Photo Exhibitions

Catherine Edelman Gallery is thrilled to present our second solo exhibition, Chasing Light, featuring new work by Clarissa Bonet. The show opens March 4 and runs through May 21, 2022. There will be an opening reception on Friday, March 4, from 5:00 - 7:30 pm. The artist will be in attendance. Face masks are required to enter the gallery. The concept of place, and our relationship to it, is at the heart of Clarissa Bonet's work. Bonet (b. 1986) was born and raised in Tampa, Florida - a coastal port city known for its amazing climate, sports teams, national defense outposts, and healthcare businesses. In 2010, Bonet moved to Chicago to attend graduate school at Columbia College Chicago. She immediately noticed the density of the city, its people, and its traffic. As she wandered the city, she was stunned by the isolation she felt among the throngs of people rushing along the sidewalks. It was this feeling that led her to City Space, an ongoing body of work about individuality in a large city. In 2014, Bonet embarked on a second ongoing project, Stray Light, which looks at the anonymity of people in their homes at night. Once the sun sets, Bonet photographs the colorful glow emanating from hotels and high-rise windows that fill the sky. Back in her studio, she downloads her images into a computer, and carefully constructs each image from multiple photographs, transforming the urban cityscape into a constellation. In 2020, Bonet created her newest series, From Shadow to Sun, which started during the pandemic shut down. While being confined to her home and studio, Bonet noticed light streaking into her space, bisecting everything in its path; the same harsh light she embraces in City Space. The resulting series continues her fascination with light, and its unique ability to transform a space. Bonet's work can be found in numerous collections including the Southeast Museum of Photography (Daytona Beach, FL), The Haggerty Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), and Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), among others.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Swimming Drunk, an exhibition of photographs by John Divola. The exhibition includes two photographic series that represent the breadth of the artist’s more-than-40-year career: Zuma (1977-1978), and Daybreak (2015-2020). Both series are a result of Divola’s engagement with abandoned buildings, and his interest in transforming a situation through photography. Thus, the photographs do not serve as mere descriptions of the scenes depicted but instead are offered as artifacts from the artist’s physical and experiential interventions within these environments. Spanning over 40 years, John Divola’s work has consistently questioned the limits of photography, interweaving sculpture, installation, and performance to highlight the inherent tensions within the medium. Divola’s imagery often examines the Southern Californian landscape, including urban Los Angeles or the nearby ocean, mountains, and desert. Initially inspired by Minimalist and Conceptual work while in college, which he accessed predominantly through photographic reproductions, Divola was one of the first artists to highlight the role of photography in mediating our experience of the world and our surroundings. Between 1973 and 1975, without a studio of his own, Divola travelled across Los Angeles in search of dilapidated properties in which to make photographs. Armed with a camera, spray paint, string and cardboard, Divola vandalized vacant homes with abstract constellations of graffiti-like marks, ritualistic configurations of string hooked to pins, and torn arrangements of card, before cataloguing the results. Entitled Vandalism Series, this early body of work informed the trajectory of Divola’s career, in which he deliberately blurs the boundaries between reality and artifice. Over the course of his career, Divola has produced many similar projects involving an extended engagement with a particular site over time. In a more recent series, George Air Force Base (2015-2020), Divola photographed the abandoned housing area at the decommissioned George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. We are shown scenes of dereliction – crumbling walls revealing layers of paint and plaster, in which Divola’s gestural interventions in the form of painted shapes offer a surprising contrast. Here, Divola captures the tension between the observation of the specific and the insistence of the abstract. Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Divola earned an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1974, where he studied under photographer Robert Heinecken. Since 1975 he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978-1988), and since 1988 he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Since 1975, Divola’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia, including Galerie Marquardt, Paris, 1990; Laura Bartlett Gallery, London 2012: Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013; Wallspace Gallery New York, 2014; and Palm Springs Art Museum, 2019. His work can be found in numerous public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Among Divola's Awards are Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986), a Fintridge Foundation Fellowship (1998), a City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (1999) and a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1998).

During 2021 and early 2022 Michelle Grabner collaborated with the Alice Austen House to create a new series of paintings and photographs inspired by the home, studio and collections of trailblazing photographer Alice Austen. Drawing on her own studio-focused practice and Austen’s photographic documentation of her home’s interior decoration and fabric collections, Grabner’s work re-examines fabric patterns and materiality in doily making, expanding on repetitive design and layering. “As an inventor, translator, copier and re-articulator of patterns, I predictably embrace Gombrich’s general observation that ‘the arrangement of elements according to similarity and difference and the enjoyment of repetition and symmetry extend from the string of beads to the layout of the page in front of the reader, and, of course, beyond to the rhythms of movement, speech and music, not to mention the structures of society and the systems of thought.’ When researching Alice Austen and her collections I was most taken with her negligible lace collection, a small box of snippets likely a practical assembly of remnants collected for mending Victorian collars and cuffs. Lace, like doilies and other domestic ornamental handiwork has varied craft and materials qualities but pattern invention is undemonstrative and mostly undeviating. Gombrich notes that decoration ‘changes slowly.’ Domestic ornamental work is practiced, produced and influenced by habit. Moreover domestic ornamental artifacts occupy habitual spaces, punctuating daily routine. ‘Radical invention is nonexistent, considerable invention the exception, and the gradual evolution of decorative motifs, some of which can be traced back for millenia, the rule.’ It is not for the lack of invention that compelled me to rearticulate and rearrange the excessively ornate patterns of lace and doilies but to challenge my aesthetic aversion to the white delicate complexity of lacework while at the same time pressing on painting’s suspicion of unoriginal abstractions. The works made for this exhibition seek to upend the Gombrichian pronouncement that ‘painting, like speaking, implicitly demands attention whether or not it receives it. Decoration cannot make this demand. It normally depends for its effect on the fluctuating attention we can spare while we scan our surroundings.’ “ – Michelle Grabner

Gitterman Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of Christiane Feser’s three-dimensional unique photographic based work from three ongoing series; Felder, Gitter and Nullpunkte. Christiane Feser’s works are photographs of complex assemblages of repeated forms and shadows with actual elements from the assemblage projecting three-dimensionally from the surface of the photograph. Feser flattens a sculptural object through the act of photography and then reconstitutes that dimension in a new way by turning the photograph into a relief sculpture. The works challenge our perception of dimension and perspective as well as our assumptions about what a photograph is. They also introduce a tension between the past and present: the original photograph is of a thing that has existed, but it has been transformed into a new object that now exists. And in this new form, the constant change of light and shadow across the relief surface will continue to keep the work in the present moment. The German word Felder has two meanings, it may refer to an agricultural field or field of color, or it may refer to a part of a grid. Each work in this series starts with a drawing of a grid that has been distorted from a flat plane into a sort of topography with dots or spheres of different sizes along the lines. What at first seems to be a perspectival, is quickly revealed as something that does not follow the rules of perspective: various parts go in and out of focus, and the dots vary in size as if closer or further away from the camera lens. Feser further confounds the rules of optics by introducing non-photographic, lacquer semicircular spheres protruding from holes in the paper’s surface. The works are therefore about both photography and sculpture. They are simultaneously images and objects that play with flatness and depth, and engage with histories of the photograph as a physical thing in space. The works in both the Gitter (Grid) and the Nullpunkte (Zero points) series are photographs of assemblages of sewing pins and their shadows alongside actual pins in the paper. Both series are a bit like drawing, line based, using shadows instead of ink, and allude to the origin of the word photograph which was derived from the Greek words photos (light) and graphein (to draw). The work is always evolving because the shadows created by the actual pins on the photograph change significantly depending upon the play of light across the surface. In each Gitter work, Feser tries to draw a grid from the placement of the pin at the end of the previous pin’s shadow. In Nullpunkte, Feser follows the same rule for placing the pins but, instead of trying to create a grid, she allows the composition to evolve without a preconceived compositional structure. Feser was born in Würzburg, Germany in 1977 and studied photography at the Offenbach University of Art and Design. She had a solo exhibition at Opelvillen, Rüsselsehim, Germany in 2019 and was included in the exhibition Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA in 2018. Other museum exhibitions include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Firenze, Italy; the Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar, Germany; Frankfurter Kunstverein and the Museum for Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany. Her work is in the public collections of Brown University, DZ Bank Art Collection, J. Paul Getty Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Foundation Juan March, Fotografische Sammlung Schloss Kummerow, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Mönchehaus Museum, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien.

This exhibition features photographs donated by Gordon Parks to Kansas State University (K-State) in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1973. It was the first time that the artist personally curated a set of photographs to donate to a public institution, a kind of self-portrait directed towards the home crowd. The exhibition title includes the first line of a poem written by Parks in 1984, commissioned by and published in the Manhattan Mercury. K-State's New Prairie Press will publish an accompanying open-access digital catalogue with new research on Parks and Kansas. Image: Uncle James Parks, 1950, printed in 2017, gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in., gift of Gordon Parks and the Gordon Parks Foundation, 2017.448

John Divola Tarah Douglas Steve Kahn Raymond Meeks & Adrianna Ault One considers the origin of a search as an extended view into the effort of returning to a place or idea and seeking the differences instead of dwelling in sameness. The attention provided to place suggests a challenge since distinctions vary from multiple points of control: change of environment, change of body dynamics, to what is beyond our control: light, weather, time. Even disappearance is an available risk given the dependence of a return. This exhibition considers a generative process of image making and the visual distinctions from one moment to the next that call attention to the process of its very creation through each frame. In each of these works a series of considered interactions result in the inquiry into the real and representative, the natural and artificial and how we designate space for ourselves in the world. In 'Enso: 36 Right-Handed Circumference Gestures' John Divola signals evidence of time, place and being. Between June 7th and August 12th, 2018, Divola performed a gesture using the circumference of his right arm in the abandoned housing tract of what was previously George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. The circular marks are made in various rooms but always in the morning. Understood as a single work, each frame offers an index of a place and a time and an index and trace of physical being. In ‘Untitled (no 1-15)’ Tarah Douglas inserts her body into the frame of natural environment as a gesture of admission, a nod to the visibility of body language and the signals and narratives it projects to the viewer. Douglas's movements are at once various and theatrical: climbing, reading, exploring, observing. The landscape and the body exist together in an orbicular way. 'Running' (1976) was captured as a self portrait by Steve Kahn while shooting in a run-down apartment complex in Los Angeles between 1974-76. Kahn turned his attention to his body in motion using framing and scale to present an illusion in space and time. The cropping of each frame allows for the minute difference and the illusion of speed. Raymond Meeks and Adrianna Ault created the photographs titled ‘Winter Farm Auction’ (2019) in response to the event itself. Each farm tool selected is thrown into the air and captured in motion, a compositional choice that provides the tool with its own life separate from that of the user. The motion of the tools captured on film pierce the frame nearly marking time.

This exhibition, drawn largely from the Getty’s collection, explores how various photographers active since the 1970s have represented the connection between photography and writing. Many of these photographs showcase text or include subjects in the act of writing, emphasizing the shared contemplative and performative nature of these mediums. Artists include Laura Aguilar, Shirin Nishat, Allan Sekula, and William Wegman.

Photographer James Van Der Zee created an extraordinary chronicle of life in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s and beyond. Residents of this majority Black neighborhood in New York City turned to Van Der Zee and his camera to mark special occasions. His carefully composed, cosmopolitan photographs conveyed the personalities, aspirations, and spirit of his sitters. Some 40 works from the National Gallery’s collection feature Van Der Zee’s studio portraits, along with his photographs of Harlem nightclubs and storefronts as well as religious, social, political, and athletic community groups. Together they provide a glimpse into Harlem’s rich social life as it became an influential center of American culture during the Harlem Renaissance.

Photographers have been reimagining the American West ever since cameras were ferried across the Mississippi River in the 1850s; photographs being the primary way people in the East could see what wonders lay in the then uncharted and mythical territories far to the West of the “Great River.” According to the Native Languages of Americas website (www.native-languages.org/state-names), “Misiziibi” is the native name of the river in the Ojibwe language. Since the 1860s when the first photographs of Yosemite Valley were made, photographs—both still and moving images—have been instrumental in promoting the West as an unexplored wilderness and the land of opportunity. Although unacknowledged when convenient, as it often was, the lands west of the Mississippi were traditional homelands to many First Peoples and a diverse cross-section of Hispanic peoples who moved into the land with the Spanish Friars and Conquistadors funded by the Spanish Crown long before the West was Anglicized. In the past few decades, a growing number of photographers have challenged the romantic myth of the American West to reflect the cultural, environmental, and racial complexities of our shared histories more accurately in an on-going conversation about what it means to be an American, how identity and the landscape are intertwined and what the real West looks like today. Photographers Joan Myers and Steve Fitch have both lived in the West for most of their lives. They document the changing landscapes of which they are a part; their lives intimately intertwined with the history of the arid lands they call home. Their images capture landscapes made famous in countless Western narratives of both literature and film, but they move in closer with their lenses to reflect the details often overlooked in a sweeping landscape narrative, gently critiquing the myth of the oversized cowboy with his long gun, the absurdity of the oversized teepee selling espresso, the oversized sombrero, the seedy roadside hotels bedazzled with garish flashing neon, the derelict movie theaters and drive-ins hawking a fading American Dream. Both artists expose the cracks of co-opting other cultures to romanticize a fabricated fable when the truth is harsher. They invite their viewers to pull back the veil and unpack the complicated narratives exposed in the landscapes they reveal with a clear-eyed mixture of love and regret. - Mary Anne Redding, Exhibition Curator

Von Lintel Gallery is thrilled to present Rewind, an exhibition of vibrant chemigrams created by Cleveland-based artist Joseph Minek. This show will be displayed in the Project Room and will run from April 23rd until June 4th. Fascinated by the infinite possibilities of camera-less photography, Minek experiments with the foundational materials of photographic practice – light-sensitive paper and photo lab chemicals – to produce one-of-a-kind, chromatically exuberant images. His work delights in exploring the physical makeup of the photographic medium itself, rather than capturing any external reflection of reality, so he first exposes his high-gloss metallic paper to light – rendering it useless for its intended purpose. Strips of paper are then organized into compositions on its surface before he rolls, dips, squeegees, or sprays his prints with a variety of chemical compounds. The resulting works are infinitely varied and wildly luminous. Within a prismatic array of chartreuse, fuchsia, emerald, indigo, cyan, mustard seed, mauve, lavender, and blood orange, the overlapping pools and striations of the chemicals in the tray leave their traces not only in the explosive palette but in the intricate patterns and oil-slick parabolas, which the liquid traces and eventually settles on. Minek’s work has been exhibited consistently since 2010 and is held in public collections such as The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Rubell Family Collection in Miami, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Bidwell Projects, Cleveland.

Hosted by Storefront Art Projects in Watertown, MA, Documents for an Imagined Future is curated by Sarah Pollman and presents work by two photographers, Vanessa Leroy and DM Witman. The exhibition is on view from May 7th through June 4th, with an opening reception on May 7th from 3-5pm and an online conversation with the artists on May 19th from 6:30-8:30pm (Free and open to the public. Registration required. The exhibition's figurative, conceptual work inhabits the gallery space in visual conversation about envisioning a future for individuals, and the environments that house them. DM Witman’s images speak towards an ecological grief felt in the wake of impending climate catastrophe, while forming strategies to deal with the concurrent sorrow. Vanessa Leroy uses the nuance of the photographic image to uplift the narratives of marginalized individuals and imagine a more just future. Both Witman and Leroy use their photographs to refuse a future devoid of hope, offering the viewer a chance to imagine and create the world that lays ahead.

Any prominent work of architecture is likely to be seen more widely through photographs than in person. These images have a profound influence on how a given building is perceived. A professional architectural photographer plays an important role in interpreting the designer's work, making critical decisions about which aspects of the building to emphasize and which to suppress-or even exclude. When widely disseminated, professional photographs help to shape public impressions of the building's architectural character. An extraordinary image of an iconic building may assume iconic status in its own right. Photographer Alan Karchmer has risen to prominence in his field thanks to his skill in conveying architects' ideas and intentions. Having earned a Master of Architecture himself, Karchmer uses his knowledge of the design process, coupled with his own artistic vision, to express the essence of a building. He is, quintessentially, "The Architects' Photographer." This exhibition presents a cross-section of Karchmer's professional photographs, coupled with personal photos and artifacts that shed light on his work. While the exhibition features numerous large-format images of remarkable beauty, it also includes didactic displays examining the technical and creative processes underlying such images. It thus illuminates why certain images are so successful in expressing both the physical and emotional aspects of architecture. By displaying multiple images of specific buildings, the exhibition also examines how a series of photographs can be used to create a visual narrative conveying a cohesive sense of design, place, and experience. The exhibition sheds light on the important but sometimes elusive role of artistic interpretation, tracing how the photographer's own vision complements that of the architect, yielding final images that ultimately reflect a blend of the two. It also explores how changing technologies-especially the transition from analog to digital cameras-have influenced architectural photography.

In his artistic practice, James Tylor highlights under-told and often unseen histories of Aboriginal peoples. The landmass now known as Australia has been known by many names to many distinct peoples. Reflecting this, Tylor takes an expansive approach to landscape, incorporating his Kaurna knowledge into its presentation, and to the photographic medium, through use of technologies old and new. In Tylor's hands, photography, once used to survey Aboriginal lands and peoples, becomes a way to indigenize landscapes. From an Untouched Landscape is Indigenous exploration of place, reframing landscape on and near the Kaurna Yarta Nation's traditional homelands, where Tylor's Kaurna Miyurna people have traced their roots since time immemorial. The exhibition includes three photographic series, We Call This Place ... Kaurna Yarta (2020), (Removed Scenes) From an Untouched Landscape (2018), and (Vanished Scenes) From an Untouched Landscape (2018), as well as objects from (Deleted Scenes) From an Untouched Landscape (2019). We Call This Place ... Kaurna Yarta inserts Kaurna Miyurna place names, etched on sweeping daguerreotype views of coasts and hills. The continuing series From an Untouched Landscape focuses on significant sites for Aboriginal peoples and sites of colonial encounters and violence. Removed Scenes and Vanished Scenes show these sites only partially, with black velvet shapes blocking the full view. To further contextualize these works, Tylor has sculpted wooden Kaurna objects, such as shields and spears, and colonial-era tools, such as guns and harpoons which, like the camera itself, contributed to the project of colonization. James Tylor (b. 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist with Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Māori (Te Arawa), and European ancestry. Trained as a carpenter as well as a photographer, Tylor takes his practice beyond those mediums to communicate his understanding of history and the contemporary moment and to contribute to the revitalization of his Kaurna culture. This is the first solo exhibition of Tylor's work in the United States, curated by Marina Tyquiengco (CHamoru), Assistant Curator of Native American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Photographer Marcia Resnick earned recognition as part of the legendary Downtown New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s with portraits of major cultural figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Belushi, and Susan Sontag. Marcia Resnick was one of the most ambitious and innovative American photographers of the 1970s. Combining social critique with poignant, often humorous performance, her photographs explore-in a conceptual vernacular-aesthetic, social, and political issues at once timely and timeless. A part of the now-mythic creative community in Downtown New York, she created work that challenged traditional ideas about what a photograph could be. This exhibition brings together for the first time her extraordinary photographs from this period.

Conceived and organized in collaboration with the Estate of László Moholy-Nagy, the first U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the photography and film practice of pioneering multidisciplinary artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) will debut at Fotografiska New York before traveling internationally. From formal experimentation to personal documentation, the 68 works in the show (all from negatives originally created between 1922 and 1945) collectively illuminate a novel side of an artist whose institutional spotlight has historically centered on painting, sculpture, and design. Light Play brings together 68 works created between 1922 and 1945, including Moholy-Nagy's earliest experiments with photomontage ("photoplastics," as he called them); photograms (images made without a camera, instead via direct light exposure to photosensitive paper); personal images taken during travels in Europe and the United States; late-career color photographs (including rare images of Moholy-Nagy himself, and never-exhibited photographs of his own sculptures); and two films. Primarily known as a painter, Moholy-Nagy is also an image-making pioneer in his use of the camera as a new instrument of vision. Light Play is able to offer a uniquely expansive portrait of the artist because its curatorial premise is constrained only by medium; an organized survey of the entire range of Moholy-Nagy's photographic work, edited down to the best examples of each category. Further, the curators worked closely with the artist's estate to design unique staging opportunities that align with Moholy-Nagy's experimental approach to lighting and form, such as custom lighting setups for the photographs and large-scale projection mapped environments for the films. The museum wishes to thank the Estate of László Moholy-Nagy and The Moholy-Nagy Foundation for their close collaboration throughout every step of planning this exhibition, which honors the artist's and the Estate's vision of presenting his original negatives at greater scale.

"Life’s ambiguities—love, loss, and longing—are subjects for my artworks. Found objects combined together in a tight space link, and create a dialogue. The silent conversation becomes a reflection of my experiences as an artist, teacher, traveler, and twin. This process is based on traditional tableau photography in which models on a stage remain motionless for an observer. The camera simply records the scene. In my works, Found objects combined together in a tight space link, and create a dialogue. Just as there are many ways of looking at the past and the present, tableaus narrate many possibilities. Story threads diverge while the viewer searches for meaning. The resulting photograph has a painterly quality which reveals and conceals layers of information. While specific interpretations are left to the viewer, according to their own experiences, my staged objects create an expectation that something meaningful just happened—or is about to."

Howard Greenberg Gallery invites you to our upcoming exhibition, Nadav Kander: The Thread, and opening reception. The exhibition of photographs by the renowned London-based artist Nadav Kander will be on view from April 21st through June 10th with an opening reception to be held April 21st from 6-8 pm, the Artist will be present. Nadav Kander: The Thread, the Prix Pictet-winning photographer’s first exhibition with Howard Greenberg Gallery, will present evocative landscapes and penetrating portraits from the 1990s-2020s that evoke the interconnectedness of humanity. The exhibition title, inspired by the poem “The Way It Is” by William Stafford, refers to this common thread. “This connectivity is the only way we can come together as a species,” Kander noted. “My approach is to drill down to the essence of things, searching for feelings of vulnerability, quiet, and beauty, whether it be a familiar face or a riverscape.” Widely regarded as one of the most insightful photographers of our time, Kander’s work brings out the essence of his subjects in both subtle and powerful ways that resonate in the viewer’s mind. For his landscapes, Kander has traveled extensively around the globe including the Yangtze River in China, the Arctic Circle, the salt flats of Utah, and Chernobyl. Three works from Kander’s series Yangtze — The Long River, 2006-2007 will be on view. The project was awarded the prestigious Prix Pictet in 2009. For this body of work, Kander travelled the nearly 4,000-mile-long Yangtze River, from mouth to source, photographing the landscape and the people living along its shores. Yangtze — The Long River is a body of work that captures the dramatic effects of a nation at the precipice of enormous industrial and economic change and considers the history and folklore of the waterway that runs through the blood of the people.

Georgia O'Keeffe forged a career as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. She became famous for her paintings of flowers, skyscrapers, and landscapes, yet her lifelong connection to photography has not been explored in depth until now. Georgia O'Keeffe, Photographer is the first exhibition devoted to O'Keeffe's work as a photographer. Nearly 100 photographs from a newly examined archive reveal the American icon's Modernist approach to the medium. Complementing the photographs are paintings and drawings to represent the full scope of her career. Captured on film throughout her life-in early family pictures, travel snapshots, and portraits by a cavalcade of photographic artists-O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was no stranger to the medium. She expressed her unique perspective through all aspects of her life, and by the time she began her photographic practice in the mid-1950s, her singular identity and artistry were well established. This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with the collaboration of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe. Generous support for the Addison's presentation has been provided by the Elizabeth and Anthony Enders Exhibitions Fund.

In a career that spanned seventy years, Imogen Cunningham created a large and diverse body of work — from portraits, to nudes, to florals, and to street photographs. In a field dominated by men, she was one of a handful of women who helped to shape early modernist photography in America. This exhibition seeks to acknowledge her stature as equivalent to that of her male peers and to reevaluate her enormous contribution to twentieth century photographic history.

Everyday, we engage with color. We immerse ourselves in moments and memories that are shaped by color. Everyday, we react to color in ways great and small - and we don’t just react to images with color, but to color itself. Color shapes our emotions. It floods our recollections. It can be both the stimulus and the response. Color Theory is our reaction to this moment in which we are coming out of darkness, winter to spring, in which we collectively navigate from pandemic to endemic. This moment where we try to bring life and balance back to our souls. We are looking for images that engage all of our senses and are flooded with color. Still life, abstract, landscape, portrait. We are excited to see your colors. We are excited to see your stories.

This exhibition will be closed to the public April 6–15, 2022. Profoundly empathetic and psychologically intense, Gillian Wearing’s photographs, videos, sculptures, and paintings probe the tensions between self and society in an increasingly media-saturated world. Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks is the first retrospective of Wearing’s work in North America. Featuring more than 100 pieces, the exhibition traces the artist’s development from her earliest Polaroids to her latest self-portraits, all of which explore the performative nature of identity. Wearing’s work often involves her asking a diverse group of volunteers to represent their authentic selves, a process that highlights distinctions between public and private identities, and spontaneous versus rehearsed behavior. For her landmark piece Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–93), Wearing photographed strangers holding placards with messages they wrote themselves. In so doing, she changed the terms of documentary street photography and performance art by giving voice to the subjects of her art. Wearing also repeatedly turns the camera on herself to examine how one’s sense of self is established within familial, social, and historical contexts, especially in the aftermath of traumatic experience. Throughout her works, masks serve as both literal props and metaphors for the performances each of us stage every day as individuals and as citizens. Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, and Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media, with X Zhu-Nowell, Assistant Curator, and Ksenia Soboleva, Jan and Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow. The show is accompanied by a comprehensive monograph that will survey the artist’s three-decade career with a particular focus on her work of the last decade, including a recent series made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition will also coincide with a new sculptural tribute to photographer Diane Arbus by Wearing, opening in October 2021 at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, organized by Public Art Fund.

The Austrian Cultural Forum presents The Camera is Cruel: Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin. The exhibition brings together a selection of key works of the three iconic photographers. Opening reception on Thursday April 7. The exhibition is on view April 8- June 15, 2022. The gallery is open daily, 10 am – 6 pm. PLEASE NOTE: The gallery will be closed from Tuesday, May 10 until Thursday, May 12. During different phases of the 20th century, Model, Arbus and Goldin recorded the social life of America, which, as a land of immigration, remains to this day a reflection of the wider world. All three were interested in the social dimensions of co-existence, in those living on the margins of society, in extraordinary personalities, and in the eccentric. With the lenses of their cameras, they cast a highly personal glance at people and their disparate living environments as a means of repeatedly questioning the validity of norms and conventions. As representatives of three generations—starting with Viennese-born Model– their works are as much expressions of their times and their particular environments as they are tributes to the plurality of being itself. Model, Arbus and Goldin also redefined, each in her own way, the dialogue between photographer and subject joining a documentary with a highly idiosyncratic and subjective approach. Lisette Model could have been speaking for all three when she remarked, in a very assured manner, “Never photograph anything you are not personally interested in.” It is not only the themes but also the attitude towards social and existential issues that link these three extraordinary photographers. Diane Arbus was, in fact, a student of Model at the New School for Social Research in New York, and significantly influenced by her work. Though Goldin initially looked to separate herself from the cautious distance and coldness of Arbus’ pictures –that reflected the spirit of their time– her work is unimaginable without that of her two predecessors. Each in different time and social context, Model, Arbus and Goldin radically widened and enhanced artistic photography with a new perspective, which leaves social and aesthetic limits behind and shows people and the world in all their diversity and colorfulness.

The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present, Rebels, an exhibition of works by British photographer Janette Beckman. Covering four decades of photography this exhibition serves as a stunning snapshot of Janette’s significance in the world of art, photojournalism, music, fashion, and popular culture. Janette Beckman has spent decades creating iconic images of larger-than-life rebels in music, fashion, and beyond. What gives her photographs their arresting flair is the unrehearsed and raw nature of each image — not unlike like the spontaneous wildness of the 1970’s and 1980’s subcultures themselves. Whether Janette’s images are grainy or slick, black & white or saturated with color, they’re never pretentious. With her fondness for rebellious eccentricity, Janette has a keen ability to capture her subjects’ complex inner lives. Her subjects seem ennobled by the complexity she strives to capture – resulting in images that translates sub-cultural life to intrigued outsiders. While Janette’s photographs span several years and continents, the tread that connects each image is that for those who found themselves in front of Janette’s lens are, in one way or another, rule breaking rebels. Janette Beckman began her career at the dawn of punk rock in London, working for publications like The Face & Melody Maker. She shot bands from The Clash to Boy George as well as documenting the rebellious youth culture fans and emblematic moments for iconoclasts like Blondie and the Police. Relocating to New York in 1983, Beckman was immediately drawn to the burgeoning hip-hop scene where she photographed trailblazers of the movement like Salt-N-Pepa, Run DMC, Grand Master Flash, Slick Rick, and LL Cool J. Fast forward to 2021, Beckman’s dedication to the rebellious still rings true today. Whether it’s photographing the BLM protests in 2020, or celebrating the subversive through collaborations with brands like Levi’s, Dior, and Gucci, Beckman has been and always will be an artist of her times. Janette Beckman’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe. Beckman’s commercial work includes assignments for clients such as Dior, Kangol, Levi’s, Schott, and Shinola. Janette Beckman’s new hardcover monograph, Rebels (DRAGO, 240 pages; $75), is available for purchase at the gallery while supplies last.

Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936) is a celebrated photographer whose wide-ranging work includes the civil rights movement, jazz musicians, landscape, and artistic studies of the human form, water, and light. He is also one of the founding members of Kamoinge, a Black photographers collective whose mission is to ‘Honor, document, preserve and represent the history and culture of the African Diaspora with integrity and respect for humanity through the lens of Black Photographers.’ This exhibition, curated by Halima Taha, presents Cowans’s use of photography to articulate the beauty within the human condition and the world we live in with over fifty images from his illustrious career. The Columbus, OH native was one of the first African American students to earn a degree in Photography from Ohio University in 1958. He studied under Clarence H. White, Jr. and later with Minor White. His education continued at the School of Motion Picture Arts and School of Visual Arts in New York City. Cowans secured a position assisting photographer Gordon Parks at LIFE Magazine, and later served in the United States Navy in Virginia Beach, VA. He continued to work as a photographer. Cowans also had an illustrious career in cinema as a film still photographer on over thirty Hollywood sets, working with directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Spike Lee. Cowans has won numerous awards and fellowships from a varied commercial and personal work portfolio. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums, the International Center of Photography, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous other art institutions have shown his photographs. The legendary photographer Gordon Parks, for whom Cowans once worked, called him “one of the most significant artists of our time” and noted, “Adger’s individualism sets him apart, simply because he follows his convictions.”

Larry Silver - a Photo League-inspired photographer still working today — moved from Greater New York to Westport, Connecticut in 1973 and, with his camera, began exploring its regional environs. This exhibition, guest curated by curator and art historian Leslie K. Brown, PhD, will bring together over 40 years of Silver's work made of and in Connecticut and consider how he continues to push the boundaries of what landscape and looking are - and can be. The first part of the exhibition’s title is a nod to poet Wallace Stevens, who also called Connecticut his home for decades, and specifically his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The exhibition layout will echo Stevens’ iconic poem and be installed in clusters. Similar to what Stevens called “sensations,” each grouping of Silver’s photographs will gather images across several of his series and reflect upon different facets of his work, while offering the audience a unique viewing and spatial experience. This multifaceted, but still focused, theme will showcase Silver’s work from several areas of the state and different kinds of “-scapes.” Exuding a sense of quiet contemplation and a studied approach, Silver engages ideas of observation and framing in his lyrical compositions. Many of his photographs, for example, feature figures looking out at the view or back towards the photographer, along with scenes seen through and transformed by weather and atmosphere, light and shadow, perspectives and formats, and nature and the built environment.

The photographers using sublimation onto metal, produce beautiful, luminous photographs. This process creates high-definition, visually stunning archival and fade-resistant images. This photo printing process creates prints that present the look of analog photography while relying on new standards for image printing using innovative technology. Freed from the limitations of paper – and the need to use protective glass or Plexi – a picture can have vivid colors and sharp definition. Opting to use this technique of infusing dyes directly onto specially coated metal prints helps create photographs that become bold, striking images with beautiful clarity and exceptional quality. The celebrated photographers in this exhibition take advantage of the immediacy of the sublimation process.

From April 30th to June 18, 2022, Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present the most recent photographs and drawings of French photographer Georges Rousse. The opening reception with the artist in attendance is scheduled Saturday April 30th from 3 to 6:30 PM in the gallery space. This is the third solo show of Georges Rousse with Sous Les Etoiles Gallery. This selection masters one more time the way Georges Rousse enjoys, embraces, and achieves his intervention on abandoned spaces and locations, founding a kind of counter space. Using space as his raw material, Rousse converts abandoned locations into almost spiritual visions of color and shape, translating his intuitive, instinctual readings of space into masterful images of several “realities”: that of the actual space, abandoned or soon-to-be demolished; the artist’s imagined mise-en-scène; and the final photograph, or the reality flattened. Since his first exhibition in 1981 at the Galerie de France in Paris, Rousse has continued creating his one-of-a-kind installations and photographs around the globe. His work has exhibited in the Grand Palais (Paris), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), Haggerty Museum (WI), House of Culture (La Paz, Honduras), Sivori Museum (Buenos Aires), and National Art Museum of China, among hundreds of others. In 1988, he received the International Center of Photography Award. The photographs of Georges Rousse are included in the collection of J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Louvre Museum, Paris, France, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Brooklyn Museum, NY Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, LaSalle Bank Photography Collection, Chicago, IL, Chase Manhattan Bank Collection, Deutsche Bank Collection and most recently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Daniel Cooney Fine Art is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition by Christopher Makos titled MONEY. A career montage featuring unseen vintage work from every stage of the artist’s life, MONEY features a selection of over 60 unique photographs, collages, and assemblages that celebrate the money shot: 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. His position in this notorious circle gained him access to everyone that was anyone including models, celebrities, icons and underground royalty. The likes of Grace Jones, Liza Minelli, Jean Michel Basquiat, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger, Keith Haring, Halston, Pat Cleveland, OJ Simpson and an unnamed Los Angeles hustler joyfully mingle on the gallery walls. Never satisfied as just an observer Makos brazenly includes multiple self-portraits in this exhibition. 1970’s surfer boy Makos can be seen in languid repose with long blonde hair, loyal dog at his side, sporting a pair of cowboy boots and nothing else. In another image, the photographer (much shorter hair, still blonde) is positioned bare-assed between two mirrors admiring himself from behind. In a photograph titled Self-Portrait In Side Mirror Makos’s erect penis is pictured in the side view mirror of a rented Pontiac Firebird while vacationing in Hawaii. “Hawaii is so boring,” says Makos when reminiscing about making the image. Perhaps even more exciting are six never-before seen vintage collages created in 1989. The intimate works are sized at 9 x 8”. Three pieces picture Jean Michel Basquiat posing at the Factory, one sees Warhol and Superstar Ultra Violet with conjoined heads, a fifth of statuesque model Ken Moody, and finally two beefy studs stuck in traffic at Jones Beach. The collages torn and colored with crayon and marker then taped back together with masking tape then boldly signed across the length of the works. Christopher Makos’s new book “Andy Modeling Portfolio Makos” published by G Editions was just released on March 29, 2022. There will be a book signing and conversation with Christopher Makos and Vincent Fremont at the Strand Bookstore on April 7. There is also a book-signing event at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on May 6. Christopher Makos is prominently featured in “The Warhol Diaries” produced by Ryan Murphy and directed by Andrew Rossi currently streaming on Netflix. 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 are currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum and have been exhibited at the Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery and The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

Artist Joshua Rashaad McFadden (American, b. 1990) uses photography to engage some of the most challenging subject matter of our time. Working across genres-social documentary, reportage, portraiture, book arts, and fine arts-he critically examines race, masculinity, sexuality, and gender in the United States. His work reveals the destructive impact of these constructs on Black Americans. Looking to the idea of “being-ness,” he considers the contemporary condition of Black life while referencing US history as a means to rediscover and define the Black self. Joshua Rashaad McFadden: I Believe I'll Run On is an early-career survey of the artist's work. The exhibition focuses on seven series: Selfhood (2016) uses conventions of Western art historical portraiture to exalt young Black men in their everyday glory, which is at once splendid and subdued. Come to Selfhood (2015-16) and Evidence (2017-20) offer a vulnerable take on Black masculinity in the form of handwritten letters and photographs of Black sons and fathers. Unrest in America (2020-21) features impactful photographs devoted to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, including solemn yet tender portraits and images of makeshift memorials for those murdered by police. After Selma (2015) documents the pensive expressions of demonstrators standing still in the wake of a commemorative march. A Lynching's Long Shadow (2018) meditates on the connection between the wooded outdoors and the gruesome histories of lynching. Finally, premiering at the George Eastman Museum, the autobiographical series Love Without Justice (2018-21) contains poetic snapshots of McFadden's family, domestic scenes, sweeping landscapes, and the artist's nude body. In the end, I Believe I'll Run On chronicles the intimacies of Black life in the United States as McFadden's practice asserts the humanity of Black Americans.

CPA is proud to present a solo exhibition by the renowned artist, Nadezda Nikolova. We will be featuring 40 of her new works, all unique collodion plates. This exhibition is produced in conjunction with her gallery, HackelBury Fine Art in London. Nadezda Nikolova is a photographic artist whose work is informed by her interest in the photographic object and her connection to the natural world. She works in the darkroom using the historic wet plate collodion process creating experimental camera-less works on metal. The immediacy, fluidity, and materiality of the process allows her to explore photography’s relationship to painting, collage, graphic arts, and sculpture. Her recent work investigates how observing Nature informs contemplation, perception, and identity, while reflecting on environmental concerns. The series is anchored in a deep connection to the landscape, fascination with the photo-based object, and daily walks in the redwood forest overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Rather than transcribing the observed landscape, she seeks to record intuitive responses that speak to the felt and ineffable experience of being present in the landscape. Her pared down visual vocabulary created with light, photo chemistry, cut paper, paint brushes, and cliché verre, arises from the immediacy of the photogram as she explores the boundaries of the photographic medium. Disorienting compositions, evidence of the hand, and process artifacts serve to undermine illusionistic references to physical locales while gesturing toward the hidden, the immaterial, the unphotographable. Nikolova studied 19th century phototrophic printing processes at the University of Kentucky and the George Eastman Museum. Prior to becoming a full-time artist, she earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and a master’s degree in policy analysis. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in numerous private collections. She is based in Oakland, California and represented by HackelBury Fine Art, London.

American photographer Gillian Laub (b. 1975) has spent the last two decades investigating political conflicts, exploring family relationships, and challenging assumptions about cultural identity. Her work frequently addresses the experiences of adolescents and young adults in transition who struggle to understand their present moment and collective past. In 2002, Laub was sent on a magazine assignment to Mount Vernon, Georgia, to document the lives of teenagers in the American South. The Montgomery County residents Laub encountered were warm and polite, both proud of their history and protective of their neighbors. To the photographer, Mount Vernon, a town nestled among fields of Vidalia onions, symbolized the archetype of pastoral, small town American life. Yet this idyllic town was also held hostage by a dark past, manifesting in the racial tensions that scar much of American history. Laub learned that the joyful adolescent rites of passage celebrated in this rural countryside-high school homecomings and proms-were still racially segregated. Laub photographed Montgomery County over the following decade, returning even in the face of growing-and eventually violent-resistance on the part of some community members. In 2009, a few months after Barack Obama's first inauguration, Laub's photographs of segregated proms were published in the New York Times Magazine. The story brought national attention to the town and the following year the proms were finally integrated. The power of the photographic image served as the catalyst and, for a moment, progress seemed inevitable. Then, in early 2011, tragedy struck the town. Justin Patterson, a twenty-two-year-old unarmed African American man-whose segregated high school homecoming Laub had photographed-was shot and killed by a sixty-two-year-old white man. At first, the murder seemed to confirm every assumption about the legacy of inequality and prejudice that the community was struggling to shake. But the truth was more nuanced than a quick headline could telegraph. Disturbed by the entrenched racism and discrimination that she encountered, Laub recognized that a larger story needed to be told. Her project, which began as an exploration of segregated high school rituals, evolved into an urgent mandate to confront painful realities. Relying on her incisive and empathic eye as a photographer, she explored the history of Montgomery County and recorded the stories and lives of its youth. What emerged over the next decade-during which the country witnessed the rise of citizen journalism and a conflagration of racially motivated violence, re-elected its first African American president, and experienced the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement-was a complex story about adolescence, race, the legacy of slavery, and the deeply rooted practice of segregation in the American South. In Southern Rites, Laub engages her skills as a photographer, filmmaker, storyteller, and visual activist to examine the realities of racism and raise questions that are simultaneously painful and essential to understanding the American consciousness. Through her lens and the voices of her subjects we encounter that which some of us do not want to witness, but what is vital for us to see. Southern Rites is a specific story about young people in the twenty-first century from the American South, but it poses a universal question about human experience: can a new generation liberate itself from a harrowing and traumatic past to create a different future? Southern Rites is organized by the International Center of Photography and ICP curator Maya Benton.

Look at the USA, an exhibition of the work of noted documentary photographer Peter van Agtmael, will focus on the fault lines of the post-9/11 United States, at home and abroad. The 128 photographs span the period 2006-2021; they examine the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their domestic consequences–wounded soldiers and the families of the fallen. This work also explores crucial social and political issues such as nationalism, militarism, refugees, race, and class, as well as the tumultuous events that led up to the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol. Texts accompanying each photograph address van Agtmael’s complex motivations as he took these photographs, while providing broader political and historical context. The title of the show comes from a library book van Agtmael found at Baghdad College, a prestigious high school for boys founded by American Jesuits in Iraq. The school was “an emblem of a time when the United States was known in the Middle East not for military action, but for culture and education.”

Gender, class & domesticity: Stunning surrealism inspired by three generations of women at Acequia Madre House, Santa Fe, NM. In a year when much of the world was confined to their homes or under imposed travel restrictions due to coronavirus, American photographer Amanda Rowan was also herself immersed in a domestic environment - but not her own. Created during Rowan’s Fellowship at the Women's International Study Center at Acequia Madre House in Santa Fe, New Mexico in April 2021 - her visually arresting new exhibition, 'Place Setting’, is a multimedia performance piece of photography, film, and sculpture. The result of the project is a collection of work - including recreated elaborate dinner parties from archival recipe books - which explores the surrealist narrative of domestic labor as well as themes of property and independence linked to the trappings of class and gender. Rowan immersed herself in the Acequia Madre House and in the lives of the women who inhabited it - Eva Scott Fényes, Leonora S.M. Curtin and Leonora F.C. Paloheimo. The matriarch, Eva Fényes, moved to New Mexico in the late 1800s during the Gilded Age. At the time, it was one of the few American territories where divorce was legal, and a single woman could own land. Through her efforts, the space has fostered local artists and craftspeople for over 100 years. Rowan examined, interpreted, and took inspiration from the extensive archive of personal artifacts of Eva, her daughter and granddaughter - who left behind an extraordinary record of their times in letters, journals, publications, albums, photographs, art, and artifacts. This was at a time in 2021 when so many people in the world were immersed in their own domestic settings - but not through their own choice. Indeed even in New Mexico, there were significant restrictions in place due to the global pandemic. The exhibition of Rowan's work - running from May 20 - June 30, 2022 - introduces the evolution of the Acequia Madre House from a historic house museum to a space for contemporary art that engages with history

The third and final exhibition in a series celebrating the Capital Group Foundation’s gift of 1000 photographs to the Cantor Arts Center, A Loaded Camera features images by the groundbreaking African American artist Gordon Parks, who used his camera to confront racism and discrimination.

Congolese photographer Gosette Lubondo’s Imaginary Trip series probes the intersections of memory and architecture, examining tensions between residual colonial constructs and contemporary life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lubondo places herself in these pictures, wearing a range of guises and interacting with other subjects. Bodies fluctuate in and out of corporeality; some are solidly in the present while others seem to emerge from a ghostly past. Staged in stylized, almost nostalgic tableaux, the characters inhabit one of two settings: a train car and a school, both abandoned and devoid of the vitality that historically characterized these key nodes of colonial infrastructure. With each photograph, Lubondo imagines her way through the lingering remnants of her country’s colonial past. Schools and stations once humming with movement and exchange now conjure the ghosts of a bygone waystation—a fitting metaphor for Lubondo’s journey and the memory of previous generations who passed through.

Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce Massimo Vitali: Endless Summer, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of newly-represented photographer Massimo Vitali. This exhibition includes stunning, large-scale photographs from his best-known series as well as recent works. For over twenty years, Vitali has photographed spaces where large groups of people congregate socially, including night clubs, rock concerts, national landmarks, ski resorts, and - most famously - beaches. “All these groups of people, seemingly isolated, feel part of the same space,” he says of his works. “Around water, people feel they have something in common.” It is this commonality that Vitali searches for when photographing from a distant, slightly elevated vantage point. From this perspective, he views the masses made miniscule against the immense landscape. Expansive azure blue water, beautiful white sand beaches, and dramatic rock faces are hallmarks of his work. Printed at monumental scale, the photographs immerse viewers in the scenes to convey the sense that we, too, have something in common with these people. After a career as a cinematographer, Vitali brings such sensibilities to his still photography. After setting up his camera he stands off to its side, not chasing a moment, but allowing the scene to unfold. In Vitali’s photographs, you might find a pair of lovers entwined on a towel, a family arguing with pails and shovels, a swimming child in the shallows, or a small dog underneath a beach umbrella. While other photographers might have one of these scenes per photograph, Vitali is able to show dozens of stories within a single frame - each containing multitudes of such tiny slices of life rendered in exquisite detail. Massimo Vitali lives and works in Lucca, Italy. His work has been the subject of numerous solo shows internationally and is held in the collections of leading art museums and institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Centre Pompidou, Foundation Cartier, and Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris. Monographs of Vitali’s photographs include Beach & Disco (Steidl Verlag, 1999), Landscapes with Figures (Steidl Verlag, 2004), and Landscapes with Figures 2 (Steidl Verlag, 2019).

Despite the cloud of Nazi censure hanging over mid-1930s Germany, Anneliese Hager made significant contributions to the medium of camera-less photography and to the wider surrealist movement in Europe. The camera-less photograph, or photogram, is an image made by placing objects directly on (or in close proximity to) a light-sensitive surface and then exposing the assembled material to light. In its final form, a photogram reverses light and dark: the longer the paper is covered, and hence unexposed, the brighter the covered parts will be, and vice versa. Referring to that effect as “white shadows,” Hager developed her experimental darkroom practice through her knowledge of and fascination with the natural sciences. Also a talented surrealist poet, she often paired photograms she made using everyday domestic objects with the naturalistic vibrancy of her own words. Undoubtedly one of the most fervent and accomplished 20th-century makers of photograms, Hager has remained virtually unknown, in part because her early artwork was destroyed in the 1945 bombing of Dresden. Hager was among only three women and the sole photographer to exhibit in the now legendary CoBrA exhibition in Amsterdam in 1949. Like the medium in which she worked, she was overshadowed by the rise of male painters on the international stage in the 1950s. The Harvard Art Museums’ 2018 exhibition Inventur—Art in Germany, 1943–55 was the first to feature her work since Struktur und Geste, organized by the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, in 1988. Hager is believed to have made up to 150 photograms over the span of her career; White Shadows will showcase 29 recently acquired photograms made by the artist between the late 1940s and the 1960s, when she abandoned the medium. The exhibition, which will incorporate examples of cyanotypes, microphotography, copy prints, photograms, and photographs, will also feature works by Hager’s 19th-century predecessors, such as Anna Atkins, Ella J.C. Hurd, and Philip Otto Runge, as well as her contemporaries, including Marta Hoepffner, László Moholy-Nagy, K. O. Götz, Christian Schad, Carl Strüwe, Elfriede Stegemeyer, Elsa Thiemann, and Otto Umbehr (Umbo). In addition, several key historical publications and selected materials from the artist’s estate (now housed in the Harvard Art Museums Archives) will be on display. Halfway through the exhibition’s five-month run, cyanotypes by Anna Atkins and Ella J.C. Hurd will be exchanged for other examples by these artists, due to the light-sensitive nature of the works. Organized by the Harvard Art Museums. Curated by Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at the Harvard Art Museums. Support for this project was provided by the Daimler Curatorship of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

On June 2, 2022, the U.S. Institute of Peace together with The VII Foundation will open “Imagine: Reflections on Peace,” a multimedia exhibit that explores the themes and challenges of peacebuilding through an immersive look at societies that suffered — and survived — violent conflict. Using historical photos, texts, video profiles and interactive opportunities, the Imagine exhibit brings visitors face-to-face with the realities of violent conflict and asks the question: “Why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it is so easy to imagine?” Conceived and designed by the VII Foundation, this in-person experience will be located at USIP’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. This exhibit also gives visitors a chance to engage with the Institute’s on-the-ground peacebuilding work — as well as learn about practical actions they themselves can take to make the world more peaceful.

A beautiful collection of 12 photographs by photographer Timothy Duffy. “Southern literature and music have long defined the cultural landscape of the South. Today, they increasingly share that landscape with photography. My recent books Blue Muse and Hanging Tree Guitars and my new work in progress Sacred Soul is an opportunity to reflect on how the intersection of music and photography defines our region. I am a folklorist, a musician, a photographer, and a producer, I view photography as an essential part of my work with Southern musicians. My goal is to both bring out the best in the musicians I work with and help protect their legacies. Photography and music- the visual and the aural- are inherently sympathetic worlds because they resonate with both our eye and our ear. Together, photographs and music harness the power of memory and sense of place in powerful ways. They work together to deepen our understanding of the American South and its musical roots. Musicians and photographers are like sorcerers who conjure past moments and sounds to enrich the present. These photographs capture the emotional power of the musician. My photographs transport us into the artists’ emotions and allow us to occupy their worlds. We enter an imaginative space where we can hear the sounds of survival from an ironing board, a one-strand guitar, or an unaccompanied voice as we travel through time. Images of deeply lined hands and faces hover in this timeless realm that might be this day of a century ago. My photographs remind us that the porous membrane between the South’s past and its present- in which the past is never dead, not even the past is never dead, the past-is constantly shifting. We are defined by our past, and each generation is forced to relive its glories and its nightmares, photography allows us a new perspective as both we and the artists float within a liminal space and time. The photography and music in my current work is a powerful reminder of how southern place and memory both hold and liberate us. Challenging us to look anew at music and photography with my exploration of Southern musical communities.” - Timothy Duffy

Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946 is an exhibition that offers an in-depth presentation of Gordon Parks’s (American, 1912–2006) photographs of the Penola, Inc. grease plant in Pittsburgh and its workers who supplied essential goods to US troops during World War II. This examination of an important chapter in Parks’s landmark career features more than 50 photographs that have not yet been seen by the public and explores a narrative that is seldom told but still resonates today. By the early 1940s, Parks, a self-taught photographer who grew up in rural Kansas during segregation, had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography with an unparalleled humanist perspective. It was at this time that Parks’s work caught the eye of Roy Stryker, who launched the documentary photography program at the US Farm Security Administration. Stryker was soon hired by Standard Oil to capture the Penola, Inc. grease plant as part of a public relations effort during World War II. In March 1944 and September 1946, Parks was tasked by Stryker to travel to Pittsburgh to photograph the plant, its workers, and the range of their activities manufacturing “Eisenhower grease,” a new, critical material that fueled US troop efforts toward the end of World War II. The resulting photographs—dramatically staged and lit, striking in their compositions— foreground the importance of the story of industry and war preparation in the US, which was a source of pride for the workers and people of Pittsburgh. Photographs in this exhibition will have specific relevance for members of the Pittsburgh community; local visitors may recognize acquaintances, family members, or even themselves in these images. Parks’s photographs during his time in Pittsburgh endure as a record of humanity and everyday life in the mid-20th century, telling countless stories that have been overlooked. Although Parks’s images of the plant were intended as marketing tools to help humanize the corporation’s public image, his pictures speak to the importance of making individual experience visible. Parks’s documentation of workers divided by roles, race, and class is a snapshot of persistent issues in labor and industry. Far from an impassive observer, Parks wanted his photographs to convey meaning and help improve the lives of his subjects, many of whom were discriminated against because of their race. He would continue this approach in his next position as the first African American staff photographer at LIFE Magazine. Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946 is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography. The exhibition and its accompanying publication have been made possible through a partnership between Carnegie Museum of Art and the Gordon Parks Foundation. Gordon Parks: Pittsburgh Grease Plant, 1944/1946, the accompanying catalogue published by Steidl that includes more than 100 previously unpublished photographs, will be available for purchase from the Carnegie Museum of Art Store. PROGRAMS AND EVENTS This exhibition will be accompanied by the following programming: - May 19, 2022, 6 p.m. — Exhibition Reception and Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946 Book Launch, featuring Mark Whitaker, author of Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance - May 26, 2022, 6 p.m. — In Conversation: Neighbors, hosted by D.S. Kinsel, co-founder of BOOM Concepts

James Nachtwey is one of the world’s most respected photojournalists and is considered the defining visual war reporter of his time. Nachtwey is an extraordinary observer and an acute witness, who has devoted his career to documenting some of the most crucial issues of contemporary history. The artist’s major retrospective, Memoria includes 77 photographs and 8 TIME magazine covers arranged in narrative sequences including many of Nachtwey’s most prominent bodies of work. Each photograph in this exhibition is a fragment of memory, captured within the continuum of the history Nachtwey experienced. Each image was intended to reach a mass audience at the time the events were taking place, as a way of raising public consciousness; one element among many in the process of change. Now, as that same continuum moves relentlessly forward, and the events themselves recede in time, the artist’s hope is that these pictures will stand as a remembrance of the people in them, of the conditions they endured and of how those conditions came to be.

Made To Last is a collection of 20 images that span from 2016 to the present and represent a survey of the varied subjects and characters found within Green’s expanding body of work. From his earlier work until now, his photography has moved from documenting a close circle of intimates, often in the parks near his former Grand Street apartment, to the covers of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other international titles. But just as his work was becoming more recognized, the global pandemic upended life as we knew it. Green’s determination to create pictures that would exist as a legacy deepened in this pause, even as he absorbed the very immediate upheaval around him. Made To Last is also a view of America in its current complexity, tenderness and possibility.

Modern Women/Modern Vision: Works from the Bank of America Collection presents more than 100 images by women artists. The traveling exhibition, which has been loaned through the Bank of America Collection Art in our Communities program, will be on view in May 1, 2022, through August 28, 2022. Modern Women/Modern Vision celebrates the bold and dynamic contributions of women to the development and evolution of photography in the 20th century. Diverse in style, tone, and subject, these images range from spontaneous to composed, detached to empathetic, monumental to intimate. The exhibition is presented in six thematic sections, including Modernist Innovators, Documentary Photography and the New Deal, the Photo League, Modern Masters, Exploring the Environment, and The Global Contemporary Lens to reflect the impact of female artists in the medium of photography.

Today, tourism is one of the biggest industries in the world, but traveling for pleasure reaches far back into history. This rotation in the Collection Gallery looks at how the invention of photography in 1839 helped to expand visual understanding of the world, especially for those without the means to travel. Additionally, the selection of objects from the museum's photography and technology collections highlights how the history of photography has intersected with the evolution of tourism in the United States and abroad. From views of the Victorian Grand Tour to snapshots from road trips on Route 66, the photographs-including travel albums, stereocards, daguerreotypes and woven inkjet prints-examine how photography and tourism influence each other. Works by Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) and Fannie E. Coburn (American, 1848-1928) highlight the impacts photography had on burgeoning tourism destinations following the creation of the National Park Service in the United States. Pieces by Shan Goshorn (American, Eastern Band of Cherokee, 1957-2018) and Lala Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) give us a lens into the cause and effect of cultural tourism, while photographs by Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) and Steve Fitch (American, b. 1949) show a comical side of tourist pictures. Tourism and photographic technology were similarly interrelated. Camera designers advanced the concept of portable cameras from the earliest days of photography. The introduction of commercially manufactured gelatin dry plates in the 1880s increased the size of the amateur photographer market, and portable cameras were designed specifically for this emerging group. Illustrating the changes in cameras for the tourist photographer, the selection on view includes the ca. 1882 Touriste, a folding dry plate magazine camera manufactured by E. Enjalbert of Paris; the ca. 1913 Tourist Multiple, one of the first 35mm cameras ever made; and the ca. 1925 Leica I Model A, which set the styling trend for 35mm cameras. The display also includes a rare example of the original 1936 35mm Kodachrome film, Eastman Kodak Company's first natural color film, whose high-contrast colors made it ideal for travel photography. Also on view is an example of the ca. 1938 Kodaslide Model 1 projector, the Kodak projector designed for use with Kodachrome transparencies (slides), and the Kodak Carousel Model 550 projector, ca. 1963.

Starting at the young age of fifteen, Brooklyn born photographer Jamel Shabazz identified early on the core subject of his lifelong investigation: the men and women, young and old, who invest the streets of New York with a high degree of theater and style, mixing traditions and cultures. Despite following a celebrated tradition of street photography that includes Gordon Parks, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, it is to his credit that Shabazz has been one of the first photographers to realize the joyous, infectious potential of youth culture in neighborhoods such as Red Hook, Brownsville, Flatbush, Fort Greene, Harlem, Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Grand Concourse section of the Bronx. A formidable archive of New York’s communities in the outer boroughs, this exhibition pays homage to Shabazz’s illustrious career of over forty years documenting the vibrant interaction of New Yorkers with their neighborhoods. The pioneering work of grassroots activists to save New York’s historical districts from being replaced by a brutal system of speedways has been for some time the focus of academic speculation. Nevertheless, Jane Jacob’s observation that “large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity” resonates beyond the walls of academia and finds validation in the work of Jamel Shabazz. Indeed, his photographs attest to the endurance of Jacobs’ belief that informal activities taking place in the streets contribute to public safety. Shabazz’s photographs capture the intricate ballet of daily life in the metropolis, where everyone is both part of the audience and on display at the same time, where everyone is at once a stranger and an equal. At the core of his practice is his steadfast sense of empathy with the common man and woman he meets on the streets, regardless of their race or social status. Through his lens, everyone gets the same share of exposure; whether black, white, Native American, or Latino his subjects are presented as the natural proprietors of the street. His images cast an impartial gaze on everyone he meets, including inmates, or fellow correction officers he met during his twenty-year tenure at Rikers Island; dapper b-boys, or young Muslim men and women dressed in their finest. The photographs in this exhibition were all made between 1980 and 2020. All of the people shown in these photographs reside within the five boroughs of New York City.

Forest Lawn Museum is proud to present, Light & Matter: The Art of Matthew Brandt, curated by Colin Westerbeck. This retrospective exhibition features more than 100 photographs and multi-media artworks, some of which have never before been exhibited. Light & Matter examines how Matthew Brandt continually reinvents and reimagines photography itself. From large-scale portraits rendered in molten metal, to photographs altered by the forces of nature, to images printed in edible materials, Brandt’s work is both thought-provoking and visually stunning.

The first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY), this exhibition presents the work of a singular voice in photography today. For more than 15 years, Lawson has been exploring and challenging conventional representations of Black life through photography, drawing on a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images. Engaging acquaintances as well as strangers she meets in cities across Africa and the diaspora, Lawson uses imagery to build extended families of strangers in living rooms, kitchens, and backyards from Brooklyn to New Orleans, Haiti to Ethiopia, and Brazil to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The artist meticulously poses her subjects in highly staged photographs that weave together narratives of family, love, and desire, creating what she describes as “a mirror of everyday life.” In the artist’s own words, “it’s about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday Black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent.” Through a selection of more than 50 works from 2004 to the present, Deana Lawson features the full range of the artist’s career to date and establishes a narrative arc of her expansive vision for the first time. The exhibition represents a return to PS1 for Lawson, whose photographs were featured in the museum’s signature exhibition series Greater New York in 2010 and 2015.

This exhibition explores over a century of photographic representations of Black Americans as represented in the Carter collection. Instead of focusing on major historical events or contemporary images of strife and violence, Black Every Day explores the fullness and richness of Black culture, addressing themes of community, excellence, family, and labor. More than 100 vernacular images by unidentified photographers join over 50 works by iconic artists including Roy DeCarava, Dorothea Lange, Deana Lawson, Gordon Parks, James Van Der Zee, and Garry Winogrand. Through this range of perspectives, Black Every Day focuses on moments of Black life that often go unacknowledged. It features people celebrating, gathering, innovating, working, and worshipping, explicitly and solely focusing on communities who don’t always see their experiences reflected on museum walls.

Jed Fielding’s in-your-face street portraiture will take you right into his subjects’ vivid lives. Working at close range, his portraits allow us to feel these intimate interactions, moving beyond traditional photojournalism into personal encounters. His curious subjects reach for each other and for the photographer, too — at times it might feel like they’re reaching for us as well. In this exhibition, MOPA visitors will see early works by Fielding, and sections focused on his work in Naples, Italy as well as his photographs of blind children in Mexico City. A publication will accompany the exhibition and be available for sale through MOPA’s store. Encounter: Photographs by Jed Fielding is made possible with generous financial support provided by the Gould Family Foundation, the Massey Charitable Trust, and the Gardner Bilingual Fund. Additional financial support is provided by the City of San Diego and the County of San Diego.

How have women artists used photography as a tool of resistance? Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum reframes restrictive notions of womanhood, exploring the connections between photography, feminism, civil rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and queer liberation. “Society consumes both the good girl and the bad girl,” wrote artist Silvia Kolbowski in 1984. “But somewhere between those two polarities, space must be made for criticality.” Spanning more than 100 years of photography, the works in this exhibition range from Frances Benjamin Johnston’s early documentary photographs of racially segregated education in turn-of-the-century United States, to a contemporary portrait by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero that celebrates the specificity of Indigenous art forms. A tribute to the generosity of collector Helen Kornblum, Our Selves features women’s contributions to a diversity of practices, including portraiture, photojournalism, social documentary, avant-garde experimentation, advertising, and performance. As we continue to reckon with equity and diversity, Our Selves invites viewers to meditate on the artist Carrie Mae Weems’s evocative question: “In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition. I’m determined to find new models to live by. Aren’t you?”

Between 1983 and 1987 along the California/Mexico border, Ken Light took his Hasselblad camera and flash and rode along with US Border Patrol agents in the middle of the night as they combed the Otay Mesa looking for “illegal aliens.” He was there when they were apprehended – captured by authorities as well as the photographer’s flash. The black and white images are stark, impromptu mug shots in the desert, taken at a moment of extreme vulnerability, when hope gave way to despair, migrants caught in a cruel game of hide and seek. In piercing words and in strobe lit images caught against the dark of night, Midnight La Frontera’s immediacy underscores the struggle and defiance of those who make the perilous hike for days and weeks in search of the American Dream. Ken Light, a freelance documentary photographer for over fifty years, and a Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the University of California, Berkeley, focuses on social issues facing America. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, his work has been published in twelve books, in magazines, exhibitions and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogues and a variety of media, digital and motion picture.

In North by Nuuk, photographer Denis Defibaugh presents his journey from Nuuk to the settlement of Illorsuit, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, following Rockwell Kent’s earlier footsteps and offers a fresh look at timeless Greenland. Defibaugh’s revealing documentary photographs, made during 2016-17, introduce a changing country and its cultural continuity in response to Kent’s 1930s historic writings and images made during his residence in Greenland. Gallery text and video include native language speakers as well as Kent’s lantern slides. The exhibition is supplemented with etchings and prints from Rockwell Kent’s Greenland sojourn, on loan from the University of Plattsburgh, and artwork from the Thaw Collection of American Indian Art. Sponsored in part by Nellie and Robert Gipson.

In his essay for the gallery guide, Steven Hoelscher, Departments of American Studies and Geography, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, writes, “This exhibition offers an enticing window into Elliott Erwitt’s oeuvre. It showcases the impressive results of a remarkable career that coincides with two of the most significant developments in photography in the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of mass-circulation picture magazines; and the occasionally contentious relationship between personal work and commercial photography.” This exhibition shows both the miracle of Erwitt’s balance between commercial and personal photography, and the memorable flavor that he brings to his work. The exhibition was organized by Photographic Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA.

Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside, the first retrospective of the artist’s work, which transcends the boundaries of both art and science, will be presented by the Addison Gallery of American Art in September 2022. The exhibition will feature over 150 of the artist’s haunting photographs, assemblages, collages, and installations spanning Purcell’s career from the late 1960s to the present day. Throughout her more than 50-year practice, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, literary scholars, historians, museum curators, and erudite magicians, and has drawn inspiration from iconoclastic sources, from a 13-acre junkyard in Maine to natural history museum collections from around the world. A pioneer of fine art color photography and an inspiration to a generation of artists from Mark Dion to Sally Mann, Purcell probes the actions of time and decay as elemental to the natural world and the human condition. Among the works in the exhibition are Purcell’s lesser-known early portraits and radically experimental Polaroid prints from the 1970s and 80s, as well as her photographs of preserved animals in museums’ collections, fossils, eggs, nests, specimens from medical museums, and forgotten human belongings, in addition to mixed media collages and constructions, including Wall, a 20-foot-long installation composed of naturally patinated scrap metal and other objects rescued from obscurity. “This retrospective is a long overdue examination of Purcell’s work, which reveals the connections between the unsettling and the sublime, the beautiful and the bizarre, the natural and the manufactured,” said Allison Kemmerer, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. “The Addison has long presented and championed photography, and Purcell’s experimental Polaroid work in the 1970s was instrumental in the recognition of color photography as fine art. But just as her work straddles the intersection of art and science, Purcell herself defies any simple categorization.” “Purcell’s six decades of work, while brilliantly varied and resistant to easy classification, speak eloquently to her persistent interrogation of the ways in which we attempt to understand the world around us, exposing how the barriers of logic and reason that we erect to make order out of chaos are porous and unreliable,” said Gordon Wilkins, the Addison’s Robert M. Walker Associate Curator of American Art and curator of the exhibition. “While Purcell is sui generis, her photography, scholarship, installations, trailblazing institutional collaborations, and writing have inspired a generation of artists. Now, in the year she turns 80, we will bring the full sweep of her works together for the first time, underscoring her enduring impact as an artist and a thinker.” Purcell grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and after graduating from Boston University began her career as a teacher before she began experimenting with photography when she received her first Polaroid camera in the late 1960s. In the early 1980s, she began creating the work for which she is best known, images of natural history specimens stored deep, oftentimes, in the bowels of scientific museums and research institutions around the world. Purcell was the subject of the 2016 documentary film An Art That Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell by Molly Bernstein. Purcell’s books include: Book Nest, Illuminations: A Bestiary, A Glorious Enterprise: The Museum of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, which documents Purcell’s 20-year exploration of a multi-acre Maine junkyard. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe and is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.; the V&A in London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Canada, and other institutions. Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside is on view from September 1 through December 31 and is curated by Gordon Wilkins. A full-color catalogue published in collaboration with Rizzoli Electa will accompany this exhibition with texts by Mark Dion, Christoph Irmscher, Errol Morris, Rosamond Purcell, Belinda Rathbone, and Gordon Wilkins. Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Artist's Resource Trust.

“The viewer...should enter my work through their own eyes, and their own lives,” the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has said. An incisive observer and a creator of dazzling pictures, Tillmans has experimented for over three decades with what it means to engage the world through photography. Presenting the full breadth and depth of the artist’s career, Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear invites us to experience the artist’s vision of what it feels like to live today. From ecstatic images of nightlife to abstract images made without a camera, sensitive portraits to architectural slide projections, documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, Tillmans has explored seemingly every imaginable genre of photography, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures. He considers the role of the artist to be that of “an amplifier” of social and political causes, and his approach is animated by a concern with the possibilities of forging connections and the idea of togetherness. Tillmans has rejected the prevailing conventions of photographic presentation, continuously developing connections between his pictures and the social space of the exhibition. In his installations, unframed prints are taped to the walls or clipped and hung from pins, and framed photographs appear alongside magazine pages. Constellations of images are grouped on walls and tabletops as photocopies, color or black-and-white photographs, and video projections, exemplifying the artist’s idea of visual democracy in action. “I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment,” Tillmans has said. “They’re also always a world that I want to live in.”

Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography highlights the dynamic ways that Indigenous artists have leveraged their lenses over the past three decades to reclaim representation and affirm their existence, perspectives, and trauma. The exhibition, organized by the Carter, is the first major museum survey to explore this important transition, featuring works by more than 30 Indigenous artists. Through approximately 75 photographs, videos, three-dimensional works, and digital activations, the exhibition forges a mosaic investigation into identity, resistance, and belonging. Artists featured in Speaking with Light include Jeremy Dennis, Nicholas Galanin, Sky Hopinka, Zig Jackson, Kapulani Landgraf, Dylan McLaughlin, Shelley Niro, Jolene Rickard, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and a new commission by Sarah Sense.

Recognized for his bold, abstract compositions of Western American landscapes and natural forms, and for his daring printing style, Brett Weston was a leading photographer of the early twentieth century. The second son of acclaimed photographer Edward Weston, Brett Weston devoted his entire life to photography, experimenting with various printing processes and exploring a wide range of themes and contexts to create a unique body of work that transcends comparison to his famous father's images. Although he acknowledged his father as a huge artistic influence and admired the work of other photographers including Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weston was also greatly inspired by artists working in painting and sculpture such as Georgia O'Keefe (whom he once proclaimed as the greatest living American painter), Constantin Brancusi, and Henry Moore. Weston initially used his father's second camera, a 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ inch Graflex, to make his first photographs in 1925. The images from this period reflect an intuitive and sophisticated approach to abstraction that would blossom later in his career when he began making pictures with an 8x10 inch camera. Brett Weston features fifty-one photographs drawn exclusively from the permanent collection of the San José Museum of Art and span approximately 40 years from the 1930s through the 1970s. The exhibition comprises images of natural landscapes and seascapes near Big Sur and Carmel, California; the Oregon Coast; and White Sands, New Mexico; as well as from three major portfolios: "Baja California," "Abstraction I," and "Abstraction II." Although he traveled extensively and photographed throughout the world, Weston's chosen subjects—twisted branches, tangled kelp, rock formations, cracked mud, and knotted roots—remained enduring motifs in his work. In 2020, SJMA was gifted fifty photographs by Weston from the Christian Keesee Collection, containing The Brett Weston Archive that represents the most complete body of the artist's work in the world. Many of the photographs donated to SJMA are vintage prints, produced in the same year as the image was taken, and a few were printed later by the artist. On his 80th birthday, Weston burned all but a dozen of his negatives to underscore his belief that only an artist should print their own photographs.

One of the typical measures of success for artists is the ability to quit their day jobs and focus full time on making art. Yet these roles are not always an impediment to an artist’s career. This exhibition illuminates how day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected new materials and methods, working knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic interest or critique, or a predictable structure that opens space for unpredictable ideas. As artist and lawyer Ragen Moss states: Typologies of thought are more interrelated than bulky categories like ‘lawyer’ or ‘artist’ allow. . . Creativity is not displaced byother manners of thinking; but rather, creativity runs alongside, with, into, and sometimes from other manners of thinking. Day Jobs, the first major exhibition to examine the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts, is dedicated to demystifying artistic production and upending the stubborn myth of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike. The exhibition will make clear that much of what has determined the course of modern and contemporary art history are unexpected moments spurred by pragmatic choices rather than dramatic epiphanies. Conceived as a corrective to the field of art history, the exhibition also encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined. The exhibition will feature work produced in the United States after World War II by artists who have been employed in a host of part- and full-time roles: dishwasher, furniture maker, graphic designer, hairstylist, ICU nurse, lawyer, and nanny–and in several cases, as employees of large companies such as Condé Nast, Ford Motors, H-E-B Grocery, and IKEA. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in a broad range of media by emerging and established artists such as Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Jeffrey Gibson, Ramiro Gomez (now Jay Lynn Gomez), Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson, among many others. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring artist essays commissioned for the book, as well as a podcast, giving artists agency in telling their stories about the compelling intersections between their day jobs and creative practices. Organized by Veronica Roberts, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, Former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art