The Impact of Images: Mamie Till’s Courage from Tragedy

Anti-Blackness seems inescapably mixed into whatever context I place it into; literature, science, government, health, art… look into any “field” and see for yourself. My people have had to cry, scream, and fight for respect for centuries, and we still have not gained what we deserve. To move past the damage this has done to our society, we can’t simply deny our history—we must recognize it. We must acknowledge the many ways in which this country has perpetuated a racial hierarchy since these lands were first colonized and stripped from indigenous peoples, and Black people were stolen from their native land and brought to America. In BLACK SNAFU (Situation Niggas: All Fucked Up), I appropriate various depictions of Black people that I find throughout the history of cartooning and juxtapose them with photographs that celebrate and line up more authentically with my Black experience. The photographs I create vary in subject matter; I seek to include celebratory portraits, didactic still lives, and representational documentations of places rich in their relation to Black community, allowing me to fight back against the history of the racist caricature that I reclaim in my work. By combining these ambivalent visual languages, I intend to expose to viewers America’s deplorable connection to anti-Black tropes through pop culture while simultaneously celebrating the reality of what it means to be Black. About André – Raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas, André Ramos-Woodard (he/ they) is a photo-based artist who uses their work to emphasize the experiences of marginalized communities while accenting the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination. His art conveys ideas of communal and personal identity, influenced by their direct experience with life as a queer African American. Focusing on Black liberation, queer justice, and the reality of mental health, he aspires for his art to help bring power to the people. Selected for Foam Museum’s Foam TALENT Award in 2024 and a two-time top-50 Finalist for Photolucida’s Critical Mass (in 2020 and 2023), Ramos-Woodard has shown their work at various institutions across the United States a beyond, including the Foam Museum–The Netherlands, Amsterdam, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston–Houston, Texas, Leon Gallery–Denver, Colorado, and FILTER Photo–Chicago, Illinois. He received his BFA from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and his MFA at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We are grateful to the Cummings Foundation for their support of the arts and the Griffin Museum. The Cummings Residency program highlights artists of diverse backgrounds and using their specific skill set, work to create a photographically based exhibition as a result of their connection to the Griffin Museum, Winchester and surrounding areas, while engaging in critical dialogues about art and culture with both the youth and adult community they inhabit. Using photography as a bridge to building relationships, the Cummings Fellow creates a series of images opening up the pathways to multicultural understanding and acceptance. The museum and its partners are creating a literacy program centered around imagery, using photography as the tool, working with professional artists to talk about their communities, cultures and new and shared origin stories.

Throughout history, artists have been captivated by the moon — not only as a celestial body, but as a powerful and evocative symbol. Its soft, silvery glow has long been associated with romance, mystery, and the passage of time. In countless paintings, drawings, and prints, the moon has served as both muse and metaphor, casting its quiet light over lovers, dreamers, and solitary figures, offering an atmosphere of reflection, longing, and poetic solitude. This installation, drawn from the Museum’s collection of works on paper, explores the many ways in which the moon has been depicted across time and artistic styles. Sometimes it functions as a compositional anchor — a glowing orb balancing the sky or guiding the viewer’s eye across the scene. In other instances, it becomes a potent symbol: of change, of cycles, of melancholy, or even of hope. Artists use the moon not only to illuminate their subjects, but to shape mood and suggest deeper emotional or philosophical themes. The light portrayed in these works is never harsh. Instead, it’s soft, diffuse, and often reflective — bathing surfaces in a gentle radiance that contrasts with the sharp clarity of daylight. But the moon is not merely a source of light; it is also emblematic of night and its inherent darkness. It represents quiet, rest, and introspection, standing in opposition to the activity and energy of the sunlit world. By contrasting moonlight with daylight, these artworks evoke a wide range of emotional and symbolic states — from vitality to vulnerability, clarity to ambiguity, reality to dream. In this dialogue between light and shadow, presence and absence, we are reminded of the enduring power of the moon to stir the imagination and speak to the rhythms of the human experience.

This exhibition is the first US survey of the work of Kunié Sugiura, an artist whose boundary-defying engagement with the photographic medium spans over sixty years. Born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942, Sugiura came to the United States in 1963 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she majored in photography. After graduation, she relocated to New York and has lived there ever since. Sugiura’s practice embraces a hybrid approach, blending various mediums and expressing her bicultural identity. The balancing of dualisms —Japanese/American, organic/human-made, and painting/photography — defines her work. Sugiura has stated that her cross-fertilization of photography with painting and sculpture partly stems from her desire that photography be taken seriously as an art form. The exhibition charts the arc of Sugiura’s long career, beginning with undergraduate work from her Cko series that reflects her sense of isolation as a foreign student in Chicago. Prints made after her move to New York in 1967 demonstrate her use of canvas as a support and new process of working on a large scale. Her Photopaintings from the 1970s take on multidimensional, sculptural qualities, pairing painted and photographic panels with wooden elements. Photograms — images made without a camera on light-sensitive material — that she first created in 1980, capture a wide range of subjects, including flowers and portraits of other artists. Sugiura’s compositions made from X-ray negatives in the 1990s and 2000s combine unrelated pieces from various sources that were cut and pasted together to create unique configurations. Throughout her career, Sugiura has willfully made artworks that “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.” Despite this inherent rebelliousness, such gestures do not overwhelm Sugiura’s vision to create dynamic and original hybrid forms in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Image: Kunié Sugiura, Azalea, 1970

Selections from the Photography Collection features changing presentations of work from the Museum’s holdings, celebrating the diverse perspectives that artists have brought to this medium. The latest installation of photographs explores imagery of roads, travel, and summer fun. On view March 15 through September 7, these works span seven decades, depicting sightseers and sunbathers as well as highways, eateries, and roadside attractions. Highlights include witty beach scenes by Herb Snitzer, modernist works by Edward Weston and Margaret Bourke White, and Judith Joy Ross’s sensitive portraits.

New York Proud is a public art project presented in partnership with the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) celebrating the vibrant and diverse stories of immigrants across New York City. This campaign brings to life the personal journeys of immigrant New Yorkers through a striking photo series of 25 portraits, now displayed in subway stations and public spaces throughout New York City during the month of September and into October. With each portrait featuring people in or at their workplaces, the campaign emphasizes the integral roles and contributions of immigrants to the city’s cultural and economic landscape. New York Proud has been featured in pop-up photo exhibitions across NYC, located in Times Square in Manhattan (August 30-September 14, 2024); in Brooklyn, as a co-presentation with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, at The Plaza at 300 Ashland Place (August 29-September 16, 2024); Hunter’s Point South Park, LIC, Queens (September 16-October 15, 2024); and Starlight Park, The Bronx (November 4-December 6, 2024). It is currently on view in Staten Island at the Ferry Terminal! These larger-than-life installations will allow the public to take a deeper look into the lives of the featured individuals. Featured campaign participants include Jesus, a Peruvian drag queen; Marie Rose, a fruit vendor from Côte D’Ivoire; Mayowa, a Nigerian visual artist; and Antonio, a bus driver from Honduras, among many others. This campaign was developed in partnership with F.Y. Eye, The Opportunity Agenda, with portraits taken by Venezuelan documentary photographer Oscar B. Castillo. “New York Proud” is a citywide campaign to uplift and honor the resilience, contributions, and experiences of immigrants who shape the economic, cultural and social fabric of New York City. The portraits offer a curated visual narrative that reveals how immigrants are seamlessly integrated into the fabric of life across the city. We hope this campaign will ignite a citywide conversation about the importance of immigration to the vitality and future of New York City.

Etherton Gallery presents a special summer exhibition featuring early works by acclaimed photographer Kate Breakey, on view May 20–September 20, 2025. This selection of hand-colored photographs offers an intimate look at critical moments in her evolution as an artist. The exhibition traces the emergence of Breakey’s distinctive visual language, and showcases work from series such as Los Sombras, Naturagraphia, Clouds and more recent landscapes, offering insight into the shifts in subject matter and technique that have defined her career. “My own collection of images serves as a record, a kind of a random, disjointed visual diary of the things I’ve seen and loved—a way to possess and preserve what is wild and ineffable, and above all transient... evidence of my life’s journey.” —Kate Breakey This exhibition reflects the emergence of Breakey’s distinctive approach: combining photographic methods with traditional artist’s tools—oil, pastel, and colored pencil—to transform paper, canvas, and other materials into richly layered, tactile objects. Each stroke of her pencil conveys a gesture of reverence for the natural world. Breakey’s awe is evident in her work, as she invites the viewer to share in her experience, fostering an appreciation of the natural world’s fragile beauty. The installation, drawn from Breakey’s archive, will evolve throughout the summer. As work in the exhibition is acquired, new ones will be introduced in the exhibition, maintaining its dynamic nature. About the Artist Kate Breakey is internationally acclaimed for her large-scale, hand-colored photographs—luminous portraits of birds, flowers, and animals that blend photographic process with painterly technique. Her work has been featured in more than 150 exhibitions across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, China, New Zealand, and France. Breakey’s photographs have been published in several monographs, including Small Deaths (2001), Birds/Flowers (2003), Painted Light (2010), Los Sombras (2015), and Slow Light (2016). Her work is held in several public collections among them the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. A native of South Australia, Breakey lives in Tucson, Arizona, where the desert landscape continues to inspire her work. Image: Kate Breakey, Coyote, n.d.

Featuring images made between 2022 and 2024, Natural Commodities draws a stark visual contrast between Earth’s untouched beauty and its transformation under industrial pressure. From the ancient, verdant rain forests of Washington State to massive cobalt mining operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the exhibition charts what Burtynsky describes as “a continuum—from pristine ecosystems to the engineered terrains shaped by human need.” The exhibition includes new work from Burtynsky’s forthcoming series Mining: For the Future, offering a rare and timely look at the extractive industries shaping tomorrow’s green economy and the race to global electrification. This collection of images—many captured by drone and stitched into hyper-detailed, panoramic compositions—depict both devastation and regeneration, particularly in places like Türkiye, where large-scale erosion control and reforestation are changing the landscape once again. Also on view are majestic views of North America’s threatened wilderness: the Coast Mountains in British Columbia, Canada, where the shock of receding glaciers mark the frontlines of climate change; and Lake Mead in Nevada, whose reservoir has reached historic lows due to prolonged droughts paired with increasing urban demand. These images function as both documents and omens—urgent reminders of what we stand to lose if we continue to push nature too far. Natural Commodities reveals the extraordinary tension between awe and reckoning that has defined Burtynsky’s work for over four decades. Image: Çayırhan Coal Mine Tailings #1, Nallıhan District, Ankara Province, Central Anatolia, Türkiye, 2022 © Edward Burtynsky

Witness the powerful photography of Baltimore-based artist Devin Allen, whose black-and-white images capture the raw emotion of the Baltimore uprisings that followed Freddie Gray’s death a decade ago in 2015. Documenting a defining moment in Baltimore’s history, Allen reveals both the pain and strength of its people. See these images—rarely on display—in remembrance of Gray’s life. Content Advisory: These photographs reflect the impact of racialized violence. Enter with mindful awareness and deep care. This exhibition is organized by Lisa Snowden, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Baltimore Beat and Tracey Beale, BMA Director of Public Programs.

The Griffin Museum is pleased to present the works of Anastasia Sierra as part of our summer exhibition Vision(ary). Anastasia Sierra’s lens tenderly showcases the profound connection between mother and child. Her images capture the nurturing touch and the unbreakable threads of love that bind them. Through luminous colors and intimate compositions, Sierra unveils the beauty and vulnerability inherent in maternal bonds. Each photograph explores the connection the two share, and the everyday moments of motherhood. Her images serve as a poignant reminder of the enduring power and artistry of this fundamental human relationship, etching fleeting moments into timeless expressions of affection. About Bittersweet – “Bittersweet” is an ongoing body of work about the conflicting emotions of motherhood, where love and joy live next to the feelings of frustration, guilt and exhaustion. I collaborate with my young son to recreate moments of tenderness and tension. Together, we make a colorful and mysterious world of our own, using light and shadow as a metaphor, with our lives bright and colorful on the outside and piles of laundry, dirty dishes and some of the darker feelings obscured by the shadows. I make these images to remember his chubby thighs and what it’s like to touch his skin and feel the weight of his body while I can still carry him. I photograph our love and nightmares, with a superstitious hope that my fears won’t materialize if I spell them out in my photographs. About Anastasia Sierra – I am a portrait and fine art photographer based in Cambridge, MA. My work explores the themes of motherhood, womanhood, and the body from a feminist perspective. Inspired by dreams and the unseen, I construct photographs that portray internal tensions – the conflicting emotions of motherhood, the push and pull between the need for connection, and the desire for independence. I use photography to gain a better understanding of my own experiences, and find a deeper connection with people and places I photograph, employing light and color to create vivid images that inhabit the space between the real and the imaginary. My work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, most recent exhibitions include Kathryn Schulz Gallery in Cambridge, MA, the Photographic Resource Center, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, Vermont Center of Photography, and Soho Gallery in New York. I have a BA in Linguistics and am currently attending the Photography MFA program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, expected to graduate in 2026.

Curated by Samantha Johnston Carl Bower, Dana Stirling, and Emily (Billie) Warnock What Remains, an exhibition inspired by the 2025 selection for One Book One Denver, features three contemporary photographers whose images explore complexities of identity, fear, memory, and the solace that can be found through art. Grief doesn’t follow a straight line. Neither does memory. The Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC) presents What Remains, an exhibition inspired by the 2025 selection for One Book One Denver—a citywide literary initiative led by the Denver Public Library. The yet-to-be-revealed book title pieces together memory and loss through the fragments of friendship, identity, and coming of age. The title’s author doesn’t write to seek resolution, but to hold on to all that is left. This exhibition features the work of Carl Bower, Dana Stirling, and Emily (Billie) Warnock—three photographers whose images carry the same quiet, contemplative power as the prose in this year’s One Book One Denver selection. Together, their work explores complexities of identity, fear, memory, and the solace that can be found through art. Bower’s intimate portraits, paired with raw confessions, confront the unspoken fears we rarely share. Stirling, the child of immigrants, constructs a visual journal that captures the silence and longing of a childhood shaped by cultural displacement. Warnock navigates queer life and love with fragile clarity, documenting expressions of self-identity, grief, and home. These photographs don’t seek to explain. They make space for what remains. Like this year’s One Book One Denver selection, they don’t offer closure. They offer presence. — Samantha Johnston, CPAC Executive Director & Curator Image: Venceas © Carl Bower

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is proud to present Panjereh, an exhibition by Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani. Panjereh—which means ‘window’ or ‘passageway’ in Farsi—builds on Soleimani’s ongoing Ghostwriter series, in which she explores her parents’ experiences of political exile and migration as a lens to examine broader systems of geopolitics. Known for her intricate, studio-based compositions that combine photographs, props, live animals and even her own parents in surreal, magical realist scenes, Soleimani expands her practice in Panjereh with the debut of a new body of work featuring injured birds. These images draw from her work as a wildlife rehabilitator and founder of Congress of the Birds, a federally licensed wild bird rehabilitation center in Rhode Island. The exhibition will also include a new site-specific wall drawing created specifically for ICP’s galleries. Curated by Elisabeth Sherman, Guest Curator, the exhibition will bring together more than forty photographs, the vast majority of which have never before been shown in New York. Sherman states, “In her work, Soleimani uniquely braids together the complex particularities of her family’s history, deep research into geopolitics and her inherited passion for care work into a visual language completely her own. The magically inventive spaces she creates allow for complexity in telling these stories, honoring their richness and continually unfolding nature. It is truly an honor to be presenting her first solo exhibition in New York, specifically at an institution historically dedicated to photography that engages with the politics of our time.” The Ghostwriter series takes Soleimani’s family history—specifically that of her parents' flight from Iran as political refugees following the 1979 revolution—as an overarching conceptual framework that informs her creative process, from the significance of the objects and family ephemera she uses to the compositions of the photographs themselves. The series carries out a form of ‘ghostwriting’ in the way it both narrates and reconstructs the lives of Soleimani’s parents without utilizing their voices directly. The works focus on their lives in Iran as pro-democracy activists before then being forced to flee the country, enduring both physical and psychological hardship on their way to eventual resettlement in the United States. Soleimani’s mother was forced to give up being a practicing nurse, leading her to begin caring for wild birds, a skill which she would eventually pass along to her daughter. With their personal emphasis, the Ghostwriter works present a distinct expression of Soleimani’s longstanding interest in Iranian history and the contemporary geopolitics between the West and the Middle East. Rather than address this history using a strictly documentary approach, Soleimani instead examines storytelling and memory as the primary means through which these stories are transmitted; the construction of her pictures captures the way that detail and meaning are often obscured, transformed or difficult to fully grasp. This process is expressed by the degree of visual compression and accumulation of detail that Soleimani’s photographs contain, as specific passages, details or textures—wildlife and plants, architecture and landscape—regularly function as stand-ins and metaphors rather than straightforward description. Soleimani situates artifacts from her parents’ journey against backgrounds made up of imagery pulled from a variety of archival family photographs, resulting in works that are layered composites of multiple stories, documenting factual traces of history within newly imagined spaces. A new development within the Ghostwriter series are the Flyways photographs, which draw attention to the plight of migratory birds, many of whom are wounded on their long journeys through populated areas. Soleimani’s work as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator grew out of a care practice that she learned from her mother and forms part of a larger cultural inheritance that has been passed down to her. Assuming the position of primary characters, the birds that Soleimani photographs and places within her tableaux provide a metaphor for the many social, political and environmental obstructions met by people forced into flights of their own. This new group of analog photographs that Soleimani made of rehabilitated birds presents a unique kind of maximalism despite their small scale while also forgoing the complex layering of reference and imagery typical of the Ghostwriter series. Shot in extreme close-up, these works render the bodies of birds as intensely detailed and complex worlds unto themselves, where feathers, talons and eyes are as richly described as Soleimani’s family history is explored. The acts of care contained within these images highlights the relationship between care and political resistance that has unfolded not only with Soleimani’s own family, but which remains critically important for our present moment. Image: Edward Burtynsky, Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community - Suburb, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2011

As a photographer I have had a lifelong desire to record the daily life around me. This has principally been in Boston and Cambridge. Like the Boston painter Allan Rohan Crite, I have thought of myself as an artist-reporter, motivated to clearly detail what life looked like in this place at this particular time. I have been drawn to the everyday, to ordinary people going about their lives. To me there is wonder in small things . I’ve often wished that photography had existed in distant times – say, in colonial Boston or medieval Europe or ancient Greece – to have a record of everyday life in those eras. Looking at the archive of Arthur Griffin was a real pleasure because it spoke to this interest of mine in the recorded past – even if only decades before my own life. In fact, what made researching his work particularly interesting to me was that the city he captured was at once both so similar and so different from the city I have photographed. (Almost every photograph I chose from the Griffin archive was made in Boston). I found that we often photographed people doing the same things, such as looking at books for sale on a sidewalk, hovering over a car engine, waiting on benches in a train station. And often our subjects were photographed in the same location – North Station, the L Street Bathhouse, the Bunker Hill Memorial – even, at times, framed from almost the exact same spot, decades apart. This caused me to reflect on the evolution of a city; what continues, carries on over the years, and what changes, what is new. There are physical and social aspects of Boston in Griffin’s pictures that are remarkably the same as in mine. But there are also differences – in what has changed in the built environment, in the mix of people who make up the city, and in the city’s changing culture. To continue observing and to continue challenging yourself to make a well-framed image of an expressive human moment in this evolving world – like Arthur Griffin did so successfully – is forever satisfying. About Tony Loreti Tony Loreti is a Boston-based photographer and photography educator. Born in Beverly, MA, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Filmmaking from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Tony recently retired after teaching photography for twenty-five years at the Cambridge School of Weston. His personal photography has been selected for many juried exhibitions and is in both private and public collections. A significant portfolio of his street photography work has been purchased for the collection of the Print Department of the Boston Public Library, and the Cambridge Public Library has also acquired a large number of prints. Tony continues to work with film and traditional printing in his personal photography. He is deeply committed to the older form of the medium, particularly because of its tangible nature and the look and feel of gelatin silver prints.