On the Inside: Portraiture Through Photography

Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the evolution of photography in Cuba from the 1960s to the 2010s. The exhibition looks at contemporary Cuban photography from its role in promoting the Cuban Revolution after Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government to engaging in social and political critique following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In subsequent years, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the changing prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy. Showcasing 100 images, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography celebrates the Museum's acquisition of some 300 photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker. Image: Alberto Korda, Heroic Guerrilla (Guerillero heroico), 1960, printed 1995, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Dan and Mary Solomon. © Estate Alberto Korda

“The Dollar Has Its Worst Start to a Year Since 1973”, New York Times, 6/30/2025 Yikes! Meryl Meisler's solo spotlight exhibition, "On the Money," is part of the wider "A Collector's Vision" show at The Bank Art Gallery. Meisler's photographs are installed inside the luxurious parlor room of a 100-year-old historic building that once housed the Newburgh Savings Bank. Money talks, and in Meryl Meisler's case, it wisecracks, reflects and reveals. In "On the Money". Meisler's work, dating from 1976 to 2025, many of which have never been seen before, takes us on a fast-paced ride through idioms, attitudes, and absurdities surrounding money. From "dirty money" to "funny money," her images and wordplay dig beneath the clichés to ask: What are our relationships with money? And why is it still taboo to talk about it? This tongue-in-cheek mini-solo explores what we value, how we spend, and the price we pay – served with wit, wisdom, and a wink. Talking about money might be impolite, but Meisler is doing it anyway, and she's making it funny, fabulous, and impossible to ignore. Image: Stacey Walking Down Playmate’s Stairs with tips in her Stockings NY, NY, 1978 © Meryl Meisler

The Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) will hold its 8th annual Latin American Foto Festival (LAFF) from July 10 – August 3, featuring large-scale photographs by both emerging and established, award-winning photographers. This year, the festival exhibitions will be on view at the Bronx Documentary Center and throughout the Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx from July 10-20. Select outdoor exhibitions will then travel to additional community spaces across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn where they’ll be on view through August 3. El Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) celebrará su 8º Festival Anual de Fotografía Latinoamericana (LAFF) del 10 de julio al 3 de agosto, con exposiciones de gran formato de fotógrafos emergentes y consolidados, muchos de ellos galardonados. Este año, las exposiciones del festival podrán verse en el Bronx Documentary Center y en todo el vecindario de Melrose, en el sur del Bronx, del 10 al 20 de julio. Algunas de las exposiciones al aire libre se trasladarán después a espacios comunitarios en Manhattan, Queens y Brooklyn, donde estarán en exhibición hasta el 3 de agosto. Image: Miradas. Angeles Torrejón, 1994. © Bats’i Lab

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics explores artistic connections among 60 contemporary artists across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. As one of the first exhibitions and catalogues to survey nearly 25 years of Black artistic production, this project introduces new LACMA acquisitions and broadens the Pan-African exhibition narrative—historically centered on the Black Atlantic—by highlighting artists from the Pacific Rim. Featuring nearly 70 works spanning painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and time-based media, the exhibition is structured around four key themes: speech and silence, movement and transformation, imagination, and representation. The accompanying catalogue includes original poetry, continuing the longstanding tradition of poetry as a vital force in Pan-African discourse. While diaspora is often framed as a displacement from origins, this exhibition redefines it as a dynamic space of reinvention and creativity. Through their aesthetic choices, the artists in Imagining Black Diasporas offer profound reflections on identity, existence, and the power of artistic expression. Image: Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey, 2019, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Just over 20 years ago, scientists introduced the term Anthropocene to denote a new geological epoch marked by human activity. Comprised of 44 photo-based artists working in a variety of artistic methods from studios and sites across the globe, Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene explores the complexities of this proposed new age: vanishing ice, rising waters, and increasing resource extraction, as well as the deeply rooted and painful legacies of colonialism, forced climate migration, and socio-environmental trauma. Since its emergence, the term “Anthropocene” has entered the common lexicon and has been adopted by disciplines outside of the sciences including philosophy, economics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, effectively linking the Anthropocene to nearly every aspect of post-industrial life. Organized around four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the exhibition proposes that the Anthropocene is not one singular narrative, but rather a diverse and complex web of relationships between and among humanity, industry, and ecology—the depths and effects of which are continually being discovered. Artists include: Sammy Baloji, Adrián Balseca, Matthew Brandt, Edward Burtynsky, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, James Casebere, João Castilho, Elena Damiani, Gohar Dashti, Sanne De Wilde, Andrew Esiebo, Gauri Gill, Noémie Goudal, Todd Gray, Acacia Johnson, Mouna Karray, Robert Kautuk, Rosemary Laing, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, Anna Líndal, Inka Lindergård and Niclas Lindergård, Pablo López Luz, Dhruv Malhotra, Laura McPhee, Gideon Mendel, Hayley Millar Baker, Joiri Minaya, Aïda Muluneh, Léonard Pongo, Meghann Riepenhoff, Cara Romero, Anastasia Samoylova, Camille Seaman, David Benjamin Sherry, Toshio Shibata, Sim Chi Yin, Thomas Struth, Danila Tkachenko, Rajesh Vangad, Letha Wilson, Will Wilson, Yang Yongliang, Zhang Kechun. Image: Todd Gray, Cosmic Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler), 2019. Four archival pigment prints in artist’s frames, UV laminate; 60 1/4 x 84 1/4 inches (153 x 214 cm). Collection of Bill and Christy Gautreaux, Kansas City, Missouri. © Todd Gray 2019. Courtesy of the artist and David Lewis, New York. Photo by Phoebe D’Heurle.

“Paris is a city that has ignited the passions of artists for centuries. From painters and sculpturers, to writers, dancers, and musicians, Paris rewards all forms of efforts to memorialize her. From the early 1900s, the camera has allowed a new breed of artists to add their voice to describe this world city. I have been lucky to “see” Paris over three decades and twenty plus visits. With my camera and a good pair of walking shoes, I am attempting to add my efforts to take you to this city and show you a few frames of what I have seen. My photographs reflect my personal vision and perhaps will inspire a smile or a pause in your day and a conversation later. Take a small journey with me, find a story or two with my images.” ~ Marc McVey

As the fiftieth anniversary of the eruption of the Lebanese Civil War approaches, Lebanon continues to suffer the long consequences of instability. Decades of domestic conflict, precarious peace, corrupt governments, and civilian protest culminated in the August 4, 2020, Port of Beirut explosion, plunging the country into a socio-economic abyss. Amid Lebanon’s tumult, photographer Rania Matar (b. 1964, Lebanon) continues her practice of capturing portraits of young women persisting in uncertain times. Instead of focusing on the devastation associated with her country and the wider region, she trains her lens on young Lebanese women to forefront their creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience. In her latest body of work, Where Do I Go? (2020 – ongoing), Matar collaborates with the young women of Lebanon to collectively commemorate the present and reimagine the future of a country defined by half a century of conflict and catastrophe. Matar photographs her subjects, who choose the locations themselves, before symbolic backdrops like the Mediterranean Sea, the craggy peaks of Mount Lebanon, the traditional and modern buildings of Beirut, and the country’s many layers of destruction and abandonment, weaving the women, the land, and the architecture into a tapestry of beauty and anxious promise. The artist was twenty years old when she fled the war in Lebanon to study in the United States. As she photographs these young women, her empathic eye sees their hopes, pains, dreams, fears, and dilemmas as they consider what future Lebanon might offer to them amidst the largest wave of emigration from the country since her own departure. These photographs speak to a universal moment of anxiety in the face of political and economic uncertainty and global unrest. At a time when the global status of women is newly precarious, Matar reveals the resilience, strength, and creativity of a society as exemplified by the grace, beauty, and resilience of its women.

Expand and Contract: AI and Alternative Processes is an international group exhibition that features artists who turn to AI as part of their production process, and, at times, as a creative generator that expands the scope of conceptual experimentations. Exhibiting Artists Aurora Wilder (Jennifer Pritchard, Patrick Corrigan and Dall-E), Dana Bell, Adam Chin, Ann Cutting, Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Liron Kroll, Lev Manovich, Osceola Refetoff. Expand and Contract: AI and Alternative Processes posits that generative AI technologies could be considered as the most recent addition to the world of photographic alternative processes, alongside cyanotypes, daguerreotypes, or albumen prints. Perhaps we can think about it as our era’s version of cameraless photography. This international group exhibition features artists who turn to AI as part of their production process, and, at times, as a creative generator that expands the scope of conceptual experimentations. Technological developments hasten pronouncements regarding the death of photography every few decades, with the most recent trigger being digital innovations, such as digital cameras and image editing software. And yet, photography persists. In fact, it continues to re-define how we engage with one another, imagine ourselves and our place in the world. Most recently, AI caused an uproar among visual practitioners, as machines have been trained to create images using images produced by humans who were not paid for services unknowingly provided. Moreover, AI seems to pose a threat to human agency. As we wait for governments to sort the legal implication, perhaps we can focus on the human agency part: What if we flip that narrative? What if we think of AI as a tool, rather than a threat? The participating artists have been exploring its capabilities from a variety of perspectives. AI allowed Liron Kroll to address gaps she identified in her childhood family album. Working with the likeness and voice of her children, she not only completed the past, but she also created unexpected documentation of the future. Media theorist and visual artist Lev Manovich uses AI to imagine what the past could never provide him: A model for an idea Soviet city in the 1960s (shown above), or a library of writings that were never created. For both, AI is a pathway to a past that could never be, but should have existed. Image: Liron Kroll, Girl with bike

Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based, American photographer, has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career. Her work is intimately tied to the history of the photographic medium through her innovative use of natural light, still life, and large-format cameras and film. Stern’s works in the Obscura Gallery exhibition, Echoes of Light, are luminous examples of her innovation. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, she veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. As a result, in both the Quickening and Force Field series, Stern highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of a shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light her images resemble charcoal drawings. Indeed, a viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper. Influenced by abstract expressionist painting but working as a lens-based photographer, Stern defies the expectations central to photography by pulling away from the sharp focus, instead blurring, veiling, cropping, partially obscuring, and otherwise de-literalizing what is in front of her lens. “My photographs are not about what they are of…. I believe that photography is a medium of light, not representation. Light is to photography as paint is to painting. I think like a painter in that my concerns are largely formal: my aim is to create tension, plasticity, texture, and, especially, spatial ambiguity in which figure (or abstract form) and ground seem to merge with The exhibition includes works from three bodies of work: Quickening, Passages, and Force Field. In Quickening, Stern placed glass bottles and circles behind a scrim, then manipulated both the objects and the scrim to create a sense of quivering movement between the objects. “The images have a dramatic luminosity and feel fleeting – as if they have suddenly come to life and could disappear at any moment,” says Stern. In Force Field, Stern placed cubes behind the scrim in such a way that the objects’ edges touching the scrim were sharp, while their bodies blurred, seeming to emerge from indeterminate space. Framed more tightly than in Quickening, and with more densely juxtaposed forms, Force Field images produce a feeling of unified, soft structure, charged with light and energy. The exhibition also includes two earlier series, Dialogues in Light and Unveilings made in 1985. Dialogues in Light marks Stern’s first experiments with the white scrim, using different types of natural light and various types of flowers. In this series, Stern noticed that the flowers’ images were elegant and poignant, generating an emotional response. Pursuing this emotional feeling led Stern to a new series titled Unveilings, in which she sought to create a dialogue between figure and ground, manipulating the scrim to create what she calls a ”charged” composition in light and shadow. The varying stances of the anemone - the curvature of the stem, the turned backs, profiles or fully open petals, their translucency or lack thereof -- become metaphors for vulnerability. Stern’s work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and is in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Art Museum (OR); the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery. Six monographs of Stern’s work have been published: Skull (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017); Frozen Mystery: Lynn Stern Photographs 1978-2008 (Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón / Center for Creative Photography: 2009); Veiled Still Lifes (exhibition catalogue, 2006); Animus (Tucson: Nazraeli Press, 2000); Dispossession (New York: Aperture, 1995), "Highly Commended Book," 1995 Ernst Haas Awards; and Unveilings, with a forward by Paul Caponigro, (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988). Stern was co-editor of Photographic INsight from 1990-1993. She was the organizer and moderator of a two-evening symposium held at New York University in 1991 titled "Examining Postmodernism: Images/Premises" and in 2016 moderated a discussion titled “Perceptual/Conceptual: How Does Art Nourish Us?” in New York. The Lynn Stern Archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.

The Hood Museum of Art will present the first major solo museum exhibition of photographs by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero, titled Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light). The exhibition will be on view at the Hood Museum from January 18 through August 10, 2025, and will feature over 50 works, including several never-before-seen photographs, and site-specific installations that will invite the viewer behind the scenes to experience the sets of Romero's most iconic photographs. An exhibition catalogue co-published by the Hood Museum of Art and Radius Books will be released in June 2025. The exhibition is curated by Jami Powell, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art. Says Romero, "The Hood Museum of Art under the leadership of curator Jami Powell and director John Stomberg is an excellent example of how an American museum can create meaningful and positive impacts on Native community, representation, and living artists. When offered my first major solo show to commence at the Hood, I cried because I never imagined this was possible for a Native woman photographer in her 40s. I am so honored to collaborate with this institution and the people making it a major force in sidelining preconceived notions about Native American art." Adds Powell, "Cara Romero is an immensely generous storyteller, and her images invite people into complex and transformative dialogues about the histories and lives of Indigenous peoples. Romero's photographs provide opportunities for audiences to recognize the humanity of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples and ask questions they might otherwise be afraid to ask." Image: Cara Romero, Zenith, 2022 © Cara Romero

This exhibition features thirty-five photographs—self-portraits or portraits of other artists—which reflect radically new propositions for what a portrait might be. They foreground the idea that identity is fluid, bodies are malleable, and strangeness is common. Whether confessional or slyly secretive, each of these photographs offers new revelations to the viewer. Working against systems meant to define, categorize, and normalize, these artists have reclaimed the portrait to express themselves and realize a vision of self otherwise foreclosed. Strangers are not entirely unknown, rather they arrive unexpectedly and often disrupt expectations. An exchange of gazes—inquiring glances, defiant smirks, vulnerable stares—typically accompany such encounters. Since the advent of photography in the 1840s, artists have used the camera to portray themselves and others. Traditional aesthetic conventions guided many early photographers, though over time new approaches emerged from diverse historical contexts. The artworks in this exhibition—self-portraits or portraits of other artists—reflect radically new propositions for what a portrait might be. They foreground the idea that identity is fluid, bodies are malleable, and strangeness is common. Whether confessional or slyly secretive, each of these photographs offers new revelations to the viewer. Working against systems meant to define, categorize, and normalize, these artists have reclaimed the portrait to express themselves and realize a vision of self otherwise foreclosed. Collectively, they ask us to consider: How do we communicate the undeniable reality of our bodies and the stories they tell about us? What does it look like to come into being, to materialize—just as a photograph develops—within as well as outside the strictures of social norms? Hello, Stranger was co-curated by Isa Cruz ‘27 and Frank Goodyear, co-director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and supported by The Riley P. Brewster ’77 Fund. All works in this exhibition have been generously donated to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art by David and Gail Mixer. Image: Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach (ringl + pit), Walter & Ellen Auerbach, London, ca. 1934, vintage silver print on paper. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of David and Gail Mixer. © ringl + pit, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery

BAXTER ST at CCNY is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at its new location at 154 Ludlow Street with The Reinforcements, a solo presentation by 2024 BAXTER ST Resident Artist and writer Qiana Mestrich, opening June 4, 2025. A powerful series of photo collages begun in 2023, The Reinforcements visualizes the labor history of Black and immigrant women of color in the American corporate workplace. Drawing from archival images—including photographs of Mestrich’s own mother, who worked in sales at Rugol Trading Corporation in New York City in the late 1960s—the work explores the everyday realities and systemic inequities that have long defined professional life for women of color. This body of work stems from Mestrich’s broader, ongoing research project @WorkingWOC: Towards a History of Women of Color in the Workplace, an independent digital archive aimed at documenting and interpreting the role of women of color in the American labor force from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the early 2000s. Despite the founding of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965, Black and other women of color continue to face racial and gender discrimination, limited pathways to leadership, and persistent wage inequality. In response to the absence of robust archival material addressing these inequities, Mestrich has created speculative visual narratives by collaging images from vintage fashion and office supply magazines. The resulting works are imagined interventions into a historical record that too often neglects the labor, agency, and ambitions of these women. The Reinforcements not only centers the experiences of its subjects but also asks viewers to reckon with the ongoing erasure of women of color in corporate and institutional histories. With this inaugural exhibition, Baxter St renews its commitment to presenting urgent, socially engaged work by emerging and mid-career lens-based artists. ABOUT QIANA MESTRICH Qiana Mestrich (b. 1977, NYC) is an interdisciplinary artist and photo historian whose work critically engages with themes of Black and mixed-race identity, motherhood, women’s labor, and the empowering role of fashion. Informed by her upbringing as the daughter of immigrants from Panama and Croatia, Mestrich’s artistic practice is complemented by significant contributions to the field of photography history. Her artwork has garnered international attention, with exhibitions at the RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain and London Art Fair’s Photo50, and inclusion in collections such as the Peggy Cooper Cafritz collection. A graduate of the ICP-Bard College MFA program, her insightful perspectives have been recognized through awards like the 2025 Saltzman Prize and CPW Vision Award, as well as the 2022 Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories grant for her research on women of color in the corporate workplace. Mestrich’s dedication to expanding the discourse around photography is evident in her 2007 founding of Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography History. This groundbreaking initiative, which evolved from a blog into a vital critique group, actively championed photographers of color. Her newly released book (Routledge, March 2025), features 35 updated interviews from the blog along with 7 critical essays on photography. Mestrich lives and works between Brooklyn and New York’s Hudson Valley.