The Photographer in the Garden

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.

The five groups of photographers in this exhibition worked collectively to capture the unique people, landscapes, and pace of life that distinguish Lexington, Kentucky. Maurice Strider collaborated with his students at Dunbar High School between 1934 and 1966 to create a rich archive of Black Lexington. Ida Nelson and Robert J. Long established Lafayette Studios in downtown Lexington to produce images for a range of commercial purposes between 1923 and 1959. The Lexington Camera Club was founded in 1936 and met regularly, often in room 208 at the UK Fine Arts Building, to encourage amateur photographers to develop more subjective uses for the medium. Their meetings continued for over thirty years with more than fifty members, and the club made its mark on photographic history with images that blend memory and imagination. In 2004, Marcie Crim, Jonathan Rodgers, David Schankula, and Richie Wireman began the Lexicon Project, a documentation of diverse communities in the city. Kurt Gohde and Kremena Todorova posted photographs and narratives on Facebook between 2020 and 2021 to facilitate connection in a time of social distancing.   This exhibition is presented in honor of Lexington’s 250th birthday celebration and features work from our Museum collection, University of Kentucky Special Collections, and the Kentucky Room at the Lexington Public Library.  Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Christopher and the Rebuilding of America from Portfolio Three: The Work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1959 (printed 1974), gelatin silver print. Collection of the UK Art Museum, Robert C. May Bequest.

This exhibition celebrates Black girls’ complex emotional lives as portrayed in a range of artworks, from portraits painted in the 1930s to twenty-first-century photographs. Resistance, hope, anger, defiance, curiosity, joy, anxiety, vulnerability, and exhaustion are some of the feelings seen on the faces of children who have been on the front lines of profound social changes such as the Great Migration, Civil Rights movement, Women’s March, and Black Lives Matter movement. Inexpression can also be a strategic refusal that makes space for freedom in an often-dangerous world. Artists featured include Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Frank Döring, Larry Fink, Edward Franklin Fisk, Baldwin S. Lee, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, RaMell Ross, Lorna Simpson, Alexandra Soteriou, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems. The Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, part of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, will host their 30th Annual Black Women’s Conference, “WE ARE THE CULTURE: A Symposium on Black Girls and Girlhood,” on March 7 – 8, 2025. Works on view are visual counterpoints to many of the themes studied as part of the symposium such as play, innovation, technical excellence, and global cultural connections. Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Mayflowers from the series May Days Long Forgotten, 2002, chromogenic print. Collection of the UK Art Museum, purchase: The Robert C. May Photography Fund.

To see a highly selective survey of the best contemporary photography from Colorado and across the country, don’t miss CPAC’s 62nd Annual Juried Members’ Show. This tradition showcases CPAC’s talented community of over 700 members and provides artists with an important exhibition opportunity. Juror Anne Leighton Massoni, Executive Director of the Houston Center for Photography in Texas, selected photographs by 37 CPAC members to exhibit. She also selected 19 additional works for inclusion in the exhibition catalog and a tv slideshow in the gallery as a Special Mention subset. Members were selected from a pool of 206 photographers who submitted more than 1,000 images. At the Opening Reception and Awards Ceremony on June 28th, Anne will present her selections for Best in Show and two Honorable Mentions. The Best in Show winner will receive $400 and the image will be added to our Permanent Collection. The Director’s Choice winner will receive $150, presented by Samantha Johnston, CPAC Executive Director & Curator. All award winners will also receive an exhibition catalog. Dupuy Bateman IV, Josh Bergeron, Mat Bobby, Ross Borgida, Lynne Breitfeller, Jo Ann Chaus, Giles Clasen, Ron Cooper, Sophia Poppy Ericksen, Bryan Florentin, Susan R. Goldstein, Rob Hammer, Alexander Heilner, Kevin Hoth, Patricia Howard, Constance Jaeggi, Michael Allan Jones, Erin M. Karp, Katie Kindle, Alison Lake, Brady LaVigne, Ernie Leyba, Rodney Gene Mahaffey, Zach Miners, James Montague, Heather Oelklaus, James Olson, Jason Pendleton, Linda Plaisted, Allison Plass, Bob Rosinsky, Erin Schoepke, John Shelton, Steven Silvers, JP Terlizzi, Frank Varney, and Torrance York. SPECIAL MENTIONS John Bonath, Lynne Breitfeller, Thomas Carr, Jo Ann Chaus, Michael Chioran, Teri Figliuzzi, Nicola Huffstickler, Alison Lake, J. K. Lavin, Zoe Congyu Liu, Anthony Maes, Jason Pendleton, Sage Sankofa, John Shelton, Steven Silvers, Laurie Smith, David Thoutt, and Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco. Image: Couple, BanHo, Vietnam, © Ron Cooper

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.

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 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

“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

“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

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.