LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography

Currents 2025, on view from December 12, 2025 through February 1, 2026, presents a vibrant snapshot of contemporary photographic practice in New Orleans through the work of New Orleans Photo Alliance members. As an annual members showcase, the exhibition reflects the creative energy of a city where photography is deeply intertwined with history, community, and lived experience. Bringing together ten photographers, this edition of Currents offers a dynamic cross-section of approaches, subjects, and visual languages currently shaping the region’s photographic landscape. Curated by Brian Piper, PhD, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the exhibition is thoughtfully assembled to emphasize dialogue rather than uniformity. Each artist contributes up to four images, allowing viewers to encounter focused selections that hint at broader, ongoing projects. From intimate personal narratives to expansive social observations, the works on view demonstrate how photography continues to evolve as both a documentary tool and a conceptual medium. The photographers featured in Currents 2025—Brian Barbieri, Marcus DiSieno, Brian Edwards, Jr., Matt Eich, Amina Massey, Gregory Miller, Horatio Nguyen, Taylor Sacco, and Samantha Yancey—represent a wide spectrum of experiences and perspectives. Their images explore themes of identity, place, memory, and transformation, often grounded in the specific textures of New Orleans while remaining attentive to broader cultural currents. Together, these portfolios form a collective portrait of a photographic community engaged with the present moment. Presented as part of the PhotoNOLA festival at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Currents functions as both a celebration and a point of connection. It invites audiences to consider how individual practices resonate within a shared creative ecosystem, and how photography can respond to social change while preserving personal vision. The exhibition underscores the role of New Orleans Photo Alliance as a vital platform for artistic exchange, mentorship, and visibility. Ultimately, Currents 2025 is less about defining a single direction than about embracing plurality. It affirms photography as an ever-shifting field, shaped by curiosity, experimentation, and the distinctive voices of those who continue to push it forward. Image: Brian Edwards, Jr., I’m in Your Care, 2024, Pigment print, 24 x 36 inches, Collection of the artist © Brian Edwards, Jr.

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.

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

William Harper: Fugue presents a striking meditation on movement, rhythm, and the visual structure of time. On view from January 2 to February 1, 2026, the exhibition brings together a series of works in which Harper translates musical ideas into photographic form, shaping images that unfold with the layered resonance of a fugue. Each photograph functions like a musical line — distinct, expressive, and interwoven — creating a complex visual counterpoint that invites viewers to look, pause, and follow the motion contained within each frame. Harper’s practice embraces motion-intensive techniques such as timelapse, burst sequencing, and aerial imaging. These approaches allow him to map the pathways of clouds, tides, birds, traffic, and shifting light. Rather than isolating a single instant, he constructs compositions made from dozens or even hundreds of frames, combining them into unified works that reveal patterns the human eye might otherwise miss. In his hands, landscapes become dynamic scores, where elements slip, collide, diverge, and resolve in intricate harmony. Many works in the exhibition expand on Harper’s long-standing interest in the connections between photography and music. Whether capturing the slow drift of fog across a mountain ridge or the rapid flicker of wings in migration, he approaches each subject as a composer might approach a theme — shaping variation, echo, rhythm, and tension. The resulting images show not only movement, but relationships: between foreground and distance, between stillness and change, between human perception and natural flux. The exhibition also includes several pieces created using drone-based cameras, allowing Harper to trace the choreography of rivers, fields, and coastlines from above. These aerial works highlight broader geometric structures — arcs, spirals, crossings — that echo the formal logic of polyphonic music. Through Fugue, Harper invites viewers to consider time as something layered rather than linear. Each image becomes a visual composition, a place where multiple trajectories converge into a single, resonant whole. Image: William Harper: Mergansers © William Harper

The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Menil Collection unite to present a major new commission by acclaimed British artist and filmmaker Sir John Akomfrah. Premiering at the BMA in November 2025 before traveling to the Menil Collection in April 2026, this immersive multichannel video installation invites viewers into a poetic dialogue between history and the present. Through layered imagery and evocative sound, Akomfrah brings together multiple perspectives of young activists from the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. By weaving together archival footage, still photographs, and newly filmed scenes, he creates a visual symphony that questions how societies remember struggle, resilience, and transformation. The installation is not merely a historical document—it is a living conversation about justice, hope, and the enduring need for social change. Akomfrah’s new work will be accompanied by a range of public programs that spotlight the local stories of Baltimore’s own activists and movements. These initiatives aim to unearth voices that history has too often overlooked, linking the global reverberations of the Civil Rights era to the present-day pursuit of equality and representation. Renowned for his profound reflections on memory, migration, and post-colonial identity, Sir John Akomfrah has spent decades exploring the intersections of image, sound, and time. A founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, his collaborations with David Lawson and Lina Gopaul continue today through Smoking Dogs Films. His works have graced major institutions around the world—from Tate and Centre Pompidou to MoMA and the Venice Biennale—earning him the 2017 Artes Mundi Prize and a Knighthood for services to the arts in 2023. This new commission promises to be both visually stunning and intellectually stirring, reaffirming Akomfrah’s place as one of the most vital voices in contemporary art. Image: John Akomfrah: Listening All Night to the Rain was commissioned by the British Council for the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. © Smoking Dogs Films, Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography by Jack Hems

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

Toward a Social Landscape revisits a landmark moment in American photography, tracing the evolution of the medium as a tool for personal and social expression. Originally curated by Nathan Lyons in 1966 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the exhibition highlighted photographers who transformed everyday moments into charged, emotionally resonant images. As Duane Michals noted, “when a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.” This perspective remains at the heart of the current presentation. The UK Art Museum’s installation draws from a rich collection of works by photographers included in or inspired by Lyons’s original exhibition, including Ruth Bernhard, Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, Alen MacWeeney, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, Peter Turnley, and Garry Winogrand. Their images go beyond simple documentation, capturing dynamic relationships between the photographer and the observed world. Each frame is a negotiation between subject, context, and the artist’s own presence, revealing deeply personal and often poignant narratives within everyday scenes. Installed on the floor above Self and Others: Japanese Photography after 1968, the exhibition offers a dialogue between American and Japanese photographic practices in the 1970s. Visitors can explore how photographers across the Pacific responded to comparable social, cultural, and artistic currents, each developing distinct yet parallel visual languages. This juxtaposition underscores the emergence of an international contemporaneity in photographic practice, highlighting shared concerns in portraiture, street photography, and documentary work. Presented in conjunction with the 2025 Louisville Photo Biennial, Toward a Social Landscape celebrates photography as both a personal and collective lens. It invites viewers to consider how photographers shape meaning, infuse emotion, and create enduring images that continue to resonate decades later. By juxtaposing intimate vision with social context, the exhibition reaffirms the enduring power of photography to illuminate human experience. 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.

Polo Silk 2025 MLK Club Detour 2, on view from December 11 to February 7, 2026, brings together a vibrant selection of photographs by New Orleans–based artist Selwhyn Sthaddeus Terrell, widely known as Polo Silk. Drawn from images made inside the legendary nightclub Club Detour 2 during the mid-1990s, the exhibition revives the exuberant spirit of a formative moment in the city’s cultural history. These photographs pulse with the energy of a so-called “Golden Era,” when music, fashion, and community converged in spaces built for collective release and self-invention. Rooted in the visual language of family albums and fashion magazines, Polo Silk’s photography occupies a space between personal memory and cultural documentation. Friends, relatives, musicians, and regular club-goers step confidently before the camera, adorned in Adidas tracksuits, Polo Ralph Lauren ensembles, Coogi sweaters, football jerseys, and polished loafers. Style operates as both armor and expression, signaling belonging, aspiration, and pride. The images reveal a community acutely aware of its own visibility, using dress and posture to claim presence and individuality within a shared social scene. Club Detour 2 emerges as more than a nightclub; it is portrayed as a crossroads where generations, neighborhoods, and creative forces intersected. Airbrushed backdrops referencing hip-hop lyrics, current events, and local iconography frame the subjects, offering a theatrical stage for personal myth-making. Within these scenes, future stars of New Orleans’ music landscape appear alongside neighborhood legends, capturing a moment before broader recognition, when talent circulated freely within the room itself. The exhibition also underscores the profound archival value of Polo Silk’s work. Having survived the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, these photographs now hold added significance, often serving as the only surviving images of individuals lost to time and circumstance. Polo’s ongoing practice of gifting framed portraits back to families transforms photography into an act of care, remembrance, and reciprocity. In this presentation, the images resonate as both historical record and living memory, honoring nights once lived intensely and now carried forward through photographs that continue to bind a community together. Image: Polo Silk, BUCKJUMP TIME, c. 1995. Chromogenic print © Polo Silk

LIFE Magazine, founded in 1936 by Henry Luce, transformed the way Americans experienced the world through the power of photography. With a pioneering focus on photojournalism, LIFE devoted more space to images than words, capturing both monumental events and the subtleties of everyday life. From political upheavals and scientific breakthroughs to theater, art, and fashion, the magazine chronicled the defining moments of the 20th century with a visual immediacy that resonated with readers nationwide. Beyond covering global affairs, LIFE also celebrated ordinary life through features such as LIFE goes to a …, which documented high school graduations, debutante balls, and other milestones familiar to its readership. In an era before instant digital communication, LIFE provided a window into both the extraordinary and the commonplace, connecting audiences to distant events and to the rhythms of their own communities. Each issue offered a carefully curated narrative of culture, identity, and history, told primarily through the lens of its photographers. This exhibition draws from LIFE’s archives, as well as the personal collections of the magazine’s legendary photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Harry Benson, Nina Leen, Andreas Feininger, Loomis Dean, Abe Frajndlich, Carl Mydans, and John Dominis. Their work reflects the magazine’s dual mission: to document history and to illuminate the human experience with both artistry and authenticity. The photographs on view reveal LIFE’s ability to capture fleeting moments, whether a quiet domestic scene or a historic political event, and to convey them with enduring impact. Although weekly publication ceased in 1972, LIFE continued as a monthly magazine until 2000, releasing occasional special editions thereafter. In 2024, the rights to LIFE were acquired with plans to resume regular print issues, reaffirming its relevance in the contemporary media landscape. The magazine’s legacy endures as a landmark in photographic storytelling and as a cultural mirror reflecting the depth and diversity of 20th century American life. Image: Alfred Eisenstaedt VJ Day, Times Square, NY, August 14, 1945 © Alfred Eisenstaedt

Silver Eye Center for Photography presents Radial Survey Vol.4, the organization’s flagship biennial exhibition, showcasing a group of artists redefining contemporary photography with experimental, thought-provoking approaches. This fourth edition emphasizes urgent, innovative practices that speak to the concerns and conditions of our current moment. The exhibition brings together six artists working within 300 miles of Pittsburgh, each nominated by participants from the previous edition and selected by Silver Eye’s curatorial team. Their work reflects a commitment to process, inquiry, and ongoing exploration, rather than predetermined outcomes, allowing photography to become a site of both personal and collective investigation. Featured artists include Amelia Burns from Detroit, McNair Evans from Richmond, Christine Lorenz from Pittsburgh, Juan Orrantia from Rochester, Ian John Solomon from Detroit, and SHAN Wallace from Baltimore. Each brings a distinctive perspective to the medium, exploring themes that range from identity and memory to environment, social structures, and the intersections of daily life with broader cultural narratives. Through their varied practices, the artists demonstrate how photography can interrogate the familiar, reimagine experience, and challenge traditional notions of representation. The exhibition celebrates risk-taking, experimentation, and the ways in which photographic work can remain open-ended and generative, reflecting the dynamism of contemporary artistic practice. Radial Survey Vol.4 is accompanied by an extensive catalog featuring original essays by Tara Fay Coleman, Jessica Lynne, Matthew Newton, Silver Eye Executive Director Leo Hsu, and Deputy Director & Director of Programs Helen Trompeteler. This publication further contextualizes the artists’ work and offers insight into the evolving landscape of experimental photography, emphasizing the exhibition’s commitment to dialogue, discovery, and the future of the medium. Image: Christine Lorenz, KS-5862, 2025. Courtesy of the artist. © Christine Lorenz