Photo Exhibitions

Penumbra Foundation proudly presents The Puppet Master, a solo exhibition by Diana Michener. This evocative series delves into the complex dynamics between a father and daughter, exploring themes of control, intimacy, and silent understanding. Michener describes the project as a mysterious collaboration between the two figures: “The daughter became the puppet, the father the puppeteer. They worked in silence, each following an unspoken script. They had their own intentions—just as I had mine.” These enigmatic photographs invite viewers to reflect on the unseen forces shaping relationships, leaving space for personal interpretation. “Photography thrives on open narratives,” Michener explains. “You may not see my story, but perhaps you will see your own—and that excites me.” The Puppet Master will be on view from February 27 through May 15, 2025. About the Artist Diana Michener (b. 1940, Boston) is an acclaimed photographer known for her introspective and poetic imagery. Based in Paris and Walla Walla, Washington, she studied at Barnard College in New York before refining her craft under the mentorship of Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the retrospective Silence Me at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris (2001), Morning After Morning at the Photo Museum of Ireland (2001), Dogs, Fires, Me at Pace/MacGill in New York (2005), Figure Studies at Nature Morte in Berlin (2010), and Anima, Animals at MEP (2016–2017). Michener’s photographs are held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has published extensively with Steidl, producing numerous books such as Silence Me (2001), Dogs, Fires, Me (2005), Figure Studies (2011), A Song of Life (2018), Trance (2020), Bones (2022), Mortes (2023), and Mirror (2024).

Lisa Elmaleh’s Tierra Prometida is more urgent than ever. In a media landscape that often reduces migration to fleeting images of crisis, her work offers an essential counternarrative—one that restores humanity, dignity, and depth to those in motion. Consider Maichol (2023), whose family fled political persecution in Venezuela, surviving the treacherous Darién Gap, or Marisela (2022), who escaped Guerrero, Mexico, with her three children after cartel extortion left them no choice. Their stories, deeply personal, reflect a larger collective reality. In 2023 alone, seven million Venezuelans left their homeland, while over 700,000 Mexicans sought refuge elsewhere. Yet statistics alone fail to convey the weight of displacement. Instead, they are often weaponized, turning real lives into numbers that fuel anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies—like renewed efforts to expand the border wall. Elmaleh began this project during the first Trump administration, seeking to cut through the political noise and explore migration beyond partisan divides. Over time, she has witnessed how xenophobia and restrictive border policies transcend party lines. Her stark photograph Border Patrol dragging tires to search for footprints, West Texas, United States (2020) confronts Prevention Through Deterrence—a strategy from the 1994 Border Patrol Strategic Plan under the Clinton administration that forces migrants into the most unforgiving desert terrain, where survival becomes a deadly gamble. Along Arizona’s 400-mile border, humanitarian groups work to identify the remains of those who never made it to safety. Organizations like Humane Borders collaborate with medical examiners in Pima and Maricopa counties to give names to the lost. Yet many will never be recovered. As of early 2025, 1,578 unidentified bodies remain—evidence of the brutal reality faced by those in search of refuge. Still, as Tierra Prometida makes clear, no wall, no desert, no policy can deter those fighting for their lives and the future of their families. Poet Warsan Shire encapsulates this truth: “Anywhere is better than home, if home is the mouth of the shark.” What is not immediately visible in Elmaleh’s images is her deep-rooted commitment to the communities she documents. Since 2020, she has volunteered with humanitarian groups along the border, including Águilas del Desierto, a search-and-rescue team that scours the Sonoran Desert for missing loved ones; Kino Border Initiative, a binational humanitarian aid organization; and shelters like Casa de la Misericordia and Casa de la Esperanza. In 13 Crosses (2024), she commemorates the tragic story of thirteen migrants who were found near death in the Sonoran Desert—one of countless losses in an ongoing humanitarian crisis. More than a documentary project, Tierra Prometida stands as a tribute—to resilience, to the fight for dignity, to the lives too often forgotten. It is a call to bear witness, to listen, and to recognize that our stories are more connected than we realize. Image: Braids, House of Mercy, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico; Trenzas, Casa de la Misericordia, Nogales, Sonora, México, 2023 © Lisa Elmaleh

Sebastião Salgado, reflecting on his experience with the Nenets during his Genesis project, said, "There is so much love in their lives: wife to husband, husband to wife, for their children. Everything around them makes their life very rich, and they tell each other such nice stories." This captures his deep admiration for their connection to nature and to each other, reinforcing the spiritual and essential nature of their existence. Sebastião Salgado’s passion for the Nenets stems from his broader quest to reconnect with untouched territories and communities deeply rooted in nature. After witnessing profound human suffering in his previous projects, such as Exodus, Salgado embarked on Genesis to restore his faith in humanity and nature. The Nenets, a nomadic people of northern Siberia, live in harmony with their environment, dependent on reindeer for survival and maintaining traditions despite the harsh Arctic climate. Their life, defined by reindeer herding, is one of simplicity but rich with love, spirituality, and connection to the land—elements that deeply resonated with Salgado. During his time with the Nenets, Salgado was struck by their resilience, adaptability, and intelligence, particularly the symbiotic relationship between them and their reindeer. He admired how they endured extreme cold, managed to navigate vast white landscapes, and preserved their culture in a rapidly modernizing world. Through his lens, Salgado captured the beauty of their way of life, which he saw as a powerful reminder of humanity's lost connection to nature and the land. This project renewed his sense of hope and purpose, showcasing the importance of preserving the world's untouched cultures and ecosystems, while highlighting the Nenets’ deep spiritual ties to the natural world, something Salgado believes is essential for our own survival.

Luke Oppenheimer is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller from rural Oklahoma, with a background in agroforestry and sustainable farming. His work explores the relationships between rural communities, the landscapes they inhabit, and the wildlife they coexist with, revealing how these forces shape each other’s destinies. Having lived and worked extensively across Latin America, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, Luke’s photography is deeply rooted in personal connections and immersive storytelling. Ottuk chronicles life in a small shepherding village in the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan. What began as a month-long project in 2020 grew into a five-year immersion, during which Luke was welcomed into the community and adopted by a local family. The series captures the villagers’ struggles and joys, shaped by their dependence on livestock, resilience against unforgiving winters, and the enduring traditions that guide their way of life.

For Shore|Lines, Chicago-based artist Regina Agu (b. Houston, Texas) presents a large-scale panoramic installation at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as part of an exploration of placemaking and community memory—tracing sites and legacies of historical Black North American migration through an expansive tradition of the panoramic form. This Joyce Foundation Award (2023) special project and collaboration, focuses on connecting the landscapes, materiality, and human histories of the Gulf South region to the Great Lakes. Drawing on methods of field work and landscape photography, Shore|Lines examines waterways and natural environments as defining sites of Black life and belonging. This investigation grounds itself in close conversation with Chicago-area land and Great Lakes region environmental advocates and ecologists of color—community historians and academics, members of sailing clubs, librarians, archivists, geographers, and families that live and work along these long-storied bodies of water. The exhibition includes an artist book” documentation that Agu refers to as a “field guide,” connecting her Midwest and Gulf South experiences of the landscapes. Shore|Lines is proud to bring together discourses of Black geographies, landscape photography, and site-specific land histories, using the methodology of landscape panorama as a format for relating ideas and themes of Black cultural memory connected to place. This project uniquely explores and documents a nuanced assemblage of sociocultural geographies and cultures that connect to the Great Migration of the 20th century, in a way that is rarely considered within the wider visual lore or heritage narrative of the Great Lakes. Asha Iman Veal, MoCP Associate Curator. Regina Agu (American, b. Houston) is a visual artist, writer, and researcher based in Chicago, IL. Agu was raised between the United States, the Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland. Her interdisciplinary practice includes conceptual and material inquiries into memory, history, representation, and Black geographies. Her work has been exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Museum, The Drawing Center, the High Line, Project Row Houses, FotoFest, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, among other venues. Agu is a 2023 Joyce Award winner with the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Agu has received an Artadia Houston award, grants from Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, a SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts and Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research project Friends of Emancipation Park. Agu holds a BS from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Five years after the start of Broadway’s Great Intermission—the 18-month period when the Covid pandemic forced theaters to close—Mark S. Kornbluth has released new images in his historic portrait series DARK. DARK comprises large-format photographs of Broadway theaters that quickly became symbols of the resilience of New York City, and a poetic tribute to the power of the arts for healing and human connection. While the buildings themselves awaited the return of actors and audiences, Kornbluth saw the opportunity to shift the spotlight to these sentinels of Times Square, many of them architectural marvels who play understudy to the incredible talents they house. Trained as a professional actor, with close friends affected by the unprecedented interruption of live performances, Kornbluth began the series as his own artistic homage to the age-old mantra “the show must go on.” ENCORE is a reprise of Kornbluth’s 2023 solo exhibition that features beloved photographs from the original collection as well as several new releases on view for the first time. Collector favorites like Richard Rodgers, in which the Hamilton marquee poignantly declares “History is Happening in Manhattan,” are on view alongside The Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theatre, nearing the end of its record-setting run. Kornbluth took his photographs at night, with streetlights serving as stagecraft, and theater signage as dialogue. There are no passersby in the images, but each artwork nevertheless comes alive with its own sort of humanity. Kornbluth succeeds in capturing the presence of absence, and in doing so, reflects a shared and profound experience. Theaters depicted in ENCORE include Ambassador, Barrymore, Belasco, Booth, Kerr, Lyceum, Lunt-Fontanne, Music Box, New Amsterdam, Radio City Music Hall, Shubert, and more. Broadway productions include legendary shows such as Chicago, Moulin Rouge, The Music Man, and West Side Story. The large-format photographs, printed as dye sublimations on aluminum, are immersive and luminous testaments to the grandeur and indomitable spirit of New York. This is an encore performance not to be missed.

Long before the term “power couple” found its way into English lexicon, dynamic duos had been making their mark on U.S. history. “Powerful Partnerships: Civil War-Era Couples” sheds light on the stories and faces of five couples whose work and lives shaped the nation around them during tumultuous times. Featuring photography by the iconic Mathew Brady Studio, the exhibition introduces visitors to the exploits of Nathaniel and Mary Banks, John and Jessie Frémont, Ulysses and Julia Grant, George and Ellen McClellan, and Charles and Lavinia Stratton (better known to the public as Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb).

Yancey Richardson is proud to present Sawubona, an exhibition bringing together work from five different series made between 2002–2013 by South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi. Their fifth exhibition with the gallery, Sawubona reveals both the historical depth and visual complexity of Muholi’s overarching project of empowering the Black LGTBQIA+ community in South Africa through a collaborative process of representation. Sawubona will also be the first gallery exhibition outside of Africa to feature their early work. The exhibition will be on view from April 17 through May 23, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 17 from 6–8PM. For more than twenty years Muholi has studied the multifarious and ever-evolving nature of Black, queer life in South Africa, specifically through a group of projects centered around forms of portraiture both intimate and disarming, personally descriptive and socially incisive. Though widely-known and celebrated for their ongoing series of self-portraiture titled Somnyama Ngonyama (“Hail, the Dark Lioness”), which they began in 2012, Muholi had by that point either completed or begun several other bodies of work that addressed the discrete circumstances and challenges—including for basic civil rights and for visibility and recognition free from stereotypes—being faced by different members of the queer community in South Africa. These early projects, including Only Half the Picture (2002–2006), Being (2006), Beulahs (2006), Faces and Phases (2006–ongoing) and Miss Lesbian (2009), each seek to empower Muholi’s participants and by extension the queer community at large, with images defined by affirmation, dignity and joy rather than struggle, tragedy or trauma. Muholi’s first project, Only Half the Picture, grew out of their work with the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, which works with survivors of hate crimes living across South Africa and its townships and which Muholi co-founded in 2002. Rather than emphasize the visceral details that would attest to the suffering endured by each participant (a term Muholi uses in place of “subject”), these photographs instead show fragments of bodies at rest or in repose and faces that are contemplative rather than vindictive. Muholi often isolates body parts and garments as well, creating pictures that complicate whatever normative assumptions about gender and identity we may hold. The challenge to stereotypical and queerphobic representations was further developed by Muholi with their series’ Being and Beulahs. For the former, Muholi made portraits of queer couples in settings and circumstances at times intimate and domestic, in others casual and public. Each photograph demonstrates the bond of love between two people regardless of personal difference or public challenge. If the Being photographs were largely situated in private spaces, those Muholi made for the series Beulahs were just as often situated outdoors and in public spaces. In South Africa the term “beulah” refers to a gay man that the queer community deems beautiful. The “beulahs” that Muholi photographed demonstrate how malleable masculinity can be—their self-presentation is their own as opposed to being socially prescribed. In their Miss Lesbian series Muholi used the conventions of pageantry as the aesthetic and conceptual framework to critique social definitions of beauty and success. These self-portraits take the staging and presentation used by beauty pageants as a pretext for exploring how they have historically expressed gender as a social construct and how that has defined what “success” or “acceptance” so often looks like. Muholi’s project Faces and Phases is a vast collective portrait that both commemorates and archives the lives of Black LGBTQIA+ people in South Africa. Many of these portraits are the result of long and sustained relationships and collaboration, as Muholi often returns to photograph the same person over time. In the title, “Faces” refers to the person being photographed, while “Phases” can signify the transition from one stage of sexuality or gender expression to another, while also marking the changes to the participants’ daily lives. As with so much of their work, Faces and Phases acts as a living archive that visualizes Muholi’s belief that “we express our gendered, racialized and classed selves in rich and diverse ways.” Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, South Africa and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. They studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg and in 2009 completed an MFA: Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. Their work has been exhibited at the 2020 Biennale of Sydney; the 58th International Venice Biennale; Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and the 29th São Paulo Biennale. They are currently the subject of a mid-career survey at the Instituto Moreira Salles, Sao Paolo. In 2024 they were the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and in 2020, the Tate Modern mounted a major mid-career survey which traveled to Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and Bildmuseet, Sweden. Other notable solo exhibitions have taken place at the Tate Modern, London; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kulturhistorek Museum, Oslo; Schwules Museum, Berlin and Brooklyn Museum, New York. They received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in 2016, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2016, an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2018, and the Spectrum International Prize for Photography in 2021. Their work is included in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum; the High Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others. Image: Zanele Muholi, Zol, 2002, from the series Only Half the Picture. Gelatin silver print, image: 27 1/2 x 20 inches, paper: 31 1/2 x 24 inches.

"Reflections" marks the first solo exhibition of photographer Rahim Fortune, a Texas native whose work examines the visual and cultural narratives of the American South. Over the past decade, Fortune has blended documentary and personal storytelling to investigate themes of collective history, migration, and identity. This exhibition presents two major series: *I Can't Stand to See You Cry* (2021) and *Hardtack* (2024), offering a deep dive into the landscapes, communities, and traditions that shape his artistic vision. Born in 1994 and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Fortune uses photography to explore fundamental questions of American identity. His images, often centered on individual families and communities, trace the shifting geographies of migration and resettlement, revealing how history is inscribed onto the landscapes of Texas and the broader South. His 2021 book, *I Can’t Stand to See You Cry*, published by Loose Joints, was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook of the Year Award and won the Rencontres d'Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022. His latest monograph, *Hardtack* (2024), has received international recognition, earning a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025. Fortune’s work is held in prestigious collections, including the High Museum of Art, LUMA Arles, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is represented by Sasha Wolf Projects in New York. *I Can’t Stand to See You Cry* captures life across Texas and its neighboring states, portraying individuals navigating personal and societal challenges amid environmental and health crises. Fortune’s approach, grounded in intimate encounters, explores the tension between public and private life while reflecting on themes of loss, resilience, and self-discovery. The series is a deeply autobiographical meditation on a transformative period in the artist’s life—marked by a cross-country move, the loss of a parent, and a shifting sense of identity. In *Hardtack*, Fortune examines his community’s historical relationship with photography by drawing from the aesthetics of vernacular and archival imagery. Rather than focusing solely on historic sites, he engages with the cultural and emotional weight these places carry, illustrating the resilience of Black communities in the face of adversity and joy. A key theme in the series is the portrayal of coming-of-age traditions—young bull riders, praise dancers, and pageant queens—all embodying a sense of continuity and pride. Fortune’s lens dignifies these cultural rites, highlighting the discipline, creativity, and intergenerational exchange that sustain them. Through his work, he bridges past and present, revealing the depth and complexity of Black life in the American South. Image: © Rahim Fortune

Renowned artists Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett present a previously unseen photo series from the early 1990s at the Alice Austen House. McCarty and Moffett's creative partnership began within the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury, which was the graphic arm of ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The collective’s public art interventions used the language of advertising and art to expose the AIDS epidemic as both a health crisis and a political disaster. This shared experience sparked the duo to establish Bureau, a cross-disciplinary design studio in New York City that operated from 1989 to 2001. Bureau's work spanned print design, film titles, and educational initiatives. In 1992, McCarty and Moffett were invited by Princeton University School of Architecture to design the university's Lecture Series Calendar. Princeton's long history, dating back to 1746 and its status as one of the original colonial colleges, inspired the artists to reconsider and queer early American history. For their project, McCarty and Moffett, dressed as pilgrims and women, ventured to the North Fork of Long Island with Bureau colleagues for a photo session, using unstable Polaroid 35mm positive film. While only two images were selected for the Princeton calendar, the remainder of the photos, hundreds of slides in total, were stored away. Over time, the film emulsion naturally deteriorated, becoming a dynamic participant in the artwork itself. For the first time since that 1992 photoshoot, new archival pigment prints of ten performative tableaux from the series will be on display at the Alice Austen House Museum, offering a unique glimpse into McCarty and Moffett’s visionary work. Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett: One Day is supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, Lily Auchincloss Foundation and the Teiger Foundation. Image: © Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett

Daniel Cooney Fine Art is beyond thrilled to announce our third solo exhibition (our first in Santa Fe) by Christopher Makos titled PARTY. The exhibition features unseen vintage work from the artist’s early career. PARTY features a selection of over 40 unique vintage photographs, that celebrate the artist’s ethos: daring, climactic and outrageous. Makos has spent the past five decades in the company of legendary cultural icons, most famously as confidant to Andy Warhol and as a key member of the Factory from 1976-86. His position in this notorious circle gained him access to everyone that was anyone including models, celebrities and underground royalty. The likes of Divine, Steven Tyler, Debbie Harry, Peter Berlin, Richard Gallo, Georgia O’Keefe and other tantalizing figures mingle on the gallery walls. Never satisfied as just an observer Makos brazenly includes multiple self-portraits in this exhibition. Young surfer boy Makos can be seen in languid repose with long blonde hair, loyal dog “Snake” at his side, sporting a pair of cowboy boots and nothing else. In another image, the photographer is positioned bare-assed between two mirrors, camera in hand, admiring himself from behind. In a photograph titled Self-Portrait I, 1970s, a nude Makos, seen from the chest down “tucks” exploring his androgynous side in a mirrored hotel room. Perhaps even more exciting are numerous one of a kind darkroom compositions including double portraits of hustlers, artists, drag queens, nude muscle boys and more. Equally compelling is the original contact sheet from Makos’s infamous “Andy in Drag” photoshoot revealing the Father of Pop Art in a curly wig and white bedsheet complete with Makos’s mark ups in grease pencil. Makos is the author of 18 books including White Trash (1977), Warhol/Makos In Context (2007), Christopher Makos Polaroids (2009) and Everything: The Black and White Monograph (2014). His work has been published in Interview, Rolling Stone, House & Garden, Connoisseur, New York Magazine, Esquire, Genre and People. His works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery and The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

Richard Avedon: Among Creatives brings together over 50 works from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), celebrating the iconic photographer’s masterful portraits of artists, writers, actors, and other visionaries, alongside his groundbreaking contributions to fashion photography. Born in New York City, Richard Avedon (1923–2004) developed an early passion for photography, first making his mark in the industry through his work for Harper’s Bazaar. Over time, his lens turned toward the most influential cultural figures of his era—capturing fellow creatives across art, literature, music, film, and design. Through his stark, revealing portraits, Avedon stripped away glamour and artifice, urging viewers to confront the nuances between public identity and private self. Avedon, a celebrity in his own right, famously remarked, “My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” His images of creative individuals, in particular, reflect his own meditations on fame, mortality, and artistic legacy. Spanning both portraiture and fashion photography, this exhibition highlights Avedon’s singular ability to capture artistry in all its forms—offering an intimate, unfiltered glimpse into the lives of those who shaped culture as much as he did. Image: Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955. Gelatin silver print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Purchase, 87.34.1. Copyright © The Richard Avedon Foundation

In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reimagines the relationship between writer Charis Wilson (pronounced CARE-iss) and photographer Edward Weston by delving into Wilson’s writings and Weston’s iconic images of the Western landscape and the female form. Connell intertwines the stories of Wilson and Weston with her own relationship with her partner at the time, Betsy Odom, offering a fresh, contemporary queer and feminist lens on the couple’s dynamic. Guided by the publications of Weston and Wilson, Connell and Odom recreate portrait and landscape photographs at the locations where the couple once lived, worked, and shared time together. The exhibition contrasts Connell’s new images with Weston's classic figure studies and landscapes from 1934 to 1945, a pivotal period in his career during his relationship with Wilson. The accompanying monograph, Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024), co-published by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, includes Connell’s reflections, portraits of Odom, newly captured landscape views, and original materials from both Wilson and Weston, further expanding on the depth of the exploration. Image: Betsy, Lake Ediza, 2015. Kelli Connell (American, b. 1974). Pigmented inkjet print; 101.6 x 127 cm (40 x 50 in.). High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography © Kelli Connell

Banu Cennetoğlu (Turkey, b. 1970) is known for her cross-disciplinary practice that delves into the collection, circulation, and presentation of data, images, and information. By focusing on the smallest details, she brings a humanizing lens to global geopolitical issues that might otherwise be reduced to mere statistics. In her work 1 January 1970 – 21 March 2018 · H O W B E I T · Guilty feet have got no rhythm · Keçiboynuzu · AS IS · MurMur · I measure every grief I meet · Taq u Raq · A piercing Comfort it affords · Stitch · Made in Fall · Yes. But. We had a golden heart. · One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game (2018), Cennetoğlu explores the interplay between personal memory and historical narrative. The video installation H O W B E I T compiles a decade's worth of visual archives, spanning from June 10, 2006, to March 21, 2018. It weaves together stills and moving images sourced from her cell phones, computers, cameras, and hard drives, resulting in what Cennetoğlu describes as an “intro-spective.” The earliest files in the work document the year before Cennetoğlu first shared The List, an ongoing project by UNITED for Intercultural Action, which tracks the deaths of over 60,620 migrants seeking refuge in Europe since 1993. The final files in the series coincide with the lead-up to Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which also marks the production deadline for her first exhibition of this work. Throughout the installation, political themes coexist with everyday moments and vibrant encounters, rejecting boundaries and hierarchies. In doing so, Cennetoğlu invites viewers to reflect on their own experiences of navigating complex realities. HOWBEIT spans more than 127 hours of footage, encompassing 46,685 digital files, presented chronologically. The immersive nature of the work encourages visitors to return multiple times, each time encountering a different segment of the narrative.

MAIN STRƎƎT: The Lost Dream of Route 66, is an exhibition of photographs by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Edward Keating. The exhibition is accompanied by Keating’s eponymous book of 84 photographs (Damiani, 2018). MAIN STRƎƎT: is the result of 11 years of travel along Route 66 — the 2,400-mile stretch between Chicago and Santa Monica. Called the “mother road” in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Route 66 has inspired countless artists and writers, including Andy Warhol and Jack Kerouac. Following the path of migrant farmers and others, Keating has ventured westward and back along Route 66, documenting the lives of Americans along the way. Keating approaches the route as both a journalist and memoirist. His photographs bring attention to the lives and myths scattered along the stretch of Route 66 and serve as a metaphor for the deterioration of middle-class America. For New York Times journalist Charles LeDuff, “This book is about those who traveled its length and those who settled along the way, wherever their bones and their broken cars dropped them.” His book is also personal mythology, constructed from the artist’s recollections of the road: Keating's mother grew up in Saint Louis along Route 66 where her father owned the city’s first Ford dealership. In his early 20s, he embarked on a cross-country trip on Route 66, but found himself, rock-bottom, in a broken-down motel in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 2000, he returned to Route 66 as a New York Times staff photographer, traversing all 2,400 miles in three weeks. The book is a milestone for an artist who has spent a life wandering along the main streets and back roads of America’s most mythic highway Edward Keating had served as a photojournalist for nearly 40 years for such publications as the New York Times, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Time Magazine. In 2001, Keating received the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography, as well as the John Faber Award for International Reporting, Overseas Press Club, for his series of photographs on the September 11 attacks. He additionally shared the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with New York Times staff for the series, “How Race is Lived in America,” and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for the 1997 series “Vows,” co-authored with Lois Smith Brady. In 2003, Keating joined Contact Press Images photography agency. MAIN STREET was Keating’s sixth monograph. Tragically, Keating died of cancer in Sept 2021, contracted as a result of his long exposure to toxic materials at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11. He was 65. Image: Ed Keating, October, 2018 by Mark Berndt

All About Photo presents It Matters by Jan Janssen, on view throughout May 2025 — a moving journey across Europe capturing the shared moments of humanity that connect us all. It Matters It Matters' or 'Pieces of Europe' is a long-term photography project, started in 2016. In this series, I show the moments I recognise in my fellow human beings. Things that are common to our human existence, such as love, play, growing up, loss and need for contact. Things that are present everywhere in the world, in anyone. Several times a year, I travel to destinations in Central and Eastern Europe. For these photos, I travelled to Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, among others. Once arrived in the country, I work together with the locals to find entry into these communities. I find it very important that I approach them as an equal, and not as a western outsider just using them to take a photo. I build a bond with my portrayed people by following them for weeks, sometimes months. I may return regularly after my visit or stay in touch with my portraits online or remotely. Through this long-term contact, I get to know their traits and discover when they are at their most beautiful, their most vulnerable or their purest. It is at these moments that the most beautiful photos are created. The series is growing and will culminate in a book of the same name in 2026. Travelling is inseparable from my practice. It is an opportunity to discover who I am. By travelling to other places, I seek precisely the things we have in common. It is also a way for me to remind myself of the gratitude of a simple existence in places elsewhere in the world: things I take for granted in the West.

L’Space Gallery proudly presents TIME CAPSULE, the first U.S. solo exhibition by Israeli artist Ronit Porat, on view from April 10 to May 31, 2025. The exhibition will be accompanied by a curated selection of 1920s-era vintage photographs by Man Ray. TIME CAPSULE opens with a public reception on Thursday, April 10. Porat’s work delves into Germany’s interwar period (1919–1933), a time of intense social transformation and photographic experimentation. Through an intricate process of collecting, layering, and reassembling archival materials—including postcards, newspapers, and historical documents—she constructs poetic collages and immersive installations that blur the boundaries between personal memory and historical narrative. Deeply influenced by the Weimar Republic era, Porat explores a period when photography both empowered and objectified, shaping new representations of the human body in advertising, art, and surveillance. This era’s themes resonate with her own personal history and the communal life of the kibbutz where she was born. TIME CAPSULE draws from her most significant series of the past decade, offering a layered visual dialogue on identity, power structures, and the intersection of personal and collective memory. At the heart of the exhibition is Porat’s exploration of crime photography—specifically, a chilling 1931 murder case in Berlin. A sixteen-year-old girl, Lieschen Neumann, along with two accomplices, killed a watchmaker named Fritz Ulbrich. The investigation revealed that Ulbrich had been operating a secret photography studio in the back of his shop, where he took exploitative images of young women, including Neumann. These photographs, produced in an era when photography was increasingly used for surveillance and social control, serve as a foundation for Porat’s examination of visual manipulation and historical power dynamics. Porat’s artistic practice is inherently fragmented and non-linear, incorporating forensic imagery, historical documentation, and elements of investigative storytelling. Her process begins in photo archives, where she gathers and recontextualizes images, merging disparate histories with personal autobiographical references. She first assembles these into “index sheets,” which then take shape as intricate collages and large-scale mural installations. Rather than recounting history in a traditional sense, Porat seeks to map human behavioral patterns and the shifting roles of victim and perpetrator—where the photographic gaze plays a pivotal role in constructing power and identity. TIME CAPSULE compels viewers to question the truthfulness of images and the narratives they shape. Alongside Porat’s work, the exhibition features a selection of Man Ray’s photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, a period of radical artistic exploration after his move to Paris in 1921. His avant-garde approach to the female form—oscillating between objectification and creative liberation—parallels Porat’s interrogation of gender, power, and representation. Both Porat and Man Ray navigate the complexities of sexuality, identity, and perception. Where Man Ray’s poetic depictions of desire and fantasy examine the fluidity of the human form, Porat’s archival compositions deconstruct the mechanisms that define and control it. Together, their works create a compelling dialogue about the evolving portrayal of women in photography—one that examines the tension between objectification and agency, history and reinvention. Image: Ronit Porat, Untititled, 2023, Photographic Collage © Ronit Porat

The Centurion refers to a fabled and exclusive credit card only available to a select few of the ultra wealthy. It’s also the title of Brian Ulrich’s newest photographic series, which examines the lure of exclusivity in the world of extreme luxury. Ulrich has photographed the American culture of commerce and consumption for over a decade. The Centurion turns to the country’s fascination with wealth and all its promises.

Jack Shainman Gallery is thrilled to announce Regardez-moi, an exhibition of photographs by the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. The exhibition, the title of which translates to "Look at Me", marks the gallery's latest celebration of Sidibé’s unparalleled ability to capture the heartbeat of Bamako, Mali following the country’s liberation from colonial rule in 1960. Featuring a vibrant selection of photographs — some of which have never before been exhibited — this presentation invites viewers into the bustling parties, joyous gatherings, and tender moments that defined the transformative era of a young nation relishing to establish its own national identity. In today’s cultural climate, where visibility and representation hold immense weight, Sidibé’s work and legacy remain as significant as ever. Presented in conjunction with this exhibition is the publication of Painted Frames, a monograph by Loose Joints, and the first exploration of Sidibé’s synergistic painted frame photographs. In these works, Sidibe collaborated with local Malian artists to blend his iconic photography with the traditional West African art of reverse-glass painting. Regardez-moi presents a selection of these painted frames; reaffirming the sanctity of African photography as a medium of memory and identity. The publication also features an essay by writer, independent researcher, and collector-archivist Amy Sall, in which she makes a case for the continued and ever-expanding importance of Sidibé’s oeuvre: “Malick Sidibé was witness to, and preserver of, a nascent, burgeoning postcolonial society in which a new modernity was being constructed by way of transcultural osmosis. From his studio to the soirées, and even to the banks of the Niger River, Sidibé and his camera were at the center of it all. He was not only chronicling Malian history and culture, but making pivotal contributions to it…. The night clubs, living rooms, and courtyards he photographed were spaces of freedom and community. Sidibé’s oeuvre reflects dialectic expressions of being because he captured his subjects as their imagined and authentic selves. From his widely recognized Nuit de Noël (Christmas Eve, Happy Club) (1963) to his series Vues de dos, the framed images carry the same undercurrents of power and rebellion, tenderness and joy that flow throughout Sidibé’s entire archive.” Regardez-moi underscores Sidibé’s role as a pioneer who sculpted the visual identity of the African diaspora, offering a window into a Malian nation that boldly joined a global youth movement. His photographs transcend their historical context, speaking to contemporary dialogues about identity, agency, and the power of being seen. Sidibé's photographs don’t just freeze time, they transform these scenes into vibrant stages where his subjects — young couples excited to be married, or older men or women reclaiming their freedom of expression — assert their presence and identity. In Dansez le Twist (1963-2010), Sidibé captures a young man and a woman in a state of joy while dancing the twist, an American rock ‘n’ roll dance that became a global cultural phenomenon from 1959 to the early 1960s, which was known for its simple yet lively steps that encouraged freedom of movement and expression. By providing his subjects with ways to be seen and celebrated, Sidibé’s lens offers a powerful counterpoint to our tech-filtered world, reminding viewers of the raw, unscripted joy of human connection. One of Sidibé most celebrated series, Vues de Dos — with examples from the series held in the collections of numerous museums such as the Getty Museum, The National Gallery of Art, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art — provides viewers with a deeper understanding of the photographer’s curatorial eye, depicting women in his studio with their bare backs to the camera against a signature backdrop of striped walls. Sidibé’s photography serves as both a reflector and a loudspeaker, magnifying the vibrant, intimate essence of Bamako’s people in the wake of gaining independence from French colonial rule. The works capture a liberated people that resonates with a contemporary urgency now more than ever.

Emerging from Micah Cash’s photography series and photo book of the same name, this exhibition focuses on the built and natural environments as seen through the windows of Waffle House restaurants. Captured from locations across the southeastern United States, these images contemplate the physical and social environments and commerce that surround each location of the southern cultural icon. The natural landscapes beyond the windowpanes are as diverse as the perspectives and stories of each guest at the tables. Yet the similarities of the restaurants’ interiors echo across states and time zones. The images look out from the restaurant’s iconic booths, past the signature midcentury pendant lamps and make viewers newly conscious of buildings so commonplace they often go unseen. Each guest, waiting for their hashbrowns, becomes witness to the intertwined narratives of economic stability, transience and politics. The familiar, well-worn interiors make us think about what we have in common. Yet the differences in environment call to mind the different ways we experience structures built and felt. This exhibition will premiere a newly commissioned time-based media component of the series. This video realizes Cash’s directive to “look up” through prolonged footage of views and sounds from three Waffle Houses. The video and its soundscape disrupt the nostalgia of the still photographs, which the audience animates with actual or imagined memories of a Waffle House meal. Instead, they emphasize a long, time-based vision of the surrounding landscape and architecture.

The Center for Photographic Art is pleased to present the work of the 2024 CPA Artist Grant Recipients. Visit the gallery to see new photographs, installations, and mixed media pieces by grantees Debra Achen, Matthew Finley, Maria Isabel LeBlanc, and Katie Shapiro. All four artists will be speaking about their projects prior to the opening reception in a special artist talk in Carpenter Hall at 3pm, so don't miss this opportunity to hear these fearless photographic artists talk about their processes and their journeys. We are honored and excited to support these talented artists and bring their work to Carmel. Image: Maria Isabel LeBlanc, Sweet Kiwi

Echoes of Resilience: Reclaiming History presents a powerful exhibition featuring the work of Bay Area photographers Harvey Castro and Izzi Valencia. Their photography documents the enduring spirit of communities facing climate disasters, cultural preservation, and the dignity of labor often overlooked in mainstream narratives. Harvey Castro’s “Los Olvidados” series captures the profound impact of natural disasters on marginalized populations. His photographs from Guatemala and Puerto Rico vividly depict communities in the aftermath of environmental catastrophes, highlighting their perseverance and the critical need for ecological accountability. Izzi Valencia’s work focuses on the unification and organization efforts of Maya Mam, Mixteca, Chatino, Wixárica, and Nahua communities. Through his lens, he portrays the strength and solidarity of these groups as they strive to preserve their cultural heritage and rights amidst external pressure. Valencia’s recent project “Native Sun Leaves” turns a spotlight on the contribution of agricultural workers to the wine industry in Napa and Sonoma Counties. In these portraits, Valencia uses a chlorophyll printing process on grape leaves to honor workers from Oaxaca, Mexico, whose labor is integral to the region’s agricultural economy. This exhibition offers an intimate look into the lives of people overcoming adversity, emphasizing their strength and solidarity. Through the eyes of two artists deeply connected to their roots, visitors are invited to engage with stories of resistance in existence. Image: Untitled from the series Los Olvidados Guatemala, 2021 © Harvey Castro

The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is proud to present The First Years by Bay Area artist Josh Smith. This ongoing series explores family and how its structure shapes identity. Rooted in personal experience, Smith uses photography to navigate the complexities of parenthood—balancing presence with individuality. His images create an open space for viewers to reflect on their own histories. The First Years serves as an attempt to hold onto what cannot be preserved. Acting as both a personal archive and a poetic interpretation, these images capture fleeting moments, offering a connection to the intangible emotions of family life.

“While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.” – Edward Burtynsky "I wanted to understand water: what it is, and what it leaves behind when we're gone. I wanted to understand our use and misuse of it. I wanted to trace the evidence of global thirst and threatened sources. Water is part of a pattern I've watched unfold throughout my career. I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world." – Edward Burtynsky (Walrus, October 2013) "The project takes us over gouged landscapes, fractal patterned delta regions, ominously coloured biomorphic shapes, rigid and rectilinear stepwells, massive circular pivot irrigation plots, aquaculture and social, cultural and ritual gatherings. Water is intermittently introduced as a victim, a partner, a protagonist, a lure, a source, an end, a threat and a pleasure. Water is also often completely absent from the pictures. Burtynsky instead focusses on the visual and physical effects of the lack of water, giving its absence an even more powerful presence." — Russell Lord, Curator of Photographs, NOMA

After nearly a 35-year career, Carol Carlisle retired as Managing Editor of Popular Photography magazine, where she was celebrated for her keen eye and ruthless sense of perfection. It was her reputation as an insightful and meticulous editor that brought both her, and the magazine, such an outstanding reputation. She was also acclaimed for her work as a photographer, with her images published many times in the magazine and on the cover. What the photography world did not know about Carol during her lifetime, however, was that she was an avid collector of almost anything that delighted her eye. She saw beauty and artistic significance, often where others did not. In that spirit, she sometimes ‘rescued’ images that were submitted to the magazine, but impractical to return and headed for destruction. She amassed more than 1200 such prized prints. Each represents a rare piece and specific moment in time, mostly from the 60s and 70s that, if not for her collector’s and conservationist’s eye, might have been lost forever. These images embody the spirit of the woman whose ‘waste not, want not’ approach to life and impressive aesthetic sense led her to save these prints from oblivion. Carol reveled in spotting and saving each important image for posterity, but she also made the people she worked with a high priority, always reaching out to make a difference. For many years, she served with Volunteer Service Photographers, a non-profit organization that was set up in hospitals, youth groups, and senior citizen centers to teach photography for rehabilitation, career development or just for fun. Carol dedicated her life to educating her readers about photography, and by sharing this art with the broader public. She devoted every other waking minute to her children: the late Claudia Lapierre, Jaye and Lee Smith and her 11 grandchildren and great grandchildren all of whom are grateful for having shared in the gift of her passion. Image: Sven-Cösta Johansson (Sweden, 1913-1997), Anita Ekberg, 1959

The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Art in City Hall program, in partnership with PhotoAlliance, are proud to present Metaphors of Recent Times: A Dialogue of the Personal, the Political and the Cultural, an exhibition that features artwork from PhotoAlliance’s INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 portfolio, alongside works by 24 artists who have created work in response to the portfolio. Metaphors of Recent Times will be on display on the Ground Floor and North Light Court at City Hall through June 20, 2025. The exhibition features a wide range of incisive visual perspectives from artists of diverse identities and backgrounds, each responding to the issues of our times.. A public reception to celebrate the opening of the exhibition will be held on the Ground Floor of City Hall on Thursday, January 16, 2025, from 5 – 7 p.m.. “PhotoAlliance has been a vital force in the local arts community for over 20 years, providing a platform for photographers to engage with and reflect on the world around them,” said Ralph Remington, Director of Cultural Affairs. “The Arts Commission is proud to collaborate with PhotoAlliance to present this timely and thought-provoking exhibition at City Hall. Metaphors of Recent Times highlights how art can serve as both a mirror to our current socio-political landscape and a powerful catalyst for activism and change.”. The exhibition’s themes are rooted in PhotoAlliance’s 20th Anniversary portfolio of limited edition prints by local, regional, and international photographers. Curated by PhotoAlliance founder and creative director Linda Connor, the set of 20 prints was conceived as a distillation of the creative responses artists have made to the upheaval seen in our political, cultural, environmental, and personal spheres in recent years. INSIGHT/INCITE captured images of hope, challenges, resilience, and humanity and included work from renowned photographers such as Binh Danh, Mercedes Dorame, Lewis Watts, J. John Priola, Amanda Marchand, Adrian Burrell, among many others.. Metaphors of Recent Times expands on the themes of INSIGHT/INCITE and includes new work that respond to the themes explored in the portfolio. The artists included were juried by photographers Linda Connor, Lewis Watts, and exhibition curator Beth Davila Waldman from a pool of 128 artists who responded to a call for artists held in the fall of 2024. Artists were asked to submit a trio of images that would expand and deepen the dialogues provoked in INSIGHT/INCITE.. “The inspiration behind Metaphors of Recent Times was compelled by the desire to provide an extended platform for the various themes and concerns voiced by the INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 portfolio,” says exhibition curator Beth Davila Waldman. “The call for artists really showed how resonant these themes are, and we are excited to highlight the spirit of our city’s inclusivity with a group of emerging and established artists, combined with the impact of presenting this selection of work in San Francisco’s City Hall.”. “We are thrilled to collaborate with PhotoAlliance on this exhibition,” states Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, SFAC Director of Galleries and Public Programs. “Metaphors of Recent Times provides a lens into the complexities of our time, capturing the turbulence of recent years while simultaneously highlighting hope and resilience. Through the camera, eyes of local, regional, and international artists, the work reminds us of the importance of capturing these stories.”. The exhibition will feature work by Pablo Tapay Bautista, Renee Billingslea, Barbara Boissevain, Kennedi Carter, Mima Cataldo, Yu-Chen Chiu, Katie Cofer, Mark Coggins, Izzy Cosentino, Kelly Fogel, David Gardner, Stuart Goldstein, Christine Huhn, Judi Iranyi, Strele Laurin, Anni Lopponen, Darcy Padilla, Eric Robertson, Lance Shields, Nina Sidneva, William Mark Sommer, Liz Steketee, Rusty Weston, and Harry Williams.. Works from the INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 folio are by Wesaam Al-Badry, Lisa K. Blatt, Leon Borensztein, Adrian Burrell, Jessica Chen, Sarah Christianson, Marna Clarke, Linda Connor, Binh Danh, Mercedes Dorame, Ed Drew, Germán Herrera, Marie-Luise Klotz, Wayne Levin, Amak Mahmoodian, Amanda Marchand, Paccarik Orue, J. John Priola, Zack Schomp, and Lewis Watts.

David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery are pleased to announce Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, on view at David Zwirner’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Organized by both galleries, the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cataclysm re-creates that 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. This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago. 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 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 © The Estate of Diane Arbus 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.

Peter Fetterman Gallery is proud to present "The World of Sebastião Salgado," a large-scale exhibition of prints by the master photographer Sebastião Salgado (Brazil, b. 1944). Opening on Saturday, March 15, 2025, and running through June 21st, this exhibition will offer an extraordinary retrospective of Salgado’s unparalleled career. A special opening reception will be held on March 15 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM. Utilizing the entire gallery space, this extensive exhibition will feature photographs, spanning over four decades of Salgado’s dedicated photographic work. Iconic images from his major bodies of work will be presented as hand crafted gelatin silver prints alongside his special, highly coveted platinum palladium prints. Curated to present Salgado’s powerful visual storytelling within a retrospective context, "The World of Sebastião Salgado" will provide a compelling insight into the depth and breadth of his documentary and artistic practice. Sebastião Salgado is widely recognized as one of the most influential photographers of our time. His humanistic approach to documentary photography has illuminated pressing global issues, from labor and migration to environmental conservation. The exhibition will highlight key works from his most renowned series, including the Serra Pelada Gold Mines, his documentation of conflict and displacement in Africa, his haunting portrayals of environmental destruction in the Oil Fields of Kuwait during the Gulf War, and his latest body of work from Brazil titled, Amazonia. Additionally, the exhibition will showcase works from his environmental magnum opus, "GENESIS," a project that explores untouched landscapes, wildlife, and indigenous cultures. The relationship between Peter Fetterman Gallery and Sebastião Salgado is rooted in a deep mutual respect and a shared commitment to photography as a force for storytelling and change. Introduced to Salgado through master photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Martine Franck (1938-2012), Peter Fetterman has been a key figure in bringing Salgado's work to a fine art audience for over 30 years. Born in Aimorés, Brazil, in 1944, Sebastião Salgado initially trained as an economist before turning to photography, a path that has since shaped the field of visual storytelling. Salgado resides in Paris with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has played an integral role in curating and publishing his works. "The World of Sebastião Salgado" at Peter Fetterman Gallery will be an unmissable opportunity to see the photographs of one of the greatest documentary photographers of our time.

Echoes of Injustice features three contemporary photographers who explore the traumatic legacy and lasting reverberations of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Echoes of Injustice brings together the work of three contemporary photographers—Renee Billingslea, Jerry Takigawa, and Dean K. Terasaki—who explore the traumatic legacy and lasting reverberations of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Through deeply personal and visually layered approaches, each artist offers a distinct perspective on this dark chapter of U.S. history, urging us to confront what has been forgotten, concealed, or left unresolved. Renee Billingslea’s Ten Japanese American Concentration Camps revisits the landscapes of incarceration through contemporary photography, stitching them together with historical images from the War Relocation Photographs. Through this juxtaposition, she reveals the tension between visibility and erasure. Her use of gold thread, referencing the Japanese art of Kintsugi, and her inclusion of earth from the sites, create a connection to the landscape and histories of lives disrupted and communities displaced. The series documents all ten camps located in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. In his series Balancing Cultures, Jerry Takigawa uses family photographs and memorabilia to interpret the injustice of his family’s incarceration at the Jerome camp in Arkansas. Born in Chicago after their release, Takigawa grapples with the tension between his parent’s silence around their experience in the camp and his own inherited trauma which is still being processed. This series seeks to preserve his parents honor while speaking for a generation that remained silent. Dean K. Terasaki’s Veiled Inscriptions are photomontages of camp locations as they appear today with personal letters sent by those incarcerated. The archive of 350 letters was discovered in Denver’s historic T.K. Pharmacy in 2012. The pharmacy had been operated by Terasaki’s uncle and his images are about loss and the lives torn apart by the forced incarceration. Together, these artists call attention to a chapter of American history that remains relevant and urgent. At a time when the erosion of civil liberties continues to echo across political and cultural landscapes, Echoes of Injustice calls us to reflect: Has America changed? Have our values? And how do we ensure that this history does not repeat? — Samantha Johnston, CPAC Executive Director & Curator Image: EO 9066, ©Jerry Takigawa

Luis González Palma is among the most recognizable Latin American photographers. The early work he is canonized for address the difficult past of his birth country of Guatemala and its people. This history of engagement spans topics from the colonial plight of the Mayan people to the legacy of the civil war and “the disappeared.” González Palma employs the intimacy of portraiture, weight of the gaze, and qualities of chosen materials to drive meaning in his work. But this is only the beginning. Möbius is a diverse and open-ended series, which began in 2013. The artist embraces, destroys and rebuilds upon structures he built up for himself over 40 years, beginning with his own iconic work. Luis González Palma has been celebrated for symbolism, portraiture, and photography. To reduce him to these realms is to underestimate his profound dialectic. To break away from the confines of his own past, through Möbius González Palma seeks to reinvent and renew his vision and its perception by others. Möbius builds upon a mathematical concept discovered by German scientists in 1858. The Möbius strip is an infinite loop, created from a linear plane with a quarter-twist (odd numbers of twists greater than one, or a knotted centerline). It is both a non-orientable object and a fixed surface. Its interior cannot be differentiated from its exterior. This mathematical discovery has been employed by famed artists from M. C. Escher to Salvador Dalí, Julio Cortazar, and principally for González Palma, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Photography is an enigma, its beauty a disguise trapped in the frame of an image which offers as many readings as viewers who look upon it. González Palma’s Möbius, and work made thereafter, are theoretical, phenomenological experiments. These threads of interest expand and reinvent. In Möbius González Palma deconstructs the history of (his own) existence evidenced by his works and builds upon it from scratch. Möbius breaks through itself to discover something new, with seemingly opposing visual language- realism and abstraction. Opposition becomes continuum. Destruction becomes creation. In Möbius symbolism and metaphor fall apart, fragment, play allowing new dialogs to be written through what the artist describes as lyrical abstraction. Palma begins with what we know- his early portraits in traditional style- hand painted prints- stained by a wash of bitumen, except for eyes that glare back at us, locking our gaze in theirs. He then integrates geometric abstraction- shapes, lines, planes rendered in gold leaf or acrylic paint. Some works opt for a lighter wash over the traditional sepia-colored bitumen, a substance used from pre-history to current day in construction and waterproofing. Visual integration of realism and geometric abstraction- figuration and raw form- intersect. Choices feel both fragmented and harmonious. The result is hypnotic, rhythmic, spectral- we can almost hear the melody of silence play through a watchful prolonged gaze like a tuning fork searching for the pitch of the universe. Hearing it in the silence. Seeing through the past into the future, written and unwritten through the language of one’s own icons. Compositions play as new possibilities emerge. The works in this exhibition, extend beyond the structural boundaries of a photograph, or a painting. They are metaphor, which underscores duality. The surface, physicality, the sculptural quality of the image, ever important to the artist, is underscored by Möbius. We are aware of the physicality of the image- the space it occupies in our plane, but this too only stands in to reference unrecordable fluid emotion. We must learn to doubt and not take anything for granted. Whatever our certainties, Möbius asks we examine everything again with fresh eyes. Luis González Palma was born in Guatemala and lives in Cordoba, Argentina. He studied architecture and cinematography at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala but chose to focus on photography. Since 1989, his work has been collected internationally and shown in more than 58 expositions throughout the Americas and Europe, including at Les Rencontres de Arles (France), the 49th and 51st Venice Biennials (Italy), Fotobeinal de Vigo (Spain), XXII Biennial in Sao Paulo (Brazil) and the V Biennial in Havana (Cuba). Palma lives and works in Cordoba, Argentina.

Robert Frank: Mary’s Book celebrates the centennial of the legendary photographer Robert Frank (1924–2019) by offering an intimate look at one of his most personal creations—a handmade scrapbook of photographs compiled for his first wife, Mary Lockspeiser. Created in 1949, Mary’s Book represents a pivotal moment in Frank’s artistic development, as he experimented with the interplay of images and text. This one-of-a-kind album features seventy-four small photographs, each paired with handwritten inscriptions, revealing Frank’s poetic sensitivity to everyday objects and spaces. Though many images lack human figures, a sense of presence lingers—seen in the way Frank captures the streets and chairs of Paris, weaving in messages for Mary that transform the book into a deeply personal meditation on solitude and connection. A visual poem in photographic form, Mary’s Book reflects Frank’s ability to evoke emotion through juxtaposition, a technique that would later define his groundbreaking work. The exhibition presents original spreads from the album, held in the MFA’s collection, alongside additional photographs taken in Paris, on loan from the artist’s foundation. Accompanying the show is a special publication featuring the first complete reproduction of Mary’s Book, offering a rare glimpse into a formative chapter of Frank’s creative journey. Image: Robert Frank, spread from Mary’s Book (detail), 1949. Illustrated book with gelatin silver prints. Gift of the Howard Greenberg Gallery. © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation.

David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive is a major traveling retrospective exhibition that spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography. Also included in the exhibition are photographs by some of Goldblatt’s peers, such as Ernest Cole, Santu Mofokeng, and Jo Ractliffe, as well as a generation of younger South Africans, many of whom Goldblatt mentored, including Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi, placing Goldblatt within a broader and intergenerational network of photographers. This ambitious project honors the life and career of an artist who used his work to celebrate his country’s working-class people, the landscape, and the built environment. On view through June 22, 2025, David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive highlights the artist’s commitment to documenting daily life in South Africa, particularly during apartheid. This major traveling retrospective traces Goldblatt’s career from his early black-and-white photography to his later color prints, capturing the impact of racial segregation. Image: David Goldblatt, Miriam Diale, 5357 Orlando East, Soweto, 18 October 1972, 1972, printed later. Carbon ink print. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979; with the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund; and with support from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to present New World Atlas: California & Nevada, the third solo exhibition at the gallery by American photographer Matt Black. Known for his visceral approach to documentary photography, Black turns his focus to the evolving climate of the American West, using thermal and infrared imaging to examine the effects of extreme weather events and the vulnerabilities of a rapidly shifting landscape. New World Atlas is organized in a series of 17 chapters, one for each state lying west of the 100th meridian. This exhibition presents California & Nevada, the first two chapters of this larger body of work. In this series Black departs from conventional photographic representation and incorporates technologies that extend human perception. Thermal imaging makes the invisible visible, allowing viewers to witness heat as a signifier of change, from drought and fire to evaporation. Infrared photography distinguishes the living from the inert, exposing a shifting terrain beneath what once seemed immutable. Based in California’s Central Valley, Black draws on his own experience with the region’s environmental volatility. He writes: “Giga-fires, mega-droughts, and thousand-year floods are reshaping the American West. From my home, I have seen massive Sierra wildfires fill the sky with smoke, and over 500,000 acres of farmland fall fallow for lack of water.” By working across the sub-humid and arid zones of the American West, areas particularly susceptible to shifts in temperature and moisture, New World Atlas offers an urgent and deeply felt chronicle of ecological transformation. Rather than documenting catastrophe alone, Black’s images invite viewers to consider new ways of seeing and understanding a landscape increasingly defined by extremes Image: Gold Butte, Nevada. 2024. Cactus., 2024 © Matt Black

Dutch photographer Ruud van Empel (b. 1958) invites viewers to see the world anew, blurring the line between reality and illusion. His images, saturated with vivid color and intricate detail, create an almost surreal experience—scenes that feel both familiar and entirely imagined. Van Empel’s process is meticulous and time-intensive, often taking hundreds or even thousands of hours to complete a single image. Using a digital collage technique he has refined since the mid-1990s, he assembles fragments of his own photographs to construct compositions that exist outside traditional photography. These layered, hyper-detailed landscapes celebrate the beauty of nature while also reflecting its tensions, as elements compete for space and attention. While Van Empel is best known for his portraits of children set within lush environments, this exhibition shifts focus to the landscapes themselves. Drawing from source images captured during his travels—from botanical gardens in the Netherlands to California’s Joshua Tree National Park—he presents both daylight and nocturnal scenes that feel dreamlike yet tangible. These constructed worlds challenge perceptions of photography’s role in truth-telling, encouraging viewers to step inside and explore a realm of wonder, memory, and mystery. Image: Ruud van Empel, Theatre #8 (detail), 2013. Archival pigment print. Gift of the artist in honor of Deborah Klochko. © Ruud van Empel

“It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role . . . It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.” -Robert Ezra Park, 1950 Casemore Gallery is pleased to present You, the performer, a group exhibition that brings together eight contemporary artists —Sophronia Cook, Jim Goldberg, Todd Hido, Whitney Hubbs, Jim Jocoy, Steve Kahn, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Larry Sultan, and Lindsey White— whose works explore the theatrical impulse embedded in both the act of image-making and the staging of the scenes documented within the frame. Drawing upon the aesthetics of performance, illusion, and mise-en-scène, these artists delve into the personal and collective unconscious, blurring the lines between documentary and fantasy, observer and participant, and fiction and reality. In his 1960 work Leap into the Void, Yves Klein subverted the notion of photography as a purely documentary medium. His photograph, a staged leap from a Paris rooftop, offered a fantastical image that questioned the relationship between reality and illusion. As curator Mia Fineman writes, Klein’s work “symbolically enacts the leap of faith we make in accepting the truth of any photograph.” This moment marked the beginning of an era in which photography began investigating truth through a conceptual and performative lens. You, the performer continues this exploration, with works spanning from the 1970s to the present, questioning and playing with the validity of the oft-repeated "quintessential American life" narrative through the use of models, the stage, and acute directorial and editorial interventions. Whether set in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the gated communities of Panama, the streets of Hollywood, a dive bar in San Francisco, or the artist’s studio, these images underscore the shifting and often surreal underpinnings between the self, the other, and the interiors we inhabit—physically and psychologically. As much about the stage as it is about the characters who perform upon it, this exhibition reveals how easily the boundaries between the two can become porous. The models in the photos of Todd Hido, Larry Sultan, and Rachelle Mozman Solano become fairytale-like femme-fatales, the stars of their own movies unfolding in real-time within the image and in collaboration with the photographer’s investigation of their personal inner subconscious landscape. Lindsey’s White’s You, the performer, the exhibition's titular piece, allows the viewer to choose whether they want to be the performer or remain part of the audience. Jim Jocoy’s double-exposure plays within a similarly temporal space, as the photographer becomes a bridge between performer and audience, evoking the energy of a performance through the physical abstraction of the scene. Other artists’ works offer a seemingly “empty” stage scattered with remnants—teddy bears, seashells, mylar curtains, ropes, swaddled organs—prompting the audience to mentally reconstruct an implied narrative. In the works of Steve Kahn, Larry Sultan, and Whitney Hubbs, interior spaces transform into psychological containers. The physicality of the printed image becomes performative in Jim Goldberg’s photograph of a stage curtain, printed on paint-embellished fabric and hung as a curtain, and in Sophronia Cook’s aluminum mold of her studio floor. With the aid of these photographers’ perspectives and directorial embellishments, stages and backdrops morph into characters in their own right. In an era where image-making is second nature, we find ourselves deeper than ever in Foucault’s epoch of simultaneity, reassessing and redesigning the everyday architecture and backdrops that shape our own lives. The works in You, the performer offer both a reflection and a means of escape from the prescribed “American life”—a portal into alternate dimensions that are, perhaps, more honest depictions of our true feelings about the world.

In a story that bridges survival, serendipity, and soaring ambition, Robert Mann Gallery is proud to present Coming Home the debut New York City exhibition of Isaac “Drift” Wright, the U.S. Army veteran turned urban explorer whose gravity-defying rooftop photography has stunned both digital audiences and the international art world.
 Wright, known globally as “Drift,” rose to prominence not through the traditional art world but through silence, steel, and the skyline. After serving in the military and confronting profound personal challenges, Wright began documenting his solitary climbs atop skyscrapers, capturing breathtaking images from vantage points few ever reach. His work, which gained viral traction online was first introduced to the wider public in a powerful 2021 New York Times profile by David Phillips, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. That story changed everything.
 Four years later, that moment of recognition comes full circle. Wright’s first physical exhibition in New York City opens this spring in the heart of Chelsea, curated to reflect the city that has defined, challenged, and inspired him. The show will include the first-ever public display of his photograph taken from the spire of the Empire State Building, among a series of large-format images exploring the architectural intimacy and soaring tension of New York’s skyline. While centered on NYC, the exhibition also includes select works from across the U.S. and around the world, reflecting Wright’s evolution into a globally recognized artist with a singular point of view.
 “For me, climbing isn’t about adrenaline, it’s clarity,” said Wright. “Above the noise, you feel invisible and infinite. I’ve been hunted, locked up, written off, but my art gave me a way forward. This show is my first time putting that journey on a wall.”
 To properly showcase the breadth and scale of Wright’s vision, Robert Mann Gallery has expanded its exhibition space within its Chelsea location. The larger venue allows for a powerful cross-section of Wright’s work across his signature formats and will better accommodate the strong, loyal following he’s cultivated through social media and digital art platforms.
 This exhibition is more than a gallery debut, it’s the culmination of a life reclaimed, a city reimagined, and a lens fixed firmly on the impossible. Image: And When We Die It Will Feel Like This, 2023

THE DOG & PONY SHOW! 1. A group photography exhibition that celebrates two endearing species that offer us unconditional friendship and support in times of need. 2. Some artful, and occasionally comedic relief from intelligent and creative human beings. 2 (alt.) Some artful, and occasionally comedic relief from the actual s***show that’s going on in Washington. Photographers: Elliott McDowell, Tony Bonanno, Glen Wexler, Patricia Galagan, Eric McCollum, Renee Lynn, Yvette Roman, Mark Berndt, Victoria Stamm, Brad Stamm, Jennifer Schlessinger, Kate Lindsey, Walter Nelson, Jane Phillips, John Chiodo, Dolores Smart, and Scott Wilson.

CLAMP is pleased to present “My Life as a Flower,” an exhibition of unique Polaroids produced by Dietmar Busse nearly twenty-five years ago, at the turn of the 21st century in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Coated from head to toe in matte, chalky pigments, Busse transforms his own body into a living canvas. Onto his skin he carefully pressed petals, blossoms, stems, and leaves, crafting self portraits that feel both fantastical and haunting. These images, rich with texture and fragility, suggest a deep intimacy with nature and a performative merging of subject and medium. Busse assembles parts from a wide range of botanical species—anemone blossoms paired with carnation leaves on a stalk of aloe—to create impossible new blooms that exist solely within his imagination. Once complete, these fleeting arrangements are photographed before they vanish, emphasizing the ephemerality at the heart of the work. Through this singular series, Busse collapses the boundaries between painting, sculpture, photography, and performance. His process foregrounds impermanence and transformation while quietly invoking our shared dependency on the natural world—an uneasy tether made more precarious in an age increasingly defined by technological acceleration and impending climate catastrophe. “My Life as a Flower” coincides with an exhibition at FIERMAN of Busse’s camera-less chemical paintings as well as newer digital floral self portraits running from May 8 – June 22, 2025. Dietmar Busse (b. 1966) lives and works in New York. He was born in Stolzenau, Germany, and as a young man learned the world of photography in Madrid before relocating to New York in 1991. His recent solo museum exhibition titled “Dietmar Busse | Fairy Tales 1991-1999” at Amant, Brooklyn, NY, was reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Cultured, The Guardian, and Paper Magazine. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; CLAMP, New York; FIERMAN, New York; Halsey McKay Gallery, New York; the Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany; Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam; Invisible-Exports, New York; Museum Sinclair Haus, Bad Homburg; the Leslie Lohman Museum, New York, among other venues. His work has been publicized in The New Yorker, TIME, The London Independent, New York Times Magazine and Interview, among other publications.

The Fahey/Klein Gallery is proud to present Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies, a new photographic exhibition that revisits the terrain of youth culture and identity formation in the digital age. Expanding on her acclaimed five-part docuseries of the same name, Social Studies (FX/Hulu) marks Greenfield’s return to a subject she has explored since her groundbreaking 1997 debut, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood. Shot during the 2021–2022 school year across Los Angeles—a city synonymous with image and aspiration—Social Studies follows a diverse group of teens navigating high school, home life, and relationships under the influence of ever-present social media. This new body of work builds on Greenfield’s legacy as a visual sociologist, capturing the tensions between online performance and private identity, aspiration and anxiety, vulnerability and self-curation. Lauren Greenfield’s photographic approach parallels her immersive filmmaking: both document a reality that is evolving in real-time. Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies is a continuation and an evolution of the artist’s decades-long interrogation of American culture. Through the raw honesty of her subjects and the clarity of her vision, Greenfield creates a powerful meditation on adolescence, what she calls “comparison culture”, and the search for authenticity in a curated world. As she continues to investigate the themes of status, beauty, identity, and power, this new series reflects her ongoing commitment to making the invisible visible—revealing how young people see themselves and how we construct and consume those images. Lauren Greenfield is an Emmy-award-winning photographer and filmmaker and has been a preeminent chronicler of youth culture, gender, and consumerism for over twenty-five years. Her documentary The Queen of Versailles won the Best Documentary Director Award at Sundance in 2012 (coming to Broadway as a musical this fall, starring Kristin Chenoweth with music by Stephen Schwartz), and her films The Kingmaker, Generation Wealth, and THIN have garnered Emmy, Critics Choice, WGA, & DGA recognition. Greenfield’s award-winning books include Fast Forward (1997), Girl Culture (2002), THIN (2006). In recent years, she directed the ambitious documentary Generation Wealth (2018) and published a retrospective monograph, a global investigation of materialism and social status that synthesizes decades of her photographic work. In partnership with the Annenberg Foundation, who also collaborated with Greenfield on the Social Studies docuseries, the Generation Wealth exhibition toured museums around the world opening at the Annenberg Space for Photography, and traveling to the ICP, the Nobel Peace Center, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Hague Fotomuseum, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), and Fotografiska. Greenfield’s photographs—including entire bodies of work such as Fast Forward, Girl Culture, THIN, and Generation Wealth—are held in major institutional collections, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the International Center of Photography, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others. Image: Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge, 2025 © Lauren Greenfield, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Zanele Muholi, a pioneering visual activist and artist, has spent two decades using photography, film, and sculpture to document and celebrate Black Queer lives in South Africa and beyond. Their work challenges gender stereotypes, elevates personal narratives, and underscores the urgent need for visibility, respect, and recognition within the LGBTQIA+ community. This exhibition highlights several key series from Muholi’s prolific practice. *Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness)*, an ongoing self-portrait series, features striking black-and-white images in which the artist assumes various personas. Using everyday objects like clothespins, rugs, and plastic bags as adornments, Muholi transforms the ordinary into potent symbols of personal and political commentary. Also on view are selections from *Brave Beauties*, a series that captures trans women and nonbinary individuals in bold, empowered poses, and *Faces and Phases*, a living archive of Black lesbians, gender-nonconforming individuals, and trans men. Initiated in response to the discrimination and violence faced by these communities in South Africa, *Faces and Phases* serves as both documentation and defiance. A never-before-seen selection of portraits from *Somnyama Ngonyama*, presented in lightbox format, intensifies the interplay of light and shadow, further amplifying the series’ dramatic impact. Across these bodies of work, Muholi redefines Black Queer representation, disrupting dominant narratives while offering a powerful and deeply human perspective. Image: Zanele Muholi, "Phila I, Parktown," 2016, edition of 8 + 2 artist’s proofs. Courtesy of Southern Guild and Yancey Richardson. © Zanele Muholi

Nearly 60 years after The Beatles performed their final concert at Candlestick Park, Beatlemania is back in the Bay. Featuring more than 250 personal photographs by Paul McCartney, along with video clips and archival materials, this exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes look at the meteoric rise of the world’s most celebrated band. The images capture the period from December 1963 through February 1964 and the band’s journey to superstardom, from local venues in Liverpool to The Ed Sullivan Show and worldwide acclaim. Photographs of screaming crowds and paparazzi show the sheer magnitude of the group’s fame and the cultural change they represented. More intimate images of the band on their days off highlight the humor and individuality of McCartney and bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Rediscovered in the artist’s personal archive in 2020, these images offer new perspectives on the band, their fans, and the early 1960s, as seen through the eyes of Paul McCartney. Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–1964: Eyes of the Storm is organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in collaboration with Paul McCartney. It is curated by Paul McCartney with Sarah Brown for MPL Communications and Rosie Broadley for the National Portrait Gallery, London. The presentation at the de Young museum is organized by Sally Martin Katz.

Conversations at a party in Oakland in 1932 changed the history of photography. At that gathering, several now-iconic Bay Area figures — including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston — banded together to form Group f.64, a collective dedicated to “true” photography and the rejection of the prevailing style of Pictorialism, which mimicked painting. The group’s name was technical, referring to the camera lens setting that permits the greatest depth of field, but their mission was creative: to make photographs of startling clarity and beauty that rivaled art made in other mediums. Although Group f.64 lasted for less than a year, its legacy endured, marking the Bay Area as an epicenter for modernist photography. Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography takes the work of this influential collective as a nexus from which to examine other local developments in the medium. The exhibition begins with a selection of pictures in the gauzy Pictorialist style, which every member of Group f.64 practiced before turning to the crisp, sharply focused compositions for which they are best known. The second gallery includes work by all eleven members of the collective made around the time they joined together. Beyond that, the exhibition branches off in related but varied directions, including an exploration of the link between Group f.64 members and the poet Langston Hughes and a presentation of contemporary artist Tarrah Krajnak’s work in dialogue with that of Weston and Adams. The final gallery serves as a visual and thematic counterpoint to those that precede it, featuring street photography from the 1970s to the present that reveals the wilder side of San Francisco. Image: Jim Jocoy, Muriel with bruised knees, 1980, courtesy of the artist and Casemore Gallery

Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. The nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers in Digital Witness illuminate today's visual culture where digital editing tools are easier to access than ever before.

“Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” So wrote one of photography’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), about his eponymous daguerreotype in 1839. Daguerre’s words, which associate women with idleness, are clearly misogynistic. Yet in a backhanded way, Daguerre predicted the pivotal role women would play in photography since its invention in the 1830s. Undaunted by photographic chemistry—and often neglected or derided by their male peers—women have made huge contributions to the development of the medium across a variety of genres. In the nineteenth century, photography was more accessible than established artistic disciplines like painting and sculpture because it was new and thus free from conventional training that historically prohibited women. It was relatively inexpensive to start and could be practiced at home with makeshift darkrooms set up in closets or bathrooms. Yet even with fewer barriers to entry, women faced their share of constraints in a male-dominated field. Expectations of gender often dictated the themes they could pursue, encouraging portraiture and still life rather than photographs of war and exploration. Women took up photography in increasing numbers in the twentieth century, and by the 1930s, some of the most successful photographers in the world included Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, all on view in this exhibition. Women in Focus, drawn from The San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection (which merged with the Museum of Photographic Arts in 2023), allows for a fuller account of the medium’s history by highlighting how women have shaped photography from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Image: Trude Fleischmann, Sibylle Binder (detail), ca. 1932. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of Michael and Joyce Axelrod, M.1993.012.001. © Trude Fleischmann

Daniel Cooney Fine Art is honored to present “George Dureau: Photographs”, the gallery’s first exhibition of the late artist’s work and Dureau’s debut solo exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On view from May 31 through July 19, 2025, the show features 40 vintage black-and-white photographs spanning the 1970s through the 1990s, offering a rare and intimate view into the formal and emotional depth of Dureau’s celebrated practice. A lifelong resident of New Orleans, George Dureau (1930–2014) turned to photography in the 1970s, having previously established himself as a painter. His lens captured a deeply personal circle of friends, lovers, and fellow eccentrics, many of whom existed on the margins of society. Dureau’s photographs are known for their rigorous composition and profound empathy, portraying his subjects with dignity, tenderness, and heroic strength. While Dureau remains lesser known to the broader public, his work holds iconic status among artists, historians, and curators. His photographs are widely studied by a new generation of creative minds who revere not only his artistic mastery but also his radical inclusivity and compassionate worldview—qualities that feel more resonant now than ever. Dureau received his B.A. in Fine Art from Louisiana State University in 1952 and studied architecture briefly at Tulane University. His work has been exhibited internationally and is the subject of two monographs: George Dureau: The Photographs (Aperture, 2016) and George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans (University Press of Mississippi, 2025). Image: "Terrell Hopkins", 1987 © George Dureau

This exhibition reimagines the history of American photography, tracing its evolution from its inception in 1839 through the early 20th century. Showcasing works from The Met’s William L. Schaeffer Collection, it places celebrated photographers—including Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen—alongside remarkable yet lesser-known practitioners from towns and cities across the nation. Through a diverse array of photographic formats, from daguerreotypes and cartes de visite to stereographs and cyanotypes, the exhibition highlights how photography swiftly shaped America’s cultural, artistic, and psychological landscape. More than a technological breakthrough, photography became a defining lens through which the nation saw itself, reflecting its transformation and identity. Even before the formal announcement of the medium’s invention, American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson astutely observed in 1835, “Our Age is Ocular,” foreshadowing photography’s profound impact on visual culture. Image: Unknown Maker, Young Man with Rooster, 1850s

Strange and Familiar Places presents 26 works from 10 contemporary photographers, offering fresh perspectives on rural life in the Midwest, South, and Western United States. These new acquisitions, displayed for the first time, showcase intimate photographs that explore the people, communities, and landscapes of these often-overlooked regions, challenging our preconceived notions of them. Great storytelling is at the heart of these works, where the sense of place is just as vital as character, symbolism, and plot. The artists draw inspiration from music, fiction, history, folklore, and the art of photography itself, creating poetic, evocative images. Their approaches vary, with some using a classic documentary style while others stage or carefully compose their photographs, offering new and sometimes surprising ways of seeing the world. Regardless of technique, each artist highlights the humanity of their subjects, deepening our understanding of place. The exhibition features work by Antone Dolezal, Terry Evans, Laura McPhee, Rahim Fortune, Holly Lynton, Elise Kirk, Kristine Potter, RaMell Ross, Bryan Schutmaat, and Lara Shipley. Image: Holly Lynton, American (b. 1972). Les, Honeybees, the Bosque, New Mexico, 2007 © Holly Lynton

Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception brings together photographs that are linked by the common objective of disrupting the viewer’s sense of time, space, place, or scale. Sometimes considered errors, photographic blur, distortion, and obfuscation have also been important creative and aesthetic strategies adopted by artists since the medium’s 19th-century inception. Highlighting photographs from the Norton’s Collection and a selection of special loans, this exhibition points to the constructed nature of perception and, in turn, photography’s vulnerability to manipulation even when it appears to show what is “real.” Image: Jeff Brouws, Interstate 40, Blurred car, New Mexico, 1992

This landmark show will present over 100 photographs by the Austrian-born photographer Trude Fleischmann (1895-1990), one of the most accomplished female photographers of the 20th century. The show, the first solo museum exhibition of the photographer’s work to be presented in the United States, will highlight Fleischmann’s groundbreaking career in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her influential work in the United States after her emigration in 1939. At just 25 years old, Fleischmann opened her own studio in Vienna and achieved great success as a photographer. She became known for photographing artists, dancers, actors, and other key cultural figures of the era. When the Nazis invaded during the 1938 Anschluss, she fled first to London and then to New York. She opened a studio just behind Carnegie Hall on 56th Street in 1940 and photographed many of the artists and intellectuals of the day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Albert Einstein. Lenders to the exhibition include the Wien Museum in Vienna, Austria, the New York Public Library, and private collectors. Importantly, it will also feature never-before-exhibited works from the Fleischmann and Cornides family collections, as well as the family collection of her student and life-long friend, photographer Helen Post (1907-1979). Together, these works provide an unprecedented and intimate view of the photographer’s personal and professional legacy. Image: Trude Fleischmann, Toni Birkmeyer Ballet in “Cancan,” Vienna, 1930, gelatin silver print. Lent by Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. © Trude Fleischmann

This exhibition is generously supported by the Wildcat Cove Foundation. The Center for Photographic Art is pleased to present Embracing Light, a unique two-person exhibition featuring the work of renowned fine art photographers Anne Larsen and John Sexton. They have been sharing a life together along with their passion for photography and exploring the land with large and medium format film cameras, for over thirty years. Their mutual devotion to the beauty of the handcrafted silver gelatin print, created in the traditional darkroom, lies at the heart of their artistic expression. Included in this exhibition, for the first time, will be a body of work they undertook over multiple photographic journeys exploring Venice, Italy. The exhibit will also include stunning images of the natural environment, as well as human-made subjects. For both photographers the use of light as it graces the subject, and its use throughout the photographic process, is essential. Though their palettes are different, both Anne's and John's prints share a common beauty and luminosity. Evan Russel, Curator at The Ansel Adams Gallery—which represents both Anne and John—offers this reflection on their work: “When looking at a photograph by Anne Larsen or John Sexton, I am immediately transported to an emphatic place of quiet light; there is a familiarity and fellowship with each subject regardless of its whereabouts or any notion of its prior existence. The darkest aspen forests glow, ice playfully masquerades as a sea of cumulus clouds, and the dazzling morning sun scattered through fog is shrouding. I feel connected, focused, and welcome. Emanating from the silver prints by both Anne and John is this tacit notion of truth; of genuine places communicating a sympathetic sublimity that is unique yet somehow universal to us all.” Image: Oaks in Fog, Sunrise, Carmel Valley, California ©John Sexton

Rebellion has long fueled resilience, igniting the courage to challenge norms and reimagine the standards of society. This exhibition explores how creativity becomes an act of defiance, questioning power structures and reshaping narratives. Rebellion describes deliberate acts of resistance that disrupt the status quo. Resilience is the strength to endure and rebuild in the face of adversity. This exhibition captures the interplay between art and resistance in two different ways: art as a form of resistance and the artistic documentation of rebellion. On one hand, there are works born from rebellion—pieces that challenge norms or confront injustice. On the other, there are images that capture the energy of rebellion and youth, reflecting the enduring spirit of defiance. The Art of Opposition was curated by Phillips Academy students enrolled in Art 400 Visual Culture: Curating the Addison Collection. The exhibition is on view in the gallery’s Museum Learning Center; as an active teaching space, it may sometimes be occupied by a class. Image: Bruce Davidson, New York City, USA, 1959. Gelatin silver print, 6 x 8 7/8 inches. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, purchased as the gift of Katherine D. and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971, and P 2005, 2007, 2010), 2012.71.46

Featuring works from the Addison’s extensive photography collection, this exhibition considers the dynamics of two beings sharing space, whether they be romantic partners, family members, close friends, rivals, strangers, or interspecies companions. Each image invites viewers to delve into the stories behind the expressions, prompting questions about the relationship, the context of the encounter, and the emotions at play. It takes two flints to make a fire. —Louisa May Alcott Drawn from the Addison Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition explores the dynamics of two beings sharing space. Whether they be romantic partners, family members, close friends, rivals, strangers, or interspecies companions, the joining of two creates an inevitable charge. This spark can manifest in many forms: a shared laugh between friends, the electric tension of rivals, the sudden eruption of violence among antagonists, a wary glance exchanged by strangers, or even the mysterious interpersonal interactions generated by staged scenarios. Each encounter is laden with unspoken narratives, as body language, facial expressions, and subtle social and psychological cues convey a world of emotions, thoughts, and stories. Photographs of these paired encounters—these instants of intersection—serve as powerful windows into narratives of shared experiences. Captured in a flash, they freeze time and encapsulate the essence of that conjoined moment. Each image invites viewers to delve deeper into the stories behind the expressions—legible and illegible, ingenuous and masked—prompting questions about the relationship, the context of the encounter, and the emotions at play. They remind us that behind every interaction—whether planned and momentous or seemingly random and negligible—lie myriad stories waiting to be explored, ultimately weaving a larger narrative of connection that transcends any single interaction of two bodies. Image: Wayne F. Miller, Father and Son at Lake Michigan, 1947

This selection of works from the Addison’s collection explores performance both as visual spectacle and as a way of investigating identity. Acrobats tumble and dancers leap across the first two galleries, revealing how the extravaganza of the circus, the drama of the theater, and the energy of dance have inspired artists across media. These ephemeral performances—from the breathtaking feats of trapeze artists to gestural movements of dancers—prompted creative strategies to preserve their dynamism in painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking. The emergence of modern dance and other performance-based art forms fueled parallel developments in visual media, particularly photography, as artists grappled with capturing the interplay between performer and audience, spectacle and spectators. In the second half of the exhibition, the focus shifts from public stages to private ones, examining the performance of the self. Through costume, roleplay, and shifting personas, the works reveal identity as fluid—an ongoing process of self-definition rather than a fixed state. In this section, artists embrace the freedom of performance to explore new identities and modes of expression, as well as challenge stereotypes and societal norms. Through their use of theatricality and artifice, these works underscore the constructed nature of all identities, inviting viewers to reflect on the roles we perform in everyday life. On and Off Stage includes works by Ida Applebroog, Charles Atlas, Gifford Beal, George Bellows, Nick Cave, Harold Edgerton, Hal Fischer, Glenn Ligon, George Platt Lynes, Barbara Morgan, Laurel Nakadate, Hunter Reynolds, Cara Romero, Cindy Sherman, and Lorna Simpson, among many others. Image: Sally Mann, New Mothers, 1989

The Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) will hold its 8th annual Latin American Foto Festival (LAFF) from July 10 – August 3, featuring large-scale photographs by both emerging and established, award-winning photographers. This year, the festival exhibitions will be on view at the Bronx Documentary Center and throughout the Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx from July 10-20. Select outdoor exhibitions will then travel to additional community spaces across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn where they’ll be on view through August 3. El Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) celebrará su 8º Festival Anual de Fotografía Latinoamericana (LAFF) del 10 de julio al 3 de agosto, con exposiciones de gran formato de fotógrafos emergentes y consolidados, muchos de ellos galardonados. Este año, las exposiciones del festival podrán verse en el Bronx Documentary Center y en todo el vecindario de Melrose, en el sur del Bronx, del 10 al 20 de julio. Algunas de las exposiciones al aire libre se trasladarán después a espacios comunitarios en Manhattan, Queens y Brooklyn, donde estarán en exhibición hasta el 3 de agosto. Image: Miradas. Angeles Torrejón, 1994. © Bats’i Lab

Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the evolution of photography in Cuba from the 1960s to the 2010s. The exhibition looks at contemporary Cuban photography from its role in promoting the Cuban Revolution after Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government to engaging in social and political critique following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In subsequent years, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the changing prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy. Showcasing 100 images, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography celebrates the Museum's acquisition of some 300 photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker. Image: Alberto Korda, Heroic Guerrilla (Guerillero heroico), 1960, printed 1995, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Dan and Mary Solomon. © Estate Alberto Korda

Just over 20 years ago, scientists introduced the term Anthropocene to denote a new geological epoch marked by human activity. Comprised of 44 photo-based artists working in a variety of artistic methods from studios and sites across the globe, Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene explores the complexities of this proposed new age: vanishing ice, rising waters, and increasing resource extraction, as well as the deeply rooted and painful legacies of colonialism, forced climate migration, and socio-environmental trauma. Since its emergence, the term “Anthropocene” has entered the common lexicon and has been adopted by disciplines outside of the sciences including philosophy, economics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, effectively linking the Anthropocene to nearly every aspect of post-industrial life. Organized around four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the exhibition proposes that the Anthropocene is not one singular narrative, but rather a diverse and complex web of relationships between and among humanity, industry, and ecology—the depths and effects of which are continually being discovered. Artists include: Sammy Baloji, Adrián Balseca, Matthew Brandt, Edward Burtynsky, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, James Casebere, João Castilho, Elena Damiani, Gohar Dashti, Sanne De Wilde, Andrew Esiebo, Gauri Gill, Noémie Goudal, Todd Gray, Acacia Johnson, Mouna Karray, Robert Kautuk, Rosemary Laing, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, Anna Líndal, Inka Lindergård and Niclas Lindergård, Pablo López Luz, Dhruv Malhotra, Laura McPhee, Gideon Mendel, Hayley Millar Baker, Joiri Minaya, Aïda Muluneh, Léonard Pongo, Meghann Riepenhoff, Cara Romero, Anastasia Samoylova, Camille Seaman, David Benjamin Sherry, Toshio Shibata, Sim Chi Yin, Thomas Struth, Danila Tkachenko, Rajesh Vangad, Letha Wilson, Will Wilson, Yang Yongliang, Zhang Kechun. Image: Todd Gray, Cosmic Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler), 2019. Four archival pigment prints in artist’s frames, UV laminate; 60 1/4 x 84 1/4 inches (153 x 214 cm). Collection of Bill and Christy Gautreaux, Kansas City, Missouri. © Todd Gray 2019. Courtesy of the artist and David Lewis, New York. Photo by Phoebe D’Heurle.

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics explores artistic connections among 60 contemporary artists across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. As one of the first exhibitions and catalogues to survey nearly 25 years of Black artistic production, this project introduces new LACMA acquisitions and broadens the Pan-African exhibition narrative—historically centered on the Black Atlantic—by highlighting artists from the Pacific Rim. Featuring nearly 70 works spanning painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and time-based media, the exhibition is structured around four key themes: speech and silence, movement and transformation, imagination, and representation. The accompanying catalogue includes original poetry, continuing the longstanding tradition of poetry as a vital force in Pan-African discourse. While diaspora is often framed as a displacement from origins, this exhibition redefines it as a dynamic space of reinvention and creativity. Through their aesthetic choices, the artists in Imagining Black Diasporas offer profound reflections on identity, existence, and the power of artistic expression. Image: Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey, 2019, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based, American photographer, has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career. Her work is intimately tied to the history of the photographic medium through her innovative use of natural light, still life, and large-format cameras and film. Stern’s works in the Obscura Gallery exhibition, Echoes of Light, are luminous examples of her innovation. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, she veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. As a result, in both the Quickening and Force Field series, Stern highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of a shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light her images resemble charcoal drawings. Indeed, a viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper. Influenced by abstract expressionist painting but working as a lens-based photographer, Stern defies the expectations central to photography by pulling away from the sharp focus, instead blurring, veiling, cropping, partially obscuring, and otherwise de-literalizing what is in front of her lens. “My photographs are not about what they are of…. I believe that photography is a medium of light, not representation. Light is to photography as paint is to painting. I think like a painter in that my concerns are largely formal: my aim is to create tension, plasticity, texture, and, especially, spatial ambiguity in which figure (or abstract form) and ground seem to merge with The exhibition includes works from three bodies of work: Quickening, Passages, and Force Field. In Quickening, Stern placed glass bottles and circles behind a scrim, then manipulated both the objects and the scrim to create a sense of quivering movement between the objects. “The images have a dramatic luminosity and feel fleeting – as if they have suddenly come to life and could disappear at any moment,” says Stern. In Force Field, Stern placed cubes behind the scrim in such a way that the objects’ edges touching the scrim were sharp, while their bodies blurred, seeming to emerge from indeterminate space. Framed more tightly than in Quickening, and with more densely juxtaposed forms, Force Field images produce a feeling of unified, soft structure, charged with light and energy. The exhibition also includes two earlier series, Dialogues in Light and Unveilings made in 1985. Dialogues in Light marks Stern’s first experiments with the white scrim, using different types of natural light and various types of flowers. In this series, Stern noticed that the flowers’ images were elegant and poignant, generating an emotional response. Pursuing this emotional feeling led Stern to a new series titled Unveilings, in which she sought to create a dialogue between figure and ground, manipulating the scrim to create what she calls a ”charged” composition in light and shadow. The varying stances of the anemone - the curvature of the stem, the turned backs, profiles or fully open petals, their translucency or lack thereof -- become metaphors for vulnerability. Stern’s work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and is in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Art Museum (OR); the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery. Six monographs of Stern’s work have been published: Skull (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017); Frozen Mystery: Lynn Stern Photographs 1978-2008 (Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón / Center for Creative Photography: 2009); Veiled Still Lifes (exhibition catalogue, 2006); Animus (Tucson: Nazraeli Press, 2000); Dispossession (New York: Aperture, 1995), "Highly Commended Book," 1995 Ernst Haas Awards; and Unveilings, with a forward by Paul Caponigro, (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988). Stern was co-editor of Photographic INsight from 1990-1993. She was the organizer and moderator of a two-evening symposium held at New York University in 1991 titled "Examining Postmodernism: Images/Premises" and in 2016 moderated a discussion titled “Perceptual/Conceptual: How Does Art Nourish Us?” in New York. The Lynn Stern Archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.

The Hood Museum of Art will present the first major solo museum exhibition of photographs by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero, titled Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light). The exhibition will be on view at the Hood Museum from January 18 through August 10, 2025, and will feature over 50 works, including several never-before-seen photographs, and site-specific installations that will invite the viewer behind the scenes to experience the sets of Romero's most iconic photographs. An exhibition catalogue co-published by the Hood Museum of Art and Radius Books will be released in June 2025. The exhibition is curated by Jami Powell, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art. Says Romero, "The Hood Museum of Art under the leadership of curator Jami Powell and director John Stomberg is an excellent example of how an American museum can create meaningful and positive impacts on Native community, representation, and living artists. When offered my first major solo show to commence at the Hood, I cried because I never imagined this was possible for a Native woman photographer in her 40s. I am so honored to collaborate with this institution and the people making it a major force in sidelining preconceived notions about Native American art." Adds Powell, "Cara Romero is an immensely generous storyteller, and her images invite people into complex and transformative dialogues about the histories and lives of Indigenous peoples. Romero's photographs provide opportunities for audiences to recognize the humanity of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples and ask questions they might otherwise be afraid to ask." Image: Cara Romero, Zenith, 2022 © Cara Romero

Guest curated by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler, along with Kristin Taylor, MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections This exhibition will feature works in the MoCP permanent collection that are included in the recent and groundbreaking publication titled Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. The book was created by a group of artists, art historians, activists, and scholars—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler—and published by Thames and Hudson in 2024. It is an extension of a project that these five authors have collaborated on for over ten years, in which they reassess a range of photographs and projects that portray stories of humanity and social movements to decenter the photographer as the only author of the image, and to emphasize the act of photographing as an inherently collaborative process in which many parties are involved. By sharing both artists’ statements and excerpts from interviews with people depicted in photographs, they question whether memories align: Did both sides remember the moment in the same way? How did the photographed feel about the photograph’s life after it circulated through art markets, print media, and online? And what role might the photograph have played in perpetuating harmful or liberatory narratives about specific histories, places, or individuals? The works—both historical and contemporary—are presented in clusters focused on topics, to highlight and propose questions about photographed moments of coercion, friendship, exploitation, community, and violence. The exhibition will also feature a reflection space for the audience engagement, as part of the project’s ongoing effort to consider the history of photography as a living and evolving entity that is unfixed and expanding as we learn more about the people, communities, and histories that images depict. MoCP is supported by Columbia College Chicago, MoCP Advisory Board, Museum Council, individuals, private and corporate foundations, and government grants. The 2024–2025 exhibition season is sponsored in part by the Efroymson Family Fund, Henry Nias Foundation, The Rowan Foundation, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, Pritzker Traubert Foundation, Comer Family Foundation, and Venable Foundation. This project is partially supported by a CityArts grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. MoCP acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council. Image: Wendy Ewald, Self-portrait reaching for the Red Star sky –Denise Dixon, from the “Portraits and Dreams” series, 1975-1982

In 1962, Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938, The Bronx, New York; lives and works in London, England) made a life-changing decision to become a photographer. His unwavering commitment was perfectly suited to the camera, an instrument that captures fleeting moments of time and space with precision, freezing them into a permanent frame. This exhibition celebrates the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s dedication to photography, spotlighting its recent acquisition of over 1,800 works from Meyerowitz’s archive. The artist is renowned for his early adoption of color photography in 1962, a move that helped pave the way for the medium’s acceptance in the art world. Meyerowitz’s expertise is evident in both the vibrant, immersive qualities of his color photographs and the subtle yet powerful nuances in his black-and-white prints. His true significance, however, lies in his exceptional ability to capture the perfect moment when shifting patterns, expressions, and light converge to form a complete image. His first major recognition came in 1964, when MoMA’s Director of Photography, John Szarkowski, included Meyerowitz in the influential exhibition *The Photographer’s Eye*, which also featured pioneers like Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Frank. Meyerowitz was placed in the section titled “Time Exposure,” a nod to his masterful handling of time within his work. Now, nearly six decades later, Meyerowitz’s work continues to resonate through its exploration of what Cartier-Bresson referred to as “the decisive moment.” This exhibition offers a chronological and thematic exploration of Meyerowitz’s oeuvre, allowing viewers to experience how his visual language has evolved over time, reflecting the fluidity of the present moment. This evolution builds on Szarkowski’s insight that a photograph captures only the time in which it was taken, referencing the past and future through its presence in the present. Additionally, the exhibition includes a selection of 'work prints' that highlight the temporal nature of photographic prints themselves. These prints reveal the impermanence of the medium, showcasing how some colors fade over time while others endure. The inclusion of prints bearing Meyerowitz’s personal annotations, along with multiple iterations of the same image, provides an intimate glimpse into the artist’s studio process, allowing viewers to trace his journey toward perfecting each image. Image: Joel Meyerowitz, Florida, 1978, 1978, Vintage RC print, 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.5 cm), NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; Gift of an anonymous donor.

“Life without photographs is no longer imaginable. They pass before our eyes and awaken our interest; they pass through the atmosphere, unseen and unheard, over distances of thousands of miles. They are in our lives, as our lives are in them.” – Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839–1939 After opening its doors to the public in 1949, the George Eastman Museum quickly became known as one of the most important venues dedicated to the collection and care of photographs. At the time of its opening, it was one of only two American museums to establish a photography department, and this early commitment to the medium has inextricably bound the institution to the history of photography itself. Life with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum explores the many ways in which photographic objects have come to shape our everyday lives. The exhibition encompasses broad cultural histories and image-making practices, from pre- photographic experimentation to critical advances that challenge our conceptions of the medium. While the objects on view highlight certain strengths in the museum’s holdings, lesser-known works are included to illuminate unexpected pathways into this rich and diverse collection. The museum’s holdings have been formulated through decades of gifts and purchases, and its distinguished exhibition history reflects the varied interests of its curators over the past seventy-five years. This presentation nods to this history while offering distinct perspectives on the medium from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. Curated by Jamie M. Allen, Phil Taylor, Daniel Peacock, and Louis Chavez, Department of Photography. Major support for 75th Anniversary exhibitions provided by the Rubens Family Foundation. Image: Acid Rain © Ming Smith

This exhibition is the first US survey of the work of Kunié Sugiura, an artist whose boundary-defying engagement with the photographic medium spans over sixty years. Born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942, Sugiura came to the United States in 1963 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she majored in photography. After graduation, she relocated to New York and has lived there ever since. Sugiura’s practice embraces a hybrid approach, blending various mediums and expressing her bicultural identity. The balancing of dualisms —Japanese/American, organic/human-made, and painting/photography — defines her work. Sugiura has stated that her cross-fertilization of photography with painting and sculpture partly stems from her desire that photography be taken seriously as an art form. The exhibition charts the arc of Sugiura’s long career, beginning with undergraduate work from her Cko series that reflects her sense of isolation as a foreign student in Chicago. Prints made after her move to New York in 1967 demonstrate her use of canvas as a support and new process of working on a large scale. Her Photopaintings from the 1970s take on multidimensional, sculptural qualities, pairing painted and photographic panels with wooden elements. Photograms — images made without a camera on light-sensitive material — that she first created in 1980, capture a wide range of subjects, including flowers and portraits of other artists. Sugiura’s compositions made from X-ray negatives in the 1990s and 2000s combine unrelated pieces from various sources that were cut and pasted together to create unique configurations. Throughout her career, Sugiura has willfully made artworks that “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.” Despite this inherent rebelliousness, such gestures do not overwhelm Sugiura’s vision to create dynamic and original hybrid forms in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Image: Kunié Sugiura, Azalea, 1970

Since the mid-19th century, photography has served as a powerful tool for examining concepts of gender, sexuality, and self-expression. The immediacy and accessibility of the medium has played a transformative role in the gradual proliferation of homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual imagery. Despite periods of severe homophobia, when many photographs depicting queer life were suppressed or destroyed, this exhibition brings together a variety of evidence to explore the medium’s profound role in shaping and affirming the vibrant tapestry of the LGBTQ+ community. Image: Gay Activists at First Gay Pride Parade, Christopher Street, New York, 1970; printed 2021, Arthur Tress. Gelatin silver print. Getty Museum. Gift of David Knaus. © Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Ansel Adams stood at the pinnacle of his career—revered, celebrated, and firmly entrenched as America’s preeminent landscape photographer. But as the 1960s unfolded, everything around him—and within photography itself—began to shift. The civil rights movement, counterculture rebellion, free love, psychedelics, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War protests reshaped the nation. Meanwhile, a younger generation of photographers rejected the grandeur of nature and the meticulous precision of Adams' Zone System, instead embracing raw, unsettling, and often provocative imagery. As photo historian Jonathan Green put it: “The obsessions of sixties photography were ruthless: alienation, deformity, sterility, insanity, sexuality, bestial and mechanical violence, and obscenity.” Against this backdrop, Adams embarked on Fiat Lux, the most extensive photographic commission of his life. Between 1963 and 1968, he captured over 7,500 images for the University of California, documenting the institution’s vast and evolving landscape. But beneath the surface, Fiat Lux reveals something more: an artist struggling to find his place in a rapidly transforming world. His once unwavering photographic vision seemed untethered, his artistic compass unsettled. Lost in the Wilderness exposes this tension, showcasing Adams not as the master of the natural world, but as a photographer navigating the shifting tides of change. Image: Image: Ansel Adams, Untitled, n.d. Scan from original negative. Collection of the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS, 1987.0027.6.UCB.63.3.

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is proud to present Panjereh, an exhibition by Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani. Panjereh—which means ‘window’ or ‘passageway’ in Farsi—builds on Soleimani’s ongoing Ghostwriter series, in which she explores her parents’ experiences of political exile and migration as a lens to examine broader systems of geopolitics. Known for her intricate, studio-based compositions that combine photographs, props, live animals and even her own parents in surreal, magical realist scenes, Soleimani expands her practice in Panjereh with the debut of a new body of work featuring injured birds. These images draw from her work as a wildlife rehabilitator and founder of Congress of the Birds, a federally licensed wild bird rehabilitation center in Rhode Island. The exhibition will also include a new site-specific wall drawing created specifically for ICP’s galleries. Curated by Elisabeth Sherman, Guest Curator, the exhibition will bring together more than forty photographs, the vast majority of which have never before been shown in New York. Sherman states, “In her work, Soleimani uniquely braids together the complex particularities of her family’s history, deep research into geopolitics and her inherited passion for care work into a visual language completely her own. The magically inventive spaces she creates allow for complexity in telling these stories, honoring their richness and continually unfolding nature. It is truly an honor to be presenting her first solo exhibition in New York, specifically at an institution historically dedicated to photography that engages with the politics of our time.” The Ghostwriter series takes Soleimani’s family history—specifically that of her parents' flight from Iran as political refugees following the 1979 revolution—as an overarching conceptual framework that informs her creative process, from the significance of the objects and family ephemera she uses to the compositions of the photographs themselves. The series carries out a form of ‘ghostwriting’ in the way it both narrates and reconstructs the lives of Soleimani’s parents without utilizing their voices directly. The works focus on their lives in Iran as pro-democracy activists before then being forced to flee the country, enduring both physical and psychological hardship on their way to eventual resettlement in the United States. Soleimani’s mother was forced to give up being a practicing nurse, leading her to begin caring for wild birds, a skill which she would eventually pass along to her daughter. With their personal emphasis, the Ghostwriter works present a distinct expression of Soleimani’s longstanding interest in Iranian history and the contemporary geopolitics between the West and the Middle East. Rather than address this history using a strictly documentary approach, Soleimani instead examines storytelling and memory as the primary means through which these stories are transmitted; the construction of her pictures captures the way that detail and meaning are often obscured, transformed or difficult to fully grasp. This process is expressed by the degree of visual compression and accumulation of detail that Soleimani’s photographs contain, as specific passages, details or textures—wildlife and plants, architecture and landscape—regularly function as stand-ins and metaphors rather than straightforward description. Soleimani situates artifacts from her parents’ journey against backgrounds made up of imagery pulled from a variety of archival family photographs, resulting in works that are layered composites of multiple stories, documenting factual traces of history within newly imagined spaces. A new development within the Ghostwriter series are the Flyways photographs, which draw attention to the plight of migratory birds, many of whom are wounded on their long journeys through populated areas. Soleimani’s work as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator grew out of a care practice that she learned from her mother and forms part of a larger cultural inheritance that has been passed down to her. Assuming the position of primary characters, the birds that Soleimani photographs and places within her tableaux provide a metaphor for the many social, political and environmental obstructions met by people forced into flights of their own. This new group of analog photographs that Soleimani made of rehabilitated birds presents a unique kind of maximalism despite their small scale while also forgoing the complex layering of reference and imagery typical of the Ghostwriter series. Shot in extreme close-up, these works render the bodies of birds as intensely detailed and complex worlds unto themselves, where feathers, talons and eyes are as richly described as Soleimani’s family history is explored. The acts of care contained within these images highlights the relationship between care and political resistance that has unfolded not only with Soleimani’s own family, but which remains critically important for our present moment. Image: Edward Burtynsky, Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community - Suburb, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2011

The Great Acceleration, the first solo institutional exhibition of world renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work in New York City in over twenty years, reveals the depth of Burtynsky's investigation into the human alteration of natural landscapes around the world, showing their present fragility and enduring beauty in equal measure. Curated by David Campany, Creative Director at ICP, this retrospective exhibition will present over seventy photographs, including many of Burtynsky’s landmark images, some of which have never previously been shown, along with three ultra high-resolution murals. The exhibition will also include a visual and narrative timeline of Burtynsky’s creative life. Intentionally scheduled to extend through Climate Week NYC in September 2025, The Great Acceleration will serve not only as an urgent call for action, but will also give visitors the opportunity to appreciate the sublimity that remains in the landscape, while also deepening our understanding of the challenges that confront us today. In this way, The Great Acceleration upholds ICP’s long-standing and core commitment to present concerned photography that can inspire new audiences. "The Great Acceleration" is an established term used to describe the rapid rise of human impact on our planet according to a range of measures, among them population growth, water usage, transportation, greenhouse gas emissions, resource extraction and food production, each of which Burtynsky has photographed the outward signs of at length and in great detail over the past forty years. From open pit mines across North America to oil derricks in Azerbaijan, from rice terraces in China to oil bunkering in Nigeria, Burtynsky has travelled across the world and back again as part of his restless and seemingly inexhaustible drive to discover the ways, both old and new, that organized human activity has transformed the natural world. Though already unified by both the precision and formal beauty that Burtynsky deploys to create each photograph, The Great Acceleration further underscores that, like their respective subjects, each project remains fundamentally interconnected. Image: Edward Burtynsky, Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community - Suburb, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2011

LACP is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition by Matthew Finley, whose work imagines the world as it should have been: A world where no queer person feels ashamed for who they love, who they are and how they want to present themselves. In this moment, when people in power insist on marginalizing, isolating and denouncing queer communities, LACP insists on elevating love and acceptance. Matthew Finley’s work imagines the world as it should have been: A world where no queer person feels ashamed for who they love, who they are and how they want to present themselves. In this universe, family support of one’s love is a given, rather than a possibility, or, we could say, an impossibility. In his poetic photographic projects, Finley provides coordinates for how life in this world would be. This solo exhibition, which depicts several series from the past decade, chronicles how Finley reimagines found images and objects, encouraging his staged subjects to discover the joy of nature, as well as a self-consciousness that never seeks to conceal or mask itself, visualizing how we package ourselves for others and the emotional states that result. Whether in fictive family albums or expansive analog projects, his photographic perspective remains intimate and vulnerable. Finley positions male bodies in compositions that echo photographic histories, in which the male subjects become a focal point of the viewing eye, a source of fascination and desire–and that desire quietly comes to the fore to insist on its rightful place. The emotional burden at the core of these works informs their shapes, perspectives, light and configurations. They are both haunting and haunted, charting a path from rejection to liberation by way of friendship and love. Desire, in these works, becomes a core element of vision; whether it is the desire to be close to another body or the desire to be fully accepted. In that sense, Finley’s work negotiates lived experiences and offers them as an invitation for the viewer, to become an active participant; re-imagine relationships and their histories alongside those captured in the frame, and insist on joy and love as an antidote for judgment, exclusion and isolation in our current world. Image: hoto by Matthew Finley, We couldn’t stop kissing on our wedding day. 2024, glitter and varnish on archival pigment print from vintage found photograph.

Zig Jackson: The Journey of Rising Buffalo brings together the performative and documentary approaches of photographer Zig Jackson, whose work sheds light on the everyday realities of Native American life. With a focus on community, sovereignty, and environmental respect, Jackson challenges misconceptions and reclaims Indigenous narratives through his lens. A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, Jackson grew up on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota and attended several boarding schools, including the Intermountain Indian School in Utah. There, he forged lasting connections with peers from various tribes, realizing the shared struggles Indigenous communities face across the country. Jackson’s photography often engages with stereotypes to critique them. In some works, he dons a feathered headdress, performing exaggerated “Indian” tropes to expose their absurdity. In another series, he disrupts Western notions of land ownership by placing signs reading *“Entering Zig’s Reservation”* in public spaces, reclaiming landscapes that have long been sites of Indigenous displacement. His practice is deeply personal, serving as a visual archive of travels across North America, visits with friends, and everyday life on reservations. Through quiet yet powerful images, he explores complex social realities, including family structures, homelessness, veterans’ experiences, substance abuse, and access to natural resources. Blending humor with profound social critique, Jackson’s work offers an authentic and dynamic portrayal of contemporary Indigenous life. His photographs challenge marginalization while celebrating resilience, documenting both the hardships and the joys of Native communities with honesty and depth. Image: Zig Jackson (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, b. 1957), Indian Man on Bus, 1994, from Indian Man in San Francisco. Inkjet print. Loan courtesy the artist, © 2025 Zig Jackson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis (pronounced CARE-iss) Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with her own and enriches our understanding of the couple from her contemporary Queer and feminist perspective. This exhibition features recent portrait and landscape photographs by Connell along with classic figure studies and landscapes by Weston from 1934–1945 one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. Using Weston and Wilson publications as a guide, Connell and her partner at the time, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together creating new artworks in the process. Image: ​Betsy, Lake Ediza, ​2015, ​© Kelli Connell

Lines of Belonging marks the 40th anniversary of New Photography with an exhibition featuring 13 artists and collectives who delve into the complexities of identity, community, and interconnectedness. As artist Sabelo Mlangeni eloquently stated, "Love is the key that takes cultures from oppression to joy," reflecting how, in his work, the concept of love serves as a powerful force for liberation and political unity. Through their varied practices, these artists explore places of belonging and trace connections that transcend generations, histories, and geographies. Some use their personal experiences to connect with broader political narratives, while others challenge historical archives and reimagine future communities through their art. Lines of Belonging focuses on four cities—Kathmandu, New Orleans, Johannesburg, and Mexico City—each of which has long been a hub for life, creativity, and cultural exchange, often predating the modern nation-states in which they now reside. The work presented here offers a stark contrast to the rapid, profit-driven pace of contemporary image production, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence. Instead, these artists advocate for slowness, persistence, and care as a response to the overwhelming speed and commodification of the modern world. This exhibition marks the first time these artists and collectives are being presented at MoMA, and it includes Sandra Blow, Tania Franco Klein, and Lake Verea (Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea) from Mexico City; Gabrielle Goliath, Lebohang Kganye, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Lindokuhle Sobekwa from Johannesburg; Nepal Picture Library, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, and Prasiit Sthapit from Kathmandu; and L. Kasimu Harris, Renee Royale, and Gabrielle Garcia Steib from New Orleans. Together, these artists offer fresh perspectives on the intersection of place, memory, and identity. Image: L. Kasimu Harris. Come Tuesday (Marwan Pleasant at Sportsman’s Corner), New Orleans. 2020. Inkjet print, 24 × 36" (61 × 91 cm). Courtesy the artist

When Langston Hughes Came to Town explores the history and legacy of Langston Hughes through the lens of his largely unknown travels to Nevada and highlights the vital role Hughes played in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes studied at Columbia University in 1921 for one year and would eventually become one of leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance. A writer with a distinctive style inspired by jazz rhythms, Hughes documented all facets of Black culture but became renowned for his incisive poetry. The exhibition begins by examining the relationship of this literary giant to the state of Nevada through a unique presentation of archival photographs, ephemera, and short stories he wrote that were informed by his visit to the area. The writer’s first trip to Nevada took place in 1932, when he investigated the working conditions at the Hoover Dam Project. He returned to the state in 1934, at the height of his career, making an unexpected trip to Reno, and found solace and a great night life in the city. The presentation continues with work created by leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance who had close ties to Hughes, including sculptures by Augusta Savage and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, and paintings by Beauford Delaney, Aaron Douglas, Norman Lewis, and Archibald Motley, Jr., among others. The range of work on display foregrounds the rich expressions of dance, music, and fashion prevalent during the influential movement. The final section of the exhibition features contemporary artists who were inspired by Hughes and made work about his life. Excerpts from Hughes’s poems and short stories are juxtaposed with related works of art, demonstrating how his legacy endures in the twenty-first century. Isaac Julien, Kwame Brathwaite, Glenn Ligon, and Deborah Willis are among the artists whose works are included. Julien, for example, in his renowned series Looking for Langston Hughes reimagines scenarios of Hughes’s life in Harlem during the 1920s. His black-and-white pictures are paired with Hughes poem No Regrets. Similarly, Brathwaite’s impactful photographs highlight the continuation of the Harlem Renaissance through the Black pride movement of the 1960s and are coupled with the poem My People. Finally, Glenn Ligon’s black neon sculpture relates to Hughes’s poignant poem Let America Be America Again, which both leave viewers to ponder the question of belonging in America.

American, Born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy traces the extraordinary artistic journeys of Hungarian-born photographers who shaped the visual landscape of the 20th century. Against backdrops of war, exile, and reinvention, these artists migrated from Hungary to Berlin and Paris, and ultimately to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where they redefined American photography. This exhibition offers the first comprehensive exploration of their odyssey—spanning two world wars and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—and the remarkable artistic contributions that emerged along the way. Featuring over 150 striking and surreal photographs, the exhibition captures the poetic interplay of light and shadow, the grit of urban life, the allure of celebrity, and the ever-present promise of America. Included are works by renowned photographers such as André Kertész, Nickolas Muray, Martin Munkácsi, and György Kepes, alongside lesser-known artists whose images have become iconic. Among them is Robert Capa, a pioneer of modern photojournalism, whose harrowing images of D-Day at Omaha Beach remain among the most defining photographs of World War II. This exhibition fills a missing chapter in art history, revealing the profound impact of Hungarian émigrés on American photography, particularly in major urban centers. László Moholy-Nagy, whose avant-garde experiments at the Bauhaus in Germany laid the foundation for Chicago’s “New Bauhaus,” emerges as a key figure in this transatlantic movement. Meanwhile, John Albok’s Depression-era street photography captured New York life with raw emotion, and on the West Coast, André de Dienes’ portraits of Hollywood icons, including Marilyn Monroe, played a pivotal role in shaping the Golden Age of cinema. From evocative street scenes and high-fashion imagery to haunting war photography and cinematic portraiture, the exhibition showcases the work of more than thirty Hungarian-born artists who transformed photography in the 20th century. American, Born Hungary is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Alex Nyerges, VMFA Director and CEO, in collaboration with Károly Kincses, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography. The exhibition premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest on April 5, 2024, to inaugurate its newly renovated galleries, before traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in October 2024. The George Eastman Museum serves as the final stop for this landmark exhibition. Image: Nickolas Muray (American, b. Hungary, 1892–1965), Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Santa Monica, California, 1929. Gelatin silver print. George Eastman Museum, gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

Can a photographic portrait inspire political imagination? Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination examines how photographers and their sitters contributed to the proliferation of Pan-African solidarity during the mid-20th century. Embracing the international spirit of the time, the exhibition gathers striking pictures by photographers working in Central and West African cities. They created images of everyday citizens, dazzling music scenes, and potent manifestations of youth culture that reflected emerging political realities. Photographs by Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Sanlé Sory portray residents across Bamako, Bobo-Dioulasso, and Kinshasa at a time when the winds of decolonial change swept the African continent in tandem with the burgeoning US Civil Rights movement. The exhibition also spotlights James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite—photographers living in Europe and North America who contributed to the construction of Africa as a political idea. Contemporary works by artists such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby show the enduring relevance of these themes. Brimming with possibility, Ideas of Africa: Portraits and Political Imagination embraces the creative potential of the photographic portrait and its political resonance across the globe. Image: Sanlé Sory. Traveller (Le Voyageur). 1970–85.

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