Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography

HOLD: Perspective Gallery’s 2026 Invitational Exhibition, on view from February 5 to March 1, 2026, brings together the work of six emerging artists from the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Curated by Aimée Beaubien, Professor and Chair of the department, the exhibition offers a thoughtful introduction to a new generation of image-makers grappling with the complexities of memory, identity, and emotional inheritance. Featuring works by Abigail Brooke Ackles, Ethan Kunoff, Isabel Lim, Collin Lust, Sarah Price, and Dev Kili Stolkiner, HOLD unfolds as a quiet but insistent meditation on what it means to grasp something already in the process of disappearance. Across varied photographic approaches, the artists explore distance—between people, places, and moments—and the tension between what is preserved and what inevitably fades. The exhibition does not seek resolution; instead, it embraces photography’s ability to linger in uncertainty, where meaning is shaped through repetition, absence, and return. The images presented here function as points of connection rather than fixed statements. They hold traces of personal histories, fragmented narratives, and emotional landscapes that stretch across generations. Photographs become vessels that carry memory forward, even as they acknowledge its instability. In this space, the act of holding is both literal and metaphorical: to hold onto an image, to be held by a memory, or to recognize the quiet forces that shape identity over time. By positioning these works within a shared continuum, HOLD invites viewers to reflect on their own relationships to the past. What do we choose to keep close, and what do we allow to drift away? How do images help us navigate the distance between what once was and what remains? This exhibition offers a compelling glimpse into the evolving language of contemporary photography, where images serve not only as records, but as living conduits between experience, remembrance, and becoming. Image: Ethan Kunoff: Ein Anfang © Ethan Kunoff

American, Born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy traces the extraordinary artistic journeys of Hungarian-born photographers who shaped the visual landscape of the 20th century. Against backdrops of war, exile, and reinvention, these artists migrated from Hungary to Berlin and Paris, and ultimately to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where they redefined American photography. This exhibition offers the first comprehensive exploration of their odyssey—spanning two world wars and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—and the remarkable artistic contributions that emerged along the way. Featuring over 150 striking and surreal photographs, the exhibition captures the poetic interplay of light and shadow, the grit of urban life, the allure of celebrity, and the ever-present promise of America. Included are works by renowned photographers such as André Kertész, Nickolas Muray, Martin Munkácsi, and György Kepes, alongside lesser-known artists whose images have become iconic. Among them is Robert Capa, a pioneer of modern photojournalism, whose harrowing images of D-Day at Omaha Beach remain among the most defining photographs of World War II. This exhibition fills a missing chapter in art history, revealing the profound impact of Hungarian émigrés on American photography, particularly in major urban centers. László Moholy-Nagy, whose avant-garde experiments at the Bauhaus in Germany laid the foundation for Chicago’s “New Bauhaus,” emerges as a key figure in this transatlantic movement. Meanwhile, John Albok’s Depression-era street photography captured New York life with raw emotion, and on the West Coast, André de Dienes’ portraits of Hollywood icons, including Marilyn Monroe, played a pivotal role in shaping the Golden Age of cinema. From evocative street scenes and high-fashion imagery to haunting war photography and cinematic portraiture, the exhibition showcases the work of more than thirty Hungarian-born artists who transformed photography in the 20th century. American, Born Hungary is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Alex Nyerges, VMFA Director and CEO, in collaboration with Károly Kincses, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography. The exhibition premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest on April 5, 2024, to inaugurate its newly renovated galleries, before traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in October 2024. The George Eastman Museum serves as the final stop for this landmark exhibition. Image: Nickolas Muray (American, b. Hungary, 1892–1965), Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Santa Monica, California, 1929. Gelatin silver print. George Eastman Museum, gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

Made in L.A. 2025 marks the seventh edition of the Hammer Museum’s celebrated biennial, a vital survey of contemporary art shaped by the vast and varied landscape of Los Angeles. Featuring twenty-eight artists, the exhibition reflects a city in constant transformation—its contradictions, diversity, and layered histories shaping the creative pulse of each work. Far from the mythic or monolithic visions often cast upon it, Los Angeles emerges here as a living organism, defined by movement, multiplicity, and dissonance. Each participating artist draws upon this urban terrain—its neighborhoods, languages, politics, and light—to reveal the many ways a city can hold meaning. The works on view span a rich range of disciplines, including film, painting, theater, choreography, photography, sculpture, sound, and video. What binds them is attitude: a shared insistence on presence and place. Whether through abstraction, documentation, or performance, each artist engages Los Angeles both as muse and as medium. The result is a portrait of the city as a state of mind—restless, layered, and irreducibly complex. Curated by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow as curatorial assistant, the biennial extends the Hammer’s long-standing commitment to supporting artistic experimentation and local voices. Made in L.A. 2025 offers not only a reflection of the city’s creative landscape but also a meditation on belonging and identity in a place perpetually reinventing itself. This year’s edition is made possible through the generosity of the Mohn Family Foundation, the Hammer Circle, and numerous foundations and patrons whose continued support sustains the museum’s mission. Through their collaboration, the exhibition invites audiences to experience Los Angeles anew—as both a site of artistic invention and a mirror of the contemporary world. Image: Black-and-white image of a light-colored car with its front crashed into the ground in front of a palm tree Pat O’Neill, Los Angeles, from the series Cars and Other Problems, ca. 1960s © Pat O’Neill

Icons In Hand: Masterworks from Local Collections invites visitors to rediscover the power of black-and-white photography through an intimate encounter with some of the medium’s most enduring images. Presented in Brattleboro’s Main Gallery from January to March 2026, the exhibition gathers museum-quality prints by legendary photographers, drawn from a remarkable local collection. Each photograph offers an opportunity to look closely—to notice the texture of the paper, the subtle grain, and the edges of the negative—and to feel how time, craft, and memory intersect within these masterworks. The exhibition encourages visitors to experience iconic images not as digital reproductions, but as physical objects with their own histories. The way a print is made, toned, or preserved becomes part of its emotional language, shaping what we perceive and how we connect to it. In this setting, works such as Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA, 1936 regain their tactile immediacy, reminding us of photography’s profound ability to bear witness and to endure. Co-curated by Josh Farr and Mitch Weiss, Icons In Hand also explores the quiet passion behind collecting photography. It invites reflection on why individuals choose to live with these works, how the story of a print’s creation and care enriches its meaning, and how private collections play a role in sustaining a shared cultural heritage. The exhibition is both a celebration of photographic artistry and a gesture of gratitude toward those who preserve it for future generations. At its heart, Icons In Hand embodies the spirit of the Vermont Center for Photography—a place where art lives in dialogue with its community, where artists and audiences meet in person, and where each photograph reminds us that seeing is not only about vision, but about presence. Image: Migrant Mother, Nipomo CA, 1936 © Dorothea Lange

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast presents a striking new series in which the artist reexamines the layered realities of American identity through the photographic lens. Drawing inspiration from Berenice Abbott’s 1954 documentation of U.S. Route 1, Samoylova retraces this historic roadway from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent, Maine, creating a contemporary visual dialogue between past and present. Her journey explores how the American landscape continues to serve as a stage for dreams, contradictions, and cultural transformation. Combining vivid color and contemplative black-and-white imagery, Samoylova’s photographs navigate the tension between the natural world and human invention. Signs of urban sprawl, consumer desire, and political ideology blend with the quiet persistence of nature, suggesting both harmony and dissonance. Rather than simply mapping the geography of the Atlantic coast, she builds a poetic sequence of recurring motifs—billboards, cars, waterways, and monuments—that evoke a shared visual memory of the nation. Through these symbols, she examines how nostalgia shapes our perception of authenticity and belonging. Atlantic Coast resonates deeply as a meditation on the American condition: a place where beauty and decay coexist, and where the pursuit of identity is constantly rewritten against the backdrop of commerce, ideology, and time. Samoylova’s photographs ask us to see the landscape as more than scenery—they reveal it as a mirror of collective ideals and disillusionments, a reflection of who Americans believe themselves to be. The exhibition holds particular significance for the Norton Museum of Art, situated along U.S. Route 1—known locally as Dixie Highway—since 1941. In presenting Samoylova’s work, the museum continues its engagement with the evolving story of this storied road and proudly welcomes her as one of its 2025–26 Artists-in-Residence. Image: Anastasia Samoylova (American, born Russia, 1984), Abandoned School Under Highway, Jacksonville, Florida, 2024 © Anastasia Samoylova

Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain explores the intertwined narratives of displacement, resilience, and renewal within Black American communities of Oakland and the East Bay. This exhibition unfolds as both a testament and a dialogue—revealing how generations have reimagined belonging amid the shifting landscapes of urban change. Through newly commissioned works in art, architecture, and archival storytelling, it honors the ingenuity and persistence that have shaped these communities’ pursuit of home and identity. Drawing from the histories of West Oakland and Russell City, Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain reflects on neighborhoods once rich in cultural life yet scarred by cycles of erasure and renewal. The exhibition interlaces pieces from the Oakland Museum of California’s collection with loans from local archives to trace the rise, displacement, and reclamation of these spaces. Through the eyes of artist Adrian Burrell, architect June Grant of blinkLAB architecture, and the Archive of Urban Futures in collaboration with Moms 4 Housing, the show examines the many ways Black residents have resisted systemic forces and reshaped their environments into acts of defiance and creation. Developed alongside East Bay residents who have directly experienced the weight of displacement, the exhibition becomes more than a reflection—it is an act of collective remembering. Each installation speaks to the power of reclaiming space, not only in a physical sense but also within the cultural and emotional landscapes that sustain a community. Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain stands as both an homage and a promise: a recognition of the creativity and strength that continue to define Black life in the Bay Area and beyond. It reminds viewers that even amid loss, the act of remaining can itself be a radical form of resistance and renewal. Image: Keith Dennison, Untitled [Sherman tank prepares to destroy homes for post office site], 1960, Gelatin silver print, The Oakland Tribune Collection, Oakland Museum of California, Gift of ANG Newspapers

Nowhere Land unfolds as a deeply personal yet broadly resonant documentary project by Jiatong Lu, recipient of CPW’s 2025 Portfolio Review Prize. Rooted in her own struggle with neurological Lyme disease, the work examines how chronic tick-borne illnesses often fall through the cracks of the U.S. medical system. Through conversations with other patients and a carefully assembled blend of photography, text, and archival material, Lu brings attention to a condition that is frequently minimized or misunderstood. Her images move between clarity and abstraction, reflecting the uncertainty and invisibility that so many patients face. The photographs express the cumulative weight of long-term illness—the physical pain, the emotional strain, and the financial burden that quietly shapes daily life. By interweaving personal testimony with visual experimentation, Lu gives form to a reality that is difficult to articulate, revealing the silent persistence of a disease that resists easy diagnosis and treatment. Based in New York, Lu works across mixed media and photography, drawing from her upbringing in Northwest China and her training at the School of Visual Arts, where she earned an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media. Her artistic practice explores the terrain of trauma, paying close attention to how individual memory intersects with broader cultural narratives and how personal experience is inevitably shaped by policy and institutional structures. Her work has reached audiences across the United States, Europe, and Asia, appearing in venues such as Candela Gallery in Virginia, Filter Space in Chicago, the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, and exhibitions in Beijing and Rome. Recognized for her thoughtful approach and compelling visual language, Lu has received distinctions including an Honorable Mention from the York Center for Photographic Art and a NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography. Nowhere Land stands as her latest effort to illuminate what often remains unseen, encouraging viewers to look closer and question more deeply. Image: © Jiatong Lu

Regen Projects is proud to present Keep Movin’, the ninth solo exhibition by Wolfgang Tillmans with the gallery since 1995. This major show gathers new photographs, videos, sculptural installations, and a fresh iteration of his longstanding project Truth Study Center — highlighting Tillmans’s evolving vision and the breadth of his inquiry into the tangled relationships between material reality, sociopolitical structures, and sensory experience. At the heart of the exhibition lie large industrial ropes — hawser shackles — displayed on mirrored tables and coiled on the floor. Once meant to tow ships, these heavy, salt-worn ropes have been repurposed in the gallery as potent metaphors for connection and fragility. Their imposing physical presence invites viewers to consider not only what binds us together, but how the infrastructures maintaining our modern world might unravel. Continuing his long fascination with process and material, Tillmans also presents a renewed selection of works derived from photocopier experiments. Among them, Curled (2025) distills images through scanning and inversion, generating abstract textures and forms from everyday objects. Another work, Panorama, left — expanded into a six-metre composition — transforms strip-folded paper into a sweeping, minimalist abstraction that resembles photographic negatives, evoking modernist precedents and experimental visual languages. Elsewhere in the exhibition, new video works deepen Tillmans’s engagement with the moving image, sound, and the natural world. In Wild Carrot (2025), a close-up of a wild carrot’s bloom merges with the artist’s kalimba soundtrack to evoke a meditative sense of organic presence; while Travelling Camera (2025) transforms a 4K monitor’s inner circuitry — circuit boards, inverters, cables — into an uncanny techno-landscape, animated by overlays of found objects and natural motifs. Through these pieces, Tillmans bridges technology and nature, exploring the porous borders between cultural production and material existence. Other photographs, sourced from a metalworking factory in his birthplace region, revisit industrial labor and legacy, capturing molten steel, workers, machinery, and the spectral beauty of manual craft. Across all media, Keep Movin’ reflects Tillmans’s belief in transformation — that matter can shift, images can evolve, and perspectives can renew. In his hands, photography becomes not just a reflection of the world but a space where history, materiality, vulnerability, and hope meet. Image: Wolfgang Tillmans. Speech Bubble, 2023 © Wolfgang Tillmans

Beyond the Frame: Highlights from the HRM Archive, on view at the Hudson River Museum from August 29, 2025 through March 1, 2026, offers an expansive look at more than a century of life in Yonkers through the lens of the Museum’s rich archival holdings. The exhibition reflects both the resilience of the city’s communities and the enduring role of the Hudson River Museum as a cultural anchor, committed to preserving and sharing local history alongside American art and science. Drawing from newly digitized archival materials, Beyond the Frame brings forward photographs and documents that have rarely—or never—been seen by the public. These images illuminate everyday moments, personal histories, and collective experiences that shaped Yonkers across generations. From intimate street scenes to significant civic milestones, the exhibition reveals how ordinary lives contribute to a broader historical narrative, emphasizing perseverance, transformation, and continuity within the city. A key focus of the exhibition is the Museum’s historic home, Glenview. Archival photographs trace its origins as a private residence before its evolution into a public institution, offering insight into how physical spaces adapt alongside the communities they serve. Alongside these architectural histories are portraits and visual records of Yonkers residents whose labor, creativity, and determination helped define the city’s character. Together, these materials connect personal memory with institutional history. At the heart of the exhibition is the Museum’s ongoing digitization initiative. More than a technical undertaking, this effort represents a commitment to access, education, and inclusion. By preserving fragile photographs and documents and making them widely available, the Museum ensures that scholars, students, artists, and the public can engage with these stories in new and meaningful ways. Digitization allows history to circulate beyond gallery walls, enriching research, learning, and creative interpretation. Beyond the Frame ultimately invites visitors to reconsider the power of archives—not as static repositories, but as living resources that continue to shape understanding of the past and present. Through these rediscovered images, the exhibition affirms the importance of preservation, community memory, and the shared responsibility of telling a fuller, more inclusive story of American life. Image: Photographer once known. Women Posing on the Steps of City Hall, Representing Different Nationalities, ca. 1918–19. Reproduction of a black-and-white photograph. Collection of the Hudson River Museum. Gift of Mrs. Elton Littell, 1952 (52.37f).

Doug Eng’s exhibition Impressions of Place – The Kuerner Farm offers a contemplative journey into one of America’s most storied artistic landscapes. Presented at the Cummer Museum’s Bank of America Concourse Art Shop from October 21, 2025 to March 01, 2026, the exhibition brings together Eng’s thoughtful vision and the enduring legacy of the Kuerner Farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. A Jacksonville native with a background in engineering and software programming, Eng approaches photography with a precise yet lyrical sensibility, balancing technical clarity with emotional depth. His work serves as a companion to Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth, extending the viewer’s understanding of the environment that shaped Wyeth’s imagination for decades. The 33-acre farm, largely preserved in its original character, becomes both subject and collaborator in Eng’s photographs. Through sweeping views of rolling fields and quiet studies of weathered structures, he reveals the subtle interplay of light, terrain, and time—echoes of the same elements that guided Wyeth’s brush. Eng moves across the landscape with a sense of respect and curiosity, observing the farmhouse, barn, and surrounding grounds with the attentive eye of both an artist and a builder. His accompanying notes do not map the farm literally; instead, they emphasize relationships—between buildings and pathways, between human history and natural forces, between the seen and the remembered. These reflections invite viewers to consider how place shapes perception and how artists, in turn, interpret that sense of place. In Impressions of Place, Eng offers more than documentation. He extends an invitation to step into a setting that has inspired generations, encouraging visitors to look closely, linger thoughtfully, and reconnect with the quiet rhythms of a landscape that continues to hold artistic meaning across time. Image: Douglas J. Eng (American, b. 1954), Kuerner Farm, 2025, archival inkjet print, Douglas J. Eng Photography. © Douglas J. Eng

Ron Jude: Low Tide presents a restrained yet quietly unsettling meditation on landscapes shaped by forces that predate and outlast human presence. Centered on the intertidal zone, the exhibition draws attention to moments of temporary exposure, when the retreating sea reveals surfaces, textures, and organisms usually hidden from view. Jude treats these environments not as scenic destinations, but as thresholds—spaces where geological time, organic growth, and erosion briefly intersect in visible form. The photographs move fluidly between shoreline and inland sites, suggesting that the logic of the tide extends beyond the coast itself. Rocks slick with moisture, tangled roots, fungal growth, and submerged debris appear suspended between states, neither fully land nor sea. Jude’s attention to material detail invites prolonged looking, encouraging viewers to consider how these forms accumulate, decay, and transform outside the rhythms of daily human life. The images reward patience, revealing complexity through quiet repetition rather than spectacle. Building on ideas introduced in his earlier work, Jude continues to question how scale and perception shape our understanding of the world. Here, the absence of human figures or built structures removes familiar points of reference, allowing surfaces and organisms to assert their own presence. The resulting ambiguity destabilizes easy readings of space and distance, creating photographs that feel both intimate and vast. This visual uncertainty echoes the fleeting nature of the intertidal moment itself, a condition defined by constant change. The title Low Tide resonates beyond its literal meaning, suggesting a broader state of revelation and vulnerability. As water withdraws, systems usually kept separate overlap, exposing fragile balances and latent tensions. Without explicitly addressing environmental crisis, the work carries a subtle unease, reflecting a contemporary awareness of ecological instability. These are not images of catastrophe, but of suspension—life caught in a brief pause before conditions shift again. Ultimately, Low Tide offers a contemplative experience grounded in slowness and restraint. Jude’s photographs resist narrative closure, instead proposing landscape as an ongoing process shaped by time, pressure, and persistence. In doing so, the exhibition asks viewers to reconsider their own position within these vast cycles, reminding us that what we see is often determined not by creation, but by moments of absence when deeper structures are allowed to surface. Image: Maritime Forest, 2021 Gelatin silver print © Ron Jude

On view from January 21 to March 7, 2026, Chris McCaw: Reversals and Revolutions marks a compelling return to San Francisco, presenting a body of work that reconsiders photography at its most elemental. Known for his rigorous engagement with light, time, and materials, McCaw approaches the medium as both a scientific experiment and a poetic act. This exhibition brings together new and iconic works that reveal how photographic images can be formed through direct encounters with natural forces rather than digital intervention. At the center of the exhibition is Inverse, a recent series that extends McCaw’s long-standing investigation into analog processes. Using solarization and carefully controlled overexposure, he creates images in which negative and positive coexist within a single frame. Landscapes appear simultaneously revealed and obscured, their tonal reversals prompting viewers to question how vision operates and how meaning is assigned to familiar terrain. These works feel less like representations of place than meditations on perception itself, where the mechanics of seeing become inseparable from the subject being seen. Complementing these photographs are McCaw’s celebrated Sunburn works, for which the sun is not only depicted but actively participates in the making of the image. Through prolonged exposures, concentrated sunlight physically burns its mark onto light-sensitive paper, tracing arcs and circles that record the Earth’s rotation and the passage of time. Each piece is the result of careful preparation and surrender, balancing precision with the unpredictability of natural conditions. The resulting images possess a striking physical presence, bearing the scars of their own creation. Taken together, the works in Reversals and Revolutions challenge conventional ideas of photography as a tool of capture or reproduction. Instead, McCaw presents the medium as an evolving dialogue between artist, environment, and process. His photographs invite slow looking and reflection, reminding viewers that even in a technologically accelerated world, photography can remain a deeply material, time-bound, and exploratory art form. Image: Chris McCaw, Inverse #122 (Lakes Basin), 2025 6 Unique paper negatives, partial in-camera solarization © Chris McCaw