Qiana Mestrich: Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate

Bryan Adams, known across the world for his legendary music, reveals another side of his artistry through the lens of his camera. The exhibition #SHOTBYADAMS invites visitors to explore his refined photographic vision, where light, composition, and emotion merge into an elegant and revealing portrait of contemporary fame. Adams’s work as a photographer is marked by a rare sensitivity. His images capture more than the surface of celebrity—they uncover the subtle humanity behind familiar faces. Whether depicting icons from the worlds of art, fashion, or entertainment, his portraits reveal a quiet dialogue between photographer and subject, a moment suspended between vulnerability and strength. In these photographs, glamour coexists with introspection. Adams does not seek to idealize; instead, he observes with empathy and precision. His compositions play with shadow and expression, transforming each sitter into both symbol and individual. Through this, he offers a vision of fame that feels personal, reflective, and unexpectedly tender. The exhibition invites viewers to step closer, to look beyond the veneer of celebrity and encounter the shared emotions that unite us all—joy, fragility, confidence, and doubt. Each image, whether a stark black-and-white study or a color portrait suffused with warmth, demonstrates Adams’s understanding of the photographic act as both revelation and connection. With #SHOTBYADAMS, Bryan Adams continues his lifelong exploration of storytelling—this time not through sound, but through stillness. His lens becomes an instrument of truth, translating rhythm into light and music into form. The result is a body of work that celebrates beauty, irony, and the human presence that endures behind every image, reminding us that art, in any medium, begins with the courage to see. Image: © Bryan Adams

Scott Offen’s series Grace is a sustained photographic collaboration that interrogates authorship, gender, aging, and representation. Created alongside his partner and co-author, Grace, the work unfolds as a dialogue between subject and artist, where each image is constructed through a process of mutual creation and negotiation. Scenes in the series operate at the intersection of reality, symbolism, and psychology, blending everyday experience with archetypal resonance. The rural landscapes of New England serve not merely as backdrops but as active participants in the narrative. Fields, forests, and waterways interact with Grace’s presence, blurring distinctions between interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, figure and ground. Within these spaces, Grace embodies roles that are often solitary and enigmatic, challenging conventional notions of femininity, visibility, and domesticity. Her presence transforms ordinary environments into sites of contemplation and narrative complexity. Central to Grace is Offen’s commitment to collaboration and repetition. Over time, the artist and Grace have cultivated a shared visual language that subverts traditional hierarchies between photographer and muse. Through this lens, the aging female body—frequently marginalized in both art and popular culture—emerges as a locus of authority, mystery, and creative agency. Each photograph becomes an exploration of co-presence, transformation, and the interplay of identity and environment. Drawing from mythology, psychoanalysis, and landscape theory, the series integrates material traces of daily life with poetic staging. Indoors, Grace’s touch lingers in shadows, objects, and the subtle impressions of her body. Outdoors, she inhabits spaces shaped by light, season, and terrain, inviting reflection on how human identity forms in dialogue with nature. Grace stands as a meditation on collaboration, experimentation, and the relationship between life, place, and photographic form. Offen’s work immerses viewers in a liminal world—where the rural landscapes of New England evoke both enchantment and uncanny resonance, and where human presence transforms the ordinary into the profoundly symbolic. Image: © Scott Offen

Behind the Curtain: Vulnerabilities Exposed brings together the work of recipients from CENTER’s annual awards and grants, offering a profound reflection on the urgent social, political, and environmental challenges shaping our world today. The exhibition spans deeply personal narratives and global crises, engaging with issues such as school violence, immigration detention, and the fragility of our planet’s ecosystems. Among the featured projects, Chloé.A’s Yellow Tiger on Blue Background examines the complex process of coming of age in Taiwan, a nation marked by both natural and political turbulence. Following the devastating earthquake of April 2024 and its countless aftershocks, the photographer turns her lens toward a generation navigating instability and identity under geopolitical pressure. Through quiet portraits and nuanced storytelling, she captures how young Taiwanese reconcile personal dreams with the shifting ground of national belonging. Greg Constantine’s Seven Doors: An American Gulag confronts the human cost of the U.S. immigration detention system, where more than 46,000 people are held daily across an expanding network of facilities. After seven years of research and travel through nine countries, Constantine builds a visual and auditory record of these places—combining panoramic photographs, oral testimonies, and data to reveal the psychological and social toll of mass detention. His work invites viewers to step inside an unseen world of endurance and injustice, amplifying the voices of those too often silenced. Alongside these powerful narratives, projects by Mitsu Maeda, Debmalya Ray Choudhuri, Sarah Sudhoff, and Alex Welsh extend the exhibition’s reach, from explorations of memory and trauma to reflections on landscape and loss. Together, they unveil the vulnerabilities that lie just beyond the surface of modern life—reminding us that art remains one of the most vital means of witnessing and understanding the human condition. Image: “Untitled” from the series Yellow tiger on blue background © Chloé.A, 2025 Project Development Grant

Lanoue Gallery proudly presents Martha Graham Dance Company: 100 Years, a world premiere exhibition featuring a curated selection of large-format photographs by Ken Browar and Deborah Ory. The exhibition coincides with the release of their new book of the same name, celebrating a century of the Martha Graham Dance Company—the oldest dance company in the United States. The artists will meet collectors at the gallery on Friday, November 7, from 6 to 8 PM, and signed copies of the book will be available while supplies last. Ken Browar and Deborah Ory, known collectively as NYC Dance Project, first gained international recognition with their 2016 publication The Art of Movement, which portrayed elite dancers from institutions such as the New York City Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Royal Danish Ballet. Their subsequent book, The Style of Movement: Fashion & Dance, expanded their vision, merging couture and choreography, capturing the world’s greatest dancers adorned in garments by Dior, Valentino, and Oscar de la Renta, among others. Their latest collaboration, Martha Graham Dance Company: 100 Years, pays homage to Graham’s enduring influence on modern dance. Often compared to innovators like Picasso and Stravinsky, Graham redefined performance through the expressive power of movement. TIME magazine named her “Dancer of the Century,” a title reflecting her deep impact on art and culture. As Artistic Director Janet Eilber notes, Graham believed in the power of stillness—a concept Browar and Ory translate into photography, suspending motion in moments of pure grace. Through meticulous collaboration, the photographers approach each session as a choreographed production, attending to gesture, light, and emotion. Their images transform dance into visual poetry, bridging the physical and the eternal. Based in Brooklyn, Browar and Ory continue to honor the language of movement, preserving its spirit one frame at a time. Image: © Ken Browar & Deborah Ory

At the height of the Weimar Republic, two visionary artists dared to challenge convention. Known as ringl + pit, Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach redefined the language of commercial photography in a society fascinated by glamour and modernity. Their photographs of wigs, mannequins, and merchandise transformed advertising into a field of experimentation, infused with humor, sensuality, and surrealism. Working in Berlin, they captured the restless energy of the avant-garde, where art and commerce collided in unexpected ways. Robert Mann Gallery presents *ringl + pit*, an exhibition running from October 23 through December 6, 2025. Featuring rare studio photographs and an exclusive limited-edition portfolio, the show brings together works that have remained unseen for decades. The duo’s practice, rooted in collaboration, was marked by constant role-switching—each artist moving fluidly between directing, photographing, and modeling. This method gave their images a striking sense of unity and play, reflecting a shared artistic vision. Trained under Bauhaus master Walter Peterhans, Stern and Auerbach absorbed his emphasis on precision and form while injecting their own wit and irony. Their photographs, such as *Komol Haircoloring Advertisement* and *Güldenring Cigarettes*, subvert traditional advertising tropes—eschewing glamour for abstraction, replacing models with objects, and suggesting touch and texture over desire. These works quietly question how femininity and consumerism were represented in a rapidly modernizing world. The exhibition also highlights two rare self-portraits that capture their mutual fascination with identity and disguise. In *pit with Veil*, Auerbach’s sidelong gaze evokes mystery, while Stern’s intense close-up radiates self-assurance and introspection. Together, their portraits reveal an intimate dialogue about art, gender, and individuality. Although forced into exile by the rise of Nazism, their friendship and creative kinship endured across continents. *ringl + pit* remains a powerful testament to the freedom and innovation that flourished in the brief yet brilliant years of Weimar modernism. Image: pit with Veil, 1931

In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis (pronounced CARE-iss) Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with her own and enriches our understanding of the couple from her contemporary Queer and feminist perspective. This exhibition features recent portrait and landscape photographs by Connell along with classic figure studies and landscapes by Weston from 1934–1945 one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. Using Weston and Wilson publications as a guide, Connell and her partner at the time, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together creating new artworks in the process. Image: ​Betsy, Lake Ediza, ​2015, ​© Kelli Connell

Bruce Davidson was born on September 5, 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois, and studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York from 1951 to 1954, and Graphic Design at the School of Art, Yale University in 1955. During military service in Paris, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and in 1958 became a full member. He worked as a freelance photographer for Life from 1958 to 1961. Davidson created such seminal bodies of work as Circus, Brooklyn Gang, and Freedom Riders. During this period of professional growth, the late Henry Geldzahler, former Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, said of this work, “The ability to enter so sympathetically into what seems superficially an alien environment remains Bruce Davidson’s sustained triumph; in his investigation he becomes the friendly recorder of tenderness and tragedy.” This survey of thirty-six of Bruce Davidson’s seminal black and white silver gelatin photographic prints is supplemented with works by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, August Sander, and Lewis Hine for comparison and contrast purposes and to demonstrate Davidson’s historical connection and affinity with these photographers’ works. Davidson’s photographs were produced in the mid-twentieth century as cultural phenomena like big top tent circuses in America were dying out, and as profound social and political changes were being ushered in by the civil rights movement. These changes were to affect American society for generations to come. In a 2015 interview, with critic Arthur Lubow, Davidson named some photographers he thought had taken the medium to “a new departure point”: Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. Frank, who was probably Davidson’s greatest stylistic influence, sought to portray scenes and people new to him. Davidson, on the other hand, spent months or years getting so close to what is portrayed in his photograph that it is seen and felt by the viewer as an insider would have experienced it. The photographer received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document the American civil rights movement, later published as Time of Change. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo exhibition. The first photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was awarded to Davidson in 1967. He spent two years witnessing the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem, New York City. The resulting book, East 100th Street, was published by Harvard University Press in 1970. This work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Danny Lyons’ photograph, Greenwood, Mississippi, is a photo of Bob Dylan performing at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Concert on July 6, 1963. It provides insight into a song that was to define an era and Davidson’s photographs. A few months after the concert in Mississippi, Dylan composed The Times They Are a-Changin in September of that same year. The song and the album with the same name were released in 1964 by Columbia Records and became an anthem of change. The song, like Bruce Davidson’s photographs, is humanistic art of the highest order. Davidson’s photographs are documents of grand and intimate moments of history from 1958 to 1992 and like Dylan’s song have become essential for an appreciation of what was lost and what was gained as we approach the end to the first quarter of the 21st century. Image: © Bruce Davidson, American, born 1933, Two Women at Lunch Counter, New York, 1962, From the series Time of Change

if a butterfly ever saw an owl presents an intricate exploration of perception, language, and the nature of photographic representation. Through interconnected series such as “The Anonymous Shapes of Words,” “I Want to Believe Sea Cucumbers Are Happy,” and “Is the Eye I Am Seen As Is the Eye I See Myself Through,” Assaf Evron interrogates how images communicate and how meaning is constructed. These works navigate the tension between abstraction and objecthood, revealing the limits of representation while remaining deeply anchored in the materiality of photography itself. Evron’s practice engages both philosophical and literary inquiries, reflecting on cameras as tools of language and architecture—both modern and ancient—as a framework for understanding human perception. Each image carries a subtle awareness of its construction, highlighting the mechanics and constraints inherent in photographic processes. Through careful formal experimentation, Evron reveals the illusion of representation while making the camera’s own language the central narrative, asking viewers to question not only what they see but how they interpret it. Rooted in a study of vision and the interplay between culture and nature, Evron’s work often reflects on the Anthropocene, using photography to capture a sense of loss, melancholy, and the fragility of our world. His investigations extend across two- and three-dimensional media, collapsing boundaries between perception, experience, and material reality. The works invite audiences to contemplate how socially constructed systems—whether linguistic, architectural, or environmental—shape our understanding of both the seen and the unseen. Born in Israel in 1977 and based in Chicago, Evron combines rigorous academic study with an inventive artistic practice. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem. if a butterfly ever saw an owl invites reflection on vision, meaning, and the poetic intersections of human perception and photographic form. Image: If a butterfly ever saw an owl 2025, 13.25 x 16.75 in. Archival pigment print, mat board © Assaf Evron

Fremin Gallery presents Paper Trail, a two-artist exhibition featuring the work of Daisy Seilern and Yeji Moon. Opening on November 6, the show unites two distinct yet complementary voices who transform humble and fragile materials into visual meditations on memory, impermanence, and renewal. Both artists begin with the discarded—the torn, the faded, the overlooked—and through their respective processes, they reconstruct what has been lost into something enduring. In their hands, paper becomes more than a medium; it is a witness to passage and transformation, a surface that carries traces of time and touch. Daisy Seilern’s practice revolves around the material history of paper itself. She collects fragments, notebooks, and remnants of written communication, weaving them into layered compositions that oscillate between sculpture and painting. Her works evoke the delicate boundary between what we preserve and what we let decay, capturing the emotional texture of recollection. The tactility of her pieces invites viewers to consider how meaning endures through fragility, how the act of repair can become a gesture of remembrance. Yeji Moon approaches paper as a space of intuitive construction. Folding, staining, and layering her materials, she explores the intersection of chaos and harmony. Her forms—at once architectural and organic—reflect an interest in cycles of destruction and rebirth, where color and rhythm suggest both collapse and regeneration. Each piece seems to hover between precision and chance, revealing the quiet persistence of renewal within impermanence. Together, Seilern and Moon’s works chart a shared language of resilience. Paper Trail becomes an exhibition about the life of materials and the endurance of stories that might otherwise be forgotten. What begins as fragility emerges as strength—a record of transformation written not in permanence, but in touch, care, and reinvention. Image: City in Layers, 2025 Newspaper on Canvas, 42 x 42 in © Yeji Moon

To step Into the Complete Unknown is to enter a realm shaped not by certainty, but by the fragile echoes of what has been lived, lost, and slowly reclaimed. This group exhibition gathers five artists whose photographs illuminate the quiet thresholds where identity wavers, memories resurface, and transformation begins. Their works do not attempt to fix meaning. Instead, they dwell in the shifting space between what we hold close and what inevitably slips away. Annette LeMay Burke’s project traces the way personal history imprints itself onto place. By projecting family photographs onto the walls of her former home, she creates images where past and present breathe together. These layered scenes suggest a house remembering itself, holding the weight of stories long tucked into its corners. Jacque Rupp explores widowhood as a terrain marked by contradiction—grief, renewal, longing, and strength intertwined. Her images honor the emotional labor of rebuilding a life, revealing how loss can sharpen one’s sense of presence. In contrast, Marna Clarke turns her gaze inward, observing the body as a vessel of time. Her portraits of aging soften the boundaries between vulnerability and dignity, offering a meditation on the quiet endurance woven into everyday existence. Charlotta María Hauksdóttir bridges personal and geographic landscapes, drawing parallels between the shifting contours of Iceland and the fluctuations of domestic life. Her photographs show how external change—economic, political, environmental—reverberates within the private sphere. Complementing this, Rohina Hoffman’s work celebrates the sustaining rituals of family. Through acts of gathering and nourishment, she reveals how love endures through the simplest gestures, forming a sanctuary in uncertain times. Together, the artists in Into the Complete Unknown map the emotional geography of transition. Their photographs remind us that stepping into uncertainty is not an act of abandonment, but one of becoming—a movement toward clarity shaped by resilience, tenderness, and the unspoken strength found in navigating the unknown. Image: Under the Painting, 2021 © Marna Clarke

Turning Heads: Style & Style Makers offers a thoughtful exploration of fashion photography’s enduring ability to shape how we understand taste, personality, and cultural expression. This exhibition gathers portraits and editorial images that illustrate how style becomes a language in itself, carried through gesture, light, and presence. Whether composed in the quiet geometry of the studio or captured in the spontaneity of the street, each photograph becomes a study in how people present themselves to the world. Here, icons such as Audrey Hepburn and Kate Moss become more than figures of elegance; they stand as symbols of shifting ideals, embodying the evolving relationship between clothing, identity, and the image. Their presence anchors a broader reflection on how fashion photography continues to influence what feels timeless and what feels new. Across the exhibition, a diverse group of photographers brings their distinctive approaches to the theme. Horst P. Horst lends his signature sense of sculpted precision, transforming glamour into controlled, luminous form. Lillian Bassman softens couture into expressive movement, treating fabric and figure with the delicacy of a brushstroke. Arthur Elgort infuses fashion with spontaneity, allowing motion and personality to take center stage, while Albert Watson pares everything back to essential clarity and graphic strength. Georges Dambier captures mid-century elegance with a lyrical touch, and Barbara Cole builds immersive scenes that explore silhouette and atmosphere in contemporary terms. Lawrence Schiller and Terry O’Neill move with ease between celebrity and cinematic allure, each image offering an intimate glimpse into cultural myth-making. Slim Aarons and Harry Benson broaden the view, presenting lifestyle and society as stages where taste becomes part of daily ritual. Meanwhile, Kali’s vivid portraits celebrate individuality with playful, confident color. Together, these works examine fashion photography as both witness and catalyst—documenting evolving ideals while simultaneously shaping them. Turning Heads invites viewers to reflect on the details that make an image linger and to consider how the most resonant photographs continue to define the aesthetics of their time. Image: Kate Moss at Cafe Lipp, Paris, Vogue Italia 1993, Printed Later Archival Pigment Photograph 60 x 80 in) at Holden Luntz Gallery © Arthur Elgort

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