Debra Bloomfield: Changing Seas

The 7th Chelsea International Photography Competition returns to New York from February 19 to February 25, 2026, transforming Agora Gallery into a meeting point for contemporary photographic voices from around the world. Set in the historic Chelsea art district, the exhibition reflects both the neighborhood’s long-standing relationship with photography and the medium’s continued evolution in a rapidly shifting visual culture. This seventh edition brings together a diverse selection of photographers whose practices span documentary, conceptual, fine art, and socially engaged approaches. Chosen from an international pool of submissions, the featured works speak to the vitality of photography as a medium that remains deeply connected to lived experience while constantly reinventing its formal language. From intimate personal narratives to broader reflections on community, identity, and place, the exhibition reveals how photography continues to function as both witness and interpretation. The jury for the 2026 competition underscores this balance between tradition and forward momentum. With backgrounds that range from education and copyright law to newsroom leadership and grassroots photojournalism, the jurors bring distinct yet complementary perspectives to the selection process. Their combined expertise ensures an exhibition that values technical excellence, ethical awareness, and emotional resonance, while remaining open to experimentation and new modes of storytelling. What unites the participating artists is a shared commitment to photography as a meaningful form of expression rather than mere image-making. Each body of work operates as a visual statement, shaped by personal history, cultural context, or social engagement. Together, these individual visions form a cohesive presentation that highlights the medium’s capacity to connect disparate experiences across borders and disciplines. Presented within Agora Gallery’s dynamic exhibition space, The 7th Chelsea International Photography Competition invites viewers to slow down and engage closely with the images on display. It offers a snapshot of contemporary photographic practice at a moment when images are everywhere, yet thoughtful, intentional photography remains essential. Rooted in craft and open to the future, the exhibition affirms photography’s enduring role as a powerful and relevant art form. Image: Baby© Michele Zousmer

Dora Somosi’s exhibition Alchemy of Memory invites viewers into a world where nature, history, and personal reflection are woven together through the luminous medium of cyanotype. Known for her striking blue-toned prints, Somosi works with sunlight, time, and instinct to create images that feel both ephemeral and deeply rooted. In this presentation, two ongoing series — By Her Side and Mending — unfold as parallel meditations on legacy, renewal, and the quiet strength found in the act of making. In By Her Side, Somosi photographs tree branches as abstract portraits of women whose creative voices have shaped her own journey. These branches, twisting, reaching, and bearing the weight of years, stand beside the former homes and studios of artists, writers, and thinkers such as Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Toni Morrison, Ruth Asawa, Agnes Martin, and Imogen Cunningham. What emerges is a poetic visual dialogue between landscape and lineage. Each image becomes a tribute to women whose ideas continue to resonate, their presence lingering in the natural forms that marked their daily lives. Somosi first explored this approach at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where the grounds provided the spark for an ongoing quest to honor creative foremothers through the quiet language of trees. With Mending, Somosi turns to a more intimate form of reconstruction. Using test prints and discarded cyanotypes as her base, she repairs and reimagines them through meticulous hand embroidery. Drawing from Hungarian folk traditions and the philosophy of Japanese kintsugi, she transforms imperfections into sites of beauty and resilience. Threads become pathways of memory, stitching together fragments that might otherwise be lost. These works highlight the power of restoration — not as an erasure of the past, but as a recognition of its value. Through both series, Somosi reveals herself as a visual wanderer, searching for the sublime in the overlooked. Her images, layered with cultural heritage and personal insight, celebrate endurance, creativity, and the ever-present conversation between the natural world and the human spirit. Image: Wilma Dykeman, White Oak Tree, Asheville, NC Hand printed cyanotype on watercolor paper © Dora Somosi

Gilman Contemporary presents a striking introduction to the work of Dutch photographer Bastiaan Woudt, whose refined visual language has quickly earned him international recognition. Born in 1987 and entirely self-taught, Woudt has shaped a distinctive monochromatic style that echoes classic photographic traditions while embracing the clarity and precision of a modern eye. His images, spanning portraiture, fashion, and landscape, reduce the world to its most essential elements—light, shadow, and line—creating compositions that feel both disciplined and dreamlike. Woudt’s photographs move naturally between the realms of haute couture and fine art. His work has appeared in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, British Vogue, Numéro, and L’Officiel, and he has lent his elegant sensibility to major campaigns, including those for Chanel. Whether printed for the page or exhibited on the wall, his images share a commitment to form, balance, and an almost architectural sense of rhythm. Among Woudt’s long-form projects, Rhythm remains especially resonant. Here, he explores how texture, posture, and fabric influence the way identity is constructed and perceived. The tension between concealment and expression becomes central, as fashion functions simultaneously as shield and symbol. This nuanced reading of the human figure continues throughout the works selected for the exhibition, where models are framed in sculptural poses, their silhouettes sharpened by precisely controlled light. Over more than thirteen years, Woudt has developed a signature that is instantly recognizable: stark tonal contrasts, flowing contours, and a minimalist sensibility that allows emotion to surface through subtle gestures. His photographs have been shown at Paris Photo, Photo London, and AIPAD, and his museum exhibitions—including Twist (2022) and Essence (2024)—have further cemented his place in contemporary photography. Woudt’s practice is also guided by purpose. Through his involvement with organizations such as the Marie-Stella-Maris Foundation and Orange Babies, he supports vital humanitarian and health initiatives. His work, both artistic and philanthropic, reflects a belief in clarity—of image, intention, and impact. Image: Bastiaan Woudt, Poise. Archival pigment print © Bastiaan Woudt

Timeless Beauty, Unseen Realities, presented at Benrubi Gallery from November 26, 2025 to February 26, 2026, offers a rare opportunity to engage with the photographic vision of Vincent Vallarino, an artist whose life has been deeply shaped by the worlds of fine art, collecting, and image-making. Drawing from more than five decades of practice, the exhibition brings together photographs created over a 55-year period, revealing a coherent and quietly powerful body of work rooted in intuition, discipline, and a lifelong pursuit of beauty. Vallarino’s artistic foundations were formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s through his studies with Minor White, whose teachings emphasized perception beyond appearances. That philosophy continues to resonate throughout this series. Working primarily with an 8 x 10 view camera, Vallarino approaches photography as both a meditative act and a craft refined through patience and precision. His mastery of large-format techniques allows for extraordinary detail, transforming familiar subjects into images that feel both hyper-real and strangely abstract. The photographs on view resist narrative in a traditional sense. Instead, they operate as visual meditations on form, texture, and light. By isolating fragments of reality and allowing them to speak through scale and clarity, Vallarino blurs the line between representation and abstraction. What emerges is a sequence of images that feel intuitive rather than descriptive, inviting viewers to slow down and engage with their own internal responses. Beyond his work behind the camera, Vallarino’s long career as a gallerist and collector informs the exhibition’s depth. His experience co-leading The Greenwich Gallery and his contributions to major institutional collections underscore a lifetime devoted to art in all its forms. Timeless Beauty, Unseen Realities stands as both a personal reflection and a distilled vision of how photography can transform observation into fantasy, and reality into something quietly transcendent. Image: Luxembourg Woods #3, Fishbach, Luxembourg, 1974 © Vincent Vallarino

Family Diary 2026, presented by the Atlanta Photography Group, reconsiders the idea of the family album through a contemporary yet deeply rooted photographic lens. Rather than focusing on casual snapshots or overt confessions, the exhibition highlights bodies of work grounded in duration, attentiveness, and lived experience. These are projects shaped by time—photographs made slowly, deliberately, and with an understanding that meaning often emerges through repetition and return. At the heart of Family Diary 2026 is a belief long central to photographic tradition: that sustained observation can reveal truths unavailable to the fleeting image. Long-term portraiture, documentary series, and studies of domestic or communal spaces function as visual journals, even when executed with formal restraint or classical technique. Here, the diary is not a single moment, but an accumulation—of gestures, routines, absences, and subtle shifts that define everyday life. The exhibition embraces an expansive definition of family. Biological ties sit alongside chosen families, inherited communities, and relationships forged through place and shared experience. Family may be anchored in a household, a neighborhood, or a generational landscape shaped by memory and change. In this context, typologies and archival approaches take on new resonance, transforming structured methodologies into intimate records of connection and continuity. What unites the works on view is a quiet rigor. These photographs resist spectacle, instead honoring the modest scale of daily life and the emotional weight carried by familiar spaces. Kitchens, bedrooms, front yards, and streets become sites where personal histories intersect with broader social narratives. Over time, the camera becomes both witness and companion, attentive to what endures and what slips away. Juried by Jamie M. Allen, Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Curator and Head of the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum, Family Diary 2026 situates contemporary practice within a lineage of photographic storytelling. The exhibition affirms that the diary form remains vital—not as a record of isolated moments, but as a sustained act of looking that honors tradition while remaining open to evolving definitions of family and belonging. Image: © Debra Barnhart

Cybele Lyle: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre unfolds as a meditation on place, memory, and the slow work of reconciliation with one’s own past. Presented from January 16 to February 28, 2026, the exhibition takes its title from the 1948 film that once shaped the artist’s expectations and disappointments alike. Lyle revisits this cinematic reference not as homage, but as a lens through which childhood longing, misinterpretation, and eventual understanding come into focus. As a child relocated to Sierra Madre, California, Lyle experienced the town as remote and confining, far removed from the ease of her earlier life. The promise embedded in the film’s title suggested a hidden value, a sense of significance that might render the unfamiliar lovable. Yet the discovery that the story’s Sierra Madre belonged to Mexico, and not her own hillside town, created an early fracture between imagination and reality. This sense of dissonance—between what is named and what is lived—echoes throughout the exhibition. Now based in Los Angeles, with physical and emotional distance from her childhood home, Lyle returns to these landscapes with renewed curiosity. The exhibition brings together three interconnected bodies of work that explore identity through fragmentation and reassembly. In the Boy Mounds self-portrait series, collaged images of iconic male figures are embedded into local terrains from the artist’s life, allowing the body to re-enter her practice as a vessel for memory, projection, and permission. These figures appear both present and unresolved, mirroring the complexities of self-formation. The hanging textile works and floor collages extend this exploration through material and spatial shifts. Drawn from photographs, colors, and patterns associated with her childhood home and garden, these pieces break familiar imagery into abstracted forms. Textiles suspend fragments in midair, while ground-level collages anchor them back to the earth, suggesting a dialogue between instability and belonging. Together, the works in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre hold space for contradiction. They acknowledge disappointment without dismissing affection, and propose the landscape as an active participant in shaping identity. Through re-framing and fragmentation, Lyle invites viewers to consider how home is not found intact, but continuously rebuilt over time. Image: © Cybele Lyle

Elliott Schildkrout: On the Water, on view at Soho Photo Gallery from February 4 to 28, 2026, offers a meditative exploration of stillness, movement, and perception. Drawn from years spent drifting across shallow turquoise flats, these images originate in moments of quiet observation rather than pursuit. As boats glide almost imperceptibly across the water, the act of looking becomes unhurried, allowing the surface of the sea to unfold as a place of calm, repetition, and subtle transformation. The photographs emerge from a process rooted in duration. Schildkrout works slowly, capturing the water over time and merging multiple exposures to reflect the way experience accumulates rather than freezes. The result is imagery that hovers between abstraction and recognition, where horizons dissolve and reflections blur into soft fields of color. Sky and sea merge into a single breathing surface, evoking the sensation of drifting without destination. These works invite viewers to let go of orientation and instead inhabit a rhythm shaped by light, motion, and silence. While the turquoise flats may appear constant at first glance, Schildkrout reveals them as endlessly variable. Subtle shifts in tone, current, and reflection become the subject itself. The photographs resist spectacle, favoring nuance and restraint. This attentiveness recalls a long photographic tradition concerned with inner states as much as external form, where landscape serves as a mirror for contemplation and emotional quiet. Schildkrout’s practice is informed by decades of engagement with photography, shaped early on by rigorous formal training and sustained alongside a life devoted to medicine. That dual commitment—to observation and care—resonates throughout this body of work. The images feel considered and generous, offering space rather than instruction, and encouraging viewers to slow their own pace of looking. In On the Water, photography becomes an act of immersion rather than documentation. These works ask little more than attention and breath. As the layered images gently unfold, they create a sense of timelessness, a reminder that beauty often reveals itself not through drama, but through quiet presence and the willingness to drift. Image: On the Water 2, Courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Elliott Schildkrout

KP Madhaven: Interior Passages, on view at Soho Photo Gallery from February 4 to 28, 2026, presents a contemplative body of work in which landscape becomes an interior map. Across vast terrains shaped by fire, ice, water, and night, Madhaven uses light and shadow to chart emotional and spiritual movement. These photographs are less about place as destination than about passage—moments where the external world reflects inward transformation. The series unfolds through six symbolic thresholds, each image functioning as an archetype rather than a document. It begins in upheaval, where elemental forces collide and the land appears charged with tension and mythic energy. Storms sweep across salt flats, skies fracture with light, and the ground itself seems to breathe. From this volatility, the work gradually ascends toward moments of clarity and suspension, where chaos gives way to awareness and the act of looking slows into stillness. As the journey progresses, Madhaven lingers in liminal spaces—those pauses between states where meaning is not fixed but forming. Waterfalls become celestial markers, moonlight serves as guide, and geological forms stand as silent witnesses to time beyond human scale. These images resist immediacy, asking viewers to remain with uncertainty and to recognize transformation as a process rather than an event. Motion is implied, yet everything feels held, as if the land itself is listening. Night plays a crucial role in the final passages of the series. Long roads, distant lights, and empty structures beneath expansive skies suggest solitude not as isolation, but as arrival. Human presence is reduced to trace and echo, allowing space for acceptance and integration. The photographs feel cinematic yet restrained, drawing power from patience and careful attention rather than spectacle. Through Interior Passages, Madhaven invites viewers to inhabit these thresholds personally. The work opens a space where atmosphere replaces narrative and scale encourages introspection. Standing before these images, one is not asked to interpret, but to pause—to linger where darkness softens into light, and where the landscape quietly mirrors the journeys we carry within ourselves. Image: Salted Fire Ode to Mangala, Courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © KP Madhaven

Strangers in the Park 2, on view at Soho Photo Gallery from February 4 to 28, 2026, continues an evolving series of large-format black-and-white portraits begun in the summer of 2024. Predominantly photographed in Washington Square Park and across locations in the UK, the project centers on encounters with people previously unknown to the artist—moments of connection shaped by chance, curiosity, and time. Using a 4x5 camera, the work embraces slowness as both method and meaning. Large format portraiture demands attention, patience, and presence. Each photograph begins not with an image, but with a conversation—an exchange that unfolds before the shutter is released. In these deliberate encounters, the act of photographing becomes a way of listening. The resulting portraits aim to reflect something essential about each sitter, but equally important is the process itself: a quiet, humanistic practice rooted in respect, empathy, and mutual recognition. The park functions as a democratic stage, a shared public space where lives briefly intersect. Here, strangers agree to pause, to be seen, and to participate in an unfamiliar ritual. The camera’s imposing physicality slows the pace, encouraging sitters to settle into themselves. Expressions are unguarded yet dignified, shaped not by performance but by presence. The portraits resist spectacle, favoring subtlety, texture, and psychological depth over easy narratives. The New York presentation carries a particular resonance. The opening offers the rare and meaningful opportunity to invite many of the photographed individuals back into the frame—this time as viewers, encountering their own likenesses on the gallery walls. This gesture completes a circle, transforming the exhibition into a shared experience between artist, subject, and audience. Conceived as an ongoing project, Strangers in the Park 2 will continue to expand into other cities around the world, mapping human diversity through sustained observation. With plans to eventually bring the work together as a book, the series stands as a quiet affirmation of photography’s enduring ability to foster connection, understanding, and appreciation across difference. Image: Carly, courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Michael Schenker

Martin Frank: Gradient, on view at Soho Photo Gallery from February 4 to 28, 2026, presents a meditative exploration of form, tone, and transformation. Drawing inspiration from both the literal and metaphorical meanings of "gradient," Frank’s series traces a journey from representation to abstraction, inviting viewers to consider how objects, surfaces, and light evolve over space and perception. At the start, the series presents images of a distressed steam engine in Paterson, New Jersey, captured with precise attention to its industrial geometry. Riveted lines, perpendicular beams, and stamped letters dominate the frame, grounding the work in tangible structure. As the eye moves across the series, these architectural details gradually dissolve into textured surfaces, rusted planes, and fractured signage. Splattered paint and natural decay interrupt the mechanical order, guiding the viewer toward an emergent surreal landscape where the boundary between the literal and the imagined blurs. The gradient also manifests in Frank’s meticulous handling of tonal range. Each hand-coated platinum print moves from deep blacks through subtle grays to luminous whites, mirroring the visual shift from concrete machinery to abstracted surfaces. This careful modulation of light and shadow heightens the sense of progression, emphasizing both the physical and emotional rhythms embedded in industrial decay. Frank’s practice combines two decades of large-format analog photography with a fascination for alternative processes, inspired by the works of Edward Steichen. His approach foregrounds patience, craft, and the contemplative possibilities of slow observation. The resulting prints reward extended viewing, revealing detail, texture, and nuance with each encounter. In Gradient, Martin Frank offers more than industrial portraiture: he creates a visual meditation on transformation, entropy, and perception. The series encourages viewers to trace subtle shifts in form, texture, and tone, discovering the poetry hidden in machinery, rust, and light. These images affirm photography’s power to turn everyday structures into spaces of reflection and wonder. Image: Gradient 4, Courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Martin Frank

Ilene Amster: Nocturne, on view at Soho Photo Gallery from February 4 to 28, 2026, invites viewers into a realm where the night transforms the familiar into something uncanny and luminous. Through her Nocturne series, Amster examines the city and landscape under the quiet dominion of darkness, revealing how evening light reshapes perception, mood, and meaning. The series captures the delicate balance between serenity and unease. Streets, buildings, and natural spaces take on new textures and colors under nocturnal illumination, where shadows stretch and neon or artificial light punctuates the darkness. These images oscillate between the poetic and the unsettling, exploring the duality of night as both a refuge and a place where hidden tensions emerge. Amster’s work is attentive to detail and atmosphere. Each frame considers composition, light, and color, transforming the ordinary into a scene charged with narrative potential. The quiet corners of a city, the glow of a distant window, or the glimmer of reflections on water become portals to a world at once familiar and estranged. There is a sense of intimacy in her gaze, as if she is guiding the viewer through the city’s nocturnal secrets, allowing us to witness the hidden rhythms of night. At the heart of Nocturne is an exploration of contrasts: light and shadow, beauty and disquiet, dream and nightmare. Amster reminds us that the night is not merely an absence of daylight, but a space where new forms of perception, emotion, and imagination arise. The series encourages contemplation, inviting the viewer to linger in the tension between calm and unease, and to recognize the poetry inherent in darkness. Through Nocturne, Ilene Amster celebrates the transformative power of night, crafting a visual meditation on how the world subtly shifts when the sun sets, revealing both its beauty and its mysteries. Image: Nocturne 4. Courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Ilene Amster

Bruce Hooke: The Dark Forest, on view at Soho Photo Gallery from February 4 to 28, 2026, invites viewers to step into the shadowed, enigmatic spaces of the natural world. Hooke’s photographs capture forests in their most elemental states—fog-laden, rain-soaked, and stripped bare by winter—inviting both apprehension and wonder. These images draw on the ancient resonance of the forest as a site of myth and memory, a place where danger and refuge exist side by side. In The Dark Forest, Hooke explores the human encounter with wildness, illuminating how we navigate fear, power, and vulnerability within and beyond ourselves. Twisted branches, skeletal trunks, and misty expanses become metaphors for the challenges and mysteries inherent in life. At the same time, they offer moments of quiet reflection, spaces where beauty emerges from darkness, and the viewer can confront the unknown while discovering solace. Hooke’s background as a sculptor and performance artist informs the tactile and spatial qualities of his photography. His lens captures texture, depth, and atmosphere with a sculptor’s eye for form, and a performative sense of presence. The images resonate with themes of gender, power, and vulnerability, revealing the forest as a mirror for human experience: wild yet ordered, threatening yet protective, chaotic yet meditative. Across the series, Hooke emphasizes our evolving relationship with nature, reminding us that forests are not merely landscapes but living, breathing spaces that reflect our fears, histories, and desires. The interplay of light, shadow, and fog imbues each image with narrative tension, as if the woods themselves are telling stories of survival, transformation, and quiet revelation. The Dark Forest is both a visual meditation and a psychological exploration, where the forest’s darkness is not merely a threat but an invitation. Hooke’s work encourages contemplation of the delicate balance between danger and beauty, solitude and connection, and the ways in which we find ourselves within the untamed rhythms of the natural world. Image: November, Courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Bruce Hooke