The Kids Are Alright

Nature of Nordic Woman at iS—G in Tribeca brings together photography, performance and conversation to examine what lies beneath the familiar image of Nordic calm. On view from June 18 to July 9, 2026, the exhibition is presented by Isabel Sullivan Gallery and developed by photographer Meeri Koutaniemi, psychologist Iida Mäkikallio and performance artist Ida-Maria Martela. The project starts from a sharp question: if Finland is repeatedly ranked among the world’s happiest countries, what does that say about the emotional lives of women living there? The exhibition does not settle for easy answers. Instead, it looks at the cost of self-suppression, and at the ways cultural expectations around composure, kindness and restraint can shape the body as much as the mind. Koutaniemi’s black-and-white photographs give the subject a direct visual frame, while Mäkikallio’s work brings a psychological reading to questions of embodiment, desire and emotional release. Martela’s performances add another layer, turning the exhibition into a live encounter rather than a static display. Together, the three practices create a setting where vulnerability is not treated as weakness, but as a site of pressure and possibility. The show’s central argument is clear: anger, eros and desire can function as forms of recovery rather than disruption. That idea gives the exhibition its edge, especially at a moment when women’s emotional labor remains widely normalized and rarely examined with this degree of specificity. The title points to a broader tension between nature as landscape and nature as condition. Nordic identity often carries associations of stillness, distance and balance, yet Nature of Nordic Woman looks at the human costs of maintaining that image. It offers a study of emotional freedom framed through photography, but rooted in psychology and performance. The result is a compact exhibition with a strong through line: not a portrait of serenity, but a closer look at what that serenity can conceal. Image: Feral, 2026 © Meeri Koutaniemi

Marie Tomanova: Three Empty Weeks in July opens at Harkawik on June 12 and runs through July 11, 2026, marking the gallery’s first exhibition with the Czech-born, New York-based artist. The series grew out of a project Tomanova began on January 1, 2022, and it settles into a body of work that is both intimate and carefully built, using self-portraiture to test the limits of documentary language. The photographs show Tomanova repeatedly turning the camera on herself, often in crouched or folded poses that make the body look guarded, hidden or interrupted. The images are set against landscapes, buildings and fragments of interior space, but the settings rarely read as straightforward backdrops. Instead, they blur into the figure through double exposure and layered instant film, making it hard to separate person from place. Shot with a Fujifilm Instax Square SQ6, the pictures use the small format’s imperfections and overlaps as part of their structure. Fruit, flowers and foliage appear often, sometimes covering the body and sometimes adding a blunt, almost theatrical charge to the frame. Those elements give the work a visual echo of older ideas about purity, beauty and femininity, while also pushing against them. The resulting pictures are not polished confessions. They are posed, repeated and self-aware, built as a daily practice rather than a single statement. Tomanova’s work sits close to the history of artists such as Francesca Woodman, Nan Goldin, Melissa Shook, Friedl Kubelka and Yurie Nagashima, but it keeps its own sharp edge. What matters here is not only the image itself, but the uneasy feeling it creates: closeness mixed with distance, exposure mixed with concealment. That tension gives Three Empty Weeks in July its force, making the series less a record of facts than a study in how the self is staged, repeated and revised. Image: January 3, 2022. Unique Fujifilm Instax Square print © Marie Tomanova

Gordon Parks: The South in Color, presented at Jackson Fine Art from April 2 through June 13, 2026, revisits one of the most powerful photographic projects of the twentieth century. Organized in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation, the exhibition commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Parks’ groundbreaking photographs of the segregated American South in Life magazine. Bringing together more than thirty images from the celebrated Segregation Story series, the presentation offers a renewed perspective on a body of work that continues to resonate with extraordinary emotional depth and historical significance. During the summer of 1956, Gordon Parks traveled to Mobile to document the daily lives of African American families living under the strict realities of racial segregation. Working primarily with a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera, Parks chose to photograph the story in color, an unusual decision for documentary photography at the time. The resulting square-format images capture quiet yet profound moments within the Thornton family and their extended community. Scenes of everyday life—children at play, family gatherings, and simple acts of resilience—stand alongside powerful symbols of segregation, including the now-iconic photograph At Segregated Drinking Fountain. The exhibition is curated by acclaimed photographer Dawoud Bey, whose scholarship and artistic practice often explore the layered histories of African American life. Through his curatorial approach, Bey highlights the remarkable visual sensitivity present in Parks’ images. Rich colors, balanced compositions, and careful attention to gesture reveal lives shaped not only by hardship but also by dignity, intimacy, and endurance. The photographs convey a deep respect for the individuals who appear within the frame, transforming documentary observation into a form of visual poetry. Alongside the historic photographs, the exhibition introduces a newly released limited-edition portfolio titled The South in Color, published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Foundation. The portfolio emphasizes Parks’ recurring attention to children, whose presence often anchors the emotional center of the series. Across these photographs, youth becomes a symbol of continuity and quiet hope within a deeply divided society. Seen today, the images remain both historical testimony and enduring works of art, reminding viewers of photography’s unique ability to illuminate injustice while affirming the humanity of those who stand before the lens. Image: Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956 (37.036) from The South in Color Portfolio (37.160), 1956. © The Gordon Parks Foundation, courtesy of the Jackson Fine Art gallery.

Callahan, Gowin and Sommer, presented at Etherton Gallery from April 14 through July 11, 2026, brings together three defining figures of twentieth-century American photography in a tightly focused exhibition built on dialogue, influence, and shared inquiry. Centered on the work of Emmet Gowin, the presentation traces a lineage that connects his formative years under Harry Callahan with his enduring friendship with Frederick Sommer, offering a rare opportunity to consider their practices in direct conversation. Harry Callahan’s contribution anchors the exhibition in the rigor of photographic modernism. Largely self-taught, Callahan developed a disciplined, daily approach to image-making that transformed familiar subjects into sites of formal experimentation. Whether photographing his wife and daughter or the streets of Chicago, he pursued variations in light, framing, and repetition, building a visual language rooted in precision and restraint. His influence extended beyond his own work through decades of teaching, where pedagogy and practice remained closely intertwined. Emmet Gowin’s photographs reflect both continuity and divergence. His early images of his wife Edith and her family in Virginia reveal an intimate, attentive gaze shaped by personal connection and spiritual reflection. This sensibility later expanded into aerial views of altered landscapes across the United States, where patterns of agriculture, industry, and environmental disruption unfold with quiet intensity. Gowin’s work holds a tension between beauty and unease, suggesting that careful observation can reveal both harmony and fracture within the same frame. Frederick Sommer introduces a more experimental and interdisciplinary dimension. Working largely in the Arizona desert, he navigated between documentation and invention, producing images that range from stark desert studies to intricate assemblages of found materials. His engagement with Surrealism and his broader artistic practice—encompassing drawing, collage, and writing—infuse his photographs with a sense of intellectual and visual curiosity that resists categorization. Together, the three photographers demonstrate how the medium evolves through sustained attention, exchange, and reinterpretation. Callahan, Gowin and Sommer reveals photography not as a fixed language, but as a continuous process of looking, questioning, and transforming the ordinary into something enduring. Image: © Emmet and Edith Gowin, Nancy, Danville, Virginia, 1969

My Days at Ray's marks a subtle but decisive turn in Elger Esser’s practice, where landscape, memory, and material presence meet in a single luminous field. Presented at ROSEGALLERY, the exhibition brings together recent works on silvered copper and introduces painted photographs on silver-plated copper, a format that pushes his images beyond reproduction and into the realm of singular objects. The result feels less like a conventional photograph than a surface in suspension, alive to light, touch, and time. Esser has long been drawn to the quiet authority of water, sky, and horizon, but here that sensibility extends inward, toward domestic space and private memory. The exhibition takes its point of departure from a 2008 residency in the mid-century modern pool house of songwriter Ray Evans, where Esser photographed rooms, corners, and the view over Los Angeles with the same patient attention he brings to open terrain. Those interior images carry the calm of a diary entry, registering atmosphere as much as architecture. They are shaped by the influence of Edward Weston’s travel notebooks, yet they remain unmistakably Esser’s: restrained, reflective, and steeped in a sense of duration. The new copper works deepen that material intelligence. Dry ink, hand-applied oil paint, shellac, and varnish alter the photographic surface until it reads as both image and artifact. The metal does not simply support the picture; it participates in it, catching and returning light in ways that make each work feel contingent on the viewer’s movement. Landscape becomes less a view than a condition, a place where description slips into emotion. In My Days at Ray's, Esser refines his long-standing interest in the poetics of stillness. The works hold together the vastness of the American West and the intimacy of a lived interior, suggesting that memory survives not only in places we cross, but also in the rooms where light lingers and time leaves its trace. Image: Elger Esser, Capbreton II, 2025 Elger Esser Capbreton II, 2025 Mixed Media: silver-plated copper plate, direct print, shellac 60 x 80 x 5 cm © Elger Esser, courtesy of the ROSE Gallery

At the Renaissance Society, Palomar (Part 2) continues a wide-ranging group exhibition that turns attention upward, treating the sky as both subject and framework. Bringing together works by more than two dozen artists, from Eadweard Muybridge to Trevor Paglen and Alec Soth, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on observation—how it is shaped by technology, history and perception. The second chapter shifts the emphasis toward contemporary conditions, where looking at the sky increasingly involves systems of control as much as wonder. The exhibition takes its title from the Palomar Observatory in California, once home to the world’s most powerful optical telescope, as well as from Italo Calvino’s fictional observer Mr. Palomar. This dual reference situates the project between scientific inquiry and introspection. Across the galleries, works explore the act of looking as something both precise and uncertain, where images do not simply reveal but also obscure. Photography plays a central role, often operating at a distance—capturing what is remote, inaccessible or deliberately hidden. In this second installment, attention turns to the infrastructures that now occupy the sky: satellites, surveillance systems and the expanding reach of military and corporate technologies. Artists such as Paglen and Lawrence Abu Hamdan examine these invisible networks, tracing how power extends into orbital space. Other contributions approach the sky more obliquely, through light, duration or absence, suggesting that what remains unseen can be as significant as what appears. Running through the exhibition is a broader reflection on time. Celestial cycles have long structured human life, yet contemporary experience increasingly fragments and accelerates these rhythms. References to lunar missions, astronomical measurement and even the diminishing visibility of stars in urban environments situate the sky within a shifting cultural landscape. The act of looking up, once tied to navigation or contemplation, now carries different implications. Palomar (Part 2) does not offer a single perspective but assembles a field of inquiries. Between scientific precision and poetic speculation, the exhibition considers the sky as a shared space marked by contradiction—at once constant and contested, distant and deeply entangled with life on the ground. Image: Sarah and Joseph Belknap, 12 Months of the Sun, 2024

Split Second places sport at the center of a photography exhibition shaped by Houston’s World Cup moment. On view from June 18 to July 12, 2026 in HCP’s HOU Gallery, the show brings together work by Texas-based and national artists who treat athletics not only as competition, but as a public language of ritual, identity and spectacle. The exhibition opens with images and installations that move across cheerleading, wrestling, football, lucha libre, basketball and soccer. Eli Durst looks at the collective energy of group performance and the strain behind it, while Geoff Winningham returns to the Texas football culture he documented for years in his celebrated Rites of Fall project. Jorge Pineda presents lucha libre as both sport and social theater, with a focus on movement, audience and cultural memory. Patty Carroll approaches soccer from a different angle, using a staged domestic scene to connect athletic culture with femininity, consumer objects and humor. Tay Butler’s collage-based work brings basketball into dialogue with classical sculpture, turning athletic imagery into a critique of hero worship, Black masculinity and the way sports figures become symbols far beyond the court. Together, the artists present sport as more than a game. The photographs shift between observation and performance, documentary and construction, and they capture the split-second moments that shape momentum, emotion and public attention. In that sense, the exhibition fits Houston’s World Cup season while also speaking to a wider culture in which sports images circulate as part of everyday life. Split Second also underscores HCP’s role in showing work by Houston-area and Texas photographers in a space devoted to the region’s visual culture. The opening reception, set for June 18 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM CST, places the exhibition in direct conversation with the city’s sports atmosphere, where the noise around the tournament and the quieter questions behind it share the same frame. Image: Kick It, 2024 © Patty Carroll

Seeing in B&W brings a focused survey of black-and-white photography to Photoworks at Glen Echo Park from June 6 to July 12, 2026. Juried by photographer Richard Batch, the exhibition gathers local artists whose work has also drawn attention from a national photography magazine, offering a compact look at how tone, contrast and composition can carry an image without the help of color. The show centers on the visual discipline that black-and-white demands. Without color to guide the eye, form becomes more important: light, shadow, texture, line and timing do the work instead. That gives the exhibition a direct, clear quality, with photographs that depend on structure and framing rather than spectacle. The result is a reminder that monochrome remains one of photography’s most durable languages. Featured artists include Craig Nedrow, Michael Goulding, Leslie McGregor-Landerkin, Christine Franklin, Vincent Smith, Sherry Gray, Frank Aquino, Tom Sliter, Prescott Lassman, Alan Simmons, Carl de Moor, William Dusterwald and Richard Batch. The range of names suggests a broad mix of approaches, but the shared format keeps the exhibition coherent. Whether the subject is portrait, landscape, street scene or abstraction, each image is asked to stand on the strength of its composition. By stripping photography down to essentials, Seeing in B&W puts attention back on the basic choices that shape an image. It is a show about clarity, restraint and the visual impact of keeping things simple. Image: © Vincent Smith

Fremin Gallery brings together five artists in True Beauty, a group exhibition that looks at how ideas of beauty shift when viewed through personal experience rather than fixed standards. On view from June 4 to July 12, the show features works by Lauren Camara, Reka Nyari, Mercedes Jelinek, Leila Massenet and Daisy Seilern, each approaching the subject from a different angle and medium. The exhibition spans photography, painting, collage and mixed media, offering a range of visual languages. Some works focus on the body and portraiture, while others move toward abstraction or material-based processes. Across these approaches, beauty appears less as an ideal to reach and more as something shaped by lived experience. Imperfections, marks of time and emotional intensity are not hidden but emphasized, giving the works a direct and sometimes raw quality. Several artists address how identity is constructed and perceived. Reka Nyari, known for her portrait photography, often centers female subjects in ways that highlight strength and individuality rather than conventional glamour. Lauren Camara and Mercedes Jelinek incorporate layered or fragmented imagery, suggesting that identity—and by extension beauty—is not singular or stable. In other works, materials themselves carry meaning, with reused or altered elements pointing to transformation and resilience. Themes of memory, displacement and personal history run throughout the exhibition. References to nature, the body and domestic space appear as recurring motifs, linking internal experience with external environments. This connection grounds the work in everyday reality, moving away from idealized representations and toward something more immediate and relatable. True Beauty positions beauty as something that evolves over time and differs from one perspective to another. By focusing on individual narratives and varied techniques, the exhibition presents a broader view of what beauty can represent in contemporary art, shaped as much by emotion and experience as by appearance. Image: Mercedes Jelinek. Immersion: Day #33, 2023 © Mercedes Jelinek

Jess T. Dugan: I want you to know my story invites viewers into a deeply human and honest exploration of identity, intimacy, and connection through portraiture. Running from January 31 to July 12, 2026 at the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Gallery, the exhibition gathers works from several of Dugan’s major series, including “Every Breath We Drew,” “Look at me like you love me,” a new ongoing series begun in 2022, and also selections from “Family Pictures.” Across these bodies of work, Dugan seeks individuals who embody both strength and tenderness — people living authentically in themselves. Dugan’s portraits bear the imprint of their commitment to collaboration and patience: using natural light, slow working methods, and a deep respect for their sitters, the images radiate a quiet intimacy. In their approach, portraiture becomes an act of witnessing — of allowing presence and vulnerability to be seen, acknowledged, and preserved. The result isn’t a stylized representation, but a living, breathing testament to humanity in its many forms. Alongside portraits of others, Dugan turns the camera on themselves and their own family, in the “Family Pictures” series. Self-portraits and multi-generational family images sit beside videos — including Letter to My Father and Letter to My Daughter — in which Dugan’s voice merges with images to tell stories of love, legacy, loss, and hope. In these works, Dugan makes vulnerability an act of connection, imagining portraiture as a space where personal truth becomes communal understanding. The decision to include both intimate portraits and personal family imagery reflects the exhibition’s broader ambition: to show relationships — romantic, familial, chosen — as essential threads in the fabric of identity. In Dugan’s words, the work is driven by “energy and love,” and this energy pulses through each frame. Honored as the recipient of the 2024 Knight Foundation Purchase Award for Photographic Media by the Akron Art Museum, Dugan’s work stands among a lineage of influential contemporary photographers. I want you to know my story continues this legacy by offering images that do more than capture appearances — they capture truth, empathy, and the enduring power of seeing one another. Image: Zach and Oskar at sunset, 2020. Archival pigment print. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Knight Purchase Fund for Photographic Media 2024.22.1 © Jess T. Dugan

Femme ’n isms, Part III: Feminine Faces and Intimate Spaces is presented in the Ripin Gallery at the Allen Memorial Art Museum from August 22, 2025 through July 12, 2026. As the concluding chapter of a multi-year series devoted to intersectional feminist artmaking, this installation draws from the museum’s collection to examine how women and femme-identifying artists shape representations of themselves and others. Inspired in part by a significant gift of works by Käthe Kollwitz and Lotte Jacobi, the exhibition foregrounds portraiture as a site of agency and self-definition. Spanning more than a century, the works on view move between private interiors and public stages. Nearly half are self-portraits, where artists situate themselves within studios or domestic spaces, emphasizing labor, craft, and creative resolve. In these images, the workspace becomes an extension of identity. Other portraits capture intimate exchanges between friends or collaborators, moments in which subjects participate knowingly in their depiction. Even when musicians, actors, or public figures adopt personas, the act of posing carries intention rather than passivity. The exhibition brings together a wide range of voices, including Emma Amos, Cecilia Beaux, Martine Gutierrez, Marie Laurencin, Joan Semmel, and Cindy Sherman, among others. Though varied in medium and historical context, these artists share a sustained attention to how femininity is constructed, performed, and contested. Photography, painting, and printmaking intersect, revealing shifts in style while underscoring enduring concerns about visibility and control. Organized by Sam Adams, the Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the presentation affirms portraiture as a powerful instrument of self-assertion. Across generations, these subjects determine how they appear—at work, at rest, in character, or in contemplation—claiming authorship over their image and, by extension, their place within cultural history. Image: Lotte Jacobi (German, 1896–1990), Käthe Kollwitz, ca. 1930. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Adam Werner in memory of Gloria (OC 1962) and Newton Werner, 2022.49.3.

Herman Leonard: Images of Jazz, presented by The Helis Foundation and on view from January 29 through July 12, 2026, celebrates the enduring legacy of a photographer whose images shaped how jazz is seen and remembered. Leonard’s photographs do more than document musicians; they translate sound into atmosphere, transforming smoke-filled rooms, sweat, and silence between notes into visual rhythm. His work stands as one of the most eloquent visual chronicles of jazz culture in the decades following World War II. Leonard’s relationship with photography began early, when a simple Kodak Brownie camera sparked a lifelong devotion to the medium. After formal training and wartime service, he immersed himself in New York’s vibrant postwar music scene. From his Greenwich Village studio, Herman Leonard forged close friendships with many of the leading figures of bebop and cool jazz. These relationships granted him rare intimacy, allowing his camera to capture musicians not as distant icons, but as fully present individuals suspended in moments of creative intensity. In later years, Leonard’s journey carried him abroad to Paris and Ibiza, where he expanded his practice while quietly reassessing his growing archive. The publication of The Eye of Jazz and the renewed attention his work received in the late 1980s marked a turning point, leading him back to the United States. His move to New Orleans in the early 1990s proved especially formative, aligning his vision with a city where music is woven into daily life. There, Leonard photographed celebrated performers alongside street musicians and cultural rituals, embracing jazz as both performance and lived tradition. The portfolio featured in this presentation reflects Leonard’s mastery of the silver gelatin print and his careful consideration of sequencing, tone, and scale. Each image balances technical precision with emotional immediacy, preserving fleeting expressions and gestures that might otherwise vanish. The devastating losses Leonard suffered during Hurricane Katrina underscore the fragility of cultural memory, making the survival of this work all the more meaningful. Today, Leonard’s photographs continue to resonate as timeless portraits of creativity, resilience, and collaboration. They remind us that jazz is not only heard, but felt and seen—carried forward through images that pulse with life long after the music fades. Image: Herman Leonard, Louis Armstrong, Paris, 1960, Printed 1998, Selenium-toned silver print, 16 x 20 inches, Gift of Stacey and Michael Burke, 2023.32.21 © Herman Leonard