Roger Ballen: Ballenesque

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noé Montes: Regional History, on view from October 11, 2025 through April 19, 2026 at the Riverside Art Museum, brings together three interrelated bodies of work produced over the past decade by Southern California–based artist Noé Montes. Through photographs, recorded interviews, and community workshops, Montes constructs layered portraits of the Coachella Valley, Cuyama, and the Imperial region—areas often flattened or overlooked in dominant historical narratives. The series on Coachella Valley farmworkers foregrounds the labor that sustains vast agricultural economies while remaining largely invisible. Montes documents workers in fields and domestic spaces, pairing images with first-person accounts that speak to endurance, migration, and generational knowledge. In Cuyama, a rural valley shaped by cycles of oil extraction and farming, he traces the imprint of boom-and-bust industries on families and landscapes. Imperial Air turns toward environmental and industrial pressures, examining how air quality and infrastructure intersect with daily life in communities long subjected to uneven development. Across these projects, Montes emphasizes collaboration rather than observation from a distance. Workshops invite residents to reflect on personal archives and collective memory, expanding the exhibition beyond the frame of a single author. The resulting photographs resist spectacle. Instead, they dwell on gestures of care, domestic rituals, and the built environments that reveal both resilience and strain. White working-class families, Indigenous communities, Latine residents, Black communities, and others appear not as statistics but as active participants in shaping the region’s social fabric. Curated by Dr. Catherine Gudis, the exhibition also raises urgent questions about power and storytelling. Who defines regional history, and whose experiences are excluded? By placing image and testimony side by side, Regional History challenges extractive narratives that privilege industry over people. It affirms that the Inland Empire’s past and present are inseparable from the labor, memory, and cultural strength of its residents—communities that continue to assert agency in the face of environmental and economic pressures. Image: Estella Hernandez, Dia de Primera Comunión / First Communion Day, Danza de Los Viejitos © Estella Hernandez

Speaking in Pairs, on view from February 5 to April 19, 2026, approaches portraiture as a site of tension, dialogue, and transformation. Anchored by August Sander’s 1938 photograph of Hermann Leubsdorf, the exhibition asks whether a single image can hold both violence and healing within its frame. Rather than offering clear answers, the show unfolds portraiture as a layered practice—one shaped by history, power, intimacy, and the shifting relationship between sitter, maker, and viewer. Installed in a gallery endowed by the Leubsdorf family, the exhibition traces how portraits circulate across time, acquiring new meanings as social and political contexts change. Here, photography is not treated as a neutral record but as a dynamic form of evidence—capable of granting visibility, preserving memory, or exposing vulnerability. The works gathered explore the friction between private lives and public histories, revealing how even the quietest images can echo with conflict, resilience, and unresolved questions. Bringing together more than eighty contributors from diverse fields, Speaking in Pairs resists a single authoritative voice. Artists, historians, writers, lawyers, doctors, and curators contribute to an evolving installation that incorporates photographs alongside books, posters, and ephemera. This porous structure blurs boundaries between vernacular imagery and fine art, between the anonymous and the celebrated, and between fact and fiction. In doing so, the exhibition emphasizes exchange—ideas speaking to one another across disciplines, generations, and geographies. Marking significant anniversaries in the histories of photography, literature, and cultural resistance, the exhibition situates itself within a longer continuum of image-making and storytelling. Portraits are presented as acts of witnessing that can affirm presence while also exposing risk. By juxtaposing images made during moments of crisis and change, Speaking in Pairs highlights how meaning is never fixed. Instead, it emerges through sustained looking and conversation, inviting viewers to consider who is seen, who speaks, and how images continue to shape our understanding of survival, memory, and responsibility. Images: Left: Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf at the beach, New York, c. 1936. Photographer unknown. Right : Bertha Leubsdorf, Berlin, Germany, c. 1912. Courtesy John Leubsdorf. Photograph by Martin Balg.

Bill Owens: Work and Leisure offers a witty and affectionate glimpse into the everyday lives of Americans in the 1970s, a period caught between the social revolutions of the previous decade and the technological dawn of the 1980s. Owens’ photographs open doors into private worlds—living rooms, backyards, offices, and parties—where leisure, labor, and aspiration blend into a portrait of middle-class life both ordinary and extraordinary. Drawn from Owens’ celebrated series Leisure (1972), Our Kind of People (1975), and Working: I Do It for the Money (1977), the works on view capture a specific slice of America—prosperous, suburban, and largely white—rooted in California and the Midwest. Yet, beneath their regional focus, these images reflect a broader cultural rhythm: the optimism and contradictions of postwar domesticity. Owens’ lens balances humor and empathy, gently poking fun at the rituals of modern comfort while finding sincerity in its subjects’ dreams and routines. His photographs suggest that the suburban ideal, so often mythologized, is as fragile and human as the people who inhabit it. Each image is accompanied by a quote from the subject, a detail that gives voice and agency to the photographed, turning the viewer into both witness and participant. These captions preserve the rhythms of conversation and self-perception from a half-century ago, reminding us how people wanted to be seen in a time of shifting identity and expectation. To some, the scenes may appear quaint or nostalgic; to others, they remain sharply familiar, reflecting enduring themes of community, conformity, and self-expression. Organized by Senior Curator Laura Burkhalter, this exhibition features works generously gifted to the collection by Dr. Steven and Yasemin Miller and Jeff Perry in honor of Jacqueline and Myron Blank. Owens’ photographs invite us all to pause, smile, and step back into a time when the American dream was both celebrated and quietly questioned. Image: Bill Owens (American, born 1938) We really enjoy getting together with our friends to drink and dance. It’s a wild party and we’re having a great time., from the “Suburbia” series, 1971 (printed 1999) Gelatin silver print Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections: The Jeff Perry Photography Collection given in honor of Myron and Jacqueline Blank, 2024.119

Focal Point: The David Hall Photography Collection brings together forty remarkable works from the extensive holdings of Tampa-based photographer and collector David Hall. Comprising more than four hundred pieces, the collection reflects a lifelong fascination with the art and history of photography. The selection on view traces the medium’s transformation throughout the twentieth century—from its early documentary purpose to its recognition as a vital and expressive art form. Hall’s particular passion for photographs made between World War I and World War II, a period of immense artistic experimentation, is evident throughout the exhibition. The presentation unfolds through themes that recur across Hall’s collection, featuring iconic works such as Ruth Orkin’s American Girl in Italy, August Sander’s Young Farmers, and Ansel Adams’s celebrated view of Half Dome in Yosemite. These images, once circulated in influential publications like LIFE, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, highlight a generation of photographers—among them Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Philippe Halsman—whose work shaped modern visual culture. The exhibition also honors the pioneering spirit of Group f/64, whose members including Adams, Ruth Bernhard, and Edward Weston pursued a vision of “pure photography” that rejected pictorialism in favor of sharp focus and formal precision. Women play a defining role within Hall’s collection, both behind and in front of the camera. The works of Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, and Lillian Bassman exemplify a generation of women who redefined the possibilities of the medium despite limited recognition in their time. Their portraits of women—muses, artists, sisters—embody strength, elegance, and humanity. Focal Point also includes pieces by Hall’s contemporaries and friends from California, a nod to his years in the Bay Area. More than an exhibition, this presentation stands as a heartfelt tribute to David Hall’s enduring legacy as a collector, photographer, and champion of the arts in Tampa and beyond. Image: Judy Dater (American, b. 1941), Self-Portrait at Salt Flats, 1981. Gelatin silver print. David Hall Collection.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is the first major retrospective of the acclaimed photographer, bringing together over two decades of his work through an expansive multi-series presentation. Born in the Dominican Republic and based in Monterrey, Mexico, Cartagena explores pressing social and environmental issues through a striking range of photographic practices that includes documentary images, collage, appropriated vernacular photographs, and AI-generated video. His work captures the complexities of suburban sprawl, the US-Mexico border, and increasing economic inequality. As visually dynamic as they are politically incisive, his photographs prompt viewers to question the systems that shape our world. Though rooted in Mexico, Cartagena’s photographic series speak to shared global conditions of migration, environmental crisis, and unchecked development, offering a powerful reflection on the broader forces defining life in the 21st century.

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