All About Photo has selected the best photo exhibitions on show right now, special events and must-see photography exhibits. To focus your search, you can make your own selection of events by states, cities and venues.
American photographer Jim Dow has long been fascinated by the ingenuity and creative spirit found in the built environment. Between 1967 and 1977, his first decade as a young photographer, he drove along old U.S. highways on numerous cross-country road trips, focusing his large format camera on time-worn signage extracted from billboards, diners, gas stations, drive-in theaters, ice cream stands, burger joints, and other small businesses. Indebted to Harry Callahan, with whom Dow studied at RISD, and the work of Walker Evans, another key mentor, Dow’s early photographs highlight the effects of time’s passage, as commercial tastes and styles shift from one era to the next. Though most of the subjects Dow photographed have long since disappeared, his images avoid nostalgic longing or ironic commentary. With reverence and humor, Dow conveys the importance making one’s mark on the land and celebrates the desire to express individual agency and creativity in the landscape we inhabit.
On view for the first time, Signs includes approximately seventy-six photographs given to the museum by the artist and the Hall Family Foundation, featuring over sixty early black and white prints as well as a small selection of recent color work.
A selection of photographs from the permanent collection, curated by Jim Dow for their visual and thematic affinities with his photographic practice, will be on view concurrently in our photography galleries.
Organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, this exhibition is supported by the Hall Family Foundation.
Standing behind the substantial presence of the large format Polaroid 20×24 camera—weighing 200 pounds and the size of a refrigerator—artists peer through the viewfinder towards another world. The process of creating the unique large dye transfer prints imparts framing to a scene and quality to an image that balances subtlety with boldness, softness paired with an undeniable presence. The 20×24 Polaroid adds an additional layer of veiling and diaphanous softness to the imagery in Joyce Tenneson’s Transformations series, which she began in 1985 and engaged with through 2005.
Transformations features partially or fully nude figures poetically presented; Tenneson’s photographs have always been interested in the magic of the human figure, contained within bodies of all ages and emotions in a broad range that are both vulnerable and bold. She interweaves elements that feel vaguely mythological or symbolic, her figures embodying Classical sculptures of gods and goddesses, both mighty and mercurial. Elements such as shells, fruits, or daggers are expressions of inner journeys and self-discovery, and draped fabric and netting echo the shifting flow of time, energy, and identity. The ethereal quality imparted by the Polaroid process resonated with Tenneson, who stated: “I often felt like a channel—the images that had been part of my inner psyche for years emerged from some mysterious source.”
This exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and curated by Hilary Schroeder, assistant curator.
California reared, fine artist, Bryan Locke is a dedicated foot soldier in dogged pursuit of the celebration of his subjects at their zenith and most raw. His visceral approach, while supported by a keen understanding of light & depth , has resulted in a body of work that summons both Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. “Hot Walker” shot over a four year period at Golden Gate fields is a labor of love that brings to light his unmistakable intuition at displaying humanity at its finest. - Bud Schmelling
Miyako Yoshinaga is pleased to announce our representation of the estate of Melissa Shook, an American photographer, artist, writer, and educator who passed away in 2020 at age 79. From September 8 to October 15, 2022, the gallery will feature a solo exhibition by Shook, presenting compelling black-and-white self-portraits she created in the early 1970s. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalog with an introduction by Kristina Shook, the artist’s daughter and the subject of her Krissy series. The opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 8, 6-8 PM. Concurrent with this exhibition, University of Massachusetts Boston, where Shook taught photography for 31 years, will hold a retrospective of her work in various mediums “Melissa Shook: Inside and Out” including photographs, drawings, artist books, and sculpture. (September 6 – October 29, 2022).
“Photographs are memory, a way of tricking fate..., talismans against loss, a bargain with death,” wrote Shook in her essay for Camera Arts in 1981. This exhibition examines her early photographs haunted by the unreliability of memory. Having lost her mother at 12 and only retaining vague memories of her childhood, Shook began photographing her biracial daughter when she was one year old. As she struggled with her own fragmented identity as a single mother, Shook, at age 33, embarked on the daily self-portrait project in December 1972.
The Daily Self-Portraits 1972-1973 series is a pioneering project exploring intimate female identity in photography. Shook captured herself in a simple setting in her downtown New York loft against an empty wall space. Over the next 8 months, Shook developed a personal landscape, taking control of her attractive body while feeling shy, playful, melancholic, tired, or intimidated. With potted avocado plants often by her side, Shook posed wearing worn-out jeans, a wrinkled chintz robe, bath towels, etc.
Featuring 25 images, the exhibition highlights Shook’s critical series in several segments: a transition from everyday scenes in December to posed portraits in January and February; torso close-ups capturing the beauty of feminine features in March; face portraits with eloquent hand gestures from March to April; dance-like movements of her naked body with childlike playfulness in May. In addition, the exhibition features 6 reclining nudes (circa 1973) which Shook appeared to have worked on in parallel to her daily photographs.
After she stopped photographing herself, Shook moved her focus to her daughter as a continuation of the same theme and went on until the daughter turned 18. However, later in her life, she revisited daily self-portraits several times, notably in 1992/93, 2002/03, 2008/09, and 2014/15, in which Shook's deep-rooted obsession with memory became increasingly entangled with the issue of aging.
Melissa Shook was born in New York in 1939 and studied at the Bard College and Art Students League of New York. She taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Creative Photo Lab in 1974, and at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1975 to 2005. Best known for photographing herself and her daughter, Shook also wrote and photo/video documented marginalized members of her community in Boston. Her photographs have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2010, “ Reality Revisited: Photography from Moderna Museet Collection” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden in 2009, and “Photography in Boston: 1955-1985” at DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Moderna Museet (Stockholm) among others.
In honor of her Legacy, University of Massachusetts established The Melissa Shook Documentary Photography Award for students who demonstrate exceptional skill or promise in photography, especially documentary photography.
Jan Groover (American, 1943 – 2011) was among the very best still life photographers since the medium’s invention. Her Kitchen Still Life photographs were first exhibited at Sonnabend Gallery. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1979. In 1987, Groover had a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art which subsequently toured the United States. Her work has been exhibited and included in the collections of most major museums worldwide, and continues to influence a new generation of artists. Groover moved to France in 1991, with her husband, the painter Bruce Boice, who still lives there.
“Snowy frozen benches, sticky nightclub floors, long lost lipsticks, and bare bulb lighting…"
From September 9 – October 16, PARTICIPANT INC presents Marti Wilkerson, The 4th Golden Cadillac, a mix of formal portraits and verité documentary photography by Marti Wilkerson, showcasing vintage prints alongside newer works. Featuring subcultural subjects and neighborhood places, including Tompkins Square Park, Howie Pyro, Terence Sellers, Heather Litteer, Jayne County, and Blacklips Performance Cult.
"Had she stopped after the third, or even the 4th Golden Cadillac, she might be with us still to enjoy the next cocktail hour. But it was determined that the Lady had consumed about nine of these potions of Galliano, vodka, and cream." --from "An Accident of Passion" by Sir Twain Kull (Terence Sellers)
Beaut will present Her Blood Ran Cold (The Silent Lizards), new songs and texts to accompany the photographs in the exhibition on Sunday, October 9. Marti Wilkerson, lyrics and vocals and Paul Twinkle, electric guitar.
"The street was small, and never clean. Gold leaves remained crunching 'neath our feet. Band Aid stood out, in the harsh night, old overcoat in the street lights. Then suddenly they began to explode, and just right then, her blood ran cold." --from "Her Blood Ran Cold" by Beaut
Marti Wilkerson, The 4th Golden Cadillac is the second in a series of three exhibitions curated by ANOHNI exploring work related to Blacklips Performance Cult. Blacklips was started by ANOHNI in New York City's East Village in the summer of 1992 with founding members Johanna Constantine and Psychotic Eve. At times, Blacklips enacted an art of death as described by artist and queer theorist Jill H. Casid, anticipating the Necrocene with the production of allegorical plays that addressed the intertwined issues of AIDS and the Anthropocene, weekly and with great effort, through scenes of post-apocalyptic horizons populated by dead and undead, non-human and human characters.
After a childhood dedicated to training in dance, Elizabeth discovered a choreographic voice through photography. In her exhibit Movement Studies, Elizabeth found urban facades she positioned as stages, and pedestrians as performers – some consciously staged; most unconsciously so. "I am particularly drawn to spaces and people that are naturally theatrical, and the subjects are sharply frozen in the pictures through the use of a very fast shutter speed.” Through this stilling, dress, body movement and backdrop transcend the quotidian urban space into that of an operatic performance piece. Ten works in the show reflect new works from this decade-long pursuit.
Coda, comprised of four still lives, is the result a chance encounter from 2015 on the subway with Linda Leven. Linda is visually striking, an active writer, actress, model, and muse. "After meeting, Linda and I developed a highly collaborative relationship over the years. She has been in isolation since February 2020 due to her compromised immune system. Our phone conversations often reflect on her younger years and her large archive of photographs taken by her many lovers who saw her as a muse. Since we were no longer able to meet and photograph her, she allowed me to photograph her archive, mostly from over half a century ago. "
JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING - TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present Burn, a new series of largescale photographs by artist Tuck Fauntleroy, on view from September 9th through October 16th, 2022, running in congruency to Yellowstone National Park’s 150th anniversary. This new body of work focuses on the wildfire burn regions in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Fauntleroy’s new series visually displaces the viewer in a similar way to his previous Waterline series (released in 2018) and Elements series (released in 2020). Burn similarly showcases the artist’s scrupulous ability to play between negative and positive space, yet this time, Fauntleroy focuses on the elegant lines and forms created by a landscape scarred by flame.
Taken over the course of three winters, the series is a mixture of aerial and ground shots of the regions of Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park that have been drastically changed by wildfires over the past four decades. As with his previous work, Fauntleroy took many of the photos from the open windows of single-engine planes he chartered to fly over the areas, while other shots were taken by hiking into remote areas of the parks in different phases of the harsh Wyoming winters. The stark contrast of charred, disfigured trees against soft, untouched snow or serene waters makes for photos that are as peaceful as they are compelling.
The silence of these remote, charred spaces is palpable in these works. Burn is timely in the face of the proliferation of recent fires across the western United States and globally. The massive 1988 Yellowstone fires were a wake-up call, foreshadowing the future climate catastrophes that have recently become the norm. Regions affected by these 1988 wildfires remain scarred and are depicted in the series, as well as abutting areas also altered by the numerous fires that have since followed. Warming, drought, and the resulting fires have never been more of a threat, and it is impossible to separate the beauty of these images from the destruction they were born of.
Critical to the series is the notion of taking something more widely perceived as unsightly and destructive and making it aesthetic and engaging. “I like to think of the winter season as a time for the land itself to rest. Zero human activity, the silence of falling snow in one of the most remote places on earth is enchanting and reflective. In that space, there's hope of discovering a healing element that a landscape at rest is pristine and peaceful - it inspires promise.” Despite the implicit chaos that created this landscape, Fauntleroy’s artful documentation, paired with his keen sense of space, lends to create images that edge on abstraction and even impressionism through the presentation of very real areas of our National Parks that have been touched by flame. The result is a beguiling series of images that are, above all, meditative, invoking pure serenity in the face of arrant desolation.
Tuck Fauntleroy grew up in a small waterfront town on the eastern shore of Maryland. He graduated with a B.A. from Bucknell University in 2000 and moved west to Jackson Hole. Combined with his personal photographic practice, Fauntleroy developed a professional foundation as a photographer in the fields of architecture and interior design over the past 20 years. Published in recognized outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dwell, Conde Nast Traveler, and Town & Country, Fauntleroy’s fine arts photography is committed to utilizing the aesthetics of the natural world. Tuck Fauntleroy lives and works in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Between 1983 and 1987 along the California/Mexico border, Ken Light took his Hasselblad camera and flash and rode along with US Border Patrol agents in the middle of the night as they combed the Otay Mesa looking for “illegal aliens.” He was there when they were apprehended – captured by authorities as well as the photographer’s flash. The black and white images are stark, impromptu mug shots in the desert, taken at a moment of extreme vulnerability, when hope gave way to despair, migrants caught in a cruel game of hide and seek.
In piercing words and in strobe lit images caught against the dark of night, Midnight La Frontera’s immediacy underscores the struggle and defiance of those who make the perilous hike for days and weeks in search of the American Dream.
Ken Light, a freelance documentary photographer for over fifty years, and a Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the University of California, Berkeley, focuses on social issues facing America. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, his work has been published in twelve books, in magazines, exhibitions and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogues and a variety of media, digital and motion picture.
The FRESH 2022 Annual Photography Exhibition is co-curated by Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching.
Finalists are selected on the basis of having demonstrated a strong vision, excellence in craftsmanship, and potential to expand and grow their creative practice. Of the photographers, some are already known, whilst others are just beginning to carve out their place within the contemporary art scene. Well-resolved projects sit beside those that are just beginning to be fleshed out. Wherever they are in their state of production, each Finalist’s creative practice shows great promise for contributing to dialogues about contemporary photographic practice.
The exhibition at the Klompching Gallery features work by five photographers, selected from the 20 FRESH Finalists. Each exhibiting artist is represented with a selection of photographs, from the single body of work that was submitted to the open call.
New York – Pace, in collaboration with Blum & Poe, is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Penny Slinger at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from September 16 to October 22 in the gallery’s first-floor library, the exhibition, titled 50% Unboxed, will feature selections from Slinger’s iconic 1971 artist’s book and collage series 50% The Visible Woman, through which the artist investigates the mapping and unveiling of the feminine subconscious. Alongside these historic works, the exhibition will also include Slinger’s new photo collage series My Body in a Box (2020-21). Pace’s presentation follows Blum & Poe’s 2021 exhibition of
Slinger’s work, titled 50/50, in Los Angeles.
Originally created in 1969 as a hand-constructed, snakeskin-bound book for the artist’s thesis project at the Chelsea College of Art in London, 50% The Visible Woman was Slinger’s response to her discovery of Surrealism, which has had a pivotal impact on her practice. An homage to Max Ernst, the book includes photocollage and concrete poetry, artworks with which Slinger sought to rectify the fraught portrayals of women and the void of feminine authorship in the male-dominated surrealist milieu. "Having discovered the magic of Surrealism, I wanted to employ its tools and methods to create a language for the feminine psyche to express itself,” the artist has said. The book’s binding alternates between sheets of poetry and photocollage imagery—her poems are typed onto semi-transparent tissue paper, allowing the prose to interact directly with their visual counterparts beneath. Words take on curvilinear shapes in response to the images beneath them.
In 2021, Slinger released a new edition of her book 50% The Visible Woman, presenting her photomontage works and poetry unabridged for the first time. The book also features a conversation between Slinger and fellow artist and friend Linder.
Among the works from this series in Pace’s forthcoming exhibition is The Dialectics (1969), an image of a totem of dismembered, floating body parts. Some body parts appear as didactic diagrams, and others are plucked from an image of a woman in mime costume, with shadows reaching in every direction.
Slinger appropriates Surrealism’s language and themes—woman's body as object, dream-state as entrance into the unconscious, and sexual and bodily desires—and applies them in analysis of Surrealism itself and its culture. Slinger inserts herself into this art historical lineage and takes ownership of a visual lexicon that had previously objectified her. Installed alongside her collage works is a sonic accompaniment produced in collaboration with musician Lydia Lunch.
Another highlight of the presentation is My Body in a Box, which Slinger created during the pandemic as part of an exploration of psychological entrapment and its attendant fears. As in her work from the 1960s, the artist uses her own image and body— photographed by her creative partner Dhiren Dasu—as subject to process a range of feelings and reactions.
In conjunction with this exhibition, Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn will present Alchemy & Ecstasy, a screening series of Slinger’s films. The program will feature early films produced in the late 1960s in tandem with the works in Pace’s exhibition, as well as a recent animated feature. The artist will participate in a live Q&A at the theater on Saturday, September 17.
David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery are pleased to announce Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, on view at David Zwirner’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York and opening in September. Organized by both galleries to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Cataclysm re-creates the iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated.
In the fall of 1971, in the aftermath of Arbus’s death in July, her friend, colleague, and fellow artist Marvin Israel approached John Szarkowski, the legendary director of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, about the prospect of a retrospective exhibition of her work. Szarkowski, who had begun championing Arbus’s photographs in the late 1960s, quickly agreed to do the show. Though widely admired and respected by other photographers and artists, Arbus was not well known at the time of her death. When the exhibition opened, on November 7, 1972, no one, not even Arbus’s most fervent supporters, could have predicted its profound impact on museum visitors, nor the impassioned—at times vitriolic—critical response the exhibition would generate among writers and thinkers. It was the most highly attended one-person exhibition in the museum’s history, with lines down the block to see it. Szarkowski later recalled, “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion.” 1
Even at the time, the retrospective was recognized for almost single-handedly helping to elevate photography to the status of fine art, paving the way for museums, collectors, and the public to embrace a previously unrecognized innate authority and power within the medium. As the New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote of the exhibition, “what Diane Arbus brought to photography was an ambition to deal with the kind of experience that had long been the province of the fictional arts—the novel, painting, poetry and films—but had traditionally been ‘off limits’ to the nonfiction documentary art of the still camera.” 2 John Perreault, writing in The Village Voice, noted, “I don’t usually write about photography … but just this once I can’t resist. Diane Arbus was such a great photographer that her work breaks out of all categories. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art should be of interest even to those who are not usually at all interested in photography.” 3
Such praise from some critics was countered with derision and ridicule by others. Susan Sontag disparaged the exhibition in the pages of The New York Review of Books: “Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.” 4 Jane Allen, writing for the Chicago Tribune, attacked the show: “[Arbus] shows us people, so locked into their physical and mental limitations, that their movements are meaningless charades. They are losers almost to a man.” 5 What seems to have enthralled some and enraged others about Arbus’s work was how she unflinchingly captured the singularity of her subjects, which—paradoxically—linked them to one another and by extension to the viewer. “This is what I love,” wrote Arbus at the age of sixteen, “the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life.… I see the divineness in ordinary things.” 6
The exhibition’s title, Cataclysm, alludes to the immensity of the uproar spawned by the retrospective and the ferocity of the critical discourse around the artist that emerged then and continues to the present day.
Image: Diane Arbus, A very young baby, N.Y.C. [Anderson Hays Cooper], 1968
1 Quoted in Who Is Marvin Israel?, directed by Neil Selkirk and Doon Arbus (2005; www.neilselkirk.com/films).
2 Hilton Kramer, “From Fashion to Freaks,” The New York Times Magazine, November 5, 1972, p. 38.
3 John Perreault, “Art,” The Village Voice, November 23, 1972, p. 40.
4 Susan Sontag, “Freak Show,” The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973, p. 14.
5 Jane Allen, “Charade of Losers in the Arbus World,” Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1973, p. 8.
6 Diane Arbus, high school essay on Plato, 1939. Quoted in Diane Arbus Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 70.
The L.A. Project is comprised of street, documentary and news photographers. Our mission is to document our changing city during a dynamic and challenging time in its history and share the work in innovative ways.
The work of 35 photographers will be projected onto a building at a festive outdoor event in Chinatown on October 22, 2022. There will be food trucks, fun, and theater-style seating.
We also plan to donate work to the DTLA library’s impressive photography collection, so that our work becomes part of the historic documentary record of Los Angeles.
Dr. Drapkin has assembled an extensive collection of press photographs spanning the Vietnam War. These images capture the conflict and pathos of this difficult part of American history. The exhibition will explore the photographs themselves, how they were created, and experiences through a local context. Understanding the American War in Vietnam, a book written by Dr. Drapkin will accompany the exhibition. Text in the exhibition and book illuminate the war’s history from multiple perspectives.
Proceeds from the exhibition and book sales will benefit the Rory Peck Trust, which makes conflict training in hostile environments available to photographers covering conflict at their own personal risk.
Border Cantos | Sonic Border, a unique collaboration between American photographer Richard Misrach and Mexican American sculptor and composer Guillermo Galindo, uses the power of art to explore and humanize the complex issues surrounding the Mexican-American border through a transformative and multi-sensory experience.
Misrach, who has photographed the border since 2004, beautifully captures landscapes and objects, including things left behind by migrants. His large-scale photographs, along with grids of smaller photos, highlight issues surrounding migration and its effect on regions and people, and also introduce a complicated look at policing the boundary.
Responding to these photographs, Galindo fashioned sound-generating sculptures from items Misrach collected along the border, such as water bottles, Border Patrol “drag tires,” spent shotgun shells, ladders, and sections of the border wall itself. The sounds they produce give voices to people through the personal belongings they have left behind. The composition embraces the Pre-Columbian belief that there was an intimate connection between an instrument and the material from which it was made, with no separation between spiritual and physical worlds. Based on the Mesoamerican Venus calendar, Sonic Border plays for a total of 260 minutes and is separated into 13 cycles of 20 minutes. Within these cycles, the instruments play in small groups of two or more, or all together as an orchestra.
Presented in English and Spanish, Border Cantos | Sonic Border offers perspective on the challenges of migration, inviting us to bridge boundaries. When experienced as a whole, the images, instruments, and emanating sounds create an immersive space in which to look, listen, and learn about the complicated issues surrounding the Mexican-American border. While the artists do not seek to provide solutions to these issues, they do provide insight into a place where most people have never ventured, creating a poignant connection that draws on our humanity.
Border Cantos | Sonic Border is organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Support for the national tour of Border Cantos | Sonic Border is provided by Art Bridges.
Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present Up Around the Bend, Julie Blackmon’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Blackmon’s photographs delicately toe the line between wit and wry. Her examination of the suburban landscape includes the discovery of new technology, childhood exploration and imaginative play through the four seasons in a world largely devoid of adults — all culminating in satiric tableaus. Although often innocent at first glance, her photographs include a menacing element just barely beneath the surface. A shark in the water, an abandoned knife near a toddler, or a child’s dead-man’s float. Blackmon explains that “The kids and crazy scenes are often just metaphors for a certain psychological state” (The Guardian).
Several recent works by Blackmon have drawn inspiration from 19th century oil paintings by George Caleb Bingham. Blackmon’s Flatboat is a reinvention of Bingham’s painting, The Jolly Flatboatmen, which “depicts a group of men who, after accomplishing the hard work of rowing their flatboat upstream and loading it with cargo, are now relaxing and enjoying music and dancing” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). In this contemporary reimagination, Blackmon recontextualizes the work, bringing the composition to life in current times through her well thought out details and beautifully placed characters. The work exudes mischievousness as the idle children who sit unwatched replace the men who have rowed upstream. Paddleboard, inspired by Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, depicts calm on the brink of chaos. Both works created in the artist's home state of Missouri, in Blackmon’s tableau, she replaces the male rower with a pregnant mother, a lounging woman with the pile of luggage, and a black cat with the small boy. However, the most notable difference is the replacement of driftwood with a shark fin, circling the travelers and adding a sense of foreboding and danger to an already curious narrative.
This exhibition opens in conjunction with the release of Blackmon’s third monograph, Midwest Materials (Radius Books 2022). In this monograph, “Julie Blackmon has created a new body of work that sparkles with the wit, dark humor, and irony for which the artist has gained such renown" (Radius Books).
Julie Blackmon lives and works in Springfield, Missouri. The artistʼs work is found in numerous museums and public collections including the George Eastman House; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Museum of Art; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Portland Art Museum; and the Musée Français de la Photographie in Bièvres, France. She was named American Photo's "Emerging Photographer of 2008" and one of PDN's "30 New and Emerging Photographers" in 2007, and has been the recipient of various awards including first prize from The Santa Fe Center for Photography in the Project Competition in 2006. Blackmon has previously published two monographs, both of which sold out, Domestic Vacations (Radius Books, 2008) and Homegrown (Radius Books co-published with Robert Mann Gallery, 2014).
The Intimacy of Distance | Explorations of the Figure/Ground is an exhibition addressing one of the quintessential relationships in representational art: the frisson and distance between the human subject and the field. Organizers Lawrence Gipe and Douglas Marshall have gathered a diverse group of seventeen artists that use photography and photo-derived processes to explore this trope, creating a conversation amongst artists that are quite divergent in vision, context and methodology.
The trajectory of the exhibition examines the myriad psychological effects produced by the figure/ground relationship. The work featured surveys a wide swath of conceptual terrain, touching on issues such as Colonialism, the Anthropocene and the Sublime, and surveillance. The human element in the composition can be intimately close or cropped, veiled, or too distant to identify – the latter being a reflection on the deferential position Humanity faces in the vastness of Nature.
Featuring: Sama Alshaibi, Albarrán Cabrera, Johnnie Chatman, Jeffrey Conley, Eileen Cowin, John Divola, John Brinton Hogan, Richard Learoyd, Rania Matar, Ryan McIntosh, Mark McKnight, Liz Miller-Kovacs, Liza Ryan, Bryan Schutmaat, Donavon Smallwood, Judith Stenneken, Alex Turner.
“My photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations, but they are also records of actions and elaborate processes. Days are spent, sometimes with a crew but more often in solitude, silently driving, carrying supplies, erecting structures and sets, and studying the slow progress of the sun overhead and its all-powerful, comfort-giving and taking effects. Created in close collaboration with the movements of the sun, precisely observed, I see my photographs as acts of reverence and participation in a deep, reassuring natural order outside of and much larger than myself.” --Chris Engman, September 2006
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce CHRIS ENGMAN: The Artist as Explorer—2002-2006, an exhibition of historical photographic works on view in the Project Space from September 17 through October 29, 2022. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 17, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Originally created by Chris Engman between 2002-2006, this is the first time this series of black and white photographs is being presented in Los Angeles. These works read differently now than when they were produced 15-20 years ago. Certainly, we have all become accustomed to images that lie more boldly or more insidiously, and as a result, the flaws in the illusions these works create will for some be more readily apparent in 2022. For Engman, however, a complete illusion is an uncompelling one—and he has always been more interested in the flaws than in the fooling. The flaws allow the viewer to enter the image and better understand the process behind it, which was conceived at the time by the artist as a performance.
Chris Engman (b. Seattle, 1978). Engman received his MFA from USC Roski School of Fine Arts in 2013 and BFA from the University of Washington in 2003. Earlier this year Engman was recently the subject of solo exhibition at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA. Recent exhibitions include the FotoFocus Biennial 2018: Open Archive, Cincinnati, OH; Prospect and Refuge at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Second Sight: New Representations in Photography, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; The Claim, High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA; Staking Claim: A California Invitational at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA; and NextNewCA at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA. Engman's work is held in collections internationally, including Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Houston Fine Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Sir Elton John Collection, Atlanta, GA; Microsoft Collection, Seattle, WA; the Cleveland Clinic Collection, Google Cloud Collection, as well as numerous corporate and private collections. Engman lives and works in Los Angeles, and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to present Wesaam Al-Badry’s solo exhibition The Other Language, considering labor, migration, the environment, and notions of otherness in the United States. The opening reception will be on Saturday, September 17 from 3-5 pm. During the reception, Al-Badry will be in conversation with Benjamin L. Jones from 4-5 pm at Minnesota Street Project Atrium to talk about the exhibition and his artistic process. This event will be live on the Jenkins Johnson Gallery’s Instagram (@jenkinsjohnsongallery).
Inspired by a Kahlil Gibran poem with the same title, The Other Language ties together two of Al-Badry’s documentary projects which explore a coal mining town in Appalachia, and migrant workers in the Central Valley. Gibran’s poem presents the idea that every person is born speaking a language that we have to forget in order to be understood by others. In these works, Al-Badry combines methods of investigative journalism and art to ask us to rethink how people deal with tragic circumstances created by corporate avarice.
By citing Gibran’s poetry, Al-Badry’s work enters a multidimensional frame, it is at once surface-level and abstract, autobiographical and biographical. As part of his Migrant Workers series, Wesaam AlBadry has documented the lives of essential agricultural workers and their families in California’s Central Valley and Salinas Valley since April 2020. These areas represent the fertile heart of California agriculture, where farmworkers harvest over a third of the vegetables and 40% of the fruit and nuts grown in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the vulnerabilities of these farming communities already hard-hit by housing shortages, food insecurity, unsafe working conditions, and the threat of deportation.
Al-Badry’s photographs reveal the “real people with hopes and fears” behind the fresh fruits and vegetables on our tables. During some forty visits over the past two years and in hours of recorded interviews, Al-Badry developed ongoing relationships with the people he met, visiting them at home, in their communities, and at work in California’s fields. The photographs convey resilience, empathy, and human dignity, three qualities the artist aims to foreground in all of his work.
Marianna series is a social exploration project that investigates the Appalachian and post-coal mining community of Marianna, PA. In the course of this ongoing project, Wesaam AlBadry seeks to personalize and expand the lives of the members of a deeply historical community. With intimate images of family, community, history and industry, the artist opens us up to this small town with stories and unique connections, personalizing and elevating this community beyond reductive stereotypes. Historically, Marianna was once a mining community, and remnants of this remain with a manmade mountain of coal ash. The town itself sits on top of a riverbank. On the one hand, it is idyllic Appalachia with beautiful, wooded forests and winding streams and rivers. On the other, it is a community besieged with problems, from the constant noise and light pollution to rising health problems.
The photographs in these two series of work agitate long-held practices of looking, such as how we construct stereotypes to how we imagine dreamscapes of ruin. For Al-Badry, “I am the other, photographing the others.” The artwork lays bare what we think connects and divides us by reaching for a language everyone in the world is born with. The Other Language is Wesaam Al-Badry’s first solo exhibition at Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present, Down by the Hudson, an exhibition of photographs by Caleb Stein. The show exhibits a selection of works from Stein’s ongoing project of the same name.
Wappinger Creek is a 41.7-mile-long creek that connects the waters of Thompson Pond to the mouth of the Hudson River in Dutchess County, New York. Carved by the creek’s path is a hidden Eden nestled in a small wooded area behind the Overlook Drive-In Theater on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie. Amongst the trees and muddy banks, residents congregate in and around this watering hole. Physical and social dissonance is forgone in this haven. The maple leaves rustle in the soft breeze, and rushed footsteps progress into a subsequent splash. Placid conversation fills the air, accompanying the slow trot of those wading in the water.
Caleb Stein’s Down by the Hudson series is an ongoing ‘ode’ to the small town of Poughkeepsie, New York. Rendered in black-and-white, his photographs provide an intimate glimpse into the lives of Poughkeepsie’s residents amidst the current backdrop of de-industrialization and political tension in the U.S. The watering hole serves as a neutral zone, a side-step from the day-to-day turbulence of life. It is a communal ground that provides a place of recreation and refuge.
“The watering hole became a central component of the project because it represented an idyllic space where people from all walks of life came together and let their guard down. The more time I spent at the watering hole, the more I wanted to convey the struggles and beauties of this town with care and tenderness.” -- Caleb Stein
CLAMP is pleased to present “The Lavender Flair,” an exhibition of artworks by artists influenced by or associated with James Bidgood (1933-2022).
James Bidgood came of age during the height of the “red scare,” an epidemic of paranoia regarding communism spearheaded by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who represented Bidgood’s home state of Wisconsin. During this period, Bidgood was settling into his new life in New York City, and the anti-communist movement shifted to include any individual who was viewed as a threat against the nation. This secondary movement has been referred to as the “lavender scare”—a mass purging of gay government workers and a wave of explicitly homophobic policies.
Originating in the State Department, before spreading to all federal agencies, policies were enacted to protect national security by allowing and encouraging the persecution of gay government workers. McCarthy believed that homosexuals posed an equal risk to national security as communists and that gays were susceptible to manipulation. Therefore, he used homosexuality as a smear tactic in his mission to rid the government of “traitors.”
Against this national backdrop of institutionalized hate and fear mongering, Bidgood started his artistic practice—creating costumes, sets, and eventually photographs that reveled and celebrated in their gayness—always with a distinct lavender flair. Employing pulp imagery and other visual tropes present during his youth in wider, straight society, Bidgood built a body of work that would inspire and influence artists of later generations.
The artists included in “The Lavender Flair” all produce imagery unmistakably linked to Bidgood. Pierre et Gilles have cited Bidgood as the major influence for their distinct style of colorful kitsch portraits, while David LaChapelle’s extravagantly staged fashion photographs share in Bidgood’s love of the fantastical and absurd. Steven Arnold’s intricate black-and-white constructions and Aaron Cobbett’s fairytale portraits all emit the same queer ethos as many of Bidgood’s works.
There are also contemporary artists who produce photographs with a dedication to hand-built fabrication like Bidgood. Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber sculpt sprawling miniatures explicitly for the camera lens, just as Bidgood did when building the sets and scenery for his pictures. Lissa Rivera works similarly in her “Dioramas” series which documents painstakingly designed miniature sets.
But James Bidgood’s legacy as a photographer goes beyond influencing just aesthetic and practical choices by artists. The way that Bidgood honored gay fantasies and produced media that could communicate a sense of acceptance to the masses, despite state-sanctioned homophobia, touched many generations of queer people.
In the era Bidgood’s pictures were being made, when homosexuality was utilized as a weapon by those seeking to divide and oppress, creating the work he did was an act of courage. The fearlessness that Bidgood displayed no doubt made it possible for photographers and artists after him to continue to spread his radically lavender flair.
Our interactions with images help shape our experience of the world. From storytelling to journalism, expressions of selfhood to shedding light on social issues, photographs have infinite capacities to engage, communicate, and convey. Yet the way we see an image reflects our individual perceptions and histories. Although photographs are often considered documents of real moments in time, we should look carefully, considering not only the choices made by the photographer but also how those choices influence our interpretations. With billions of images produced and shared each day, discerning how we read pictures has become vitally important—especially with representations of historical events, notions of identity, and shared human experiences all in play.
Beyond the Frame spotlights the MoCP’s permanent collection of more than 16,500 works as a rich resource for harnessing visual literacy skills. Each gallery features works focused on critical topics that appear over and over again in the history of the medium, such as Portraiture and the Human Subject, Landscape and Place, and Staged and Constructed Images. By placing works by historical and contemporary, local and international artists together according to distinct themes, we invite you to look with awareness, and when you re-enter the image-saturated world beyond the museum’s walls, to pursue thoughtful, questioning engagement with the visual depictions you encounter. There is always more to the story beyond the frame.
This exhibition is organized by Kristin Taylor, Curator of Academic Programs and Collections.
In Then and There, I document a crucial aspect of public street behavior at the 1979 New Orleans Mardi Gras. Shooting with an instant SX-70 Polaroid camera, the process allowed me to directly interact with my subjects who perform, observe, and even share in the photographic process. The portraits are made just feet away from each person, mostly at dusk, and who are sharply revealed by the light of the camera’s flash bar. The subjects creatively present themselves in diverse colorful masks, makeup, and revelry. Each portrait is a glimpse into a layered and hidden personal identity made possible by the collaborative choices of the photographer and the subject acting in front of the camera. The raw excitement of Mardi Gras flows through each portrait with the people physically filling the entire frame of the Polaroid as if the print itself were a stage just for them. Mardi Gras allows both the subject and myself a moment of freedom to observe a transformation into another reality of being. As I see it, the major themes of the work, whether subtle or overt, are: mask, Carnaval, past time, memory, identity, creativity, fun and abandon, reverie, costume, altered realities and transformation.
Harvey Stein is a professional photographer, teacher, lecturer, author, and curator based in New York City. He currently teaches at the International Center of Photography and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Stein is a frequent lecturer on photography both in the United States and abroad. He was the Director of Photography at Umbrella Arts Gallery, located in the East Village of Manhattan, from 2009 until 2019 when it lost its lease and closed. He has also been a member of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, New School University, Drew University, Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Bridgeport. A recipient of a Creative Arts Public Service (CAPS) fellowship and numerous artist in residency grants, Stein’s ninth and latest book Then and There: Mardi Gras 1979 was published by Zatara Press in October of 2020. Other books of Stein’s photographs are Parallels: A Look at Twins, E.P. Dutton (1978); Artists Observed, Harry Abrams, Inc. (1986); Coney Island, W.W. Norton, Inc. (1998); Movimento: Glimpses of Italian Street Life, Gangemi Editore, Rome (2006); Coney Island 40 Years, Schiffer Publishing, (2011); Harlem Street Portraits, Schiffer Publishing (2013); Briefly Seen New York Street Life, Schiffer Publishing (2015), and Mexico Between Life and Death, Kehrer Verlag (Germany, 2018). Stein’s photographs and portfolios have been published in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Time, Life, Esquire, American Heritage, Smithsonian, The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Glamour, GQ Magazine (Mexico), Forbes, Psychology Today, Playboy, Harpers, Connoisseur, Art News, American Artist, New York, People, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, The Hopkins Review (cover), Sun Magazine (cover)and all the major photo magazines, including Camera Arts, Black & White Magazine (cover), Shutterbug, Popular Photography, American Photo, Camera, Afterimage, PDN, Zoom, Rangefinder, Photo Metro, fotoMagazine (Germany), photo technique, Zeke and View Camera Magazine.
Stein’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe — 89 one-person and over 166 group shows to date.
He has curated 67 exhibits since 2007. His photographs are in 59 permanent collections, including the George Eastman Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, the Denver Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the Portland (Oregon) Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, Museet for Fotokunst (Odense, Denmark), Musee De La Photographie (Charleroi, Belguim), the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, The New York Historical Society and Museum, The Brooklyn Historical Society, and among others, the corporate collections of Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard, LaSalle Bank (Chicago), Barclay Bank and Credit Suisse. Stein’s work is represented by Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, New York City.
Ways of Seeing: The Art of Travel, Trade, and Transportation is an exhibition that brings together over seventy objects from BMA's permanent collection to explore subjects of travelling for both pleasure and necessity.
Even in the digital age, access to affordable, reliable, and safe transportation is vital to life. Transportation-beginning with our feet-supports all travel and thus all trade, which includes securing food for survival, access to work, and connections to communities that are necessary to thrive. The Art of Travel, Trade & Transportation, the fifth iteration of the exhibition series Ways of Seeing, explores the experience of the wider world through not only the visual arts, but also the very materials that comprise them.
Both artists who traveled to foreign lands and those who stayed closer to home, generated aspirational and enjoyable imagery for the armchair traveler-often their intended audience. The joys of leisure travel are contrasted by the more poignant aspects of necessities of travel-for economic opportunity, military service, fleeing hardship, or being transported against one's will. Localized and globalized trade in prized goods such as silver, ivory, tea, tobacco and glass have a lasting and complicated legacy of beauty and tragedy. These works of art will surprise and delight viewers as well as provide room for reflection on the costs and benefits of travel, trade and transportation.
Drawn entirely from the Museum's permanent collection, the exhibition features over 70 works, many of which have never been seen by the public. Nearly all media is represented ranging from paintings to woodblock prints, lithographs and photographs to quilts and jewelry. Works range in date from the 2nd to the 20th centuries and feature works by artists from: China, Cote d'Ivoire, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mali, Navajo Nation, Scotland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United States of America-including a number of Alabama artists.
Highlights include: Paintings and drawings by Thomas Birch, Richard Blauvelt Coe, Giacomo Guardi, Li Kui, Ya Ming, Reverend Benjamin Franklin Perkins, Rosalie Pettus Price, Arnold Rönnebeck, Deng Tao, Kwan S. Wong, Wu Zuoren. Photographs by Sid Avery, Ed Willis Barnett, Anton Bruehl, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Phyllis Galembo, Adama Kouyaté, Willy Ronis, and Peter Stackpole among others. Prints by John Taylor Arms, Radcliffe Bailey, Thomas Hart Benton, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh, James McBey, Hasegawa Sadanobu II, Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, Hiroshi Yoshida, Utagawa Yoshikazu, Utagawa Yoshikuni I, and Utagawa Yoshitora. Textile arts by Helen McCain Cargo, Ramona Faye McCormick McRae, Louise Nez, Opal Wenonah McCormick Villadsen
Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present Typologies, an online presentation of works by Jeff Brouws featuring three new portfolios by the artist: Railroad Tunnel Exteriors, Railroad Tunnel Interiors, Substations and various earlier works.
Practicing what the artist terms “visual anthropology,” Brouws, over the past thirty years, has persistently pursued a body of work that examines the evolving American landscape through its myriad cultural and industrial artifacts. Taking inspiration from the “anonymous sculpture” studies of Hilla and Bernd Becher, the New Topographics Movement, the deadpan artist books of Ed Ruscha—and with these latest series the topographic surveys of the 19th Century—Brouws has produced visual archives focused mainly on architectural and landscape forms that forge his own photographic territory. Without romanticizing his subject matter, the photographs ask us to consider the historic, economic or social forces that have shaped our built environment—from its initial development to its eventual demise to its rebirth.
Begun in 2019, Brouws’ Railroad Tunnel series’, is not only an homage to U.S. Geological Survey photographers Carleton Watkins and A J. Russell (both of whom photographed the construction of the transcontinental railroads), but also reflects the artist’s life-long interest in the railroad landscape and its environs. As railroad networks expanded and then contracted during the 20th century—due to redundancies, mergers, loss of manufacturing, outsourcing and globalization—rail lines across the United States either remained active, became moribund, or were abandoned. Brouws's photographs reflect these transitional states, with the tunnels acting as physical examples of “history and technology embedded in the landscape.” That history, like the rails themselves, also speaks to the labor of countless workers who toiled to build them, many dug by hand before dynamite and TNT came into common use. To document these often hidden and out-of-the-way earthworks of the Industrial Age, Brouws utilized contemporary mapping technology, researching the locations online and through Google Earth satellite imagery before venturing into the field.
Similarly, but more aligned with the Becher’s “anonymous sculpture” modalities, Brouws has spent the last decade assembling a collection of electrical substation photographs, exploring their varied, yet recognizable structural forms as “readymade" or “found" pieces of unintended industrial sculpture. Anticipating that the rise of wind and solar power will necessitate a reinvention of the grid, these substations will also be rebuilt, torn down or abandoned. As with the tunnels, Brouws uses photography in this capacity as both an aesthetic tool and mechanism for preserving history, recording for posterity the infrastructure that is essential to our everyday life but goes mostly unnoticed.
Over the course of Jeff Brouwsʼ career he has created an encyclopedic visual archive devoted to preserving the artifacts of our heritage. This exploration of subjects has allowed him to create a visual anthology of technological, cultural, and architectural history. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and others. His monographs include Approaching Nowhere (2006), Readymades (2003), Inside the Live Reptile Tent (2001), and Highway: Americaʼs Endless Dream (1998). He is also the co-editor and co-creator of Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013, MIT Press). Born in 1955, Brouws lives in Stanfordville, New York.
Sarah Sense (b. 1980) lives and works in California. Sense has traveled extensively
through the Americas, Europe, United Kingdom and Southeast Asia. Her landscape
photography is an essential part of her travel and visual art practice. Sense’s weaving
practice began in New York while a master’s student at Parson New School for Design
(2003-2005). While director and curator of the American Indian Community House
Gallery, New York, Sense catalogued the gallery’s thirty-year history, inspiring her
search for Indigenous art internationally. Her world travels were charged with archive
research, photo-weaving project that expanded to community programming,
international Indigenous artist interviews and the book, Weaving the Americas. She is
currently a visiting fellow at the British Library, London.
ollowing the success of Allen Frame’s book Fever, (color photographs of his friends in New York in 1981), Gitterman Gallery presents rarely seen, vintage black and white prints from the same period in his career.
Frame came to New York in 1977 and began to photograph his friends in his apartment and theirs — intimately observed, unposed scenes that were influenced by his love of film and theater. After his first solo show in 1980, he found himself cast as Jack Nicholson in Gary Indiana’s play The Roman Polanski Story, starring his friend John Heys as Roman and Cookie Mueller as Sharon Tate. He was suddenly introduced to a world of downtown legends that included Bill Rice, Taylor Meade and Jack Smith. In the exhibition, Whereupon, a haunting photo of Heys and Mueller shows them coming out onto the terrace of Heys’ East Village penthouse terrace. There’s also a photograph of William Burroughs at home in the Bunker on the Bowery. Nan Goldin is seen sitting on Frame’s bed with artist Siobhan Liddell and a friend, their limbs mysteriously intertwined. Many of the same friends who appear in Fever show up in these black and white photographs: a self-portrait with painter friend Charlie Boone; Butch Walker with Charlie and his boyfriend Bill; a morning photo of a young man lying across a mattress on the floor as a young woman crosses the room. As Mark Alice Durant writes:
His images are not decisive moments, they are not exactly portraits, or figure studies either. They exist interstitially. A quiet intimacy and muted staging share the proscenium, as friends, acquaintances, and strangers pause and proceed through the mostly nocturnal tableaux. Allen’s photographs are unique in their elegant understatement, they observe without judgment, are melancholy but not sentimental, smolder without clamor.
Frame went from performing to directing and writing, adapting monologues by David Wojnarowicz with his friend Kirsten Bates for a theater production in Bill Rice’s backyard garden on East 3rd Street. He wrote about experimental theater in London for two years while directing a play he co-wrote with Bertie Marshall. Coming back to New York in 1987, he returned to photography and started teaching in 1992. His first monograph, Detour, black and white work from the 1990s, was published in 2001.
Like photographers from his own generation, such as Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Philip-Lorca Di Corcia, his vision is highly cinematic, but in his case, the framing and mise en scène have also been influenced by theater. As Nan Goldin wrote about Frame for a show at Galerie Polaris in Paris in 1990:
He does the improbable by using the medium of the still image to sustain a non-linear narrative, a narrative not explicated but implied. He doesn’t define his relationships with his friends—his subjects—as a series of seized moments of frozen time but as a flow of shared experiences, interactions, and emotions. Through his pictures we experience the open-ended nature of each moment, all that went before and will come after, the tension of the revelation of things not yet realized.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer brings a trove of newly identified photographs by the groundbreaking artist to Colorado in summer 2022 in an exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) with the collaboration of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe. The presentation reveals a new aspect of the modernist artist’s career through nearly 100 photographs, as well as several paintings, drawings, and related ephemera.
O’Keeffe's artistry has inspired volumes of scholarly analysis, exhibitions, and portraiture. This exhibition finally sheds light on her work as a photographer. O’Keeffe focused on her mastery of painting for decades, but also was very fond of expressing her unique perspective through other mediums, such as photography. Her creative identity and singular artistry were well established by the time she focused on her photography in the mid-1950s, showing the artist’s ongoing fascination with the cycles and transformations of nature.
The exhibition is organized by the key tenets of O’Keeffe’s photography: reframing, the rendering of light, and seasonal change, revealing the ways she used photography as part of her unique and encompassing artistic vision. The presentation is the culmination of three years of research and analysis by Lisa Volpe, Curator of Photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Volpe visited numerous collections to examine more than 400 works and identify the corresponding photographs by O’Keeffe.
Art on Hulfish, the Art Museum’s new gallery at 11 Hulfish Street in downtown Princeton, will showcase a roster of exhibitions led by photography that consider questions and themes of significance to 21st-century life. In addition to presenting four exhibitions each year through late 2024, Art on Hulfish will host a rich schedule of related programming—including University discussion group meetings, hands-on learning opportunities, and drop-in activities.
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. . . . All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” --Susan Sontag, On Photography
When the writer and philosopher Susan Sontag refers to a photograph’s capacity to freeze a moment in a person’s life and simultaneously document time’s unrelenting movement, she explores ideas that can also apply to the strange experience of time during the COVID-19 pandemic—when most of us faced disrupted daily routines, an upended view of the future, and a rupture in the sense of time’s passage as a reliable means by which to mark a life. Time’s Relentless Melt presents photographic and time-based works that grapple with time as multifaceted—linear, cyclical, disjointed, or compressed—and explore the tension between transience and permanence, between recording and remembering. Works on view include Katie Paterson’s visualizations of cosmological time, Andy Goldsworthy’s performances with nature, and Dawoud’s Bey’s commemorations of lives lost.
"When I was six, I planned to be just like Evel Knievel. Naively, I couldn’t understand the consequences of my choice. Imagining myself in his striking leathers, I raced my bike down a hill like a kamikaze on a mission for the sake of a stunt. At the bottom of the hill, with too much speed, I crashed, tumbled hard across the gravel, laid there unconscious—my prize was spending four days in the hospital with a fractured skull. Injury aside, I gained bragging rights. In the 1970s, Evel Knievel was the daredevil—steadfast, virile, courageous, and determined. Knievel’s illustrated legend captivated an audience. Clad in red, white and blue, he embodied the fantasy of soaring over obstacles—even if the landing wasn’t pretty.
Color Me Lucky is inspired by Evel Knievel’s swagger. It explores desire, sexuality, masculinity, image, and risk. It’s about the momentum that carries you forward, even when you know there’s a train wreck ahead. My work about this popular daredevil opens up a conversation about what attracts a woman or man to act on or witness risky behavior for the sake of a thrill. In these images, Knievel is the metaphor to decipher if we all have a bit of Evel in us." --Alexis Pike
Alexis Pike is a sixth generation Idahoan calling on the geography of her genes while focusing on the mythologies of the American West. Pike received her BFA from Boise State University and her MFA from the University of Iowa. She’s been a Top 50 finalist for Critical Mass and has exhibited widely, at venues including Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Sun Valley Museum of Art, Missoula Art Museum, Photoville, Guate Photo Festival, Aperture Foundation and the Bienal de Curitiba in Brazil. Her work’s been featured in Photo District News, Harper’s, LensCulture, and Wired.com and has two monographs—Color Me Lucky published by Aint-Bad in 2019 and Claimed: Landscape published by Blue Sky Books in 2014. She lives in Bozeman, Montana and is a Professor of Photography and Interim Director of the School of Film & Photography at Montana State University.
Culver Center of the Arts
Image: Alexis Pike, from the series Color Me Lucky. Courtesy of the artist.
One of the great pleasures of running an art gallery is developing invaluable relationships with the artists. Through time, we learn so much about their lives, their families, politics, desires and philosophy.
This exhibition highlights the careers of three PDNB artists that passed away within the past nine months. We pay tribute to the art they created and their everlasting friendship.
Jesse Alexander, 1929 - 2021, b. Santa Barbara, California
Paul Greenberg, 1935 - 2022, b. Kansas City, Missouri
Jeffrey Silverthorne, 1946 - 2022, b. Honolulu, Hawaii
We remember Jesse Alexander's motor sport photographs from the great races in Europe during the 1950's and 60's. He photographed the sexy, fast cars, the handsome drivers speeding dangerously along the winding roads in numerous races including Monte Carlo, Le Mans, and Nürburgring. This was an exceptional era that Jesse witnessed and captured on film. The resulting images are some of the most notable in the history of motorsport culture. Since 2001 we have represented Jesse's work. He was a kind man with a great smile that had many stories to tell of great photographers he met like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams, and the great drivers in the racing world including Phil Hill, Jim Clark, Juan Fangio, and Jackie Stewart. There are many sought after books of Jesse's work, and his remarkable photographs are collected world-wide.
Paul Greenberg was a medical internist and a photographer who lived in Dallas, Texas. Since Paul was allowed to convert a closet into a darkroom as a child, he has been actively involved in photography. His collection of photography books and photographs grew, as well as his career in photography. Paul was fortunate to travel to many countries: Russia, China, India, and more. But his favorite place to travel was New York City, a street photographer's muse. There he captured his iconic image, Post No Dreams. Paul understood the history of photography from collecting photographs by the great masters like André Kertész, Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank. He attended multiple photography workshops, museum and gallery exhibitions and was a regular at FotoFest Biennials. Paul created many wonderful series: Street Corners, Museum Guards, Waitresses, and Immigrant business owners, to name a few. Paul was never idle, always thinking of his next photography series, printing in his darkroom, playing tennis, traveling, dining with family and friends, and celebrating life.
Jeffrey Silverthorne was the consummate artist. We were familiar with his significant 1973 Morgue series when we first met in 1998. His subjects were people mostly, the locations included carnivals, Boystown, the Texas border, and bullrings. Allegories and street photography were also his practice. What he saw was not easy to look at. Jeffrey's investigation of various cultures, the seeking of joy...only disrupted, and even the final expression of death has resulted in some of the most powerful images in the history of photography.
We are thankful to have worked with these artists. Each of them have been important to the gallery's history and to those that have been profoundly affected by their images.
Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Nick Brandt's most recent body of work, The Day May Break (2020-ongoing). Made in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Bolivia, this show includes work from the first two chapters of a global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction.
The series shows people and animals, photographed together in the same frame, who have been affected by rapid changes to their environments and ways of life. Each of Brandt's works, titled with the names of the people and animals pictured, attests to the shared challenges the 21st century bears on the world's most vulnerable. As Brandt has written, "The fog in the photos is symbolic of the natural world that we once knew rapidly disappearing from view. The animals and humans are photographed together in this fog, in the same frame, because simply, we are all denizens of the same home: our actually very small planet."
Of the people and animals portrayed in this series, Brandt writes, "In spite of their losses, they are survivors. And... in this survival through such extreme hardships — there lies possibilities and hope."
Explore facets of American history through the photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston and Keris Salmon, two artists working nearly a century apart, who captured enduring images of Southern architecture.
One of America’s first female photojournalists, Johnston documented early American architecture in the South in the 1930s. Although she captured elegiac views of stately manors and crumbling interiors, Johnston was equally intent on recording vernacular structures, including cabins, barns, taverns, mills, and dwellings built by and for enslaved people.
In 1936, VMFA purchased and exhibited more than 150 photographs by Johnston and they remain a treasured part of the collection. Last year, the museum acquired Keris Salmon’s series To Have and To Hold, photographs of former plantations and homes of slave-owning individuals in the United States and Caribbean islands. Salmon explores and imagines the lives of both the enslaved and enslavers by juxtaposing quiet, luminous views of interior and exterior scenes with texts she culled from a variety of archival sources, including ledgers, diaries, legal documents, accounting logs, interviews, and slave auction records.
This exhibition is curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center.
In conjunction with Michael Joseph’s September 21st presentation as part of the , we are pleased to present an exhibition of his work at fp3 Gallery in Fort Point Boston. Lost and Found is a portrait series featuring youth who travel around the U.S. by hitchhiking and freight train hopping. They often go unseen and are their appearances can be misconstrued. Joseph sees them as being on a personal journey driven by wanderlust and escapism. Each traveler’s story is different, but they are bound by a sense of community and as they search for transient jobs they also discover a new family in their traveling friends. The images are photographed on public streets using natural light.
In Joseph’s own words, “Like graffiti on the walls of the city streets they inhabit and the trains they ride, their bodies and faces become the visual storybook of their lives. Tattoos are often given to one another by stick and poke – a method of using a pin or needle with India ink to inscribe a memory from their travels. Their clothing is often a mismatch of found items. Jackets, pants and vests are self-made like a patchwork quilt, using fabric pieces of a fellow traveler’s clothing embellished by metal bottle caps, buttons, safety pins, lighter parts, syringe caps, and patches. The high of freedom however, does not come without consequence. Their lifestyle is physically risky and rampant with substance abuse.”
Inspiring images from four internationally acclaimed artistic photographers will be on display at Michael Frey’s FAS44 gallery, offering a rare opportunity to experience the mystique and allure of Paris just off the Las Vegas Strip.
Presented by Frey and Michael Hulett of The Hulett Collection, the “Fall into Paris” exhibition will showcase the masterful works of esteemed photographers Louis Stettner, René Grobli, Alain Laboile and Kit Young.
“This show features stunning black-and-white photography that evokes all your memories and vivid emotions from the first time you visited Paris,” said Frey, an avid collector of fine art photography for more than 30 years.
“These works allow you to smell the coffee and the croissants, marvel at the wide boulevards and the fashionable women in stylish skirts and Hermes scarves. They capture all the style and elegance of Paris, and you’ll be able to enjoy it right here in Las Vegas. I like to refer to it as ‘Fall into Paris … and fall in love.’ ”
Obscura Gallery is excited to present the solo exhibition, My America, by fine art portrait photographer Rashod Taylor. The exhibition includes his two poignant and sensitive projects, Little Black Boy and My America. Through “wet” darkroom printing methods including the 19th Century wet-plate collodion process, as well as the enlarging process on traditional gelatin silver paper, the artist uses portraiture to express themes of family, culture, legacy, and the black experience.
The intimate portrait series Little Black Boy centers on Rashod Taylor’s son, LJ, examining from the photographer’s own perspective both LJ’s childhood and the world he navigates. Taylor’s images reflect his unspoken anxiety over his son’s well-being and his own fatherhood.
Like many first-time fathers, Rashod Taylor began taking photographs of his son, LJ, when he was born. Eventually, though, he began to think there might be more to the photographs than family snapshots, and he began gently choreographing his (mostly) cooperative son in images that lovingly portray mundane moments from his life. The photographs, which sometimes include Taylor himself or his wife, are tender, intimate images of a Black family raising a Black boy in the United States. – excerpt from Photograph Magazine interview in May 2022 with Rashod Taylor by Jean Dykstra.
“At times I worry if he will be ok as he goes to school or as he plays outside with friends as children do. These feelings are enhanced due to the realities of growing up black in America. He can’t live a carefree childhood as he deserves; there is a weight that comes with his blackness, a weight that he is not ready to bear. It’s my job to bear this weight as I am accustomed to the sorrows and responsibility it brings- the weight of injustice, prejudices, and racism that has been interwoven in our society and institutional systems for hundreds of years. I help him through this journey of childhood as I hope one day this weight will be lifted.” – Rashod Taylor
"It's one of those things that while I am a very proud American and glad I live in this great country," Taylor said in a CNN interview on June 17, 2022, "but at the same time, it's almost like a daily struggle because you live in a place where people with black and brown skin are still not treated with the respect and dignity that they deserve."
Rashod’s series, My America, is an examination of what it's like to live in America as a Black man shown through the process of wet-plate collodion tintypes. He says of the process, “The wetplate collodion process dates back to the decade just before the start and end of the Civil War. I use this process to connect the past to the present, and to explore the atrocities of slavery, Jim Crow and the institutional and systematic racism that remains so tightly woven into the fabric of American society. The American Dream is founded on the idea that equality of opportunity is accessible to all people, but it is a dream which continues to be out of reach for a majority of Black Americans. By capturing the Black America that I live every day, I hope to shed light on what people unfamiliar with Black lives either don’t want to see, or refuse to acknowledge.”
Rashod Taylor attended Murray State University, receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Art with a specialization in Fine Art Photography. Taylor has since exhibited and published not only nationally, but also internationally. Most recently, his Little Black Boy series was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and received the 2021 Arnold Newman Prize For New Directions in Photographic Portraiture. In addition, he was also a 2020 Critical Mass Top 50 Finalist, winner of Lens Culture’s Critics Choice award and a 2021 Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Awards winner. Taylor’s editorial clients include National Geographic, The Atlantic, Essence Magazine and Buzzfeed News, among others. His work has also been included in CNN, Photograph Magazine, Feature Shoot and Lenscratch among others. Rashod Taylor lives in Springfield, MO, with his wife and son.
Galerie XII Los Angeles is pleased to host the new exhibition of Norwegian artist Anja Niemi. The exhibition will present her most recent bodies of work: The Blow: At first glance, The BLOW shows an unaccompanied woman, dressed in black and with a face that is always turned, driving to a solitary house in the desert. Here she trades her clothes for that of a boxer. The boxing paraphernalia builds upon the idea that each photograph is a site of mental training and introspective battle.
In The RIDER, Anja Niemi expresses her struggle in the form of a rider and her horse. The trust and the will to understand each other are essential to their mutual bond. Together they are on an open-ended journey that requires perseverance and the suspension of fear.
Higher Pictures Generation is pleased to present Má by Tommy Kha. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Má—the Southern Vietnamese term for “mom”—is an ongoing, decade-long collaboration between the artist and his mother, May. Their mother-son dynamic is both affectionate and antagonistic; while co-creating these photographs on view May cooks for Tommy and helps him pose which results in what Kha considers partial self-portraits. Kha’s work is characterized by his signature sense of humor—an unexpected combination of deadpan and camp—that he uses to explore ideas around dislocation and alienation as well as home, family, and love.
Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, TN) is a photographer currently working between Brooklyn, New York and Memphis, Tennessee. Kha holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University. His first major publication will be released by Aperture early next year. He is a recipient of the Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, and most recently was named an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography Fellow. Kha’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Aperture, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.
The Hulett Collection is proud to present iconic music images including everything from The Rat Pack to Sex Pistols, Queen, Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan amongst many others. The Gallery's preeminent collection includes work from such artists as Roberta Bayley, Andrew Kent, Lisa Law, Graham Nash, Terry O'Neill, Neal Preston and more. These artists were initiators of a movement and have captured the culture that was and is rock and roll.
Music is a reflection of our culture and our place in time. It is the adhesive that draws us together and propels us forward towards shared aspirations. This undeniably emotional collection of photographs contains images that appeal to viewers of all ages and musical appetites. The photographs will set aside commonplace notions while showcasing the tremendous influence of both the photographers and their subjects.
In his practice, Rafael Soldi examines how queerness and masculinity intersect with immigration, memory, and loss. The artist writes, “I stem from a family of immigrants and my identity has always felt transient, as if built from a collective memory. I was aware of my queerness in an abstract sense from an early age, and this difference added another layer that I never felt empowered to assert. As is often for queer people, I felt my identity existed in a slightly different dimension than everyone else’s. Growing up in Perú, I knew that whatever society expected of me as a man, I was destined to disappoint.” Soldi’s photographs are at once powerful and intimate; they reflect deep retrospection by the artist, a process navigated by many, especially when one experiences displacement and feels neither rooted in one place or another but exists in the spaces in-between.
Soldi uses various methods to create works including the nineteenth-century technique of photogravure and the contemporary photobooth. This exhibition includes works from three interconnected series, Imagined Futures, Entre Hermanos, and Cargamontón. The thirty-six self-portraits that comprise Imagined Futures re-imagine the photobooth experience. Instead of making hyperbolic or silly poses for the camera, Soldi appears with his eyes closed. For the artist, the photobooth evokes a Catholic confessional and offers a nuanced space for reflection, and ultimately a mechanism for bidding farewell to his previous ideas about the future. Related to this series, Entre Hermanos, turns the camera toward queer male-identifying Latinx immigrants. The subjects, with their eyes closed, are sensitively portrayed as the portraits challenge traditional ideas of masculinity. Cargamontón mines vernacular video archives that mirror the artist’s experience in an all-boys Catholic school in Lima, Perú where horseplay was common and acceptance of difference was not always felt. Each series offers deeply personal ruminations on identity while simultaneously presenting universal yet complex implications of fragility, struggle, and resilience.
Born in Perú, Soldi lives and works in Seattle, Washington. This presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum. The Frost Art Museum FIU presents Rafael Soldi: A body in transit to complement FIU’s Common Reading Program and First Year Experience courses. This year, FIU’s entering class and other new students read App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman.
This exhibition celebrates various ways that femme performance is depicted in photography. The subjects of these photos embrace femme as an aspect of their self-representation across genders, queer orientations, races, ethnicities, and time. The exhibition includes photography by Laura Aguilar, Andy Warhol, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, and others. The joyous approach of Femme Is Fierce affirms that femme is not a display of fragility, but a performance of a person's right to use gender signifiers deemed feminine to their own ends, and to radically state that strength is not only found in the masculine.
Organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, and generously supported by the Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund.
Sheldon presents recently acquired works by Kelli Connell from her ongoing series Double Life. Since 2002, Connell has explored the subjects of gender, intimacy, and aging through invented documentation of a couple’s quiet, personal moments. Each work is a carefully constructed image in which both partners are played by the same model. Using Photoshop software, Connell seamlessly stitches multiple images together to assemble single scenes that cause attentive viewers to question what they’re actually seeing. Connell describes Double Life as “constructed realities that, through their fictions, reveal inner truths.”
A visual artist in different domains for over twenty-five
years, Soren has long explored the intersection of
psychology, culture, politics, and the body. A former
reporter for MTV News, ABC News, and NBC News,
Soren begins each new series using the methodical
investigative tools she used during her time in
journalism. Books, research studies, and statistics lay
a necessary analytical foundation for the visual ideas
she communicates. These data points then merge with
her experiences growing up in a military family,
spending her youth moving around the world and
adjusting to the cultural differences, social structures,
and visual cues that came with each relocation.
A through-line connects the three bodies of work in Jackson Fine Art’s show, evoking the universal
paranoia and contemplation of our historical moment. In Running, the earliest of the exhibited series,
Soren photographs archetypal figures ambiguously captured in the act of arrival or flight, often in desolate
urban landscapes. Though the series ended in 2014, their isolation recalls the quiet dread of the early
days of the pandemic and presages an uncertain future.
For Surface Tension, which she began in 2014, Soren shines raking light on a dirty iPad screen,
capturing and reimagining the found images underneath with her 8x10 film camera. The resulting body of
work, titled with source file names and urls, investigates modern technological mediation, the collision of
our human bodies with what Jia Tolentino calls in The New Yorker the “cold and infinite knowledge of the
world.” In addition to the exhibition at Jackson Fine Art, Surface Tension has received widespread
attention in the press and by museums and is currently on view in four museum exhibitions
internationally. A monograph (Surface Tension) was published by RVB Books in September of 2021.
Finally, Relief — on view exclusively for the first time — returns to an interest in the overtly tactile, a
reaction to the all-encompassing submersion into the digital that Surface Tension required of the artist
(and viewer). Soren manipulates beautiful landscapes and formal portraits by cutting, bending, burning,
In African Studies, Burtynsky reflects on landscapes undergoing rapid industrial and manufacturing expansion. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, his images present environments shaped by processes of resource extraction, from the salt pans of Senegal to the ‘residual landscapes’ of mechanized extraction. Images of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam reflect an ongoing enquiry into the global theme of water and its related environmental and geo-political impacts.
Alongside industrialised landscapes, Burtynsky presents images of the pristine natural environment as a reminder of its fragility and finitude and the unaltered ecosystem of the Rift Valley in northern Kenya. Photographed predominantly from aerial viewpoints, Burtynsky’s works often have a flattened frontal aspect, transforming the image into sumptuously graduating colour fields or vigorous grid-like compositions, strikingly reminiscent of Modernist abstraction. Presented at a large scale, and with compelling detail, their painterly surfaces and gestural marks reveal the coalescing designs of both nature and human infrastructure. Burtynsky’s perpetual search for abstraction within the landscape navigates a fine balance between form and content. He describes this dualistic approach as “keeping two doors open” for the viewer to enter the work — leading an enquiry into the expansive subject matter, while exploring the image as a mode of intuitive sensory expression.
Born in Munich, Germany, Christian Voigt lives and works in Hamburg and the South of France. He works with large-format cameras, both digital and analog, experimenting with new camera techniques to make the best use of the digital medium. His large-format photographs can measure as much as eight meters in width.
Voigt records the repositories of history, such as museums, national libraries, architectural & historic monuments, as well as, landscapes and nudes. He has developed a visual language capable of telling new stories, or perhaps recounting a tale with new eyes. Libraries, much like museums, are avenues to establish positive change and promote community by giving the public access to valuable resources and information. Voigt, in particular, makes the viewer feel as though they can be anywhere and everywhere within these spaces at once. He continually works to refine a pictorial idiom unveiling the tale that wants to be told. The inner and outer journeys in his aim to capture the narrative calls for deep concentration and the ability to come face to face with people, their histories, cultures and religions. In short, Voigt records a treasury of the inventiveness and imagination of human evolution.
SPACES is Christian Voigt’s debut exhibition in Chicago. Solo shows and art fairs have been staged in Basel, Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, Saint Tropez, Amsterdam, Madrid.
In North by Nuuk, photographer Denis Defibaugh presents his journey from Nuuk to the settlement of Illorsuit, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, following Rockwell Kent’s earlier footsteps and offers a fresh look at timeless Greenland. Defibaugh’s revealing documentary photographs, made during 2016-17, introduce a changing country and its cultural continuity in response to Kent’s 1930s historic writings and images made during his residence in Greenland. Gallery text and video include native language speakers as well as Kent’s lantern slides.
The exhibition is supplemented with etchings and prints from Rockwell Kent’s Greenland sojourn, on loan from the University of Plattsburgh, and artwork from the Thaw Collection of American Indian Art.
Sponsored in part by Nellie and Robert Gipson.
In his essay for the gallery guide, Steven Hoelscher, Departments of American Studies and Geography, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, writes, “This exhibition offers an enticing window into Elliott Erwitt’s oeuvre. It showcases the impressive results of a remarkable career that coincides with two of the most significant developments in photography in the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of mass-circulation picture magazines; and the occasionally contentious relationship between personal work and commercial photography.”
This exhibition shows both the miracle of Erwitt’s balance between commercial and personal photography, and the memorable flavor that he brings to his work.
The exhibition was organized by Photographic Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA.
Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside, the first retrospective of the artist’s work, which transcends the boundaries of both art and science, will be presented by the Addison Gallery of American Art in September 2022. The exhibition will feature over 150 of the artist’s haunting photographs, assemblages, collages, and installations spanning Purcell’s career from the late 1960s to the present day.
Throughout her more than 50-year practice, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, literary scholars, historians, museum curators, and erudite magicians, and has drawn inspiration from iconoclastic sources, from a 13-acre junkyard in Maine to natural history museum collections from around the world. A pioneer of fine art color photography and an inspiration to a generation of artists from Mark Dion to Sally Mann, Purcell probes the actions of time and decay as elemental to the natural world and the human condition.
Among the works in the exhibition are Purcell’s lesser-known early portraits and radically experimental Polaroid prints from the 1970s and 80s, as well as her photographs of preserved animals in museums’ collections, fossils, eggs, nests, specimens from medical museums, and forgotten human belongings, in addition to mixed media collages and constructions, including Wall, a 20-foot-long installation composed of naturally patinated scrap metal and other objects rescued from obscurity.
“This retrospective is a long overdue examination of Purcell’s work, which reveals the connections between the unsettling and the sublime, the beautiful and the bizarre, the natural and the manufactured,” said Allison Kemmerer, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. “The Addison has long presented and championed photography, and Purcell’s experimental Polaroid work in the 1970s was instrumental in the recognition of color photography as fine art. But just as her work straddles the intersection of art and science, Purcell herself defies any simple categorization.”
“Purcell’s six decades of work, while brilliantly varied and resistant to easy classification, speak eloquently to her persistent interrogation of the ways in which we attempt to understand the world around us, exposing how the barriers of logic and reason that we erect to make order out of chaos are porous and unreliable,” said Gordon Wilkins, the Addison’s Robert M. Walker Associate Curator of American Art and curator of the exhibition. “While Purcell is sui generis, her photography, scholarship, installations, trailblazing institutional collaborations, and writing have inspired a generation of artists. Now, in the year she turns 80, we will bring the full sweep of her works together for the first time, underscoring her enduring impact as an artist and a thinker.”
Purcell grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and after graduating from Boston University began her career as a teacher before she began experimenting with photography when she received her first Polaroid camera in the late 1960s. In the early 1980s, she began creating the work for which she is best known, images of natural history specimens stored deep, oftentimes, in the bowels of scientific museums and research institutions around the world. Purcell was the subject of the 2016 documentary film An Art That Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell by Molly Bernstein.
Purcell’s books include: Book Nest, Illuminations: A Bestiary, A Glorious Enterprise: The Museum of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, which documents Purcell’s 20-year exploration of a multi-acre Maine junkyard. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe and is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.; the V&A in London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Canada, and other institutions.
Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside is on view from September 1 through December 31 and is curated by Gordon Wilkins. A full-color catalogue published in collaboration with Rizzoli Electa will accompany this exhibition with texts by Mark Dion, Christoph Irmscher, Errol Morris, Rosamond Purcell, Belinda Rathbone, and Gordon Wilkins. Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Artist's Resource Trust.
Photography gave me happiness. I am not an artist. I am an artisan. I don’t create anything... I am just a witness of what I see and what interests me, which has always been human beings. - Sabine WeissSabine Weiss (July 23, 1924 - Dec. 28, 2022) is universally recognized as a member of France's celebrated
humanist school. In the first West Coast exhibition, Peter Fetterman Gallery shares the dynamic body of
work of this incredible female artist who passed away in December 2021. Weiss's retrospective exhibition at
the Tre Oci, Italy is currently on view until October 23rd , 2022. Exhibition catalogue will be available for
purchase at the gallery.
Sabine Weiss was born in Switzerland in 1924. In 1942, she wondered what to do with her life, and decided
to pursue a career in what she loves: photography. Weiss' mother showed her art galleries and Roman
churches at a very young age, and her researcher-chemist father loved to see her print her photos with the
resources available at the time. From 1942 until 1945 she was an apprentice at Boissonnas in Geneva,
house of a dynasty of photographers that celebrated its 80th birthday.
In 1945, Sabine Weiss moved to a studio in Geneva, but in 1946 she decided to leave her childhood city to live in Paris. She knew there was no turning back. There she asked Willy Maywald to become her assistant.,
and in 1949, she met the painter Hugh Weiss and realized right away that she would spend her life with
him. Sabine Weiss began to truly master her craft and started her long career, experimenting fashion,
photojournalism, advertising and everything in between.
During her free time she liked to immortalize the depths of man in all simplicity. Her photographs moved
Edward Steichen when preparing his major exhibition "The Family of Man" and he decided to present three
of her images. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Newsweek, LIFE, Vogue, Elle, and took
commissions from large institutions, most notably NATO. Although she contributed to many
publications, Weiss's street photography was never staged. ''All the pictures I take are entirely instant,'' she
says. ''What I like is to make an instant picture. Even if there are no people, I like the click, click, click. I never
wait.''
In recent years, Sabine Weiss dedicated her time to exhibitions that showcased the humanist side of her
work, believing it was the most important aspect of her oeuvre. Weiss was the last living member of
Photography's French humanist movement, she passed away in December 2021, at the age of 97 at her
residence in Paris.
Peter Fetterman Gallery is proud to announce the inaugural exhibition of acclaimed photographer and filmmaker,
Roger A. Deakins. The exhibition is slated to open to the public September 17th , 2022 and run through the end of the
year. The opening reception will also include a book signing featuring Deakins's book, Byways, published by Damiani
Publishers in September 2021 and has since been reprinted 5 times. Works on display will include photographs
featured in Byways, as well as new, never-before seen photographs. Signed copies of Byways will also be available for
purchase and pre-order at the gallery.
Roger A. Deakins was born and raised in Devon. He studied Graphic Design at the Bath College of Art and before
continuing on to the National Film School, he spent time shooting still photographs for North Devon, with the intent
of capturing the disappearing rural farm life. Here he developed his love of still photography.
Throughout his career still photography has remained one of Deakins few hobbies although it is more often an excuse
for him to spend hours just walking, his camera over his shoulder, with no purpose but to observe. In his monograph,
Byways, one finds a wide range of images. There are the images that document a vanished postwar Britain, as well as
a collection of photos that express his love of the seaside and finally frames from around the world, caught while
traveling for his cinematic work. Throughout them all, his sense of irony shows clearly.
Known widely for his film works, Roger has been nominated 15 times for an Academy Award and won twice for the
movies BLADERUNNER 2049 and 1917. He has also been nominated 16 times for the top award of the American
Society of Cinematographers, 10 times for the BAFTA award and 11 times for the British Society of Cinematographers.
He has also been awarded Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Society of Cinematographers, the British
Society of Cinematographers and the National Board of Review. He is also the only cinematographer to have been
awarded the honour of CBE in 2013 as well as receiving the honour of knighthood in 2021.
In 2021, in addition to publishing a book, he and his longtime collaborator James Ellis Deakins created an
immensely successful podcast, Team Deakins, on the subject of filmmaking.
The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) invites you to the opening reception for the exhibition Of Objects and Shadows/ De Objetos y Sombras tomorrow from 5:00 - 7:00 pm. This event will take place at CPW's gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY.
Celebrating the beginning of Latinx Heritage Month in the United States, The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is pleased to present Of Objects and Shadows/ De Objetos y Sombras, a group exhibition of Latinx artists living and working upstate, including recent and former participants of the CPW artist-in-residence program. Curated by Qiana Mestrich, the exhibition will be on view at CPW, 474 Broadway, Kingston, from September 17th through December 31, 2022.
The artists featured in this exhibition are Genesis Baez (Puerto Rico/USA), Nydia Blas (Panama/USA), William Camargo (Mexico/USA), Steven Molina Contreras (El Salvador), Zoraida Lopez-Diago (Panama/USA), and Qiana Mestrich (Panama/USA).
Of Objects and Shadows/De Objetos y Sombras highlights an important group of emerging Latinx artists, and considers the political, spiritual, and cultural allusions in their photographic depictions of objects and (their) shadows. Pushing beyond stylistic experimentations with light and shadow, these artists use symbolic personal belongings and disobedient objects to elucidate aspects of Latinx culture and the lived experiences of their families, their ancestors, and themselves.
“The viewer...should enter my work through their own eyes, and their own lives,” the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has said. An incisive observer and a creator of dazzling pictures, Tillmans has experimented for over three decades with what it means to engage the world through photography. Presenting the full breadth and depth of the artist’s career, Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear invites us to experience the artist’s vision of what it feels like to live today.
From ecstatic images of nightlife to abstract images made without a camera, sensitive portraits to architectural slide projections, documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, Tillmans has explored seemingly every imaginable genre of photography, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures. He considers the role of the artist to be that of “an amplifier” of social and political causes, and his approach is animated by a concern with the possibilities of forging connections and the idea of togetherness.
Tillmans has rejected the prevailing conventions of photographic presentation, continuously developing connections between his pictures and the social space of the exhibition. In his installations, unframed prints are taped to the walls or clipped and hung from pins, and framed photographs appear alongside magazine pages. Constellations of images are grouped on walls and tabletops as photocopies, color or black-and-white photographs, and video projections, exemplifying the artist’s idea of visual democracy in action. “I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment,” Tillmans has said. “They’re also always a world that I want to live in.”
Photography is often thought to truthfully depict what is put in front of the camera. But each choice that a photographer makes— subject, angle, framing—and the context in which we see the work affect our understanding of the image, the medium of photography, and the world around us.
The works presented in Perspectives showcase different ways that photographers see, depict, or manipulate the concept of space. All of the works are recent gifts to the George Eastman Museum collection, which the museum actively expands through donations and purchases. The exhibition is presented in the museum's Project Gallery, with select photographs on view in the Potter Peristyle.
Thomas Ruff’s photographs of white tile-clad bathrooms (2000) are studies in form as well as portrayals of emptiness, as the seemingly clean spaces yield to well-worn surfaces devoid of the people who inhabit them. JoAnn Verburg’s study of a tree at Artpark in Lewiston, New York (1990) subverts our ability to understand the very subject she is portraying because it has been replaced by a photographic replica. Andrew Moore’s War of 1812 Mural, Building 125, Governors Island, New York (2003) is, on its face, a study of a Works Progress Administration mural honoring the island’s military history, but his framing plays with the viewer’s understanding of foreground and background. Anne Collier’s work Crying (2005) completely flattens the photographic plane, making conceptual art from a stack of record albums leaned against a wall. Similarly, what appears to be a photograph of the remains of a party is actually a highly composed still-life by Laura Letinsky that belies the veracity that is often assumed of photography. Finally, Tamas Dezsö’s direct depiction The Flooded Village of Geamăna (2011) documents what is now known to be an environmental catastrophe after the remote Romanian village was flooded with toxic mud and water runoff from a nearby copper mine.
Taken together, the works in this exhibition show how contemporary artists continue to explore our understanding of diverse spaces through photographed (mis)representations or constructions.
Widely recognized as one of the most important American artists of her generation, Cindy Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice and opened the door for generations of artists and critics to rethink photography as a medium.
Explore a curated selection of Cindy Sherman’s most powerful and enigmatic bodies of work in her first major solo exhibition with the gallery on view at 69th street.
Untitled Film Stills (1977 – 1980)
This iconic series of eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs was originally conceived as a group of imaginary film stills from a single actress’s career. Inspired by 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films, Sherman’s plethora of invented characters and scenarios imitated the style of production shots used by movie studios to publicize their films. The images are evocative of certain character types and genres, but always intentionally ambiguous, leaving room for the viewer to insert themselves into the work and walk away with their own interpretations.
Rear Screen Projections (1980)
In 1980, Sherman stopped making the Untitled Film Stills and began working in color. She continued to use herself as a model, transforming her appearance with various costumes, makeup, and wigs, leaving the narrative of her scenes deliberately vague. However, instead of making use of existing light and locations, Sherman brought her work back into the controlled environment of her studio, posing in front of locations projected onto a large screen – a technique made famous in several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films – to create the series now known as the Rear Screen Projections. Unlike the Untitled Film Stills, with their artificial narratives set in real locations, this series presents women no longer bound by their physical surroundings.
Centerfolds (1981)
Continuing her exploration of the tension between artifice and identity in consumer culture, in 1981 Sherman responded to a commission from Artforum magazine, with a series of images which clearly referenced erotic images commonly found in the middle of men’s magazines at the time. The photographs were ultimately never published by the magazine for fear of public backlash and instead became a critically acclaimed series of 12 large-scale horizontal color works known as the Centerfolds. Designed to make viewers uncomfortable, the series continues to challenge expectations surrounding this type of photograph, drawing attention to the way we consume images – especially of women.
Color Studies (1981 – 1982)
This series derives its name from the artist’s focused interest in the formal challenges of composition and color, forgoing the invention of character, expressed by the ways in which the subject seems to disappear into the background. Many critics and writers have interpreted these works as showing the ‘real’ Cindy Sherman but, in-keeping with her other series, they are a complete fabrication. The tight framing, the truncated figure and strongly contrasting light as the figures are simultaneously obscured and revealed by shadow and light, are all part of this artifice.
This exhibition is the first large-scale survey of the Do Good Fund’s remarkable and sweeping collection of photography made in the South from the 1950s to the present. Since its founding in 2012, the Do Good Fund has built a museum-quality collection of photography that charts a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South. The collection includes images by more than 25 Guggenheim Fellows, five Magnum Photographers and two Henri Cartier-Bresson Award winners as well as images by lesser-known or emerging photographers from the region. In part a survey of the art and artists within Do Good’s holdings, the exhibition is also and more crucially a scholarly investigation of southern photography since World War II.
Highlighting a wide-ranging group of photographers — diverse in gender, race, ethnicity and region — the exhibition will feature 125 photographs by 73 artists. It unfolds within six sections that examine each of the project’s core themes: land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual and kinship. These themes are inherently expansive and internally paradoxical. Within this thematic structure, the project raises key questions that identify and problematize fixed ideas of an “American South” and “southern photography.” How do photographs navigate the interface between nature and culture in the South, as well as the ravages of extraction, settlement and sprawl? How do photographers string together histories of quotidian labor, creativity and caretaking and the region’s painful histories of enslaved and incarcerated labor? How have photographs captured the performance of southern community and identity through civic and religious rituals? How has the medium signaled exclusion and estrangement, yet also belonging and kinship in the American South?
These six themes link disparate works in the fund’s collection and capture southern history, culture and identity in all their complexity and contradictions. Through the installation, where clusters of objects variously construct and deconstruct each thematic category, the exhibition reckons with southern-ness as a coherent category. In so doing, it resists notions of the South as a retrograde region and instead presents the enigmatic, “ever-changing” qualities of the place and its people: a region where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and indignity and dignity commingle; a place seeking reconciliation and restoration, captured by photographers with an ethical vision for a “Better South.”
“Reckonings and Reconstructions” will be accompanied by the first comprehensive catalogue of the Do Good Fund’s photographic holdings, co-published with the University of Georgia Press. The project will also consider the role of Athens, Georgia — with its vibrant community of photographers, renowned photography program at the University of Georgia and celebrated alternative art and music scene — within the history of southern photography.
"I miss my water
I keep missing my water
I keep missing my water
And I want my water
I need my water
I love my water
And I want my water"
– Otis Redding, “You Don’t Miss Your Water”
I Keep Missing My Water is a newly commissioned exhibition by photographer Naima Green that continues the artist’s ongoing investment in documenting intimacy within Black and queer communities. At the center of this exhibition are photographs taken on and around multiple bodies of water across the US, in Virginia, California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. The water functions as a metaphor for fluidity and vitality, as they relate to sexuality, the body, and our relationship to everyday life; but also as they relate to the energy pulsing throughout Green’s multimedia installation.
Utilizing framed photographs, custom vinyl wallpaper, video, sound, and ephemera, Green generates an exhibition of boundless environments. Seductive interior scenes and exterior landscapes seep into each other. Scenes and sitters withdraw and reemerge, activating a sense of desire that is fulfilled elsewhere in this exhibition. These images evoke the recurring sensations of missing, needing, and loving, recalling the sense of longing evoked in Otis Redding’s 1965 song “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” Redding’s message is one of caution: take pleasure in the things you have while you have them. I Keep Missing My Water does just this, adoring the moments in which community is alive, ritual is abundant, and living is both large and tender.
This exhibition, and all of Green’s work, functions as a living archive. For Green photography isn’t just a means of capture but a gateway into life. In her ongoing online archive Skin Contact, which appears in this exhibition as an interactive installation, Green engages deeply with her sitters, collecting materials that contribute to their quality of life. Poems, playlists, questionnaires, love letters, audio recordings, and the residue of shared meals are made public and archived, enhancing the intimacy evident in Green’s portraits.
I Keep Missing My Water is curated by ICA Curator Amber Esseiva.
For more than three decades, Selwhyn Sthaddeus “Polo Silk” Terrell (American, born 1964) has been photographing Black New Orleans, creating a unique body of work that blends elements of portraiture, fashion, performance, and street photography. This exhibition explores how Polo Silk successfully blends all of those elements, while illustrating his role as an important part of photographic history.
Polo Silk mobilized the traditional portrait studio, taking it to the streets and clubs of New Orleans and transforming it into an adaptable, on-the-spot method of picture making. In the course of his career, Polo perfected the use of instant-photo technology, making dynamic, one of a kind portraits that capitalized on the vibrant color range and immediacy that is a hallmark of Polaroid and other instant films. Sold on demand to clients who wanted a record of an event like Super Sunday, or to show off their carefully planned outfit on any given Saturday night, Polo’s pictures have become an integral part of how many Black New Orleanians have used photography to represent themselves.
Polo’s pictures are often taken in front of the colorful airbrushed backdrops painted by his cousin Otis Spears (American, born 1969) that feature figures from hip-hop and bounce music, fashion brands, sports logos, and the hot songs of the day. In bringing photography out of the studio and directly to the people, Polo made it a truly accessible phenomenon. While traditional portrait photographs were often designed to appear timeless and placeless, Polo’s pictures are absolutely fixed in time, and rooted in New Orleans. Together, Polo and his subjects have created one of the most important visual archives of this time and place, an important set of pictures that highlight Black expression, individuality, and ultimately, a collective community identity.
From photography’s beginnings in the United States, Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of photographic media to produce beautiful portraits for their clients, while also making a variety of other photographic work in keeping with important movements like pictorialism, modernism, and abstraction. Called to the Camera illustrates the artistic virtuosity, social significance, and political impact of African American photographers working in commercial portrait studios during photography’s first century. The exhibition is among the first to focus exclusively on this national cohort of artists and entrepreneurs, while situating that group within a broader inclusive history of picture-making. Called to the Camera reframes the history of American photography by placing Black photographers and subjects at the center of that story, arguing for a reconsideration of how historians and institutions evaluate and display photography.
This exhibition brings together over 150 vintage photographs, many of them unique objects, from the nineteenth century to the present. Celebrating famous portrait photographers such as James Presley Ball, James Van Der Zee, and Addison Scurlock, this exhibition additionally brings attention to more than two dozen other photographers, including Arthur P. Bedou and Florestine Perrault Collins, Arthur L. Macbeth, Emmanuel F. Joseph, and more. Works by these and other artists illustrate how professional Black photographers were crucial to their communities’ efforts to represent themselves in the early twentieth century. Works by modern and contemporary photographers make clear the connection between the historical legacy of Black photography studios and what we consider to be art photography today.
The ICP exhibition presents distinct vantage points that are shaping the scope of the pioneering photography collective Magnum Photos, with pivotal projects by 12 emerging and established contemporary women photographers: Olivia Arthur, Myriam Boulos, Sabiha Çimen, Cristina de Middel, Bieke Depoorter, Carolyn Drake, Nanna Heitmann, Susan Meiselas, Hannah Price, Lua Ribeira, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Newsha Tavakolian. Together, they move and challenge the photography collective’s boundaries, deepening Magnum’s photographic quest to explore the human realm.
Close Enough features more than 150 works, each telling diverse, unexpected, and personal visual stories. Taken together, the works encompass an array of highly relatable accounts of the artists’ individual perspectives, their relationships with their chosen subjects, and, in the context of this exhibition, their relationships with each other. Showcasing three generations of
Magnum women, each revealing a point on her own creative journey, the exhibition includes the first showing of newly completed photographic projects; reflections on and re-animations of earlier projects drawn from the photographers’ own archives; and installations that reveal the working processes within long-term and ongoing personal projects. Curated by Charlotte
Cotton, Close Enough coincides with the 75th anniversary of the founding of Magnum Photos. “Close Enough presents a selection of critical projects by a truly extraordinary group of Magnum photographers spanning multiple generations and cultures,” said ICP executive director David E. Little. “Each project points to the contemporary evolution of concerned photography around the globe and reflects on the complexity of politics and representation today.”
The first major monographic exhibition to tell the story of Robert Capa’s influential 1938 wartime photobook, Death in the Making: Reexamining the Iconic Spanish Civil War Photobook will be on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP) from September 30, 2022 through January 9, 2023. The exhibition brings together nearly 75 original photographs and related ephemera to offer new insight into the book Death in the Making, a touchstone in the history of war photography that resonates today. In addition to work by Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa, the exhibition presents new scholarship to properly credit the contributions of Polish-American photojournalist Chim (David Seymour), and German photojournalist Gerda Taro. The book is dedicated to Taro and was published in the wake of her death at the Spanish front in July 1937. The show, curated by Cynthia Young, former curator of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at ICP, is accompanied by a 2020 edition of the book Death in the Making, published by Damiani/ICP.
Death in the Making: Reexamining the Iconic Spanish Civil War Photobook represents the first in an ongoing series of exhibitions that revisit and highlight ICP’s permanent collection and celebrate its history. ICP was founded in 1974 by photojournalist Cornell Capa, who championed “concerned photography.” Cornell was the brother of Robert Capa, who founded Magnum Photos in 1947. Capa, Taro, and Chim’s work in 1930s Spain set a precedent for photojournalists covering war, with parallels in subject that can be seen in contemporary war coverage. The book, Capa’s first, was in part a propaganda effort to raise awareness and support for Republican Spain to help defeat the fascist General Francisco Franco. New York, where the book was published, was a hotbed of activity for the Republican side, challenged by the loyalty of powerful Catholic leaders to Franco. The events of the Spanish Civil War sparked an international support effort, from raising funds to sending supplies to international volunteers who fought in Spain. “As we celebrate ICP’s history by revisiting collection highlights in a contemporary context, Death in the Making presents audiences with new insight into the historically resonant contributions of Robert Capa, Chim, and Gerda Taro,” said David E. Little, Executive Director of ICP, “and, as evidenced in recent photographs of the Russia-Ukraine War, points to photography’s ongoing relevance in political discourse, debate, and action.”
Death in the Making: Reexamining the Iconic Spanish Civil War Photobook consists of nearly 75 photographs along with more than 25 ephemera items, including magazines and printed matter of the period, as well as related letters, and copies of the original book, all from the ICP archive. Although the original book did not identify work by each photographer, new archival research on the vintage prints has revealed that several Taro prints were mislabeled as Capa’s work, and Chim’s efforts were obfuscated entirely. Each photographer is now properly credited for their contributions to this seminal work for the first time.
The exhibition is organized thematically in accordance with the book – from the initial exuberance at the start of the war to the later reality of wounded and dead soldiers, the preservation and destruction of cultural artifacts, the contribution of peasants to the war effort, the defense of Madrid, civilian life disrupted, and the brutality of the air raids by German and Italian airplanes. Among the magazines on view are copies of Vu, a French pictorial magazine, and Regards, a French Communist title known for photojournalism, which published work by Capa, Taro, and Chim. Kertész’s 1934 book, Paris Vu, will also be on display.
Death in the Making: Reexamining the Iconic Spanish Civil War Photobook is the first exhibition of the prints since the 1938 show Life in the Making, held at the New School for Social Research in New York following the release of the book. “This exhibition and new edition of the book is part of the ongoing process of focused research on the Capa, Taro, and Chim archives at ICP,” said Cynthia Young. “Their work in Spain continues to remind us of the cyclical devastation of war and the importance of fighting for democratic ideals and against authoritarian leaders.”
This annual display in the historic mansion provides a glimpse of George Eastman’s life and work one hundred years ago. The new selection of objects highlight the goings on in 1922—most notably the opening of the Eastman School of Music and the Eastman Theatre in downtown Rochester.
Now in his late sixties, George Eastman was paying less and less attention to business matters and giving more thought to leisure time for Rochesterians. In Eastman’s view, there was no better pursuit than music, and he had been working toward the opening of the Eastman School of Music and its accompanying Eastman Theatre for many years. The theater finally opened in September 1922.
With the introduction of the Ciné-Kodak—the first 16mm camera intended for making home movies—Eastman for the most part stopped taking still pictures. He took his first home movie footage during the fall of 1922 during a trip to Oak Lodge, his rustic hunting retreat in North Carolina.
See original objects from the collection related to these and other aspects of Eastman’s life in 1922, on view throughout the year in the Sitting Room.
Kodachrome Test Shots
In 1913, Kodak’s fledgling Research Laboratories developed two-color Kodachrome (an experimental film stock unrelated to the later, more popular product of the same name). Further development of the process was shelved during the Great War when red dye became too difficult to obtain from Germany. In 1922, the process was reworked to create color motion pictures. Kodak set up two studios for color work and sent John Capstaff, who led the team that created the process, to Hollywood to get color footage. Two-Color Kodachrome Test Shots No. III (John G. Capstaff, US 1922) is a selection of outtakes featuring actors Hope Hampton, Mary Eaton, and Mae Murray.
The Cincinnati Art Museum presents Natural World, a photography-based exhibition and artist-designed book that explores and expands existing ideas of the natural order. The special exhibition is on
view September 30, 2022–January 15, 2023.
Natural World premieres newly commissioned bodies of work by artists John Edmonds (American, b. 1989) and David Hartt (Canadian, lives/works in the United States, b. 1967), together with new writings by poet and scholar Dr. Jason Allen-Paisant (Jamaican, lives/work in England, b. 1980), and Cincinnati Art Museum Curator of Photography Dr. Nathaniel M. Stein (American, b. 1976).
Featuring over thirty works of art—including photographs, tapestries, and sculptures—Natural World explores an intersection of perspectives on the world informed by nationality, race, queer identity, and institutional practice.
The artists and writers involved share an interest in the ways the natural and social worlds are intertwined, and together, they bring new points of view to questions such as: What is natural about the world as we know it? How might we expand our understandings of that world?
“Culturally dominant understandings of naturalness are foundations of knowledge and limitations on our ability to see,” says Stein. “Ultimately, the Natural World project is about justice—about what voices and ways of knowing are admitted into human representation of what is valid, obvious, and good. Museums play a role in building and teaching human stories about what we know, and how. They’re also places where stories can evolve in meaningful and influential ways. I’ve been incredibly lucky and honored to explore this territory at CAM, with the support of our funders, and most of all, in partnership with John, David, and Jason.”
Edmonds’s body of work, Father’s Jewels, is a profound meditation on family, reflecting on themes of identity, community, and belonging. Conceived in dialogue with sculptures from the museum’s collection of African art and with the European artistic tradition, Edmonds’s photographs explore wounding, conflict, reverence, and love within and between generations of Black men.
From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, almost all of the photographs printed for consumption by the American public appeared in illustrated magazines. Among them, Life magazine—published weekly from 1936 to 1972—was both wildly popular and visually revolutionary, with photographs arranged in groundbreaking dramatic layouts known as photo essays. This exhibition takes a closer look at the creation and impact of the carefully selected images found in the pages of Life—and the precisely crafted narratives told through these pictures—in order to reveal how the magazine shaped conversations about war, race, technology, national identity, and more in the 20th-century United States. From Neil Armstrong’s photographs of the historic moon landing to Charles Moore’s coverage of the Birmingham civil rights demonstrations, the photographs on view capture some of the defining moments—celebratory and traumatic alike—of the last 100 years.
Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives as well as photographers’ archives, the exhibition brings together more than 180 objects, including vintage photographs, contact sheets, assignment outlines, internal memos, and layout experiments. Visitors can trace the construction of a Life photo essay from assignment through to the creative and editorial process of shaping images into a compelling story. This focus departs from the historic fascination with the singular photographic genius and instead celebrates the collaborative efforts behind many now-iconic images and stories. Particular attention is given to the women staff members of Life, whose roles remained forgotten or overshadowed by the traditional emphasis on men at the magazine. Most photographs on view are original working press prints—made to be used in the magazine’s production—and represent the wide range of photographers who worked for Life, such as Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Yousuf Karsh, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith.
Interspersed throughout the exhibition, three immersive contemporary “moments” feature works by artists active today who interrogate news media through their practice. A multimedia installation by Alfredo Jaar, screen prints and photographs by Alexandra Bell, and a new commission by Julia Wachtel frame larger conversations for visitors about implicit biases and systemic racism in contemporary media.
Life Magazine and the Power of Photography offers a revealing look at the collaborative processes behind many of Life’s most recognizable, beloved, and controversial images and photo essays, while incorporating the voices of contemporary artists and their critical reflections on photojournalism.
The exhibition is accompanied by a multi-authored catalogue, winner of the College Art Association’s 2021 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.
In 1967, Life magazine published a groundbreaking profile of Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, with images and reporting by photographer Gordon Parks. The exhibition Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power features the five images by Parks from the article, along with nearly 50 additional photographs and contact sheets never before published or exhibited. Also included in the presentation is footage of Carmichael’s speeches and interviews.
One of the 20th century’s preeminent American photographers, Parks (1912–2006) created work focusing on social justice, race relations, the civil-rights movement, and the African American experience. In 1966 and 1967 he went on the road with Carmichael (1941–1998) and took more than 700 photographs as the controversial young civil-rights leader addressed Vietnam War protesters in New York, spoke with supporters in a Los Angeles living room, and went door to door in Alabama registering Blacks to vote. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael issued the call for Black Power in a Mississippi speech in June 1966, eliciting national headlines and media backlash.
Parks was the first Black staff member at Life, and in his finely drawn sketch of a charismatic leader, he reveals his own advocacy of Black Power and its message of self-determination. Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power is on view exclusively at the MFAH.
Exploring Gender, Agency, and Identity | Selections from the Asheville Art Museum and Rubell Museum.
Rebel/Re-Belle: Exploring Gender, Agency, and Identity | Selections from the Asheville Art Museum and Rubell Museum combines works from two significant collections of contemporary art to explore how artists have innovated, influenced, interrogated, and inspired visual culture in the past 100 years. Expressions of identity are at the core of many artists’ work, and artists have long used colors, imagery, gestures, and media to tell their stories and share their points of view. The 20th and 21st centuries are defined by movements to uplift the voices of the otherwise silenced and give agency to authentic expression. Artists working in the United States have created artworks in support of and in response to these activist movements, including the Civil Rights Movement, feminist movements, and movements for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) rights.
Rebel/Re-Belle showcases the viewpoints of artists whose identities exist at the intersection of many lived experiences, including gender, race, and socio-economics in two sections: Rebel and Re-Belle. Featured artists in the exhibition include Anni Albers, Judy Chicago, Bessie Harvey, Wendy Red Star, and Liz Williams from the Asheville Art Museum’s 74 years of collecting, and Marilyn Minter, Catherine Opie, Jennifer Rubell, Tschabalala Self, Cindy Sherman, and Mickalene Thomas from the Don & Mera Rubell’s 54 years of collecting. This exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum, featuring additional works from the collection of the Rubell Museum in Miami, FL, and curated by Hilary Schroeder.
Rebel/Re-Belle is organized by the Asheville Art Museum. Generous support for this project is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Essential support provided by April Liou and Kevin Click.
Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography highlights the dynamic ways that Indigenous artists have leveraged their lenses over the past three decades to reclaim representation and affirm their existence, perspectives, and trauma. The exhibition, organized by the Carter, is the first major museum survey to explore this important transition, featuring works by more than 30 Indigenous artists. Through approximately 75 photographs, videos, three-dimensional works, and digital activations, the exhibition forges a mosaic investigation into identity, resistance, and belonging.
Artists featured in Speaking with Light include Jeremy Dennis, Nicholas Galanin, Sky Hopinka, Zig Jackson, Kapulani Landgraf, Dylan McLaughlin, Shelley Niro, Jolene Rickard, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and a new commission by Sarah Sense.
Recognized for his bold, abstract compositions of Western American landscapes and natural forms, and for his daring printing style, Brett Weston was a leading photographer of the early twentieth century. The second son of acclaimed photographer Edward Weston, Brett Weston devoted his entire life to photography, experimenting with various printing processes and exploring a wide range of themes and contexts to create a unique body of work that transcends comparison to his famous father's images.
Although he acknowledged his father as a huge artistic influence and admired the work of other photographers including Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weston was also greatly inspired by artists working in painting and sculpture such as Georgia O'Keefe (whom he once proclaimed as the greatest living American painter), Constantin Brancusi, and Henry Moore. Weston initially used his father's second camera, a 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ inch Graflex, to make his first photographs in 1925. The images from this period reflect an intuitive and sophisticated approach to abstraction that would blossom later in his career when he began making pictures with an 8x10 inch camera.
Brett Weston features fifty-one photographs drawn exclusively from the permanent collection of the San José Museum of Art and span approximately 40 years from the 1930s through the 1970s. The exhibition comprises images of natural landscapes and seascapes near Big Sur and Carmel, California; the Oregon Coast; and White Sands, New Mexico; as well as from three major portfolios: "Baja California," "Abstraction I," and "Abstraction II." Although he traveled extensively and photographed throughout the world, Weston's chosen subjects—twisted branches, tangled kelp, rock formations, cracked mud, and knotted roots—remained enduring motifs in his work.
In 2020, SJMA was gifted fifty photographs by Weston from the Christian Keesee Collection, containing The Brett Weston Archive that represents the most complete body of the artist's work in the world. Many of the photographs donated to SJMA are vintage prints, produced in the same year as the image was taken, and a few were printed later by the artist. On his 80th birthday, Weston burned all but a dozen of his negatives to underscore his belief that only an artist should print their own photographs.
This special exhibition presents a focused selection of works from longtime intellectual colleagues Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems, two of the most significant photo-based contemporary American artists working today. Both born in 1953, Bey and Weems both explore ideas grounded in the experiences of Black people refracted through issues of gender, class, and systems of power. The exhibition presents a series of thematic explorations of their distinct yet overlapping concerns and approaches. The exhibition is organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum; SAM is the third stop on its US tour.
Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue is organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
Drawing primarily from the National Portrait Gallery's vast collection of self-portraits, this exhibition will explore how American artists have chosen to portray themselves since the beginning of the last century. As people are confronted each day with "selfies" via social media and as they continue to examine the fluidity of contemporary identity, this is an opportune time to reassess the significance of self-portraiture in relation to the country's history and culture. The exhibition will feature more than 75 works by artists such as Josef Albers, Patricia Cronin, Imogen Cunningham, Elaine de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Joan Jonas, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Diego Rivera, Lucas Samaras, Fritz Scholder, Roger Shimomura, Shahzia Sikander and Martin Wong. "Eye to I: Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today" is curated by Brandon Brame Fortune, chief curator, National Portrait Gallery. This exhibition concludes the Portrait Gallery's 50th anniversary celebrations, and an expanded, illustrated companion book will be published in spring 2019.
“No matter how dark a situation may be, a camera can extract the light and turn a negative into a positive. In creating Flint Is Family In Three Acts, I see the role of photographs as empowering and enacting visible change: in Act I, the photographs bear witness and reclaim history; in Act II, the photographs reveal a hidden narrative; in Act III, the photographs are a catalyst for obtaining resources.” --LaToya Ruby Frazier
Flint Is Family In Three Acts is a multi-part exhibition by renowned artist LaToya Ruby Frazier. For five years, Frazier researched and collaborated with two poets, activists, mothers and residents of Flint, Michigan, Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan, as they endured one of the most devastating ecological crises in U.S. history. Resulting in a monumental oeuvre of photographs, video, and texts Frazier developed Flint Is Family In Three Acts (2016–2021) to advocate for access to clean and safe drinking water for all regardless of race, religion and economic status. The series records stories of surviving and thriving, especially within racialized and marginalized neighborhoods in Flint, to ensure that they remained visible in national debates concerning environmental justice. Drawing inspiration from the urgency in Frazier’s work, which also sheds light on building equitable and inclusive futures Stamps Gallery, part of Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at University of Michigan, initiated a partnership with the Flint Institute of Arts and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University to bring this important exhibition together for the first time in Michigan. As co-presenters of this landmark exhibition our goal is to offer a creative pedagogical platform that reaches broader audiences across Michigan and beyond—Flint is Family: Act I (2016–2017) will take place at the Flint Institute of Arts, Act II (2017–2019) at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, and Act III (2019) at Stamps Gallery. The exhibition served as a catalyst to bring three disparate institutions together to deepen our understanding of individual and institutional agency in advocating for equity, transparency and environmental justice in our respective communities, while also highlighting the role of the artist as an agent for enacting positive social change.
Organized by Stamps Gallery in partnership with the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, and the Flint Institute of Arts. Curated by Srimoyee Mitra, Tracee Glab, and Steven L. Bridges with the assistance of Jennifer Junkermeier-Khan, Rachel Winter, and Rachael Holstege.
For 50 years, Robert Adams (born 1937) has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams celebrates the art of this seminal American photographer and explores the reverential way he looks at the world around him and the almost palpable silence of his work. Capturing the sense of peace and harmony created through what Adams calls “the silence of light” that can be seen on the prairie, in the woods, and by the ocean, American Silence features some 175 pictures from 1965 to 2015. Other images on view question our moral silence to the desecration of that beauty by consumerism, industrialization, and lack of environmental stewardship. Divided into three sections—The Gift, Our Response, and Tenancy—the exhibition includes works from not only the artist’s most important projects but also lesser-known ones that depict suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and stores, as well as rivers, skies, the prairie, and the ocean. While these photographs lament the ravages that have been inflicted on the land, they also pay homage to what remains.
Organized in cooperation with the artist, the exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 332-page catalogue published by the National Gallery of Art and Aperture, New York. The exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.
This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition and catalog are made possible through the leadership support of the Trellis Fund and a generous gift from Jane P. Watkins. The exhibition is also made possible in part by The Shared Earth Foundation. Additional support is provided by Randi and Bob Fisher, Wes and Kate Mitchell, Nion McEvoy, Greg and Aline Gooding, and the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.
Scottish born photojournalist Harry Benson CBE came to America with The Beatles in 1964 and in his words, "never looked back." In the decades since, the award-winning photographer has demonstrated incredible range. He photographed Civil Rights marches and the Watts Riots, was on the scene when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and covered conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia, and the Gulf War. The only photographer who has photographed the last 13 U.S. presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Joe Biden, Benson has also turned his lens on everyone from Mohammad Ali to Queen Elizabeth II. His photographs of historic events, political figures, and luminaries have been published in major magazines including LIFE, The Daily Express, Time, Vanity Fair, W, Newsweek, French Vogue, Paris Match, Forbes, The New Yorker, People, Quest, and The Sunday Times Magazine. The subject of a 2015 documentary, Harry Benson: Shoot First, Benson's work has also been published in numerous monographs including the recently released Paul celebrating the 80th birthday and career of Paul McCartney.
Building on the Addison's holdings of works by Benson and amplified with loans from the artist, this exhibition focuses on four powerful photo stories from the 1960s: the building of the Berlin Wall, the Beatles' first American tour, the James Meredith March Against Fear, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. These photographs not only catapulted Benson's career, but also incisively capture defining moments of this tumultuous period in history.
This landmark exhibition surveys the work of Christina Fernandez, the crucially important Los Angeles-based artist who has spent thirty years in a rich exploration of migration, labor, gender, her Mexican-American identity, and the unique capacities of the photographic medium itself. Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures brings together the artist’s most important bodies of works for the first time, allowing audiences to discover the threads that connect them, both formal and conceptual. Through work that spans decades, Fernandez compels us to reconsider history, the border, and the real lives that cross and inhabit them.
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is organized by UCR ARTS and is curated by Joanna Szupinska, Senior Curator at the California Museum of Photography. Chon Noriega, Distinguished Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA, is curatorial advisor.
This exhibition is available to other venues through UCR ARTS Traveling Exhibitions. Please contact the museum for more information.
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures was made possible by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Support for the publication was provided by AltaMed Health Services, Fundacion Jumex Arte Contemporaneo, and Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UCR, and the City of Riverside.
Image: Christina Fernandez, Lavanderia #1, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles.
Anne Noggle’s (American, 1922–2005) life is the stuff of legend. Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1922, she earned her pilot’s license as a teenager. In the 1940s she flew missions as a Women’s Air Force Service pilot (WASP) a small, elite group of women who served during World War 2. She then went on to become a stunt pilot in an air show and a crop duster, and then again flew missions during the Korean War. Emphysema grounded her from official aviation shortly after that, but she never fully abandoned personal flight.
She did, however, begin a second, influential career as a photography professional, making photographs, teaching photography at the University of New Mexico, and working as a curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art. In all of these capacities, Noggle foregrounded women in photography. As a curator, she produced a major exhibition for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Women of Photography: An Historical Survey in 1975. As a photographer, she explored the aging process of women, a process she referred to as “the saga of the fallen flesh.” In her most famous body of work, Noggle repeatedly photographed herself throughout the 1970s and ’80s in direct, revelatory images that record, for example, her face shortly after a facelift with sutures still visible under her eyes. Her desire to present her own body, with all of its wrinkles and folds, challenged traditional art historical concepts of feminine sexuality in pictures.
Her adventurous and fearless spirit is perhaps best embodied in the self-portrait she made while flying her own plane. One of the greatest selfies ever produced, Noggle would have had to temporarily let go of the plane controls to hold the camera and release the shutter. Finally, even later in life, Noggle tracked down and photographed as many WASP members as she could find. The portrait here of Bonnie Dorsey Shinski is further evidence of Noggle’s devotion to preserving the contributions of women in the twentieth-century.
This exhibition explores fashion and street style photography through the eyes of Swiss collector and patron Nicola Erni, who has built one of the most important private collections of fashion photography. It is the first time that this comprehensive collection of more than 250 photographs is being presented in a public institution.
Alongside high fashion photography, originally created for editorial and commercial projects by famous photographers such as Richard Avedon, Tina Barney, Guy Bourdin, Arthur Elgort, Hiro, Horst P. Horst, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Tyler Mitchell, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Albert Watson, and Esther Haase, street style photography will also be on view. This photographic genre, noted for its candid and spontaneous approach to capturing everyday people in their daily, urban lives, is documented in work by renowned artists such as Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Anthony Hernandez, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand as well as Bill Cunningham and Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist), amongst others.
Rather than showing the works chronologically, High Fashion & Street Style looks at the binding themes and synergies that run through the photographs, dividing the exhibition into twelve sections such as The New Look, Fiction & Fantasy, Unreal, or Unfiltered. In addition to the main sections, High Fashion & Street Style includes backstage material from the world of fashion including portraits of era-defining models and designers that shaped our view of beauty and clothes from the 1930s to the present day. The exhibition will present rare vintage prints, large-format photographs, Polaroids, and original collages.
It is a strongly personal exhibition, which reflects Nicola Erni’s close relationship with a great number of artists. A substantial number of prints are unique and were especially produced for the Nicola Erni Collection or commissioned by her.
Shane Brown is an Oklahoma-based, Cherokee photographer and filmmaker documenting the present-day cultural landscape of the American West, experimenting with representations of time and motion, and working on a variety of film projects. Brown’s documentary photography project “In the Territories,” is a photographic survey of the cultural landscape of the American state of Oklahoma, its convoluted histories and their present-day manifestations. Other photography projects include “Life Out There,” an exploration of the Atomic Age-based mythology of the American West; and, “Great Plains Schema,” a survey of the ethos, archetypes, and myths of the Great Plains region. Brown’s projects reveal that the American West, Oklahoma, and the Great Plains region—in spite of or, perhaps because of, their mythos—have not escaped the 21st century any more than they did the 19th, 16th, or 5th centuries.
Over the last two decades, Brown has pursued freelance and creative projects in documentary and experimental photography and cinematography. Presently, Shane is the on-set still photographer for the Peabody Award winning FX series, Reservation Dogs, created by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo. The series depicts contemporary reservation life through the lives of four teenagers. Other photography and cinematography clients and projects include—The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Tiger King 2, Teton Trade Cloth, First Americans Museum, Smithsonian Magazine, American Indian Quarterly, Bob Dylan Archive, Woody Guthrie Archive, Yeti, Buffalo Nickel Creative Agency, and Love and Fury (2020), Mekko (2015), and This May Be the Last Time (2014), all feature-length films by director Sterlin Harjo. In 2022, Shane was part of a team of Wall Street Journal editors, journalists, and photographers nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism.
Featuring work made over the past two decades, this exhibition is the first museum survey dedicated to Deana Lawson. Working primarily in photography, Lawson investigates and challenges conventional representations of Black identities and bodies. Her work evokes a range of photographic histories and styles, including family albums, studio portraiture, and staged tableaux; she also employs documentary pictures and appropriated images.
In Lawson’s highly staged scenes, individuals, couples, and families are pictured in intimate domestic spaces and public settings, interacting with one another. The artist describes her work as “a mirror of everyday life, but also a projection of what I want to happen. It’s about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday Black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent.” Lawson’s practice is global in scope, as she creates her images throughout the African diaspora in locations as varied as Brooklyn, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Southern United States. This broad geographical range points to a collective memory of shared experiences and various cultural histories of the past.
This exhibition is co-organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and MoMA PS1.
Throughout 2020, Rasmuson Foundation gathered with Alaska Black leaders to discuss critical issues and how the Foundation could be a better partner to the Black community in Alaska. Through these conversations, a need for more positive media by and for Black Alaskans was highlighted.
Black in Alaska is a multimedia project with interviews, photos and short videos profiling 50 Black Alaskans. Participants are from all over the state and represent diverse backgrounds in age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Through storytelling, this project aims to dismantle stereotypes and create a deeper connection between communities. Stories, photos, and videos are available on Black in Alaska social media channels as well as the website blackinalaska.org.
Other People’s Pictures: Gifts from the Robert and Kerstin Adams Collection explores the reciprocal relationships among artists and their creative exchange of objects. Comprised of more than 70 photographic works selected from a collection donated to the DAM in 2018 by Robert and Kerstin Adams, this exhibition also examines the themes of collecting, the pleasure of looking, and how diverse points of view interact to shape perspectives.
Through photographic themes of landscape and recreation; people and places; forces of nature; slowing down; and ethics, belief and memory, Other People’s Pictures invites visitors to contemplate their own connections to the objects, people, and places in their own lives and how photographs can convey that attachment.
Maude Schuyler Clay: Portraits of a Place features nearly 100 photographic works by Clay of images that move across time. They are of objects and people informed by the past, belonging to Clay and her family and the larger community. Each image serves as a memory device that assists the viewer with recall. The works presented in this exhibition trace the disappearance of time within our present. Sumner, Mississippi, with its current population of under 500 inhabitants, is the setting for the majority of Clay’s images. The porch of Clay’s intergenerational home, built in 1911 by Clay’s great grandfather Joseph Albert May, offers an idyllic view of Cassidy Bayou, one of the longest bayous in the world. Images in the exhibition inform us of a people, their social placement, their fading architecture, and the freedom of existing in the shadows of historical constraints.
While visitors might be familiar with Clay’s images of Delta landscapes and Delta dogs in a distant fog, the majority of this exhibition, guest curated by Phoenix Savage, is a compilation of Clay’s family portraits represented in an intimate size to convey the relationship between the photographer and the subject. These portraits speak to the domestic realm that binds femininity to motherhood and home. In documenting her immediate family, Clay transcends the boundaries of domesticity and serves as a visual archivist, recording the daily life in a manner that brings awe and delight.
Organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, this exhibition debuts a recent body of work by New York-based artist Elle Pérez.
Including 13 photographs created between 2019 and 2021, Devotions explores relationship building, creating space to reflect on how we navigate ourselves in relation to others and the world. Pérez’s carefully sequenced images dwell in moments of grief and care, pain and pleasure, desire and self-exploration. Amidst recurring motifs of water, touch, and BDSM are also striking choices in proximity, scale, color, and light.
The works will be presented at the BMA as an immersive experience, connecting the John Waters Rotunda and adjacent galleries.
This exhibition is organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art. It is curated in Baltimore by Cecilia Wichmann, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.
This exhibition is supported by the Art Fund established with exchange funds from gifts of Dr. and Mrs. Edgar F. Berman, Equitable Bank, N.A., Geoffrey Gates, Sandra O. Moose, National Endowment for the Arts, Lawrence Rubin, Philip M. Stern, and Alan J. Zakon.
Transformations: A Gender Exploration by Mariette Pathy Allen with selections from Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them and Fantasy & Flowers series.
In 1978 New Orleans, Mariette Pathy Allen stumbled upon the mostly closeted world of men looking to express their “feminine sides.” With her camera, she set out to document and “de-freakify” the liberating world of crossdressing. She realized the potential to offer a different view of the LGBTQ+ community around the world through photography.
Pathy Allen’s work has contributed to numerous publications and lectures, both academic and cultural, regarding gender variance and gender consciousness around the globe. Her collection of works exploring this misunderstood community led to the publication of her first book, Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them, in 1989. Pathy Allen’s work is currently being archived by Duke University’s rare book and Manuscripts Library, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s Studies.
Tierra Entre Medio is a multi-generational exhibition that foregrounds four Chicana photographers working in Southern California. It features new works by Christina Fernandez installed alongside works by Arlene Mejorado, Lizette Olivas, and Aydinaneth Ortiz. Organized by Fernandez, the exhibition bridges myriad concerns inherent to her own work, highlighting practices that consider the regional, cultural, and topographical diversities that span Southern California Latinx communities. Beyond demonstrating the socio-cultural and physical nuances of landscapes between the border and inland Southern California, the exhibition will provide a framework through which to consider how environments shape the perspectives and experiences of working class, migrant, and diasporic communities.
About the Artists
Christina Fernandez (b. 1965) is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose practice explores issues related to migration, labor, gender, Mexican American identity, and the unique capacities of the photographic medium. She earned her BA at UCLA in 1989, and her MFA at the CalArts in 1996. She is associate professor at Cerritos College, Norwalk, where she has been on faculty since 2001.
Arlene Mejorado (b. Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans analog and digital photography, video, and installation. Mejorado’s work employs documentary forms, visual media, everyday materials, and repurposed documents to counter cultural erasure and personal, collective, diasporic, and migrant experiences and stories. She earned her BA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas, Austin, and is currently an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at UCSD.
Lizette Olivas (b. 1986, El Monte, CA) is a San Bernardino-based photographer whose work chronicles the quotidian moments of inland Southern California through a blend of portraiture and landscape photography that is at once urban and rural. She earned her BA in Art at UCLA in 2014.
Aydinaneth Ortiz is a Southern California-based photographer who utilizes documentary, landscape, and portrait genres to examine the intersections among the urban environment, familial relationships, mental illness, drug addiction, and immigration. She earned her BA in Art at UCLA, and her MFA in Photography at CalArts. She is assistant professor of Photography at Cypress College.
Culver Center of the Arts
Image: Christina Fernandez, Burn Area I, 2021 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles.
This dynamic installation of the photography collection unearths new narratives of influence, innovation, and belonging from the medium’s invention to the present day.
Rather than following a linear chronology, Sightlines explores a series of stories and perspectives, spotlighting recent additions to the collection throughout. Some galleries focus on an individual artist or series, like Louis Carlos Bernal’s vibrant color photographs of Chicanx families in the Southwest, or Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones’ poignant documentation of the demise of a small town in Napa County. Others consider the evolution of a single theme across the history of the medium, such as studio portraiture or the relationship between the body and landscape. The exhibition culminates with a generous selection of works made without a camera, probing the question of what constitutes a photograph.
Photographer Marcia Resnick earned recognition as part of the legendary Downtown New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s with portraits of major cultural figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Belushi, and Susan Sontag.
Marcia Resnick was one of the most ambitious and innovative American photographers of the 1970s. Combining social critique with poignant, often humorous performance, her photographs explore—in a conceptual vernacular—aesthetic, social, and political issues at once timely and timeless. A part of the now-mythic creative community in Downtown New York, she created work that challenged traditional ideas about what a photograph could be. This exhibition brings together for the first time her extraordinary photographs from this period.
This exhibition was organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the George Eastman Museum.
One of the typical measures of success for artists is the ability to quit their day jobs and focus full time on making art. Yet these roles are not always an impediment to an artist’s career. This exhibition illuminates how day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected new materials and methods, working knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic interest or critique, or a predictable structure that opens space for unpredictable ideas. As artist and lawyer Ragen Moss states:
Typologies of thought are more interrelated than bulky categories like ‘lawyer’ or ‘artist’ allow... Creativity is not displaced byother manners of thinking; but rather, creativity runs alongside, with, into, and sometimes from other manners of thinking.
Day Jobs, the first major exhibition to examine the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts, is dedicated to demystifying artistic production and upending the stubborn myth of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike. The exhibition will make clear that much of what has determined the course of modern and contemporary art history are unexpected moments spurred by pragmatic choices rather than dramatic epiphanies. Conceived as a corrective to the field of art history, the exhibition also encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.
The exhibition will feature work produced in the United States after World War II by artists who have been employed in a host of part- and full-time roles: dishwasher, furniture maker, graphic designer, hairstylist, ICU nurse, lawyer, and nanny–and in several cases, as employees of large companies such as Condé Nast, Ford Motors, H-E-B Grocery, and IKEA. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in a broad range of media by emerging and established artists such as Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Jeffrey Gibson, Ramiro Gomez (now Jay Lynn Gomez), Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson, among many others. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring artist essays commissioned for the book, as well as a podcast, giving artists agency in telling their stories about the compelling intersections between their day jobs and creative practices.
Organized by Veronica Roberts, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, Former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art
Evelyn Hofer (American, born Germany, 1922-2009) was a highly innovative photographer whose prolific career spanned five decades. Despite her extraordinary output, she was underrecognized during her lifetime and was notably referred to by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer as “the most famous unknown photographer in America.” She made her greatest impact through a series of photobooks, published throughout the 1960s, devoted to European and American cities, including Florence, London, New York, Washington, DC, and Dublin, and a book focused on the country of Spain. Comprising more than one hundred vintage prints in both black and white and color, Eyes on the City, the artist’s first major museum exhibition in the United States in over fifty years, is organized around those publications. The photographs to be featured combine landscapes and architectural views with portraiture, conveying the unique character and personality of these urban capitals during a period of intense structural, social, and economic transformations after World War II.
American photographer Gillian Laub (b. New York, 1975) has spent the last two decades investigating political conflicts, exploring family relationships, and challenging assumptions about cultural identity. In Southern Rites, Laub engages her skills as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual activist to examine the realities of racism and raise questions that are simultaneously painful and essential to understanding the American consciousness.
In 2002, Laub was sent on a magazine assignment to Mount Vernon, Georgia, to document the lives of teenagers in the American South. The town, nestled among fields of Vidalia onions, symbolized the archetype of pastoral, small town American life. The Montgomery County residents Laub encountered were warm, polite, protective of their neighbors, and proud of their history. Yet Laub learned that the joyful adolescent rites of passage celebrated in this rural countryside—high school homecomings and proms—were still racially segregated.
Laub continued to photograph Montgomery County over the following decade, returning even in the face of growing—and eventually violent—resistance from community members and local law enforcement. She documented a town held hostage by the racial tensions and inequities that scar much of the nation's history. In 2009, a few months after Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Laub’s photographs of segregated proms were published in the New York Times Magazine. The story brought national attention to the town and the following year the proms were finally integrated. The power of her photographic images served as the catalyst and, for a moment, progress seemed inevitable.
Then, in early 2011, tragedy struck the town. Justin Patterson, a twenty-two-year-old unarmed African American man—whose segregated high school homecoming Laub had photographed—was shot and killed by a sixty-two-year-old white man. Laub’s project, which began as an exploration of segregated high school rituals, evolved into an urgent mandate to confront the painful realities of discrimination and structural racism. Laub continued to document the town over the following decade, during which the country re-elected its first African American president and the ubiquity of camera phones gave rise to citizen journalism exposing racially motivated violence. As the Black Lives Matter Movement and national protests proliferated, Laub uncovered a complex story about adolescence, race, the legacy of slavery, and the deeply rooted practice of segregation in the American South.
Southern Rites is a specific story about twenty-first century young people in the American South, yet it poses a universal question about human experience: can a new generation liberate itself from a harrowing and traumatic past to create a different future?
Southern Rites is curated by Maya Benton and organized by the International Center of Photography.
The L.A. Project debuts its first annual public art event, Projecting L.A., in DTLA, featuring the work of 35 renowned and emerging photographers to celebrate the photographic community and diverse stories that make up the streets of Los Angeles, on Saturday, October 22, 2022
Part of the exclusive online showroom developed by All About Photo, this exhibition is on view for the month of September 2022 and includes seventeen photographs from the series 'Folding and Mending'<
Sebastião Salgado's Magnum Opus -a new survey of 50 photographs spanning 1978 to present - will highlight bodies of work that provide an intimate and intergenerational lens into global subcultures; amplify recognition of 12 indigenous communities; and bring crucial visibility to the global climate crisis.
Gallery FIFTY ONE is proud to announce its 4th solo exhibition by Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert . In 'Between Worlds' - accompanying the launch in October of an eponymous book published by Thames & Hudson (English) and Atelier Xavier Barral (French) - Gruyaert presents a selection of images from his diverse oeuvre, all of which depicting a 'threshold' or barrier, such as a window or reflection.
A remarkable window into Europe before World War II will be seen by the public for the first time when Street Visions: Europe, 1934 -- Photographs by Richard J. Scheuer has its official opening on September 22, 2022, at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.
Yet another year where photojournalists have been prominent in tragedy. First there was Afghanistan, then Ukraine, not to mention so many other theaters of war, violence and atrocities standing as clear and often cruel evidence to prove that photojournalism is a leader in advocating human rights, condemning war crimes, and defending freedom of information, i.e. the right to critical information in a context of democratic debate.
Pernod Ricard's constant commitment to creation dates back to the origins of the Group under the aegis of the insatiable entrepreneur and artist that was my grandfather, Paul Ricard. The recent opening of the new exhibition space of the Pernod Ricard Foundation, in our Parisian headquarters, is a testament to what remains cardinal to us: art is only meaningful if it is shared.
Tomlinson has spent the last two years exploring the lives of islanders in modern-day Italy, capturing little- known rituals and traditions inspired by paganism, fables and folklore. These almost theatrical images document traditional costumes and masks, preserved and handed down for generations, worn during festivities and celebrations in Sicily, Sardinia and islands of the Venetian lagoon. The project provides a meditation on place, faith and identity.
Part of the exclusive online showroom developed by All About Photo, this exhibition is on view for the month of July & August 2022 and includes twenty photographs from the series 'Coney Island Beyond the Boardwalk'
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