Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue

In conjunction with the 2025 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to presnt A layin’ on of hands..., a solo exhibition of work by Alayna N. Pernell. In A layin’ on of hands..., Alayna N. Pernell explores the cultural and emotional significance of care in the lives of Black women, drawing inspiration from a phrase she often heard growing up in Alabama. In her community, "a laying on of hands" symbolized the transmission of power, healing, and blessing through touch—a love language Pernell has carefully incorporated into her visual practice. Through photography and archival exploration, this exhibition reflects on how the act of care shapes the lives and experiences of Black women. Our Mothers’ Gardens delves into historical photographic research, offering a broader societal perspective, while for the record intimately explores personal narrative through the act of mending photographs. Together, these works form a nuanced portrayal of the interconnectedness between the historical and personal facets of care—revealing how care transcends individual experience to become a deeply rooted cultural and historical force. Pernell envisions this exhibition as both a memorial and an honorary space— one that remembers and honors the lives of Black women. These works collectively reveal that care is not just a personal practice, but a force that continues to shape the lives of Black women and the communities they sustain. About the Artist Alayna N. Pernell is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from Heflin, Alabama. She is currently the Associate Lecturer of Photography and Imaging at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is also a Content Editor for Lenscratch, an online photographic arts publication, and founder of Surely You Know, an archival photographic initiative dedicated to returning displaced photographs to black families. In May 2019, she graduated from The University of Alabama where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in Photography and a minor in African American Studies. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2021. Pernell’s artistic practice considers the gravity of the mental well-being of Black women concerning the physical and metaphorical spaces they inhabit. She has provided lectures about her work at various spaces including Texas Tech University, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, The Sheldon, and Syracuse University, among others. Her work has been exhibited in various cities across the United States, including FLXST Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Refraction Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), JKC Gallery (Trenton, NJ), RUSCHWOMAN Gallery (Chicago, IL), Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO), Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), among several others. Her work is currently held in private collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Illinois State Museum. Pernell was named the 2020-2021 recipient of the James Weinstein Memorial Award by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Department of Photography, the 2021 Snider Prize award recipient by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, a 2023 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Emerging Artist recipient, and a 2024 gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix Artist. She was also recognized on the Silver Eye Center of Photography 2022 Silver List, Photolucida’s 2021 Critical Mass Top 50, and a 2021 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention, among others.

In conjunction with the 2025 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to announce, On the Shelf, an open call for a photo book exhibition, juried by Tim Carpenter. With an open theme, On the Shelf seeks well-conceived, original, and compelling photo books. Eligible entries include all types of photo books, whether self-published, handmade, or commercially published. Books by or featuring the work of more than one artist are also eligible. Books must have been completed within the last three years.. A Juror’s Choice and Honorable Mention will be awarded. The Juror’s Choice Award comes with a $500 cash prize. The cost to submit to On the Shelf is $25.00 for a single photo book project. Please note: artists will be responsible for the cost of shipping books to and from Filter Space gallery if accepted into the exhibition.

Pace is pleased to present The Weight of Hope, a monumental exhibition by Robert Longo, in New York from September 11 to October 25. As a sequel to the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent presentation of Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History—curated by Margaret Andera, the institution’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art—Longo will take over Pace’s entire 540 West 25th Street gallery, exhibiting 26 drawings, three films, three sculptures, and 33 studies across the flagship’s first, second, third, and seventh floors as well as its exterior. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s new catalogue for The Acceleration of History, featuring contributions from Andera, artist Rashid Johnson, and journalist Tom Teicholz, will be released during the run of Pace’s show and available to purchase on-site at the gallery. A Pace Live performance featuring musician Rhys Chatham, along with an opening reception for the exhibition, will take place on the evening of Wednesday, September 10, and the show will also be open to visitors from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 11. The Weight of Hope will highlight Longo’s enduring engagement with social and political happenings in his work across mediums, bringing together large-scale charcoal drawings, films, sculptures, and studies—including private and institutional loans—created between 2014 and 2025. This landmark show at Pace will open on the heels of the artist’s first full-scale Scandinavian survey, on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark through August 31, and his presentation of a new multimedia work at Art Basel Unlimited in June. Over the past decade, the artist has increasingly turned his focus to images from the media, including coverage of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the Black Lives Matter movement. Building up his hyper realistic, black-and- white charcoal drawings in layers with painstaking attention to light and shadow, he creates highly detailed works based on news photography as well as images of protests, civil unrest, and war on the Internet. Transforming his source images into epically scaled, emotionally resonant compositions, he reflects on power, violence, and national mythmaking. His works slow down the “image storm” and “culture of impatience” in which we live through the historic and venerable medium of charcoal, encouraging viewers to take time to absorb and process the turbulence of the current moment—both in the US and around the globe—while also proposing hope for the future. “As artists, we’re reporters,” Longo said in a recent interview for his Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibition. “Our job is to report what it’s like to be alive now. We’re one of the few professions left in the world that has the opportunity to try to tell the truth. I feel a moral imperative to preserve the images of our shared dystopic present with the hope that something will one day change.” Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Longo was deeply influenced by social and political issues from an early age. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the US invasion of Cambodia—including one of Longo’s former classmates, whose body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that shocked the world. In 1973, Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he trained as a sculptor and began his decades-long friendship with fellow artist Cindy Sherman. The two moved to New York together in 1977, and, throughout the 1980s, Longo frequently performed in New York rock clubs in Menthol Wars, his band with Richard Prince. During this period, he also designed album covers for numerous bands and directed music videos for New Order and R.E.M. In his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York in 1981, Longo showed his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, works that became icons of the “Pictures Generation.” This group, which includes Longo, Sherman, Prince, Louise Lawler, and David Salle, is known for critiquing the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media through their art. Working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales over the course of his career, Longo cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Today, his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and many other international institutions.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by photographer Paolo Roversi at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Opening on September 12, during New York Fashion Week, and running through October 25, this focused retrospective will feature works produced by Roversi between the early 1990s and the present, highlighting the artist’s relationships with his many collaborators in the fashion industry. Roversi’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York—his first solo show with the gallery since 2019—will present an overview of his storied career through a selection of photographs created over the past 35 years.“Every portrait is a meeting, an exchange, a mutual intimate confession,” Roversi has said of his work. The show will shed light on Roversi’s legacy as the artist behind some of the most iconic fashion images of our time. Drawing inspiration from the work of August Sander, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, Roversi developed a distinctive style that is deeply influenced by the Byzantine architecture and rich cultural history of his birthplace, Ravenna, Italy. “Paolo's photography is timeless,” Sylvie Lécallier, curator Roversi’s 2024 exhibition at the Palais Galliera in Paris, said in an interview last year. “It is detached from the spirit of the times, from the ephemeral trends of fashion. It is located both at the heart of fashion and at the edge.” Made with Polaroid film and mostly taken in his Parisian studio, Roversi's dreamlike, enigmatic images are imbued with a classical sensibility. His studio, he has said, “is a place for the chance, the dream, the imaginary to prevail. I give these forces as much space as I can.” In addition to his collaborators in the fashion world, Roversi has recently joined forces with his friend and fellow artist Sheila Hicks. For these works, which will figure in Pace’s exhibition, no discussion is had between the two artists regarding a direction for the final work, each knowing and respecting the other’s practice. Born in Ravenna, Italy in 1947, Roversi discovered his passion for photography during a 1964 family holiday in Spain— upon his return from the trip, he built a darkroom in the basement of his home. He began his career in 1970, taking photojournalism assignments from the Associated Press. In 1973, at the invitation of photographer and ELLE art director Peter Knapp, Roversi moved to Paris, where he has lived and worked ever since. After a nine-month period assisting British photographer Lawrence Sackmann, whom he cites as an influential teacher, Roversi started shooting independently with small commissions for ELLE and the band Depeche Mode, gaining wider recognition with a Dior beauty campaign in 1980 and ultimately forging his reputation as one of the industry's leading photographers by the mid- 1980s. As model Guinevere van Seenus, who has worked with Roversi for nearly three decades, has said, “Having your portrait taken is more than just looking at the camera, [Paolo] creates the space for the person to [emerge]." Today, Roversi’s work can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has had major exhibitions around the world—in recent years, at the Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Palais Galliera in Paris, the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, and Dallas Contemporary in Texas—and has published numerous books, including Paolo Roversi: Palais Galliera (2024), Lettres sur la lumière (Gallimard, 2024), Des Oiseaux (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2023), Paolo Roversi – Studio Luce (Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, 2020), Natalia (Stromboli, 2018), and Nudi (Stromboli, 1999).

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Katy Grannan: Mad River, an exhibition of new photographs made in Northern California’s Humboldt County, where Grannan has recently been living and working. In the ongoing portrait series, on view for the first time, Grannan depicts subjects who reflect the independent spirit of an area known for the privacy and seclusion it offers. Often building relationships with her subjects, Grannan explores the connections between self-presentation and place, creating a kind of collaborative fiction. This will be the gallery’s sixth exhibition of Grannan’s work since 2006. The gallery will hold a public reception with the artist on Saturday, September 13, from 2-4pm, concurrent with the reception for Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited. Densely forested and largely rural, Humboldt County has been called a place where people go to disappear. Grannan first came to the area in 2023 and began photographing people she met through methods she knew, using Craigslist ads and fliers posted on local bulletin boards to find models. Her subjects are eager to be seen, and to collaborate with Grannan for reasons as varied as the individuals themselves: an autistic teenager, a circus performer, an actress, a queer farmer, a man and his goat. Over time, Grannan’s network has expanded as subjects refer friends and roommates, offering a cross-section of a particular community. In a place that has long attracted nonconformists of different types, many of the people Grannan photographed are part of the area’s different creative circles, and many identify as genderqueer. Grannan made her first portraits more than twenty years ago, in series such as Poughkeepsie Journal and Sugar Camp Road, where she found subjects through newspaper ads. Since then, social media and ubiquitous digital cameras have reshaped the experience of being photographed, and Grannan’s subjects today innately understand how they appear to her camera. In these photographs, Grannan focuses on ambiguous gestures, capturing the spaces between poses. Several images are set in a studio with bright red carpet, where subjects flirt with the language of fashion photography while subverting its rules. Others are set at the beach, in a forest, and in the shallow water of the Mad River. In a place known for its magnificent redwoods and dramatic coastline, the landscape is quiet in Grannan’s images, leaving the focus on people while revealing the outlines of the place that shapes them. Image: Morgan, Arcata, CA, 2025 © Katy Grannan

In celebration of the year-long Greene Fellowship program, RedLine is delighted to announce two solo exhibitions featuring the 2025 Greene Fellows: Aesthetic Impermanence by Alex Branch, and Artificial Geologies by Phillip David Stearns. Guest curated by George Bolster, Curator at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. In this time of continuous attacks on science in favor of origin stories and the projections of fantasies on reality, many artists—including Stearns and Branch—have once again become fascinated by it, reflecting its research in their aesthetic practices. While Alex Branch and Phillip Stearns presentations might not immediately seem to share many correlations, it is a trust and experimentation in scientific subjects and narratives that unites them. Alex Branch’s recent practice conflates science in the form of an ongoing study of entropy, with a poetic sensibility evident in metaphoric visual narratives. Aesthetic Impermanence features her works in a broad variety of media including photography, stop motion animation and sculpture. Collectively, they investigate time, cycles of life, the bodily fragility, and the ephemerality of objects. Humans exact their will on the world through physical strength. While it has the illusion of permanence, it is temporary. For Branch, a sculptor who for a period of time lost that faculty, it must have been an impossible prospect for the longevity of her practice. This mortalizing event resulted in a dream, where the artist’s limbs were buried in the icy surface of a mountain top. Another outcome is an ongoing range of works including photographs Suspended Animation, Liminal Thaw, and Artifact, and the sculpture When It’s Darker Than It Is Now, And the Snow Is Colder, all 2025. Each depicts her appendages and/or blocks of ice in various stages of liberation. This direct interfusing of humans with nature is also evident in works such as Passing Through You Like Wind Through A Wind Chime a sculpture in a dress form made from dandelion seed puffs, and a corresponding stop motion animation film The Foreignness of What You No Longer Are of a woman’s hair covered in gradually blooming dandelion stalks. Branch’s practice is ultimately one of flux: every element is in a state of change; time-based, shapeshifting, transforming. Through foregrounding these factors, she visually communicates the impossibility of stasis in nature. Image: Alex Branch, Liminal Thaw, 2024, Photographic print on hahnemuhle rag paper. Courtesy of the artists.

All About Photo presents ''Blueprint' by Benita Mayo, on view throughout October 2025. BLUEPRINT Memory is unreliable, and time has a way of bending the truth. I have always been on ajourney to unearth and examine the stories that live within me—some through my own experience, but most through inheritance. When Daddy suddenly passed in 2020, the tectonic plates of my life forever shifted. In an instant, I knew life would never be the same. As I find myself longing to understand the past, the impermanence of memory is palpable. I feel as if I’m racing toward an invisible finish line. My parents were born in Virginia, a state with an indelible imprint on America’s most painful and pivotal chapters: the rise of slavery, the Civil War, and the long struggle for civil rights.Over 350,000 men, women, and children were sold from Richmond’s auction block. Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy, and the Fall of Richmond marked the end of the CivilWar. Later, during a time of “massive resistance,” a neighboring county chose to close its public schools rather than integrate them. This was the Virginia into which my father was born. History and politics shaped my family’s story. They directly influenced how we were raised.The most pervasive feelings I remember from childhood were fear and loneliness. We lived with trauma, sorrow, silence, and deep wounding. But at the heart of it all, there was love—and a steadfast hope that tomorrow could be better than today. Toni Morrison, in The Bluest Eye, urges us not to “forgive and forget,” but to “remember and do better.” Too often, shame and embarrassment silence truth. But only through declaration and revelation can truth and insight rise. Only then can the cracks begin to mend, and healing begin. Much of what I have struggled with throughout my life has roots in collective trauma. In mysearch to understand what happened to me, I’ve spent 1,571 hours in therapy. It has takendecades to identify the cycles, to stop the bleeding, to clean the wound, and to begin thework of healing. For any wound to heal, this must come first. Then, in time, new tissueforms—a foundation for new skin that is stronger, more resilient. Through words and pictures, I recount the fierce determination of a man caught in the web of history. The deck was stacked against him. But he made a way out of no way. The calmness of the landscape conceals the quiet outrage, the mourning, and the sacred commemoration.

The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is delighted to present Summertime // Love, a solo exhibition by renowned photographer Mark Steinmetz, on view from September 1 through October 31, 2025. With an eye attuned to fleeting gestures and the quiet theater of everyday life, Steinmetz has spent decades creating photographs that feel both intimate and timeless. This exhibition brings together selections from his celebrated Summertime series, with tender portraits and languid moments steeped in the haze of youth, alongside images made during his travels across the globe. From sun-dappled afternoons in American suburbs to shadow-lined streets in faraway cities, his photographs speak in a language of patience and empathy, capturing both the universal and the particular, the unrepeatable moment and the enduring essence of place.

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition, Kate Breakey: In Pursuit of Light, with an opening reception on September 20th, from 6-8pm. The exhibition will feature a salon-style installation of Breakey’s color photographs of moths. Each pigment print on display is uniquely framed by the artist, drawing out the subtle details of the nocturnal creatures with pastel and pencil, and continuing the artist’s established tradition of hand-painting the surface of her photographic prints. In her monumental moth portraits, the exquisite form and pattern of these seemingly caped insects are showcased by enlarging their features to hundreds or even thousands of times their size, celebrating the unique details and elegant shapes. Moths are in the insect Order Lepidoptera, and share this Order with Butterflies. There are some 160,000 species of moths in the world, compared to 17,500 species of butterflies. In the United States, there are nearly 11,000 species of moths. The artist states, “My fascination with moths began long ago, perhaps because they go unnoticed and are somewhat unloved. They are primarily nocturnal and often drab—not as colorful or iconic as butterflies—but they are staggeringly beautiful if you look closely enough”. Her depictions follow a lineage of natural history and scientific illustration, and art photography, with an affinity for the work of naturalist illustrators Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), John James Audubon (1785-1851), and botanical photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). A passionate advocate for conservation, Kate Breakey invites us to reflect on the unseen splendor of the living world and the dire need to protect it before it vanishes. Her work reminds us to recognize how inextricably interconnected and dependent we are on the natural world. Kate Breakey's work is held in many public collections, including The Australian National Gallery in Canberra, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Austin Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography. Monographs by the artist include: Small Deaths, Flowers/Birds, Painted Light (a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of image making), and Las Sombras / The Shadows.

James Cohan is pleased to present Portrait, an exhibition of new work by Teresa Margolles, on view from October 10 through November 1, 2025, at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Margolles’ third solo exhibition with James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, October 10, from 6-8 PM. Portrait features a monumental installation comprising 735 photographs of individuals from the trans+ community in Mexico and the United Kingdom. Margolles cast the participants’ faces in plaster to create individual improntas, imprints or masks. Photographed at a 1:1 scale, the casts often bear traces of makeup, facial hair, or skin serving as poignant reminders of each subject’s physical presence. Through this act of preservation, Portrait honors the individuality of every participant, unveiling a deeply human archive, forever immortalized. Created with the participants of the artist’s Fourth Plinth commission Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant) in Trafalgar Square, London, Portrait uses a minimalist, grid-like format reminiscent of Margolles’ earlier works to create a serial rhythm that both unifies and differentiates the many faces. The structure echoes the language of architecture and order, yet within this, each face interrupts the possibility of repetition. This visual tension between sameness and specificity, anonymity and self, drives the emotional force of the installation. The grid does not flatten the identities it holds; instead it frames them in a space where they can be seen clearly, powerfully, side by side, not as statistics or symbols, but as people. In Margolles’ words, “Every face has a story attached.” Portrait serves as a tribute to Karla, a singer who was one of the artist’s dear friends. In December 2015, Karla was murdered in Juárez, Mexico, and her murder remains unsolved today. She was a fixture of the trans community. While casting the improntas, Margolles created a suite of Polaroid photographs that serve as both physical artifacts and visual testaments to the profound exchanges she had with the sitters. Each session unfolded as a space for testimony beginning with Margolles speaking of her friend Karla, to whom the project is dedicated, and opening a space for the participant’s own story to emerge. The Polaroids, intentionally manipulated by the artist to reveal glitches, multiplications and distortions, hold aura not only as singular physical objects but as vessels that capture the full presence, life, and spirit of each individual.

This exhibition brings together work of three seminal photographers: Harry Callahan, Kenneth Josephson, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Each explored the expressive potential of in-camera multiple exposures to evoke the energy and complexity of nature. Harry Callahan (1912–1999) was a pioneering figure who taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago (1946–1961) and later at the Rhode Island School of Design (1961–1977). His work has influenced generations of photographers and helped further the art of photography. Included in the exhibition are two innovative works: Royal Oak, Michigan (1945), made by moving the camera horizontally between exposures on the same negative of a willow tree. Multiple Exposure Tree, Chicago (1956), made by rotating the camera in a circular motion between exposures of on the same negative. Callahan once reflected, “I was doing photography to find something—which is different.” He also explained, “What I have observed is that when a student or a person makes a picture which really surprises you, it is because that person has found something out about himself.” Kenneth Josephson (b. 1932) studied under Callahan and Aaron Siskind as a graduate student at the Institute of Design (1958–1960) after getting his undergraduate degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied under Minor White. After graduating in 1960, Josephson taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for almost forty years and influenced generations of artists. Josephson was an early figure in conceptual photography. His innovative explorations often used photography to comment on itself and our perception. Inspired by Callahan’s multiple exposure work and encouraged by the atmosphere of experimentation at the Institute of Design, Josephson titled his graduate thesis An Exploration of the Multiple Image. He cited that the harmonic polyphony in music and streams of consciousness in literature excited him to the possibilities of expression with “…multiple images on a single sheet of film exposed within the camera.” He sought to expand “the expressive vocabulary of photography.” Though he utilized some of Callahan’s techniques of camera position movement, Josephson also made exposures with varying degrees of focus while maintaining a fixed film-plane, creating ethereal images that seem to reveal dimensions beyond human sight. This exhibition features four rare vintage prints from this early period of his career (1959–1961). Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) was an optometrist and an artist. Initially working in Chicago, Meatyard moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he became involved with the Lexington Camera Club. There, he was mentored by photographer (and later curator) Van Deren Coke who introduced Meatyard to the concept that “the camera sees even beyond the visual consciousness.” In 1956, Coke encouraged him to attend a two-week photography seminar organized by Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University. Meatyard found inspiration in the work and ideas of the presenters, Smith and Aaron Siskind and especially Minor White, who introduced him to Zen philosophy. Meatyard’s growing engagement with Zen merged with his knowledge of optometry and optics, and shaped much of his work, notably the series No-Focus, Light on Water, Zen Twigs, and Motion-Sound. It is noteworthy that Meatyard had expertise in strabismus, a condition that can cause double vision, when considering his Motion-Sound series, which involves horizontal, vertical, or circular camera movements between exposures on the same negative. Meatyard began his Motion-Sound series in 1967, the same year he met Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, writer, poet, theologian, and activist. Merton, known for his advocacy of interfaith dialogue and Eastern philosophies, including Zen, became a close friend of Meatyard until Merton’s untimely death in December 1968. In 1967, Meatyard also met writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry and began collaborating on a project on the Red River Gorge, which resulted in the publication of The Unforeseen Wilderness in 1971. Another literary friend of Meatyard’s, Guy Davenport, refereed to the Red River Gorge as a “primeval forest” and which was also the place where Meatyard’s ashes were scattered after his death from cancer in 1972. The exhibition features a 15-print sequence from the Motion-Sound series titled Common Open Spaces and Footpath Preservation Society (1969). Meatyard was introduced to sequencing by Minor White and intuitively understood the importance of narrative in images. The title is nonsensical and thus encourages the viewer to use their imagination to interpret the meaning of the work. Though made during the time Meatyard was photographing in the Red River Gorge, it is unclear if these images were made there as well. They are dark and haunting and vibrate with energy even though the photographs were made late in the year when much of the foliage had died. In the forward of Ralph Eugene Meatyard: A Fourfold Vision (Nazraeli Press, 2005), photographer Emmet Gowin recalls meeting Meatyard in 1968 and being introduced to the Motion-Sound series: “…Gene instructed me that it would be more useful to think in terms of Vibration, or Visible Sound.” Gowin later reflected, “Everything in these photographs reminds us that all of nature depends on its proper pulse.” For the finest overview of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s artistic career, I highly recommend Barbara Tannenbaum’s Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary (Akron Art Museum/Rizzoli, 1991). Additionally, Cynthia Young’s interview with Guy Davenport in Ralph Eugene Meatyard (International Center of Photography/Steidl, 2004) has great first-hand accounts of Meatyard. Also, Emmet Gowin’s introduction in Ralph Eugene Meatyard: A Fourfold Vision (Nazraeli Press, 2005), provides a personal perspective by a great artist on the Motion-Sound series. For a wonderful dive into some of Meatyard’s other work, I highly recommend Episode 33 of The Expert Eye podcast, Twist Endings by Aimee Pflieger. I will forever remain grateful to James Rhem whose collegiality and his scholarly work on Meatyard (Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and Other Figurative Photographs, DAP 2002 and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Nathan, Collection Photo Poche, 2000) has contributed significantly to the understanding of one of my favorite artists. Image: Kenneth Josephson, Chicago, 1961

Casemore Gallery presents Daido Moriyama: Dog and Man, a new exhibition of iconic and more recent images by legendary Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. This exhibition focuses the city of Tokyo as seen through the constantly sprinting Moriyama’s lens in his latest color and black-and-white works, in addition to some of his iconic images from the 60s and 70s. Known as a master of snapshots, Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s preeminent photographers, began his career in the 1960s, and achieved initial notoriety as one of the members of Provoke photomagazine. Their style, which came to be described as “are, bure, boke” (rough, blurry, out of focus), sent shockwaves through the photography world and created nothing less than a new lingua franca of photography, with its grainy, high-contrast, kinetically composed snapshots of a post-war Japan rapidly transforming itself. Moriyama described their work in simple terms—“Japan was moving fast, and we wanted to reflect that in our work.” Dog and Man presents a selection of Moriyama’s early Provoke-era pictures. They depict Tokyo’s bustling and gritty streets and alleys, women’s legs in fishnet tights photographed in closeups that approach abstraction, and people young and old, adapting in the aftermath of a war that irrecoverably opened and changed their society in ways shocking and thrilling. Centering the show is a mural-size gelatin silver print of what is perhaps Moriyama’s most famous and enigmatic image, “Stray Dog,” In the decades following his early notoriety, Moriyama has never stopped working, never stopped exploring and pushing boundaries of what the camera can show and say, and never stopped documenting his restless journey in envelope-pushing photobooks. The more recent images are represented in the show in black-and-white gelatin silver prints and rarely seen color pigment prints. They reflect Tokyo as an ever-alluring subject for Moriyama, a city where history and modernity both collide and coexist in ceaseless transformation. Taken together, the fullness of these works show a revolutionary photographer who became a master photographer, still stirred by a city that fuels his revolutionary spirit as he continues his effort to reach, in his words, “the end of photography.”