Photosynthesis XXI: Winchester and Burlington High School Students

Living in the Fault Lines, presented at the Maison Française of New York University from April 17 through May 15, 2026, offers a meditation on crisis that resists spectacle. Rather than focusing on moments of rupture, the exhibition turns its attention to the slow, often imperceptible tensions that precede upheaval. Curated by doctoral researcher Charli Sas, the project frames instability not as an isolated event but as an ongoing condition—one that unfolds across time, bodies, and landscapes. The photographs by Reza, whose career spans more than five decades and over a hundred countries, reflect a sustained engagement with regions shaped by conflict, displacement, and political uncertainty. Known for his work in war zones and humanitarian contexts, the artist brings a measured, human-centered perspective to subjects often reduced to headlines. Here, his images emphasize duration: the accumulation of strain, the persistence of daily life under pressure, and the quiet resilience that emerges in unstable environments. Faces, gestures, and fragments of everyday existence anchor the exhibition. These are not images of catastrophe in its most visible form, but of the conditions that make such events possible. The sense of immediacy coexists with a deeper temporal layer, suggesting that the present is always informed by forces that remain partially unseen. In this approach, dignity appears not as heroism, but as endurance—the capacity to continue inhabiting spaces marked by uncertainty. Sas’s curatorial framework draws on literary and philosophical inquiry, positioning the notion of “fault lines” as both a physical and conceptual metaphor. The exhibition resonates with broader reflections on time, memory, and the politics of representation, encouraging viewers to consider how images can render visible what often escapes perception. It also aligns with Reza’s long-standing commitment to education and visual literacy, notably through initiatives that empower communities to tell their own stories. By shifting the focus from rupture to process, Living in the Fault Lines invites a more attentive form of looking. It suggests that understanding crisis requires patience and proximity, as well as a willingness to engage with what unfolds slowly, beneath the surface of events. Image: The Frame © Reza, courtesy of La Maison Française of New York University

In the Library: Mary Cassatt’s American Legacy at the National Gallery of Art offers an intimate look at the transatlantic networks that shaped one of the most celebrated figures of Impressionism. On view from February 16 through May 15, 2026, this focused installation in the museum’s Library complements the major exhibition dedicated to Cassatt’s life and work, illuminating the documentary traces behind her artistic achievements. Drawing from the Gallery’s extensive research holdings, the presentation gathers archival photographs, rare exhibition catalogues, and personal correspondence to reveal Cassatt’s deep and sustained ties to the United States. Born in Pennsylvania and professionally rooted in Paris, Cassatt cultivated a cosmopolitan identity that bridged continents. Her work absorbed diverse influences, from the radical compositional strategies of Japanese printmakers such as Hiroshige and Hokusai to the painterly authority of European masters including El Greco and Diego Velázquez. Through this synthesis, she forged a distinctly modern language grounded in observation, intimacy, and structural clarity. Beyond her achievements as a painter and printmaker, Cassatt played a crucial advisory role for American collectors and institutions. Letters and documents on view underscore how she guided patrons toward progressive acquisitions, encouraged support for contemporary French art, and championed both avant-garde innovation and historical masterworks. Her recommendations helped shape important private collections and influenced the development of public museums in the United States at a pivotal cultural moment. By presenting these materials within the scholarly setting of the Library, the exhibition emphasizes Cassatt’s impact not only as an artist but as a cultural mediator. The installation highlights how her exchanges—across oceans, languages, and artistic traditions—expanded American understanding of modern art. In tracing these connections, In the Library: Mary Cassatt’s American Legacy affirms her enduring role in forging a dialogue between American ambition and European modernism. Image: Mary Cassatt with Mrs. Joseph Durand-Ruel, after 1894, c.1916, Gelatin silver

Jean-Pierre Laffont: New York Noir, presented from March through May 2026 at the Leica Store Miami, explores the striking black-and-white vision of the renowned French-American photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont. The exhibition gathers twenty-seven gallery prints alongside a digital projection of street photographs that evoke the restless pulse of New York City during the late twentieth century. Working primarily with grainy film and dramatic contrasts, Laffont constructs images filled with shadow, glare, and movement, echoing the visual intensity associated with classic noir cinema while capturing the unpredictability of urban life. Born in 1935 in French Algeria and raised in Morocco, Laffont studied photography in Vevey before settling in the United States in the mid-1960s. New York quickly became both his adopted home and a constant source of inspiration. Armed with a camera and an instinct for storytelling, he documented a nation undergoing profound transformation. His photographs recorded civil rights demonstrations, anti-war protests during the Vietnam era, and the political upheaval surrounding the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Alongside his wife Eliane, he helped establish influential photo agencies that played an important role in the international circulation of photojournalism. The images in New York Noir reveal another dimension of Laffont’s practice: the city as a stage where drama unfolds in everyday encounters. Streetlights carve sharp patterns across sidewalks, rain-slick pavement reflects passing headlights, and anonymous figures appear suspended between anonymity and narrative. The photographs recall the mood of mid-century noir films, yet they remain firmly rooted in lived experience. Each frame conveys the tension, humor, and raw vitality that defined the city he encountered when he first arrived in the 1960s. Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, Laffont’s photographs appeared in major publications including Time, Life, and Newsweek. Beyond the press, his long-term projects addressed humanitarian concerns, most notably his documentation of global child labor beginning in the late 1970s. Seen together, the works in this exhibition form a personal portrait of New York—an environment that appeared chaotic, exhilarating, and endlessly compelling through the lens of one of photography’s most dedicated observers. Image: © Jean-Pierre Laffont

New York City Never Sleeps unfolds as a vivid meditation on a metropolis that has long existed as both subject and stage for photographers drawn to its restless energy. Presented at the Peter Fetterman Gallery from January 10th to May 16th, 2026, the exhibition brings together a constellation of 20th-century voices who navigate the city’s shifting surfaces and hidden depths. Rather than offering a singular narrative, the show traces a layered portrait of New York as an ever-changing organism, where anonymity and intimacy collide on every corner. Emerging from the lineage of street photography that flourished in mid-century America, these images reveal a city defined as much by atmosphere as by architecture. Light cuts sharply between skyscrapers, carving fleeting geometries across sidewalks and faces. In these moments, photographers such as Ruth Bernhard, Louis Faurer, and Bruce Davidson capture not only what is visible, but what hovers just beyond perception. Their work transforms ordinary encounters into charged visual fragments, where a glance, a gesture, or a pause becomes a narrative in itself. The exhibition also reflects the evolving language of photography during a period when New York acted as a laboratory for experimentation. From the lyrical abstraction of Harry Callahan to the humanist sensitivity of Sabine Weiss, each artist approaches the city as both witness and participant. Subway platforms, crowded avenues, and quiet interiors become sites of observation where time feels suspended, even as the city pulses relentlessly around them. New York City Never Sleeps ultimately reveals a place defined by contradiction: harsh yet poetic, chaotic yet composed. Through these photographs, the city emerges not simply as a location, but as a state of mind—an enduring symbol of movement, tension, and possibility that continues to resonate far beyond its streets. Image: Sabine Weiss Switzerland, 1924-2021, New York, 1962 © Sabine Weiss, Courtesy of Peter Fetterman Gallery

A Fearless Eye – The Photography of Barbara Ramos, presented at the Harvey Milk Photo Center in San Francisco from March 6 through May 16, 2026, unveiling a remarkable body of work hidden for nearly half a century. Created in the early-to-mid 1970s, Ramos’s photographs trace a California suspended between countercultural aftershocks and suburban expansion. Printed for the first time from recently digitized negatives, these images carry the clarity of youth and the resonance of time passed, offering a rare encounter with a vision once set aside but never extinguished. Ramos moved to San Francisco in 1969 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, immersing herself in a city alive with experimentation and social change. With camera in hand, she navigated both the shifting streets of San Francisco and the sprawling terrain of the San Fernando Valley where she had grown up. Gas stations at dusk, vacant lots, passing strangers, fragments of signage and shadow—her photographs dwell in transitional spaces. There is no nostalgia here, no mythic California of sunlit promise. Instead, she reveals the understated tension and quiet poetry of ordinary places, observing with a directness that feels instinctive and unguarded. Ramos has described the act of photographing as requiring complete presence, a state she found impossible to reconcile with the responsibilities of work and raising children. Choosing family, she stored her negatives away, unseen even by those closest to her. The stillness of the pandemic decades later prompted a return to those boxes, initiating a dialogue between her younger and present selves. What emerges is not simply an archive rediscovered, but a living body of work entering public view at last. These photographs exist in a compelling double register: they are documents of a transformative era and contemporary prints shaped by reflection and renewed commitment. In bringing them forward, Ramos resumes a conversation interrupted by circumstance. The result affirms photography’s enduring capacity to hold time in suspension—proof that a fearless eye, once opened, never fully closes. Image: Cotton candy, Los Angeles © Barbara Ramos

Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna offers the first comprehensive survey of the remarkable career of Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna, on view at the Center for Creative Photography from January 31 to May 16, 2026. Spanning decades of work, the exhibition brings long-overdue recognition to an artist whose photographs quietly shaped American modernism while remaining largely outside the spotlight. Through architecture, portraiture, and documentary images, McKenna’s work reveals a photographer deeply attuned to form, intellect, and lived experience. After graduating from Vassar College in 1940, McKenna forged an independent path as a professional photographer at a time when few women were able to do so. She became widely respected for her architectural photography, capturing modern buildings with a clarity and sensitivity that emphasized structure, rhythm, and human scale. Her images were included in influential publications and exhibitions, notably the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark 1955 exhibition on Latin American architecture, placing her work within an international dialogue on modern design and visual culture. Equally compelling are McKenna’s portraits, which form an extraordinary record of twentieth-century literary and artistic life. She photographed writers, poets, and artists not as distant icons, but as thoughtful, complex individuals. Her portraits of figures such as W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, and Henry Moore convey an uncommon intimacy, shaped by trust and intellectual kinship. McKenna’s camera becomes a tool of encounter, revealing inner lives through gesture, posture, and gaze rather than theatrical pose. More than a retrospective, Making a Life in Photography frames McKenna’s practice as a means of personal and creative self-determination. Photography allowed her to navigate professional ambition, independence, and emotional depth in mid-twentieth-century America. This exhibition illuminates a body of work that is rigorous yet humane, modern yet deeply personal, offering a fuller understanding of an artist who used photography not only to document the world around her, but to actively shape a life of curiosity, freedom, and sustained creative purpose. Image: Rollie McKenna, "Lever House, New York City," 1956, Gelatin silver print, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of the artist, 1987.53.105. © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

The fiftieth anniversary of the Museum of Contemporary Photography marks a moment to reflect on a collection that has grown and shifted alongside the broader cultural landscape. Since its founding in 1976, and the beginning of its collecting program a few years later, the museum has assembled an expansive archive of images and objects from a wide spectrum of artistic approaches and photographic technologies. This variety has allowed the institution to foster conversations that extend far beyond aesthetics, reaching into political, social, and cultural realms where photography continues to play a defining role. MoCP at 50 brings together a thoughtful selection of rarely seen works and recent acquisitions, inviting visitors to consider how a collection evolves and what it reveals about the values of its time. Each gallery in the exhibition represents a decade of collecting, beginning with the present and moving backward, creating a reverse chronology that highlights shifting priorities and widening perspectives. Seen in this way, the collection becomes not only an artistic record but also a reflection of changing institutional viewpoints and societal awareness. The exhibition underscores how the early decades of the collection reveal notable omissions, especially the limited presence of women and artists of color. These absences speak to the broader challenges of the period rather than a lack of creative activity, and they illuminate how cultural institutions once viewed artistic value through narrower lenses. Over time, the museum’s focus expanded beyond post-1959 American work, opening the door to global voices, conceptual practices, and projects that stretch the definition of photography itself. By presenting this layered history, MoCP at 50 celebrates collecting as a dynamic, intentional, and educational act. It affirms the museum’s commitment to preserving diverse photographic narratives while embracing new ideas, ensuring that the medium remains vibrant, relevant, and in dialogue with the world it reflects. Image: Raul Corrales, Maria and Mario. Dos Fotografos, Dos Epocas, Dos Estados, 1980. 2006:296

Urban Forms brings together a newly acquired selection of photographs and the longstanding commitment of the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection to geometric abstraction, creating a dialogue between image, architecture, and modernist aspiration. With this exhibition, JCMC highlights the conceptual and formal currents that connect Paolo Gasparini’s visual investigations to the broader legacy of 20th-century abstract thought. Gasparini, the Italian-Venezuelan photographer whose career spans more than six decades, is celebrated for his incisive reflections on Latin American urban life. In these photographs, he turns his attention to the monumental modernist projects that reshaped Brazil and Venezuela during the mid-century. His images, rich in contrast and rhythmic structure, reveal striking affinities between architectural innovation and the language of geometric abstraction. The exhibition positions these photographs not simply as documentary records, but as visual essays that echo the principles of Bauhaus, Neoplasticism, and the early Soviet avant-garde. By placing Gasparini’s work in conversation with the abstract-geometric masterpieces within the collection, Urban Forms underscores how artists and architects across continents pursued similar visions: the activation of surfaces through line and pattern, the intelligent modulation of light, and the creation of spaces capable of conveying emotional as well as functional clarity. These shared pursuits transformed cities into dynamic environments, where concrete and color could coexist with texture, shadow, and human presence. The show ultimately invites viewers to retrace this intertwined history of modern creativity. From late-19th-century formal experiments to the ambitious urban programs of the mid-20th century, visual artists and architects—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes in close alliance—imagined new ways of shaping the modern city. Their work sought to humanize expanding urban landscapes and to infuse them with aesthetic vitality. In this way, Urban Forms is more than an exhibition: it is an opportunity to reflect on the cultural ideals that animated modernity and the enduring connection between the built environment and the abstract visions that helped define it. Image: © Paolo Gasparini

William Klein: In Your Face! marks a long-awaited return of one of photography’s most disruptive voices to Los Angeles, presented at Peter Fetterman Gallery from January 10 to May 16, 2026. This major exhibition revisits Klein’s radical vision with fresh urgency, offering audiences an unfiltered encounter with an artist who refused refinement in favor of truth, movement, and confrontation. Born in New York and creatively forged between America and postwar Paris, William Klein developed a visual language that rejected polite distance. His photographs surge forward with abrasive closeness, fractured compositions, and a sense of lived immediacy. Rather than imposing order, Klein welcomed disorder, allowing the unpredictability of the street to shape the image. Faces collide with the lens, gestures blur, and grain becomes a form of expression, mirroring the pulse of modern life. The exhibition traces Klein’s break from traditional photographic elegance and his embrace of the raw spectacle of everyday existence. Long dismissed by American publishers for being too aggressive and too honest, his work instead found resonance among those who recognized photography as a living, breathing act. Klein photographed not what society aspired to be, but what it was—loud, contradictory, restless, and alive. Klein’s influence extends far beyond the gallery wall. His revolutionary photobooks reshaped how images could be sequenced and experienced, transforming the book into a cinematic, immersive object. This same rebellious spirit carried into his fashion photography, where models stepped into the street and couture met chaos. In doing so, Klein forever altered the visual grammar of magazines, proving that elegance could coexist with friction. William Klein: In Your Face! brings together decades of visual audacity, reminding viewers that photography’s power lies in its ability to confront rather than comfort. In an age of polished surfaces and curated realities, Klein’s work feels more relevant than ever—an enduring call to look harder, step closer, and accept the world in all its unruly intensity. Image: William Klein 1928-2022 Gun 1, New York, 1955 © The Estate of William Klein, Courtesy of Peter Fetterman Gallery

Gold Standards: The Art of the Orotone transforms Robert Mann Gallery into a chamber of reflected light, where photography shimmers between image and object. Gathering nearly one hundred rare works, the exhibition revisits a little-known process that turns photographs into luminous artifacts. Each orotone glows from within, its surface infused with gold, creating a visual warmth that feels both intimate and theatrical. These works resist the neutrality often associated with photography, instead embracing a heightened, almost dreamlike register where reality appears gently burnished. Emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, the orotone process reflects a moment when photographs exist as precious, handcrafted items rather than infinitely reproducible images. Thin layers of gold are applied behind the photographic emulsion, producing a radiant effect that shifts with the viewer’s movement. Popularized by figures such as Edward Curtis, these images often depict the landscapes and peoples of the American West, filtered through an aesthetic that merges documentation with myth. The resulting pictures offer not only a record of place, but also a carefully composed vision shaped by light, desire, and cultural imagination. Within the exhibition, the American West appears as both real and constructed. Tourist destinations such as Yosemite become stages for a perpetual golden hour, their cliffs and waterfalls rendered with a reverence that borders on the sublime. Arthur Clarence Pillsbury’s photographs stand out for their attentiveness to natural phenomena, capturing shifting light with a near-scientific precision. Yet even these images participate in a broader visual language that frames the landscape as something to be admired, possessed, and remembered. Gold Standards ultimately invites reflection on the meaning of value in photography. Gold, as both material and metaphor, elevates these works while also complicating their status as souvenirs. Suspended between artistry and ornament, they suggest that every image carries layers of intention—what is shown, what is omitted, and what is transformed into something enduringly radiant. Image: A.C. Pillsbury The Gates of Yosemite, ca. 1900-1910 Orotone, courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery

April in Paris at Duncan Miller Gallery presents a distinctly photographic love letter to the French capital, assembling images that span much of the twentieth century and reflect Paris as both subject and symbol. The exhibition gathers work by Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Martine Franck, Willy Ronis, Marc Riboud, Jeanloup Sieff, and others whose pictures helped shape the visual memory of the city. Each photographer approaches Paris differently, yet all treat it as a living place of passing gestures, private exchanges, and public theater. Atget’s views of old streets and fading façades establish a quiet foundation, preserving a Paris on the edge of modernization. Cartier-Bresson introduces speed and precision, finding structure in a glance, a stride, a moment of urban coincidence. Doisneau and Ronis bring warmth and human scale, turning cafés, sidewalks, and neighborhood corners into scenes of wit and tenderness. Franck and Riboud extend that attention to atmosphere, balancing documentary clarity with a sense of lyric movement. What emerges is not a postcard version of Paris, but a layered portrait of daily life. The city appears in lovers leaning together, workers crossing a square, children in motion, and anonymous figures who carry the pulse of the streets. These photographs also reflect the wider history of French humanist photography, a tradition that valued observation, empathy, and the poetry of ordinary life. In that sense, April in Paris captures not only the architecture and elegance of the capital, but also its changing social rhythm, where memory and modernity remain in constant conversation. By bringing together such canonical voices, the exhibition underlines how Paris became one of photography’s most enduring subjects. It is a city seen again and again, yet never exhausted, always rediscovered through the patient eye of those who walked its streets with a camera and a way of seeing. Image: Cafe on rue Mouffetard, Paris, 1952, Henri Cartier-Bresson, courtesy of the Duncan Miller Gallery

At Throckmorton Fine Art, Roger Ballen: Ballenesque unfolds as a striking retrospective that traces more than five decades of one of photography’s most singular voices. Bringing together nearly 40 works produced between 1969 and 2025, the exhibition maps a trajectory that moves from documentary observation to a deeply personal visual language where fiction, performance, and psychological inquiry converge. Roger Ballen’s early images, rooted in the rural landscapes of South Africa, carry the weight of classic documentary traditions. Stark portraits and scenes of marginal communities reveal a direct, unembellished engagement with reality. Yet even within these early works, there is a sense of unease, a subtle tension that foreshadows the artist’s later shift toward more constructed and ambiguous imagery. Over time, Ballen departs from strict documentation, embracing a hybrid practice that integrates drawing, sculpture, and collage into the photographic frame. The exhibition highlights key series that define this evolution, including Dorps, Platteland, and Outland, before moving into the increasingly complex worlds of Shadow Chamber and Asylum of the Birds. In these later works, the photograph becomes a stage where fragments of bodies, animals, and objects interact within claustrophobic interiors. The boundaries between reality and invention dissolve, replaced by a visual language that probes the subconscious and confronts viewers with unsettling, often absurd scenarios. Ballen’s imagery resists easy interpretation. Instead, it invites a confrontation with what he has often described as the “shadow side” of human existence. His compositions, meticulously arranged yet seemingly chaotic, suggest that meaning emerges not from clarity but from contradiction. The absence or fragmentation of the human figure further intensifies this effect, turning the viewer into an active participant in decoding the scene. In Ballenesque, the cumulative force of this work becomes evident. What begins as a documentary impulse transforms into a broader meditation on perception, control, and the fragile boundary between order and disorder. The exhibition stands as both a survey and an immersion, offering a rare opportunity to engage with an artist who continuously challenges the limits of photographic expression. Image: Roger Ballen, Tommy, Samson and a Mask (30/35), 2000 - Silver Gelatin Print, 15.74 x 15.74 in © Roger Ballen - Courtesy Throckmorton Fine Art