Mario Algaze: Focus

Portraits are more than images of people—they're reflections of connection, presence, and intention. At their best, they capture not just appearance, but emotion, identity, and the quiet dynamics between photographer and subject. ​ In Portraits and Persons, Cynthia Freeland identifies three core elements of portraiture: a visible body, a sense of inner life, and the act of self-presentation. Together, these form the foundation for how we see—and are seen. ​ Praxis Gallery welcomes photographic portraits that explore these dimensions through craft, concept, and character—portraits that reveal something personal, poetic, or profoundly human. Guest Curated Exhibition by Sandrine Hermand-Grisel

"I have spent my entire career photographing children all over the world. The last several years I have focused my eyes on the Irish Traveller that live in caravans on the side of the road or in open fields throughout Ireland. The Traveller community are an Irish nomadic indigenous ethnic minority. There is no recorded date as to when Travellers first came to Ireland. This is lost to history, but Travellers have been recorded to exist in Ireland as far back as history is recorded. Even with their great history they live as outsiders to society and face unbelievable racism growing up. As a mother of two daughters, I became so interested in the culture and traditions and lives of these children. I have spent many years traveling back and forth to Ireland to document these incredible children." "The experience I had photographing the grit and beauty, that is the everyday life of a Traveller child, is one that inspires me every day. Their deep respect for family and cultural values is refreshing, one that can be quite difficult to find in an age with the convince of social media. Not always immediately accepting of an outsider holding a large camera, I took my time getting to know and understand these faces that represent the new generation. My ever-growing fascination with the children of today has led me all over the world, capturing their innocence or in some cases loss of, in its most raw form." "Unlike most children they are unable to refer to a history book to learn about their ancestors, a part of this journey was being able to document an era that is so different to any other I have photographed. It is one that is and will always be rapidly changing, every time I visit it is a whole different world yet with the relationships, I have been lucky enough to make, it seems to feel like I never left. I am exponentially grateful to the young people documented and that I have encountered over my years." "It is with an honest heart I hope to show that these beautiful children who have great hopes and goals and work every day to reach their dreams no matter how hard they must fight racisms and stereotypes placed on them for centuries. A child is an innocent, happy, precious part of the world that should be loved and accepted and encouraged no matter where or how they live."

“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” is a groundbreaking exhibition that marks the first major showcase of the Dean Collection, owned by renowned musicians and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, “Giants” highlights nearly 100 significant works by Black diasporic artists, including Gordon Parks, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, and more. The exhibition reflects the Deans’ passion for supporting established and emerging artists while fostering important dialogues about art, culture, and identity. “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” is organized by Kimberli Gant, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Indira A. Abiskaroon, Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. Image: Kwame Brathwaite. Untitled (Model Who Embraced Natural Hairstyles at AJASS Photoshoot), circa 1970, printed 2018. Pigmented inkjet print. The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © Kwame Brathwaite. (Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com)

“Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” So wrote one of photography’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), about his eponymous daguerreotype in 1839. Daguerre’s words, which associate women with idleness, are clearly misogynistic. Yet in a backhanded way, Daguerre predicted the pivotal role women would play in photography since its invention in the 1830s. Undaunted by photographic chemistry—and often neglected or derided by their male peers—women have made huge contributions to the development of the medium across a variety of genres. In the nineteenth century, photography was more accessible than established artistic disciplines like painting and sculpture because it was new and thus free from conventional training that historically prohibited women. It was relatively inexpensive to start and could be practiced at home with makeshift darkrooms set up in closets or bathrooms. Yet even with fewer barriers to entry, women faced their share of constraints in a male-dominated field. Expectations of gender often dictated the themes they could pursue, encouraging portraiture and still life rather than photographs of war and exploration. Women took up photography in increasing numbers in the twentieth century, and by the 1930s, some of the most successful photographers in the world included Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, all on view in this exhibition. Women in Focus, drawn from The San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection (which merged with the Museum of Photographic Arts in 2023), allows for a fuller account of the medium’s history by highlighting how women have shaped photography from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Image: Trude Fleischmann, Sibylle Binder (detail), ca. 1932. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of Michael and Joyce Axelrod, M.1993.012.001. © Trude Fleischmann

Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. The nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers in Digital Witness illuminate today's visual culture where digital editing tools are easier to access than ever before.

The central importance of glass in the history of photography has often been taken for granted: a crucial material that has largely escaped commentary, as if hidden in plain sight. In 1851 English photographer Frederick Scott Archer invented the wet plate collodion, the first practical method for making photographic negatives on glass, which produced sharper and more densely toned pictures than paper negatives. By 1853, photographers had adapted the process for the ambrotype, which grew in popularity as a less expensive alternative to daguerreotypes. The introduction of dry-plate negatives in the 1870s made glass plates an easy-to-use and preferred material, which photographers continued to rely on into the 1930s. Similar technology enabled mass production of jewel-like slides for magic lantern shows, a popular form of visual entertainment into the early twentieth century. Today, contemporary photographers continue to utilize glass for its depth and beauty, as well as to ground their work in histories of photographic imagery. Delicate Sights spans the nineteenth century to the present day and includes works produced around the world. Works on display include glass based photographs from NOMA’s permanent collection, by such photographers as E.J. Bellocq and Joseph Woodson “Pops” Whitesell. Delicate Sights includes unique historical photographs on loan from the collections of Dr. Stanley B. Burns, Elizabeth A. Burns, and Jason L. Burns of New York. The exhibition concludes with an installation of ambrotypes by artist Felicita Felli Maynard that uses a historical process to make an important, contemporary intervention in the photographic record. All together, Delicate Sights is an invitation to consider how glass photographs have always made it possible to see our world more clearly. Image: Vueltiao, from the series Ole Dandy, The Tribute, 2018–ongoing, Felicita Felli Maynard, Ambrotype

Higher Pictures presents Susan Meiselas’ earliest series of photographs, 44 Irving Street 1970 – 1971, following its exhibition at Harvard Art Museums. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. In 1970, while still a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Susan Meiselas was living in a boarding house at 44 Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Boarding houses, like the one at 44 Irving Street, often began as large, single-family homes in cities or college towns. As average family sizes decreased and the socioeconomic makeup of neighborhoods changed, these homes were then divided up into smaller units while maintaining a shared kitchen, bathrooms, and common areas. As a result, each of the rooms at 44 Irving Street retained some of the home’s original single-family character. At Harvard, Meiselas enrolled in a photography course and chose to photograph her neighbors for a class project. Though she didn’t know any of them, she began knocking on their doors and asking to take portraits of them in their rooms. “The camera was this way to connect,” Meiselas remembers. Once she had developed the film, she would make contact sheets to share with her neighbors, initiating a dialogue about how they saw themselves. Their written responses, which Meiselas presented alongside the photographs, provide insights into their lives and how they felt the pictures did or did not capture them. By incorporating their perspectives into the work itself, Meiselas draws out a crucial tension between socially engaged photography as a historical genre and the subjects it purports to depict. The photographs and letters on view in this exhibition are the fruits of those exchanges. Though boarding houses are often transitory living spaces, Meiselas was drawn to the individuality and self-expression she discovered in each room. This comes across in the images themselves, which show her subjects at home and in situ, surrounded by their personal effects. In return, the letters they wrote are sometimes strikingly honest and revelatory, a written punctum—Roland Barthes’ term for something that pierces the viewer—as a counterpoint to the photographs. This series helped Meiselas develop her conception of “photography as an exchange in the world.” “It wasn’t about the formalism of photography,” she says, “It was about the narrative and the connectivity.” The exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph of 44 Irving Street, 1970-1971 by Susan Meiselas published in partnership with TBW books + Higher Pictures. The dates for the opening and book signing are to be announced during the run of the show. Stay tuned! Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. She was a 1992 MacArthur Fellow and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015) and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), among other awards. Mediations, a retrospective exhibition of Meiselas’ work, was initiated by the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2018 and traveled to eight venues including SFMOMA, San Francisco (2018); Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo (2020), Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna (2021); and C/O Berlin (2022). She has been a member of the photographic collective Magnum Photos since 1976 and has been the president of the Magnum Foundation since 2007. She lives and works in New York City.

Daniel Cooney Fine Art is honored to present “George Dureau: Photographs”, the gallery’s first exhibition of the late artist’s work and Dureau’s debut solo exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On view from May 31 through July 19, 2025, the show features 40 vintage black-and-white photographs spanning the 1970s through the 1990s, offering a rare and intimate view into the formal and emotional depth of Dureau’s celebrated practice. A lifelong resident of New Orleans, George Dureau (1930–2014) turned to photography in the 1970s, having previously established himself as a painter. His lens captured a deeply personal circle of friends, lovers, and fellow eccentrics, many of whom existed on the margins of society. Dureau’s photographs are known for their rigorous composition and profound empathy, portraying his subjects with dignity, tenderness, and heroic strength. While Dureau remains lesser known to the broader public, his work holds iconic status among artists, historians, and curators. His photographs are widely studied by a new generation of creative minds who revere not only his artistic mastery but also his radical inclusivity and compassionate worldview—qualities that feel more resonant now than ever. Dureau received his B.A. in Fine Art from Louisiana State University in 1952 and studied architecture briefly at Tulane University. His work has been exhibited internationally and is the subject of two monographs: George Dureau: The Photographs (Aperture, 2016) and George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans (University Press of Mississippi, 2025). Image: "Terrell Hopkins", 1987 © George Dureau

Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception brings together photographs that are linked by the common objective of disrupting the viewer’s sense of time, space, place, or scale. Sometimes considered errors, photographic blur, distortion, and obfuscation have also been important creative and aesthetic strategies adopted by artists since the medium’s 19th-century inception. Highlighting photographs from the Norton’s Collection and a selection of special loans, this exhibition points to the constructed nature of perception and, in turn, photography’s vulnerability to manipulation even when it appears to show what is “real.” Image: Jeff Brouws, Interstate 40, Blurred car, New Mexico, 1992

This exhibition reimagines the history of American photography, tracing its evolution from its inception in 1839 through the early 20th century. Showcasing works from The Met’s William L. Schaeffer Collection, it places celebrated photographers—including Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen—alongside remarkable yet lesser-known practitioners from towns and cities across the nation. Through a diverse array of photographic formats, from daguerreotypes and cartes de visite to stereographs and cyanotypes, the exhibition highlights how photography swiftly shaped America’s cultural, artistic, and psychological landscape. More than a technological breakthrough, photography became a defining lens through which the nation saw itself, reflecting its transformation and identity. Even before the formal announcement of the medium’s invention, American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson astutely observed in 1835, “Our Age is Ocular,” foreshadowing photography’s profound impact on visual culture. Image: Unknown Maker, Young Man with Rooster, 1850s

Strange and Familiar Places presents 26 works from 10 contemporary photographers, offering fresh perspectives on rural life in the Midwest, South, and Western United States. These new acquisitions, displayed for the first time, showcase intimate photographs that explore the people, communities, and landscapes of these often-overlooked regions, challenging our preconceived notions of them. Great storytelling is at the heart of these works, where the sense of place is just as vital as character, symbolism, and plot. The artists draw inspiration from music, fiction, history, folklore, and the art of photography itself, creating poetic, evocative images. Their approaches vary, with some using a classic documentary style while others stage or carefully compose their photographs, offering new and sometimes surprising ways of seeing the world. Regardless of technique, each artist highlights the humanity of their subjects, deepening our understanding of place. The exhibition features work by Antone Dolezal, Terry Evans, Laura McPhee, Rahim Fortune, Holly Lynton, Elise Kirk, Kristine Potter, RaMell Ross, Bryan Schutmaat, and Lara Shipley. Image: Holly Lynton, American (b. 1972). Les, Honeybees, the Bosque, New Mexico, 2007 © Holly Lynton

Process Work: Intersections of Photography and Print ca. 1825 to Today explores the development of photographic printmaking processes and traces its historical legacy into the present day. Starting around 1825, a widespread interest in reproducing visual information faster and more cheaply fueled an explosion of experimentation in photographic printmaking techniques, with wide-ranging effects across visual culture and the fine arts. This exhibition highlights those early experiments and innovations, as well as the culture of mass-market illustration and printed media into which they first unfolded. Across a presentation of over 40 historic and contemporary photogravures, collotypes, photolithographs and relief prints, this exhibition poses the question: What are the social, aesthetic, and technological possibilities that emerge from the marriage between photography and print, both then and now? Curated by Sarah Mirseyedi, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.