Karen Navarro: The Constructed Self

At Artists Space in New York, David Armstrong: Portraits offers the first comprehensive survey of a photographer whose work has long circulated at the margins of both fashion and fine art. Bringing together more than 90 images from the 1990s to the 2010s, the exhibition draws largely from vintage prints, tracing a practice shaped by intimacy, loss and a persistent rethinking of what portraiture can encompass. Armstrong first gained recognition in late 1970s New York, photographing friends and fellow artists within a downtown scene marked by experimentation and fragility. His early black-and-white portraits, depicting figures such as Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller, carry a quiet intensity. Composed with precision yet grounded in closeness, these images convey a sense of stillness that contrasts with the volatility of the era. Portraiture, for Armstrong, never functions as mere likeness; it becomes a way of registering emotional presence. The devastation of the AIDS crisis marks a turning point in his work. In the late 1990s, Armstrong turns toward landscapes and still lifes, producing deliberately out-of-focus color photographs. Gardens, pathways and urban scenes appear softened, almost dissolving into light and atmosphere. Though absent of figures, these images retain a human charge, suggesting memory and absence through their diffuse forms and saturated tones. By the early 2000s, Armstrong returns to photographing people, often within the layered interiors of his Brooklyn brownstone. These portraits, frequently centered on male subjects, draw on references to Renaissance painting and Dutch still life, blending historical sensibilities with contemporary immediacy. Natural light and carefully arranged settings create scenes that resist clear temporal or spatial markers, reinforcing a sense of ambiguity. Later experiments with digital processes extend this inquiry. Armstrong reworks his own images into composite arrangements, photographing and rephotographing them to collapse distinctions between original and reproduction. Across three decades, Portraits reveals a sustained engagement with photography as both medium and question—an exploration of how images hold, distort or release the presence of those they depict. Image: David Armstrong, Koos, 2003, C-print © David Armstrong. Courtesy of the Estate of David Armstrong [A figure lays face up on a white mattress. His expression is languid and his hair falls over the edge of the mattress.]

InSight: Photos and Stories from the Archives offers a rare and deeply human perspective on Indigenous life, drawn from the vast photographic holdings of the National Museum of the American Indian. Spanning more than a century and encompassing communities across the Western Hemisphere, the exhibition brings forward images selected from an archive of over half a million photographs. Rather than presenting history as a distant or abstract concept, these photographs anchor it in lived experience, revealing moments of everyday life marked by dignity, intimacy, and continuity. The images capture ordinary yet meaningful scenes: families gathered for portraits, children learning from elders, friends sharing celebrations, and individuals pausing in quiet reflection. These photographs resist spectacle, instead emphasizing familiarity and presence. Through simple gestures and unguarded expressions, they communicate the richness of daily life and the strength of relationships that sustain communities over generations. The result is a visual record that feels personal rather than institutional, shaped by closeness rather than observation from afar. Central to the exhibition is the idea that photographs are not complete without the voices of those represented within them. Each image is accompanied by stories shared by Native community members, adding context, names, memories, and meaning that might otherwise be lost. This collaborative approach reflects the Archives Center’s long-standing commitment to working directly with Indigenous communities to expand and enrich the historical record. Over time, these relationships have transformed static images into living documents. Presented as an ongoing exhibition, InSight underscores that archives are not fixed repositories, but evolving spaces shaped by dialogue and care. By reconnecting photographs with the people and stories they represent, the exhibition challenges conventional narratives of the past and affirms Indigenous presence as continuous and dynamic. In doing so, it invites visitors to look more closely, not only at the images themselves, but at the responsibilities involved in preserving, interpreting, and sharing them. Image: Sarah Grandmother’s Knife (Apsáalooke [Crow], age 10), wearing an elk-tooth dress and sticking her tongue out playfully, Montana, 1910. Fred Meyer photograph collection. N22034

Home Truth: Image-making in absence, presented at the Lilley Museum of Art from January 27 to May 23, 2026, brings together three interconnected bodies of work by Steven Seidenberg that examine what remains when people move on. Across Italy, Japan, and the margins of contemporary Europe, Seidenberg turns his attention to overlooked environments shaped by economic rupture, migration, and quiet abandonment. His photographs do not seek spectacle; instead, they linger on the material traces of lives once embedded in these places, inviting viewers to read absence as a form of presence. Central to the exhibition is The Architecture of Silence, a series rooted in the remnants of Italy’s postwar land reform initiative. Scattered across the agricultural regions of Basilicata and Puglia, concrete farmhouses and infrastructure stand isolated in fields now shaped by machines rather than families. Seidenberg’s images approach these structures with restraint and sensitivity, allowing light, weather, and framing to reveal their fragile dignity. The photographs move beyond documentation, transforming political failure into a visual meditation on displacement, unrealized promises, and the human cost of systemic planning without sustainability. The exhibition expands outward to other geographies shaped by transience. In Rome, Seidenberg observes the impermanent architecture of a migrant tent city, capturing provisional shelters that speak to resilience under constraint. In Kanazawa Vacancy, he turns to Japan’s growing landscape of akiya and akichi—vacant homes and empty lots embedded within long-established neighborhoods. These quiet voids interrupt the urban fabric, revealing a city slowly hollowed by demographic change, yet still rich with architectural memory and cultural continuity. Throughout Home Truth, Seidenberg’s photographs resist easy narratives of decay or nostalgia. Instead, they ask how space absorbs human movement and how landscapes remember what societies forget. By focusing on structures shaped by absence, the work proposes a slower, more attentive way of seeing—one that acknowledges loss while honoring the subtle beauty found in what remains. Image: © Steven Seidenberg

Resilient Communities, on view from March 14 through May 23, 2026 at the Alice Austen House Museum, marks Staten Island’s fourth Triennial of Photography. Set within the historic home of pioneering photographer Alice Austen, the exhibition extends the site’s long-standing commitment to social observation and civic engagement. This juried presentation brings together emerging and mid-career artists whose work foregrounds stories of endurance, solidarity, and cultural continuity. Curated by Paul Moakley and Victoria Munro, the exhibition centers on communities often overlooked or misrepresented. Through documentary approaches, staged portraiture, and experimental image-making, participating artists explore how resilience takes shape in daily rituals, mutual aid, intergenerational bonds, and collective memory. The photographs do not romanticize hardship; instead, they reveal the complexity of lived experience—how perseverance is cultivated over time and sustained through shared care. Artists including Niamh Alarcon, Lila Barth, Kristen Welles Bartley, Beth Amanda Cummins, Adan Huertas, Wayne Liu, Jean Marquez, and Nadette Staša present projects rooted in close collaboration with their subjects. Their images reflect neighborhoods adapting to economic shifts, families preserving language and tradition, and individuals asserting identity in the face of displacement or change. Across diverse visual styles, a common thread emerges: resilience is neither solitary nor abstract, but grounded in relationships and everyday acts of commitment. By situating contemporary voices within a site historically dedicated to photography’s role in shaping social understanding, Resilient Communities creates a dialogue between past and present. The triennial affirms the medium’s capacity to bear witness and to strengthen connection. In doing so, it invites viewers to consider how communities endure—not simply by surviving adversity, but by actively building networks of support that allow them to imagine and sustain shared futures. Image: Adan Huertas, Untitled, 2025 © Adan Huertas, courtesy of the Alice Austen House Museum

Ayana V. Jackson, on view from January 27 through May 23, 2026, brings together a decade of work by an artist who has consistently interrogated the foundations of photographic history. Born in 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey, and living between Brooklyn and Johannesburg, Ayana V. Jackson examines how Black women’s bodies have been framed, classified, and circulated across the African diaspora. Through carefully staged self-portraiture and archival research, she reconsiders the authority long granted to the photographic image. Drawing from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial archives, European modernist aesthetics, and ethnographic portraiture, Jackson reconstructs visual languages that once claimed objectivity. She often casts herself in the role of historical figures, inhabiting poses and settings that echo imperial imagery. In doing so, she exposes the mechanisms through which photography helped codify racial hierarchies. Her images do not simply critique; they re-stage and re-author, transforming documents of domination into sites of resistance and agency. Across series produced between 2013 and 2023, Jackson moves fluidly between themes of flight and stillness, spectacle and interiority. References to Black equestrian histories, myths of the diaspora, and modernist composition intertwine. The body becomes both archive and instrument—at times defiant, at times contemplative. Questions of authorship, authenticity, and power surface repeatedly, inviting viewers to consider the ethical relationship between photographer, subject, and audience. Jackson’s work has entered major public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the National Gallery of Victoria, reflecting its international resonance. In 2023, her exhibition From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, marking a significant institutional milestone. Beyond her studio practice, Jackson founded STILL Art in Johannesburg, an artist residency dedicated to supporting emerging voices in Southern Africa. This exhibition offers a sustained encounter with an artist who insists that revisiting the past is not an act of nostalgia, but a necessary step toward reshaping the visual narratives that inform the present. Image: Ayana V. Jackson, Mary Fields: With a jug of Whiskey by her Foot, a pistol packed Under her apron, and a shotgun by her side, 2023, courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. © Ayana V. Jackson

Youssef Nabil: No One Knows but the Sky unfolds at Mariane Ibrahim as a deeply introspective journey through memory, cinema, and the passage of time. The exhibition gathers works spanning two decades, where photography and film merge into a singular, poetic language. For Nabil, cinema does not simply inform his aesthetic; it shapes his way of seeing, rooted in early encounters with the golden age of Egyptian film culture and its enduring visual legacy. His images carry the atmosphere of another era, where gestures appear suspended and color feels both vivid and melancholic. Each photograph begins as a black-and-white print before being meticulously hand-colored, echoing the techniques of vintage film posters once seen across Cairo. This process transforms the image into something intimate and tactile, resisting the reproducibility of digital photography. The figures within these works—often artists, performers, or symbolic presences—seem caught between worlds, embodying a quiet awareness of time slipping away. Nabil’s films extend this meditation, weaving together personal history and collective memory. In works such as The Beautiful Voyage, reflections on life unfold through voice, landscape, and movement, while The Room approaches the threshold between life and death with a sense of calm surrender. Collaborations with figures from cinema and performance introduce a layered narrative space, where reality and fiction blur. These moving images do not seek resolution; instead, they dwell in the uncertainty of existence, where departure and arrival remain intertwined. Throughout No One Knows but the Sky, the act of remembering becomes central. Nabil does not attempt to preserve the past as it was, but reimagines it through a cinematic lens that embraces loss and transformation. His work suggests that images hold a fragile permanence, capable of outlasting the bodies and moments they depict. In this space, time does not disappear but lingers, glowing softly like a scene that continues long after the screen fades to black. Image: Youssef Nabil, The Wedding, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim. © Youssef Nabil

Gold Standards: The Art of the Orotone transforms Robert Mann Gallery into a chamber of reflected light, where photography shimmers between image and object. Gathering nearly one hundred rare works, the exhibition revisits a little-known process that turns photographs into luminous artifacts. Each orotone glows from within, its surface infused with gold, creating a visual warmth that feels both intimate and theatrical. These works resist the neutrality often associated with photography, instead embracing a heightened, almost dreamlike register where reality appears gently burnished. Emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, the orotone process reflects a moment when photographs exist as precious, handcrafted items rather than infinitely reproducible images. Thin layers of gold are applied behind the photographic emulsion, producing a radiant effect that shifts with the viewer’s movement. Popularized by figures such as Edward Curtis, these images often depict the landscapes and peoples of the American West, filtered through an aesthetic that merges documentation with myth. The resulting pictures offer not only a record of place, but also a carefully composed vision shaped by light, desire, and cultural imagination. Within the exhibition, the American West appears as both real and constructed. Tourist destinations such as Yosemite become stages for a perpetual golden hour, their cliffs and waterfalls rendered with a reverence that borders on the sublime. Arthur Clarence Pillsbury’s photographs stand out for their attentiveness to natural phenomena, capturing shifting light with a near-scientific precision. Yet even these images participate in a broader visual language that frames the landscape as something to be admired, possessed, and remembered. Gold Standards ultimately invites reflection on the meaning of value in photography. Gold, as both material and metaphor, elevates these works while also complicating their status as souvenirs. Suspended between artistry and ornament, they suggest that every image carries layers of intention—what is shown, what is omitted, and what is transformed into something enduringly radiant. Image: A.C. Pillsbury The Gates of Yosemite, ca. 1900-1910 Orotone, courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery

Stella De Mont: This Life Wants You unfolds as a meditation on presence, surrender, and the quiet force of the natural world. In her first solo exhibition at Benrubi Gallery, De Mont turns to water, stone, forest, and desert light to shape images that feel less observed than received. Each photograph carries the sense of a moment charged with meaning, as if the landscape itself had briefly opened to reveal something intimate and enduring. Rooted in a practice shaped by her work as an intuitive guide, De Mont approaches photography as a form of listening. Her images do not isolate the body from its surroundings; they allow figure and terrain to enter into a state of alignment. A body suspended in cold water, a figure resting on sand at dusk, two women standing close within a field of trees: each scene suggests a passage between the physical and the spiritual, between what can be seen and what can only be felt. The photographs are marked by a stillness that never feels empty. Instead, they hold tension between fragility and ease, individuality and communion. De Mont often gathers two or three figures together, creating compositions where proximity becomes a language of trust and shared breath. In these works, the feminine appears not as an idea but as an energy of receptivity, intuition, and transformation. What gives This Life Wants You its force is the conviction that beauty can be a form of knowledge. De Mont’s pictures ask for attention, but also for openness: a willingness to slow down, to notice how a body belongs to the earth, and how the earth, in turn, seems to answer. From that exchange emerges a vision that is both tender and expansive, grounded in the ordinary and lit from within. Image: Stella de Mont, Cradled, 2025 © Stella de Mont

The Vanguard, presented at the Houston Center for Photography from March 12 through May 24, 2026, commemorates the institution’s forty-five years of dedication to the photographic arts. Conceived as both an exhibition and a reflection on institutional memory, the presentation brings together twenty women photographers whose work appeared during the center’s formative decades. Drawn from HCP’s archives, the exhibition highlights artists whose practices shaped the visual and intellectual landscape of contemporary photography while also illuminating the organization’s long-standing commitment to supporting women in the field. Since its founding in 1981, HCP has stood apart as a member-driven space where artists, curators, and educators collectively influenced the direction of the organization. Early leadership and curatorial voices helped foster an environment in which women photographers received visibility at a time when many institutions overlooked their contributions. The influence of figures such as Anne Wilkes Tucker helped establish a thoughtful and ambitious approach to photographic exhibitions, placing HCP among the most respected nonprofit photography centers in the United States. Over time, the organization cultivated a reputation for championing innovative work and introducing emerging artists to broader audiences. The Vanguard revisits that history through photographs that span a wide range of visual approaches and cultural perspectives. The exhibition includes works by artists such as Graciela Iturbide, Carrie Mae Weems, and An-My Lê, whose images address identity, social structures, and the complexities of memory and place. Their photographs appear alongside works by Deborah Bay, Dornith Doherty, Maggie Taylor, and others whose practices range from documentary observation to digital experimentation and conceptual storytelling. Together, these artists reveal the extraordinary diversity that characterizes contemporary photographic practice. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, the exhibition unfolds through a series of personal connections and curatorial reflections. Each selected artist represents a moment in the evolving relationship between the curator and the institution—artists discovered through HCP’s early programming, collaborators encountered through professional exchange, or photographers whose work emerged more recently within the Houston community. Through this layered approach, The Vanguard honors the women who shaped the center’s legacy while reaffirming the enduring importance of institutions that nurture artistic voices and expand the history of photography. Image: © Deborah Bay

From March 20 through May 24, 2026, Labors of Love | Illuminating the Archive brings the work of Edward Boches into dialogue with that of Arthur Griffin in the Founder’s Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Part of the museum’s ongoing Illuminating the Archive series, the exhibition invites a contemporary photographer to respond to Griffin’s vast body of work, creating a conversation across generations grounded in shared values of observation and respect. Boches, a Boston- and Cape Cod–based documentary photographer, has spent years immersed in communities defined by dedication: amateur boxers training in spare gyms, social justice activists organizing behind the scenes, oyster farmers tending their beds before dawn. His practice resists spectacle. Rather than focus on the triumphant moment—on stage, in print, or plated for applause—he turns his lens toward rehearsal, preparation, and repetition. The photographs honor the discipline required to pursue a calling, suggesting that meaning resides not only in achievement but in persistence. In revisiting Griffin’s archive, Boches discovered a kindred sensibility. Griffin, whose career spanned much of the twentieth century and who became a pioneer in the expressive use of color film, documented athletes, performers, and working people throughout New England with curiosity and dignity. As a photojournalist for publications including the Boston Globe and national magazines, he captured everyday life with clarity and warmth, revealing the pride embedded in ordinary labor. Installed alongside the larger exhibition Labor Daily | American Working Class, this focused presentation underscores a common thread: devotion to craft. Whether depicting a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at work or a lobster fisherman hauling traps, both photographers seek the same quiet intensity. Their images affirm that behind every public accomplishment lies unseen effort—labors of love that define character, sustain communities, and bind past to present through the enduring language of photography. Image: Cleaning the Run © Edward Boches

Sophie Calle: Overshare, on view from January 31 to May 24, 2026, presents the first major North American survey to fully explore the scope of Sophie Calle’s influential career. Spanning five decades, the exhibition traces how Calle has consistently placed herself at the center of her work, using her own experiences as both material and method. Long before digital platforms normalized public confession, Calle was already probing the fragile boundary between private life and public display. Through photography, text, video, and installation, her work reveals how storytelling, observation, and intimacy can become artistic strategies—inviting viewers into narratives that feel at once personal and unsettling. At the heart of Overshare lies a sustained reflection on self-disclosure and its inherent contradictions. Calle’s projects often begin with a simple gesture—following a stranger, documenting a relationship, or exposing a personal loss—but quickly unfold into complex investigations of trust, consent, and voyeurism. These works do not merely reveal the artist’s life; they implicate the viewer, activating curiosity and discomfort in equal measure. By foregrounding acts of looking, recording, and recounting, Calle raises enduring questions about surveillance and intrusion, issues that resonate strongly in a contemporary culture shaped by constant visibility and performance. Organized by the Walker Art Center and presented at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Sophie Calle: Overshare situates Calle’s practice within a broader cultural conversation about identity, authorship, and ethics. Her work feels strikingly prescient, anticipating how social media would later transform everyday life into curated narrative. Yet it also remains deeply rooted in conceptual traditions, emphasizing structure, repetition, and chance encounters. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to engage with Calle’s art in its full complexity, encouraging viewers to reconsider how stories are told, shared, and consumed—and what is at stake when the line between observer and subject quietly dissolves. Image: Sophie Calle, Autobiographies (Dead in a Good Mood) (detail), 2013, digital print and text panel, framed photo: 19 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. (50.5 x 50.5 cm), framed text: 30 1/8 x 19 7/8 in. (76.5 x 50.5 cm). © 2026 Sophie Calle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Rebel Girl: Luisa Dörr, Selina Román, and Jo Ann Chaus, presented at the Houston Center for Photography from March 12 through May 24, 2026, brings together the work of three contemporary photographers whose practices examine the evolving meanings of female identity. Through portraiture, performance, and conceptual self-representation, the exhibition highlights the many ways women challenge inherited expectations and reshape cultural narratives surrounding gender, beauty, and autonomy. The project continues the institution’s long-standing commitment to supporting women artists and amplifying voices that have historically received less recognition within the photographic field. Brazilian photographer Luisa Dörr contributes images from her series Imilla, which follows a collective of Indigenous women skateboarders in Cochabamba. Wearing traditional pollera skirts while skating through the city’s streets, the group merges ancestral identity with contemporary youth culture. The garments, once imposed during colonial rule and later associated with discrimination, are reclaimed as symbols of pride and resistance. Dörr’s portraits capture moments of confidence and solidarity, presenting the skaters not only as athletes but also as agents of cultural affirmation. In contrast, photographer Selina Román turns the camera toward her own body in the series XS. Through tightly framed images and vibrant fabrics, Román transforms familiar parts of the body into abstract compositions of color, curve, and texture. The photographs playfully disrupt conventional ideas of scale and beauty, inviting viewers to reconsider the ways the female form is seen and judged. By combining minimalist compositions with bold visual experimentation, Román creates images that oscillate between intimacy and abstraction. The exhibition concludes with work by Jo Ann Chaus, whose ongoing project Conversations with Myself examines the tension between mid-century ideals of femininity and contemporary understandings of identity. Through staged self-portraits and vintage clothing drawn from personal memory, Chaus reflects on aging, self-perception, and the lingering influence of social expectations. Together, the three artists trace a wide arc of experience, from youthful rebellion to introspective maturity, revealing how photography continues to provide a powerful space for questioning, reimagining, and affirming the many dimensions of womanhood. Image: © Luisa Dörr