BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York presents
Phantom Sun, a solo exhibition by Swiss-American artist and filmmaker Ohan Breiding, curated by Mathilde Walker-Billaud, the 2025–2026 Guest Curatorial recipient. On view from November 20, 2025, to January 28, 2026, the exhibition brings together photography, video, and archival material to examine how landscapes bear witness to histories of erasure, displacement, and resilience. Breiding’s lens-based approach transforms the natural world into a space of testimony—one that reveals both ecological fragility and enduring forms of care.
At the center of
Phantom Sun is Breiding’s engagement with the
Killed Negatives, a collection of images originally created under the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression. These photographs, once deemed unsuitable for publication and physically punctured to mark their rejection, expose the selective narratives that shaped America’s visual record of that era. By reanimating these discarded negatives, Breiding challenges the authority of the archive and its power to define whose stories are told and whose are omitted. The resulting installation overlays the ghosts of the past with present-day questions about belonging, stewardship, and visibility.
Through the recurring motif of the black hole—floating above the rejected images—Breiding transforms absence into a site of inquiry. This circular void becomes both a wound and a portal, inviting viewers to look through the gaps of history and imagine what might emerge from them. In collaboration with Walker-Billaud, the artist expands the documentary tradition pioneered by
Roy Stryker and his FSA team, pushing it toward a trans-feminist reimagining of care, ecology, and collective memory.
Phantom Sun ultimately proposes a new kind of seeing—one that acknowledges loss while illuminating the persistence of life and meaning in the spaces once cast aside.
Image:
© Ohan Breiding