Through the Lens of Father Browne, S.J.: Photographic Adventures of an Irish Priest

Here is a unique 300-word text inspired by the press release, with for italics and at the end of each paragraph: Marilyn Monroe’s centenary becomes an invitation to look again, more closely and more quietly, at a life that has long hovered between legend and longing. In Marilyn Turns 100, Melissa Morgan Fine Art presents an intimate body of work by Lawrence Schiller, whose photographs from Monroe’s final year trace a portrait that is both luminous and deeply human. These images, many rarely seen, capture moments when the star stepped out of performance and into vulnerability, revealing the person behind the icon. Schiller’s perspective is shaped by unusual proximity. Granted access during the filming of Something’s Got to Give and throughout private intervals, he observed Marilyn at a pivotal moment: the height of her fame intertwined with the fragility of transition. His photographs do not simply record a public figure; they explore the shifting expressions, hesitations, and quiet confidences that defined her late career. The result is a visual narrative that defies caricature and restores the complexity of her presence. Within this exhibition, viewers encounter Marilyn as collaborator and subject, self-aware yet unguarded. The images reflect a woman negotiating her identity—professional, emotional, and personal—while navigating the relentless gaze that shaped her public life. Schiller’s photographs offer space for contemplation, inviting us to see her anew not as a symbol, but as an individual whose contradictions remain compelling a century later. Lawrence Schiller’s career, spanning photography and film, has earned recognition across major institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New York Historical Society. His work, widely published in influential magazines, continues to frame cultural memory with clarity and insight. Marilyn Turns 100 extends that legacy, honoring both the photographer’s enduring craft and the timeless presence of a woman who continues to inspire devotion and inquiry in equal measure. Image: Lawrence Schiller Marilyn Monroe at Pool Edge, 1962 Melissa Morgan Fine Art © Lawrence Schiller

Daniel Cooney is pleased to present Shirttail Kin – New Work, the first solo exhibition with Texas-born artist Chivas Clem. Opening one year after his solo museum survey at the Dallas Contemporary, this exhibition features 14 never-before-seen photographs from Clem’s ongoing series Shirttail Kin, a project that began in 2012. The series’ title draws from Southern vernacular, referring to someone considered family through affection rather than blood, setting the tone for a body of work steeped in intimacy, connection, and observation. Shirttail Kin documents young white men living in and around Northeast Texas and Southeast Oklahoma, near Clem’s hometown of Paris, Texas. The photographs present the subjects mostly unclothed, captured within the private and public spaces of motels, trailer parks, abandoned houses, and Clem’s own studio. Some figures pose deliberately, while others are recorded in candid moments, creating a fluid tension between performance and authenticity. Through these depictions, Clem examines themes of masculinity, class, power, and eroticism, while also highlighting the visibility and self-presentation of this marginalized community. Clem has described his models as actors in an unscripted film, emphasizing the improvisational quality of each image. Beyond individual portrayal, the series reflects broader societal concerns, exploring the vulnerabilities of rural working-class life and the shifting notions of masculinity within contemporary culture. The photographs subtly interrogate the larger cultural and political pressures faced by these communities, offering both critique and empathy. Born in 1971 in Paris, Texas, and currently based there, Chivas Clem is a multimedia artist working across photography, film, sculpture, and painting. A graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Clem is also the founder of the influential New York artist space The Fifth International. Shirttail Kin – New Work underscores Clem’s ongoing exploration of identity, community, and the cinematic potential of everyday life, presenting a deeply personal yet socially resonant vision of contemporary rural America. Image: Chivas Clem Chris on the Red River, 2025 Archival inkjet print 40 x 30" © Chivas Clem

Stevenson Library at Bard College presents Melissa Shook: Freedom to Create, curated by Fiona Laugharn, an independent curator and Bard alumna. On view from September 18 through December 19, 2025, the exhibition celebrates the enduring influence of Bard on the artistic and intellectual life of Melissa Shook, who studied at the college between 1959 and 1961. The opening reception will take place on September 25, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM. At just seventeen, Shook wrote in her Bard application, “I have begun to realize how important freedom is for the person who desires to create in any way.” This early insight into the nature of creativity becomes the guiding thread of the exhibition. Drawn from a recent gift by her daughter, Krissy Shook, the presentation gathers an extraordinary array of personal materials—letters, essays, photographs, and ceramics—alongside a rich selection of handmade artist books and camera equipment. Highlights include prints and contact sheets from Shook’s iconic series Daily Self-Portraits 1972–1973 and Wellfleet (1973), which together capture her lifelong exploration of identity, discipline, and the passage of time. Through correspondence, annotated drafts, and early works, Freedom to Create maps the evolution of a young woman who came to Bard as an English major and left on a path toward becoming one of the most reflective and independent voices in American photography. The exhibition reveals how the environment of freedom and curiosity that Bard fostered served as both inspiration and foundation for Shook’s later work as an artist and educator at the University of Massachusetts Boston. By pairing archival fragments with completed artworks, the exhibition encourages visitors to reflect on their own creative beginnings. It asks a question that Shook herself might have posed: What do we require—internally and externally—to create freely? Image: Kemper Peacock Melissa Shook, ca. 1960s Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches © Kristina Shook & The Estate of M. Melissa Shook

Ken Gonzales-Day returns to Luis De Jesus Los Angeles with Afterlife, a striking new exhibition that expands his long-standing exploration of history, race, and representation. On view from November 8 through December 20, 2025, the show marks his sixth solo presentation with the gallery and reaffirms his deep commitment to reinterpreting the narratives held within museum collections. In Afterlife, Gonzales-Day examines the ways cultural objects survive across time—how they carry stories, identities, and contradictions from one civilization to another. Drawing on imagery from the Mexica and other Mesoamerican traditions, and combining them with artifacts from Europe, Africa, and Asia, he creates visually layered compositions that challenge the conventional hierarchies of art history. The resulting works invite viewers to consider how the past continues to shape the present and how museums, often seen as guardians of culture, are also sites of omission and erasure. For over two decades, the artist has photographed artifacts in institutions worldwide, digitally reconstructing them into new visual dialogues. In Xipe Totec with Busts, Gonzales-Day brings together figures of American icons—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and Susan B. Anthony—alongside Mesoamerican deities and skulls from a museum of criminal anthropology. This haunting combination reflects on cultural survival, loss, and the uneasy coexistence of power and mortality. Other works continue his ongoing inquiry into what is preserved and what is forgotten. Pairing a Roman Dying Gaul with a Mesoamerican Chac Mool, Gonzales-Day creates a conversation between civilizations separated by time but united by themes of sacrifice, renewal, and human vulnerability. Ultimately, Afterlife is both an artistic excavation and a meditation on continuity. Gonzales-Day reminds us that every object—and every image—has its own afterlife, carrying within it the traces of countless stories waiting to be seen anew. Image: Ken Gonzales-Day Afterlife (Digital composition with Mexico, Effigy of Death, National Museum of Anthropology (MNA), Mexico City; Leonard Wells Volk, Abraham Lincoln, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NGP); Mexico, Aztec, Figure of Xipe Totec, LACMA; Jean-Antoine Houdon, George Washington, NPG; Houdon, Benjamin Franklin, NPG; Adelaide Johnson, Susan B. Anthony, NPG; Mexico,Scull Mask, MNA; Jean-Antoine Houdon, Flayed Man; Sculls, Museum of Criminal Anthropology, Turin; Rosenborg Tapestries, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen), 2025 Archival ink on rag paper 40 x 80 in (101.6 x 203.2 cm) © Ken Gonzales-Day

Filter Photo presents The Tenderness of Tides, a solo exhibition by Alison Chen, curated by María Sprowls-Cervantes. The show unfolds as a meditation on gravity, motherhood, and the unseen currents that connect us across generations. In this poetic body of work, Chen draws a parallel between the pull of the Moon on the tides and the enduring bond between mother and child. Just as the Moon’s gravity shapes the waters of the Earth, maternal love leaves invisible imprints that shift and move through time. Each photograph becomes an echo of that force—sometimes gentle, sometimes overwhelming—revealing how tenderness and distance coexist within the same orbit. The Tenderness of Tides grew from Chen’s reflections on her own experience as a mother, deepened by her discovery of an old photograph of her grandmother holding her newborn daughter. Found after her grandmother’s passing, the image awakened questions about the nature of care, the inheritance of emotion, and the weight of family histories. For Chen, these quiet generational links mirror the ocean’s ceaseless motion: both are shaped by forces we can feel but rarely see. Through photography and video, Chen traces the interplay of intimacy and loss, of cycles that repeat and evolve. Her images suggest that love, like the tides, is not static but rhythmic—rising, retreating, and returning with renewed strength. The exhibition also reflects the sensitivity of curator María Sprowls-Cervantes, whose thoughtful approach amplifies Chen’s exploration of memory and transformation. Together, artist and curator invite viewers to consider how personal experience is tethered to cosmic rhythm, and how, within that vast continuum, tenderness remains our most enduring tide. Image: © Alison Chen

CLAMP presents As My Eyes Open and You Disappear, the second solo exhibition by Robert Calafiore, bringing together a new series of nude studies conceived as theatrical compositions. Drawing inspiration from Greek and Roman sculpture, the sensuality of odalisques, and the expressive photography of George Platt Lynes and Duane Michals, Calafiore arranges each image like a staged performance. Within these luminous scenes, light and gesture unfold a drama of presence and fragility, rendering the human body both sculptural and fleeting—illuminated as if through stained glass. Working entirely with analogue methods, Calafiore constructs handmade pinhole cameras that expose light directly onto chromogenic paper. Each image is the result of long exposures lasting several minutes or hours, requiring his models to remain still as time accumulates across the frame. The faint movements that occur—small tremors of breath or shift of limb—become layered traces that collapse time into a single image, transforming the figure into a radiant, spectral form suspended between solidity and dissolution. By presenting these photographs as negatives, Calafiore inverts darkness and light, creating a world that must be slowly deciphered. This inversion invites viewers to look closely and reconstruct what they see, countering the immediacy of digital consumption. His work asks for patience and contemplation, encouraging an encounter with photography as both process and revelation. Calafiore’s practice, deeply rooted in material craft and ritual discipline, reflects his upbringing in a traditional Italian Catholic household, where devotion and labor intertwined. The glowing hues and inverted palettes of his prints evoke the sacred atmosphere of stained glass and devotional painting. In turning away from digital technologies, Calafiore reclaims photography as a tactile art of endurance and wonder—a meditation on how we see, remember, and inhabit the luminous traces of time. Image: Exhausted, At the End 2024 Signed and dated, verso Chromogenic print (Unique) 16 x 20 inches © Robert Calafiore

John M. Valadez: A Two Second Gaze—Street Photography from the 1970s and 80s offers an intimate portrait of East Los Angeles through the keen eye of an artist who walked his neighborhood with a camera and curiosity. Valadez’s images stop time for a beat—two seconds, perhaps—to reveal gestures, fashions, storefronts, and faces that together map a vibrant community. These photographs are at once documentary and tender: they honor everyday life without flattening it into stereotype. Working with Kodachrome film and a practiced instinct for timing, Valadez captured neighbors, friends, and strangers in moments of self-expression and quiet dignity. The streets, theaters, and markets of East L.A. become more than backdrop; they are active characters that shape and reflect the people who inhabit them. Against a landscape marked by social change and political struggle, the images assert presence and pride, making visible the textures of a Chicano experience often overlooked by mainstream narratives. Valadez’s practice—walking, photographing, returning to the images as notes for later paintings—reveals a sustained commitment to seeing. His photographs read like a living sketchbook: spontaneous compositions that later informed his pastels and oils, and that continue to resonate as cultural testimony. Humor, style, vulnerability, and resilience appear together in frames that reward slow looking and attentive listening. More than a historical record, this body of work is an act of recognition. A Two Second Gaze invites viewers to witness a community on its own terms, to appreciate how identity is performed and preserved in public life, and to acknowledge the ordinary gestures that make a neighborhood into home. In Valadez’s photographs, appearing is an assertion—and being seen matters. Image: John M. Valadez Highland, Circa 1978 - 1982 Archival inkjet print © John M. Valadez

Richard Misrach: Rewind at Fraenkel Gallery offers an expansive view of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, presenting a journey backward through five decades of artistic evolution. Organized in reverse chronology, the exhibition moves from Misrach’s recent series Cargo—a meditation on global trade and its environmental and human costs—to his early 1970s project Telegraph 3 A.M., which captured Berkeley’s street culture in the aftermath of the counterculture movement. Together, the works form a compelling portrait of an artist who has continually balanced social engagement with formal and aesthetic inquiry. Across film, digital, and large-scale prints, Misrach’s photography embraces both technical experimentation and emotional resonance. His images of freighter ships illuminated by sunrise hues of pink and violet in San Francisco Bay reflect a fascination with beauty as a vehicle for deeper reflection. As Misrach has stated, beauty can compel viewers to confront issues they might otherwise turn away from. This balance between allure and unease runs throughout his practice—from his haunting documentation of the U.S.–Mexico border wall and Louisiana’s polluted Cancer Alley to his meditative seascapes and desert landscapes. Each image captures a world suspended between stillness and consequence. Since his early experiments with night photography in the American West, Misrach has pursued the intersection of the sublime and the political. Series such as Desert Cantos explore humanity’s complex relationship with nature, while later works like Golden Gate and On the Beach translate natural phenomena into near-abstractions of light, color, and form. His ongoing engagement with abstraction reaches a new dimension in Notations, where inverted negatives reveal ethereal patterns and textures otherwise unseen. Through five decades, Misrach has remained steadfast in his exploration of photography’s capacity to illuminate both the beauty and the fragility of the world we inhabit. Image: Self Portrait, 1975 gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches (sheet) [40.6 x 50.8 cm] © Richard Misrach

Anxiety of Amnesia brings together the intertwined visions of Andrea Wenglowskyj and her late father, Bohdan, through a dialogue that spans more than six decades. Combining original imagery, found archival photographs, and text, the exhibition explores how memory and photography overlap to shape identity, belonging, and grief. The project delves into the quiet power of vernacular photography—those intimate, everyday images that often outlast their creators—and questions who owns the stories they preserve. Through this layered conversation between past and present, Wenglowskyj reimagines her father’s absence as a space for connection, creating a tender exchange that bridges generations. The genesis of the project lies in a trunk her father left behind after his death in 2000—filled with photographs, negatives, and their worn packaging. Once an attorney and a young Ukrainian immigrant, Bohdan photographed his surroundings with curiosity and care, documenting a life of adaptation and memory. By juxtaposing his images with her own, Andrea constructs an imagined dialogue, written directly on the gallery walls, where she and her father converse as peers—as artists, parents, and companions in loss. The result is both personal and universal, inviting viewers to reflect on how photography transforms recollection into presence. Andrea Wenglowskyj, based in Buffalo, New York, is a photo-based artist and commercial photographer. A Fulbright Grant recipient, she spent time in Ukraine exploring the country’s cultural identity through its artists and institutions. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times and NPR, and exhibited at venues including Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, Galerie Amu in Prague, and The Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver. Anxiety of Amnesia is supported by Arts Services Inc., the New York State Council on the Arts, and Erie County. Image: Anxiety of Amnesia By Andrea Wenglowskyj © Andrea Wenglowskyj

Jenkins Johnson Gallery announces its exciting return to Manhattan through a collaborative alliance with Marian Goodman Gallery. Over the next twelve months, Jenkins Johnson will present a series of exhibitions on the third floor of Marian Goodman Gallery at 385 Broadway in New York. This partnership between two members of the Art Dealers Association of America reflects the cooperative and forward-thinking ethos that defines the city’s vibrant art community. While both galleries will continue to operate independently, this shared endeavor offers audiences a rare opportunity to experience two distinct programs in conversation. For Jenkins Johnson, the return to Manhattan marks a full-circle moment. Founded in San Francisco in 1996, the gallery established its presence in Chelsea in 2005 before relocating to Brooklyn in 2017 to open Jenkins Johnson Projects. The new chapter in Tribeca reaffirms its commitment to fostering dynamic artistic dialogues across neighborhoods and generations. The debut exhibition in this renewed Manhattan space will be Believable, a solo presentation by acclaimed New York artist Lola Flash. Opening on November 8th, with a public conversation between Flash and Rhea L. Combs of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition revisits four decades of Flash’s groundbreaking practice. From the iconic Cross Colour series of the 1980s and 1990s—created in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis—to recent works exploring gender, race, and identity, Flash’s photographs stand at the intersection of activism and art. Widely recognized for challenging cultural norms through a genderqueer lens, Flash’s work is represented in major museum collections, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Through Believable, Jenkins Johnson Gallery celebrates an artist whose visual and political legacy continues to shape contemporary photographic discourse. Image: Lola Flash, Cow Girl (Cross Colour Series), c. 1994, chromogenic print 24 x 20 in © Lola Flash

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Homeland, an exhibition featuring Larry Sultan’s series of the same name, marking the artist’s third collaboration with the gallery. In this body of work, Sultan turns his lens to Latino day laborers positioned within the suburban landscapes of California, capturing moments suspended between movement and stillness. Drawing inspiration from the tradition of landscape painting, his images evoke order while simultaneously emphasizing ambiguity and uncertainty, revealing the latent possibilities that emerge in quiet intervals. The exhibition will be on view in the project gallery from October 30 through December 20, 2025, with an opening reception on Thursday, October 30 from 6–8PM. Over two years, Sultan visited lumber yards and hardware stores in the Bay Area and Simi Valley, where men congregated daily seeking temporary work. Rather than photographing them simply as laborers, he invited them to perform within the landscape, choreographing their postures and expressions across suburban margins. The resulting tableaux are neither dramatic nor dynamic but deliberate, capturing the tension of waiting and the rhythms of daily life. Each image explores the interplay between longing, melancholy, and possibility, suggesting that even the mundane holds unexpected potential. Sultan’s attention to overlooked spaces—fields behind strip malls, borderlands along the LA River—reflects a lifelong fascination with the places that shaped his childhood in the San Fernando Valley. By revisiting these environments, Homeland interrogates notions of suburban identity, blending the ordinary with subtle layers of anticipation and quiet reflection. The series challenges assumptions about domesticity, labor, and the landscapes we inhabit, creating images that feel both specific and universal. Throughout his career, Sultan merged documentary and staged photography to examine the psychological and physical contours of suburban life. From Pictures From Home to The Valley and Katherine Avenue, his work interrogated reality, fantasy, and desire, embedding cultural meaning within everyday spaces. Homeland continues this exploration, offering a poetic vision of people, place, and the subtle interplay between presence and possibility in the Californian landscape. Image: Larry Sultan, Antioch Creek, 2008. © Larry Sultan

303 Gallery presents Stephen Shore: Early Work, an exhibition highlighting the formative years of one of photography’s most influential figures. Spanning the period from 1960 to 1965, the show showcases a selection of largely unpublished photographs taken during Shore’s teenage years in New York City. Coinciding with the release of his book Early Work, published by MACK, this presentation provides a rare glimpse into the artist’s early creative explorations and the beginnings of a vision that would later reshape contemporary photography. The works on view capture a young Shore experimenting with the medium in both technical and conceptual ways. These black and white photographs reveal an artist eager to explore film types, developers, and printing techniques, laying the groundwork for his precise attention to light, composition, and color that would define his mature work. Each image reflects a curiosity about urban life, objects, and everyday moments, offering an intimate portrait of a city in transition as seen through the eyes of a keen observer still discovering his artistic voice. Taken before his famed series The Velvet Years, shot at Warhol’s Factory, these early works provide an alternate view of New York in the early 1960s, one that is both personal and socially resonant. They show Shore’s early interest in sequencing, framing, and the visual narrative—a foundation that would later inform his celebrated series Conceptual Sequences, American Surfaces, and Uncommon Places. The exhibition traces the evolution of a young photographer developing his technical fluency while also probing the texture of everyday life. Stephen Shore: Early Work invites viewers to witness the nascent stages of a remarkable photographic career, offering insights into the experimentation, observation, and perceptive sensibilities that would later make Shore a defining voice in the documentation of contemporary America. Image: Stephen Shore New York, New York, 1964 1964 Gelatin Silver Print 9 3/8 x 14 inches (23.8 x 35.6 cm) image size 11 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches (29.8 x 41.9 cm) paper size Edition of 5, with 2 AP SS 3662 © Stephen Shore