Lisa Elmaleh: Tierra Prometida & Douglas Miles: Apacheria

This exhibition presents a curated selection of photographic works by contemporary artists who have significantly influenced the visual language of photography. Spanning genres such as fashion, landscape, and portraiture, the images on display are not bound by a singular theme, but by an enduring, distinct, and powerfully expressive vision. Each photograph bears the unmistakable imprint of its creator, serving as a timeless testament to the art of seeing. Featured artists include Flavia Junqueira, Rodney Smith, JP Terlizzi, Maria Svarbova, Laurie Victor Kay, Ellie Davies, and Dana Hart-Stone.

The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Art in City Hall program, in partnership with PhotoAlliance, are proud to present Metaphors of Recent Times: A Dialogue of the Personal, the Political and the Cultural, an exhibition that features artwork from PhotoAlliance’s INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 portfolio, alongside works by 24 artists who have created work in response to the portfolio. Metaphors of Recent Times will be on display on the Ground Floor and North Light Court at City Hall through June 20, 2025. The exhibition features a wide range of incisive visual perspectives from artists of diverse identities and backgrounds, each responding to the issues of our times.. A public reception to celebrate the opening of the exhibition will be held on the Ground Floor of City Hall on Thursday, January 16, 2025, from 5 – 7 p.m.. “PhotoAlliance has been a vital force in the local arts community for over 20 years, providing a platform for photographers to engage with and reflect on the world around them,” said Ralph Remington, Director of Cultural Affairs. “The Arts Commission is proud to collaborate with PhotoAlliance to present this timely and thought-provoking exhibition at City Hall. Metaphors of Recent Times highlights how art can serve as both a mirror to our current socio-political landscape and a powerful catalyst for activism and change.”. The exhibition’s themes are rooted in PhotoAlliance’s 20th Anniversary portfolio of limited edition prints by local, regional, and international photographers. Curated by PhotoAlliance founder and creative director Linda Connor, the set of 20 prints was conceived as a distillation of the creative responses artists have made to the upheaval seen in our political, cultural, environmental, and personal spheres in recent years. INSIGHT/INCITE captured images of hope, challenges, resilience, and humanity and included work from renowned photographers such as Binh Danh, Mercedes Dorame, Lewis Watts, J. John Priola, Amanda Marchand, Adrian Burrell, among many others.. Metaphors of Recent Times expands on the themes of INSIGHT/INCITE and includes new work that respond to the themes explored in the portfolio. The artists included were juried by photographers Linda Connor, Lewis Watts, and exhibition curator Beth Davila Waldman from a pool of 128 artists who responded to a call for artists held in the fall of 2024. Artists were asked to submit a trio of images that would expand and deepen the dialogues provoked in INSIGHT/INCITE.. “The inspiration behind Metaphors of Recent Times was compelled by the desire to provide an extended platform for the various themes and concerns voiced by the INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 portfolio,” says exhibition curator Beth Davila Waldman. “The call for artists really showed how resonant these themes are, and we are excited to highlight the spirit of our city’s inclusivity with a group of emerging and established artists, combined with the impact of presenting this selection of work in San Francisco’s City Hall.”. “We are thrilled to collaborate with PhotoAlliance on this exhibition,” states Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, SFAC Director of Galleries and Public Programs. “Metaphors of Recent Times provides a lens into the complexities of our time, capturing the turbulence of recent years while simultaneously highlighting hope and resilience. Through the camera, eyes of local, regional, and international artists, the work reminds us of the importance of capturing these stories.”. The exhibition will feature work by Pablo Tapay Bautista, Renee Billingslea, Barbara Boissevain, Kennedi Carter, Mima Cataldo, Yu-Chen Chiu, Katie Cofer, Mark Coggins, Izzy Cosentino, Kelly Fogel, David Gardner, Stuart Goldstein, Christine Huhn, Judi Iranyi, Strele Laurin, Anni Lopponen, Darcy Padilla, Eric Robertson, Lance Shields, Nina Sidneva, William Mark Sommer, Liz Steketee, Rusty Weston, and Harry Williams.. Works from the INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 folio are by Wesaam Al-Badry, Lisa K. Blatt, Leon Borensztein, Adrian Burrell, Jessica Chen, Sarah Christianson, Marna Clarke, Linda Connor, Binh Danh, Mercedes Dorame, Ed Drew, Germán Herrera, Marie-Luise Klotz, Wayne Levin, Amak Mahmoodian, Amanda Marchand, Paccarik Orue, J. John Priola, Zack Schomp, and Lewis Watts.

Luis González Palma is among the most recognizable Latin American photographers. The early work he is canonized for address the difficult past of his birth country of Guatemala and its people. This history of engagement spans topics from the colonial plight of the Mayan people to the legacy of the civil war and “the disappeared.” González Palma employs the intimacy of portraiture, weight of the gaze, and qualities of chosen materials to drive meaning in his work. But this is only the beginning. Möbius is a diverse and open-ended series, which began in 2013. The artist embraces, destroys and rebuilds upon structures he built up for himself over 40 years, beginning with his own iconic work. Luis González Palma has been celebrated for symbolism, portraiture, and photography. To reduce him to these realms is to underestimate his profound dialectic. To break away from the confines of his own past, through Möbius González Palma seeks to reinvent and renew his vision and its perception by others. Möbius builds upon a mathematical concept discovered by German scientists in 1858. The Möbius strip is an infinite loop, created from a linear plane with a quarter-twist (odd numbers of twists greater than one, or a knotted centerline). It is both a non-orientable object and a fixed surface. Its interior cannot be differentiated from its exterior. This mathematical discovery has been employed by famed artists from M. C. Escher to Salvador Dalí, Julio Cortazar, and principally for González Palma, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Photography is an enigma, its beauty a disguise trapped in the frame of an image which offers as many readings as viewers who look upon it. González Palma’s Möbius, and work made thereafter, are theoretical, phenomenological experiments. These threads of interest expand and reinvent. In Möbius González Palma deconstructs the history of (his own) existence evidenced by his works and builds upon it from scratch. Möbius breaks through itself to discover something new, with seemingly opposing visual language- realism and abstraction. Opposition becomes continuum. Destruction becomes creation. In Möbius symbolism and metaphor fall apart, fragment, play allowing new dialogs to be written through what the artist describes as lyrical abstraction. Palma begins with what we know- his early portraits in traditional style- hand painted prints- stained by a wash of bitumen, except for eyes that glare back at us, locking our gaze in theirs. He then integrates geometric abstraction- shapes, lines, planes rendered in gold leaf or acrylic paint. Some works opt for a lighter wash over the traditional sepia-colored bitumen, a substance used from pre-history to current day in construction and waterproofing. Visual integration of realism and geometric abstraction- figuration and raw form- intersect. Choices feel both fragmented and harmonious. The result is hypnotic, rhythmic, spectral- we can almost hear the melody of silence play through a watchful prolonged gaze like a tuning fork searching for the pitch of the universe. Hearing it in the silence. Seeing through the past into the future, written and unwritten through the language of one’s own icons. Compositions play as new possibilities emerge. The works in this exhibition, extend beyond the structural boundaries of a photograph, or a painting. They are metaphor, which underscores duality. The surface, physicality, the sculptural quality of the image, ever important to the artist, is underscored by Möbius. We are aware of the physicality of the image- the space it occupies in our plane, but this too only stands in to reference unrecordable fluid emotion. We must learn to doubt and not take anything for granted. Whatever our certainties, Möbius asks we examine everything again with fresh eyes. Luis González Palma was born in Guatemala and lives in Cordoba, Argentina. He studied architecture and cinematography at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala but chose to focus on photography. Since 1989, his work has been collected internationally and shown in more than 58 expositions throughout the Americas and Europe, including at Les Rencontres de Arles (France), the 49th and 51st Venice Biennials (Italy), Fotobeinal de Vigo (Spain), XXII Biennial in Sao Paulo (Brazil) and the V Biennial in Havana (Cuba). Palma lives and works in Cordoba, Argentina.

Echoes of Injustice features three contemporary photographers who explore the traumatic legacy and lasting reverberations of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Echoes of Injustice brings together the work of three contemporary photographers—Renee Billingslea, Jerry Takigawa, and Dean K. Terasaki—who explore the traumatic legacy and lasting reverberations of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Through deeply personal and visually layered approaches, each artist offers a distinct perspective on this dark chapter of U.S. history, urging us to confront what has been forgotten, concealed, or left unresolved. Renee Billingslea’s Ten Japanese American Concentration Camps revisits the landscapes of incarceration through contemporary photography, stitching them together with historical images from the War Relocation Photographs. Through this juxtaposition, she reveals the tension between visibility and erasure. Her use of gold thread, referencing the Japanese art of Kintsugi, and her inclusion of earth from the sites, create a connection to the landscape and histories of lives disrupted and communities displaced. The series documents all ten camps located in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. In his series Balancing Cultures, Jerry Takigawa uses family photographs and memorabilia to interpret the injustice of his family’s incarceration at the Jerome camp in Arkansas. Born in Chicago after their release, Takigawa grapples with the tension between his parent’s silence around their experience in the camp and his own inherited trauma which is still being processed. This series seeks to preserve his parents honor while speaking for a generation that remained silent. Dean K. Terasaki’s Veiled Inscriptions are photomontages of camp locations as they appear today with personal letters sent by those incarcerated. The archive of 350 letters was discovered in Denver’s historic T.K. Pharmacy in 2012. The pharmacy had been operated by Terasaki’s uncle and his images are about loss and the lives torn apart by the forced incarceration. Together, these artists call attention to a chapter of American history that remains relevant and urgent. At a time when the erosion of civil liberties continues to echo across political and cultural landscapes, Echoes of Injustice calls us to reflect: Has America changed? Have our values? And how do we ensure that this history does not repeat? — Samantha Johnston, CPAC Executive Director & Curator Image: EO 9066, ©Jerry Takigawa

David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery are pleased to announce Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, on view at David Zwirner’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Organized by both galleries, the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cataclysm re-creates that iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated. This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago. In the fall of 1971, in the aftermath of Arbus’s death in July, her friend, colleague, and fellow artist Marvin Israel approached John Szarkowski, the legendary director of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, about the prospect of a retrospective exhibition of her work. Szarkowski, who had begun championing Arbus’s photographs in the late 1960s, quickly agreed to do the show. Though widely admired and respected by other photographers and artists, Arbus was not well known at the time of her death. When the exhibition opened, on November 7, 1972, no one, not even Arbus’s most fervent supporters, could have predicted its profound impact on museum visitors, nor the impassioned—at times vitriolic—critical response the exhibition would generate among writers and thinkers. It was the most highly attended one-person exhibition in the museum’s history, with lines down the block to see it. Szarkowski later recalled, “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion.”1 Even at the time, the retrospective was recognized for almost single-handedly helping to elevate photography to the status of fine art, paving the way for museums, collectors, and the public to embrace a previously unrecognized innate authority and power within the medium. As New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote of the exhibition, “What Diane Arbus brought to photography was an ambition to deal with the kind of experience that had long been the province of the fictional arts—the novel, painting, poetry and films—but had traditionally been ‘off limits’ to the nonfiction documentary art of the still camera.”2 John Perreault, writing in The Village Voice, noted, “I don’t usually write about photography … but just this once I can’t resist. Diane Arbus was such a great photographer that her work breaks out of all categories. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art should be of interest even to those who are not usually at all interested in photography.”3 Such praise from some critics was countered with derision and ridicule by others. Susan Sontag disparaged the exhibition in the pages of The New York Review of Books: “Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.”4 Jane Allen, writing for the Chicago Tribune, attacked the show: “[Arbus] shows us people, so locked into their physical and mental limitations, that their movements are meaningless charades. They are losers almost to a man.”5 What seems to have enthralled some and enraged others about Arbus’s work was how she unflinchingly captured the singularity of her subjects, which—paradoxically—linked them to one another and by extension to the viewer. “This is what I love,” wrote Arbus at the age of sixteen, “the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life.… I see the divineness in ordinary things.”6 The exhibition’s title, Cataclysm, alludes to the immensity of the uproar spawned by the retrospective and the ferocity of the critical discourse around the artist that emerged then and continues to the present day. Image: Diane Arbus, A very young baby, N.Y.C. [Anderson Hays Cooper] 1968 © The Estate of Diane Arbus 1 Quoted in Who Is Marvin Israel?, directed by Neil Selkirk and Doon Arbus (2005; www.neilselkirk.com/films). 2 Hilton Kramer, “From Fashion to Freaks,” The New York Times Magazine, November 5, 1972, p. 38. 3 John Perreault, “Art,” The Village Voice, November 23, 1972, p. 40. 4 Susan Sontag, “Freak Show,” The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973, p. 14. 5 Jane Allen, “Charade of Losers in the Arbus World,” Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1973, p. 8. 6 Diane Arbus, high school essay on Plato, 1939. Quoted in Diane Arbus Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 70.

Peter Fetterman Gallery is proud to present "The World of Sebastião Salgado," a large-scale exhibition of prints by the master photographer Sebastião Salgado (Brazil, b. 1944). Opening on Saturday, March 15, 2025, and running through June 21st, this exhibition will offer an extraordinary retrospective of Salgado’s unparalleled career. A special opening reception will be held on March 15 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM. Utilizing the entire gallery space, this extensive exhibition will feature photographs, spanning over four decades of Salgado’s dedicated photographic work. Iconic images from his major bodies of work will be presented as hand crafted gelatin silver prints alongside his special, highly coveted platinum palladium prints. Curated to present Salgado’s powerful visual storytelling within a retrospective context, "The World of Sebastião Salgado" will provide a compelling insight into the depth and breadth of his documentary and artistic practice. Sebastião Salgado is widely recognized as one of the most influential photographers of our time. His humanistic approach to documentary photography has illuminated pressing global issues, from labor and migration to environmental conservation. The exhibition will highlight key works from his most renowned series, including the Serra Pelada Gold Mines, his documentation of conflict and displacement in Africa, his haunting portrayals of environmental destruction in the Oil Fields of Kuwait during the Gulf War, and his latest body of work from Brazil titled, Amazonia. Additionally, the exhibition will showcase works from his environmental magnum opus, "GENESIS," a project that explores untouched landscapes, wildlife, and indigenous cultures. The relationship between Peter Fetterman Gallery and Sebastião Salgado is rooted in a deep mutual respect and a shared commitment to photography as a force for storytelling and change. Introduced to Salgado through master photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Martine Franck (1938-2012), Peter Fetterman has been a key figure in bringing Salgado's work to a fine art audience for over 30 years. Born in Aimorés, Brazil, in 1944, Sebastião Salgado initially trained as an economist before turning to photography, a path that has since shaped the field of visual storytelling. Salgado resides in Paris with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has played an integral role in curating and publishing his works. "The World of Sebastião Salgado" at Peter Fetterman Gallery will be an unmissable opportunity to see the photographs of one of the greatest documentary photographers of our time.

Robert Frank: Mary’s Book celebrates the centennial of the legendary photographer Robert Frank (1924–2019) by offering an intimate look at one of his most personal creations—a handmade scrapbook of photographs compiled for his first wife, Mary Lockspeiser. Created in 1949, Mary’s Book represents a pivotal moment in Frank’s artistic development, as he experimented with the interplay of images and text. This one-of-a-kind album features seventy-four small photographs, each paired with handwritten inscriptions, revealing Frank’s poetic sensitivity to everyday objects and spaces. Though many images lack human figures, a sense of presence lingers—seen in the way Frank captures the streets and chairs of Paris, weaving in messages for Mary that transform the book into a deeply personal meditation on solitude and connection. A visual poem in photographic form, Mary’s Book reflects Frank’s ability to evoke emotion through juxtaposition, a technique that would later define his groundbreaking work. The exhibition presents original spreads from the album, held in the MFA’s collection, alongside additional photographs taken in Paris, on loan from the artist’s foundation. Accompanying the show is a special publication featuring the first complete reproduction of Mary’s Book, offering a rare glimpse into a formative chapter of Frank’s creative journey. Image: Robert Frank, spread from Mary’s Book (detail), 1949. Illustrated book with gelatin silver prints. Gift of the Howard Greenberg Gallery. © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation.

“While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.” – Edward Burtynsky "I wanted to understand water: what it is, and what it leaves behind when we're gone. I wanted to understand our use and misuse of it. I wanted to trace the evidence of global thirst and threatened sources. Water is part of a pattern I've watched unfold throughout my career. I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world." – Edward Burtynsky (Walrus, October 2013) "The project takes us over gouged landscapes, fractal patterned delta regions, ominously coloured biomorphic shapes, rigid and rectilinear stepwells, massive circular pivot irrigation plots, aquaculture and social, cultural and ritual gatherings. Water is intermittently introduced as a victim, a partner, a protagonist, a lure, a source, an end, a threat and a pleasure. Water is also often completely absent from the pictures. Burtynsky instead focusses on the visual and physical effects of the lack of water, giving its absence an even more powerful presence." — Russell Lord, Curator of Photographs, NOMA

David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive is a major traveling retrospective exhibition that spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography. Also included in the exhibition are photographs by some of Goldblatt’s peers, such as Ernest Cole, Santu Mofokeng, and Jo Ractliffe, as well as a generation of younger South Africans, many of whom Goldblatt mentored, including Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi, placing Goldblatt within a broader and intergenerational network of photographers. This ambitious project honors the life and career of an artist who used his work to celebrate his country’s working-class people, the landscape, and the built environment. On view through June 22, 2025, David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive highlights the artist’s commitment to documenting daily life in South Africa, particularly during apartheid. This major traveling retrospective traces Goldblatt’s career from his early black-and-white photography to his later color prints, capturing the impact of racial segregation. Image: David Goldblatt, Miriam Diale, 5357 Orlando East, Soweto, 18 October 1972, 1972, printed later. Carbon ink print. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979; with the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund; and with support from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

Dutch photographer Ruud van Empel (b. 1958) invites viewers to see the world anew, blurring the line between reality and illusion. His images, saturated with vivid color and intricate detail, create an almost surreal experience—scenes that feel both familiar and entirely imagined. Van Empel’s process is meticulous and time-intensive, often taking hundreds or even thousands of hours to complete a single image. Using a digital collage technique he has refined since the mid-1990s, he assembles fragments of his own photographs to construct compositions that exist outside traditional photography. These layered, hyper-detailed landscapes celebrate the beauty of nature while also reflecting its tensions, as elements compete for space and attention. While Van Empel is best known for his portraits of children set within lush environments, this exhibition shifts focus to the landscapes themselves. Drawing from source images captured during his travels—from botanical gardens in the Netherlands to California’s Joshua Tree National Park—he presents both daylight and nocturnal scenes that feel dreamlike yet tangible. These constructed worlds challenge perceptions of photography’s role in truth-telling, encouraging viewers to step inside and explore a realm of wonder, memory, and mystery. Image: Ruud van Empel, Theatre #8 (detail), 2013. Archival pigment print. Gift of the artist in honor of Deborah Klochko. © Ruud van Empel

Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to present New World Atlas: California & Nevada, the third solo exhibition at the gallery by American photographer Matt Black. Known for his visceral approach to documentary photography, Black turns his focus to the evolving climate of the American West, using thermal and infrared imaging to examine the effects of extreme weather events and the vulnerabilities of a rapidly shifting landscape. New World Atlas is organized in a series of 17 chapters, one for each state lying west of the 100th meridian. This exhibition presents California & Nevada, the first two chapters of this larger body of work. In this series Black departs from conventional photographic representation and incorporates technologies that extend human perception. Thermal imaging makes the invisible visible, allowing viewers to witness heat as a signifier of change, from drought and fire to evaporation. Infrared photography distinguishes the living from the inert, exposing a shifting terrain beneath what once seemed immutable. Based in California’s Central Valley, Black draws on his own experience with the region’s environmental volatility. He writes: “Giga-fires, mega-droughts, and thousand-year floods are reshaping the American West. From my home, I have seen massive Sierra wildfires fill the sky with smoke, and over 500,000 acres of farmland fall fallow for lack of water.” By working across the sub-humid and arid zones of the American West, areas particularly susceptible to shifts in temperature and moisture, New World Atlas offers an urgent and deeply felt chronicle of ecological transformation. Rather than documenting catastrophe alone, Black’s images invite viewers to consider new ways of seeing and understanding a landscape increasingly defined by extremes Image: Gold Butte, Nevada. 2024. Cactus., 2024 © Matt Black

Stephen Daiter Gallery proudly presents Chicago: Mark Steinmetz, on view from February 7 to April 27, 2025. This marks Steinmetz’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, showcasing selections from his newly released book, Chicago. Nearly thirty-five years ago, Steinmetz lived in a modest apartment in Wrigleyville, where he transformed his bedroom into a makeshift darkroom. It was during this time that he developed some of his most well-known series—The Players, Summertime, and Carnival—alongside a lesser-known body of work made in Chicago, now coming to light for the first time. “The gestures of these men and the expressions on their faces are observed with delicate precision,” writes Peter Galassi in the book’s introduction (Chicago: Nazraeli Press, 2025). “Elsewhere, with the same gentle eye, Steinmetz is alert to people in the act of adjusting a sandal or a sneaker, reading, giving the thumbs-up, lifting weights, flying a kite, lighting a cigarette, focusing a long lens, leaning against a rickety bus stop, fishing, counting change, talking on a pay phone—and a woman scratching her back.” Steinmetz’s photography is defined by its compassion, curiosity, and quiet respect. His images do not impose meaning but allow subjects to simply exist—capturing them with a sensitivity that is both rare and deeply human. His lens reveals Chicagoans in their element, embracing everyday moments that, in his hands, become profound reflections of the city’s unique rhythm and soul. Image: © Mark Steinmetz