Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape

The exhibition Notes from a Peripatetic Collector: Selections from the Collection of Dr. Charles Hamlin brings together more than thirty photographs that chart the course of a lifetime devoted to the art of collecting. Dr. Hamlin’s vision is characterized by its boundless curiosity—expansive in subject, emotion, and technique. His collection reveals an eye that values resonance over convention, guided not by market trends or critical approval, but by the instinctive power of personal response. Spanning the 1980s through the early 2000s, the works on view embody a deep engagement with both the craft and spirit of photography. From the pioneering creativity of Hal Gould and the refined vision of James O. Milmoe to the quiet surprises found in lesser-known artists, each photograph bears the mark of discovery. For Dr. Hamlin, collecting has always been a journey—an ongoing dialogue between artist, image, and viewer that enriches both intellect and imagination. The exhibition also showcases a remarkable range of processes: dye transfers and palladium prints, intricate photo-montages, and long-exposure motion studies sit alongside classic gelatin silver and archival pigment prints. Together, they illuminate the evolving language of photography while tracing the rhythm of one collector’s lifelong pursuit. Beyond his medical career as a renowned hand surgeon, Dr. Hamlin has nurtured an enduring passion for the visual arts since his formative years at Columbia University. Those early visits to New York galleries and studios offered balance to the demands of medicine and planted the seed of a six-decade fascination. His collection reflects both aesthetic sensitivity and a profound respect for humanity—a belief that art, like healing, connects us through empathy, emotion, and shared experience. Image: Patti Hallock. "Watson Ranch, Nebraska." 2008. Archival pigment print. © Patti Hallock

Karen Keating’s photographs, now brought together in an expansive exhibition at Photoworks, trace a life shaped by curiosity, empathy, and the quiet power of observation. Spanning decades of work and more than forty handmade darkroom prints, the presentation reflects an artist who moves through the world with genuine attentiveness. Whether she is documenting the familiar rhythms of her hometown of Coshocton, Ohio, or forging connections with people thousands of miles away, Keating approaches every subject with patience and openness. Her portraits from Cuba and Honduras form the emotional core of the exhibition. In these works, Keating’s camera becomes a bridge, capturing not only faces but exchanges—moments marked by dignity, humor, and trust. The images occupy a space between documentary and personal encounter, revealing stories that reside in a gesture, a glance, or the texture of a lived-in environment. These photographs resonate not because they are dramatic, but because they honor the fullness of ordinary life. Alongside the international portraits are Keating’s early studies of Mothers and Daughters in Washington, DC during the 1970s. These images portray intimacy across generations, revealing both the tenderness and strength embedded in family relationships. Printed with an exquisite sensitivity to tone, they highlight the emotional complexity that unfolds in everyday domestic scenes. Keating’s nightscapes, created outdoors and often carrying a sense of hushed wonder, introduce another facet of her practice. Through soft gradients of light and shadow, she evokes nature as a place of contemplation. Her experiments with infrared film further expand the exhibition’s range, transforming familiar environments and portraits into something mysterious and otherworldly. Throughout the exhibition, what unites these varied bodies of work is Keating’s unwavering dedication to craft. Each print reveals her mastery of the darkroom, her careful modulation of blacks, greys, and luminous highlights. Together, these images form a deeply human record—proof of a photographer who sees with both precision and heart. Image: I Come From... © Karen Keating

Power & Light: Russell Lee's Coal Survey is an exhibition of photographs of coal communities by American documentary photographer Russell Lee. These images tell the story of laborers who helped build the nation, of a moment when the government took stock of their health and safety, and of a photographer who recognized their humanity. About the Exhibit Power & Light is free and open to the public. The exhibition features more than 200 of Russell Lee’s photographs of coal miners and their families in the form of large-scale prints, projections, and digital interactives from a nationwide survey of housing and medical and community facilities of bituminous coal mining communities. The survey was conducted by Navy personnel in 1946 as part of a strike-ending agreement negotiated between the Department of the Interior and the United Mine Workers of America. The full series of photographs, which numbers in the thousands, can only be found in the holdings of the National Archives. These images document inhumane living and working conditions but also depict the joy, strength, and resilience of the miners' families and communities.

The Soldier’s Lens is a curated exhibition showcasing the original perspectives of active-duty service members, veterans, and their families. This powerful exhibition will explore the diverse experiences of military life, from moments of intensity and duty to the quiet rhythms of everyday routines. Chosen submissions will be carefully selected by a panel of judges with deep knowledge in both art and military service. These selected works will be featured in a group exhibition at FMoPA in October 2025. This ambitious project is planned in multiple phases, including an online exhibition, live programming, and curriculum development. The exhibition’s core aim is to honor the profound intersection of photographic arts and military service, while simultaneously raising awareness of veterans’ experiences and generating support for both FMoPA and vital veterans’ causes. This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Tom and Dixie Arthur and the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners.

What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape is a unique selection of photographs from the museum's collection that have never been shown to the public. Featuring acquisitions from the past 17 years since the Photography department was established in 2008, the exhibition represents the variety of ways landscape photographs help us see and appreciate other times and places and consider where the world has been and what it is becoming. Photographs are informally organized by theme or subject matter, such as Meghann Riepenhoff’s large camera-less image of water and ice, flanked by photographs of rivers and oceans by artist Masao Yamamoto and others. Intimate photographs of nature include works by Linda Conner and Terri Weifenbach as well as a hypnotically detailed tableau by Tanya Marcuse. Landscapes by Christina Fernandez, Patrick Nagatani and Zora J. Murff confront troubling conflicts in our collective history. America’s scenic beauty is celebrated in works by Marion Post Wolcott, William Henry Jackson, Mary Peck, and Abelardo Morell. Steve Fitch’s photograph of a radio tower announces the near-universal presence of technology. Challenges of living in a changing, unpredictable world are the subject of photographs by John Ganis, Frank Gohlke and others, while Henry Wessel, Jr. evokes the easy pleasures of road trips. Other pictures show more troubling aspects of the North American landscape, from the effects of natural disasters to dark moments in the history of slavery and conflicts with Indigenous people. All are bound together by the idea that landscape can serve as an autobiography of the people, societies, and natural forces that shape the world over time. Image: © Steve Fitch

Tideland presents a hauntingly beautiful series of black-and-white photographs by Savannah-based artist Parker Stewart (b. 1992), taken between 2020 and 2024. Through his lens, Stewart captures the raw essence of Georgia’s coastline—a region where the natural world feels both ancient and alive. His images transport viewers into an environment where sea and land intertwine endlessly, creating a dialogue between stillness and motion. With fog-draped marshes, weathered docks, and timeworn shrimp boats, these photographs immerse us in a landscape that hums with memory and quiet transformation. The Georgia coast, with its barrier islands and tidal estuaries, becomes in Stewart’s vision a place of mystery and reverence. Each photograph balances delicacy and strength: sunlight filtered through mist, reflections trembling on dark water, the texture of salt-stained wood. There is a sense that the landscape itself breathes—that history, climate, and human presence have all left invisible traces. Stewart’s camera becomes an instrument of listening, attuned to the rhythms of tide and wind, to the murmurs of an old world that continues to endure. A native of North Carolina, Parker Stewart arrived in Savannah in 2011 to study photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His work centers on the concept of Place, using the camera not simply to observe, but to engage deeply with the spirit of a landscape. Alongside his ongoing study of Georgia’s wild coast and the Savannah River Basin, Stewart has photographed in diverse regions such as Coastal Maine, Western North Carolina, the Oregon Coast, and the Mojave Desert. Across these terrains, he seeks the moments when nature and emotion intersect—where the ordinary becomes transcendent, and time feels suspended within the frame. Image: Parker Stewart; Boardwalk and Pilings, Valona, 2020; archival pigment print; courtesy of the artist. © Parker Stewart

Since 2007, Pixy Liao (廖逸君) has collaborated with her partner, Takahiro Morooka (諸岡高裕, nicknamed Moro), on a series of staged, often humorous self-portraits. These works wryly examine the power dynamics between artist and muse, prod at conservative gender roles, and document the evolution of their relationship. Pixy (born 1979 in Shanghai, China), an artist working in photography, installation, and performance, met Japanese-born artist and musician Moro in 2006 when both were international students in Memphis, Tennessee. Their creative partnership has grown and evolved over the years to include many projects including their music group, PIMO, which has released six albums to date. Pixy began the photographic series, known as Experimental Relationship, shortly after she and Moro met, with many of the works playfully referencing art history, film, music, and other artifacts of popular culture. She plans to continue it so long as they remain together. Presenting approximately 45 works that span the duration of this ongoing series, Pixy Liao: Relationship Material—the artist’s first exhibition in Chicago—celebrates the couple’s many ways of being and working together. As the title suggests, the show frames Pixy’s relationship with Moro as artistic material in itself, showing how this manifests not only in photographs but also in sculptures, videos, and PIMO. Through these works, Pixy chronicles and enacts efforts to “reach a new equilibrium” in a partnership that is both artistic and romantic, examining questions of fantasy, desire, and control. Image: How to build a relationship with layered meanings, 2008, Pixy Liao, Courtesy of the artist. © Pixy Liao

When the Veil is Thin opens at Galerie XII Los Angeles from October 4 through December 9, 2025, bringing together four artists whose work explores the liminal, the hidden, and the ephemeral. The exhibition unfolds in the season of autumn, when the shadows grow long and the boundaries between seen and unseen feel most fragile, inviting visitors into a space of reflection and wonder. Charlotte Mano’s luminous self-portraits capture a body at once human and celestial. Bathed in the glow of full moonlight, her figure shimmers with pearlescent light, appearing to float weightlessly into the night. In some images, she transforms into the moon itself, a radiant presence suspended in serene solitude, evoking the mystical power of stillness and introspection. Quentin Shih interrogates memory as a spectral, unstable force. His images, often drenched in red light or suffused with eerie interiors, conjure recollection as an act of summoning. Figures emerge and dissolve within shadow, caught between what is remembered and imagined, creating a haunting sense of presence that hovers at the edges of consciousness. Siri Kaur weaves intimate family moments with archetypal myth, revealing the intersection of home, ritual, and transformation. Her work examines how familial bonds can be both nurturing and uncanny, binding the personal to larger, symbolic narratives that shape identity in subtle, often occult ways. Anja Niemi explores identity’s fracturing through playful and unsettling performance. Donning wigs, costumes, and elaborate disguises, she presents a series of döpplegangers—alternate selves that erupt, collide, and evolve. Her work blurs the line between roles and realities, creating a visual meditation on multiplicity and metamorphosis. Together, these artists construct a twilight realm where perception wavers and thresholds shift. When the Veil is Thin captures the moment when the familiar world dissolves into the unknown, revealing spaces of wonder, reflection, and the hidden energies that stir just beyond ordinary sight. Image: RJ17.WB21.29, 2017 Digital Chromogenic print 43.3 x 43.3 in / 110 x 110 cm 59.1 x 59.1 in / 150 x 150 cm Edition limited to 3 prints + 1 AP © Quentin Shih

Salve Regina University’s Department of Art and Art History presents Infancia, an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Newport-based nonprofit Fundación Magdalena, showcasing 42 silver gelatin prints by renowned Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. This significant presentation includes previously unpublished works that explore themes of childhood and rural life across various corners of the world. Thanks to Iturbide’s longstanding relationship with Fundación Magdalena, this marks the first exhibition dedicated solely to her photographs of children. The exhibition is accompanied by a beautifully designed catalog published by Editorial RM in Barcelona, featuring reproductions of the works alongside an insightful essay by Colombian curator María Wills. This publication, which deepens the conversation around Iturbide’s artistic vision, will be available later this year through Editorial RM and select independent booksellers worldwide. Infancia also launches a new cultural partnership between Salve Regina University and Fundación Magdalena, intended to foster dialogue and connection through the arts. As part of this initiative, the university will host weekly after-school workshops that bring together native English-speaking students and English language learners from Rhode Island public schools. These creative encounters will use art as a tool for empathy, reflection, and shared understanding, encouraging participants to see both themselves and others in new ways. Born in Mexico City in 1942, Graciela Iturbide has long used photography as a means of exploring her country’s identity, rituals, and contradictions. Her black-and-white images—poetic yet grounded in reality—have been exhibited in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Over her distinguished career, she has received numerous international honors, confirming her place among the most influential voices in contemporary photography. Image: © Graciela Iturbide

In this powerful collaborative exhibition, Robin Lasser and Sydney Brown invite viewers to confront the emotional and ecological crises shaping contemporary life by returning to the body—its senses, fears, and fragile resilience. Their work suggests that to navigate global trauma and profound loss, we must resist distancing ourselves from discomfort and instead move closer to the intimate truths these emotions reveal. Through a union of film and sculptural form, the artists create a space where vulnerability becomes a necessary tool for understanding. Lasser’s projected films appear within and around Brown’s copper structures, which evoke homes, water towers, and memorials. These forms, semi-abstract yet deeply symbolic, echo the impermanence of human constructions and the instability of the world they occupy. Delicate and luminous, Brown’s structures hold the films like keepsakes—fragile vessels carrying memories, anxieties, and fragments of hope. Together, the moving images and sculptural frames create a dialogue about what humanity chooses to preserve when faced with disaster and what slips through the cracks of memory. At the heart of the installation lies an exploration of what remains after upheaval. Lasser and Brown gesture toward the collective dreams and nightmares of communities grappling with ecological precarity and the consequences of human-made destruction. Their collaboration becomes a meditation on remembrance: what we treasure, what we rebuild, and what stories we carry forward when the world shifts beneath our feet. Robin Lasser, a Professor of Art at San José State University, is known for her socially engaged projects addressing public health, environmental issues, and justice. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the San José Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore, the Museum of Goa, the Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, and the Caixa Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro. Her participation in global biennials and longstanding commitment to collaborative art-making ground this exhibition in a broader conversation about humanity’s shared future. Image: Robin Lasser Ghost Ship and Mourning Dove 01 (1/5), 2025 Archival Pigment Print on Metal 30 x 45 in 76.20 x 114.30 cm at Chung 24 Gallery © Robin Lasser

Stephen Wilkes: A Day in the Life… @ JL Modern invites viewers into a world shaped by patience, observation, and a deep reverence for the passage of time. Through his distinctive approach, Wilkes compresses the shifting rhythms of an entire day into a single, seamless image, creating photographs that feel both expansive and intimate. Each work becomes a tapestry of moments—morning light blending into dusk, quiet gestures giving way to the pulse of human activity—revealing the poetry hidden in the ordinary flow of life. Wilkes’s method relies on remaining anchored to one vantage point for hours, sometimes more than a full day, allowing him to witness subtle transformations that most viewers experience only in fragments. By weaving together these collected instants, he constructs scenes that honor not only the beauty of place but the living history unfolding within them. Whether depicting a bustling city, a fragile ecosystem, or a site of cultural significance, his images illuminate the ways in which time shapes our perceptions of the world. A Day in the Life… underscores the photographer’s commitment to storytelling grounded in both vision and craft. The resulting compositions are not merely technical achievements; they are meditations on change, continuity, and our relationship to the spaces we inhabit. Observers are encouraged to linger, discovering new details with each return, much like Wilkes himself does through his long hours behind the lens. What emerges is an invitation to consider the balance between permanence and impermanence. In the glow of shifting skies or the quiet rearrangement of shadows, Wilkes captures the essence of daily existence—fleeting, layered, and deeply human. A Day in the Life… stands as a reminder that even in familiar places, time offers endless stories to those willing to slow down and truly see. Image: Stephen Wilkes — Fagradalsfjall Volcano, Iceland, Day to Night, 2021 Fuji Crystal Archival Photograph 48 x 65.5 in, at JL Modern Gallery © Stephen Wilkes

Microscope Gallery presents Navigations, the fourth solo exhibition by Peggy Ahwesh, featuring new video installations and photographic works that explore the politics of flight, displacement, and belonging. Using imagery and footage from a mid-2000s 3D flight simulation game, Ahwesh transforms digital landscapes into meditations on power and freedom, particularly within regions marked by occupation and conflict. Her question lingers throughout the work: what does it mean to be free to fly—to cross borders without fear or restriction? Set primarily in the Eastern Mediterranean, across the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, Navigations draws upon Ahwesh’s background as a second-generation Syrian-American and her years living in Ramallah. Two central video installations were inspired by her visit to the now-abandoned Qalandia Airport, once a hub of travel and exchange, now a silent site layered with contested histories. Through these scenes, Ahwesh reflects on how landscapes become archives of power, memory, and erasure. The large-scale installation The Wayfinders features five simultaneous video projections accompanied by rotating floor fans. Each flight—a journey over Beirut, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the night sky—was generated within a virtual simulation that Ahwesh deliberately subverts, crashing planes and breaking digital rules to uncover unexpected imagery. Voices and sounds weave through the air, merging political testimony with atmospheric noise, creating a cinematic space where history and speculation intertwine. Complementing these installations are photographic works made in Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, many dating back to the early 1990s. These images juxtapose ancient ruins and modern boundaries, technological progress and cultural loss, revealing how civilizations and tools of communication both fade over time. Through Navigations, Ahwesh reimagines flight as a metaphor for resilience and imagination, tracing routes between memory, technology, and the enduring desire for freedom. Image: Peggy Ahwesh, “The Wayfinders,” 2025, five-channel video installation, floor fans, sound, dimensions variable – Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York © Peggy Ahwesh