Ruven Afanador: Great Performers

Foto Féminas: 10-Year Anniversary marks a significant milestone in the ongoing effort to amplify the voices of Latin American and Caribbean women and non-binary photographers. Founded by Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, Foto Féminas has spent the past decade building a bridge between regions, generations, and visual languages—creating a space where underrepresented artists can share their perspectives on identity, memory, and belonging. This anniversary exhibition stands as both a celebration and a reflection on ten years of creative exchange, resilience, and community. Bringing together multiple artists from the Foto Féminas network, the exhibition showcases a wide range of photographic styles and stories that span continents and cultures. From intimate portrayals of everyday life to bold documentary projects, the featured works embody the diversity of experience that defines Latin America and the Caribbean today. Accompanying the exhibition is a reading library of publications that further contextualize the artists’ practices and the evolving dialogue around gender and visual representation in contemporary photography. Since its founding in 2015, Foto Féminas has hosted monthly online features and organized exhibitions across the globe—in Argentina, China, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, and Mexico—demonstrating the platform’s far-reaching influence. Curated by Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, this special anniversary exhibition honors not only the artists themselves but also the collective effort to challenge visibility barriers within the art world. Supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Office of the Governor, the New York State Legislature, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Foto Féminas: 10-Year Anniversary serves as a testament to the power of photography as an agent of connection and change. It invites viewers to look beyond borders and discover how women and non-binary image-makers continue to reshape the visual narratives of the Americas. Image: In January 2017, at the Poli-Valencia detention facility in Venezuela, a transgender woman reveals her wounds and scars through the bars of her cell. © Ana María Arévalo Gosen

Greetings from Niagara at Leica Gallery reframes the familiar postcard image of Niagara Falls into a landscape of memory and consequence. Natalia Neuhaus combines documentary investigation and archival research to reveal how wartime industry transformed parts of Niagara Falls, NY, into sites contaminated by uranium refining during the Manhattan Project. Her photographs trace radioactive byproducts embedded in sidewalks, buildings, and homes—everyday surfaces that quietly record a history of secrecy and environmental neglect. A graduate of the Leica x VII Agency Mentorship Program, Neuhaus fuses journalistic rigor with visual sensitivity. Her images shift between intimate domestic scenes and evidence of industrial harm, showing children at play, neighborhood streets, and the misted grandeur of the falls alongside the less visible traces of contamination. The result is a body of work that resists easy binaries: beauty and danger coexist, memory and erasure overlap, and photography serves as both witness and accusation. Neuhaus insists that these are not distant footnotes of history but living conditions that demand attention and redress. Greetings from Niagara embodies Leica’s commitment to photography as civic inquiry. By bringing archival documents, scientific context, and carefully observed images into one project, Neuhaus asks viewers to reckon with the long shadows of technological progress. Her work calls for awareness and justice for residents whose lives have been shaped by industrial decisions beyond their control. In these photographs, a celebrated landscape becomes a layered record—beautiful, haunted, and impossible to ignore. Image: © Natalia Neuhaus

The 2024 WPOW Photography Exhibition celebrates the creative vision and storytelling power of women in visual journalism. Curated by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for the Women Photojournalists of Washington (WPOW), this annual showcase features remarkable work from twenty-three photographers who have documented the world with courage, empathy, and precision. Each image offers a distinct perspective on the human experience, reflecting the diversity of both subject matter and voice that defines contemporary photojournalism. Founded as a volunteer-driven non-profit, WPOW is dedicated to advancing the role of women—and those who identify as women—in photography, video, and multimedia reporting. The organization serves as both a professional resource and a community, bringing together over four hundred members, from seasoned photojournalists to emerging talents and students. Through grants, mentorship, and educational initiatives, WPOW provides vital support to those shaping the visual record of our times. Each year, the organization curates a traveling exhibition highlighting the most powerful and representative works created by its members. The 2024 edition presents images from a distinguished group of contributors, including Katina Zentz, Amy Toensing, Maansi Srivastava, Erin Schaff, Ana Elisa Sotelo van Oordt, Allison Robbert, Astrid Riecken, Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, Valerie Plesch, Rosa Pineda, Leah Millis, Jacquelyn Martin, Melina Mara, Anna Rose Layden, Olga Jaramillo, Evelyn Hockstein, Carol Guzy, Tierney Cross, Arwen Clemans, Bonnie Cash, Allison Bailey, Jocelyn Augustino, and Céline Apollon. The exhibition stands as both a celebration and an act of advocacy. It reminds audiences that the work of women photojournalists is essential not only for its artistic merit but for the depth of understanding it brings to the stories that shape our world. Through their collective lens, WPOW members continue to expand the narrative of who tells history—and how it is seen. Image: © Carol Guzy

Leica Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to present Moonstruck, a compelling solo exhibition by Mona Kuhn, opening September 3 through November 2, 2025. The evening’s vernissage, held from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM, will introduce visitors to a new body of work commissioned in collaboration with Leica. Moonstruck evolves Mona Kuhn’s enduring exploration of the human form by merging it with abstraction, inspired directly by musical improvisation and atmospheric light conditions in Southern California and beyond Artist Mona Kuhn reflects, “Madly in love and partially insane, I fell for a glimmer, a gesture, a vanishing trace. I had been struck by the moon.” In Moonstruck, Kuhn continues her twenty-five-year practice of intimate photographic approaches to the nude, but takes a more abstract and painterly direction. Through refined techniques and collaborative improvisations, she dissolves distinctions between figure, landscape, and abstraction, crafting dream‑like compositions that evoke both the ethereal and the corporeal Born in São Paulo in 1969, Mona Kuhn has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2005. She has exhibited widely, including retrospective exhibitions titled Works (Los Angeles, New York, London, and Shanghai in 2021), Kings Road (Paris, 2023), and Between Modernism and Surrealism (New York, 2024) Kuhn’s work is known for its deeply expressive representation of the body and subtle interplay of light, form, and atmosphere. In Moonstruck, she harnesses the precision and sensitivity of the Leica SL3 to explore new horizons in abstraction and gesture

In the Apsáalooke (Crow) language, the word Áakiwilaxpaake (People of the Earth) describes Indigenous people living in North America, pointing to a time before colonial borders were established. In this exhibition, curated by the Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star, artists from throughout what is now called North America—representing various Native nations and affiliations—offer diverse visions, building on histories of image-making. Some of the artists presented in Native America: In Translation are propelled by what the historian Philip J. Deloria describes as “Indigenous indignation”—a demand to reckon with eviction from ancestral lands—while others translate varied inflections of gender and language, as well as the impacts of climate change, into inventive performance-based imagery or investigations into personal and public archives. “The ultimate form of decolonization is through how Native languages form a view of the world,” Red Star notes. “These artists provide sharp perceptions, rooted in their own cultures.” Wendy Red Star (born 1981, Billings, Montana) is a Portland, Oregon–based artist raised on the Apsáalooke reservation. Her work is informed both by her Native American cultural heritage and by her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives that are inquisitive, witty, and unsettling. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Red Star’s first major monograph, Delegation, is copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts. This exhibition is adapted from “Native America,” the Fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine, guest edited by Wendy Red Star. It is organized by Aperture and made possible, in part, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Image: Rebecca Belmore, "matriarch," 2018, from the series "nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations)." Photograph by Henri Robideau. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Rice Gallery presents HOME, a heartfelt group exhibition by John Dolan, Michele O’Hana, and Jack Dolan—an artistic family whose collaboration transforms personal history into a shared creative expression. The show, running this fall, invites visitors into an intimate world where fine art photography, design, ceramics, textiles, and metalwork intertwine to explore the essence of belonging and the meaning of home. Inspired by the family’s barn studio in Chatham, New York, HOME reimagines the gallery as a warm and tactile domestic space. Michele O’Hana’s design transforms the interior into a layered environment of hand-stained wooden walls, glowing porcelain lights, and woven textiles. John Dolan’s photographs rest quietly within this setting—capturing the serenity of landscapes and the intimacy of lived spaces—while Jack Dolan’s hand-forged knives stand as sculptural reminders of labor, craftsmanship, and lineage. Together, their works evoke both memory and materiality, creating a sensory experience that feels deeply grounded and profoundly human. The exhibition poses a timeless question: what makes a home? Is it built from the materials we touch, the memories we share, or the acts of creation that connect us? For this family, home is all of these—an evolving place shaped by collaboration, movement, and love. Through wool, wood, porcelain, and steel, each artist contributes a distinct voice to a collective narrative rooted in care and authenticity. John Dolan’s meditative photographs reflect decades spent observing life’s quiet moments, while Michele O’Hana’s handcrafted objects reveal her reverence for natural materials and enduring design. Jack Dolan, trained in blacksmithing in Ireland, forges steel into elegant forms that bridge the functional and the poetic. Together, their works form a living dialogue—a portrait of family, craft, and connection. In HOME, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the handmade becomes the heartbeat of art itself. Image: John Dolan, Dunlough, West Cork, Ireland, 1996 @ John Dolan

Gallery Luisotti presents the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Arlene Mejorado, a body of work that intertwines memory, geography, and identity into a poetic reflection on belonging. The exhibition gathers eleven framed photographs, a sculptural installation of grass, and a luminous hanging made of printed film strips. Together, these works trace the artist’s evolving relationship with the landscapes and layered histories of Los Angeles—a city that is both origin and ongoing subject. The exhibition opens with a diptych that sets the tone for what follows. A fabric backdrop, positioned on a grassy median along a busy street, functions as both stage and screen. Against it, the city flickers between presence and illusion, while the artist’s shadow appears and fades like a memory suspended in motion. By situating this cinematic device within an everyday urban site, Mejorado bridges the artificial and the lived, the interior and the exterior, offering a meditation on visibility and place. Throughout the series, curtains, mirrors, and familial portraits recur as symbols of connection and distance. Mejorado rephotographs worn images from her father’s archive directly on the skin—her own and her partner’s—folding generations into a single frame. This act of re-inscription turns photography into an embodied ritual, merging private lineage with the broader topography of the city. The domestic and the public collide, blurring where home begins and where it dissolves. In her black-and-white silver prints, Mejorado deepens this spatial interplay through reflective glass and layered imagery. The mirrored surfaces collapse time and perspective, implicating both artist and viewer in the reconstruction of memory. Arlene Mejorado’s work is ultimately a form of cultural restoration—a delicate weaving of absence, inheritance, and renewal within the ever-changing landscape of Los Angeles. Image: Crista and Fenix at the Median in North Hills, 2023 Archival color pigment print 35 x 28 in. Edition of 5 + 2 AP © Arlene Mejorado

Luke Shannon’s Replacement Character explores the intersection of surveillance, identity, and technology through a strikingly physical yet digital installation: the plotter-scanner. This custom-built device merges a large-scale plotter with a traditional document scanner to form a life-sized scanner bed. Within this hybrid machine, Shannon reimagines how the act of recording and observing the self is transformed in the digital age, turning documentation into both performance and reflection. The plotter-scanner functions as an instrument of duality—both surveillance and witness. The scanner’s mechanical precision evokes detachment, yet the process it enables demands closeness, intimacy, and bodily presence. Each image produced holds the human form at life scale, fragmented and reassembled across lines and grids. Shannon likens this experience to the online self: dispersed across screens, profiles, and feeds, perpetually updated yet never whole. In engaging directly with his machine, the artist performs a kind of living self-portrait—one that is processual, time-based, and inherently unstable. The title Replacement Character refers to the symbol “?” the digital placeholder that appears when a system cannot recognize a character. This symbol becomes a metaphor for contemporary identity—a reminder of how our representations are constantly breaking, reloading, and reforming in a landscape dominated by data and visibility. Shannon’s installation reflects on the fragility of selfhood in an era where constant documentation leads not to permanence but to replacement. Through this merging of body, image, and code, Shannon prompts viewers to consider what it means to be perceived by machines. His work exposes the paradox of a world in which technologies see us everywhere, yet never fully understand us, offering a meditation on presence, absence, and the evolving shape of the human image in digital life. Image: Luke Shannon, Sunday, August 31, 2025 at 1:42 PM (Sleeping) Unique print (+1 AP) Archival pigment print, signed on verso + Ethereum token. 
58.5 × 34 in. · 148.6 × 86.4 cm © Luke Shannon

Pamela Hanson’s photography captures a world where fashion feels natural, personal, and full of life. Unlike the staged glamour often found in glossy magazines, her images reveal genuine emotion and friendship between photographer and model. Laughter, play, and spontaneity define her work, reflecting a time when beauty felt effortless. Beginning her career in Paris during the 1980s, Hanson lived among models and absorbed their world—their ambitions, daily routines, and creative energy. This closeness helped her develop a unique visual language, one that celebrated authenticity at a moment when fashion photography was dominated by carefully constructed ideals. Her exhibition and the release of her book The ’90s (Rizzoli) pay tribute to a decade that transformed the fashion industry. Many of the images featured have never been seen before, offering an intimate look into a time defined by freedom and self-expression. Hanson describes the collection as “a love letter to the decade that changed everything,” a reflection of an era when style was spirited, relaxed, and human—qualities that continue to resonate in today’s cultural landscape. Born in London and raised in Switzerland, Hanson’s cosmopolitan background shaped her vision early on. After attending the American School in Lugano and the University of Colorado, she began her professional journey assisting the celebrated photographer Arthur Elgort. Her rise was swift, with photographs of emerging supermodels such as Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Kate Moss appearing in leading magazines including VOGUE, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, and Vanity Fair. Beyond editorial work, she created campaigns for major brands like Dior, Ralph Lauren, and Estée Lauder, and directed public service films supporting causes such as juvenile diabetes research and drug prevention. Today, Pamela Hanson’s photographs stand as both cultural icons and personal narratives—testaments to an artist who captured fashion’s most human side. Image: Pamela Hanson, Nadja Auermann, Paris, 1994 © Pamela Hanson

Hauser & Wirth is honored to present its first New York City exhibition devoted to the work of Sir Don McCullin CBE, lauded internationally as one of the most significant photojournalists of our time. Coinciding with his 90th birthday, McCullin’s most comprehensive US presentation to date brings together over fifty works, as well as seldom seen archival materials and historical ephemera. ‘A Desecrated Serenity’ offers a deep look at both the beauty and brutality of McCullin’s expansive archive. From the gritty unfiltered images taken on the battlefield and in postwar Britain to painterly European vistas and meticulously crafted still lifes, the exhibition reveals the twin forces that course through and characterize McCullin’s oeuvre: an innate and profound compassion for humanity and exceptional mastery of composition and process. ‘A Desecrated Serenity’ chronicles McCullin’s remarkable seven-decade career, including his seventeen-year tenure as special contract photographer for The Sunday Times, when his assignments took him to the frontlines of war across Greece, Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland and Beirut. It was during this time that he captured searing images such as ‘A shell-shocked US Marine, Hué’ (1968). This widely circulated photograph shows an American soldier gripped by quiet distress during the brutal battle to retake Hue City—one of the Vietnam War’s fiercest conflicts—his intense expression capturing the war’s deep personal toll. ‘A Desecrated Serenity’ presents these harrowing images alongside personal objects that speak to the extraordinary risks McCullin faced in the field, most notably his Nikon F camera that absorbed a bullet during combat. McCullin’s deep, hard-won sense of empathy, shaped by his youth living through poverty and violence in East London, is evident in these images and objects. Examples of photographs taken during McCullin’s formative years, portraits such as ‘The Guvnors in their Sunday Suits, Finsbury Park, London’ (1958) and stark industrial landscapes––reflecting the grim realities of crime and unemployment in Northern England in the 1950s and 1960s––serve to demonstrate the photographer’s innate ability to capture sorrow and dignity in equal measure, finding poetry within bleakness, serenity within desecration. The exhibition also delves into the work McCullin made during his personal travels across India, Indonesia and the Sudan, where he often turned his lens to local communities, everyday rituals, celebrations and architecture. Intimate compositions such as ‘India, The Great Elephant Festival, The River Gandak’ (1965) transcend a straightforward documentary practice and engage the viewer through their emotional charge, a result of McCullin’s empathetic exchange with his subjects. In the late 1980’s, McCullin turned his lens toward more peaceful subjects—the landscapes of France, Scotland and England, in Somerset, where he had been evacuated to as a child during the Blitz and where he now makes his home. Rendered in richly tonal black and white, these painterly depictions of the English countryside—the place the artist himself has described as his greatest refuge—offer an exquisitely personal and poignant meditation on solitude, memory and the longing for stillness. They capture wild, windswept vistas that echo the emotional resonance of McCullin’s earlier reportage, revealing nature not merely as an idyllic escape but as a site of quiet reckoning. The same chromatic and emotional gravity carries over to a selection of still lifes inspired by the work of Flemish and Dutch Renaissance masters, as well as images of Roman statuary evolving from his ‘Southern Frontiers’ series, McCullin’s 25-year survey of the cultural and architectural remains of the Roman Empire. Imbued with both awe and unease, these images, like much of McCullin’s oeuvre, inhabit a space between beauty and brutality, evoking the psychological weight of history seen through the photographer’s unflinching eye and compassionate gaze. Image: Don McCullin, Catholic youths escaping from CS gas, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1971, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Samuel Fosso’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, which opens to the public on Wednesday, September 3, 2025, with a reception from 6-8 PM. This is Fosso’s first solo exhibition in New York in more than two decades, and spans more than thirty years of his practice, showcasing works from his series 70s Lifestyle and African Spirits. The exhibition follows the unveiling of an installation of the artist’s photographs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing earlier this year; the exhibition also precedes the artist’s inclusion in Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, a survey of African studio photography at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Oluremi Onabanjo and opening on December 14, 2025. Over his decades-long career, Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso (b. 1962; Kumba, Cameroon) has deployed self-portraiture to innovate on storied traditions of studio photography from West Africa and beyond. Since the debut of Fosso’s work on a global stage when he was awarded First Prize at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali in 1994, the artist has used his practice as a conduit for questions central to identity: How can self-representation reclaim African identity from colonial imagery? How is Fosso’s personal history reflected in collective history? And, critically, how does photography assist in resisting erasure? Collector and author Artur Walther writes in his foreword for AUTOPORTRAIT, a 2020 monograph of the artist’s work: “Since the days of his experimental self-portraits, made as a teenager in the 1970s in a commercial studio in Bangui, the Central African Republic, [Fosso] has constantly explored the mythmaking potential of the camera. In his self-portraits, he amplifies himself and yet becomes someone else entirely.” Across all his work, and beginning with his earliest series 70s Lifestyle (1975-78), Fosso intuitively pulls back the curtain, collapsing subject and subjectivity by depicting himself, the photographer. 70s Lifestyle was incepted in 1975 at Photo Studio Nationale, the photography venture the artist opened at just thirteen, three years after fleeing from Nigeria’s civil war to Bangui, the Central African Republic. After hours busy with customers taking headshots, portraits, and passport photos, Fosso would photograph himself with the last few frames in a roll of film to send to his grandmother in Nigeria. Over time, the practice took on the capricious qualities of a true artist’s process. In an interview with the late Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 56th Venice Biennale, Fosso shared: “Sometimes when I made photographs I was not satisfied with, where I didn’t feel beautiful inside, I would cut up the negatives instead of printing them… I did not know I was making art photography. What I did know is I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become.” Fosso’s early interest in photography was driven by his own exclusion from photographic record: as a child, Fosso, partially paralyzed, disabled, and displaced, was not pictured until he was ten years old. Eventually, this erasure would spell out the social value of representation to the artist, and self-portraiture would show a way to enter himself into an archive with agency. In the vintage black-and-white self-portraits of 70s Lifestyle, Fosso shows his keen understanding of the fashion of the time, of his body, and of the formal qualities of the photographs themselves. Every image varies despite their consistent elements: figure, outfit, backdrop, lights. The trappings of the studio are transfigured by Fosso into shapes influenced by imported magazines and popular African singers. The artist screens himself behind dividers, dresses up and down, holds props, and, most critically, looks directly into his camera’s lens. This produces a gestalt that reflects a pop sensibility and uses the commercial as a site of metamorphosis. 70s Lifestyle makes the processes inherent to studio photography self-aware and selfreferential, and brings Fosso and the viewer into a mutual contract of observation. Fosso would continue this reflexive notion of spectatorship would continue in the following decades, which over time would continue to expand in the scope of its inquiry. The artist’s landmark series African Spirits (2008) orients his practice of self-depiction towards a politically-minded act of channeling. Across fourteen stark monochrome images, Fosso casts himself as figures key to African and diasporic histories. By inhabiting visages like Angela Davis, Miles Davis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela, Tommie Smith, Malcolm X, and more, the artist connects a web of historical movements into a unified arc of Black liberation on a global scale. The series was initially conceived as an investigation into the global impact of slavery, and grew into an inspirational review of figures committed to human dignity and the reclamation of culture. Ultimately, it sought to correct a problem of institutional underrepresentation. Though concerned with history, each of these images is only a partial restaging of its source, a détournement from icon into iconography. Fosso strips away the backgrounds behind each subject, lending each composition a graphic quality. Streamlined and simplified, these figures become the symbolic forms they take in collective memory. Fosso’s oeuvre becomes an evaluation of the deep significance of photography in the modern era, from the historic to the contemporary; from the documentary to the constructed. A thread emerges in tracing the evolution from 70s Lifestyle through African Spirits: an emergence of the self-portrait as something more, an advancement of concern from the personal to the historical. In an almost atavistic process, Fosso harnesses this essential power of photography to show collective and historic truths. Works by Samuel Fosso are held in permanent collections around the globe, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; as well as the Musée des Beaux-Arts; Tate Modern; Victoria & Albert Museum; Musée National d’Art Moderne; Centre Pompidou; Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Deutsche Bank, among others. Fosso has mounted solo exhibitions at institutions including the Walther Collection; National Portrait Gallery; Princeton University Art Museum; Museum der Moderne; Museo de Canal, and Jack Shainman Gallery, among others. In 2023, the Menil Collection, presented a solo exhibition of Fosso’s entire African Spirits series. Fosso has exhibited work in prominent group exhibitions internationally, including at the International Center of Photography; Art Institute of Chicago; Fotomuseum; Barbican Art Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary Art; Stephen Friedman Gallery, and Gagosian Gallery. The artist has been awarded prizes such as the Prix Afrique en Creations in 1995; First Prize for photography at the Dak’Art Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, Dakar, Senegal in 2000, and Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2023. Fosso lives and works between Bangui, Central African Republic and Paris, France. Image: Samuel Fosso, Autoportrait, From the series 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–1978 © the artist and courtesy Yossi Milo, New York

The photo-based work of Louviere+Vanessa draws on Southern Gothic traditions. They have developed a style innovatively using mixed media and photography. Their latest work, Dust of the Stars, delves into the delicate interplay between earthly life and the cosmos. Each piece is finished with a gilt varnish and homemade bioplastics, infusing the work with a subtle luminosity that is a reminder of the divine spark within all matter, connecting the mundane with the transcendent Our latest series “Dust of the Stars” explores the intrinsic connection between the celestial and the earthly. We have created a unique medium by combining bone and water to form handmade bio plastics, symbolizing the organic and the intangible. These images represent what the natural world is made of: bone, water, cartilage, the essence of life and a symbol of fluidity and change. Bone and water then come together again to fuse these images into a state of permanence, something the living world is not afforded. L+V 2025 This collection delves into the delicate interplay between human life and the Cosmos; with Carl Sagan’s poetic assertion that we are all make of “Star Stuff” as inspiration. These photographs came to be from a time of intense personal transformation, V’s ongoing struggles with major spinal surgeries and the continuous challenges and changes she faces. Vanessa and her father handmade the frames of all our past work and with his passing, we chose to leave the art unframed but still include him by adding a trace of his ashes into each piece… star stuff. Instead the pieces are floating off the wall with magnets, giving them room to change their form as if they were alive. - L+V 2025 Louviere + Vanessa (Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown) make their home and art in New Orleans. Their work combines the mediums and nuances of film, photography, painting and printmaking. They use Holgas, scanners, 8mm film, destroyed negatives, wax and blood. Since they began showing professionally in 2004, they have been in over 50 exhibits and film festivals in America and abroad. They are included in the collections of the Museum of Art | Houston, the Photomedia Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as the film archive for Globians International Film in Potsdam Germany, Microcinema in San Francisco, and the George Eastman House. In addition to producing their innovative still images, Louviere + Vanessa experiment in moving pictures. They have created the first movie, consisting of 1,900 frames, shot with a plastic Holga camera. Based on that film, they shot the animation sequence for Rosanne Cash’s short film, “Mariners & Musicians”, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. They were included in the Australian Photography Biennale. Image: Rime, 2025, 14 x 20”, homemade bio plastic and gold paint, unique variant edition of 3