PCNW 23rd Juried Photography Exhibition

Beuford Smith: A Retrospective of Community, Witness, and History presents a profound and long-overdue examination of a photographer whose work shaped the visual language of African American life in the second half of the twentieth century. On view from February 11 to March 12, 2026, the exhibition spans decades of Smith’s practice, bringing together intimate scenes of daily life with landmark moments of national significance. Through his lens, history unfolds not as abstraction, but as lived experience—felt on sidewalks, in homes, and within tightly knit communities. Beuford Smith photographed from a position of trust and belonging. His images move seamlessly between quiet domestic moments and charged public spaces, capturing joy, tension, humor, and resilience with remarkable sensitivity. Rather than observing from the margins, Smith worked from within the communities he photographed, producing images marked by emotional precision and dignity. Family gatherings, neighborhood streets, and fleeting encounters are rendered with the same care as moments of collective upheaval, forming a body of work that feels both personal and historically grounded. At the center of the retrospective is Smith’s extraordinary photographic response to April 4, 1968, the day Dr. Martin Luther King JR. was assassinated. On the streets of Harlem, Smith recorded the immediate aftermath as grief and disbelief swept through the community. His photographs capture faces suspended between shock and resolve, crowds bound together by sorrow, and the charged stillness of a historic rupture. These images stand as rare visual testimony—documents of mourning made by someone who shared fully in the weight of that moment. Beyond his own photographic output, Smith was a vital force in shaping African American photography. As a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop and a driving presence behind the Black Photographers Annual, he helped build platforms for artists long excluded from institutional recognition. This retrospective affirms Smith’s legacy as both artist and advocate, reminding us that photography can preserve memory, challenge erasure, and carry history forward through images rooted in truth and human connection. Image: The Day After MLK was Assassinated, NYC, 1968 © Beuford Smith

Weight of It All, presented by CENTER in Santa Fe from February 13 to March 13, 2026, is a deeply intimate collaborative photographic project by Heather Mattera and her son, Ben Mattera. Developed over several years, the work emerged from a moment of quiet crisis, as a family confronted the slow, frightening disappearance of a teenage son into an eating disorder. Rather than documenting recovery as a linear process, the project dwells in uncertainty, vulnerability, and the fragile spaces where care and fear coexist. The earliest images began almost accidentally, with Heather photographing still lifes of foods her son once loved but had begun to refuse. These carefully composed scenes became a silent form of communication when conversation felt impossible. The photographs hold absence as much as presence, transforming everyday objects into symbols of longing, grief, and vigilance. In these images, nourishment becomes both literal and metaphorical, reflecting the tension between control and care, refusal and desire, that defined their daily lives. Two years later, Ben stepped into the process as an active collaborator. Together, mother and son shaped a visual dialogue that traces isolation, tenderness, and the slow reemergence of connection. The photographs resist spectacle, favoring restraint and honesty. Bodies, gestures, and domestic spaces are rendered with sensitivity, allowing viewers to feel the weight of what is unsaid. The collaboration itself becomes an act of trust, revealing how making images together offered a way back to one another when words were insufficient. Beyond its personal origins, Weight of It All speaks to broader experiences of caregiving, mental health, and resilience. Heather Mattera’s background in therapeutic practice and community-based work informs the project’s ethical care and emotional clarity. The exhibition stands as a testament to the power of photography to hold pain without resolving it, to witness without fixing. Ultimately, the work affirms a quiet truth: love endures not through solutions or certainty, but through sustained presence, attention, and the courage to remain. Image: © Heather Mattera and Ben Mattera

From February 21 to March 14, 2026, POLAROID: The Instant Image brings together a group of artists who embrace the immediacy and physicality of instant photography as a living, evolving medium. Curated by the directors of Praxis Gallery, the exhibition considers the instant photograph not simply as a nostalgic artifact, but as a material object shaped by chemistry, touch, and time. In an era dominated by frictionless digital images, these works insist on presence—on the singular print that cannot be endlessly revised or replicated. Since its introduction by Polaroid Corporation in the mid-20th century, instant photography has occupied a distinctive space between experimentation and accessibility. The process—once revolutionary for its speed—has become newly relevant for its resistance to perfection. Each exposure unfolds through chemical reaction, yielding subtle tonal shifts, surface irregularities, and the occasional flaw. Rather than correct these variations, the artists featured here welcome them as collaborators. Chance becomes an aesthetic strategy, and unpredictability a form of authorship. The exhibition spans a wide array of instant processes, from classic Polaroid formats to Fuji Instax, peel-apart films, and large-format 4×5 materials. Techniques such as emulsion lifts and image transfers extend the life of the photograph beyond its frame, allowing the image to migrate, wrinkle, or fracture. Some works are presented as original instant prints, intimate in scale and direct in impact; others are reproduced from high-resolution scans, printed at true instant-film dimensions to preserve their tactile proportions. In every case, scale matters. The smallness of the object demands proximity, encouraging viewers to lean in and encounter the photograph as a thing held as much as seen. POLAROID: The Instant Image ultimately foregrounds the photograph as artifact. These works bear the visible traces of their making—edges, fingerprints, chemical blooms—reminding us that photography can still be an event in time, fixed in a single, unrepeatable instant. Image: © Ken Lorentz

From January 17 through March 14, 2026, Marshall Gallery presents Windows to the Unexpected, the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by the Spanish duo Albarrán Cabrera. Featuring works from their recent series The Indestructible alongside selections from earlier bodies of work, the exhibition coincides with the release of their eighth artist book and offers a sweeping view of a collaboration that has steadily deepened since the late 1990s. Comprised of Ángel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera, the Barcelona-based artists approach photography less as documentation than as meditation. Drawing influence from literature, cinema, philosophy, and even physics, their images hover between presence and disappearance. In The Indestructible, they reflect on nature’s persistence—on light filtering through branches, horizons dissolving into atmosphere, and subtle forces that endure beyond human measure. These photographs function as thresholds, inviting viewers into spaces where perception slows and certainty softens. The exhibition also includes select works from The Mouth of Krishna, Kairos, and Opticks, the latter among their most experimental explorations of light and surface. Throughout, Albarrán Cabrera’s meticulous printing techniques are central to the experience. Employing pigment inks on hand-coated papers adorned with gold leaf, they create prints that shimmer and shift as one moves before them. The gold does not decorate; it transforms, catching ambient light and lending the image a quiet radiance that feels almost devotional. Each photograph asserts itself as an object—crafted, tactile, and singular. Collected by institutions and private patrons across Europe and beyond, the duo’s work has earned international recognition while remaining steadfastly introspective. Windows to the Unexpected affirms their belief that photography can still offer moments of pause and contemplation. In an age of instant images, Albarrán Cabrera ask us to look longer—to find, within the luminous surface, intimations of time, memory, and an enduring life force that resists erasure. Image: Albarrán Cabrera, The Indestructible #70040, 2025 Pigment ink on gold leaf, 20 x 29 in © Albarrán Cabrera

Reservoir emerges as a thoughtful initiative shaped by LACP’s ongoing commitment to using photography as a bridge between individuals, communities, and the emotional realities of contemporary life. Envisioned as both archive and catalyst, the program gathers artistic responses to the growing global crisis of loneliness, creating a living record of how people experience connection, distance, and belonging in a rapidly shifting world. Through visual storytelling, Reservoir becomes a space where images serve not only as reflections of solitude but also as proposals for healing and renewed engagement. Much like the structures for which it is named, Reservoir is designed to steady the flow of creative perspectives. By inviting artists, mentors, and collaborators into an intentional, research-driven process, the project nurtures work that examines the ways personal histories, cultural landscapes, and technological habits shape human relationships today. Its launch at LACP’s DTLA gallery marks the beginning of a traveling exhibition and publication, extending conversations beyond Los Angeles and into varied communities. The project arrives at a moment when loneliness is widely recognized as a defining condition of modern life. Studies show rising disconnection despite increased digital access, revealing a paradox in which constant communication often deepens emotional distance. External pressures—from pandemic isolation to political division—further contribute to a sense of retreat. In a city like Los Angeles, where geography and infrastructure already challenge daily interaction, artists see these themes woven into the experience of moving through both physical and emotional space. Reservoir gathers more than forty artists and mentors whose varied backgrounds, ages, and artistic methods create a dynamic collective voice. Their work spans documentary, conceptual experimentation, and personal narrative, offering multiple pathways into understanding how loneliness manifests and how creativity can respond to it. Supported by educators, curators, institutions, and innovators, the program embraces cross-disciplinary inquiry as a means of imagining new forms of connection. In bringing these voices together, Reservoir underscores a simple yet enduring idea: that art can illuminate what binds us, even in moments when we feel most alone. Image: by Erik Kessels, Priest at Arles © Erik Kessels

Will Insley: Architecture of the Mind, on view at WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC from January 8 to March 14, 2026, offers a rare opportunity to explore the visionary world of American artist Will Insley. Spanning over five decades, the exhibition presents more than twenty paintings, drawings, photomontages, and poems, tracing the evolution of Insley’s lifelong project, ONECITY—a conceptual metropolis imagined as a total civilization for the future. Central to the show is the premiere of the concluding chapter of Insley’s typewritten manuscript ONECITY, authored in 1972 and never before published. Original pages from the manuscript are displayed alongside paintings, drawings, and photomontages, creating a dialogue between text and image that illuminates the artist’s process. The exhibition also includes Insley’s drafting table and typewriter from his Bowery studio, offering a tangible connection to his creative environment and underscoring the interplay between his architectural thinking and artistic output. Insley’s work bridges architecture, abstraction, and poetry. Beginning with early explorations of hidden spaces in Indianapolis and Amherst, he developed a fascination with fragments—shards of objects representing whole systems—which became a guiding principle in his Wall Fragment paintings of the 1960s. Over time, his abstraction evolved into complex, monolithic visions of ONECITY, informed by his architectural studies at Harvard, walks through Manhattan’s urban grid, and reflections on existential and societal structures. Every painting, photomontage, and drawing is both a building block and a portal into the meticulously imagined metropolis that occupies his mind. The exhibition is organized chronologically, presenting Insley’s major series in conversation with over forty poems from his epic manuscript. Together, the works articulate questions of scale, space, and possibility, revealing a world where architecture, philosophy, and imagination converge. Will Insley: Architecture of the Mind offers an unprecedented glimpse into a singular artistic universe, celebrating the ambition and rigor of a practice dedicated to envisioning a total civilization through the lens of art, architecture, and poetry. Images: Will Insley in his Studio on Bowery & Spring Street, 1966

Surviving Shadows – Afghan Art in the Face of Suppression, presented at apexart in New York and curated by Yama Rahimi, offers a profound and urgent meditation on artistic survival under extreme political repression. The exhibition emerges from the aftermath of August 2021, when the Taliban’s return to power abruptly dismantled Afghanistan’s cultural ecosystem. Public spaces for art disappeared almost overnight, and artists found themselves silenced, surveilled, and endangered. Within this climate, creative expression became both a lifeline and a liability. To make art was to assert identity and dignity, yet also to risk exposure in a system that punishes visibility. This tension lies at the heart of the exhibition’s emotional force. Through photographs, texts, videos, paintings, and personal testimonies, the exhibition traces fragmented artistic journeys. Some works shown no longer exist, having been destroyed by their creators to protect themselves and their families. Others were looted, abandoned during hurried escapes, or lost during searches. Alongside these absences are works that survived clandestinely inside Afghanistan, as well as new creations made in exile. Together, they form a constellation of presence and loss, where what cannot be shown is as powerful as what remains visible. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the exhibition embraces multiplicity. It highlights artists who fled to Europe or the United States carrying only digital traces of their work, alongside those who stayed behind, continuing to create under constant threat. The exhibition does not frame Afghan artists solely as victims, but as active agents who transform fear, displacement, and silence into acts of resistance. Art here becomes testimony, protest, and memory all at once. More than a temporary exhibition, Surviving Shadows functions as a living archive of contemporary Afghan art. It preserves fragile histories that risk erasure and insists on the endurance of creative voices despite attempts to extinguish them. By honoring resilience, adaptability, and hope, the exhibition ensures that these artists—whether hidden, displaced, or exiled—remain seen, remembered, and heard. Image: Akbari Farshad, What is your dream? © Akbari Farshad

Pie Projects Contemporary Art in Santa Fe presents Janet Russek + David Scheinbaum: Giverny, an exhibition on view from February 14 through March 14, 2026, that reflects a shared artistic journey rooted in observation, patience, and reverence for place. The project began with a single visit to Claude Monet’s gardens, an experience that lingered and eventually drew the artists back to Giverny with a renewed sense of purpose. Granted rare access to photograph the gardens across all four seasons, Russek and Scheinbaum approach this historic site not as documentarians, but as attentive interpreters of light, growth, and change. The resulting photographs move beyond the familiar imagery associated with Giverny. Rather than replicating the iconic views that have been endlessly reproduced, the artists focus on quieter moments where form, color, and atmosphere subtly shift. Seasonal transitions become central to the work, revealing cycles of bloom, decay, dormancy, and renewal. These rhythms echo long-standing traditions in landscape photography, where time and perception are as important as subject matter. The gardens emerge as a living system, shaped by human care yet constantly redefining itself. Both artists bring decades of experience and deep ties to photographic history to the collaboration. Russek’s background in still life and metaphor infuses the images with a sense of introspection, while Scheinbaum’s longstanding engagement with portraiture and photographic scholarship lends clarity and structure. Their shared histories as assistants to influential figures in photography inform a disciplined, respectful approach to the medium, one that values craftsmanship and continuity. Together, they balance personal response with historical awareness. Presented in Santa Fe, a city long connected to photographic innovation and tradition, Giverny resonates as a meditation on influence and inheritance. The exhibition invites viewers to slow their gaze, to consider how places shaped by artistic vision continue to inspire new interpretations. Through their collaborative lens, Russek and Scheinbaum offer not a homage, but a thoughtful conversation across time, where nature, art, and memory quietly converge. Image: Janet Russek, Giverny, 2023 © Janet Russek

Marshall Gallery presents Albarrán Cabrera: Windows to the Unexpected, an exhibition that invites viewers to step into a world shaped by contemplation, nuance, and quiet wonder. On view from January 17 to March 14, 2026, the exhibition marks the fourth solo presentation of the Spanish duo at the gallery and brings together works from their most recent series, The Indestructible, alongside select photographs spanning their collaborative career. Together, these images form a sequence of visual thresholds—moments where the familiar gently dissolves into uncertainty. Composed of Ángel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera, the duo has long pursued a poetic approach to photography that favors intuition over explanation. Their images are not meant to be read quickly or definitively, but encountered slowly, allowing meaning to emerge through sustained looking. In The Indestructible, nature appears not as a subject to be described, but as a presence that endures—quietly resilient amid impermanence and change. Landscapes, fragments of light, and suspended forms evoke memory and time as fluid states, hovering between what is seen and what is felt. A defining element of Albarrán Cabrera’s practice lies in their extraordinary attention to materiality. Through meticulous printing processes and the use of hand-coated gold-leafed papers, their photographs take on a luminous, tactile quality that shifts with movement and light. Pigment inks interact with reflective surfaces, creating depth and vibrancy that resist reproduction and insist on physical presence. These works encourage viewers to slow down, to consider the photograph not merely as an image, but as an object shaped by care and intention. This exhibition coincides with the release of the artists’ eighth book, underscoring their sustained commitment to the photobook as an extension of their visual language. Influenced by literature, philosophy, and cinema, Albarrán Cabrera continue to build a body of work that defies easy categorization. Windows to the Unexpected offers a reflective pause—a space where perception is unsettled and renewed, and where photography becomes a quiet act of endurance. Image: Kairos #4021, 2015 Cyanotype over Platinum palladium print © Albarrán Cabrera

Alison Rossiter: Semblance, on view at Yossi Milo Gallery from January 15 to March 14, 2026, presents a quietly powerful exploration of photography stripped of the camera yet deeply rooted in its history. For her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Rossiter draws from her extensive archive of expired photographic papers, transforming materials once designed for utility into meditations on time, process, and perception. The exhibition reflects a practice grounded in restraint, where chance and intention exist in careful balance. Rossiter’s work begins with acts of selection and discovery. She develops vintage and antique papers—some more than a century old—allowing their latent chemistry to reveal tonal shifts, imperfections, and unexpected textures. These works echo the visual languages of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, while remaining unmistakably photographic in their reliance on light-sensitive surfaces. In Semblance, subtle gradations of black, gray, and white carry the weight of history, offering images that feel both ancient and resolutely contemporary. A central grouping within the exhibition pairs obsolete daguerreotype plates with early photographic papers, aligning materials from different technological moments into spare, vertical compositions. These works evoke thresholds between invention and obsolescence, progress and decay. Their surfaces—scarred, mottled, and reflective—suggest landscapes, horizons, or fields of color, quietly recalling the ambitions of postwar abstraction while remaining anchored in photographic materiality. Time itself becomes an active collaborator, shaping each surface long after its original purpose has expired. The exhibition also introduces a body of work inspired by Man Ray’s early textile constructions, extending Rossiter’s ongoing dialogue with art history. By assembling gaslight photographic papers into patterned forms, she revisits early twentieth-century experiments in abstraction through the lens of contemporary reflection. Silver mirroring and chemical shifts shimmer across the surfaces, functioning both as physical phenomena and as metaphors for memory, distance, and endurance. In Semblance, Rossiter invites viewers to slow down and look closely, rewarding patience with subtle complexity. Her works do not illustrate the past; they embody it. Through modest means and rigorous attention, the exhibition affirms photography’s enduring capacity to evolve, even when working with materials long considered finished. Image: Alison Rossiter (American, b. 1953) Eastman Kodak Polycontrast F, expired September 1977, processed 2017, 2025 © Alison Rossiter

Manifest Destiny at The Griffin Museum presents a thoughtful reevaluation of America’s landscape — not as an open frontier, but as a layered archive of memory, displacement, and resilience. By highlighting photographers who document present-day terrain rather than romanticized myth, the exhibition challenges the old narratives of conquest and erasure, revealing how land can hold traces of histories often left unseen. It asks us to look at what remains, what is recovering, and what continues to resist. The show brings together powerful voices such as Scott Conarroe, Craig Easton, Lisa Elmaleh, Rich Frishman, Drew Leventhal, and Vicky Sambunaris. Each artist offers a distinct lens: Conarroe travels between places and climates, tracking patterns of change; Easton merges documentary realism with emotional subtlety; Elmaleh explores migration and borderlands through haunting large-format photographs; Frishman investigates the built environment’s social fabric; Leventhal uses his anthropological background to trace ritual, history, and human presence; and Sambunaris documents industrial and ecological transformation across wide expanses. Through these varied practices, Manifest Destiny reframes the American landscape as contested terrain — one shaped by dislocation, environmental disruption, cultural resistance, and ongoing renewal. What appears at first like empty space often reveals itself to be a site of layered histories and urgent human stories. The photographs serve as visual testimonies, capturing what has been lost, changed, or abandoned — while also preserving what endures. As part of the larger “State of Our Union” series, this exhibition participates in a national reflection on identity, legacy, and environment, timed with the country’s 250th anniversary. In doing so, it offers not nostalgia but reckoning: a call to see landscape not as background for myth, but as record of experience, human agency, and ecological consequence. Manifest Destiny invites viewers to reconsider place — to acknowledge that every hill, every field, every empty building once carried lives, labor, and memory. It suggests that the work of recovery and remembrance is ongoing, carried out not only by archives, but by those willing to look, to question, and to hold the land accountable to its history. Image: © Craig Easton

On view from December 6, 2025 to March 15, 2026 at The Capa Space in Yorktown, Cornell Capa: Father of Concerned Photography revisits the legacy of a photographer whose work helped redefine the moral responsibility of the medium. More than a chronicler of events, Cornell Capa believed photography could serve as a call to conscience, urging viewers to look closely at the human condition and respond with empathy and awareness. This exhibition brings together more than three decades of his work, revealing a career shaped by deep conviction and humanist values. Coined by Capa in 1967, the concept of “concerned photography” reflects his belief that photographers should engage with the world ethically, using images to illuminate injustice and affirm dignity. The photographs on view move fluidly between public power and private vulnerability. Intimate portraits of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy offer moments of reflection behind political authority, while images made in South America and within psychiatric institutions confront viewers with lives shaped by poverty, exclusion, and neglect. Throughout these varied contexts, Capa’s approach remains measured and compassionate, avoiding spectacle in favor of understanding. Religion and ritual also occupy an important place in Capa’s work, as he documented spiritual practices across cultures with the same attentiveness he brought to political and social subjects. These photographs suggest a shared search for meaning, resilience, and belonging, regardless of geography or belief. His images are quietly powerful, grounded in patience and proximity rather than drama, allowing subjects to retain their individuality and presence within the frame. Together, the works in Cornell Capa: Father of Concerned Photography trace a vision of photography as an ethical practice rooted in responsibility to others. The exhibition underscores Capa’s enduring influence, not only through his images but through his advocacy for photographers committed to social justice. In an era still marked by inequality and conflict, his photographs remain a reminder that the camera, when guided by conscience, can bear witness with clarity, humility, and lasting relevance. Image: Robert F. Kennedy campaigning for Senate in Elmira, New York, September 1964. Photograph by Cornell Capa. Courtesy of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography © Cornell Capa