Storytelling: Photographers Making Meaning, from the Wellin Museum’s Collection

Polo Silk 2025 MLK Club Detour 2, on view from December 11 to February 7, 2026, brings together a vibrant selection of photographs by New Orleans–based artist Selwhyn Sthaddeus Terrell, widely known as Polo Silk. Drawn from images made inside the legendary nightclub Club Detour 2 during the mid-1990s, the exhibition revives the exuberant spirit of a formative moment in the city’s cultural history. These photographs pulse with the energy of a so-called “Golden Era,” when music, fashion, and community converged in spaces built for collective release and self-invention. Rooted in the visual language of family albums and fashion magazines, Polo Silk’s photography occupies a space between personal memory and cultural documentation. Friends, relatives, musicians, and regular club-goers step confidently before the camera, adorned in Adidas tracksuits, Polo Ralph Lauren ensembles, Coogi sweaters, football jerseys, and polished loafers. Style operates as both armor and expression, signaling belonging, aspiration, and pride. The images reveal a community acutely aware of its own visibility, using dress and posture to claim presence and individuality within a shared social scene. Club Detour 2 emerges as more than a nightclub; it is portrayed as a crossroads where generations, neighborhoods, and creative forces intersected. Airbrushed backdrops referencing hip-hop lyrics, current events, and local iconography frame the subjects, offering a theatrical stage for personal myth-making. Within these scenes, future stars of New Orleans’ music landscape appear alongside neighborhood legends, capturing a moment before broader recognition, when talent circulated freely within the room itself. The exhibition also underscores the profound archival value of Polo Silk’s work. Having survived the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, these photographs now hold added significance, often serving as the only surviving images of individuals lost to time and circumstance. Polo’s ongoing practice of gifting framed portraits back to families transforms photography into an act of care, remembrance, and reciprocity. In this presentation, the images resonate as both historical record and living memory, honoring nights once lived intensely and now carried forward through photographs that continue to bind a community together. Image: Polo Silk, BUCKJUMP TIME, c. 1995. Chromogenic print © Polo Silk

Toward a Social Landscape revisits a landmark moment in American photography, tracing the evolution of the medium as a tool for personal and social expression. Originally curated by Nathan Lyons in 1966 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the exhibition highlighted photographers who transformed everyday moments into charged, emotionally resonant images. As Duane Michals noted, “when a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.” This perspective remains at the heart of the current presentation. The UK Art Museum’s installation draws from a rich collection of works by photographers included in or inspired by Lyons’s original exhibition, including Ruth Bernhard, Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, Alen MacWeeney, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, Peter Turnley, and Garry Winogrand. Their images go beyond simple documentation, capturing dynamic relationships between the photographer and the observed world. Each frame is a negotiation between subject, context, and the artist’s own presence, revealing deeply personal and often poignant narratives within everyday scenes. Installed on the floor above Self and Others: Japanese Photography after 1968, the exhibition offers a dialogue between American and Japanese photographic practices in the 1970s. Visitors can explore how photographers across the Pacific responded to comparable social, cultural, and artistic currents, each developing distinct yet parallel visual languages. This juxtaposition underscores the emergence of an international contemporaneity in photographic practice, highlighting shared concerns in portraiture, street photography, and documentary work. Presented in conjunction with the 2025 Louisville Photo Biennial, Toward a Social Landscape celebrates photography as both a personal and collective lens. It invites viewers to consider how photographers shape meaning, infuse emotion, and create enduring images that continue to resonate decades later. By juxtaposing intimate vision with social context, the exhibition reaffirms the enduring power of photography to illuminate human experience. Image: Duane Michals, Untitled from Alice’s Mirror, 1974, gelatin silver print. Collection of the UK Art Museum, purchase: The Robert C. May Photography Fund.

Silver Eye Center for Photography presents Radial Survey Vol.4, the organization’s flagship biennial exhibition, showcasing a group of artists redefining contemporary photography with experimental, thought-provoking approaches. This fourth edition emphasizes urgent, innovative practices that speak to the concerns and conditions of our current moment. The exhibition brings together six artists working within 300 miles of Pittsburgh, each nominated by participants from the previous edition and selected by Silver Eye’s curatorial team. Their work reflects a commitment to process, inquiry, and ongoing exploration, rather than predetermined outcomes, allowing photography to become a site of both personal and collective investigation. Featured artists include Amelia Burns from Detroit, McNair Evans from Richmond, Christine Lorenz from Pittsburgh, Juan Orrantia from Rochester, Ian John Solomon from Detroit, and SHAN Wallace from Baltimore. Each brings a distinctive perspective to the medium, exploring themes that range from identity and memory to environment, social structures, and the intersections of daily life with broader cultural narratives. Through their varied practices, the artists demonstrate how photography can interrogate the familiar, reimagine experience, and challenge traditional notions of representation. The exhibition celebrates risk-taking, experimentation, and the ways in which photographic work can remain open-ended and generative, reflecting the dynamism of contemporary artistic practice. Radial Survey Vol.4 is accompanied by an extensive catalog featuring original essays by Tara Fay Coleman, Jessica Lynne, Matthew Newton, Silver Eye Executive Director Leo Hsu, and Deputy Director & Director of Programs Helen Trompeteler. This publication further contextualizes the artists’ work and offers insight into the evolving landscape of experimental photography, emphasizing the exhibition’s commitment to dialogue, discovery, and the future of the medium. Image: Christine Lorenz, KS-5862, 2025. Courtesy of the artist. © Christine Lorenz

LIFE Magazine, founded in 1936 by Henry Luce, transformed the way Americans experienced the world through the power of photography. With a pioneering focus on photojournalism, LIFE devoted more space to images than words, capturing both monumental events and the subtleties of everyday life. From political upheavals and scientific breakthroughs to theater, art, and fashion, the magazine chronicled the defining moments of the 20th century with a visual immediacy that resonated with readers nationwide. Beyond covering global affairs, LIFE also celebrated ordinary life through features such as LIFE goes to a …, which documented high school graduations, debutante balls, and other milestones familiar to its readership. In an era before instant digital communication, LIFE provided a window into both the extraordinary and the commonplace, connecting audiences to distant events and to the rhythms of their own communities. Each issue offered a carefully curated narrative of culture, identity, and history, told primarily through the lens of its photographers. This exhibition draws from LIFE’s archives, as well as the personal collections of the magazine’s legendary photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Harry Benson, Nina Leen, Andreas Feininger, Loomis Dean, Abe Frajndlich, Carl Mydans, and John Dominis. Their work reflects the magazine’s dual mission: to document history and to illuminate the human experience with both artistry and authenticity. The photographs on view reveal LIFE’s ability to capture fleeting moments, whether a quiet domestic scene or a historic political event, and to convey them with enduring impact. Although weekly publication ceased in 1972, LIFE continued as a monthly magazine until 2000, releasing occasional special editions thereafter. In 2024, the rights to LIFE were acquired with plans to resume regular print issues, reaffirming its relevance in the contemporary media landscape. The magazine’s legacy endures as a landmark in photographic storytelling and as a cultural mirror reflecting the depth and diversity of 20th century American life. Image: Alfred Eisenstaedt VJ Day, Times Square, NY, August 14, 1945 © Alfred Eisenstaedt

The exhibition Deadbeat Club, The Californians at the Center for Photographic Art offers a compelling portrait of California through the lenses of three distinct photographers: Ian Bates, Tracy L. Chandler, and Janet Delaney. Though each artist follows their own path, the show weaves their works together into a collective reflection on identity, place, and the shifting cultural landscape of the Golden State. Ian Bates, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, explores the contradictions of human nature and how individuals engage with their environments. His images often register subtle tensions—between desire and decay, freedom and restraint—revealing a California that is both alluring and troubled. Bates’s viewpoint offers a contemporary look at setting, social dynamics, and the intimate dramas that unfold in the spaces we inhabit. Tracy L. Chandler brings a deeply personal and emotional perspective to the exhibition. Working across portraiture, landscape, and narrative, Chandler’s photographs confront memory, psychological projection, and the weight of place. Her series A Poor Sort of Memory connects individual history with broader cultural currents, tracing the impact of time and change on people and land alike. Chandler’s work resonates with vulnerability and quiet strength, inviting the viewer to reflect on what is carried forward and what is lost. Janet Delaney’s long-term engagement with urban transformation brings documentary depth to the show. Her photographs bear witness to the evolving realities of cities like San Francisco and New York—through gentrification, protest, migration, and shifting social fabrics. Delaney captures not just physical change, but the human stories entwined with it: communities at once fragile and resilient, searching for belonging amid upheaval. Together, the works in Deadbeat Club, The Californians present California as a layered landscape—geographic, cultural, and emotional. The exhibition explores continuity and disruption, memory and reinvention. By bringing these three photographers together, the show reveals how identity and place merge, diverge, and transform, reflecting both the promise and the complexity of life in California. Image: Janet Delaney, Too Many Products © Janet Delaney

Heart of the City presents a vivid and unsentimental portrait of New York street life through the lens of David Stock, whose photography has long been rooted in the daily realities of working communities. On view at 440 Gallery from January 8 to February 8, 2026, the exhibition reflects Stock’s sustained engagement with the neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, Queens, an area defined by migration, labor, and constant movement. Rather than seeking spectacle, Stock focuses on the ordinary moments that reveal the city’s enduring pulse. Wandering busy sidewalks and storefront-lined avenues, Stock captures scenes shaped by chance encounters and human proximity. His photographs are alive with motion and color, yet grounded in careful observation. Within the apparent chaos of the street, he uncovers small narratives—glances exchanged, gestures frozen mid-action, fleeting interactions that speak to perseverance and collective energy. These images form a textured portrait of grassroots New York, where cultural difference coexists with shared routines and aspirations. Stock’s background as a political activist deeply informs his approach. Having worked a range of labor-intensive jobs after graduating from Harvard in the early 1970s, he brings an insider’s awareness to the people he photographs. His work resists romanticization while maintaining a clear sense of empathy and respect. The camera becomes a tool for solidarity, bearing witness to lives shaped by work, migration, and resilience, and honoring the dignity found in everyday struggle. This exhibition marks Stock’s fifth solo presentation at 440 Gallery, underscoring a long-standing relationship between artist and venue. Over the decades, his photographs have been shown internationally in museums, universities, and community spaces, reflecting a practice that moves fluidly between art institutions and public contexts. That balance mirrors the spirit of his images, which remain firmly rooted in lived experience rather than abstraction. Heart of the City is both a continuation and a reaffirmation of David Stock’s commitment to street photography as a form of social engagement. In an era of rapid urban change, these photographs preserve the rhythms of neighborhood life and remind viewers that the soul of the city is found not in landmarks, but in the people who animate its streets each day. Image: © David Stock

Time Exposed: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes, on view at the Parrish Art Museum from September 13, 2025 through February 8, 2026, presents one of the most meditative bodies of work in contemporary photography. Drawn from a decade-long pursuit that began in 1980, this exhibition invites viewers to slow down and contemplate the elemental meeting of sea and sky, a horizon that has remained unchanged throughout human history. For Sugimoto, the ocean is both subject and metaphor, a timeless presence that anchors memory, perception, and being. Traveling to distant coastlines across the globe, Sugimoto photographed oceans that have witnessed the passage of civilizations, wars, and migrations. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Adriatic to the Tasman Sea, each image shares the same restrained composition: water below, sky above, divided by a nearly perfect horizon line. Yet within this apparent sameness lies infinite variation. Shifts in light, atmosphere, and weather transform each photograph into a unique meditation on time and impermanence. Using a large-format, nineteenth-century camera and black-and-white film, Sugimoto embraces a deliberately traditional photographic process. Long exposures allow subtle movements of water and air to register on the film, creating images that feel suspended between stillness and motion. Some seascapes appear crystalline and sharply defined, while others dissolve into mist, where sea and sky nearly merge. The absence of land, figures, or man-made elements intensifies the sense of quiet and encourages a contemplative mode of viewing. Seen together, the fifty-one photolithographs form a visual rhythm rather than a linear narrative. Repetition becomes a tool for reflection, reminding viewers that while the world accelerates, certain experiences remain constant. Time Exposed: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes offers not spectacle, but solace—an encounter with the sublime that reconnects us to nature’s enduring presence and to photography’s capacity to reveal the profound within the seemingly simple. Image: Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948). Sea of Japan, Oki, 1987, photolithograph, 9 ½ x 12 in. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, Gift of the Joy of Giving Something, Inc., 2022.7.73. © Hiroshi Sugimoto

In 1974, photographer Ken Ohara embarked on an experiment that transformed the act of image-making into a collective gesture of trust and chance. Living in New York City but born in Tokyo in 1942, Ohara began what he called a photographic chain letter—an invitation sent to strangers chosen randomly from the phone book. Each received a preloaded camera with simple instructions: take photographs of yourself, your family, and your surroundings, then return the camera along with the name of the next participant. Over two years, this modest device passed through a hundred hands across thirty-six states, traveling from Hawai’i to the Bronx, carrying with it fragments of countless unseen lives. The resulting project, titled CONTACTS, emerged amid the turbulence of 1970s America—an era marked by both disillusionment and transformation. Through this process, Ohara relinquished authorship, replacing the single photographer’s gaze with the plural vision of a nation in flux. What he gathered was not a documentary in the traditional sense, but a collective self-portrait of intimacy and distance, chaos and connection. Each roll of film became a diary of a moment in time, revealing the textures of domestic life, friendship, and solitude across vastly different geographies. The title CONTACTS resonates on multiple levels. It recalls the photographic contact sheet—a sequence of small images that reveal the rhythm and accidents of seeing—while also invoking the human touch at the project’s core. The selected enlarged contact sheets displayed in chronological order form a visual map of encounter and exchange. Through repetition, simplicity, and surrender, Ohara created what he described as a photography of possibility—an image of America shaped not by its surface unity, but by the unpredictable beauty found in its multiplicity of voices. Image: Ken Ohara, CONTACTS 47, Carr, San Francisco, California, 1974–1976. Gelatin silver print, 19 13/16 × 23 3/4 in. (50.3 × 60.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2025.37.47. © Ken Ohara

Tengo Lincoln Park en mi Corazón: Young Lords in Chicago revisits a pivotal moment in the city’s history, tracing the transformation of the Young Lords Organization (YLO) from a local street gang into a powerful force for social justice. Set against the backdrop of Lincoln Park’s gentrification and urban renewal during the 1950s and 1960s, the exhibition captures the resilience of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community as it confronted displacement and fought for recognition, dignity, and self-determination. Through an array of archival materials, photographs, murals, and prints, the exhibition reveals how activism took shape within everyday life. The works of Carlos Flores, Ricardo Levins Morales, and John Pitman Weber—alongside newly commissioned pieces by Sam Kirk—trace a visual history of collective resistance. At the heart of the presentation, a multimedia installation by Arif Smith with Rebel Betty invites visitors to experience the emotional and cultural landscape of the movement, transforming memory into an immersive act of witness. A central concept explored throughout is counter-mapping: the act of redrawing the city through the eyes of those who lived its hidden histories. These maps reclaim space and voice, charting a geography of belonging that challenges the erasures of official narratives. They serve as tools of empowerment, reminding audiences that place, culture, and struggle are intertwined. One of the most defining moments in this story came in May 1969, when the Young Lords occupied the Stone Administration Building at McCormick Seminary—now part of DePaul University. This act of defiance became a lasting symbol of protest and community action. Today, a public plaque marks the site, anchoring the exhibition’s reflection on memory, justice, and legacy. Curated by DePaul University Professor Jacqueline Lazú and organized by the DePaul Art Museum, Tengo Lincoln Park en mi Corazón stands as both tribute and testimony—an enduring reminder of how collective resistance can reshape the city’s heart. Image: Young Lords members protesting the Vietnam War in a march from Lincoln Park to Humboldt Park, 1969. ST-70004742-0005, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum.

This focus exhibition explores artistic engagement with the natural environment as a source of creative inspiration worth celebrating and protecting. Approximately 25 photographs, prints, drawings, and textiles illustrate the elements of air, water, earth, and fire against broader themes of ecological awareness and preservation. These range from how artists have used visual language to convey the act of locating oneself in nature; works that depict natural forms through the physical integration of environmental components; and artists’ commentary on sites of environmental disaster, the socio-political ramifications of human impact, and the potential of symbiotic healing for this planet and its occupants. Presented as part of the Turn Again to the Earth environmental initiative. Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

Gregory Crewdson has long stood at the crossroads of photography and cinema, crafting images that are at once meticulously staged and hauntingly ambiguous. Over the past three decades, he has created a distinct visual language rooted in mystery, emotion, and the subtle drama of the everyday. Through elaborate sets, hand-built interiors, and carefully controlled lighting, Crewdson transforms ordinary American settings—often small towns in the Northeast—into dreamlike spaces where the familiar becomes strange and the mundane turns mythic. His recent series, Eveningside (2021–2022), marks a striking evolution in his work. Rendered entirely in black and white, these photographs evoke a cinematic melancholy, recalling both the shadows of film noir and the rich tonal traditions of classic photography. Each image is created with the precision of a film production, involving large crews, complex lighting, and deliberate choreography. Yet the result is a single frozen moment—a still that suggests an untold story, leaving viewers to imagine what exists beyond the frame. Presented at the Taubman Museum of Art, Eveningside invites audiences into a quiet, surreal world of solitude and beauty. The figures who inhabit these scenes seem both grounded and otherworldly, suspended in moments of introspection or longing. Crewdson’s art asks us to slow down, to feel the emotional weight of stillness, and to consider how light itself can tell a story. Born in Brooklyn and now based in western Massachusetts, Crewdson is a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale School of Art. His influential career—spanning works such as Twilight, Beneath the Roses, and Cathedral of the Pines—has redefined what a photograph can be: a fragment of fiction that captures the quiet intensity of life’s most elusive moments. Image: Madeline’s Beauty Salon, 2021-22, digital pigment print, © Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy of the Artist

Grace, a seven-year collaborative project by Scott Offen, is a profound meditation on intimacy, aging, and selfhood. In this work, Offen photographs alongside his partner, Grace, examining the nuanced intersections of gender, representation, autonomy, and visibility over the course of a long-term relationship. By situating Grace within both domestic interiors and mythic outdoor landscapes, the project navigates how personal identity evolves in private and public spheres, and how presence is felt even in moments of solitude. Within domestic interiors, Grace’s essence permeates the space, revealing traces of her life and agency even when she is not physically in frame. These quiet moments reflect the ways intimacy and familiarity shape understanding, capturing the subtle gestures and rhythms that constitute everyday life. Outdoors, mythic landscapes become a character in themselves—like fantastical realms reminiscent of Wonderland or Oz, the natural world oscillates between the whimsical, the eerie, and the sublime, inviting viewers to consider the interplay between human presence and environment, and how landscapes shape our perception of identity. Offen’s photographic approach blends traditional and contemporary methods, from 8×10 large format to digital photography, producing images that are at once meticulously composed and emotionally resonant. The resulting series foregrounds Grace’s autonomy and explores the larger questions surrounding aging and visibility in a society often dismissive of older women, presenting both vulnerability and strength in equal measure. First published as a monograph by L’Artiere in 2025, Grace has been exhibited nationally and recognized in festivals and reviews across major photography publications, solidifying Offen’s place among contemporary photographers exploring intimate collaboration and identity. On view at The Griffin @ WinCam, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience a deeply personal, collaborative exploration of life, love, and the enduring complexity of human presence, both indoors and in the vast, unpredictable landscapes that mirror our inner worlds. Image: © Scott Offen