Becoming Marilyn

At the Southeast Museum of Photography, Robert Maxwell: Visionary assembles more than a hundred images tracing a career shaped by careful observation and a sustained interest in the human figure. The exhibition moves between early work produced in Paris and later commissions for international publications, outlining a trajectory that shifts from intimate, personal studies to highly controlled portraiture associated with the worlds of fashion and culture. Maxwell’s early photographs, many rooted in his immediate surroundings, establish a visual language grounded in restraint. Still life compositions occupy a central place here. In works such as Forêt de Champignons, a cluster of enoki mushrooms appears almost architectural, arranged against a dark field that emphasizes their pale, sculptural surfaces. Across these images, everyday materials—flowers, utensils, organic fragments—are reorganized into precise arrangements where light defines volume and texture. The result sits somewhere between observation and construction, where natural forms take on an almost symbolic charge. Portraiture, however, remains the axis of Maxwell’s practice. The exhibition highlights both early figurative studies and more recent series, including images of women dressed in traditional Japanese kimonos. These photographs focus less on costume as spectacle than on the ritual embedded in its preparation. The layered process of dressing becomes visible through posture, gesture and gaze, with each subject asserting a distinct presence. Maxwell’s approach avoids overt dramatization, relying instead on stillness and attention to detail to convey individuality. Alongside these bodies of work, Visionary includes a wide selection of editorial assignments produced for titles such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ. These commissions, often centered on prominent cultural figures, reveal Maxwell’s ability to navigate between artistic intent and the demands of publication. Seen together, the images suggest a consistent preoccupation: how light, surface and expression can be arranged to construct a lasting image, whether in the studio or on assignment. Image: Forêt de Champignons © Robert Maxwell

Objects at Hand, on view at Olney Gleason from May 7 through June 6, 2026, presents a new body of photographs by Daniel Gordon that further complicates the relationship between image, object, and illusion. Known for transforming printed source material into handmade sculptural constructions before photographing them, Gordon has spent the last two decades dismantling photography’s claim to realism. In this latest exhibition, however, the artist moves into notably restrained territory, abandoning the vivid color palette that has long defined his work in favor of black-and-white compositions focused on light, shadow, and surface. The exhibition coincides with the release of Gordon’s fifth monograph and arrives at a moment of increasing institutional recognition, including his inclusion in the Guggenheim Museum’s upcoming exhibition Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now. Yet rather than expanding outward, Objects at Hand turns inward, concentrating on ordinary domestic items—glasses, scissors, combs, kitchen utensils, and stationery—arranged in tightly framed still lifes that recall the precision of early modernist photography. Gordon’s process remains deliberately transparent. Images sourced online or photographed by the artist himself are printed, cut apart, folded, glued, and reconstructed into fragile three-dimensional objects. Seams, tape marks, and torn edges remain visible, emphasizing the handmade quality of the constructions. Once photographed, however, these imperfect paper assemblages take on an uncanny visual coherence. Some objects appear translucent despite being entirely opaque in reality, creating subtle perceptual contradictions that destabilize the viewer’s trust in the image. The resulting photographs engage a broad lineage of photographic experimentation, echoing the sculptural still lifes of Edward Weston, the surreal arrangements of Man Ray, and the perceptual investigations of artists such as Barbara Kasten and Jan Groover. Yet Gordon’s work remains distinctly contemporary in its negotiation between digital imagery and physical craft. The photographs originate in screens and printers, but arrive as carefully staged objects existing somewhere between sculpture, collage, and illusion. In Objects at Hand, Gordon strips photography down to its essential deceptions. Through the quiet choreography of paper, light, and shadow, he transforms familiar objects into visual puzzles that reward slow, sustained attention. Image: Light Study (Scissors and Hand), 2024 © Daniel Gordon, courtesy of Olney Gleason gallery.

Sebastiaan Bremer: Super Modern Things, on view from April 16 to June 6, 2026 at Edwynn Houk Gallery, presents a new body of work that continues the artist’s distinctive dialogue between photography and painting. Known for his meticulous interventions on photographic surfaces, Bremer revisits the still life tradition, using it as a framework to examine enduring questions around beauty, time, and cultural value. The works originate from historical imagery, often drawn from seventeenth-century Dutch botanical catalogues and still life paintings. These sources, already dense with symbolic meaning, are rephotographed by Bremer, who then transforms them through a labor-intensive process of drawing and painting directly onto the surface. Layers of ink and acrylic—dots, lines, and fluid marks—accumulate across the image, creating a visual rhythm that both obscures and reveals. The result is neither purely photographic nor painterly, but a hybrid form that unfolds gradually, inviting prolonged attention. Bremer’s engagement with the Dutch still life tradition brings forward its historical associations with trade, colonial expansion, and the commodification of nature. Flowers, once emblematic of wealth and mortality, are recontextualized here within contemporary concerns about ecology and global exchange. The works suggest that the symbolic language embedded in these images remains active, raising questions about how beauty operates within systems of power and consumption. In this sense, the exhibition bridges past and present, linking early modern visual culture to current debates. At the same time, the artist’s process introduces a deeply personal dimension. Each mark functions as a trace of time and attention, transforming the image into a record of sustained looking. The surfaces carry a sense of intimacy, as if the act of embellishment becomes a form of meditation or annotation. References to language, musical notation, or even celestial patterns emerge through these interventions, expanding the interpretive possibilities of the work beyond its original source material. With Super Modern Things, Bremer offers a contemplative reconsideration of the still life, positioning it not as a static genre but as a living field of inquiry. The exhibition underscores how historical images continue to resonate, shaped by contemporary perspectives and the artist’s own evolving relationship to time, memory, and visual meaning. Image: Cunning stunts, 2025. Unique hand-painted chromogenic print with mixed media © Sebastiaan Bremer

Mao Ishikawa: ROGUE, presented at Alison Bradley Projects from April 16 to June 6, 2026, brings the work of the Okinawan photographer to a United States audience in her first solo exhibition in the country. Gathering more than 30 vintage prints spanning three decades, the exhibition offers a focused look at a practice shaped by proximity, trust, and an unflinching engagement with lived experience. Ishikawa’s photographs emerge from a deeply personal approach that rejects distance between photographer and subject. Her early series Red Flower (Akabanaa), produced in the years following Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, captures the social environments surrounding U.S. military bases. Rather than observing from the outside, Ishikawa immersed herself in these communities, working alongside women employed in bars and documenting their relationships with African American servicemen. The resulting images convey a sense of immediacy and shared presence, where intimacy and complexity replace simplified narratives of occupation. This relational method continues in Life in Philly, created during her time in Philadelphia. There, Ishikawa photographs the everyday lives of people connected to her earlier experiences in Okinawa, tracing bonds that extend across geography. Scenes of domestic life, gatherings, and quiet moments reveal a continuity of connection shaped by migration and memory. In A Port Town Elegy, her attention returns to Okinawa, focusing on laborers and marginal communities in Naha. These photographs highlight both the precarity of their conditions and the resilience found within shared spaces. Later works, including My Family, shift inward. Following significant medical procedures, Ishikawa turns the camera on herself, producing self-portraits that maintain the same directness present in her earlier work. The body becomes both subject and site, confronting vulnerability without mediation. Across all series, her images resist categorization, moving between documentation and personal narrative while remaining grounded in long-term relationships. Presented alongside her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, ROGUE underscores Ishikawa’s enduring relevance. Her work offers a perspective rooted in Okinawa’s complex geopolitical reality, while speaking more broadly to themes of identity, power, and human connection that continue to resonate across borders. Image: © Mao Ishikawa. Courtesy of the artist and Alison Bradley Projects

Bruce Weber: Try a Little Tenderness, on view from April 9 through June 6, 2026 at Fahey/Klein Gallery, unfolds as an intimate reflection on the formation of an artist. Bringing together photographs produced across several decades, the exhibition reveals how personal relationships, early experiences, and creative encounters shape the visual language of Bruce Weber. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, the selection moves through moments of influence and memory, offering a portrait of artistic growth rooted in lived experience. Weber’s early years in Greensburg play a defining role in this narrative. Introduced to image-making through family life, he experiments with drawing and filmmaking before receiving his first camera, an Argus C3, at a young age. His later studies at New York University and his encounter with influential figures such as Diane Arbus and Lisette Model deepen his commitment to a photography grounded in emotional immediacy and human connection. By the late 1970s, Bruce Weber establishes a distinctive voice within fashion photography, collaborating with major houses such as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. His images, often bathed in natural light and infused with a sense of nostalgia, depart from the rigid aesthetics of the era. Instead, they evoke a cinematic atmosphere where youth, beauty, and vulnerability coexist. Whether working for magazines or advertising campaigns, Weber maintains a consistent sensitivity to gesture and presence, allowing his subjects to appear both staged and spontaneous. The exhibition also reflects Weber’s engagement with film, notably through Let’s Get Lost, his portrait of jazz musician Chet Baker. This cross-disciplinary practice reinforces the narrative quality of his photography, where each image suggests a fragment of a larger story. His work moves fluidly between commercial and personal contexts, blurring the boundaries between assignment and expression. Accompanying the exhibition, the publication Bruce Weber: My Education gathers images and reflections that echo the themes presented in the gallery. Together, they form a meditation on influence, memory, and the enduring role of tenderness in shaping an artistic vision. Image: Bruce Weber | Kate Moss and friends, Miami, Florida, 2003 © Bruce Weber, courtesy of FaheyKlein Gallery, Los Angeles

Lynn Adler: And So We Moved To Petaca, on view from May 8 through June 6, 2026 at Obscura Gallery, presents a remarkable photographic record of a brief yet meaningful cultural convergence in northern New Mexico. Featuring images made by Lynn Adler between 1970 and 1974, the exhibition accompanies the release of her recent book and offers an intimate look at a rural community undergoing subtle but profound change. Adler arrived in the small village of Petaca at a moment when its long-established Hispano population encountered an influx of newcomers seeking an alternative way of life. Rooted in traditions that stretched back generations, the local community lived with modest means, sustained by agriculture, faith, and close family ties. Into this environment came young families from urban centers such as San Francisco and New York City, drawn by the promise of self-sufficiency and a deeper connection to land and community. Using a simple 35mm camera, Adler documented daily life with clarity and sensitivity. Her black-and-white photographs reveal scenes of labor and routine: tending animals, cultivating fields, building homes, and raising children. At the same time, her images capture moments of encounter between cultures—shared gestures, cautious interactions, and evolving relationships that reflect both curiosity and tension. Rather than imposing a narrative, Adler allows these moments to unfold naturally, creating a nuanced portrait of coexistence. The modest scale of the prints reinforces their intimacy, encouraging close viewing and quiet reflection. Faces, gestures, and landscapes emerge with a sense of immediacy, preserving a way of life that might otherwise have faded from memory. Over time, the village has changed, and many of those pictured have passed on, giving the photographs an added resonance as documents of both presence and absence. Curated by Bill Shapiro, the exhibition situates Adler’s work within a broader tradition of documentary photography while highlighting its singular perspective. And So We Moved To Petaca stands as a testament to the enduring power of photography to record fragile histories and to illuminate the complexities of community, identity, and belonging. Image: Lynn Adler. Louella at Sundown, 1971 © Lynn Adler

Robert Giard: Particular Voices, Portraits of LGBTQ+ Writers & Artists, 1985–2002, on view from May 9 to June 6, 2026 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, brings renewed attention to a landmark photographic project that documented a vital chapter in cultural history. Presented in conjunction with the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, the exhibition gathers approximately 40 portraits selected from Giard’s extensive archive, offering a focused view into a much larger body of work created over nearly two decades. Beginning in 1985, Giard embarked on an ambitious effort to photograph LGBTQ+ writers, artists, and activists across the United States. The project emerged at a pivotal moment, shaped by both the aftermath of the Stonewall era and the unfolding AIDS crisis. Rather than approaching his subjects as distant figures, Giard sought to create images grounded in respect and presence. His portraits often situate individuals in environments that reflect their personal or creative lives, allowing each image to function as both representation and conversation. The exhibition highlights figures whose contributions have shaped literary and artistic discourse, while also emphasizing voices that have historically remained underrecognized. Writers such as Margaret Randall, Judy Grahn, and Gloria Anzaldúa appear within a broader constellation of cultural producers whose work expanded the boundaries of identity, language, and community. Giard’s photographs do not impose a singular narrative; instead, they reveal a diverse and evolving network of individuals connected through shared experience and creative expression. Visually, the portraits are marked by clarity and restraint. Giard avoids theatricality, favoring a direct approach that allows subtle gestures and expressions to carry meaning. This consistency across the series underscores his commitment to the project’s documentary dimension, while also acknowledging the individuality of each sitter. The cumulative effect is one of quiet intensity, where the weight of history is conveyed through personal presence rather than overt symbolism. More than a retrospective selection, Particular Voices stands as an enduring record of a community that navigated profound social and political challenges while continuing to produce influential work. In revisiting these images today, the exhibition underscores the importance of visibility and the role of photography in preserving cultural memory across generations. Image: Robert Giard Alison Bechdel, Grand Isle, VT, 1995 Gelatin silver print © Robert Giard, courtesy of Daniel Cooney | Fine Art

Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, on view at Gitterman Gallery from April 14 through June 6, presents a focused selection of vintage gelatin silver prints that trace the singular vision of an artist who moved fluidly between photography, mythology, and psychological inquiry. Spanning several key series, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter work that resists straightforward categorization, instead inviting viewers into carefully constructed worlds where reality and imagination converge. Thorne-Thomsen’s practice centers on staging images within landscapes, then rephotographing them to produce seamless, often disorienting compositions. Using techniques such as pinhole apertures and handmade setups, she blurs distinctions between foreground and background, object and environment. The resulting photographs carry a dreamlike coherence, where symbolic elements—figures, stones, water, fragments of architecture—appear suspended in spaces that feel both ancient and internal. Several series included in the exhibition highlight the breadth of her approach. Expeditions draws on the visual language of early archaeological photography, evoking the wonder associated with nineteenth-century encounters with distant civilizations. In Views from the Shoreline, the influence of Renaissance portraiture becomes apparent, though reinterpreted through a surreal lens that compresses space and shifts meaning toward the psychological. Other bodies of work, such as Songs of the Sea and Proverbs, deepen her engagement with myth, combining narrative suggestion with introspective symbolism. Underlying these varied explorations is a consistent interest in the human psyche. Thorne-Thomsen often returns to recurring motifs—particularly the head and the figure—as vessels for universal experience. Her imagery suggests that personal memory and collective mythology remain intertwined, forming a visual language that speaks across time and culture. This sensibility reflects her broader engagement with literature, dream analysis, and symbolic systems. Though her work resides in major museum collections, it has often remained less visible within broader photographic discourse. This exhibition underscores its enduring relevance, presenting an artist who approaches photography not as documentation, but as a means of constructing inner landscapes—spaces where perception, memory, and imagination quietly intersect. Image: Levitating Man, Wisconsin, 1983 © Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, courtesy of the Gitterman Gallery

Erica Baum: The Bite in the Ribbon—A Paper Show invites viewers into a world where text and image converge in unexpected ways. Through the careful selection, transformation, and reinterpretation of printed materials, Baum constructs a poetic interplay of language and form, encouraging both deep looking and reading. This exhibition presents a dynamic juxtaposition of her early and ongoing projects alongside her latest work, including never-before-seen pieces. At the heart of the show, Dog Ear, displayed in the Potter Peristyle, exemplifies Baum’s signature method of repurposing found books. By folding pages at precise angles, she creates surprising interactions between words and images, generating new narratives and abstract compositions from existing texts. This simple yet radical intervention challenges traditional notions of reading, inviting fresh interpretations with every fold. In the Project Gallery, Baum’s recent series, Patterns and Fabrications, explore the aesthetics of fashion and craft through printed media. Patterns focuses on the striking geometries, colors, and textual fragments found in mid-century sewing pattern designs, while Fabrications expands this investigation to include materials from magazines, catalogs, and books on fashion and craft. By incorporating advertisements and coupons, Baum reframes the domestic and commercial imagery embedded in these everyday objects, offering a meditation on material culture and visual storytelling. Through these interwoven series, The Bite in the Ribbon—A Paper Show highlights Baum’s ongoing fascination with the interplay between print, language, and image, revealing the hidden beauty and meaning within overlooked materials. Image: Erica Baum (American, b. 1961), Wrought Iron, from Fabrications, 2024. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York. © Erica Baum

Farah Al Qasimi: Psychic Repair unfolds as a vivid, immersive experience that blurs the boundaries between image, sound, and belief. Installed across the SCAD Museum of Art’s façade vitrines and interior gallery, the exhibition plays with shifts in scale and dimension, inviting viewers to navigate a visual environment that feels at once intimate and overwhelming. Al Qasimi’s saturated palette and layered compositions reflect a world shaped by constant exposure, where identity is performed, adjusted, and endlessly reframed. Rooted in memories of growing up in the United Arab Emirates and shaped by her life in the United States, Al Qasimi’s work explores how rituals of self-presentation take form across cultures. Her photographs examine everyday gestures, domestic interiors, and symbolic objects, revealing how beauty, fashion, and personal style become tools for meaning-making. These images oscillate between documentation and fantasy, suggesting that belief systems are often built not through grand narratives, but through small, repeated acts of looking and being looked at. The exhibition’s visual language draws inspiration from early internet aesthetics and commercial display strategies. Overlapping images, vinyl prints, and architectural interventions recall pop-up windows and storefront vitrines, where desire is carefully staged. Al Qasimi moves fluidly between analog and digital processes, using patterns, textures, and shadows to create spaces where the real and the imagined coexist. Her approach reflects a generation shaped by screens, where memory is fragmented and emotion circulates at high speed. Sound plays a crucial role in Psychic Repair. Through music videos and audio works, Al Qasimi transforms jump-rope chants, spoken poetry, and punk-inflected songs into hypnotic refrains. These sonic elements function as modern incantations, reinforcing the exhibition’s interest in the supernatural as a metaphor for unseen cultural forces. Beauty standards, online hierarchies, and consumer fantasies appear as invisible energies that quietly influence behavior and self-perception. Across photography, film, and music, Al Qasimi embraces collaboration and storytelling as acts of resistance to fixed meaning. Her anthropomorphized narrators and unexpected performers introduce humor and vulnerability, echoing the logic of children’s cartoons while addressing adult anxieties. Psychic Repair ultimately offers a space for reflection, proposing art as a site where fragmented identities can be examined, reassembled, and momentarily healed through imagination and play. Image: Farah Al Qasimi, "Leopard Print Blanket," 2022, archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. © Farah Al Qasimi

Ming Smith: Jazz Requiem – Notations in Blue offers an intimate journey into the early artistic path of Ming Smith, focusing on the shaping forces of place, identity, and creative freedom that marked her emergence in the 1970s and 80s. At a time when many Black artists sought opportunities beyond the United States, Smith found in Europe a space that welcomed experimentation and allowed her to refine her vision. This exhibition reflects on those formative travels and how they continue to echo through her work today. The selected photographs, many newly printed, reveal Smith’s nuanced approach to depicting the Black experience—capturing fleeting gestures, shadows of movement, and the quiet poetry found in daily life. Her images resist the traditional documentary expectations once imposed on photographs of Black communities. Instead, she expands the medium toward a more expressive, introspective language. By challenging the assumptions surrounding the photographic gaze, Smith both acknowledges and subverts the medium’s history, offering images that feel at once personal and universal. Central to the exhibition is the influence of music and dance, especially jazz, whose improvisational rhythms have long guided Smith’s approach behind the camera. Her encounters with the atmospheric works of Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson during her time in Paris deepened her interest in mood, motion, and the lyrical possibilities of the photograph. These early influences merge with her own instincts, resulting in a style defined by blur, abstraction, and a sensitivity to the ephemeral. Smith’s legacy is anchored in her groundbreaking achievements and unwavering dedication to portraying the depth of Black life. From her early days in New York—balancing modeling with photographing city streets and intimate cultural spaces—to her historic milestones with the Kamoinge Workshop and major museum collections, she has continually expanded what photography can express. Her images, alive with emotion and spontaneity, function as both memory and meditation, honoring the complexity of lived experience while inviting viewers to feel its resonance. Image: Ming Smith (United States, born 1950), Judith Jamison, 1981, archival pigment print, 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Gund at Kenyon College © Ming Smith

Photography has long held a special place in the world of children’s imagination, shaping how young readers see and understand the world around them. From the poetic lens of Edward Steichen and the whimsical humor of William Wegman to the inventive compositions of Dare Wright and Mo Willems, generations of photographer-illustrators have used the camera to tell stories that blur the line between the ordinary and the extraordinary. This exhibition celebrates that vision, presenting eighty archival photo prints alongside a remarkable collection of rare children’s books dating from the 1890s to the present. Together, they reveal how photography has illuminated the pages of childhood—transforming shadows, reflections, and simple gestures into windows of wonder. Whether through black-and-white studies of daily life or colorful staged scenes, these artists show how photography can speak directly to a child’s curiosity and sense of discovery. The exhibition includes works by celebrated creators such as George Ancona, Nina Crews, Tana Hoban, Charles R. Smith JR., and Walter Wick, whose inventive puzzles and intricate compositions have delighted generations. Each artist contributes a distinct voice: some document the richness of everyday life, while others construct dreamlike worlds where toys, textures, and light become characters in their own right. By reuniting these photographs and books, the exhibition invites visitors to reconsider photography as an essential language of children’s literature—one capable of teaching observation, empathy, and imagination. The images remind us that a camera can be more than a tool of record; it can be an instrument of wonder, one that captures the poetry of the moment and preserves the timeless magic of seeing the world anew. Image: Peter Buckley, Illustration for Cesare of Italy: An Around the World Today Book, 1954. Peter Buckley Papers and Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. © Estate of Peter Buckley.