Adam Ekberg: Minor Spectacles

Nelson W. Armour: Teaching, on view from April 2 through May 3, 2026 at Perspective Gallery, brings together photographs created during the artist’s residency with Artists in the Public Schools. Over the course of two academic years, Nelson W. Armour immersed himself in the daily rhythms of Chicago classrooms, turning his lens toward a profession that shapes generations yet often remains unseen in its full complexity. The resulting body of work offers a thoughtful tribute to the labor, patience, and conviction that define teaching. Armour’s essay moves beyond the familiar image of a teacher at the front of a classroom. His photographs follow educators through early-morning preparation, late-afternoon grading, staff meetings, professional development sessions, parent conferences, and after-school activities. In doing so, he reveals teaching as a continuum of visible and invisible work. Small gestures—a hand on a student’s shoulder, a marked-up lesson plan, a quiet moment of reflection at a desk—accumulate into a broader portrait of dedication. The images balance intimacy with structure, echoing the ordered yet improvisational nature of the classroom itself. The residency unfolded at Lázaro Cárdenas Elementary School in Little Village during the 2021–22 school year and later at Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet High School in Austin during 2023–24. By working across grade levels and neighborhoods, Armour highlights both the shared foundations and distinct challenges of public education. His photographs suggest that teaching is at once intensely local and broadly civic, rooted in community while tied to larger social systems. Founded to connect artists with public schools across the city, Artists in the Public Schools fosters collaborations that preserve and celebrate the stories of Chicago’s educational communities. Armour’s contribution stands as a visual archive of commitment and care. Rather than romanticizing the profession, the exhibition acknowledges its pressures and constraints while affirming its enduring purpose. Through steady observation and respect for his subjects, Armour invites viewers to reconsider the meaning of teaching—not as a single act, but as a sustained practice of attention, resilience, and belief in the future. Image: Nelson W. Armour: Teaching #18 © Nelson W. Armour, courtesy of Perspective Gallery

Downtown Lens: Curated by Richard Boch brings viewers back to a moment when New York City pulsed with unruly freedom and creative urgency. Presented at The Gallery at Soho Grand, this exhibition gathers the work of 20 photographers who bore witness to the city’s nightlife from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, a period when downtown Manhattan functioned as both laboratory and stage for cultural reinvention. These images capture a city alive after dark, where music, fashion, art, and rebellion collided in cramped clubs and on gritty sidewalks. The photographs on view transport audiences inside legendary venues such as CBGB, the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and Max’s Kansas City—spaces that became incubators for punk, new wave, and experimental art scenes. Shot from within the crowd rather than from a distance, the works reflect an insider’s perspective shaped by proximity and trust. Artists including Maripol, Kate Simon, Bob Gruen, David Godlis, Michael Halsband, and Roberta Bayley photographed friends, performers, and fleeting moments with an immediacy that mirrors the era’s restless spirit. The resulting images feel spontaneous and intimate, charged with sweat, sound, and motion. New York during this time was marked by economic hardship and social tension, yet those very conditions fostered an atmosphere of radical possibility. Downtown Lens reveals how nightlife became a refuge and a proving ground, a place where identities were tested and new forms of expression took shape. These photographs preserve more than faces and fashions; they document a way of being together, driven by curiosity, defiance, and the belief that something meaningful could happen at any moment. On view from February 4 through May 3, 2026, Downtown Lens offers both a visual archive and an emotional time capsule. With additional images displayed at The Roxy Hotel, the exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls, echoing the way this culture once spilled into the streets. Together, these works remind us how deeply nightlife has shaped New York’s cultural legacy, and how photography can hold onto moments that were never meant to last, yet continue to resonate decades later. Image: Dave's Luncheonette at Night - Lisa Genet, 1980 © Lisa Genet

Deana Lawson: Monsen Photography Lecture unfolds in the mezzanine galleries of the Henry Art Gallery from February 1 through May 3, 2026. The presentation accompanies the annual Monsen Photography Lecture, a program dedicated to advancing the understanding and appreciation of photographic practice. In this setting, Lawson’s images enter into dialogue with audiences not only as autonomous works, but also as part of a broader reflection on portraiture, collaboration, and the construction of meaning through the camera. Born in Rochester, New York, in 1979, Deana Lawson builds her photographs through encounters with strangers whom she approaches with care and deliberation. Each image emerges from collaboration. Domestic interiors become charged stages where pose, gesture, and décor operate with intention. Lawson draws from the visual languages of historical portrait painting, documentary traditions, and vernacular family albums, yet she reshapes these inheritances into something distinctly her own. Her compositions suggest what she describes as an ever-expanding mythological extended family, linking sitters across geographies and generations through atmosphere and gaze. Light plays a central role in this body of work. It functions as both a technical necessity and a symbolic presence, imbuing her subjects with a sense of radiance that borders on the sacred. Romance, intimacy, ritual, and spirituality inhabit the same frame, often held together by the direct, unwavering look of the sitter. The carefully arranged interiors—filled with textiles, photographs, and personal objects—underscore the psychological ties between individuals and the spaces they inhabit. Biography and symbolism intertwine, and everyday life acquires a monumental gravity. Lawson’s practice resonates internationally. A major survey co-organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and MoMA PS1 traveled widely between 2021 and 2023, affirming her position within contemporary art discourse. Works reside in prominent museum collections across the United States and Europe. Within the context of the Monsen Lecture, her photographs stand as both image and inquiry, inviting sustained attention to the layered realities of Black life, history, and imagination. Image: Deana Lawson (U.S., b. 1979). Latifah’s Wedding, 2020. Pigment print. © Deana Lawson, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces a significant promised gift from Artur Walther and the Walther Family Foundation, recognized worldwide for their commitment to advancing the study of photography. This extraordinary collection of approximately 6,500 works includes photographs, albums, and time-based media spanning continents and centuries. It encompasses modern and contemporary art from Africa, China, Japan, and Germany, as well as vernacular photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries taken in the United States, Europe, Colombia, and Mexico. Together, these works trace the evolution of photography as both an artistic language and a cultural mirror, revealing how image-making shapes our understanding of the world. Selections from the collection will debut in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing when it reopens in May 2025, featuring iconic African photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Samuel Fosso. A subsequent exhibition in fall 2025 will present a broader international overview, while a comprehensive survey of the collection is planned for 2028. The Met also intends to integrate photographs and video works from the gift into future installations in the Tang Wing, the museum’s new home for modern and contemporary art opening in 2030. These presentations will explore how artists use the camera to capture changing social, cultural, and physical landscapes—moments where observation becomes both record and reflection. Artur Walther’s vision was to challenge and expand the boundaries of photographic practice. Over more than three decades, he assembled a collection that brings together celebrated masters and lesser-known voices, forming a dialogue across geography and history. The exhibition View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection introduces this transformative gift, celebrating the diversity of global perspectives. From city streets to intimate interiors, these images reveal photography’s enduring ability to question, connect, and redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. Image: Luo Yongjin (Chinese, born 1960), Oriental Plaza, Beijing (detail), 1998–2002. Inkjet print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised gift of The Walther Family Foundation © Luo Yongjin

Selection from the Collection at the George Eastman Museum offers a thoughtful and ever-evolving encounter with the history of photography, inviting visitors to slow down and look closely at how images have shaped the way we see the world. Drawn from one of the most significant photography collections globally, this presentation brings together new acquisitions, rediscovered works, and foundational objects to reveal the depth and continuity of the medium across nearly two centuries. Rather than following a single narrative, the exhibition emphasizes connections. Photographs made for art, science, journalism, and personal use are placed in conversation with one another, highlighting shared visual strategies and recurring themes. Portraits, landscapes, technical experiments, and documentary images echo across time, demonstrating how photography has continuously absorbed and reflected cultural, technological, and social change. These juxtapositions underscore photography’s dual nature as both a record of reality and a creative interpretation of it. Spanning more than 185 years, the works on view represent an international range of photographers and processes, from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital prints. Renowned figures of the medium appear alongside anonymous makers, reminding viewers that photography’s history is built as much from everyday images as from canonical masterpieces. Scientific studies, vernacular snapshots, and commercial photographs enrich this broader story, offering insight into how photography has functioned across disciplines and communities. A defining feature of Selection from the Collection is its changing nature. Over the course of the exhibition, objects are periodically rotated, allowing fresh perspectives to emerge and encouraging repeat visits. Each iteration reveals new relationships between images, emphasizing that photographic history is not fixed but continually reinterpreted through ongoing research and discovery. Housed in the Collection Gallery, this presentation reflects the museum’s long-standing commitment to preservation, scholarship, and public engagement. Built over more than 75 years through the dedication of curators, researchers, and supporters, the collection stands as a living archive. Selection from the Collection celebrates this legacy, offering an open invitation to explore photography not as a single story, but as a rich and interconnected visual language that continues to evolve. Image: Margaret Bourke White (American, 1904–1971), Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954. Gelatin silver print. George Eastman Museum, museum accession, 1971. © Margaret Bourke White

(Re)Constructing History invites viewers to consider how photographs do more than capture fleeting moments—they also carry the weight of histories that continue to shape the present. Taking its title from Carrie Mae Weems’s powerful series Constructing History, the exhibition encourages reflection on how images can both document and reinterpret the narratives that define our collective memory. Through the lens of contemporary photography, the show reveals how the past remains alive within every frame, layered into the visual and emotional fabric of today’s world. Spread across three galleries, the exhibition unfolds as a journey through time, power, and representation. The first gallery turns its gaze toward Wall Street, a longstanding emblem of American ambition and authority. Here, photographs old and new reveal how the imagery of finance and architecture has served to both glorify and critique national ideals. The second gallery presents artists who reimagine and reclaim visual traditions, transforming inherited imagery through acts of reference, appropriation, and subversion. Their work asks how the repetition of images—when reworked with intention—can shift meaning and open new spaces for cultural dialogue. The final gallery explores the capacity of photography to uncover the invisible forces that shape landscapes and social environments. From the erosion of natural sites to the evolution of urban structures, these works make visible the continuous process of change and reconstruction. At the heart of this installation are contemporary Black artists such as Nona Faustine, Carla Williams, Dawoud Bey, and Carrie Mae Weems, whose practices challenge the boundaries between history and imagination. Their images transcend the role of mere documentation, offering poetic and political reinterpretations of the past. Through their vision, (Re)Constructing History becomes an invitation to see photography not as static memory, but as an ongoing act of reimagining what has been and what might yet be. Image: Carla Williams, Side (detail), from the series How to Read Character, 1990, printed 2024; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; © Carla Williams

HARD COPY NEW YORK brings renewed attention to the tactile qualities of photographic reproduction, inviting viewers to reflect on the material presence of the copied image. Expanding on Aaron Stern’s ongoing project, the exhibition revisits the visual language of the photocopier—a tool once central to countless creative pursuits. By highlighting the grain, contrast, and imperfections inherent in this process, the show evokes a time when making an image required intention, patience, and direct engagement with physical materials. In an era defined by instant digital circulation, the exhibition serves as a gentle reminder of photography’s enduring strength as a tangible medium. As curators David Campany and Aaron Stern suggest, the flood of screen-based imagery can obscure the unique resonance of an object held in the hand. Through a diverse selection of works, the show underscores how copies, far from being secondary or disposable, can carry their own sense of intimacy and immediacy. These photocopied images reveal how artists continue to experiment with form, surface, and repetition, transforming simple technology into a tool for expression. Central to this presentation is Stern’s commitment to fostering a renewed appreciation for photography as a democratic art form. The copy machine—accessible, imperfect, and unpretentious—has long allowed creators of all backgrounds to distribute their work widely. In spotlighting this device, the exhibition honors a tradition of making that values resourcefulness and authenticity over polish. It also challenges visitors to consider how the physical act of reproduction can shape meaning and memory. Aaron Stern’s broader career reflects a deep engagement with photography and its communities. Known for moving fluidly between roles as curator, writer, and image-maker, he has contributed to exhibitions, publications, and fairs across the Americas and Europe. His collaborations with institutions and magazines reinforce his commitment to exploring how images circulate, endure, and continue to inspire. HARD COPY NEW YORK stands as a testament to that ongoing pursuit. Image: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, 2023/2024. Photocopy by Aaron Stern, © Takashi Homma

Eugène Atget’s legacy continues to resonate through the history of photography, and a new exhibition invites visitors to reconsider how his reputation was shaped long after his lifetime. Centered on the remarkable influence of Berenice Abbott, the presentation reveals how her dedication, scholarship, and advocacy helped secure Atget’s place as a major figure in modern photography. Through carefully selected prints and archival material, the exhibition traces how Abbott’s efforts brought renewed attention to a body of work that might otherwise have remained overlooked. Atget’s photographs, created between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, capture a Paris caught between tradition and transformation. He wandered the city with his cumbersome equipment, recording storefronts, courtyards, gardens, and tradespeople in images characterized by quiet clarity and atmospheric light. His scenes often appear suspended in time, offering a visual record of districts soon swept away by modernization. Architects, painters, and designers once relied on his pictures as references, yet today viewers find in them a poetic evocation of a Paris that no longer exists. The exhibition places special emphasis on Atget’s singular way of looking. His views, expansive yet attentive to detail, reveal the subtle rhythms of daily life. Whether depicting modest workshops or elegant façades, his compositions suggest both the charm and fragility of a city in transition. It was this sensitivity that captivated avant-garde artists such as Man Ray, who recognized in Atget’s images an unexpected affinity with emerging modernist ideas. After Atget’s death, Abbott recognized the significance of his archive and devoted years to preserving, cataloging, and promoting it. Her writings, exhibitions, and unwavering commitment ensured that Atget’s work reached museums, scholars, and the wider public. Thanks to her efforts, he is now celebrated as a foundational figure whose vision shaped the course of twentieth-century photography. Image: Eugène Atget, Hôtel du Marquis de Lagrange, 4 et 6 Rue de Braque, 1901 (printed 1901–27). International Center of Photography, Gift of Caryl and Israel Englander, 2008 (2008.111.20)

Latitudes arrives at the International Center of Photography as a vivid testament to cultural exchange and the widening of global photographic dialogue. Created in partnership with the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the exhibition’s newest chapter turns its attention to Côte d’Ivoire, presenting fresh work by laureates Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré. Together, their projects offer distinct yet complementary visions shaped by memory, landscape, and the enduring pull of personal history. Established in 2024, the Latitudes program extends the spirit of the former Immersion initiative by embracing a broader international lens. Each cycle focuses on a single country, inviting local photographers to propose new work. A jury selects one laureate, who receives support to produce a series that will travel from Paris to New York before returning home. This structure not only amplifies underrepresented artistic scenes but also reaffirms the value of geographic and cultural perspective in contemporary photography. Côte d’Ivoire, the program’s inaugural focus, sets the tone for a deeply engaged, globally connected approach. Nuits Balnéaires brings to the exhibition a practice shaped by poetry, spirituality, and the ever-changing waters of the Gulf of Guinea. His work traces the rhythms of life, death, and the unseen spaces in between, creating images that feel suspended in a realm both real and imagined. With water as a recurring element, his photographs and films become meditations on ancestry, connection, and transition. His path—from fashion photography to international exhibitions—reflects an artist continually expanding the boundaries of his visual language. François-Xavier Gbré approaches image-making through the lens of architecture and its layered histories. His work examines buildings and territories as living archives, revealing how political, social, and environmental forces shape collective memory. Whether documenting remnants of colonial eras or contemporary shifts in urban space, he constructs narratives grounded in place yet resonant far beyond it. His presence in major museum collections and global exhibitions underscores the breadth of his vision. Together, these two artists embody the guiding principle of Latitudes: a commitment to elevating voices that broaden our understanding of the world through images rooted in their own histories and landscapes. Image: François-Xavier Gbré, Rubino, from the series Radio Ballast, 2024. © François-Xavier Gbré, ADAGP, Paris, 2025

Helmut Newton x Steven Klein: on the dark side, presented at Staley-Wise Gallery from March 19 through May 2, 2026, brings together the work of two photographers whose images redefine the visual language of fashion. Through a selection of striking photographs, the exhibition places the work of Helmut Newton in dialogue with that of Steven Klein, revealing how both artists explore glamour, sexuality, power, and performance with fearless intensity. Their images move beyond the conventions of editorial photography, constructing cinematic scenes where elegance and provocation coexist. Helmut Newton emerges as one of the most influential fashion photographers of the late twentieth century. Born in Berlin in 1920, he begins his career assisting the photographer Yva before leaving Germany as the political climate darkens in the late 1930s. After settling in Australia, Newton develops a distinctive photographic voice that eventually finds an international stage in fashion magazines such as Vogue. His images from the 1970s and 1980s challenge expectations of fashion imagery through bold compositions, dramatic lighting, and narratives that openly address themes of authority, desire, and theatricality. Decades later, Steven Klein emerges as a major figure in contemporary image-making, continuing a similarly audacious approach while reflecting the evolving aesthetics of modern culture. Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, Klein initially studies painting before turning fully toward photography in the 1990s. His work becomes widely recognized for its stylized visual storytelling and collaborations with leading figures in fashion, music, and cinema. Through editorial commissions and advertising campaigns, Klein constructs images that blend surreal narrative, psychological tension, and high-fashion spectacle. Seen together, the photographs reveal a shared fascination with the theatrical potential of the camera. Models appear as protagonists within carefully staged environments where luxury, fantasy, and danger intertwine. Humor and irony frequently surface within these compositions, offsetting their darker undertones. By placing the work of Newton and Klein side by side, the exhibition highlights how fashion photography evolves across generations while maintaining a powerful capacity to challenge social conventions and expand the boundaries of visual storytelling. Image: Helmut Newton Woman examining man, Calvin Klein, American VOGUE, Saint-Tropez, 1975 (© Helmut Newton Foundation)

Carrie Mae Weems: Something Grander Still is presented at the Art Galleries at Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin from January 30 through May 9, 2026. Centered in the Christian-Green Gallery, the exhibition revisits Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), the foundational body of work through which Carrie Mae Weems first articulated her enduring concerns with self-definition, memory, and power. Drawn from photographs, text, and audio rooted in her own family archive, the installation traces how these early images continue to inform her evolving practice. The title, borrowed from Weems’s 1984 artist statement, underscores her conviction that understanding how we construct personal history is itself a profound creative act. Rather than staging a retrospective, the exhibition follows the afterlives of these pictures across decades of artistic and intellectual exchange. Family photographs—among them the tintype of her maternal grandfather—appear not as static relics but as active agents in an ongoing inquiry. Weems’s work moves between intimacy and structural critique, linking domestic interiors to broader histories of race, labor, and representation in the United States. Through careful sequencing of image and text, she reveals how personal narrative intersects with institutional power, insisting that private memory carries public consequence. A complementary study room in the Idea Lab expands this dialogue, situating Weems within conversations among Black photographers, feminist thinkers, and media activists of the 1980s and early 1990s. Works by contemporaries who challenged dominant visual paradigms appear alongside publications and archival materials, illuminating the cultural landscape in which her practice took shape. Photography and video emerge here as tools of resistance—means of countering erasure and reframing visibility. Across more than four decades, Weems has built a multidisciplinary oeuvre spanning photography, installation, and film, earning recognition from institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. Yet Something Grander Still emphasizes process over accolade. By returning deliberately to formative material, the exhibition proposes revisitation as method: a way to deepen research, refine questions, and claim authority over one’s own story. In doing so, it affirms the enduring power of images to shape how history is known—and who has the right to tell it. Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Van and Vera with kids in the kitchen, from Family Pictures and Stories, 1978-84. Gelatin silver print, size variable. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery © Carrie Mae Weems

The conceptual boundaries of family portraiture and biological identity undergo a clinical examination in Aneta Grzeszykowska’s latest series, Daughter, appearing at Lyles & King from April 10 through May 9, 2026. Grzeszykowska, a prominent figure in the Polish avant-garde, continues her long-standing inquiry into the erasure and construction of the self. This body of work arrives twenty-one years after her seminal Album (2005), in which she digitally removed her own image from hundreds of family photographs. In this new cycle, the artist utilizes a hyperrealistic mask of her younger self to navigate the psychological shift occurring as her own daughter enters adolescence. The project functions as a "vivisection" of domestic roles, blurring the chronological distinctions between mother and child through a series of highly staged, unsettling tableaus. The exhibition draws significant influence from the biological phenomenon of feto-maternal microchimerism, the process by which fetal cells migrate to the mother’s body and persist for decades. Grzeszykowska interprets this cellular exchange as a material basis for a fractured personhood, where the mother exists as a vessel for both her progenitor and her offspring simultaneously. By donning a mask that replicates her features at age fourteen, the artist creates a visual paradox: an adult body inhabiting the face of a child. This artifice allows her to inhabit the role of her daughter’s peer or alter ego, yet the physical opacity of the mask creates a literal barrier. The performance results in a profound sense of detachment, where the only figure capable of recognizing the artist beneath the prosthetic layer is her own mother, whose embrace serves as the sole anchor to the past. Grzeszykowska’s compositions frequently mimic the aesthetic tropes of idealized vacation photography found on contemporary social media platforms. However, the technical perfection of the lighting and the natural settings is punctured by a lingering sense of ontological horror. The silence within the frames suggests a rupture between social performance and the "crawling anxiety" of aging. As a woman’s societal value often remains tethered to transient standards of youth, the artist captures the futile pursuit of a lost self. Currently featured in the New Humans exhibition at the New Museum, Grzeszykowska’s work remains a vital critique of how identity is perceived, performed, and eventually surrendered within the architecture of the family unit. Through these meticulous stagings, she exposes the discontinuity of human existence, proving that the labor of care eventually leads to a total reversal of roles. Image: Aneta Grzeszykowska, DAUGHTER #6, 2025 © Aneta Grzeszykowska, courtesy of the Lyles & King Gallery