Fred Zafran: Just Passing Through

Atlas of the Present: Collage and Photography Today – Virtual, on view from February 19 through May 19, 2026, brings renewed attention to the tactile, deliberate act of making at a time when photographic culture has been reshaped by artificial intelligence. As debates around machine-generated imagery intensified throughout 2025, many artists turned back to processes grounded in the hand, the cut edge, and the physical surface. This exhibition embraces that return, positioning photo-based collage as both a response to and reflection on our current visual climate. The works gathered here demonstrate how collage continues to function as a vital conceptual language. Fragments of photographs, texts, archival materials, and found imagery intersect in layered compositions that speak to memory, displacement, identity, and emotion. Rather than offering seamless illusions, these artists foreground rupture and reconstruction. Edges remain visible; seams are celebrated. In doing so, they assert the presence of the maker and reestablish photography as something shaped through touch and intention. The top prize winners—Rebecca Dietrich (1st Place), Mélina Bismuth (2nd Place), and Michael S Cohen (3rd Place)—each present distinctive approaches to assembling and reimagining the photographic image. Their works exemplify how fragmentation can generate new coherence, how the act of cutting and recombining becomes a means of mapping personal and collective narratives. Across the exhibition, individual voices remain strong while contributing to a broader conversation about the state of contemporary image-making. Juror Paris Chong, Gallery Director of the Leica Gallery Los Angeles, brings decades of curatorial experience to her selection. Having participated in international fairs such as Art Basel and Paris Photo, Chong highlights the sophistication and intentionality evident throughout the exhibition. Her longstanding affinity for collage underscores the show’s central premise: that in an era of digital abundance, artists continue to find meaning in the deliberate layering of images. Atlas of the Present ultimately affirms collage not as nostalgia, but as a resilient and forward-looking form capable of articulating the complexities of our time. Image: First Place Winner Rebecca Dietrich, Liminal View. © Rebecca Dietrich

At Ortuzar, Whipped Cream & Other Delights unfolds as a two-week residency by Fraenkel Gallery, on view from May 9 to 21, 2026. Conceived as a dynamic pop-up, the exhibition reflects Fraenkel’s longstanding approach to photography as a porous medium, one that engages in constant dialogue with other forms of artistic expression. Installed in Ortuzar’s West Broadway space, the project brings together works that span more than a century, encouraging unexpected connections across time, genre, and intention. The exhibition moves fluidly between canonical figures and contemporary artists, placing Eadweard Muybridge and Diane Arbus alongside more recent voices such as Martine Gutierrez and Kota Ezawa. At its center is a new work by Gutierrez, which reimagines the iconic album cover of Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert. By inserting herself into this familiar image, she plays with identity, performance, and artifice, echoing themes that run throughout her broader practice. The gesture sets the tone for an exhibition that delights in both homage and transformation. Elsewhere, the juxtapositions are equally striking. Muybridge’s nineteenth-century motion studies appear in dialogue with the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher, while works by Carrie Mae Weems and Liz Deschenes extend the conversation into questions of history, perception, and materiality. The inclusion of figures such as John Waters further expands the exhibition’s scope, introducing installation and film into a setting traditionally associated with photography. These layered dialogues underscore the curatorial premise: that meaning emerges through proximity, friction, and the crossing of disciplines. The residency also reflects a broader spirit of collaboration between the two galleries, emphasizing shared affinities and mutual influence. Extending beyond the exhibition space, the program includes film screenings at Metrograph, reinforcing the interplay between still and moving images. In this context, Whipped Cream & Other Delights becomes more than a temporary installation; it stands as a compact yet expansive exploration of how photography continues to evolve through dialogue with other media and generations. Image: Eadweard Muybridge, Detail of Lifting a 50-lb. dumbell., 1887 collotype © Eadweard Muybridge, courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery

Autofictions, on view from April 18 to May 22, 2026 at Candice Madey in New York, brings together five artists whose practices challenge the boundaries between lived experience and constructed narrative. Featuring works by Darrel Ellis, Libuše Jarcovjáková, Abby Robinson, Gail Thacker, and Ann Weathersby, the exhibition explores photography as a space where identity is continuously shaped, performed, and reimagined. The title draws from a literary tradition in which autobiography merges with fiction, suggesting that personal truth is often inseparable from invention. In this context, the artists approach photography not as a straightforward document but as a flexible medium capable of holding contradiction. Across the exhibition, diaristic impulses intersect with staged imagery, resulting in works that feel at once intimate and deliberately constructed. The influence of earlier figures in both literature and photography resonates throughout, reinforcing a lineage of self-reflective storytelling that remains highly relevant. Darrel Ellis’s contribution stands out for its theatrical intensity. Known for manipulating archival imagery, he presents here a rare series of staged photographs in which close collaborators reenact allegorical scenes. These images merge personal history with art historical references, producing layered compositions that oscillate between vulnerability and performance. In contrast, Abby Robinson’s long-running AutoWorks unfolds through repetition and sequence, using small-scale self-portraits to suggest an ever-shifting identity shaped over time. Gail Thacker’s work revisits the experimental spirit of New York’s downtown scene, pushing the material limits of Polaroid photography. Her images combine mythological references with contemporary portraiture, creating figures that feel both archetypal and immediate. Meanwhile, Libuše Jarcovjáková’s photographs from Prague’s underground queer community offer a raw, immersive account of life under political constraint, where acts of self-expression become gestures of resistance. Ann Weathersby’s sculptural works introduce a different dimension, transforming found photographs into layered objects that question authorship and memory. By embedding anonymous images within glass, she creates a distance that is both aesthetic and conceptual, inviting reflection on the lives these fragments once represented. Together, the works in Autofictions suggest that photography’s relationship to truth remains fluid, shaped as much by imagination as by experience. Image: Libuše Jarcovjáková, Untitled (from the T-Club series), ca. 1981-85 © Libuše Jarcovjáková

Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, on view at Fraenkel Gallery from March 12 to May 22, 2026, gathers forty-five photographs made between 1961 and 1971 in spaces defined by privacy and trust. The title refers to a sacred inner room, a place not meant for casual entry, and the exhibition reflects Arbus’s rare ability to be welcomed into such environments. Bedrooms, homes, trailers, and personal interiors become sites of encounter, where the presence of the camera is neither concealed nor disruptive, but openly acknowledged and quietly accepted. Arbus’s photographs reveal moments shaped by mutual recognition rather than observation from a distance. Her subjects meet the lens with candor, curiosity, or resolve, offering themselves without performance or apology. Whether depicting well-known figures or anonymous individuals, the images resist hierarchy and spectacle. Arbus’s interest was never in classification, but in attention—allowing each person to exist fully within the frame. The intimacy of these settings amplifies that exchange, making the viewer aware of the delicate balance between vulnerability and self-possession. The exhibition brings together both celebrated and lesser-known works, encouraging a reconsideration of images long embedded in photographic history. Seen within this focused context, familiar photographs open onto new emotional registers, while rarely exhibited works extend the scope of Arbus’s vision. Across the series, private spaces become psychological landscapes, revealing how identity, desire, and difference are shaped within domestic and personal realms. These interiors are not merely backgrounds, but active participants in the relationships Arbus forged with those she photographed. Following recent international presentations that reassessed Arbus’s legacy, Sanctum Sanctorum offers a quieter, more concentrated perspective on her work. It underscores her enduring relevance as an artist who approached photography as an act of encounter—one grounded in curiosity, respect, and moral clarity. Rather than exposing secrets, these photographs honor the complexity of being seen, reminding viewers that intimacy in art is not taken, but given. Image: Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966 gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches (sheet) [50.8 x 40.6 cm] © Diane Arbus

For a century, Lehigh University Art Galleries has stood at the intersection of creativity and innovation, reflecting the rich artistic and industrial heritage of the Lehigh Valley. From the ingenuity of the Lenape people to the region’s steel and railroad industries, and now its high-tech manufacturing, the area has long been a site of experimentation and craftsmanship, a spirit embraced by both artists and engineers alike. This creative ethos has been embedded in Lehigh University since its founding by Asa Packer, a carpenter and boat-builder who valued a comprehensive education. Built on this foundation, LUAG has championed the transformative power of art since 1926, the year the first art exhibition was held on campus. Over the decades, the galleries have offered visitors access to artworks from internationally recognized institutions and the university’s own collection of over 20,000 pieces, providing a space where art, education, and community converge. To celebrate its centennial, LUAG presents Here and Now: 100 Years of LUAG, 100 Local Artists, a juried exhibition showcasing one hundred artists from the region. On view from September 2, 2025, through May 22, 2026, the exhibition highlights the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary artistic practice in the Lehigh Valley. Selected from nearly 300 applicants and 800 submitted works, these pieces will activate the galleries while serving as a catalyst for receptions, lectures, workshops, and special events, connecting audiences with the local art ecosystem. The exhibition also coincides with an initiative to acquire significant works by local artists for LUAG’s permanent collection, further cementing the institution’s dedication to regional creativity. Featuring artists such as Lydia Panas, Francisco Aguilar, Katie Arnold, Rain Black, Amy Burke, Dylan Collazo, Angela Fraleigh, Julia Lundy, and many others, Here and Now celebrates a century of artistic engagement while looking forward to the next hundred years of innovation, community, and inspiration through art. Image: Red Still Life with Tatiana's Hand and Blood Oranges, 40 x 40" 2020 © Lydia Panas

Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81, on view from January 26 through May 22, 2026 at the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, revisits one of the most searching documentary projects of the late twentieth century. In 1976, Mary Ellen Mark and sociologist Karen Folger Jacobs spent thirty-six days inside Oregon State Hospital’s Ward 81, a high-security psychiatric unit for women. Their extended presence allowed for a rare depth of engagement, resulting in images and testimonies that resist simplification and demand sustained attention. Mark’s photographs from Ward 81 are direct yet profoundly empathetic. Working in black and white, she portrayed women in moments of vulnerability, defiance, boredom, and connection. The camera does not sensationalize; instead, it acknowledges the complexity of lives shaped by institutional structures and personal histories. The women appear neither reduced to diagnoses nor elevated into symbols. They remain individuals—sometimes guarded, sometimes open—caught within a system that both shelters and confines. This exhibition expands the original project by incorporating Jacobs’s newly uncovered audio recordings alongside archival documents and prints. The voices of the women resonate across time, adding texture and agency to the visual record. Together, sound and image create a layered narrative that reflects the social climate of the 1970s, when psychiatric practices, women’s rights, and public attitudes toward mental health were undergoing profound shifts. The result is not simply a historical document but an immersive encounter with lived experience. Over the course of her career, Mark built a reputation for photographing those on the margins of mainstream society, later publishing influential books such as Streetwise and becoming a member of Magnum Photos. Her work appeared in major publications and earned numerous honors, yet it retained a consistent ethical core: a commitment to seeing and being present. In returning to Ward 81, the exhibition affirms photography’s capacity to foster understanding, inviting viewers to look carefully and to listen closely to stories that continue to resonate today. Image: Mary Ellen Mark, [Laurie in the Bathtub, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, USA], 1976. © Mary Ellen Mark, courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation.

Yamamoto Masao: Ten Owls unfolds as a quiet meditation on presence, fragility, and attention. Presented from April 16 to May 22, 2026, the exhibition gathers a focused selection of gelatin silver prints, each shaped by Yamamoto’s meticulous hand and poetic sensibility. Installed within the intimate setting of the project gallery, the works invite a slowed encounter, where small-scale photographs hold expansive emotional weight. The owl, a recurring figure in Yamamoto’s practice, emerges here not only as subject but as companion—an entity observed with reverence and familiarity. Yamamoto’s images resist spectacle, favoring subtlety and restraint. Each print carries delicate tonal variations, where light and shadow seem to breathe across the surface. The owls appear in moments of stillness or near-invisibility, perched quietly or dissolving into their surroundings. Their presence feels fleeting, as if glimpsed rather than captured. This approach reflects the artist’s longstanding engagement with impermanence, a sensibility often associated with Japanese aesthetics, where beauty resides in the transient and the incomplete. The photographs do not impose meaning; they offer space for contemplation, allowing viewers to meet the image on its own terms. The exhibition also carries an undercurrent of ecological awareness. Yamamoto’s reflections on the gradual disappearance of forest habitats resonate through the work, though never in overt or didactic ways. The absence of certain landscapes, the rarity of these encounters, and the quiet dignity of the owls suggest a world in subtle imbalance. Yet, within this awareness, there remains a sense of calm. The faint echo of nocturnal calls, the memory of wings passing silently overhead, and the enduring rhythm of the natural world persist as sources of solace. Ten Owls becomes a study in attentiveness—an invitation to notice what often goes unseen. Through his careful, almost devotional practice, Yamamoto shapes a visual language where intimacy and distance coexist. The exhibition lingers not through grand statements, but through its ability to attune the viewer to quieter frequencies, where the ordinary reveals itself as deeply profound. Image: Yamamoto Masao, Untitled #1672 (from Kawa = Flow), 2016. © Yamamoto Masao, courtesy of the Yancey Richardson Gallery

Sheida Soleimani: Forest of Stars, presented at Yancey Richardson from April 16 through May 22, 2026, unfolds as a layered exploration of exile, memory, and care. In this first exhibition with the gallery, the Iranian-American artist extends her ongoing Ghostwriter series, drawing from her parents’ histories as political dissidents forced to flee Iran after the 1979 revolution. What emerges is not a straightforward narrative, but a carefully constructed visual language where personal history intersects with broader geopolitical realities. Soleimani’s photographs resist conventional documentary approaches. Instead, she stages intricate tableaux in the studio, assembling archival materials, symbolic objects, and living subjects into dense, surreal compositions. These images operate as acts of reconstruction, piecing together fragments of memory without claiming direct testimony. Her parents’ experiences are evoked through gesture and metaphor, suggesting the emotional residue of displacement rather than its literal chronology. A notable evolution within the exhibition appears in the Flyways works, which draw on Soleimani’s parallel practice as a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Close-up images of birds—feathers, talons, and eyes rendered in striking detail—introduce a new dimension to her visual vocabulary. These animals, often rescued and cared for by the artist, become powerful symbols of migration and vulnerability. Their journeys mirror those of human displacement, shaped by forces both natural and imposed. The presence of Soleimani’s mother extends beyond subject matter into the exhibition space itself, with a site-specific wall drawing that underscores the intergenerational transmission of care. This gesture anchors the work in lived experience, reinforcing the idea that acts of tending—to bodies, to memories, to fragile ecosystems—carry political weight. Care, in this context, becomes both an ethic and a form of resistance. Visually rich and conceptually layered, Forest of Stars situates storytelling within a framework of survival. Soleimani’s images blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, intimacy and history, offering a perspective in which personal narratives illuminate larger systems of power, while quietly insisting on the enduring force of compassion. Image: Sheida Soleimani, Deliverance, 2024. Archival pigment print, 70 x 90 inches. © Sheida Soleimani, courtesy of the Yancey Richardson Gallery

Stella De Mont: This Life Wants You unfolds as a meditation on presence, surrender, and the quiet force of the natural world. In her first solo exhibition at Benrubi Gallery, De Mont turns to water, stone, forest, and desert light to shape images that feel less observed than received. Each photograph carries the sense of a moment charged with meaning, as if the landscape itself had briefly opened to reveal something intimate and enduring. Rooted in a practice shaped by her work as an intuitive guide, De Mont approaches photography as a form of listening. Her images do not isolate the body from its surroundings; they allow figure and terrain to enter into a state of alignment. A body suspended in cold water, a figure resting on sand at dusk, two women standing close within a field of trees: each scene suggests a passage between the physical and the spiritual, between what can be seen and what can only be felt. The photographs are marked by a stillness that never feels empty. Instead, they hold tension between fragility and ease, individuality and communion. De Mont often gathers two or three figures together, creating compositions where proximity becomes a language of trust and shared breath. In these works, the feminine appears not as an idea but as an energy of receptivity, intuition, and transformation. What gives This Life Wants You its force is the conviction that beauty can be a form of knowledge. De Mont’s pictures ask for attention, but also for openness: a willingness to slow down, to notice how a body belongs to the earth, and how the earth, in turn, seems to answer. From that exchange emerges a vision that is both tender and expansive, grounded in the ordinary and lit from within. Image: Stella de Mont, Cradled, 2025 © Stella de Mont

Youssef Nabil: No One Knows but the Sky unfolds at Mariane Ibrahim as a deeply introspective journey through memory, cinema, and the passage of time. The exhibition gathers works spanning two decades, where photography and film merge into a singular, poetic language. For Nabil, cinema does not simply inform his aesthetic; it shapes his way of seeing, rooted in early encounters with the golden age of Egyptian film culture and its enduring visual legacy. His images carry the atmosphere of another era, where gestures appear suspended and color feels both vivid and melancholic. Each photograph begins as a black-and-white print before being meticulously hand-colored, echoing the techniques of vintage film posters once seen across Cairo. This process transforms the image into something intimate and tactile, resisting the reproducibility of digital photography. The figures within these works—often artists, performers, or symbolic presences—seem caught between worlds, embodying a quiet awareness of time slipping away. Nabil’s films extend this meditation, weaving together personal history and collective memory. In works such as The Beautiful Voyage, reflections on life unfold through voice, landscape, and movement, while The Room approaches the threshold between life and death with a sense of calm surrender. Collaborations with figures from cinema and performance introduce a layered narrative space, where reality and fiction blur. These moving images do not seek resolution; instead, they dwell in the uncertainty of existence, where departure and arrival remain intertwined. Throughout No One Knows but the Sky, the act of remembering becomes central. Nabil does not attempt to preserve the past as it was, but reimagines it through a cinematic lens that embraces loss and transformation. His work suggests that images hold a fragile permanence, capable of outlasting the bodies and moments they depict. In this space, time does not disappear but lingers, glowing softly like a scene that continues long after the screen fades to black. Image: Youssef Nabil, The Wedding, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim. © Youssef Nabil

Ayana V. Jackson, on view from January 27 through May 23, 2026, brings together a decade of work by an artist who has consistently interrogated the foundations of photographic history. Born in 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey, and living between Brooklyn and Johannesburg, Ayana V. Jackson examines how Black women’s bodies have been framed, classified, and circulated across the African diaspora. Through carefully staged self-portraiture and archival research, she reconsiders the authority long granted to the photographic image. Drawing from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial archives, European modernist aesthetics, and ethnographic portraiture, Jackson reconstructs visual languages that once claimed objectivity. She often casts herself in the role of historical figures, inhabiting poses and settings that echo imperial imagery. In doing so, she exposes the mechanisms through which photography helped codify racial hierarchies. Her images do not simply critique; they re-stage and re-author, transforming documents of domination into sites of resistance and agency. Across series produced between 2013 and 2023, Jackson moves fluidly between themes of flight and stillness, spectacle and interiority. References to Black equestrian histories, myths of the diaspora, and modernist composition intertwine. The body becomes both archive and instrument—at times defiant, at times contemplative. Questions of authorship, authenticity, and power surface repeatedly, inviting viewers to consider the ethical relationship between photographer, subject, and audience. Jackson’s work has entered major public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the National Gallery of Victoria, reflecting its international resonance. In 2023, her exhibition From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, marking a significant institutional milestone. Beyond her studio practice, Jackson founded STILL Art in Johannesburg, an artist residency dedicated to supporting emerging voices in Southern Africa. This exhibition offers a sustained encounter with an artist who insists that revisiting the past is not an act of nostalgia, but a necessary step toward reshaping the visual narratives that inform the present. Image: Ayana V. Jackson, Mary Fields: With a jug of Whiskey by her Foot, a pistol packed Under her apron, and a shotgun by her side, 2023, courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. © Ayana V. Jackson

Resilient Communities, on view from March 14 through May 23, 2026 at the Alice Austen House Museum, marks Staten Island’s fourth Triennial of Photography. Set within the historic home of pioneering photographer Alice Austen, the exhibition extends the site’s long-standing commitment to social observation and civic engagement. This juried presentation brings together emerging and mid-career artists whose work foregrounds stories of endurance, solidarity, and cultural continuity. Curated by Paul Moakley and Victoria Munro, the exhibition centers on communities often overlooked or misrepresented. Through documentary approaches, staged portraiture, and experimental image-making, participating artists explore how resilience takes shape in daily rituals, mutual aid, intergenerational bonds, and collective memory. The photographs do not romanticize hardship; instead, they reveal the complexity of lived experience—how perseverance is cultivated over time and sustained through shared care. Artists including Niamh Alarcon, Lila Barth, Kristen Welles Bartley, Beth Amanda Cummins, Adan Huertas, Wayne Liu, Jean Marquez, and Nadette Staša present projects rooted in close collaboration with their subjects. Their images reflect neighborhoods adapting to economic shifts, families preserving language and tradition, and individuals asserting identity in the face of displacement or change. Across diverse visual styles, a common thread emerges: resilience is neither solitary nor abstract, but grounded in relationships and everyday acts of commitment. By situating contemporary voices within a site historically dedicated to photography’s role in shaping social understanding, Resilient Communities creates a dialogue between past and present. The triennial affirms the medium’s capacity to bear witness and to strengthen connection. In doing so, it invites viewers to consider how communities endure—not simply by surviving adversity, but by actively building networks of support that allow them to imagine and sustain shared futures. Image: Adan Huertas, Untitled, 2025 © Adan Huertas, courtesy of the Alice Austen House Museum