whose vision remains as compelling and relevant today as ever.

All About Lee Friedlander

Newsha Tavakolian: And They Laughed at Me

By Newsha Tavakolian

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2026 | 220 pages

Newsha Tavakolian: And They Laughed at Me is a bold and disarming return to the fragile beginnings of a photographer who would later gain international recognition. Instead of assembling a volume of celebrated images, Newsha Tavakolian turns to what she once dismissed as her “eyesores”—photographs made in her teenage years when she began working as a photojournalist in Tehran. Taken at sixteen, in the charged atmosphere of a country shaped by political tension and social constraint, these early frames carry the urgency and uncertainty of youth.

Revisiting these photographs decades later, Tavakolian confronts not only her technical inexperience but also the emotional terrain of growing up under scrutiny. The images reveal crowded streets, intimate domestic moments, and fleeting expressions that hover between defiance and vulnerability. What once felt flawed now reads as raw testimony. Through this act of excavation, she reframes imperfection as evidence of persistence, tracing the arc from youthful aspiration to the sobering awareness of reality’s weight.

The book unfolds as a rite of passage. Tavakolian reflects on the tension between hope and disillusionment, between the instinct to withdraw into darkness and the determination to move toward light. Her career, later marked by international exhibitions and major honors, including the Carmignac Photojournalism Award and the Prince Claus Award, began in these formative encounters with the camera. The photographs capture the seeds of a voice that would grow increasingly nuanced, attentive to identity, censorship, and the quiet resilience of everyday life in Iran.

And They Laughed at Me becomes more than an archival project; it is a meditation on self-doubt and endurance. By embracing images she once rejected, Tavakolian asserts the value of vulnerability in artistic growth. The result is an honest and reflective volume that invites readers to reconsider failure, to see in missteps the contours of becoming, and to recognize that the path toward clarity often begins in uncertainty.

All About Newsha Tavakolian

Marching West: The Los Angeles Civil Rights Movement in Photographs

By Karin L. Stanford with Mark Speltz

Publisher : Getty Publications

2026 | 192 pages

This volume offers a compelling visual record of the people, organizations, and coalitions that shaped the civil rights movement in Los Angeles, presenting a first-of-its-kind photographic history of activism on the American West Coast.

In 1963, during a landmark speech at Wrigley Field before nearly forty thousand people, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged Angelenos to confront inequality at home, stating that meaningful change required action within their own city: “The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free, because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”

Marching West traces this urgent call through the lens of photography, revealing how images not only documented the struggle for Black equality but also actively participated in shaping its visibility and momentum. The book brings together more than one hundred photographs, including previously unpublished works, that connect local activism in Los Angeles to broader national movements.

Spanning churches, street demonstrations, cultural gatherings, and political organizing, these images highlight the role of a diverse network of participants—community leaders, religious figures, Hollywood personalities, and everyday citizens—who collectively advanced the fight for civil rights in the American West.

Drawn from significant archives such as the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge, the Getty Research Institute, and other Southern California collections, the volume features work by photographers including Harry Adams, Howard Bingham, Charles Brittin, Joe Flowers, Vera Jackson, and Charles Williams.

Together, these photographs offer more than documentation. They form a layered narrative of resistance and solidarity, expanding the historical understanding of the civil rights era by foregrounding voices and events often overlooked in mainstream accounts of American social progress.

Albert Watson: Kaos

By Albert Watson

Publisher : Taschen

2026 | 408 pages

Albert Watson: Kaos is a masterful survey of one of photography’s most influential voices, spanning five decades of work that oscillates between intimacy and spectacle. Watson’s photographs are at once meticulously composed and viscerally immediate, capturing both the iconic and the unexpected with equal authority.

KAOS charts Watson’s journey from his breakthrough Alfred Hitchcock portrait in 1973 to the present, revealing the astonishing range of his vision. Across its pages, readers encounter a kaleidoscope of subjects: celebrities in revealing vulnerability, strangers in fleeting urban moments, wildlife in arresting stillness, and landscapes that shimmer with elemental power. Each frame is a study in light, shadow, and narrative tension, embodying Watson’s extraordinary ability to render the familiar as extraordinary.

The book moves fluidly between worlds. Supermodels and pop icons—David Bowie, Kate Moss, Jay Z, Jennifer Lopez, Mick Jagger—sit alongside anonymous figures in neon-lit cities and remote Scottish landscapes, their presence amplified by Watson’s uncanny sense of timing and composition. From sensuous nudes to stark urban street photography, his work explores surface beauty while hinting at the emotional and psychological depth beneath. Watson’s camera captures not only what is seen, but the subtle textures of human experience: desire, humor, solitude, and magnetism.

Accompanied by an essay from Philippe Garner and enriched with Watson’s own reflections, as well as previously unpublished Polaroids from his personal archive, KAOS is both an authoritative career retrospective and a deeply personal document. The photographs pulse with cinematic allure, formal precision, and the irrepressible vitality of a life spent observing the world in its most dynamic and intimate moments.

Presented in a sumptuous hardcover, with optional signed Art Editions including exclusive prints, Albert Watson: Kaos is a definitive celebration of an artist whose work continues to inspire photographers, collectors, and enthusiasts around the globe, capturing a universe simultaneously chaotic, poetic, and utterly compelling.

Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography

First Exhibition to Explore Photography’s Relationship with Resource Extraction

May 23 - August 23, 2026

More information about the exhibition

Selected Books