POLAROID: The Instant Image

Landscapes of Wonder: National Parks, on view from January 23 to April 15, 2026, invites viewers into a rich visual meditation on the enduring power of the American landscape. Drawing from a national call that yielded hundreds of submissions, the exhibition brings together a carefully curated selection of photographs that reflect the diversity, scale, and emotional resonance of protected lands across the United States. Presented collectively, these images honor places shaped long before human presence and entrusted to future generations. The exhibition moves through deserts and coastlines, forests and wetlands, mountains and plains, revealing ecosystems that are both familiar and awe-inspiring. National parks have long occupied a central place in the American imagination, standing as symbols of freedom, discovery, and natural abundance. Yet these landscapes are not static backdrops. The photographs reveal subtle traces of time, weather, and seasonal change, reminding us that even the most seemingly immutable terrain is alive and continually evolving. Each artist contributes a distinct way of seeing. Some images emphasize vastness and solitude, using scale to underscore humanity’s smallness within the natural world. Others draw the viewer closer, focusing on intimate details—light on stone, mist in trees, water carving its patient path. Together, the works form a visual dialogue about permanence and fragility, suggesting that wonder and responsibility are inseparable. To admire these places is also to recognize the care required to sustain them. Landscapes of Wonder encourages a slower form of looking, one rooted in observation and respect. In an era defined by speed and constant mediation, the exhibition recalls older traditions of landscape photography that valued patience, craft, and attentiveness to place. At the same time, it speaks forward, urging renewed stewardship of environments that cannot be replicated once lost. These photographs do more than document scenery; they ask viewers to reflect on their own relationship to the land, and to consider how preservation ensures that such wonder endures beyond our own moment in time. Image: © Kylie Harrigan

CONTEXT 2026 on show at Filter Photo from March 6 through April 18, 2026, presenting the twelfth annual survey of contemporary photography curated under the discerning eye of Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography. This juried exhibition showcases the work of 25 artists whose practices span analog, digital, collage, and alternative photographic processes, reflecting the breadth and vitality of the medium today. The photographs in Context 2026 exemplify the ways in which the genre can expand perception and understanding. Images oscillate between reality and imagination, bringing viewers to intimate interiors, rural landscapes, and imagined worlds alike. Some works probe climate and migration, others explore themes of aging, intimacy, or loss, each creating a space for reflection on our shared human experience. In a moment marked by uncertainty, the exhibition offers both a mirror and a window: it reflects contemporary concerns while inviting audiences to consider unfamiliar perspectives with empathy and curiosity. The participating artists—ranging from Andrés Altamirano and Shweta Bist to Ginger Russell and Hamzeh Zahran—bring distinct voices that collectively articulate a dialogue about society, memory, and imagination. Each image acts as both a personal statement and an entry point for broader conversation, reminding viewers that photography is not merely documentation but also a form of inquiry, meditation, and creative exploration. Juror Sara Ickow emphasizes that Context 2026 is about the “tools of understanding” embedded in photographic practice. By blurring lines between fact and fiction, merging contemporary techniques with historical ones, and challenging conventional forms, these works spark engagement on both aesthetic and conceptual levels. As viewers move through the exhibition, they are invited to reconsider what photography can be: a bridge between internal and external realities, a means of inquiry, and a catalyst for connection in a complex, rapidly changing world. Image: © Zackery Hobler

An Impossibly Normal Life, on view at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center from February 27 to April 18, 2026, unfolds as a tender visual fiction built from fragments of the past and hopes for a gentler future. In this imagined archive, Matthew Finley constructs an alternate world where queerness is ordinary, unremarkable, and fully embraced—a place where love needs no explanation and family expands with ease rather than resistance. At the heart of the project is the fictional life of Uncle Ken, a character inspired by a late family revelation that arrived decades too late. Rather than revisiting the silence, fear, or erasure that shaped many queer lives in the mid-twentieth century, Finley offers a radical reimagining. Using vintage found snapshots gathered from across the world, he assembles scenes of youthful swagger, intimate friendships, weddings, and quiet domestic moments. These images feel familiar and universal, suggesting that joy was always possible, even if history failed to record it. Finley deepens this invented biography through handwritten letters, ephemera, and subtle interventions into the photographs themselves. Glitter, rhinestones, and hand-applied color animate the images, drawing on the visual language of queer nightlife, drag, and celebration. These embellishments do not overwrite the past; instead, they gently insist on pleasure, visibility, and pride. The work balances humor and sincerity, fantasy and longing, honoring both what was denied and what can still be claimed. Rooted in personal experience, An Impossibly Normal Life speaks broadly to the power of images to heal, revise, and connect. Finley’s practice transforms the archive into a space of care, where chosen stories replace inherited silences. The exhibition invites viewers to imagine how ordinary life might look if acceptance were assumed rather than earned—and how close that world might still be, waiting to be built through empathy, creativity, and love. Image: Mom (bottom right), as a teen, with her family outside Lucca, Italy, 2024, ©Matthew Finley

Parting Gift: Fitting in America, on view at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center from February 27 to April 18, 2026, presents a vivid and quietly radical rethinking of family portraiture. In this ongoing project, Leonard Suryajaya constructs richly staged photographs made between the United States and Indonesia, using the familiar format of the family portrait to examine who is permitted visibility, legitimacy, and care within the American social frame. Shaped by the artist’s own transnational life, the work is sustained through cycles of departure and return. While Suryajaya has settled in the United States, much of his family remains in Indonesia, and the images reflect the effort required to maintain intimacy across borders. Family appears not as a stable or inherited structure, but as something continuously rehearsed and protected—an accumulation of gestures, time, and commitment. Distance becomes a defining presence, underscoring the labor involved in belonging. America, in these photographs, is neither neutral nor symbolic. It operates as a regulating system, structured by immigration law, race, religion, and legal definitions of marriage and kinship. By placing his family in relation to unexpected counterparts—Amish households, gun-owning Americans, neighbors, and chosen family—the artist expands the portrait to include community as an active force. These juxtapositions expose the uneven distribution of recognition and protection, asking whose bonds are affirmed and whose remain provisional. Queerness functions here as both identity and strategy, opening space for alternative models of care that resist fixed hierarchies. Suryajaya’s images are playful, meticulous, and deeply sincere, holding tension between humor and vulnerability. Together, they challenge inherited assumptions about what family should look like and what must be altered, translated, or surrendered to be legible in America. Parting Gift: Fitting in America ultimately invites viewers to reconsider family not as a closed unit, but as an evolving relationship shaped by persistence, negotiation, and love across difference. Image: Diego and Friends from Church, 2024, ©Leonard Suryajaya

Vesna Pavlović: No Ordinary Sunsets, presented from March 14 through April 18, 2026 at Whitespace Gallery, brings together three recent bodies of work by Serbian-born artist Vesna Pavlović. Known for her thoughtful engagement with archives, architecture, and political memory, Pavlović continues her long-standing exploration of how photography can interpret the layered histories of places shaped by ideological conflict and cultural exchange. Through carefully constructed images and conceptual strategies, the exhibition reflects on the ways historical narratives remain embedded in landscapes, buildings, and visual records. One of the central projects in the exhibition, Non-Aligned Visualities, grows out of a collaborative research initiative examining architectural networks that connected countries within the Cold War–era Non-Aligned Movement. Pavlović focuses on the IMS Žeželj prefabricated construction system, a building method developed in former Yugoslavia during the 1970s and later used in projects across nations such as Cuba and Angola. Her photographs isolate structural details and fragments of these constructions, transforming them into quiet meditations on shared architectural language and the global circulation of political ideals during the Cold War period. Another series, Sometimes I can hear the ocean in my ears, shifts attention to the coastal landscape of Jibacoa in Cuba. Once the site of a sugar plantation owned by American industrialist Milton S. Hershey, the area carries traces of complex economic and colonial histories. Pavlović photographs the lush surroundings with a contemplative sensibility, focusing on textures, foliage, and shifting light. The images suggest how natural environments quietly absorb the remnants of political and industrial pasts. The exhibition concludes with Searching for a perfect sunset, an experimental project created during an artist residency in Joshua Tree National Park. A grid of color photographs records the artist’s playful attempt to frame an ideal sunset while holding vintage 35mm slides in front of the landscape. The resulting compositions blur the boundary between past and present imagery, emphasizing photography’s role as both a document and a constructed experience. Across the exhibition, Pavlović approaches photography as a flexible medium capable of expanding beyond the frame, inviting viewers to reconsider how images carry memory, ideology, and the passage of time. Image: © Vesna Pavlović

Isa Genzken: VACATION is on view at David Zwirner, Walker Street, New York, from March 13 through April 18, 2026. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, the exhibition brings together a focused selection of works by Berlin-based artist Isa Genzken, spanning the late 1970s to the 2010s. Installed in the gallery’s Tribeca space, the presentation functions as both pause and provocation, echoing Genzken’s pointed declaration that the art system itself is in need of a holiday. Over more than five decades, Genzken has forged a practice that moves restlessly between sculpture, photography, film, and installation. Her early concrete forms from the 1980s, several of which appear here, read like fragments of modernist architecture—columns, towers, and skeletal structures that seem at once utopian and precarious. These works established her long-standing engagement with the built environment, a theme that would evolve into complex reflections on globalization, consumer culture, and the psychological texture of contemporary life. The exhibition also includes examples from her Weltempfänger (World Receiver) series, sculptures that evoke antennae or communication devices, suggesting both connection and overload in an age saturated with signals. VACATION further highlights lesser-seen film and photographic works, alongside collaborations with figures such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Kai Althoff. Across mediums, Genzken tests the boundaries between refinement and improvisation, permanence and collapse. Everyday materials—mirrors, mannequins, concrete, found objects—are reassembled into charged constellations that resist easy interpretation. Her work draws equally from the legacy of twentieth-century avant-garde experimentation and the visual noise of the twenty-first century. This marks the gallery’s sixth solo presentation of Genzken’s work since 2004 and follows significant institutional recognition, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With VACATION, Genzken does not retreat from critique; rather, she reframes it. The exhibition offers viewers a space to reconsider the systems that shape perception itself, inviting reflection on what it might mean—personally and collectively—to step back and see anew. Image: Isa Genzken, Yachturlaub, 1993 (detail) © Isa Genzken. Courtesy of the David Zwirner Gallery

Robert Mapplethorpe, on view from March 5 through April 18, 2026 at Gladstone Gallery, revisits the powerful visual language of one of the most influential photographers of the late twentieth century. Organized in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the exhibition presents a selection of the artist’s most iconic images in newly produced large-scale prints. Many appear in a striking 60 × 60 inch square format, echoing Mapplethorpe’s long-held fascination with scale and the technical possibilities of photographic printing. Throughout his career, Robert Mapplethorpe pursued a singular balance between classical beauty and provocative subject matter. His photographs combine sculptural precision with an almost obsessive attention to form, light, and tonal contrast. Working primarily with the square format of a Hasselblad camera, he created compositions defined by symmetry, geometry, and dramatic chiaroscuro. The images presented in the exhibition highlight recurring motifs that shaped his work: elegant studies of flowers, classical sculpture, nude bodies, and striking portraits of cultural figures who helped define the creative energy of New York during the 1970s and 1980s. Portraiture played a particularly important role in Mapplethorpe’s practice. His camera captured artists, performers, and musicians with an intensity that blended glamour, intimacy, and theatrical presence. Among the figures he photographed were close collaborators such as Patti Smith, whose iconic portrait later appeared on the cover of the album Horses, and the magnetic performer Grace Jones. These images documented a vibrant cultural moment while reflecting the photographer’s fascination with identity, style, and self-presentation. Mapplethorpe also turned the camera toward himself throughout his life, creating a sequence of self-portraits that range from playful experimentation to solemn confrontation with mortality. In later works, the artist addressed themes of vulnerability and endurance with stark clarity. Alongside these personal images, the exhibition includes some of his most recognizable photographs, including a powerful depiction of a torn American flag illuminated by sunlight—an image that resonates with both beauty and tension. More than three decades after his death, Mapplethorpe’s work continues to shape conversations about photography, aesthetics, and artistic freedom. This exhibition emphasizes the lasting force of his vision, revealing how precision, daring subject matter, and a relentless pursuit of perfection combined to redefine the possibilities of photographic art. Image: Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1980 Silver gelatin print. © Robert Mappplethorpe Foundation

Neil O. Lawner: The Fabric of Faith unfolds as a quiet meditation on identity within the restless rhythm of New York City. Presented at Soho Photo Gallery from March 25 to April 19, 2026, the exhibition gathers fourteen candid photographs that linger on the subtle yet powerful dialogue between tradition and modernity. In a city often associated with reinvention, Lawner’s lens reveals a different narrative—one where continuity becomes an act of presence rather than resistance. Moving through neighborhoods shaped by generations of migration, Lawner observes individuals whose clothing carries stories older than the streets they walk. A carefully wrapped turban, a flowing hijab, the simplicity of a habit, or the modest kippah—each gesture of dress speaks to a lineage that extends far beyond the moment captured. These are not staged portraits but fragments of lived experience, where faith inhabits the everyday: a subway ride, a crosswalk, a fleeting pause in conversation. Lawner’s approach echoes the long tradition of street photography in New York, recalling the humanist sensibilities of photographers who sought meaning in ordinary encounters. Yet his work remains distinctly contemporary, attentive to the layered identities that define the city today. The images do not isolate their subjects; instead, they situate them within the vibrant, often chaotic urban fabric, allowing contrast and coexistence to emerge naturally. What resonates throughout The Fabric of Faith is a sense of quiet resilience. The subjects do not perform their beliefs—they inhabit them. In doing so, they transform public space into a site of continuity, where heritage remains visible and alive. Lawner’s photographs invite viewers to look more closely, to recognize the profound within the familiar, and to consider how faith, like the city itself, becomes something worn, carried, and shared. Image: Face to Face Conversation, N.Y.C., courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Neil O. Lawner

2026 PRC Student Show, presented from March 14 through April 19, 2026 at the Photographic Resource Center, marks the twentieth edition of an exhibition dedicated to emerging photographers in the Boston area. Over the past two decades, the annual show has become an important platform for students exploring photography at a formative stage of their artistic development. By bringing together work from colleges, universities, and local high schools, the exhibition highlights the vitality of the region’s educational programs and the diverse voices shaping the next generation of image-makers. The 2026 edition features students from leading institutions across Greater Boston, including Boston University, Emerson College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Northeastern University, and School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, among others. This year’s exhibition also expands its scope by welcoming participants from several Boston-area high schools, reinforcing the role of early mentorship and education in cultivating creative practice. The resulting presentation reveals a broad spectrum of photographic interests, from documentary storytelling and portraiture to conceptual experimentation and mixed-media approaches. Within the gallery space, the works reflect the personal perspectives and cultural experiences of young artists responding to contemporary life. Some photographs examine themes of identity, community, and belonging, while others focus on the quiet details of everyday environments or the imaginative possibilities of constructed imagery. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity for audiences to encounter work at the moment when artists begin shaping their visual language and discovering the expressive potential of the medium. For the Photographic Resource Center, the student exhibition remains central to its mission of education and artistic engagement. Through public programs, discussions, and community outreach connected to the show, the organization continues to support emerging photographers while strengthening the cultural network that surrounds photography in Boston. 2026 PRC Student Show stands as both a celebration of youthful creativity and a reminder that the future of photography grows from spaces where experimentation, curiosity, and learning thrive. Image: © Karl Kang, Northeastern University

AMBIGUITY, a solo exhibition by Alan Sislen, unfolds at Multiple Exposures Gallery from March 10 through April 19, 2026. The exhibition brings together a recent body of photographic work that examines the fragile moment when perception falters. Sislen focuses on the instant in which the eye recognizes shapes and structures, yet the mind hesitates before assigning them meaning. Through this deliberate pause, the photographs open a space where certainty dissolves and familiar environments become unexpectedly mysterious. Architecture plays a central role in Sislen’s visual investigations. Buildings often symbolize order, stability, and permanence, but within these photographs they appear unsettled and fluid. Reflections on glass facades, compressed perspectives, and repeated patterns alter the viewer’s orientation. Lines bend, surfaces mirror one another, and structural forms fragment into layered compositions. What initially appears recognizable gradually shifts toward abstraction, revealing how perception depends as much on interpretation as it does on sight. The exhibition unfolds across three distinct sections within the gallery space, each exploring ambiguity in a different visual register. The first grouping introduces instability through fractured reflections and overlapping architectural details. In these works, familiar urban surfaces multiply and distort, producing images that seem to hover between representation and illusion. The central sequence intensifies this sensation by pushing spatial perception further, compressing depth and perspective until walls, windows, and corridors dissolve into intricate visual puzzles that challenge the viewer’s sense of orientation. In contrast, the final section of the exhibition offers a quieter visual atmosphere. Here, architectural elements gradually give way to simplified forms, where light, shadow, and subtle tonal shifts dominate the frame. Ambiguity transforms from disorientation into contemplation, encouraging a slower and more attentive mode of looking. Across the exhibition, Sislen’s photographs invite viewers to remain within uncertainty for a moment longer than usual. In doing so, the work suggests that ambiguity itself becomes a productive space, where familiar places reveal unexpected dimensions and perception finds new possibilities. Image: Curved Perspectives. © Alan Sislen

Ann Rosen: Being Seen: Part III unfolds at Soho Photo Gallery as a continuation of a deeply collaborative and socially engaged practice. On view from March 25 to April 19, 2026, the exhibition brings together portraits and personal texts shaped through years of workshops with women whose lives intersect with homelessness, incarceration, and addiction. Rather than observing from a distance, Rosen works within a shared creative space where authorship becomes collective and visibility is carefully reclaimed. The origins of the project trace back to 2015, in Brooklyn shelters where conversations gradually evolve into images. Participants paint their own backdrops, write fragments of their stories, and step in front of the camera on their own terms. These layered portraits carry the presence of multiple voices, blending visual and written expression into something that resists simplification. Each image holds a sense of deliberation, shaped not only by the photographer’s eye but by the subject’s intention. As the work expands through collaborations with HousingPlus, the project deepens its engagement with communities navigating systemic hardship. Rosen constructs a temporary studio within familiar environments, introducing professional lighting and materials that shift the atmosphere without erasing context. Within this space, participants shape their representation—choosing posture, clothing, and symbolic objects that reflect both lived experience and imagined possibility. The act of being photographed becomes a form of self-definition rather than documentation. Presented as diptychs, the pairing of image and text invites a slower encounter. The written narratives complicate the act of looking, challenging assumptions often imposed on marginalized women. These works do not seek to resolve the tension between vulnerability and strength; instead, they hold both in view. Being Seen: Part III proposes visibility not as exposure, but as a deliberate and collaborative act—one that restores nuance, dignity, and a sense of agency to those too often overlooked. Image: Veteran A East NY, Brooklyn, courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Ann Rosen

Max Marienko: Borderless City presents a vivid and often playful reflection on the shifting cultural landscape of New York. Exhibited at Soho Photo Gallery from March 25 to April 19, 2026, the series emerges from Marienko’s daily wanderings through Brooklyn and beyond, where the street becomes both stage and subject. His photographs resist simplicity, inviting viewers into layered compositions where coincidence, tension, and humor quietly unfold. Working in the tradition of candid street photography, Marienko captures scenes that feel at once accidental and carefully composed. A reflection interrupts a gesture, a passerby disrupts a moment, a juxtaposition turns ordinary movement into something subtly absurd. His images carry a sense of visual contradiction—order and chaos coexisting within a single frame. This balance reflects the city itself, where millions of lives intersect without pause, forming fleeting relationships that rarely announce themselves. In Borderless City, cultural identity does not appear as a fixed marker but as something fluid, constantly reshaped through proximity. New York’s reputation as a global crossroads becomes less of a grand statement and more of a quiet, ongoing negotiation. Marienko pays attention to the in-between moments: mismatched symbols, overlapping languages, gestures that echo across backgrounds. These are instances where difference does not disappear but instead cohabits in unpredictable ways. There is a subtle irony running through the work, a recognition that coexistence is not always seamless. Yet within these imperfect encounters lies a distinct beauty. Marienko’s photographs suggest that the city’s identity does not depend on harmony alone, but on its capacity to hold contradictions together. In this shared urban space, boundaries lose their clarity, and what remains is a collective rhythm shaped by movement, collision, and the quiet acceptance of difference. Image: Starfish, courtesy of Soho Photo Gallery © Max Marienko