Mario Algaze: Focus

The Hulett Collection is proud to present iconic music images including everything from The Rat Pack to Sex Pistols, Queen, Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan amongst many others. The Gallery's preeminent collection includes work from such artists as Roberta Bayley, Andrew Kent, Lisa Law, Graham Nash, Terry O'Neill, Neal Preston and more. These artists were initiators of a movement and have captured the culture that was and is rock and roll. Music is a reflection of our culture and our place in time. It is the adhesive that draws us together and propels us forward towards shared aspirations. This undeniably emotional collection of photographs contains images that appeal to viewers of all ages and musical appetites. The photographs will set aside commonplace notions while showcasing the tremendous influence of both the photographers and their subjects.

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce Austromancy, its third solo exhibition with German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, on view from October 1 – December 3, 2022. The show probes man’s place in the cosmos by juxtaposing photographs of three motifs: the winds colliding with Mount Ararat; futurist, yet abandoned structures in Kronstadt, Russia; and the intensely magnified crust of the moon. Austromancy is the lost art of reading man’s fortune from the shape of the clouds and the speed of the wind. Long before the invention of modern-day meteorology, which uses barometric readings and temperatures in faraway places to calculate the probabilities of specific weather conditions, soothsayers from the Kingdom of Urartu (9th – 6th centuries BCE) attempted to decipher the skies above Mount Ararat. During her first trip to Armenia in 2006, Schulz-Dornburg learned about this clairvoyant practice and a corresponding ancient lexicon for the region’s various winds. These photographs of Ararat are from the artist’s second trip to the Khor Virap monastery in 2010. During the shoot, the mirror inside her Hasselblad camera unexpectedly stuck, cropping off the mountain’s wide, gradual base. Although she was initially dismayed by the pictures and relegated them to her archive, she now – over ten years later – welcomes their unintentional qualities. This is a shift from decipherment to happenstance, asking us to consider the role of chance in divination. The images from Kronstadt are also a coincidence. Schulz-Dornburg was on her way to photograph the remainders of the Kursk submarine disaster when she discovered the steel vessels. Their geometric shapes and rigid skeletons recall the designs of Russian Constructivism, yet their function has strangely gone missing. The artist prefers to keep the true nature of the objects a secret, encouraging us, instead, to imagine how they could be ruins of an unknown civilization or objects from a distant planet. While Little Ararat was heavy and grounded in the earlier photographs, the mountain now looks atmospheric, even galactic. This effect is reversed in the case of the lunar images. Without cues of scale, craters and canyons on the surface of the moon look microscopic, like the cross section of cells. On one hand, thick black fog descends surreptitiously like an oversized spaceship. On the other, an amoeba-like wrinkle squiggles across the frame. In her new show, Schulz-Dornburg explores the prehistory and future of civilization, finding some unexpected life forms along the way. Image: ©Ursula Schulz-Dornburg - Ararat – The Darker (group 1), 9759_09, 2010/2021

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce VVVVVVVVVVVVV, its second solo exhibition with photographer CJ Heyliger, on view from October 1 – December 3, 2022. This new series of seascapes was inspired by the dynamic and sometimes unsettling forces of the Pacific Ocean, observed by the artist during repeated trips along the California coast. Despite being made on the iconic Southern California coastline, the sites depicted are rendered unrecognizable by Heyliger’s technique, which probes the material limits of photographic film. Bathed in extreme light, these pictures venture into the void between camera and human vision. Through Heyliger’s lens, seascapes undergo a radical transformation, loosening their resemblance to our understanding of the natural world, and at times verging on pure abstraction. While familiar details of the coastline are present, they are points of departure for formal exploration. The shimmering surface of the ocean resembles a fleck painting. Partially transparent cliff structures fade into darkness, recalling how they are, in fact, slowly eroding. Swells of waves and the accompanying puffs of foam are reduced to a set of diagrammatic forces, ripples, and eddies. The sun and its reflection on the horizon, normally too bright to look at directly, are rendered in inky shades of black. The image and the after-image coexist within a single frame. The photographs in this exhibition employ solarization, a phenomenon in which the luminance striking areas of the film becomes so intense that it passes a threshold and begins to break away from a direct transcription of the world as seen by the human eye. In these areas of the print, the resulting positive looks like a negative. Surf Line # 1 and #2 (the most recent works on view) are taken from a fixed vantage point, capturing the infinite permutations of solarization caused by the light reflected off the waves lapping at the shore below. The serpentine line dividing sand and water is a visual counterpoint to the stark horizon lines that dominate other photographs in the series. Heyliger’s process is one of slow looking and meditation. He taps into the constant flux of a single site, in addition to noticing otherworldly details often overlooked by a casual glance. This is a deliberate rejection of a desire to arrest the landscape – to preserve its grandeur forever – as is common in nature photography. CJ Heyliger (*1984) grew up on the Colorado Front Range and is based in Southern California. He received an M. F. A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015. His photographs have been exhibited at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Columbus Museum of Art, and San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts. His photographs have been purchased by LACMA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Capital Group, and JP Morgan Corporate Collections, as well as many private collectors. In 2020, he produced VVVVVVVVVVVVV as a spiral-bound book. Image: ©CJ Heyliger - VVVVVV, 2020

M+B is pleased to present Funny, Ha Ha, an exhibition of new works by Whitney Hubbs. The exhibition opens at our Doheny space on October 29, 2022 and will run through December 3, 2022 with an opening reception on Saturday, October 29 from 6 to 8 pm. In her third solo exhibition with M+B, Los Angeles, Whitney Hubbs offers us photographs of herself in various ideational states, in collaged contact prints on mirrors, and in images of surrogate objects: a rose, crumpled paper bags, the yawn of a cave at night, a clay sculpture of disembodied sex organs. Words and descriptions serve her photographs to limited capacity, if only to lead us into analogous territory, that of an erotic, humorous, and base self-representation. In her mirror works, we see Hubbs intersecting these territories at a higher pitch, implicating us in the process, seeing ourselves as reflected slivers in between and around her prints. If it helps to be aware of our own witnessing, we apprehend sex not so much as Hubbs’ main subject, but as a lure for states of being and experience that constellate around it: stuffing, purging, and gagging, intense color, the tenuous exchange between gazes, regressive teenage fantasy, and strip club aesthetics are several of its attractors. Such indignities, with all their humorous byproducts, are sublimated by Hubbs into eroticism (and the inverse), by virtue of her enactments of them into role-play. That Hubbs projects onto external objects distills these ideas further, identifying with them as they are wilting, drying, or stubbornly existing. Some are past their expiration date and not long for this world. Each object she depicts retains its own mood in a string of chronicled encounters. Her photograph of a rose exists in staccato against her clay sculpture of breasts and phalluses, against the cave that offers its hole, against the weary brown paper bags, replete with grease stains on the kitchen floor. These amount to something similar to her mirror pieces, aside from chronicling, in which there’s a bathetic confrontation with herself and the conditions of being in her forties, of being at a certain place in life. She negotiates this subjective and objective experience, of seeing herself through idea-experiments, only to return to forms, all forms, in all of their frailties. We engage with this vulnerability because it is resonant and compelling, but also for the solidarity in knowing that her photographs account for something familiar in trying to recognize one’s desires, no matter how debasing, against conditions that repel them. Image: © Whitney Hubbs

Opening Tuesday, September 20th 2022, Etherton Gallery will present a selected survey of photographs by Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942, Mexico). The first major exhibition of the photographer’s work in Tucson, Graciela Iturbide: Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración (Dreams, Symbols and Storytelling), includes 30 iconic and recent images from the photographer’s five-decade career. The exhibition includes images of rural and urban Mexico, cityscapes and religious sites in India, the Chicano community in Los Angeles, birds, and recent landscapes from Japan. A selection of photographs documenting the impact of the Cuban Revolution (1954-1974), from The Cuban Collection, will accompany Iturbide’s work. On Saturday, September 24, from 7-10 pm, Graciela Iturbide will attend the opening reception for Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración at Etherton Gallery, 340 South Convent Avenue, in downtown Tucson. The opening will feature live music by the Matt Mitchell Trio. “Graciela Iturbide is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential contemporary photographers today, and I am proud to present the first significant exhibition of her work in Tucson,” said Terry Etherton, President of Etherton Gallery. A limited number of signed copies of Graciela Iturbide’s recent exhibition catalogues and books will be available for purchase including: Heliotropo 37, (exhibition catalogue, Cartier Foundation, Paris, 2022); Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico (exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2019); and the illustrated graphic novel, Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2017). To pre-order a signed book, please call Etherton Gallery at (520) 624-7370 with a credit card. Etherton Gallery and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) have arranged for Graciela Iturbide to give a public lecture in response to her five-decade career on Friday, September 23, 2022, at 5:30 pm, at the CCP. Admission is free. The Center for Creative Photography is located on the campus of the University of Arizona, at 1030 North Olive Road. For information about the lecture, contact the CCP at (520) 621-7968 or info@ccp.arizona.edu. Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración underscores Graciela Iturbide’s deeply personal vision, which is informed by the fundamental belief in photography as a medium of internal and external exploration, her embrace of indigenous cultures, an openness to chance, and her ability “to fit into the different rhythms of the worlds that [she] photograph[s].” “Photographs emerge from exterior realities and our inner selves – from within and without. They cross our paths, but we also carry them. This is why I believe photography is largely a matter of self-discovery. When I look at the images I have made, I see not only fragments of the world I have been able to capture, often by chance, but also observe the imprint of my interpretations, projections, desires and dreams.” -- Graciela Iturbide: On Dreams, Symbols and Imagination (Aperture, 2022) One of the highlights of the exhibition, Mujer ángel (Angel Woman), Desierto de Sonora, 1979, is a dream-like image of an indigenous Seri woman in a long skirt carrying a boom box, as she makes her way through a compressed Sonoran Desert landscape. The juxtaposition of the portable boom box, a late 1970s symbol of urban, African American and Latinx street culture, with the Seri woman’s adaptation of the boom box for use in the desert, where no reception is available, operates as a comment on gender and indigenous culture. It also implicitly addresses political disparities and the layered complexity of Mexican culture, creating a powerful statement about Mexican identity. This is just one example of the many richly allusive images to be seen in Graciela Iturbide: Sueños, Símbolos, y Narración. Image:Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México, 1979 © Graciela Iturbide

In his practice, Rafael Soldi examines how queerness and masculinity intersect with immigration, memory, and loss. The artist writes, “I stem from a family of immigrants and my identity has always felt transient, as if built from a collective memory. I was aware of my queerness in an abstract sense from an early age, and this difference added another layer that I never felt empowered to assert. As is often for queer people, I felt my identity existed in a slightly different dimension than everyone else’s. Growing up in Perú, I knew that whatever society expected of me as a man, I was destined to disappoint.” Soldi’s photographs are at once powerful and intimate; they reflect deep retrospection by the artist, a process navigated by many, especially when one experiences displacement and feels neither rooted in one place or another but exists in the spaces in-between. Soldi uses various methods to create works including the nineteenth-century technique of photogravure and the contemporary photobooth. This exhibition includes works from three interconnected series, Imagined Futures, Entre Hermanos, and Cargamontón. The thirty-six self-portraits that comprise Imagined Futures re-imagine the photobooth experience. Instead of making hyperbolic or silly poses for the camera, Soldi appears with his eyes closed. For the artist, the photobooth evokes a Catholic confessional and offers a nuanced space for reflection, and ultimately a mechanism for bidding farewell to his previous ideas about the future. Related to this series, Entre Hermanos, turns the camera toward queer male-identifying Latinx immigrants. The subjects, with their eyes closed, are sensitively portrayed as the portraits challenge traditional ideas of masculinity. Cargamontón mines vernacular video archives that mirror the artist’s experience in an all-boys Catholic school in Lima, Perú where horseplay was common and acceptance of difference was not always felt. Each series offers deeply personal ruminations on identity while simultaneously presenting universal yet complex implications of fragility, struggle, and resilience. Born in Perú, Soldi lives and works in Seattle, Washington. This presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum. The Frost Art Museum FIU presents Rafael Soldi: A body in transit to complement FIU’s Common Reading Program and First Year Experience courses. This year, FIU’s entering class and other new students read App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman.

The Griffin Museum of Photography is pleased to announce the winner of the 2021 John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship, Justin Michael Emmanuel. His series A Facefull of Mangos captivated this years jury to earn him a monetary award, an exhibition and artist talk at the Griffin Museum as well as a volume from the collection of photographer John Chervinsky. Now in its sixth year, over 171 photographers submitted applications to be considered for the scholarship. The jurors, Tricia Capello, Bruce Myren and Connie and Jerry Rosenthal have selected Justin Michael Emmanuel as the 2021 recipient of the John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship. About A Facefull of Mangos With this photographic series, I present to the viewer a resistance to systemic racism and also a window into understanding what makes us human. I hope that by showing imagery of touch, warmth, laughter, and love, I may begin to unravel and break down any preconceived notions or ideas that do not give resonance to those qualities in regards to Blackness in the mind of the viewer. I am desperately attempting to declare my own humanity and have it recognized by others. By showing the gentle side of our human nature I am hopeful that the viewers will recognize their own familial behaviors and interactions, thus bridging gaps that are set by race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and economic social-political forces. This work desires to deconstruct and challenge the mainstream historical imagery that has described Blackness in a light that wasn’t its own. I hope that the importance of these images are not only determined by what they express visually or culturally but also by the fact that they are documents of the human capacity to care for and feel empathy towards one another. Most importantly, the purpose of this work is to create empathy among people by showing the human aptitude to love. In the Bible, it is said that at the tower of Babel, God, frustrated and threatened by the power of human cooperation, fractured our language so that we could no longer understand each other and work together. And while an ancient story that reverberates with myth, the essence of this still rings true. That when we work together, not even the heavens will be the limit of our greatness. That God himself will pale in comparison to the vastness of our achievements. If only we could work together, we could become so much more. It is as the writer Eric Williams once said, “Together we aspire, together we achieve.” Image: © Justin Michael Emmanuel, Celeste 1

The Griffin Museum presents new work from creative artist Aline Smithson, Fugue States. On the walls of the Atelier Gallery in Winchester this November, Smithson won the Directors Prize in 2021 during the Members Juried Exhibition, selected by Executive Director and Curator Paula Tognarelli. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of the works included in the exhibition. Join us on Sunday November 6th from 4 to 6pm for a reception with the artist at the museum in Winchester. From Aline Smithson’s Artist Statement Fugue States is an on-going exploration of the future legacies of photography, currently with two areas of focus: the disappearance of the physical print and the life span of digital files. For the past several decades, I have considered how photographs move through time and how they are appreciated and stored in preparation for the future. Photography is an ever-changing medium, morphing and shifting with new technologies, some profoundly impacting our ability to access our photographic histories. As an analog photographer, I have watched my practice diminished and altered by the loss of materials and methodologies. Over the years I have collected and created hundreds of portraits, some acquired are almost a century old and it’s made me consider the formal portrait amid the shifting sands of photography, the loss of photograph as object, and most importantly, the loss of photographic legacies. Fugue States speaks to the potential loss of the tangible photograph in future generations. I observe my children, part of the most documented generation in history, creating thousands of images for their social media outlets, but am painfully aware that they have never made a photographic print and will most likely have no physical photographs to pass down to their grandchildren. This loss of the photograph-as-object, as something tangible to be circulated through the decades, reflects the fading away of specific memories and identities, and the loss of cultural and familial histories in forms that we associate with family preservation. The photographs created for this series sit in an in-between space of the future and the past, demonstrating the clash between images and materiality, where materiality, unfortunately, seems to be losing ground. For this project, after creating analog portraits of people in my life, I have damaged the emulsion of my negatives, wounding the film stock with a variety of chemicals. I then reinterpret the image in the digital darkroom in the original, negative state where the potential for both the restoration and erasure of memory are present. I am in fact, damaging my own photographic legacy to call attention to this shift from the physical to the visual. Fugue States Revisited was created after the loss of a hard drive that held 20 years of analog scans. In my attempt to recover the files, only half came back in a format that was accessible. The rest of the files were corrupted, each totally unique in how the machine damages and reinterprets the pixels. This alarming result made me begin to consider ever-shifting digital platforms and file formats, and I realized that much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility. As an analog photographer, rather than let the machine have the last word, I have cyanotyped over my damaged digital scans. I use silhouettes of portraits from my archives to conceal and reveal the corruption. By using historical processes to create a physical object, I guarantee that this image will not be lost in the current clash between the digital file and the materiality of a photographic print. Fugue States Revisited calls attention to the fact that today’s digital files may not retain their original state, or even exist, in the next century. The Getty Research Institute states, “While you are still able to view family photographs printed over 100 years ago, a CD with digital files on it from only 10 years ago might be unreadable because of rapid changes to software and the devices we use to access digital content.” As we are reliant on technology to keep our images intact for future generations, it begs the question, who will maintain our hard drives after we are gone? Will we be able to conserve photographs that speak to family histories? These are important considerations for our visual futures, as we may be leaving behind photographs that will be re-imagined by machines or no longer cherish physical markers of proof that we existed. Image: © Aline Smithson

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Baldwin Lee. The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Saturday, the 22nd of October, from 4-6pm, and continue through December 10th. This will be the second solo exhibition of the photographer’s work presented by Joseph Bellows Gallery. The gallery first showcased Lee’s epic project online, from April 18th – June 26, 2020. The upcoming show will present a remarkable selection of vintage prints from this critically acclaimed and highly celebrated body of work taken within Black communities in the South, that began in 1983, and continued throughout that decade. The resulting collection of images from this seven-year period contains nearly ten thousand black-and-white negatives taken with a 4 x 5-inch view camera. Lee’s graceful pictures from this project perfectly balance the photographer’s presence and the subject’s will, honoring both through the resulting, beautifully printed 16 x 20-inch black-and-white photographs. The esteemed photography curator Joshua Chuang has noted that, “The pictures stand apart, not because they are depictions of Black subjects by a first-generation Chinese-American, but because they were made by a photographer of rare perception and instinct.” Baldwin Lee studied photography with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1972. Lee then continued his education at Yale University, where he studied with Walker Evans. He received a Master of Fine Arts in 1975. After school, Lee began teaching photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and then at Yale, while creating his own photographs, which at the time were rooted in the exploration of the contemporary built environment. Lee's later work from the early to late-1980s entitled, Black Americans in the South (from which this exhibition is drawn), is a compelling and empathic portrait that represents its subjects within their rural environments, expressing the joys of childhood, the gravity of adult life, and the places in between. Images from Lee’s Southern work were featured in Aperture Magazine, Issue 115, New Southern Photography: Between Myth and Reality (1989), and now form the newly published monograph, Baldwin Lee (Hunters Point Press, 2022). Lee's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, The Morgan Library, and the Museum of the City of New York. He has been honored with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1984) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984 and 1990).

Lehmann Maupin presents Part Two: Run, an exhibition of new photographs, film, and sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager. The multi-part exhibition will culminate in the debut of Prager’s ambitious new film at the gallery’s New York location in January 2023. Directly responding to a period of cultural ambivalences and uncertainties, the exhibition urgently examines the collective will to exist and explores the opportunities for empathy, participation, and action present both within art and everyday life. Throughout the ten photographic works that comprise Part Two: Run that will be featured in Palm Beach, Prager examines the cultural mythologies and archetypes that shape our shared existence. Fervently cinematic, works such as Claire and Frances, Diner, and The West craft richly developed characters and interrogate genres such as the noir and the Western as they probe contemporary concerns and anxieties. Occupying a tenuous relationship to time and place, the carefully staged figures remain suspended between the past and the present. Across her practice, Prager crafts rich, often ambiguous narratives. Slyly suspended in action, Prager’s carefully staged but ultimately open-ended scenes invite questioning and active engagement from viewers. Prager’s work suggests a relentless, unyielding movement forward through time even in the face of suspended uncertainties and anxieties, but her nostalgic and cinematic body of work also evokes a notion of contemporary experience that looks to the past to interpret the present and explore themes about common humanity. The Palm Beach exhibition builds upon a solo presentation of the artist’s work at Lehmann Maupin London earlier this year. In this new body of work, Prager engages theatrical strategies and cinematic conventions, exploring how both our senses of self and our engagement with others are often mediated by identification with familiar narratives and tropes. Shot from above, Mime is a vivid, intricately orchestrated image of a group. The work’s sharp angle renders the scene uncanny, at once exposing its artifice and undermining it. Present in the lower edge of the work is the titular mime, gesturing expressively with her hands, but the mime as the idea of a farcical drama is present in the entirety of the frame. In Prager’s work, the mime is not only a character, but also, perhaps, a method for thinking through strategies of representation: here, and across Prager’s practice, figures assume familiar postures and poses in order to inhabit character; to engage and reflect; and ultimately, to understand and empathize with others. Viewers, too, become active participants in Prager’s works. At the center of Mime is a woman with a camera, who faces the viewer and points her lens toward them. Here, as throughout the exhibition, Prager invites viewers into her visually and symbolically saturated works, suggesting that they, too, have critical parts to play. The foundation for this new body of work is the artist’s powerful new film, Run, which will be exhibited at the gallery’s New York location in January 2023. Featuring musical compositions by Ellen Reid and Philip Glass and starring Katherine Waterston, the film deploys cinematic archetypes and absurdist humor as it examines human resilience in the face of catastrophe. An otherwise ordinary day in an uncannily generic setting erupts into chaos when a massive, mirrored sphere propels itself through a community. Here, forward motion is countered by retrospection, and figures collide into their own reflections in the sphere’s surface, and Prager suggests a curative, collective reckoning with those forces outside of our control. Image: Alex Prager, Diner, 2022 - Courtesy Alex Prager Studio © Steven Cuffie

The Curious and Creative Eye is our way of both distracting you from your daily tasks and bringing you a light hearted smile. If there was ever a time to appreciate humor as a panacea and tonic to our souls, it is now. Our modern world can seem overly complicated. With the internet, instantaneous communication and an almost constant barrage of visual and audio information, overload our senses and give us little peace and quiet. Gone seems to be the idle time where we are left alone with our thoughts and undisturbed. Coupled with this, bad news travels faster than good news and collectively our daily stimuli weighs heavy on our spirits. Humor elicits momentary happiness and joy. It lifts us out of the routine of our daily lives. Humor and visual surprises can take many forms and are difficult to codify.

New York Life Gallery is pleased to announce our inaugural exhibition, Women, a presentation of photographs by Steven Cuffie, beginning October 21 and running through December 16, 2022. Curated by his youngest, Marcus Cuffie, the exhibition will be the first time the work has been shown outside of Baltimore, where the photographer lived and worked for most of his life. The show focuses on a rarely-seen body of work Cuffie made in the 1970s, specifically portraits of the women in his life and the city. Some are photographs of lovers and girlfriends, women who reoccur in other images from this period, while others are subjects he approached on the street, asking for a quick photo or inviting them to sit for him. Cuffie took the photographs in his late 20s and early 30s when he was first living on his own and coming into himself as an artist. The diverse execution of the images speaks to a youthful divergence and confluence of influences from other photographers he was looking at during the time. Considering the range of images selected for the exhibition, Marcus Cuffie notes that through the variety, they sought to extract a common thread in the informal nature of the women’s gazes, at ease and intimately looking toward the viewer, towards the lens of their father. “To more closely examine the intention of my father’s work, I wanted this first show to tighten its focus on one theme. These images occupy a narrow window in the 40 years my father was taking pictures, but they represent a charged period of discovery in his work.” Steven Cuffie (1949–2014) was born in North Carolina and moved to Baltimore with his family as a child. He began taking photos as a teenager, and after studying photography for three years at the University of Maryland, he dropped out to pursue a career in the field. After leaving college, Cuffie connected with a small group of Baltimore-based photographers, showing his work in a few exhibitions around the city and doing work on commission. For the majority of his life, he worked as a photographer for the City of Baltimore, taking pictures of city events, crime scenes, and politicians – everything mundane and extraordinary required for public record. Cuffie’s day job meant most of his hours were spent taking photos and his practice extended to his time at home, where he built a darkroom in his basement and turned the laundry room into his studio. Here, he had all the necessary equipment and chemicals to develop and print his own work. By the time Cuffie’s oldest daughter Morgan was born in 1982, he had stopped showing his work publicly, though he continued taking pictures, processing film, and making prints throughout his life. Image: © Steven Cuffie