Reclaiming the Muse by Grace Weston

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.

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.

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.

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

Geoglyphs are ancestral symbolic forms, etched into the ground with dry-stone lines, cleared furrows, and tamped soil. Created by Indigenous communities as ritual acts, they embody communal cosmologies across the landscape—a shared vision of the Cosmos. Often aligned with constellations or natural features—and most legible from above—they weave culture, Land, and the heavens.” This photographic investigation is a personal reflection on human values and how they are carved into the Earth’s body. I have traversed South America’s mining territories for fifteen months in search of meaning. As an architect expanding my practice into the realm of the visual arts, I have sought to engage with the spiritual dimensions of our epoch, immersing myself in monumental voids that descend into the Earth’s depths. From the air and from the ground, what emerged transcended the commodification of minerals for the energy transition: these voids exist as testaments to humanity’s aspirations. The chronicles of modernity are inscribed across the Planet’s surface. Sacred Lands have become kingdoms of accumulation, empires of extraction. These new cosmotechnic terrains are the geoglyphs of our time—monuments to the values we pursue. - Lorenzo Poli

LACP is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition by Matthew Finley, whose work imagines the world as it should have been: A world where no queer person feels ashamed for who they love, who they are and how they want to present themselves. In this moment, when people in power insist on marginalizing, isolating and denouncing queer communities, LACP insists on elevating love and acceptance. Matthew Finley’s work imagines the world as it should have been: A world where no queer person feels ashamed for who they love, who they are and how they want to present themselves. In this universe, family support of one’s love is a given, rather than a possibility, or, we could say, an impossibility. In his poetic photographic projects, Finley provides coordinates for how life in this world would be. This solo exhibition, which depicts several series from the past decade, chronicles how Finley reimagines found images and objects, encouraging his staged subjects to discover the joy of nature, as well as a self-consciousness that never seeks to conceal or mask itself, visualizing how we package ourselves for others and the emotional states that result. Whether in fictive family albums or expansive analog projects, his photographic perspective remains intimate and vulnerable. Finley positions male bodies in compositions that echo photographic histories, in which the male subjects become a focal point of the viewing eye, a source of fascination and desire–and that desire quietly comes to the fore to insist on its rightful place. The emotional burden at the core of these works informs their shapes, perspectives, light and configurations. They are both haunting and haunted, charting a path from rejection to liberation by way of friendship and love. Desire, in these works, becomes a core element of vision; whether it is the desire to be close to another body or the desire to be fully accepted. In that sense, Finley’s work negotiates lived experiences and offers them as an invitation for the viewer, to become an active participant; re-imagine relationships and their histories alongside those captured in the frame, and insist on joy and love as an antidote for judgment, exclusion and isolation in our current world. Image: hoto by Matthew Finley, We couldn’t stop kissing on our wedding day. 2024, glitter and varnish on archival pigment print from vintage found photograph.

EUQINOM Gallery presents Blue Women, the first solo exhibition by Brea Souders with the gallery, offering a compelling exploration of identity, technology, and image. The exhibition brings together Blue Women and Another Online Pervert, two distinct yet intertwined bodies of work that probe how human subjects are shaped, mediated, and transformed by both artificial and natural forces. Another Online Pervert (2021–2023) emerges from years of dialogue between Souders and an early female AI chatbot, predating the mainstream adoption of AI companionship. These conversations are interwoven with entries from Souders’ personal diary spanning two decades and paired with photographs from her archive. The work navigates intimate questions of love, desire, mortality, perception, and the body, revealing how human and machine can construct a shared narrative. Its diaristic and image-driven perspective creates a space where technology and human experience intersect, reflecting on connection, identity, and the transformation of meaning through artificial interfaces. Blue Women (2024–2025) turns its focus to storefront beauty posters gradually sun-bleached to shades of blue. Rephotographed in public spaces across four continents, the series examines the eroded expressions of women and the faded motifs surrounding them. These images, altered by time, light, and weather, shed their commercial intent and assume a new ambiguity. Drawing on references from Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes to 19th-century spirit photography, Blue Women evokes visual haunting, exploring the afterlife of consumer imagery and the impermanence of beauty and desire. Both projects investigate the fragile interplay of memory, image, and mediation. Where Another Online Pervert engages the intimacy of human–machine dialogue, Blue Women examines the material and symbolic traces left by time on images once imbued with commercial fantasy. Together, they suspend viewers between past and future, artificial and organic, presence and absence. The exhibition captures the tensions of contemporary life, probing how technology, environment, and emotion shape perception and the endurance of meaning across time and interface. Image: BREA SOUDERS, Blue Woman #05, 2024 from the series Blue Women Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 16 in (50.80 x 40.64 cm), Edition of 3 +1AP @ Brea Souders

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

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