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Photo Exhibitions

All About Photo has selected the best photo exhibitions on show right now, special events and must-see photography exhibits. To focus your search, you can make your own selection of events by states, cities and venues.
Oculus by Stuart Rome
The Space Art Gallery | Philadelphia, PA
From September 23, 2023 to November 30, 2023
Oculus is a solo exhibition of photographs made from with-inside ancient, living redwoods and sequoias in the American west. These giant trees are hollowed-out from millennia of lightning strikes and fires, and they form apertures to the sky and the canopy above. Though hollow, these trees remain very much alive and their charcoal dark interiors reveal strange shapes that suggest a passage from one recognizable world to another that is like a waking dream. For Rome, every process in picture-making is a vehicle for considering meaning. The choice of black and white materials simplifies chaotic imagery into a form where a new visual order appears. Rome places himself within the trees and uses the openings at the top as apertures, framing the sky. For him, these works are not meant to be photographic descriptions or documentation, but rather a catalyst designed to transport the viewer from a recognizable world into something original and unexpected. Image: H14-PC30-3, Prairie Creek, CA, 2014/21 © Stuart Rome
Romualdas Požerskis and Geoffrey Berliner
SLA Art Space | New York, NY
From November 02, 2023 to November 30, 2023
SLA Art Space is pleased to present "Photography," The exhibition, curated by Francine Rogers and Julia Rothenberg, showcasing the work of Lithuanian photographer Romualdas Požerskis and New York photographer Geoffrey Berliner. While differing in the focal length of their gaze – Berliner is a master of the close-up and Požerskis’ lens is more macro - they both explore intimacy, time, abstraction and documentation through black and white analogue photography. This show includes 19 photographs from Požerskis’ work documenting his subjects against the background of small town life in Lithuania during the Soviet/post-Soviet Era and 18 of Berliner’s portraits of photographic artists and abstract works utilizing the wet plate collodion process.. Both Požerskis and Berliner are preoccupied with the passage of human beings through time. Romualdas Požerskis, one of the best known Lithuanian photographers, was born in Vilnius in 1951 and lives and works in Kaunas, where he teaches the history and aesthetics of photography at Vytautas Magnus University. In the body of work from which we have drawn, he follows and records his subjects in and through historical time, sharing their lifeworld of the street, the town square, the courtyards of Soviet Era housing complexes, marketplaces and homes for the aged. Creating an ethnography in images, Požerskis is an anthropologist who has “gone native” – forfeiting the objectifying gaze of the scientist and the photojournalist’s cool detachment. With this sacrifice he humanizes subjects whose social marginality (the aged in his Last Home series or the touching and elegant portraits of Little Alfonsas, children on the awkward edge of puberty) might be exploited or rendered grotesque or pitiable in the hands of less empathetic photographers. In Požerskis gaze, these subjects and the environments in which they are woven are rendered with the affection and empathy that emerges from a shared sense of community and experience.. Berliner’s portraits also record both the passage of time and an intimate relationships that derive from deep empathy, but his approach is psychological rather than anthropological. Berliner, a native New Yorker who was introduced to photography at an early age, is co-founder and Executive Director of Penumbra Foundation, an arts organization devoted to both historical and alternative photographic processes in New York City. Through Penumbra’s lecture series, workshops, exhibitions spaces, residencies and other programs, Berliner meets a comprehensive range of photographers. Over the last decade, he has utilized the 19th century wet plate collodion process to make tintype portraits of the artists who come through Penumbra. These images are taken with period large format studio cameras, where they are recorded on a metal plate processed by hand. Despite the immediacy of this process (sitters can view their image as they’re being made as a unique hand-crafted direct positive image object), it is also slow and deliberate enough to provide time for interaction with the subject. This is time Berliner savors. It allows for a natural interaction with the subjects, who as photographers, often are interested in learning about this process and thinking and talking about how this historical process might inform their own work and vision. Together Berliner and his subjects reflect on photography and myriad other topics and through this process come to know each other more intimately. While, as Berliner explains, portraits are always a collaborative process, he makes this collaborative dimension manifest. Sometimes, as with the portrait of Samira Yamin, Berliner incorporates aspects of the photographer's process or vision into his portrait.. Like a good ethnographer, Požerskis approaches time longitudinally, spending months or even years with his subjects in their worlds. He produces multiple images of his subjects over time, images which document change and the ravages of history. Berliner’s portraits also record the passage of time, but frozen, in the immediacy of the flesh and the face. Where Požerskis portraits rely on architecture, city streets and landscape to tell the story of time, Berliner’s portraits are close up, set against an empty studio wall and free of any extraneous hints about the subject’s position in time, space and history. Berliner’s time spent with subject in the studio like an analyst with his client in the bland space of a therapist’s office tease out the subject’s story, her history, her evolution. At the same time, Berliner’s process lays bare the individuality and passage of time on the canvass of the subjects’ skin. The orthochromatic nature of the wet plate collodion process itself reveals (sometimes brutally) irregularities, wrinkles, blemishes, freckles, warts, moles that we collect over time. These are highlighted again by the use of the large format camera and the directness of the process – the tintype is one of kind, it cannot be retouched or photoshopped. While much of this exhibition focuses on portraiture, like all great photographers, both Požerskis and Berliner are obsessed with the formal, abstract potential of the photographic medium. We see this in Požerskis experiments with dramatic natural light situations, (as in the photo of the boy with an umbrella), in his painterly monochrome palate and most strikingly, in his wide range of compositional expressions, in which figures are placed sometimes at striking angles and sometimes in harmonious geometrical relationship to architectural and natural elements. Berliner focuses his interest in abstraction in a series presented here in which representational themes are eliminated entirely. Here Berliner is experimenting with form, motion and light without the use of a camera or lens. With these images he moves deftly from interaction with humans to interaction with the chemistry and tools of photography and the essential elements of space time, light and form. These compelling images, juxtaposed with his portraits, suggest, at least to this viewer, a dialectic between the finite and particular nature of the individual and the timelessness and generality of space, form, time and motion.
Reclaiming the Muse by Grace Weston
All About Photo Showroom | Los Angeles, CA
From November 01, 2023 to November 30, 2023
All About Photo is pleased to present Reclaiming the Muse by Grace Weston RECLAIMING THE MUSE Patriarchy has controlled the narrative for 10,000 years. My staged miniature photography series, RECLAIMING THE MUSE, reframes historic artworks and stories in contemporary terms. In centering women, historically cast as objects of beauty or scorn, I strive to revitalize the muse with agency, furthering the issues important to me as a contemporary female artist. Mythos, power dynamics, gender roles, liberation, empowerment, and self-preservation are explored in this series, all with a deceptively playful overlay. Although I never depict actual people in my photographs, the human psyche is undeniably at the center of my work. I am fascinated by the psychological landscape, our search for meaning and the contradictions of human existence. So many stories, myths and artworks throughout history address these same concerns. I have found much rich source material to inspire my own interpretations for this series. In my research, time and time again, the women in myths, folk tales, the Bible, and elsewhere are held responsible for causing both the world’s ills and the failings of men. This includes their own rapes, which are recounted in mythology with shocking frequency, and are always deemed the woman’s fault, justifying her inevitable punishment. Of course, creating variations and reinterpretations of past tales and depictions is not a novel idea, but rather an age-old tradition, practiced throughout art history. My muses take back their power and tell their own stories. There is a rich well to draw upon from historical representations. We must remember, the old tales are fiction, and it is far past time for the retelling. This series is ongoing. Curator: Ann Jastrab, Executive Director, Center for Photographic Art
A World on The Move: Navigating Borders Amidst Conflict and War by Ada Trillo
Chicago Center for Photojournalism | Chicago, IL
From September 22, 2023 to December 07, 2023
A World on The Move: Navigating Borders Amidst Conflict and War by Ada Trillo. Through the lens of a dedicated photojournalist, Ada Trillo’s collection of images chronicles the harrowing journeys of those who chose to remain amidst the chaos as well as those who embarked on the treacherous journey to escape. A powerful and intimate exploration of the experiences faced by individuals caught in the tumultuous upheaval of oppressive border conflicts within their homelands. Step into the world of "On the Run from the Northern Triangle to America" and "The Ones Who Stay in the Heartland of Ukraine," two extraordinary photographic series of the photographer's tireless travels alongside refugees and migrants from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border. Having dedicated seven years to documenting the plight of Central American refugees, the artist was compelled to extend their lens to the conflict unfolding as the Russian crisis engulfed Kyiv and beyond. Through these photographs, we are invited to reflect on the choices forced upon individuals during times of turmoil and to bridge the gap between disparate worlds shaped by conflict and the pursuit of justice. It underscores the potential of photojournalism to ignite conversations, raise awareness, and drive change by giving a face to those existing on the fringes of conflict, striving for basic human rights. Discover the captivating narrative of Mexican American photojournalist, Ada Trillo, through an immersive exhibition at the Chicago Center for Photojournalism. From September 22 to December 7, 2023, join us on a visual journey as we showcase the remarkable works of this dedicated artist.
Carla Williams: Circa 1985
Higher Pictures | Brooklyn, NY
From October 11, 2023 to December 09, 2023
Higher Pictures restages Carla Williams’ Princeton University Bachelor of Arts thesis exhibition from 1986. The seventy-two intensely personal self-portraits included here were made between 1984 and 1986, two years after Williams began studying photography at age 17. Her professor Emmet Gowin called it the best thesis show in his thirty-six years of teaching. Only a handful of the works have since been exhibited or published. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Williams’ images are at once tender and wise, awkward and exhilarating. They reflect a young woman’s burgeoning sexuality and expansive curiosity about the medium. As a Black woman processing a canonical history that positioned so many models, girlfriends, and wives as muses to their photographic ‘masters,’ Williams did not see herself reflected in any of the history books’ most revered images. She was nevertheless absorbing a classic, timeless aesthetic of female representation. Her photographs were made using mostly Polaroid 4 x 5 and instant 35mm film formats. The immediacy of results allowed her to interact with the images at the time of the sitting rather than wait for the darkroom process, lending both an energy and technical looseness to the photographic finish. The images reflect Williams’ creative urgency, her desire to render the likeness in the moment. It would become a signature style in her work. As a child of Hollywood, Los Angeles native Williams grew up with her own portfolio of head shots. She consumed the culture of performance, observing, mimicking, and fantasizing about the reality and representation of adult life, another role, another costume. Aged out of acting by her teen years, Williams would ultimately find her creative refuge on both sides of the camera. The proliferation of selfie-culture in the last decade has compelled Williams to reflect on the populism and popularity of contemporary technologies and self-representation. A lot of my influence at the time was popular culture, so it felt like the right time to see the images in the context of the present and to fill in another important piece of Black women’s contributions to the medium. Williams received her BA in photography from Princeton University and her MA and MFA from the University of New Mexico. She spent the next decades working independently as a photography historian, writer, and editor. She has occasionally participated in publications and exhibitions, but never pursued a creative career.
Abelardo Morell | New Ground: In the Terrain of Van Gogh and Monet
Edwynn Houk Gallery | New York, NY
From October 19, 2023 to December 09, 2023
Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to present Abelardo Morell's most recent bodies of tent-camera works, New Ground: In the Terrain of Van Gogh and Monet (2022-23), opening on Thursday, October 19. A reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, October 21 from 2-4pm. Morell's signature tent-camera technique, an expansive part of his practice that has evolved for more than 10 years, reinvigorates the earliest discoveries in optics with a contemporary vision. Using the earliest ancestor of modern photography, the camera obscura phenomenon, the artist has developed a way to project arresting views onto the earth beneath his feet. The resulting works reflect highly intentional marriages of the landscape with the materiality of the ground. Morell's experimental approach not only engages with the photography's ancient history but also with modern painting. Inspired by the plein air practices of van Gogh and Monet, Morell made works in the same locations in France where those artists painted, not recreating their works but rather creating a new, radically modern vocabulary informed by art history. Image: Yew Tree in Monet's Garden, Giverny, France, 2023 © Abelardo Morell
Pictures in the Half-Light
Holden Luntz Gallery | Palm Beach, FL
From November 19, 2023 to December 09, 2023
Most of the photography that we view is very literal in its presentation – the images we see are set in front of us as if they are straightforward data. However, some photographers are more interested in the expressive potential of the medium. Barbara Cole, Michael Massaia and Joyce Tenneson have found unique ways to create photographs that are less about showing their subjects in a merely denotative manner, and more about concentrating on the mood, spirit and tonal range of their artwork. The images in front of a photographer’s lens can be captured and presented in a myriad of ways. The traditional tools that photographers have had to work with are focus, depth of field, palette (whether black and white or color,) scale and composition. In general art terms, Expressionism is referred to when an artist chooses to present the world in a subjective manner. He or she allows their sensibilities to reshape and reimagine the subject matter for emotional effect. The artworks have the ability to convey a specific mood and have a visceral effect. Cole, Massaia and Tenneson are practitioners of this experiential form of photography – their images have latent emotional effects.
Angelika Kollin: Turning Darkness into Light
Florida Museum of Photographic Arts -FMOPA | Tampa, FL
From October 31, 2023 to December 10, 2023
Angelika Kollin’s captivating photograph Everyday Saint Lucy won first place in this year’s International Photography Competition. FMoPA is delighted to be able to present a selection from “Everyday Saints” and from her tender “Song of Psalms” series. Kollin is self-taught and engages with her passion for photography and art as a tool for the exploration of interhuman connections and intimacy. The direction of her work is driven by her lifelong yearning to understand and gain a deeper perspective on human loneliness and suffering, as well as the role faith plays in overcoming it. Born in Estonia, she has spent eight years living in African countries, exploring the same topics in various cultures and economic conditions. Angelika’s work has been recognized by Lensculture (1st prize winner, 2020/finalist, 2022), BIFA (1st Place, 2021), Lucie Foundation (finalist, 2020), and PHMuseum (finalist, 2020), among others. Her work has been exhibited at Helsinki Foto festival, Lensculture group exhibition in New York, Cape Town (solo), OFF Foto Festival in Bratislava, FotoNostrum gallery in Barcelona, and The International Photographer group exhibition in Berlin.
Michael Kenna, Collecting Light, Photographs 1973-2023
The Center for Photographic Art (CFPA) | Carmel, CA
From November 11, 2023 to December 10, 2023
The Center for Photographic Art is proud to present Collecting Light: 1973-2023, a solo exhibition by renowned photographer Michael Kenna. In celebration of Michael’s fiftieth year as a photographer, CPA partnered with Nazraeli Press to create this retrospective exhibition which includes some of the artist’s most beloved images as well as some that may not be as familiar! We’re honored that Michael will be here in person to discuss his career and sign copies of his latest beautiful monograph. About the book: In celebration of Michael Kenna’s fiftieth year as a photographer, Nazraeli Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Michael Kenna: Photographs and Stories. This gorgeous new monograph, beautifully printed on Japanese Kasadaka paper and bound in custom deep blue cloth, is limited to 2,000 casebound copies. It is published in association with the Center for Photographic Art to coincide with a traveling exhibition opening at their historic Carmel, California exhibition space in November 2023. Kenna has selected one image for each year beginning 1973 (when he enrolled in the Banbury School of Art, right after leaving seminary boarding school) and for each subsequent year. Following the “Photographs” section is “Stories”, in which Kenna writes a brief text about each photograph in the book, and how the making of it related to his own life’s situation at the time. Michael Kenna is arguably the most influential landscape photographer of his generation. Often working at dawn or during the night, he has concentrated primarily on the interaction between the ephemeral atmospheric conditions of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass. Over ninety books and catalogs have been published on his work. His exquisite, hand crafted, silver gelatin prints have been exhibited throughout the world and are included in such permanent museum collections as The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 2022, Mr. Kenna was made an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. “This book is a journey, navigating places foreign and familiar, winding through black and white scenes full of spacious calm. It is a great pleasure to look at these images, to feel that maybe everything is going to be alright after all, that the world isn’t such a bad place, and magic still exists. There is a reassuring quality to these photographs, and I, for one, am grateful for Michael Kenna’s half century of watching the light and recording his vision.” — From the Introduction by Ann Jastrab
Leaving Their Mark: Studio Practice: Chris Rauschenberg & Meggan Gould
Griffin Museum of Photography | Winchester, MA
From November 01, 2023 to December 10, 2023
Creativity takes many forms. Performing artists use their bodies, writers elucidate thoughts and put them on paper, and visual artists take their tools to a blank canvas or light sensitive paper. Artists, passionate about their craft are compelled to create exposing the invisible and engaging us in thought, emotion and narrative. We celebrate the tools artists surround themselves with as we create a studio visit through the works of two photographic artists, Chris Rauschenberg and Meggan Gould. The intimacy of the studio and beautiful chaos of making is a visual feast. Chris Rauschenberg’s series Studio Views fills the gallery with color and creativity. These large scale composites engage us in the details and connection to the art practice of Rauschenberg’s friends and colleagues. Meggan Gould explores the darkrooms of fellow photographers, exposing the tools of the medium used in darkness.
Wig Heavier Than a Boot: David Johnson and Philip Matthews
Griffin Museum of Photography | Winchester, MA
From November 01, 2023 to December 10, 2023
Wig Heavier Than a Boot brings together photography and video by David Johnson and poetry by Philip Matthews. As we reveal Petal—a persona as whom Philip writes, and whom David photographs—the project crosses art-making rituals with isolated performances in domestic spaces and pastoral landscapes. Taken together, the images and poems reveal surprising relationships between character, observer, and author. The photographs provide one record of Petal and Philip’s personalities, blurring art-historical feminine / masculine postures and gestures. The poems provide another which elaborates upon the lived experience of performing or, sometimes, obscuring or protecting the self from being seen. Thus, a continuous exchange between photographer and two subjects in one body reflects the complications of power and gender expression through the history of photography.
The Other Stories: Cody Bratt
Griffin Museum of Photography | Winchester, MA
From October 19, 2023 to December 10, 2023
Cody Bratt (b. 1982) is a San Francisco-born and based artist. His father, a photoengraver, and his mother, a multimedia artist, inspired his love of photography and book making, in particular. He holds a BA in Rhetoric with a formal concentration in Narrative and Image from the University of California, Berkeley (2005). Shying away from a literal approach, Cody’s photography employs primarily non-linear emotional or psychological approaches to exploring subjects and concepts. Unreliable memories, displacement, loss and coming of age feature centrally in Cody’s work. He has exhibited internationally at Athens Photo Festival, Berlin Art Week, Month of Photography Los Angeles, Griffin Museum of Photography, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, ICP Museum, Brighton Photo Fringe, Filter Photo Festival amongst others. Cody is a 2016 LensCulture Emerging 50 Talent, 2018 PDN 30 nominee and 2019 Review Santa Fe attendee. His most recent series, THE OTHER STORIES, was honored with a 2020 CENTER Awards Director’s Choice Award and a 2020 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction. Cody’s first monograph, LOVE WE LEAVE BEHIND, debuted by Fraction Editions in 2018. That series was awarded a 2018 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction, named as a finalist for the 2016 Duke University CDS/Honickman First Book Prize and had images selected and published as winners in American Photography 34 (2018). His work is in public and private collections in several states across the US, as well as Europe. Cody’s work has been published worldwide in print and online venues including PDN, LENSCRATCH, LensCulture, Lomography Magazine, iGNANT, Gente Di Fotografia, Blur Magazine, Aint-Bad, and Float Magazine amongst others.
Czech Avant-Garde
Gitterman Gallery | New York, NY
From November 14, 2023 to December 12, 2023
Gitterman Gallery is proud to present a selection of avant-garde Czech photography with a focus on rare vintage works by two seminal figures, František Drtikol and Josef Sudek. Each created exquisite prints that added dimension to their innovative visions. František Drtikol’s (1883-1961) photographs are distinctly emblematic of the Art Deco period (1920s and 30s) by merging styles of Symbolism, Pictorialism, and Modernism. Though most known for his Pictorial images of nudes in Modernist stagings, we highlight a series from the early 1930s he referred to as “photopurism.” In this series, he photographed paper cut-outs and carved wood figures, as Mannerist silhouettes of the human form, in geometric abstract environments, to explore themes of Buddhism. He gave up photography in 1935 to concentrate on painting. Josef Sudek (1896-1976), after having lost his right armin combat during World War I, devoted his life to photography. Working with a large format camera, he stayed close to home. He primarily worked in his studio in Prague, photographing intricately constructed still lifes and atmospheric views through his studio window, as well as portraits, landscapes, and his city. Though Sudek chose seemingly conventional subjects, his delicate prints convey the poetic magic of the photographic medium. In addition, we present an iconic image by Sudek’s early teacher, Jaromír Funke.
National Character Photographing American Character: John Sanderson
Chashama | New York, NY
From November 17, 2023 to December 13, 2023
Chashama presents ''National Character: Photographing American Character'' an exhibition of large format color photographs by John Sanderson to be exhibited at ChaShaMa 266 West 37th, from November 17th to December 14th, 2023 with an artist's reception Saturday, November 18th from 5-8pm. The exhibition will include a selection of ten framed photographs ranging in size from 40x50" to 8x10" inches. The prints are selected from his larger body of work exploring the United States of America. John Sanderson is drawn to broad topographical subjects within the United States of America. It is there in the outdoors he feels most creative. His photographs reconcile American motives of impermanence, and expansion within the contemporary landscape. His projects include themes such as transportation, leisure, residence, industry, and decay. The influence of growing up in New York City's Midtown Manhattan underpins much of Sanderson's work which is rooted in a passion for architectural design. He captures photographs for each project with multiple large format film cameras as well as smaller digital cameras as needed for commercial clients. Sanderson's photographs have been featured in a variety of publications such as: PDN Magazine, Slate Magazine, BBC News, The Wall Street Journal, Lenscratch, and NBC News. Fallen Flags, and Railroad Landscapes have both been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions. In 2017, he published National Character, a Monthly Monograph Magazine, by Subjectively, Objective. John holds a BA in Political Science from Hunter College. His work resides in a number of private and public collections including the Figge Museum of Art, MTA Metro North Railroad, New York Transit Museum, Center for Railroad Photography & Art, and the special collection libraries of the International Center of Photography, Amon Carter Museum, and UC Berkeley. Zatara Press published his Carbon County project in 2019, which originated with an artist residency at Brush Creek, Wyoming in 2015 and 2017. In 2022, the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project commissioned Sanderson to photograph the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery | Baltimore, MD
From August 30, 2023 to December 15, 2023
Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore is the first career retrospective of artist Amos Badertscher (American, 1936–2023) in the United States. Between the 1960s and 2005, Badertscher documented hustlers, club kids, go-go dancers, drag queens, drug addicts, friends, and lovers who were part of LGBTQ+ life in Baltimore. A self-taught photographer, Badertscher worked on the fringes of the polite society into which he was born as an upper-middle class white Baltimorean. “Breaking all the rules of documentary photography,” as he has stated, he developed a signature style of spare portraits staged in his home studio. Taking his camera into the city’s clubs and gay bars, Badertscher recorded the shifting geographies and personalities of queer Baltimore pre-Stonewall and through the height of the AIDS epidemic. In the early 2000s, he captured the urban decay, economic devastation, and rampant drug use of sex workers in the city’s post-industrial landscape, in a body of work foregrounding aspects of Baltimore’s queer history that have rarely been acknowledged. Badertscher returns repeatedly to his personal photographic archive, inscribing his prints with handwritten notes on his subjects’ personal histories, filtered through his own recollections. This exhibition explores the power dynamics and desires embedded in his photographs, which memorialize people often marginalized by society. Image: Portrait of a Hustler, 1978. Courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate.© Amos Badertscher
 Rineke Dijkstra: Night Watching and Pictures from the Archive
Marian Goodman Gallery | New York, NY
From October 31, 2023 to December 20, 2023
Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of Rineke Dijkstra. The exhibition will include the East Coast premiere of Night Watching (2019), a 3-channel video installation commissioned and first shown at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2019. Dijkstra will also present a selection of never-before-seen works following a two-year period of revisiting her archive. These include new pictures from her Beach Portrait series, as well as selected portraits that span a decade created in locations all over the world. Both Night Watching and the new photographs show the diverse ways in which people connect to each other, to the camera, to art and to the viewer. Night Watching (2019), a three-channel video installation, features 14 groups of people observing and speaking in front of Rembrandt's iconic painting The Night Watch (1642). These conversations vary from visual descriptions to conjectures on the circumstances in which the painting was created. A group of Dutch schoolgirls discuss whether Rembrandt gave the only woman in the painting the face of his wife Saskia; Japanese businessmen consider the painting’s potential for tourism; and a group of young artists discuss what it must feel like to make such an incomparable masterpiece. The scenes in the video are sequenced to explore the different ways a viewer might relate to a painting and its subject. The first groups speculate about what they are seeing: for instance, a dog painted in a vague manner, or an illuminated girl. They are followed by groups who link similar observations to their own personal lives, making comparisons between past and current society. The final groups examine the painting within an art historical context Dijkstra was given unprecedented access to film Night Watching in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour, after closing time, over the course of six evenings. She filmed directly in front of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, so that the participants would have a personal and close encounter with the painting. When exhibited at the Rijksmuseum, Night Watching was installed in a room adjacent to The Night Watch, offering visitors an opportunity to revisit the painting. In a broader context, Dijkstra’s Night Watching offers us the occasion to engage in and reflect on the conversational and social nature of people in a discursive relationship to art and history, and to consider the importance of storytelling in the creation of meaning, culture and history. These subjects were similarly explored in Dijkstra’s 2009 video installation I See a Woman Crying which features British schoolchildren looking at and discussing Picasso’s painting The Weeping Woman (1937) at Tate Liverpool. While the Beach Portraits that Dijkstra exhibited earlier in her career often focused on young people as autonomous subjects, the works in this new exhibition focus on connection. The duos and groups in these works have been captured all over the world, from the beaches of Poland, the United States, and the Netherlands, to various locations in Ghana, the UK, and Ukraine. In these pictures Dijkstra raises the question of how the bond between people becomes visible - which can be through a subtle resemblance in appearance, a similarity in bodily attitude towards the camera, the casual holding of two hands, or even through a strikingly large difference between the characters. All photos in this exhibition invite the viewer to consider the ways in which human beings can forge identity and potency through their connection to each other. Precisely because of her exceptional eye for detail and the gestures unique to each individual, and her great sense of human relationships and emotions, these portraits shine a special light on the power of Rineke Dijkstra's unique oeuvre. Rineke Dijkstra was trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1984 at de Moor in Amsterdam. Dijkstra's photographs have appeared in numerous international exhibitions, including the 1997 and 2001 Venice Biennale, the 1998 Bienal de São Paulo, Turin's Biennale Internationale di Fotografia in 1999 and the 2003 International Center for Photography's Triennial of Photography and Video in New York; Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg (2014); ICA, Boston in 2019; Barbican Art Gallery, London (2020); The Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2022). Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris (2023); Timken Museum, San Diego (2022); Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (2022); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2019) de Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2018); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2018), Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark (2017); Hasselblad Center, Gothenberg (2017); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2016); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012); Tate Liverpool (2010), Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Jeu de Paume, Paris and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005-6), and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2001). She is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Spectrum Internationaler Preis für Fotografie der Stiftung Niedersachsen (2018), the Hasselblad Foundation International Award (2017), Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize – now Deutsche Börse Photography Prize – (1998), Werner Mantz Award (1994).
Sama Alshaibi: Silsila
The Center for Fine Art Photography | Fort Collins, CO
From October 05, 2023 to December 22, 2023
Silsila - Arabic for ‘chain’ or ‘link’— is a multi-media project depicting Sama Alshaibi’s seven year cyclic journey through the significant deserts and endangered water sources of the Middle East and North African region. The story of water and desert is an enduring paradox and starting point for broader and philosophical readings that place mystical and historical importance on the natural world and point to our uncertain ecological future.
Daniel Arnold: New York Life
New York Life Gallery | New York, NY
From October 27, 2023 to December 22, 2023
New York Life Gallery is pleased to announce Daniel Arnold: New York Life, opening October 27, 2023. Attuned to moments in the city that many fail to notice, Arnold documents the personalities who rush, stumble, and idle through every sidewalk, subway, bodega, park, beach, and ferry throughout the five boroughs. From his vantage point-a camera perched on scaffolding in the rain or nestled to his torso amidst a crowd-he creates a time capsule of the city that is simultaneously unsentimental and imbued with sublime oddity. Arnold's photographs feature a broad cast of characters improbably brought together on the street. People who appear archetypal or stereotypical at first glance are revealed for their idiosyncrasies-exposing the uncanny nature of unassuming subjects. Through his candid lens, metropolitan scenes steeped in cliché are distilled back into the raw, bizarre, humorous, and miraculous. In Arnold's universe, there is no right moment, wrong moment, or perfect shot; there is only the impulse to load a new roll and take the next picture. His work is sustained by this forward motion. While each image is an index of a particular place and time, the breadth and scope of Arnold's photographs form a composite image of city life today. In New York, Arnold has found an infinite muse. Daniel Arnold (b. 1980 Madison, Wisconsin) is a photographer living and working in New York. Arnold's photography appears regularly in publications including The New York Times, Vogue, and Interview, among others. In 2022, Elara Press published his first monograph entitled Pickpocket. Previously, Arnold's work has been exhibited at Larrie, New York. Image: © Daniel Arnold
Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends
Gagosian Gallery | New York, NY
From November 11, 2023 to December 22, 2023
Gagosian is pleased to announce Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends, opening on November 11 at 976 Madison Avenue, New York. The exhibition centers on the long, fruitful relationship between American photographer Lee Miller (1907–1977) and English Surrealist painter, collector, art historian, and Picasso biographer, Roland Penrose (1900–1984). In addition to photographs by Miller and Penrose, it will feature paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper by Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Valentine Penrose, and Pablo Picasso—all artists in their extended network. Curated by Jason Ysenburg and Richard Calvocoressi, Seeing Is Believing also presents letters, albums, and ephemera that trace a history of interconnected lives and relationships. As a model for American Vogue in the 1920s, Miller was photographed by leading fashion and portrait photographers before traveling to Paris to study with Man Ray. She developed a uniquely Surrealist vision of portraiture and captured many arresting images as a correspondent during World War II. Penrose co-organized the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition that introduced the movement to the United Kingdom, cofounded London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1946, and curated important retrospectives of Picasso and Man Ray. Summering in the South of France in the 1930s, moving to London at the outbreak of World War II, traveling in the United States after the war, and relocating to East Sussex in 1949, Miller and Penrose cultivated enduring connections with key artists and writers, playing a vital role in the culture of their era. With an emphasis on Surrealism, Seeing Is Believing paints a picture of the creative life the couple shared with their friends. Image: Lee Miller, 1930 © Man Ray
Meghann Riepenhoff & Richard Misrach: Duet
Jackson Fine Art | Atlanta, GA
From October 05, 2023 to December 22, 2023
Jackson Fine Art is pleased to present Meghann Riepenhoff and Richard Misrach in a two-person exhibition entitled Duet. For the fourth exhibition of our inaugural year at 3122 East Shadowlawn, Duet reasserts the gallery’s commitment to bringing together through a common curatorial thread the best artists of the 20th and 21st centuries across traditional and innovative photo-based mediums. Misrach, one of the most influential photographers of his generation, has come to be nearly synonymous with the American West, photographing vast, empty deserts and sites at the margin where human impact on the environment has resulted in a greater sense of existential uncertainty. Misrach acted as a mentor to Riepenhoff, an Atlanta native, in her early years as a working photographer in San Francisco — this exhibition celebrates the harmonious creative relationship between these two artists, and the importance of the teacher-student relationship to the continuation of the photographic tradition. Curated from each artist’s most recent series, Riepenhoff’s Ice and Misrach’s Notations, Duet honors the constant evolution of two artists deeply invested in pushing the limits of their own practice — and each other’s. Image: Untitled #1026 (Psychedelic Jessica), 2007 © Richard Misrach
Zana Briski: Animalograms
Robert Koch Gallery | San Francisco, CA
From October 26, 2023 to December 23, 2023
The Robert Koch Gallery is delighted to announce Academy Award winning artist Zana Briski’s upcoming inaugural exhibition, Animalograms. Through her one-of-a-kind camera-less photograms, Briski offers viewers a synthesis of art and the natural world, immersing viewers in the realm of wild creatures within their native habitats. The resulting images are a record of the artist’s extraordinary animal encounters, all captured without the reliance on a conventional camera amidst the backdrop of nocturnal woodlands. Briski’s ingenious process embraces the serendipitous interplay of uncontrollable and unpredictable factors. With meticulous preparation, Briski delves into a detailed study of her subjects' natural habitats, forging an intimate connection with their daily routines and the paths they traverse through the wilderness. The artist ventures into wild and remote locations on moonless nights, strategically positioning expansive sheets of light-sensitive photographic paper. In the presence of these majestic animals, she patiently awaits their appearances in complete darkness, at times enduring long, hushed vigils. When a wild inhabitant crosses the paper's path, she captures a fleeting exposure using a small hand-held flash, ensuring the creature remains undisturbed. The exposed paper is then carefully rolled and stored until Zana Briski later develops each life-size image in the darkroom and only then discovers if a successful image is created. To imbue an additional layer of depth and enhance image permanence, Briski enriches the resulting photogram by gold toning the print. When successful, the uncontrollable and unpredictable factors fall into place and a singularly unique and otherworldly life-size image of wild creatures directly imprint onto photographic paper. Zana Briski aligns herself with the heritage of unveiling the imperceptible. In this realm, there exists no photographic negatives and each image stands alone in its uniqueness. Briski's Animalograms serve as spectral offerings, and invite us to contemplate the beauty and fragility of the natural world through her unique perspective. Alongside Briski’s Animalograms, the gallery will exhibit a pair of the artist's Panoranimals works printed on custom handmade Japanese Kozo paper. These panoramic photographs capture vast landscapes and their animal inhabitants, imbuing them with an essence of authenticity and untamed beauty. Following her graduation from the University of Cambridge, Briski attended the International Center of Photography in New York. Her thirty-plus years of dedication to her field have earned her recognition in the form of prestigious awards and fellowships. Her documentary film, Born Into Brothels, achieved highest acclaim by winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. Her film also received an Emmy, along with 33 other awards. Notably, she was also the recipient of two distinguished New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in 1996 and 1998. The Open Society Institute recognized her with a prestigious fellowship in 1999, and in the same year, she was awarded the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. Among her numerous distinctions, she was honored with the esteemed Lucie Humanitarian Award in 2005, in recognition of her commitment to humanitarian causes.
Frances F. Denny: Spellwork
Clamp | New York, NY
From November 09, 2023 to December 23, 2023
CLAMP is pleased to present “Spellwork,” an exhibition of still life photographs by Frances F. Denny inspired by the occult, motherhood, and the medium of photography. “Spellwork” is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with CLAMP. What is magic? In contemporary witchcraft circles, the notion of magic is seen as a practiced shift in consciousness. Though it is uncanny, magic is not supernatural. It is rooted in the mind—and in the earth. And photography itself is magical—a singular alchemy of vision, light, and glass. On the heels of the Denny’s successful series “Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America,” she gave birth to her first child. “Spellwork” represents a rumination on the experience of childbirth and motherhood and comments upon the unique dynamic between a mother and her child. The images in “Spellwork” are constructed in the studio using plants and flowers as well as personal items gathered from the artist’s home that together conjure a sense of collaborative, childlike play. Some of the plant materials were sourced from the artist’s backyard with others from grocery stores or specialty flower markets. All were chosen for their formal properties or symbolic resonance. Each photograph features a flower invoking birth, fragility, and mortality, alongside a child’s symbolic “interruption.” Many images include a “magical” photographic shift (smoke, filters, blur, rainbows, refraction, spectral stars) and a plastic material representing a shield for the preservation of the self (often a container for a child’s mess). In the images the studio set becomes an altar; the act of creation is an incantation. Together the images introduce a subjective duality of both artist and mother—the triumphant, deathly dance of those two roles, merging into one. The titles reference phrases from rituals and spells in The Spiral Dance by Starhawk.
Adam Ekberg: Minor Spectacles
Clamp | New York, NY
From November 09, 2023 to December 23, 2023
CLAMP is pleased to present Minor Spectacles, a solo exhibition of photographs by Adam Ekberg, which originated at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, where it was on display from January – September 2023. Ekberg builds constructions and executes experiments in front of the camera lens. These fabricated subjects are ephemeral and result in an event which ultimately exists only as a photograph. Ekberg’s interventions vary in complexity from a single pumpkin bouncing off a trampoline to a concoction with a milk jug, bucket, cocktail umbrella, and lighter referencing a Rube Goldberg machine. As a whole, this collection of images speaks to a simultaneously playful but also lonely practice. These constructions exist only for the artist and the camera in the moment. The hand of the constructor is never explicitly shown, as if these occurrences miraculously came to be in a landscape devoid of humanity. Despite Ekberg’s sometimes elaborate constructions, the images maintain a humble quality, one enhanced by his use of mundane objects and materials. This transparency in process and production allows the viewer to unpack each image on equal footing with the artist and to share in the artist’s poetic visual associations. Ekberg’s most recent solo shows was at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. Other solo exhibition venues include CLAMP, New York City; De Soto Gallery, Los Angeles; Platform Gallery, Seattle; Thomas Robertello Gallery, Chicago; and Fotografiska Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden. He has been featured in group exhibitions in major cities such as San Francisco, Portland, Kansas City, and Cork, Ireland. Ekberg has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Monson Arts, Playa, and Monhegan. He is the recipient of the Society for Photographic Education’s Imagemaker Award and the Tanne Foundation Award. His monograph The Life of Small Things was published in 2015.
Looking Forward: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography
Pier 24 | San Francisco, CA
From August 08, 2022 to December 31, 2023
Looking Forward—the second of two consecutive exhibitions celebrating the tenth anniversary of Pier 24 Photography—highlights a selection of photographers collected by the Pilara Foundation over the past decade. With a focus on single artist galleries, Looking Forward demonstrates our belief that exhibiting photographers’ works in depth is the best way to communicate their visions for a given project or moment in time. Many of the featured photographers address the human condition in the twenty-first century. Tabitha Soren reflects on how we relate to others and the mass media we consume in an era dominated by digital technology. Tania Franco Klein depicts anonymous characters in cinematic worlds pervaded by feelings of isolation and disconnection, where ambiguity undermines any perceived narrative. Todd Hido juxtaposes ethereal pictures of romantic landscapes with scenes of industrial development and devastation caused by wildfires. Erica Deeman, Zanele Muholi, Eva O’Leary, and Chanell Stone examine contemporary identity politics. Deeman’s portraits of men from the African diaspora speak to the social constructs of identity, gender, and race. Muholi’s evocative self-portraits integrating everyday objects redress inequalities in representation in portraiture by forefronting black, queer, and trans narratives in their native South Africa. O’Leary’s tender portraits of adolescent and college-age women focus on how the self-images of young women—informed by the media and societal expectations—shape their projected identities. And Stone creates intimate self-portraits, still lifes, and landscapes that explore the black body’s relationship to nature—overlooked urban environments in particular—claiming the natural world as a site for reconciliation and reprieve. Pier 24 Photography’s long-standing dedication to collecting work related to the city of San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area is also prominent. In the reception area, we pay tribute to our location under the Bay Bridge with pictures commissioned by three different photographers—John Chiara, Veronika Kellndorfer, and Richard Learoyd—and an installation of vintage postcards illustrating this iconic structure through the decades. Awoiska van der Molen’s striking black-and-white nighttime scenes and John Chiara’s ethereal skyline views reveal their makers’ unique perspectives on and approaches to San Francisco’s urban landscape. Daniel Postaer’s poignant vignettes of the evolving city and Austin Leong’s wry black-and-white pictures of everyday moments on the street speak to a constantly changing social climate. The exhibition’s earliest pictures exemplify twentieth-century approaches to working in the urban landscape. Fred Herzog and Ray K. Metzker documented everyday urban life in their respective cities of Vancouver and Chicago, memorably capturing their environs through their distinctive styles. In 2019, Looking Back, the first of our two tenth-anniversary exhibitions, focused on some of the collection’s key building blocks. Looking Forward demonstrates the scope and focal points of more recent collecting. Together, these anniversary exhibitions consider the collection’s origins, decade-long history, and future trajectory.
Gillian Laub: Southern Rites
Eastman Museum | Rochester, NY
From June 30, 2023 to December 31, 2023
American photographer Gillian Laub (b. New York, 1975) has spent the last two decades investigating political conflicts, exploring family relationships, and challenging assumptions about cultural identity. In Southern Rites, Laub engages her skills as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual activist to examine the realities of racism and raise questions that are simultaneously painful and essential to understanding the American consciousness. In 2002, Laub was sent on a magazine assignment to Mount Vernon, Georgia, to document the lives of teenagers in the American South. The town, nestled among fields of Vidalia onions, symbolized the archetype of pastoral, small town American life. The Montgomery County residents Laub encountered were warm, polite, protective of their neighbors, and proud of their history. Yet Laub learned that the joyful adolescent rites of passage celebrated in this rural countryside—high school homecomings and proms—were still racially segregated. Laub continued to photograph Montgomery County over the following decade, returning even in the face of growing—and eventually violent—resistance from community members and local law enforcement. She documented a town held hostage by the racial tensions and inequities that scar much of the nation's history. In 2009, a few months after Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Laub’s photographs of segregated proms were published in the New York Times Magazine. The story brought national attention to the town and the following year the proms were finally integrated. The power of her photographic images served as the catalyst and, for a moment, progress seemed inevitable. Then, in early 2011, tragedy struck the town. Justin Patterson, a twenty-two-year-old unarmed African American man—whose segregated high school homecoming Laub had photographed—was shot and killed by a sixty-two-year-old white man. Laub’s project, which began as an exploration of segregated high school rituals, evolved into an urgent mandate to confront the painful realities of discrimination and structural racism. Laub continued to document the town over the following decade, during which the country re-elected its first African American president and the ubiquity of camera phones gave rise to citizen journalism exposing racially motivated violence. As the Black Lives Matter Movement and national protests proliferated, Laub uncovered a complex story about adolescence, race, the legacy of slavery, and the deeply rooted practice of segregation in the American South. Southern Rites is a specific story about twenty-first century young people in the American South, yet it poses a universal question about human experience: can a new generation liberate itself from a harrowing and traumatic past to create a different future? Southern Rites is curated by Maya Benton and organized by the International Center of Photography.
As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic
Peabody Essex Museum | Salem, MA
From June 17, 2023 to December 31, 2023
Explore Black identity through a compelling compilation of photographs from African diasporic culture. Drawn from Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection in Toronto, a Black-owned collection dedicated to artists of African descent, As We Rise looks at the myriad experiences of Black life through the lenses of community, identity and power. Organized by Aperture, New York, the exhibition features more than 100 works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the United States and South America, as well as throughout the African continent. Black subjects depicted by Black photographers are presented as they wish to be seen , recognizing the complex strength, beauty and vulnerability of Black life. Texas Isaiah, Liz Johnson Artur, Seydou Keïta, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz and Carrie Mae Weems, touch on themes of agency, beauty, joy, belonging, subjectivity and self-representation. Writings by Isolde Brielmaier, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Mark Sealy, Teka Selman and Deborah Willis, among others, provide insight and commentary on this monumental collection. Image: Jebron Felder and his son Jae’shaun at home, Harlem, New York, September 2011 © Zun Lee
Lost Kingston: Documentary Photographs by Gene Dauner
The Center for Photography at Woodstock - CPW | Kingston, NY
From October 28, 2023 to December 31, 2023
Kingston, NY, November 2, 2023–The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is pleased to open “Lost Kingston: Documentary Photographs by Gene Dauner,” the first major exhibition by this Kingston native. The exhibition is on view at CPW, 474 Broadway, Kingston, from October 28 through December 31, 2023. Gene Dauner (b. 1944) is a self-trained documentary photographer who, in the late 1960s, began to record the destruction of Kingston buildings during planned urban renewal. From 1967 to 1973, young Dauner photographed nearly 500 historic buildings, mostly in Rondout, that were later demolished. The thousands of Kodachrome slides that Dauner made during this period were all carefully recorded in his ledger then stored in a closet for the next 40 years. Dauner’s work first received widespread attention in the award-winning film “Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal” (2016), directed by Stephen Blauweiss and Lynn Woods. This exhibition of 34 photographs was organized by filmmaker and historian Stephen Blauweiss, noted for his books “The Life and Death of the Kingston Post Office” (2018) and “ The Story of Historic Kingston” ((2022). “Lost Kingston” is the first major exhibition to focus on Dauner’s photography. “We are deeply honored to present this one-person exhibition by Gene Dauner, an extraordinarily talented local photographer, who, fifty years ago, as a young man in the 1960s, created an unparalleled documentary record of the destruction of much of Kingston’s rich architectural and cultural heritage,” said CPW Executive Director Brian Wallis.
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch
National Museum of the American Indian | New York, NY
From May 27, 2023 to January 01, 2024
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York will host Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch, the first major retrospective of work by the multimedia artist Shelley Niro (Six Nations Reserve, Bay of Quinte Mohawk, Turtle Clan, b. 1954). For more than 50 years, Niro has been creating art building upon Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) philosophies, deep understandings of history and a woman-centered worldview. The exhibition will be open May 27 through Jan. 1, 2024. Accessible, humorous and peppered with references to popular culture, Niro’s art delves into the timeless cultural knowledge and generational histories of her Six Nations Kanyen’kehá:ka community to provide purpose and healing. Niro employs a wide variety of art practices in her work, including paintings, photographs, mixed-media works and films. The exhibition is divided into four sections titled: Memory, Matriarchy, Actors and Relations. Each provides vantage points from which Niro probes ideas central to her experience and identity as a Mohawk woman, such as the story of Sky Woman, the gender roles and stereotypes imposed on her culture by patriarchal settler culture and the persistence of Haudenosaunee matrilineal culture. The exhibition is curated by David W. Penney, associate director of museum scholarship at the National Museum of the American Indian; Melissa Bennett, senior curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton; and Greg Hill, multidisciplinary artist, curator and art consultant. “Shelley Niro employs humor and wit to probe the joy, sorrow and contradictions of Indigenous existence, and she delivers hard truths with a smile,” said Cynthia Chavez Lamar (San Felipe Pueblo, Hopi, Tewa and Navajo), director of the National Museum of the American Indian. “Her inclusion of Native people, including family members, in much of her work, allows us to see Indigeneity in its complexity while also addressing themes of empowerment, matrilineal kinship and dispossession. The museum is very pleased to celebrate Niro’s art through this exhibition.” Image: (Six Nations Reserve, Bay of Quinte Mohawk, Turtle Clan, b. 1954), “The Rebel,” 1987 © Shelley Niro
Best in Show: Pets in Contemporary Photography
Fotografiska New York | New York, NY
From September 22, 2023 to January 01, 2024
Explore the role our furry (and feathered) friends have played in culture and how they stand in as representations of status, power, loyalty, compassion and companionship through the perspectives of 25 global artists. Among the works on view are examples by William Wegman, famed for his portraits of his Weimaraners; Walter Chandoha, the world’s first professional cat photographer; and Sophie Gamand, known for her touching, sensitive photographs of dogs taking baths. With this exhibition we want to celebrate and acknowledge our constant companions, their presence in Western art and popular culture, and our multifaceted relationship with them. We place these animals on a pedestal, and consider them from all perspectives: as life partners, status symbols, friends and family members, and as works of art. Image: Henry and Hope © Gerrard Gethings
Julie Blackmon: A Life in Frame
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art | Kansas City, MO
From September 14, 2023 to January 06, 2024
Julie Blackmon: A Life in Frame is a survey focuses on the last decade of the artist’s photography. Julie Blackmon's (American, born 1966) subject is the conflation of art and life—particularly everyday life in Springfield, Missouri. The works on view show scenes depicting family, community, and landscape deeply rooted in her Midwestern heritage. Blackmon uses her surroundings to engage broader ideas of social and political issues, gender issues and family dynamics, and art historical references. While Blackmon’s work celebrates the visual vernacular of an area of the country that many dismiss as culturally unremarkable, she positions it in conversation with a wide range of artistic references–including 17th century Dutch painters, 19th century Missouri-based artist George Caleb Bingham, and contemporary photographers like Diane Arbus. She applies these genres’ techniques to create uniquely playful and critical examinations of the modern family, feminism, and other social and political issues. The 20 works on view demonstrate these conceptual and aesthetic themes that the artist has engaged over the past decade, as well as the deep collecting history of Blackmon’s work in the Midwest. While her work is known and collected nationally – her work was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. – many of the works on view come from local collections, emphasizing the close relationship with Blackmon and her work in the region. Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art was the first museum to collect Blackmon’s work when it acquired four of the artist’s photographs in 2008. Image: Records, 2021 © Julie Blackmon
Bailey Photographs
Fahey/Klein Gallery | Los Angeles, CA
From September 28, 2023 to January 06, 2024
The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present selected photographs by David Bailey. This exhibition includes some of Bailey’s signature images of luminaries of fashion, music, and fine art. In portraits and little-known “torn” prints, he captures subjects including Jane Birkin, Michael Caine, David Hockney, Helmut Newton, Jean Shrimpton, and Mick Jagger. Bailey’s bold and iconoclastic style has made him one of the world’s most renowned living portrait photographers and earned him as much fame as his subjects. Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, he channeled and immortalized the energies of London in the 1960s and beyond. Self-taught, his distinctive style comprises stark white backgrounds, uncompromising crops, and striking, seemingly spontaneous poses. From the beginning of his career, which now spans more than six decades, his arresting yet spare portraits and fashion images have conveyed a radical sense of youth and sexuality, often typifying the look of the times. David Bailey was born in London in 1938. His childhood shaped his early experiences in the East End during the Blitz of WWII. Having left school at fifteen, he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force in 1956. Whilst posted in Singapore, he bought his first camera and was inspired to be a photographer after seeing Cartier Bresson's photograph, 'Kashmir'. Bailey started working with fashion photographer John French as his assistant in 1959. He left soon after to strike out his career as a photographer and published his first portrait of Somerset Maugham for 'Today' magazine in 1960. Bailey’s meteoric rise at British Vogue in the early ’60s was followed by the publication, in 1965, of his first photography book, Box of Pin-Ups, which, as its title suggests, depicted media stars such as Mick Jagger, The Beatles, and Andy Warhol, among many others. His mercurial persona was the inspiration for the principal character—a fashion photographer—in Michelangelo Antonioni’s modern classic film Blow-Up (1966), and Bailey went on to create some of the most memorable and sensual portraits of the last century. Bailey has exhibited worldwide, with the first of his landmark exhibitions in 1971 at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Other exhibitions have been held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (1983), International Center of Photography, New York (1984), Birth of Cool, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000), and Bailey's Stardust, National Portrait Gallery, London (2014), which travelled through 2015 to Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, and Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Bailey's work is held in private and public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Reshaping the Earth: Energy and the Environment
Photo-Eye Gallery | Santa Fe, NM
From November 03, 2023 to January 06, 2024
photo-eye Gallery is pleased to present “Reshaping the Earth: Energy and the Environment,” an exhibition of photographs by Jamey Stillings and David E. Adams. This exhibition observes the transformation of land due to the extraction of natural resources from the earth. This exhibition also highlights a selection of images by Bremner Benedict that explore natural springs in the Southwest, many of which are currently being threatened. Jamey Stillings’ stunning color, aerial photographs record rapidly growing large-scale renewable energy projects that incorporate wind, solar, hydro and mining projects in the Atacama desert of Chile. The landscape of the Atacama desert has a long history of being altered by humans due to the region’s abundant natural resources such as lithium, copper, gold and iron ore. David Emitt Adams uses historical photographic techniques to explore his subjects, spark- ing conversations about the past and present. His “Power” series features images of industrial landscapes from the American oil industry, captured using a custom-built camera and printed directly onto 55-gallon steel oil drum lids using wet plate collodion chemistry. Benedict’s “Hidden Water” project documents springs in the Southwest, including the Chihua- huan, Sonoran, and Mojave deserts, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. The project raises awareness about the loss of these vital ecosystems that have long been essential to hu- man survival but are overlooked in our modern world. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Jamey Stillings is a photographer based in Santa Fe, NM. His work is in the permanent collection of the United States Library of Congress Museum, of Fine Arts, Houston amung other public and private collections. His recent monograph ATACAMA: Renewable Energy and Mining in the High Desert of Chile, was published by Steidl. David Emitt Adams is a photographer based in Phoenix, Arizona. His work is in the permanent collection of The Center for Creative Photography, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Muse- um of Photographic Arts San Diego, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The George Eastman Museum, and The Worcester Art Museum as well as numerous private collections. Bremner Benedict is a photographer based in Massachusetts. Her work is in the permanent collection of Fidelity Art Boston Collection, The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, New Mexico Museum of Art, George Eastman International Museum of Photography, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela, 1928–1978
J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center | Los Angeles, CA
From August 29, 2023 to January 07, 2024
Alfredo Boulton is considered one of the most important champions of modern art in Venezuela and a key intellectual of 20th-century modernism. He was a pioneer of photography, an art critic, a researcher and historian of Venezuelan art, and a friend to many of the great artists and architects of his time. This exhibition explores Boulton's multidimensional persona by showcasing his photographic work, his relationships with modern artists, and his influence on the formalization of art history in his country. Image: Luis Sánchez Olivares, "El Diamante Negro," no. 2 (Luis Sánchez Olivares, "The Black Diamond," no. 2), 1952, Alfredo Boulton. Partial donation of the Alberto Vollmer Foundation. Getty Research Institute, 2021.M.1
Nydia Blas: Love, You Came from Greatness
Johnson Museum of Art | Ithaca, NY
From August 19, 2023 to January 07, 2024
In 2021, the Johnson Museum commissioned artist Nydia Blas to create a new body of work in response to a collection of eighteen family albums held by Cornell University Library. The albums were created by Black families from the 1860s to 1980s; they document everyday events and special occasions in the lives of the people pictured. Photographic formats, aesthetics, and representational strategies evolve over the decades, as do the powers historically claimed by and denied Black Americans from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era, during which families visited photographers’ studios and, later, recorded their experiences with the camera themselves. Research to identify the albums’ subjects and their locations in the United States is ongoing, but we know that photographs were created across the country—in New York City and the Catskills; Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia; in San Francisco, Galveston, and the Mississippi Delta. Blas, who lives in Atlanta, was born and raised in Ithaca, where her family history goes back to an ancestor’s arrival from Harlem around the time of the First World War. She is part of a local Black community two hundred years old, rooted in the Southside neighborhood and along what is now Cleveland Avenue. Its history is studded with the names of artists, activists, educators, and spiritual leaders beloved locally and known nationwide: Dorothy Cotton, Alex Haley, Cecil A. Malone, Beverly J. Martin (Blas’s aunt), Ruth Carol Taylor. Over two summers, Blas photographed Black families in Ithaca, making her own contribution to a theoretical album of Black American family life. Specifics of the Ithaca context, missing from the Library’s albums, are continually present here: nature in abundance, revelry in glorious summer, signs of local Black history, realities of life in a mostly white town. As is typical of her practice, Blas worked with families known to her, beginning with her own. Her loving portrayals of her subjects draw from the visual conventions and personal and community functions of the photographs in the Library albums but are suffused with poetry, even the otherworldly—for Blas, necessary tools of healing and resistance. Images that might be everyday become mythic, as the familiar family snapshot is subsumed into the enigmatic, ennobling, and singular work of art. This exhibition was curated by Kate Addleman-Frankel, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography. Special thanks to Kofi Acree, Director of the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library and Curator of Africana Collections for the Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and Andrea Inselmann, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Johnson Museum, for their key support and input. Image: The Negation (Dequan, Sahanna, and Giannis Calloway) © Nydia Blas
Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art | New York, NY
From September 22, 2023 to January 07, 2024
Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant is the first museum exhibition surveying the work of artist, critic, and curator Christian Walker (1953-2003). Active in Boston and Atlanta from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Walker was a pathmaking Black, gay photographer who made compelling and experimental work about queer sexuality, race, and their intersections. In the mid-1980s, his artistic practice shifted from documentary photography and portraiture toward alternative photographic processes of multiple exposure, archival appropriation, and integration of paints and non-traditional materials. Walker’s artworks, criticism, and exhibition-making addressed myriad subjects, including queer public sex, interracial desire, HIV/AIDS, censorship, drug use, and Blackness and whiteness in public and private image cultures. By contextualizing Walker within his artistic and activist communities in Boston and Atlanta, this exhibition situates his photographs, critical writings, and curatorial projects as vital contributions to the histories of art and photography. Image: The Theater Project, 1983-4 © Christian Walker
Come to Colorado
Amon Carter Museum of American Art | Fort Worth, TX
From August 27, 2023 to January 07, 2024
Drawn exclusively from the Carter’s Fred and Jo Mazzulla Collection, this exhibition showcases 19th-century photographs including work from W. J. Carpenter, Joseph M. Collier, and William Henry Jackson. Fred Mazzulla spent decades building a collection of visual materials, including photographs, about the history of Colorado. Acquired by the Carter in 1976, these rarely shown photographs document Colorado’s settlement and the promotion of the area as an outdoor playground in tandem with the growth of the mining industry of the late 19th century. Image: Tunnels 10 and 11. 11 Mile Cañon. Colo. Midland R.R. © William Henry Jackson
Rafael Soldi: Soft Boy
Frye Art Museum | Seattle, WA
From October 07, 2023 to January 07, 2024
Seattle artist Rafael Soldi uses photographic media to examine the intersection of individual identity with larger political and social themes such as immigration, memory, and loss. The artist’s current work builds on his experience as a queer youth in Peru to focus on the construction of masculinity in Latin American society. Soft Boy, Soldi’s first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast, brings together three recent projects that explore how gender expectations are encoded—and can be subverted—within language and childhood games. The core of the exhibition is a new immersive video installation, Soft Boy (2023), Soldi’s ambitious first foray into moving-image work. The nonlinear video follows a group of uniformed, school-aged adolescents as they perform a series of rituals drawn from the artist’s memories of his days at an all-boys Catholic school. Schoolyard brawling, marching in military-style parades, arm wrestling, performative athleticism: the depicted actions index a type of masculinity largely governed by violence. Soldi’s treatment, however, frames the boys’ machismo as both threatening and absurd, barely concealing an urgent need for intimacy and connection. The exhibition also includes selections from the artist’s print series CARGAMONTÓN (2022) and a new hand-written text installation, mouth to mouth (2023). “Cargamontón,” a pile-on form of hazing common in Latin American schools, hovers in Soldi’s recollection between bullying and homoerotic self-discovery. The artist translates pixelated found footage of the practice into a sequence of elegant large-scale etchings, which evoke obscure memory and an ambiguous mix of pain and pleasure. In mouth to mouth, Soldi again centers moments of fluidity and dissonance, presenting word plays and Spanish-English pairings that reveal the gendered power structures built into language and the slipperiness of meaning. For the artist, probing states of in-betweenness—especially as it occurs across tongues—provides nuanced insight into immigrant identity while also offering a rich metaphor for queer experience. Image: CARGAMONTÓN, 2022 © Rafael Soldi
Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955
The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) | Houston, TX
From October 08, 2023 to January 07, 2024
In 1955, two photographers received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation for U.S. survey projects: Robert Frank and Todd Webb. Frank’s cross-country trip by car would result in the celebrated book The Americans. Webb was awarded a grant to walk, boat, and bike across the United States to depict “vanishing Americana, and the way of life that is taking its place.” Though the men had no knowledge of each other during the application process, both secured a recommendation from famed photographer Walker Evans, and both completed their cross-country surveys—though in radically different ways. Frank’s resulting work became a landmark text in the history of photography, and Webb’s project remains almost entirely unknown. Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955 brings together both 1955 projects for the first time. In some instances, Frank’s and Webb’s images are strikingly similar—both men took photographs of the highway and dim, smoky barrooms. Because each was unaware of the other’s work, these similarities can be traced to popular cultural trends and shared ideologies. Both men, after all, engaged in projects that challenged the idealistic purity of the “American road trip.” Radically different photographs made in the same location reveal the photographers’ diverse perspectives and approaches. Frank’s grainy, off-kilter style was matched with his harsh examination of the darker side of American life. An immigrant born in Switzerland, Frank (1924–2019) harnessed his outsider perspective. The tender, carefully composed images created by Detroit-born Webb (1905–2000) celebrated the individual oddities of the American way of life. Ultimately, comparing the work of these photographers reveals the complexity of their projects and the impossibility of capturing a singular vision of “America.” Image: Robert Frank, Rodeo, New York City / Todd Webb, Cowboy, Lexington, NE © Robert Frank & Todd Webb
Transcendence: Awakening the Soul
Griffin Museum of Photography | Winchester, MA
From December 13, 2023 to January 07, 2024
My name is Xuan Hui. I am from Singapore and currently live in Tokyo. I began photographing as a form of self-therapy. I was grieving the loss of my mother to cancer. She had been both my confidante and my moral compass. Losing her plunged me into a downward spiral until a chance encounter with nature set me on my path to recovery. Its vastness gave me a sense of perspective while its beauty reignited in me a sense of wonder and adventure. It reminded me that life is beautiful, that there is so much to live for and to explore. Initially, the urge to photograph stemmed from an almost desperate desire to prolong the serenity that nature brought. Over time, I began to enjoy simply being in the embrace of the forests, lakes and meadows. The Chinese idiom “天时地利人和” speaks to the importance of fortuitous timing (天时), favorable conditions (地利) and the human resolve (人和) to our endeavors. I think this is especially true for my photography because my images are a collaborative effort with nature. I am grateful to be blessed with serendipitous encounters and would like to share these precious tokens of memories with others. Nature has been pivotal to my own healing and growth. I dedicate my images to kindred spirits, the weary, the lost and the lonesome. I hope that they can experience the joy I felt when I laid my eyes on these magical landscapes. Image: © Xuan Hui Ng
Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan
ICP Museum | New York, NY
From September 29, 2023 to January 08, 2024
Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan is an exhibition showcasing three projects created by the artists during their respective residencies—Halpern’s in Guadeloupe, Yogananthan’s in New Orleans, and Meeks’s in France. The photography projects are part of Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission created by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and presented in collaboration with ICP and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. Consisting of alternating residencies between France and the United States, the Immersion program supports contemporary photography, with each laureate creating an original series to be shared with a wide audience through exhibitions at ICP and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as through publications. Gregory Halpern’s book Let the Sun Beheaded Be (2020) is published by Aperture; Vasantha Yogananthan’s Mystery Street (2023) is published by Chose Commune; and Raymond Meek’s The Inhabitants (2023) is published by MACK. About the Projects Let the Sun Beheaded Be by Gregory Halpern (USA) is an ensemble of photographs taken during his 2019 residency in the archipelago of Guadeloupe, an overseas region of France with a violent colonial past. Guided by the region’s rich diversity and vernacular culture, Halpern’s images embrace and develop the Caribbean Surrealism of Martinican writer Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), from whose work the project’s title is borrowed. Slow and intimate, Gregory Halpern’s photographs pick out small details in which the tremors of history can be felt. Vasantha Yogananthan (France) made Mystery Street in New Orleans during the spring and summer of 2022. Following a group of children as they play and explore together, Yogananthan’s images are alert to the subtleties of place, friendship, and growth. Replete with the artist’s celebrated attention to light and sumptuous use of color, Mystery Street is Vasantha Yogananthan's visual poem told in fragments, full of life, light, and the possibilities of youth. Raymond Meeks (USA), an artist renowned for the unhurried nuance and contemplative intelligence of his photographs, spent much of 2022 in two regions of France—the southern border with Spain and the northern coast along the English Channel—that are important crossings for asylum seekers making their way to the United Kingdom. The Inhabitants, infused with care and deep empathy, looks to the land itself—its traces and pathways—as a silent witness to uncertain futures. What are the effects of this type of migrant life, when one is forced to leave behind one’s culture, to feel unseen and voiceless, to not feel at home in the world? This debut presentation of The Inhabitants features photographs from Raymond Meeks interspersed with fragmentary texts by George Weld, in a deeply empathetic exploration of the terrain that illuminates the spaces of temporary dwelling and fraught transit of so many who are seeking better lives.
Muriel Hasbun Tracing Terruño
ICP Museum | New York, NY
From September 29, 2023 to January 08, 2024
Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño is the first survey in New York City of the career of multidisciplinary artist Muriel Hasbun. The photography exhibition celebrates Hasbun’s dedication to exploring identity and memory, using her personal story to examine collective histories through photography, video, and installation from the late 1980s to the present. A descendent of Salvadoran and Palestinian Christians on her paternal side and Polish and French Jews on her maternal side, Hasbun grew up in El Salvador. Reckoning with a family history filled with exile, loss, and migration, Hasbun herself had to leave her home country in 1979 at the start of the Salvadoran Civil War. She moved to France and then the United States to study, settling in Washington, DC, where she has since worked as an artist and professor of photography. Tracing Terruño presents a selection of Muriel Hasbun’s series, from her earliest photographic explorations in 1988 to recent photographic experiments with chemigrams and expired photographic papers. The exhibition will include Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows (1990–97), a series in which Hasbun layers negatives of archival family documents and new images to create photographs that collapse receding memories with their impact on the present. In the series X post facto (équis anónimo) (2009–13), Muriel Hasbun re-presents a selection of X-rays from her father’s dental practice, decontextualizing medical records and turning the images into landscapes and abstractions, thereby unlocking their metaphoric potential. Selections from her most recent series, Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales (2020–ongoing), maps El Salvador by combining art history with seismic records.
 Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich
ICP Museum | New York, NY
From September 29, 2023 to January 08, 2024
Featuring 250 photographs taken from 1905 to 1978, Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich examines the multifaceted evolution of Dietrich’s (1901–1992) public persona. The exhibition features photographs by well-known artists such as Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Edward Steichen as well as photographers with whom Dietrich collaborated repeatedly throughout her life, including the noted Hollywood photographer George Hurrell, Eugene Robert Richee, and William Walling Jr. Rarely seen and previously unpublished images, snapshots, some of the last photos of Marlene Dietrich, and other works complement the formal portraits and studio images that have come to represent Dietrich, illustrating the true complexity of her life. Drawn from the collection of Pierre Passebon, this exhibition marks the first time his noted collection will be shown in the United States. Dietrich is best known for her starring roles in films including The Blue Angel (1930), the first feature-length German talkie, and for her long collaboration with the filmmaker Josef von Sternberg. Born in Berlin, she emigrated to the United States in 1930, vocally opposing the rising Nazi regime, and ultimately renounced her German citizenship. She became an active supporter of US troops in World War II, raising funds for refugees, and toured with the USO. For her efforts, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1947. On-screen and off, she challenged the gender and sexual norms of her time, making her a core figure in feminist and queer film history.
Ellen von Unwerth: This Side of Paradise
Scad Fash Museum | Atlanta, GA
From May 18, 2023 to January 08, 2024
Drenched in saturnalian escape, Ellen von Unwerth’s vibrantly raucous photographs beckon viewers into a world of debaucherous liberation and lushness. The artist theatrically styles her subjects as classic pinups and dazzling starlets in narrative-driven images — brimming with movement and decadence — that elucidate the vitality of unbridled expression. Through a glittering prism of sensuality and humor, von Unwerth reimagines the paradigm of the strong, self-assured woman, evoking a titillating emotional response to the female gaze. This Side of Paradise is curated by Rafael Gomes, creative director of SCAD FASH museums. Ellen von Unwerth (b. 1954, Frankfurt, Germany) began her career as a model in Germany and France, but quickly transitioned to a role behind the lens, drawing inspiration from her early experiences in her effusively glamourous photographs. Across her decades-long career, von Unwerth has gained recognition for her work on campaigns for Chanel, Dior, Miu Miu, Azzedine Alaïa, Agent Provocateur, Guess, Jimmy Choo, Ferragamo, and Absolut, among countless others. Her photographs appear frequently in the pages of Vogue, i-D, Interview, Elle, Vanity Fair, Glamour, and Playboy. Von Unwerth has also directed short films, music videos, and commercials, and published several pivotal titles combining fiction, photography, and femme empowerment. She has been honored with first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography in 1991, a LUCIE Award for Fashion Photography in 2019, a Royal Photographic Society Award in 2020, and an Iconic Photographer Influencer Award in 2021.
Albarran Cabrera: Here Blooms The Flower Of Dawn
Sous Les Etoiles Gallery | New York, NY
From November 18, 2023 to January 13, 2024
There is the story of the infant Krishna, wrongly accused of eating some dirt. His mother, Yashoda, comes up to him wagging her finger and scolds him: ‘You shouldn’t eat dirt, you naughty boy.’ ‘But I haven’t’, says the unchallenged lord of all and everything, disguised as a frightened human child. ‘Tut! Tut! Open your mouth’, orders Yashoda. Krishna does as he is told. He opens his mouth and Yashoda gasps. She sees in Krishna’s mouth the whole, complete, entire timeless universe. All the stars and planets of space and the distances between them; all the lands and seas of the earth and the life in them; she sees all the days of yesterday and all the days of tomorrow; she sees all ideas and all emotions, all pity and all hope, and the three strands of matter; not a pebble, candle, creature, village or galaxy is missing, including herself and every bit of dirt in its truthful place. ‘My Lord, you can close your mouth’, she says reverently. In any part of the universe there is a whole universe. Hamlet saw the infinite space in a nutshell; William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower, eternity in an hour. Our daily perception relies on the assumption that reality is like a building and as such, is made of building blocks. However, at a very microscopic level, quantum physics describes to us a scenario where elemental particles are basically energy fields. Activity is not the by-product of matter interacting, but the other way round. Entities turn out to be temporarily stabilized nodes in a web of interactions. The things that we perceive and imagine are assemblies of a provisional nature. This essential fact is what Buddhism defines as emptiness. In fact, some of the most original ideas of the ancient Mahayana Buddhism (Nāgārjuna, c. 150 –c. 250 CE) are its critiques of the notion of identity: there are no two identical things in nature; nothing is identical toanother thing. And the central notion of “emptiness” suggests that there is nothing that exists only in itself, independent of everything else. The echo with modern physics is clear. ‘In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatiotemporal standpoint mirrors the world.’ -A.N. Whitehead
Darcy Padilla: The Weight of Time
Leica Gallery San Francisco | San Francisco, CA
From October 30, 2023 to January 13, 2024
The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is excited to announce our exhibition, The Weight of Time, which opens on Monday, October 30, 2023, featuring photography by Darcy Padilla. Comprising nearly forty mostly unseen photographs selected from her extensive projects, this exhibition invites audiences to embark on a visual odyssey, transcending from the heart of San Francisco to people and landscapes afar. These documented moments delve into the photographic fundamentals of context, emotion, and time.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold
Brooklyn Museum | New York, NY
From September 15, 2023 to January 14, 2024
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is a monographic exhibition of a visionary voice in photography, immersive installation, painting, and performance. Spanning nearly four decades of visually engaging artworks, the exhibition explores Campos-Pons’s prescient and sensorial work—transporting viewers across geographies, mediums, and spiritual practices. In her explorations of migration, diaspora, and memory, Campos-Pons draws from her family story to examine the global histories of enslavement, indentured labor, motherhood, and migration. The first multimedia survey of the artist’s work since 2007, Behold highlights the artist’s dedication to creating new modes of understanding, as well as her engagement with interconnected historical and present-day challenges. These themes are examined through Campos-Pons’s performance-based practice and centering of Yoruba-derived Santería symbolism, as well as her work with communities in Boston, Cuba, Italy, and Nashville (her current residence). Image: Red Composition, 1997 © María Magdalena Campos
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845
High Museum of Art | Atlanta, GA
From September 15, 2023 to January 14, 2024
The South has occupied an uneasy place in the history of photography as both an example of regional exceptionalism and as the crucible from which American identity has been forged. As the first major survey of Southern photography in twenty-five years, this exhibition examines that complicated history and reveals the South’s critical impact on the evolution of the medium, posing timely questions about American culture and character. Featuring many works from the High’s extensive collection, A Long Arc presents photographs of the American Civil War, which transformed the practice of photography across the nation and established visual codes for articulating national identity and expressing collective trauma. Photographs from the 1930s to the 1950s, featuring many created for the Farm Security Administration, demonstrate how that era defined a new kind of documentary aesthetic that dominated American photography for decades and included jarring and unsettling pictures exposing economic and racial disparities. With works drawn from the High’s unparalleled collection of civil rights–era photography, the exhibition shows how photographs of the movement in the decade that followed galvanized the nation with raw depictions of violence and the struggle for justice. Contemporary photography featured in the exhibition demonstrates how photographers working today continue to explore Southern history and themes to grasp American identity. The South cleaves toward old ways. But these are not old times, and this distinction is crucial to understand. The South is not ‘backwards’; it is palimpsestic and ritualistic, filled with people living the ravages of history. Revision and transformation are possible; however, that replay requires new ways of seeing. —Imani Perry Image: Sally Mann (American, born 1951), Blowing Bubbles, 1987, gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 1995.177.
Melissa Shook: Krissy’s Present
Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery | New York, NY
From December 08, 2023 to January 20, 2024
From December 8, 2023 to January 20, 2024, MIYAKO YOSHINAGA is pleased to present Krissy’s Present, featuring 30 black-and-white photographs made between 1965 and 1983 by the late American artist Melissa Shook (1939-2020). The opening reception will be held on Friday, December 8, 6-8 PM with Kristina Shook, the artist’s daughter and the subject of this body of work. In the mid-1960s Shook, a single mother, began photographing her mixed-race infant daughter Kristina – “Krissy.” Krissy recalls she could think of no other way to have grown up with her mother, holding the camera and photographing her all the time. “My earliest memories are of being photographed with my friends on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—running naked on the street or playing games in my friends’ apartments. My mother Melissa chasing after us—not interrupting us –clicking away with her camera, an extension of her.” Image: Untitled (Krissy in her grandparents' home, Milford, Connecticut)), ca. 1968 © Melissa Shook
Proof: Maxime Du Camp’s Photographs of the Eastern Mediterranean
The Metropolitan Museum of Art | New York, NY
From October 23, 2023 to January 21, 2024
In October 1849, twenty-seven-year-old Maxime Du Camp—an aspiring journalist with big ambitions—left Paris to photograph sites across the eastern Mediterranean. Officially encouraged to exploit photography’s “uncontestable exactitude,” he returned to France a year and a half later with more than 200 paper negatives, from which 125 were selected to illustrate Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (1852). This work, the first photographically illustrated book published in France, arguably established an aesthetic standard for documentary photography: its salted paper prints are rendered in cool, gradated tones that one contemporary critic described as “vaporous gray.” The published photographs stand in stark contrast to several sets (each unique) that Du Camp privately printed before planning his book. These “proof prints” are noteworthy for their surprising range of warm colors, handwork, and a luminescence that recalls their Mediterranean origin. Unlike the book’s focus on monuments and ancient ruins, they also provide evidence of modern civilization in unfamiliar, arid landscapes. Proof is the first exhibition to focus on The Met’s collection of these earlier prints, including previously unseen and unpublished views from a portfolio and a small, handbound album. Offering an exceptional opportunity to compare these photographs to those published in 1852, the exhibition reveals that Du Camp’s ultimate project did not present objective proof of its Mediterranean subject, but rather a complicated view shaped by personal ambition, emergent technology, and the taste and temperament of its nineteenth-century European audience. Image: Maxime Du Camp (French, 1822–1894). Vue de la seconde Pyramide, prise au Sud-Est [View of the Second Pyramid, taken from the Southeast], December 10, 1849. Salted paper print from paper negative, 5 7/8 × 8 9/16 in. (15 × 21.7 cm). Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 (2005.100.376.19)
Picturing the Intangible
Allen Memorial Art Museum | Oberlin, OH
From August 29, 2023 to January 21, 2024
A large, grayscale photograph by Dawoud Bey captures an opening in the woods—a glimpse of Lake Erie. Details in the photograph come into focus only with prolonged looking, as if adjusting one’s eyes to the darkness of night. In his series called Night Coming Tenderly, Black, from which the photograph comes, Bey said, “I didn’t just want to document what remained of that history, but I wanted to find a way through the imagination to make it resonate through the photograph.” In light of Bey’s aim to use imagination to transcend the documentary role of photography, in this small, experimental installation, the curators dispense with art-historical interpretation to allow visitors to see this photograph through the reflections and alternative connections offered by community members with a personal connection to the work’s subject. They include Langston Hughes’s poem from which the work takes its title, a 19th-century testimonial by a self-emancipated man, the story of a traveler on the Underground Railroad told by his great-granddaughter, and the voices of the Oberlin Gospel Choir. These voices offer an experience of the work that is more multisensory, deeply personal, and ultimately more historical than any art historical analysis. Image: Night Coming Tenderly, Black (Untitled #24), (At Lake Erie), 2017 © Dawoud Bey
Blackfork Bestiary: Robert Langham
Pictura Gallery | Bloomington, IN
From December 01, 2023 to January 27, 2024
The Blackfork Bestiary is a photographic collection of the animals and insects from the Blackfork Creek ecosystem. Photographer and naturalist, Robert Langham, roamed his backyard in Tyler, Texas where he made the acquaintance of the creatures who briefly became his portrait subjects and were returned to the wild. Robert will tell you that this body of work generated itself. He was trying to shoot something else entirely in Smith County, Texas, but the animals kept showing up to be reckoned with, sometimes right up to his doorstep. They were briefly, gently borrowed for a photograph, then quickly returned to the places they had each been found. That Langham also gathered them into a bestiary is my favorite part of the project. The very word invokes my imagination. Here he talks about his inspiration from the archaic form. ​“Ancient bestiaries were the first scientific books. They cataloged living things from bees to dogs to fish.…and gave written descriptions of their defining traits: industrious, faithful, aquatic. They also cataloged animals of the imagination: the Phoenix, Unicorn, the Sea Serpent and described their magical powers. Further they wildly projected personal traits: The Lion was regal, the Fox cunning, the Owl, wise. I began to feel that our modern science, discarding those projections might have discarded something else as well.” Langham urges us to try on that way of looking – with special fascination – with common neighborhood animals. We may have well-formed ideas of them, but we may not know them at all. In his photographs, we’re free to stare them down, face to face with a raw presence. The mystery of the individual animals themselves stays front and center. Langham’s photographs do not reduce their wildness. He does not dress them in gauze, or re-insert them into constructed environmental scenes. The humble studio set-ups are fairly simple. The human handlers are not hidden away, leaving the strangeness of the encounter between the two species inside the frame. Nature arrives alive in the tame clarity of the studio, a delicate and momentary collision. – Lisa Woodward
RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped
Contemporary Jewish Museum | San Francisco, CA
From July 31, 2023 to January 28, 2024
Travel through some of the most explosive moments in music history through the lens of Bay Area–based photographer Jay Blakesberg. RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped presents photographs of legendary musicians that reveal the evolution of San Francisco’s unique music culture and its wide-reaching influence. The exhibition brings together more than 200 photographs and related ephemera from the years 1978–2008, when Blakesberg shot exclusively on film. Growing up as a Jewish kid in New Jersey, Blakesberg chased his passion for music and photography to San Francisco, where he chronicled era-defining musicians and moments across rock, grunge, blues, psychedelic, folk, and every genre in between. Featuring images of the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Neil Young, Soundgarden, and many more alongside original tickets stubs, press passes, and other ephemera, this exhibition invites visitors to experience an electrifying visual history of the sounds and stories that have shaped the Bay Area and beyond. Image: Jay Blakesberg, Rolling Stones, Oakland Coliseum, Oakland, CA, November 14, 1997. © Jay Blakesberg
Beyond Here: The Judy and Sidney Zuber Collection of Latin American Photography
Cantor Arts Center | Stanford, CA
From September 11, 2023 to January 28, 2024
Beyond Here: The Judy and Sidney Zuber Collection of Latin American Photography features 34 works by Latin American photographers who foreground the figure’s natural capacity for storytelling and craft compelling narratives about the profound changes of the 20th century. This single-gallery exhibition includes work by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño, Javier Silva Meinel, and Marta María Pérez Bravo, among others from 10 countries. These artists work across a range of photographic traditions, from studio photography and social documentation to formal modernism and more contemporary experimentations with process and narrative structure. Casting their sitters as agents of history, these photographers reflect each country’s unique history as well as themes that resonate across national boundaries: political revolution and civil unrest, the growth and decline of cities, Indigenous and rural traditions, and the ways these threads are woven together to shape ideas of modern national and personal identity. Drawn from the highly nuanced Spanish phrase “más allá,” the exhibition’s title gestures to the multiplicity of futures referenced in the photographs. The Judy and Sidney Zuber Collection of Latin American Photography is a promised gift to the Cantor Arts Center and will form the foundation of a growing collection of Latin American photography. This exhibition celebrates this transformative promised gift and the establishment of the Zuber Family Art Fund for collecting Latin American photographs at the Cantor. Image: Pablo Ortíz Monasterio (b. Mexico, 1952). Volando bajo (Flying Low), 1986. Gelatin silver print. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Promised gift from the Judy and Sidney Zuber Collection of Latin American Photography. Photo: Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Courtesy: Almanaque. © Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
A/political Rocks
Henry Art Gallery at Washington University | Seattle, WA
From July 22, 2023 to January 29, 2024
Drawn from the Henry collection, A/political Rocks explores the role landscape photography has played in shaping experience of the American West, paying particular attention to among the most superficially banal and apolitical of landscape subgenres: images of rocks. Spanning a roughly hundred-year period, the works in the exhibition range from documentary images produced as part of nineteenth-century geological surveys to modernist pictures made with artistic intent in the twentieth century. Taking several canonical American photographers as its focus, the exhibition includes work by Ansel Adams, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and Edward Weston, among others. Surveying a range of photographic approaches to landscape, the exhibition will also consider the formation of modernist camera aesthetics, evolving American attitudes towards nature, questions of race and citizenship, and photography’s complex entanglements with industrial capitalism and settler colonialism in the United States. Image: Canyon de Chelle, 1873 © Timothy O’Sullivan
Trust Me
Whitney Museum of American Art | New York, NY
From August 19, 2023 to February 01, 2024
Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Trust Me brings together photographic works that invite shared emotional experience. The artists in the exhibition embrace intuition and indeterminacy as part of their creative process and recognize that vulnerability, usually associated with powerlessness and exposure, can play a role in forging connection. Depicting familial and ancestral bonds, friendship, romantic partnership, and other networks of influence and exchange, these photographs make such connection visible—in the image and often beyond it—by evoking the overlapping lives and loves of the works’ creators, viewers, and caretakers. The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Alvin Baltrop, Jenny Calivas, Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Barbara Hammer, Muriel Hasbun, Dakota Mace, Mary Manning, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Many of their images do not include people but instead offer reflections on everyday surroundings and experiences, with objects often representing intimate aspects of the artists’ lives. Precisely staged or in response to chance encounters, these images encourage careful attention. As artist and writer Lydia Okrent has said about Manning’s photographs, such work “emboldens available tenderness,” kindling through the image something already present in the viewer. In addition to taking up themes of vulnerability, the artists in the exhibition have chosen a precarious medium. Photographs emerge through combinations of light, chemicals, time, and chance, and yet these same elements can also push an image past legibility. Many of the artists draw parallels between material and emotional contingency, and welcome accidents, imperfections, and the unexpected. Gambling on the power of images to carry deep feeling, the works in Trust Me ultimately offer space for expanded capacity, reciprocity, and learning. Image: Elysian, 2018 © D'Angelo Lovell Williams
Michael Kenna: Celebrating Fifty Years
Robert Mann Gallery | New York, NY
From December 14, 2023 to February 02, 2024
In honor of reaching this significant milestone, Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present, Michael Kenna: Celebrating Fifty Years, with the presentation of over twenty photographs made around the globe and selected for this exhibition by the artist himself. This exhibition coincides with the release of his new monograph Photographs and Stories. Michael Kenna: Celebrating Fifty Years exhibits a beautiful reflection of Kenna’s personal vision of the world spanning half of a century. The exhibition journeys from panoramic views of Northamptonshire, England, to the desert dunes of Merzouga, Morocco, to the tranquil coasts of Hokkaido, Japan, to Venice, Italy to name a few. Kenna’s keen eye radiates through the long exposures of morning clouds and the motif of birds gliding through the sky. Kenna beautifully captures the geometrics of ancient Stonehenge as well as seaweed farms and a lone-fishnet structure in Biwa Lake. The selection navigates places both foreign and familiar through black and white scenes full of spacious calm and the guiding air of the artist himself. All of the prints are beautiful renderings, traditional silver prints made in the darkroom and toned using Sepia by the artist. Kenna’s renowned pairing of natural landscapes and human-made structures, captured as the sun peaks over the horizon or in twilight, ask viewers to consider what lies just beyond the visible. Kenna’s own curation properly reflects his intricate skill and sense of adventure with views of the city-that-never-sleeps across from medieval Pacentro to the icy sheets of St. Petersburg, Russia juxtaposing the misty, rolling mountains of Yunnan, at the most eastern tip of the Himalayas. Kenna's photographs have been featured in over four hundred and fifty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, and are in over one hundred permanent institutional collections. His contemplative and transportive photographs have clearly resonated with those who have a love of natures’ inherent beauty and the sublime. Michael Kenna: Celebrating Fifty Years will debut at the gallery on December 14, 2023 with a reception and book signing with the artist from 6-8pm. The monograph Photographs and Stories contains one image for each year of Kenna's photography journey, beginning in 1973 (when he enrolled in the Banbury School of Art). Following the “Photographs” section of the book is “Stories,” in which the artist discloses how the photography relates to his own life’s situation at the time. The exhibition will be on view, by appointment, through February 2, 2024.
Christina Fernandez: Subdivisions
Gallery Luisotti | Los Angeles, CA
From December 09, 2023 to February 03, 2024
Gallery Luisotti is pleased to present “Christina Fernandez: Subdivision”, the premier exhibition in the Gallery’s new home in downtown Los Angeles at 818 S. Broadway. In this new body of work, Los Angeles-based photographer Christina Fernandez examines life in the suburbs, focused on the life of her teenage son. Subdivision finds Fernandez approaching familiar themes of community and itinerancy in the most quotidian of environments: the stucco, the sidewalks, and the streetlights of Los Angeles. The photographs in Subdivision follow Diego, Fernandez’s son, across the surface of the city. As we see him both isolated and together with friends, what emerges are not just the distinct spaces teenagers occupy, but also the particular atmosphere in which he thrives. “Crepuscular” comes to mind: a word signifying the unique light of the sky just after the sun sets. The term is sometimes used by zoologists to describe the particular creatures who emerge at this time of day, and in suburbia we have a name for such beings: teenagers. Throughout her career, Christina Fernandez has had a remarkable ability to capture communal and familial places that often have quite challenging light sources. Lavanderia (2002-2003) pictures the facades of laundromats, artificially lit from within; the landscapes of abandonment in Sereno (2006-2010); or, View from Here (2016-18) capturing spaces from their abandoned interior looking out. What recurs throughout this work is not just Fernandez’s skill in capturing the Southland’s light, but that such light expresses a sense of familiarity and inhabitance. As with much of her previous work, Subdivision’s visual interlocutors present a compelling survey of modern depictions of American life – from Robert Adams’ Summer Nights (1974), perhaps the most emotive of New Topographics-era photography projects, to the SoCal landscape in the coming-of-age film Rebel without a Cause (1955). Against these precedents, Fernandez’s Subdivision charts an equally poignant picture of social connectedness, inevitable solitude, and self-discovery, against a backdrop of residences, infrastructure, and the accouterments of teen self-expression.
Manuel Carrillo: Mexican Modernist
New Mexico Museum of Art | Santa Fe, NM
From April 15, 2023 to February 04, 2024
Mexican photographer Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989) turned to the camera fairly late in life, joining the Club Fotográfico de México at the age of 49. He quickly found his voice by making images of everyday life throughout Mexico, celebrating local culture and the human spirit. His work is an extension of Mexicanidad, a movement begun in the 1920s to forge a Mexican national identity free of foreign influence. Stylistically, however, Carrillo was inspired by Mexican artists trained abroad and international artists who converged on Mexico during that fertile period. His interest in indigenous cultures and his use of bright sunlight to create compositions with dramatic shadows and bold geometric forms has roots in the photographic work of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, American modernist photographers active in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than idealizing, estheticizing, or moralizing, Carrillo portrays Mexico from the perspective of an affectionate observer, transforming ordinary moments into expressions of quiet eloquence. Image: Manuel Carrillo, Untitled (Vendor and shadows, Mexico City), 1960 © Manuel Carrillo
Michael Kenna: Trees
PDNB | Dallas, TX
From December 02, 2023 to February 10, 2024
Michael Kenna (b. 1953, Widnes, Lancashire, England) will have his fifth solo show at PDNB Gallery this fall season. His show coincides with the release of his book, TREES, published by Èditions Skira, Paris and another stunningly beautiful new book, Photographs and Stories, published by Nazraeli Press. About two years ago, PDNB Gallery Co-Director, Missy Finger, read Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Overstory. In this novel, there are individual stories with characters that find common connection with trees. One of the main characters is a woman who is a botanist that believes that trees talk to another. “The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community,” This storytelling was quite compelling, and the botanist character helped define the importance of trees. She speaks of forests as an ecosystem that cannot be separated, cleaned out, but must remain intact, the dead with the living. “There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer…”
Keith Carter: Ghostlight
PDNB | Dallas, TX
From December 02, 2023 to February 10, 2024
This exhibition, coinciding with the release of Keith Carter’s book, Ghostlight, features photographs that were taken in the mysterious swamp land and forest of the Big Thicket in Texas. Keith Carter (b. 1948, Madison, Wisconsin), is known for his regional images of Texas, especially around his home town of Beaumont. Although he has traveled the world to create poetic images of interesting people, animals and nature, he spent several years before and during the pandemic, walking through this extraterrestrial land that is near his home. The book is an extraordinary compilation of images and text that immerse the viewer in this hauntingly beautiful landscape. Keith will be signing copies of the University of Texas Press monograph, designed by Pentagram’s DJ Stout and Michelle Maudet, on Saturday, December 9th, from 3 – 6 PM.
Alaska from Above: The Art of Bradford Washburn
Anchorage Museum | Anchorage, AL
From April 07, 2023 to February 11, 2024
Bradford Washburn (1911–⁠2007) was an American mountaineer, cartographer, photographer and student of Alaska's mountains and glaciers. Washburn established the Boston Museum of Science and served as its director from 1939 to 1980. But he was best known for ascending multiple Alaska peaks over the course of two-and-a-half decades and for pioneering aerial photography while surveying Denali in the 1930s. This exhibition presents a selection of photographs from the Anchorage Museum collection. These black and white images were taken between 1930 and 1979 in the Coast Range, Alaska Range, the Chugach and St. Elias Mountains. Washburn's photographic work incorporated aerial documentation of the landscape, as well as abstracted views of the stark contrast between shadowed abyss and sunlit snow. The photographs on view in this exhibition demonstrate Washburn’s ongoing fascination with the beauty of Alaska’s peaks and glaciers.
 Jon Henry  Stranger Fruit
California Museum of Photography - UCR ARTS | Riverside, CA
From September 23, 2023 to February 11, 2024
Stranger Fruit is a prayer, a protest, a silent commemoration, a call to action. Artist Jon Henry was haunted by the 2006 shooting of 23-year-old Sean Bell, one among scores of Black lives lost to police violence. The photographer’s response became a country-spanning set of modern American Pietàs—Black mothers cradling their sons. The mothers feel the weight of their sons, we feel the weight of love, of violence, of history. Image: Jon Henry, Untitled #42, Central Los Angeles, CA. Image courtesy of the artist.
Personal Geographies: Trent Davis Bailey | Brian Adams
Denver Art Museum | Denver, CO
From July 30, 2023 to February 11, 2024
Personal Geographies: Trent Davis Bailey ǀ Brian Adams presents a selection of images by two artists who seek to understand themselves and the places they treasure though photography. The exhibition is divided into two galleries, one featuring 32 photographs by Trent Davis Bailey and the other 19 by Brian Adams. Colorado photographer Trent Davis Bailey reflects on his personal history and the relationship between images and memory. Personal Geographies presents work from his series The North Fork, which draws inspiration from childhood memories, small-scale family farms, and the landscape of western Colorado. Anchorage-based Iñupiaq photographer Brian Adams has travelled across Alaska and beyond to make pictures that celebrate the Arctic landscape and sensitively share the stories, cultures, and perspectives of Inuit people and communities. Personal Geographies will be on view from July 30, 2023, to Feb. 11, 2024, and is included with general admission. Image: Karen, Hotchkiss, 2014 © Trent Davis Bailey
Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art | Kansas City, MO
From September 11, 2023 to February 16, 2024
Evelyn Hofer (American, born Germany, 1922-2009) was a highly innovative photographer whose pioneering work spanned five decades. She produced her most notable photographs for a series of photobooks, published between 1959 and 1967, that focused on European and American cities, including Florence, London, New York, Washington, DC., and a volume on the country of Spain. Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City features more than 100 vintage prints from these projects, and is the first major museum exhibition of photographer’s work in the United States in over fifty years. Despite her prolific career, Hofer remained underrecognized in her lifetime. At a time when spontaneous black and white pictures were the hallmarks of street photography, Hofer favored the detailed precision of large-format cameras, and worked in both black and white and color. The pictures she produced for her photobook projects—portraits, architectural and landscape view—are subtle and rigorous. Working with deliberate slowness, Hofer sought to convey the essence of her subjects and the unique character and personality of these urban capitals during a period of social, structural, and economic transformation following World War II. Image: Phoenix Park on a Sunday, Dublin, 1966 © Evelyn Hofer
Lora Webb Nichols: Heap-O-Livin
Alice Austen House Museum | Staten Island, NY
From November 04, 2023 to February 17, 2024
Heap-O-Livin features a selection of images by Wyoming photographer and diarist Lora Webb Nichols (1883-1962). Nichols created and collected approximately 24,000 negatives and 65 years of diaries throughout her lifetime in the town of Encampment. In addition to the industrial and economic aspects of this sparsely populated ranching and copper mining town, Lora’s images and diaries documented the lives of the girls and women within private households. Despite the inherent isolation created by geography, the long brutal winters, and the patriarchal ideology that undervalued the role of women in Encampment in the late 19th and early 20th century, a robust female-led community emerged that provided a network of spiritual and emotional support. This was cultivated through the habitual visitations of immediate and extended family and friends into each other’s homes during their transition from children to wives and mothers. In Nichols’ sphere, these visitations often involved the act of picture-making. Lora photographed their duties and mothers and homemakers but also made photographs that reveal the pleasure they experienced in simply being in each other’s company.
All Aboard: The Alaska Railroad Centennial
Anchorage Museum | Anchorage, AL
From May 05, 2023 to February 18, 2024
Opening in the centennial year of the completion of the Alaska Railroad, this exhibition created in collaboration with Alaska Railroad historians and experts looks at the history, impact, and legacy of the railroad through archival images, objects, and ephemera. Examining three key eras of railroad history spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, the exhibition highlights crucial moments, technological innovations, and human stories connected to the railroad and its operations in Alaska. All Aboard includes public programs presented in collaboration with the Alaska Railroad, community clubs, and railroad enthusiasts.
Sheila Metzner From Life
J. Paul Getty Museum | Los Angeles, CA
From October 13, 2023 to February 18, 2024
This exhibition celebrates the artistry of the internationally acclaimed American photographer Sheila Metzner, who made her mark on the history of late 20th-century photography in the areas of fashion and still life. Metzner’s unique style blends aspects of Pictorialism and Modernism to forge an aesthetic that not only stands out in the history of photography, but became closely associated with the best of 1980s fashion, beauty, and decorative arts trends. Image: Brooklyn Bridge, from the series Hokusai, 2007, Sheila Metzner. Pigment print. Getty Museum, Gift of Jack Shear. © Sheila Metzner
Arthur Tress Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows
J. Paul Getty Museum | Los Angeles, CA
From October 31, 2023 to February 18, 2024
This is the first exhibition to chronicle the early career of Arthur Tress, one of the most innovative American photographers of the postwar era. During his first decade as an emergent professional in the New York photography world (1968–78), his artistic practice evolved from the social documentary tradition to a bold new approach drawing inspiration from the inner worlds of fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares. Image: Boy in Tin Cone, Bronx, New York, from the series The Dream Collector, 1972, Arthur Tress. Gelatin silver print. Getty Museum. © Arthur Tress Archive LLC
Spandita Malik: Jāḷī - Meshes of Resistance
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art | Kansas City, MO
From July 06, 2023 to February 24, 2024
International photographer and social practice artist Spandita Malik (Indian, born 1995) collaborates with women across North Indian states to create embroidered portraits that embody and empower their subjects. For Malik’s first solo museum exhibition, Spandita Malik: Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance, the artist expands upon her photographic series Nā́rī, a project that she began as a graduate student at Parsons School of Design in 2019. For Nā́rī, she traveled to small communities in India known for their distinct embroidery styles and places where women learn handicraft to gain financial independence. Malik met with women who are part of self-help groups for survivors of domestic and gender-based violence and requested permission to document them within their homes or personal spaces. Each woman was invited to embroider her own portrait and claim agency over her portrayal. In the years following, the women connected with each other and Malik over phone calls and group chats, where they were able to deepen their relationships and form a greater support system. The word jāḷī is recognized across many languages with roots in Sanskrit, referring to the openwork that appears in architecture, metalwork, and embroidery. Here jāḷī refers to an openwork stitch that produces a fine mesh structure or the appearance of a net. Within the context of Malik’s exhibition, jāḷī also transforms into an expansive metaphor that uplifts networks and communities, particularly those formed among women with shared experiences. Produced in dialogue with many collaborators, Malik’s portrait series showcases the unique preferences, desires, and fears of the individual women who comprise the collective, nurturing a symbiotic relationship between group and self-expression. Image: Rukmesh Kumari IV, 2023 © Spandita Malik
If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision: Honoring Aline Smithson
Brand Library and Art Center | Glendale, CA
From December 16, 2023 to February 24, 2024
Artists: Safi Alia Shabaik, Elizabeth Bailey, Dena Elisabeth Eber, Sarah Hadley, Diane Hemingway, Rohina Hoffman, Susan Lapides, Annette LeMay Burke, Annie Omens, Lori Ordover, Aurora Wilder Collective (Jennifer Pritchard in collaboration with Patrick Corrigan and DALL-E), Aline Smithson, Rosalie Rosenthal Our hard drives may fail. Our phones might break. We may forget an image that was once cemented in our minds. Our relationships with images and devices that hold our memories define how we understand our position in the world. If Memory Serves emerges from the moments those devices fail us, our recollections betray us and our pictures refuse to bring back the people they once captured. This exhibition emerges from the intersection of our haunting pasts, possible futures, and our connections to photographic images, technologies and the systems that ask to speak for our photographs. The projects included here invite the viewers to immerse in transitions and transformations, in discomfort, in the borderlines between vision and sense, knowing and unknowing. At the same time, these works refuse nostalgia in its depoliticized state. These projects are defined by the viewpoint and lived experiences of their creators: female-identified, immigrants, descendants of inherited traumas, caregivers, providers. Photography is key to efforts to claim visibility, capture narratives and elicit conversations about the lives of vulnerable bodies and communities. The works on view are opening points, a threshold, for a conversation that should never be silenced, a conversation that is concerned with the conditions of its production – the present and future of photography – as it is concerned with its political, social and personal content. The exhibition begins with and honors Aline Smithson, a mentor, photographer and educator, whose work with artists is redefining photographic practice. If Memory Serves celebrates her immense contribution to photography and further comments upon the reach of her stewardship and pedagogy. The participating artists have all been studying with and from her. Seen together, their works offer profound insight into our co-existence with photography, suggesting meeting points between personal experiences and broader societal issues and conflicts – from privacy to grief, from representation to immigration.
Dawoud Bey: Elegy
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts | Richmond, VA
From November 18, 2023 to February 25, 2024
Mesmerizing and evocative, these 50 photographs and two film installations by contemporary American artist Dawoud Bey contemplate landscapes in Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio as deeply profound repositories of memory and witnesses to American history. Internationally renowned for his Harlem Street scenes and expressive portraits, Bey has turned his camera lens toward geographic locations that have historical significance. In Dawoud Bey: Elegy, landscape photographs and film installations with immersive sound elements engage the imagination, facilitating an experiential shift from mere viewer to active participant. Individually and collectively, the works in the exhibition bridge factual and imagined realities, resulting in a moving and visceral art experience. Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Dawoud Bey: Elegy showcases three photographic series. Visitors will first encounter Stony the Road (2023), commissioned by VMFA, which takes viewers to the historic trail in Richmond, Virginia, where Africans arrived in bondage to an unknown land and were walked into enslavement. The photographs in In This Here Place (2021) contemplate the plantations of Louisiana and the toils and horrors of enslavement. Photographed in Ohio, Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) elucidates our understanding of the Underground Railroad and the perilous flight to self-emancipation. The first film installation, 350,000, evokes the 350,000+ men, women, and children sold from Richmond’s auction blocks at Manchester Docks between 1830 and 1860. The film’s soundtrack features Richmond-based professor of dance Dr. Elgie Sherrod. Visitors will also experience Evergreen, a three-channel film installation created in collaboration with ethnomusicologist Imani Uzuri, whose vocals add a haunting soundscape. Image: Untitled (Trail and Trees) from the series Stony the Road, 2022 © Dawoud Bey
W. Eugene Smith: A Life in Pictures
Center for Creative Photography | Tucson, AZ
From September 02, 2023 to March 02, 2024
In 1978, Life magazine photojournalist W. Eugene Smith died at age 59 in Tucson, Arizona where he had moved the year before. He left behind a vast and rich archive of correspondence, his own research material, negatives, proof prints, and audio recordings. The Center for Creative Photography is presenting 45 of Smith’s photographs as an opportunity to think about what conditions promote interdisciplinary engagement. Drawn from five series: World War II, Nurse Midwife, Jazz Loft, Hitachi Corporation, and Minamata, Smith’s work will be presented with archival material that helps expand consideration of his practice beyond an art historical lens, connecting his photographs to other fields and disciplines. Image: ​W. Eugene Smith, Fishing in Minamata Bay, ​ca. 1972, ​​W. Eugene Smith Archive/Gift of Aileen M. Smith © Aileen Mioko Smith
Gregory Halpern: 19 winters / 7 springs
Eastman Museum | Rochester, NY
From September 16, 2023 to March 03, 2024
Picture the idea of a place. Allow it to be shaded with the desires and memories of all who reside there. Consider how this picture would be molded by the past. 19 winters / 7 springs contends with the idea of Buffalo, New York, and the lives of its inhabitants—its human and animal life, its architecture and landscape—all rendered by Gregory Halpern in their dynamic complexity. This exhibition plots the cyclical nature of time and the passage of seasons, but Halpern’s photographs also register both the visual evidence of history and the particularity of life in the present. Although these different temporalities pulse through the work, what it means to dwell in a particular place is its central concern, and portraiture anchors the project: portraits of houses, young adults, animals, and objects that seem to face a world arranged and deranged by the camera. Halpern was born and raised in Buffalo and has lived in Rochester since 2009. The photographs in 19 winters / 7 springs were made throughout Western New York and beyond over the past two decades. Halpern’s practice emerges from careful, extended observation of the world and a sensitive engagement with the people he photographs. But the pictures and the relationships forged between them also approach the surreal, the dreamlike, the enigmatic. Through Halpern’s photography, the appearance of everyday reality becomes both volatile and marvelous. For Halpern, no hard-and-fast boundary separates photographic objectivity from a more elastic idea of representational truth. In addition to presenting pictures on the gallery’s walls in 19 winters / 7 springs, Halpern has created a group of photo-sculptures that speak to the limits of photographs to describe their subjects beyond their surfaces. His Eclipse Houses unite inner and outer space. The exteriors display the facades of residential architecture, while their exposed interiors are lined with photographs of total solar eclipses. The alignment of celestial bodies resonates with the kinds of encounters that compel Halpern’s photographs of people and places: something is inevitably obscured, but another vision becomes possible. Image: © Gregory Halpern
Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything
NOMA - New Orleans Museum of Art | New Orleans, LA
From October 06, 2023 to March 03, 2024
Debbie Fleming Caffery has long been recognized as one of the foremost photographers from the American South, but with major bodies of work from Mexico, France, and across the United States, her career has long transcended its Southern roots. In each of the places where she has worked, Caffery has spent significant periods of time living and learning with the people she photographs. Caffery’s work emphasizes the deep emotional relationships between people and place, raises questions about social and economic structures, and explores a wide variety of human relationships and rituals. In Caffery’s own words, this exhibition is “about that moment, in taking a photograph, when everything works…eyes, guts, heart, life experiences, [and] years of paying attention.” Through her characteristic combinations of rich shadows, dramatic lighting, and dizzying long exposures, Caffery’s photographs function as meditations on different aspects of human experience—faith, the dignity of labor, childhood, and the natural world, framed in ways that are both familiar and mysterious. Installed across three distinct spaces at NOMA, In Light of Everything begins in the museum’s Great Hall, with a selection of the photographer’s most recent work. Here, visitors encounter Caffery’s large-scale portraits of birds in rehabilitation facilities in Louisiana, New Mexico, and France. Imbued with a gothic sensibility, these photographs reveal the birds to have great personality and demonstrate Caffery’s ongoing significance as a contemporary artist. In the Templeman Galleries on the museum’s second floor, visitors experience bodies of work that Caffery began in the 1970s and continued through the 2000s. These include pictures of sugar cane workers in and around Caffery’s home parish that vary between intimate portraits and intense landscapes, photographs made in small-town Mexico where the cultures of the Church and the cantina overlap, community-making and home life in rural Mississippi, and her most focused series: portraits of Caffery’s friend and muse Polly Joseph in her home. Finally, in the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Gallery, Caffery’s photographs of churches and religious statuary in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita offer a reflection on hope and faith. Image: PaPa, 1987 © Debbie Fleming Caffery
Shaping Landscapes: 150 Years of Photography in Utah
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts | Salt Lake City, UT
From September 16, 2023 to March 03, 2024
The history of photography in the United States is deeply tied to the American West. From 19th-century survey expeditions to 21st-century environmental activism, western landscapes have been featured as some of the most prominent subjects in American photographic history. This exhibition traces 150 years of Utah landscape photography from the UMFA’s expansive collection. The artworks offer insight into how generations of photographers have used this technology to construct an image of Utah. The photographs confront humanity’s impact on this land since the 1870s–the railroads, highways, mines, and other forms of infrastructure that puncture the “natural” landscape and shape our perception of this place. Shaping Landscape offers a history of Utah landscape photography as it intersects with the legacies of industrialization and colonization in the American West.
Carlton Ward Jr: Path of the Panther
Florida Museum of Photographic Arts -FMOPA | Tampa, FL
From December 07, 2023 to March 07, 2024
Showcasing a collection of photographs by Carlton Ward Jr, this captivating exhibition celebrates Florida’s wild heart through the story of our state animal – the Florida panther. The panther was driven to extinction throughout its range in the eastern United States except for a small remnant population that persisted in Florida’s Everglades. Numbers had dwindled to fewer than 20 individuals by the 1980s, but heroic conservation efforts have helped panthers come back to nearly 200 today. The biggest obstacle for the panther’s continued recovery is access to enough of its historic territory throughout Florida and adjoining states. Carlton Ward Jr is a National Geographic Explorer and photographer who has spent almost two decades fighting for the Florida Wildlife Corridor – a storytelling campaign he founded in 2010 that is creating a lifeline for the survival of the Florida panther and other threatened wildlife. Rising north out of the Everglades, the tale of the Florida panther has grown from the unlikely survival of a rare cat to a story of new hope for all wild Florida. The photographs in the exhibit, which are featured in the new National Geographic film and book, Path of the Panther, provide an unprecedented portrait of the panther amidst Florida’s wildest landscapes. From the remote cypress swamps of the Fakahatchee Strand, to the headwaters of the Everglades, the photographs will transport viewers into a hidden Florida that deserves to be seen and protected.
Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder
Norton Museum of Art | West Palm Beach, FL
From December 02, 2023 to March 10, 2024
Photographs are, as writer Roland Barthes affirms, “certificates of presence”: verification that a moment, a person, or a place existed. From the adoration of a loved one or the wonder felt before nature, to the hardship of labor and the devastation of war, photographs are imprinted by human experience. Arranged thematically, the exhibition explores “presence” in four sections: Portraits, Admiration, and Delight; Expressions of Place; Specters of History; and Politics, Labor, and Justice. From Pictorialism and social documentary photography to Surrealism and street photography, artists such as Merry Alpern, Richard Avedon, Irving Bennett Ellis, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Danny Lyon, Sally Mann, Susan Meiselas, Inge Morath, Gordon Parks, Edward Steichen, Joyce Tenneson, James Van Der Zee, and Todd Webb come together to create unique and complex conversations across space and time. Together, the photographs encourage us to consider our development as individuals and members of our communities, ultimately finding meaning and connection across humanity. This exhibition features a remarkable selection of 20th century photography drawn from the holdings of artist and philanthropist Judy Glickman Lauder. Incredibly, the nearly 110 photographs by 56 artists represent only a fifth of Glickman Lauder's entire photography collection, which has generously been promised to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. Image: Suzie, Bahama Beach Club, Portland, Maine, 1996 © Melonie Bennett
Stranger Fruit: Work by Jon Henry
Photographic Center Northwest | Seattle, WA
From January 11, 2024 to March 10, 2024
Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of black men across the nation by police violence. Even with smart phones and dash cams recording the actions, more lives get cut short due to unnecessary and excessive violence. Who is next? Me? My brother? My friends? How do we protect these men? Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits and protests is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child. The title of the project is a reference to the song “Strange Fruit.” Instead of black bodies hanging from the Poplar Tree, these fruits of our families, our communities, are being killed in the street. Jon Henry is a visual artist working with photography and text, from Queens NY (resides in Brooklyn). His work reflects on family, sociopolitical issues, grief, trauma and healing within the African American community. His work has been published both nationally and internationally and exhibited in numerous galleries including Aperture Foundation, Smack Mellon, and BRIC among others. Known foremost for the cultural activism in his work, his projects include studies of athletes from different sports and their representations. He was recently named one of The 30 New and Emerging Photographers for 2022, TIME Magazine NEXT100 for 2021, and included in the Inaugural 2021 Silver List. He recently was awarded the Arnold Newman Grant for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture in 2020, an En Foco Fellow, one of LensCulture’s Emerging Artists, and has also won the Film Photo Prize for Continuing Film Project sponsored by Kodak. Image: ​Untitled 33, Jersey City, NJ_2018 © Jon Henry
Sea Change: Photographs from the Exhibition
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - SFMOMA | San Francisco, CA
From September 02, 2023 to March 17, 2024
This permanent collection exhibition explores how photography registers change, bearing witness to cultural, political, and environmental shifts across time. Presented as a suite of eight transhistorical thematic and monographic galleries, Sea Change approaches the topic of change from various angles. Placing historical and contemporary work in conversation, the exhibition offers a survey of the history of photography that spotlights recent museum acquisitions and work by underrecognized artists. Sea Change features works by more than fifty artists, including Takashi Arai, Jonathan Calm, Tina Barney, Guanyu Xu, and Zoe Strauss, as well as solo presentations of work by Ilse Bing and beloved Bay Area photographer Reagan Louie. Cumulatively, the show not only foregrounds how artists have used photography to examine moments of transformation, but also reflects the ongoing evolution of the museum’s collection. Image: Reagan Louie, Beijing, 1987; collection SFMOMA, gift of Bill Press and Elana Auerbach; © Reagan Louie; photo: Don Ross
Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - SFMOMA | San Francisco, CA
From November 11, 2023 to March 23, 2024
Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear is the most comprehensive exhibition of the influential artist’s work to date, charting the development of his practice from the 1980s through the present, across every genre of photography imaginable. From early experiments with a photocopier to ecstatic nightlife images, intimate portraits, incisive documentation of social movements, and innovative cameraless abstractions, Tillmans’s broad subject matter reveals his steadfast commitment to engage unflinchingly with the world. Tillmans plays an integral role in designing and installing his exhibitions. This survey features both framed and unframed photographs arranged in constellations that extend from floor to ceiling, magazine pages taped to the wall, video work, and his Truth Study Center table installations. This approach embraces the concept of visual democracy, where, as Tillmans puts it, “If one thing matters, everything matters.” Image: Icestorm, 2001 © Wolfgang Tillmans
The Impact of Images:  Mamie Till’s Courage from Tragedy
California Museum of Photography - UCR ARTS | Riverside, CA
From November 04, 2023 to March 30, 2024
The lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till by white supremacists in 1955 was a shocking tragedy, made worse by the appalling miscarriage of justice in the trial that followed. Emmett’s mother, Mamie, courageously made the decision to forego the privacy of her devastating loss by insisting the world see what they had done to her son. She chose to have an open casket funeral and invited the Black press corps in order to provide visual evidence of this tragedy to the world. The collective awakening and the actions that followed contributed directly to the Civil Rights Movement. Driven by courage, the event inspired a generation to force change, and the images that record this tragedy sparked consciousness across society. The impact of these images shook the world and there was no turning back. This photography exhibition begins with family photos of Mamie and Emmett, but at the core are extraordinary images made by Black photojournalists. The powerful photographs by Ernest Withers, for example, capture acts of bravery and of prejudice at the trial. Photographs of the funeral are fundamental to the story and are included. The famed images Mamie Till wanted “to let the world see,” however, are readily found elsewhere should one wish to bear witness. The exhibition continues with images of many exhilarating moments of the Civil Rights movement that followed and concludes with a photograph taken last year by Deborah Watts, Emmett’s cousin, of President Biden signing the “Emmett Till Antilynching Act.” Although sixty-eight years have passed, the images, lessons, inspiration, and courage of this singular tragedy can and must continue to educate, provoke, and inform today’s generation. This is the “Impact of Images.” The materials that contributed to this exhibition come from The Withers Collection, the Medgar Evers family and the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, among other sources. Co-curator Chris Flannery gathered these historic photographs originally as support for the production of the 2022 film Till. Orion Pictures has generously made them available for this exhibition, which will feature screenings of the film and other public programs.
Dorothea Lange: Seeing People
National Gallery of Art | Washington, DC
From November 05, 2023 to March 31, 2024
During her long, prolific, and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People reframes Lange’s work through the lens of portraiture, highlighting her unique ability to discover and reveal the character and resilience of those she photographed. Featuring some 100 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism. Image: Grandfather and grandson of Japanese ancestry at a War Relocation Authority center, Manzanar, California, July 1942 © Dorothea Lange
Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm
Chrysler Museum of Art | Norfolk, VA
From December 05, 2023 to April 07, 2024
Captured by Paul McCartney using his own Pentax Camera, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm features more than 250 photographs taken between November 1963 and February 1964, illuminating the period in which The Beatles became international superstars. The photographs were rediscovered in McCartney’s personal archive in 2020. “Looking at these photos now, decades after they were taken, I find there’s a sort of innocence about them,” said Paul McCartney. “Everything was new to us at this point. But I like to think I wouldn’t take them any differently today. They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all, and know that they will always fire my imagination.” With these photographs, visitors can witness the dawn of the “British Invasion” that fundamentally transformed Rock and Roll music and American society. The exhibition also captures McCartney’s interest in the visual arts, with his photos reflecting the aesthetic and culture of the moment. McCartney describes this collection as “the eyes of the storm,” chronologically documenting the experiences of the band on their travels beginning in November 1963 at the height of Beatlemania and culminating with photographs taken in February 1964 during the final days of the band’s first triumphant trip to America. Most of these photographs have never been made into prints, existing as negatives and contact sheets for 60 years until now. “What struck me about these images, beyond their obvious historical value, was McCartney’s sensitivity to his subjects,” said Erik Neil, Macon and Joan Brock Director of the Chrysler Museum of Art. “The empathy that is at the center of his music is equally evident in his photographs.” Traveling from the National Portrait Gallery in London to Norfolk, the Chrysler Museum of Art will be the first venue in the United States to host this major exhibition, burnishing the Chrysler’s reputation as an institution committed to the presentation of the diverse histories of photography through exhibitions and the permanent collection. Exhibition curated by Paul McCartney with Sarah Brown on behalf of MPL Communications Limited and Rosie Broadley for the National Portrait Gallery, London, and presented by the Chrysler Museum of Art. This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Special Exhibitions Endowment. Image: Self - portraits in a mirror. Paris, January 1964 © 1964 Paul McCartney under exclusive license to MPL Archive LLP
Mixed Up - Connected: Joe Ramos Photographs
Monterey Museum of Art | Monterey, CA
From January 18, 2024 to April 21, 2024
Mixed Up – Connected presents the works of California photographer, Joe Ramos. The exhibition merges intimate portraits of family and friends with captivating landscapes, reflecting themes of identity, belonging, and the intricate interplay between humanity and nature. The portraits capture a lifetime of cherished faces, while the landscapes reveal the artist's profound connection to the Salinas Valley. As a person of mixed Filipino and Mexican heritage, Ramos navigates the complexities of identity, echoing the experiences of many. These photographs, from birth to the end of life, remind us that we are all connected, regardless of our backgrounds. Joe Ramos, a San Francisco-based photographer hailing from Salinas Valley, has dedicated over four decades to the art of photography. Trained at the San Francisco Art Institute under Richard Conrat, a close associate of Dorothea Lange, Ramos specializes in documentary photography, capturing profound imagery from the Salinas Valley and San Francisco's Mission District. Beyond documentary, his botanical images reflect a deep appreciation for nature, emphasizing the sculptural essence and vibrant hues of plants, often bordering on abstract representation. Ramos's forte lies in portrait photography, evident in the depth and strength of his images—a testament to the mutual trust between the photographer and the subject. Since 2006, he has significantly contributed to San Francisco's Project Homeless Connect, capturing over 1,000 portraits, which culminated in a notable exhibition at the San Francisco Main Branch Library in 2012. Drawing inspiration from legends like Robert Frank, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier Bresson, Ramos's work transcends mere imagery, encapsulating the essence of both everyday and profound moments. Image: ​Monique as a Child, 1980/2023 © Joe Ramos
Dorothea Lange: 1935 – 1942
Monterey Museum of Art | Monterey, CA
From January 11, 2024 to April 21, 2024
As one of America's most notable documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange offers a compelling glimpse into a pivotal period in American history. Marked by the Great Depression (1929-1939) and the tumultuous years leading up to World War II (1939-1945), this exhibition displays Lange's seamless ability to capture the essence of human experience in times of profound hardship. The photographs in this exhibition – selected from the Oakland Museum of California's Dorothea Lange Archive and the United States Library of Congress – showcase Lange's unwavering commitment to documenting history. Focused on the impacts of life in California, these photographs reveal Dust Bowl migrants, braceros (Mexican laborers brought to the U.S. as seasonal agricultural workers), and life within the migrant labor camps. Image: Filipinos cutting lettuce. Salinas, California, 1935
Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts | Richmond, VA
From October 21, 2023 to April 28, 2024
Celebrate this groundbreaking, internationally renowned photographer and painter whose remarkable Richmond-based career spans over six decades. Presenting 63 photographs and 9 paintings by the Richmond native, born in 1924, this is the first major exhibition to explore the trajectory of her impressive 60-year career. From playful and irreverent scenes of everyday life to ethereal evocations of the past, Willie Anne Wright’s experimental paintings and photographs examine pop-culture, feminine identity, the pull of history and the shifting cultural landscape of the South. With a focus on photography’s role in shaping collective understandings of history, place, and gender, the exhibition draws from VMFA’s recent acquisition of Wright’s work, including more than 230 photographs and 10 paintings, as well as a comprehensive artist archive. Image: Anne S at Jack B’s Pool, 1984 © Willie Anne Wright
Dynamic Range: Photographs by Bill Tennessen
Haggerty Museum of Art | Milwaukee, WI
From January 19, 2024 to May 12, 2024
Bill Tennessen was born in 1934 and grew up on 39th Street in North Milwaukee. He is a 1956 graduate of Marquette University’s School of Business Administration. Tennessen is a self-taught photographer who began contributing photos to the Milwaukee Community Journal, Wisconsin’s largest African American newspaper, in 1981. He has documented the Ernest Lacy demonstrations, Juneteenth Day celebrations, activities of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee and the YWCA of Greater Milwaukee, and the Ko-Thi Dance Company. He captured many of Milwaukee’s Central City storefront churches and the appearance in town of numerous important cultural and political personalities of our time. He has photographed the Milwaukee Bucks and Marquette University basketball and many other sports and community events. Dynamic Range was curated by Lynne Shumow (Haggerty Museum Curator for Academic Engagement) in collaboration with Dr. Robert Smith (Marquette University Harry G. John Professor of History and Director of CURTO) and Mia Phifer (Education & Research Coordinator at America's Black Holocaust Museum). Additional assistance was provided by Kate Rose (Haggerty Museum Career Diversity Fellow), Caroline Bielski (Haggerty Museum intern) and UWM students/America’s Black Holocaust Museum interns; Sebastien Brown, Sophia Furman, Logan Glembin and Niktalia Jules. Support for this exhibition is generously provided by the Marquette University Women’s Council Endowment Fund. Image: Juneteenth Day Celebration, 1985 © Bill Tennessen
Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour
Tang | Saratoga Springs, NY
From February 03, 2024 to May 19, 2024
London-based artist Isaac Julien CBE RA is a multimedia filmmaker and photographer known for bringing history to life with a nuanced and thought-provoking visual language that critically addresses the politics of race and gender. His film installation Lessons of the Hour features actor Ray Fearon in the role of Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century abolitionist, writer, and freed slave. Open-ended narrative vignettes set in Washington, DC, London, and Edinburgh portray Douglass with various influential women of his time—including Susan B. Anthony and Ottilie Assing—dramatizing ideas of racial and gender equality. Julien’s work reiterates Douglass’s belief in the importance and power of photography and picture-making in advocating for social justice. Julien conjures Douglass’s role in the abolitionist movement, powerfully emphasizing its relevance to contemporary social justice struggles. Lessons of the Hour features ten screens of varying dimensions hung salon-style—referencing a popular nineteenth-century method of arranging a group of images. The vibrant colors of the film have a modern aesthetic that, in conjunction with the period set, costumes, and salon-style screens, unites past and present. Isaac Julien CBE RA, born in London in 1960, makes work that focuses on themes of remembrance and social justice in contemporary and historical cultural narratives. His previous films include the 1989 documentary-drama Looking For Langston and his 1991 feature-film debut, Young Soul Rebels, which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique prize. His films and photography have been shown worldwide in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums, including Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town; and the 57th Venice Biennale at the inaugural Diaspora Pavilion, Venice. Julien has received numerous awards for his work, including the Charles Wollaston Award for his work in the 2017 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, an annual show at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he was named a Royal Academician. In addition to creating film, photography, and installation art, Julien has taught at the University of the Arts London and Staatliche Hoscschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. He is currently a professor of digital arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Image: The North Star (Lessons of the Hour), 2019 © Isaac Julien
Death Of A Valley  Photography By Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones
Booth Western Art Museum | Cartersville, GA
From November 11, 2023 to June 09, 2024
Featuring photographs by two of the 20th century’s most important photographers, Death of a Valley is a nearly 70-year-old story full of contemporary issues such as water policy, private property rights, land conservation and local governance vs. state and federal jurisdiction. Dorothea Lange is famous for her social realist images, including the iconic Migrant Mother which many consider THE image of the Dustbowl and Great Depression era of the 1930s. In 1956 she convinced Life magazine to commission a photo essay documenting the last year of the Berryessa Valley, including the town of Monticello, roughly 80 miles northeast of San Francisco. The entire area was due to be submerged with the opening of the Monticello Dam and the creation of Lake Berryessa to provide water for irrigation and recreational purposes. Lange then invited Ansel Adams protege Pirkle Jones to collaborate on the project. “The Berryessa Project was one of the most meaningful photographic experiences of my professional life. When Dorothea Lange, a friend, and colleague, invited me to collaborate on this project with her in 1956, I looked forward to the experience.” –Photographer Pirkle Jones. The essay proved unsettling for Life, and they declined to publish it. In 1960, the photographic journal of the Aperture Foundation published thirty of the photos as an essay entitled “Death of a Valley.” These photographs were then exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and later at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then, the project has been largely forgotten; until now. The Booth Museum exhibition, organized with Lumière of Atlanta and the Special Collections and Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Robert Yellowlees Special Collection, will include over 80 images, most having never been exhibited before.
Truth Told Slant: Contemporary Photography
High Museum of Art | Atlanta, GA
From March 22, 2024 to August 11, 2024
This exhibition will feature the work of Rose Marie Cromwell, Jill Frank, Tommy Kha, Zora J Murff, and Kristine Potter, five photographers who take unique approaches to documentary photography that challenge the principles of observing the contemporary world. The more than seventy-five works in the exhibition, including several from the High’s collection, exemplify a recent shift in how photographers have taken up the challenge of making meaningful images from the world around them in a lyrical way, rather than utilizing the traditional approach of a dispassionate observer. These artists consider issues that documentary photographers have grappled with for decades and that remain pertinent to contemporary American life: race and inequality; identity and sexual orientation; immigration and globalization; youth and coming of age; climate change and environmental justice; and the uncanny pervasiveness of violence. There are overlaps and intersections of these topics within each body of work as the artists address the pulse of the moment while self-consciously skirting the direct and detached methods of traditional documentary photography. Image: Jill Frank (American, born 1978), Talent Show, Noelle, 2019, pigmented inkjet print, courtesy of the artist. © Jill Frank..
An-My Lê  Between Two Rivers
The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA | New York, NY
From November 05, 2023 to November 16, 2024
For 30 years, the photographs of artist An-My Lê have engaged the complex fictions that inform how we justify, represent, and mythologize warfare and other forms of conflict. Lê does not take a straightforward photojournalistic approach to depicting combat. Rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora. “Being a landscape photographer,” she has said, “means creating a relationship between various categories—the individual within a larger construct such as the military, history, and culture.” An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières is the first exhibition to present Lê’s powerful photographs alongside her forays into film, video, textiles, and sculpture. Never-before-seen embroideries—some large scale, others the size of a laptop screen—and rarely shown photographs from her Delta and Gabinetto series explore the relationship between mass media, gender, labor, and violence. And an immersive installation created especially for the exhibition attests to the artist’s long-standing consideration of the cinematic dimensions of photography and war. Born in Vietnam in 1960, Lê came to the United States in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, as a political refugee. The two rivers in the exhibition’s title refer to the Mekong and Mississippi river deltas, to Vietnam and the United States. The phrase also gestures toward other subjects that Lê has inflected with her own experiences of war and displacement, from the Seine, to the Hudson River, to the Mexican-American border along the Rio Grande. It is a metaphor that invites viewers to reflect on the circularity of time and history, the layering of disparate geographies, and the intimacies that paradoxically grow out of conflict.
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature
Phoenix Art Museum | Phoenix, AZ
From December 12, 2023 to November 17, 2024
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature showcases photographic works by a groundbreaking yet underrecognized artist who challenged perceptions of beauty by examining the female body in dialogue with the natural world. Born and raised in California’s San Gabriel Valley, Laura Aguilar created photographic representations of historically excluded and marginalized groups of women from various communities across Los Angeles. She eventually turned the camera on herself to consider the multitude of factors that defined her own identity as a Chicana and a lesbian who lived in poverty and with depression and learning disabilities. Later in her career, Aguilar began to capture intimate portraits of nude, large-bodied women in natural settings. She created various series within this framework to highlight the inherent connections between nature and the female form. Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature brings together nearly 60 photographic works from the most-recognized of those series, including Nature Self-Portrait (1996) Stillness (1999) Motion (1999) Center (2000–2001) and Grounded (2006–2007). Featured works either directly explore the relationship between physical features of the body and the landscape or adopt an abstract approach. Exhibited in conversation, they encourage reflection on the ways female bodies are perceived within the natural world in comparison to how they are viewed in social and cultural spaces. All of the images in Nudes in Nature were made in the Southwestern region of the United States. With this particular backdrop, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to consider Aguilar’s trailblazing work within the context of our desert region. Image: Motion #59, 1999 © Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016
Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva
Center for Creative Photography | Tucson, AZ
From September 14, 2024 to January 25, 2025
Born in 1947 in Douglas, Arizona, and based in Tucson, Louis Carlos Bernal was a pioneering Chicano photographer, among the very first to envision his work in the medium not as documentation, but as an art form. He began his career in the early 1970s in the wake of the Chicano civil rights movement, articulating a quietly political approach to photography with the aim of heralding the strength, spiritual and cultural values, and profound family ties that marked the lives of Mexican Americans who were marginalized and little seen. Initially focusing on the people of modest means he encountered in the barrios of Tucson, the city where he lived and taught, Bernal eventually traveled to small towns throughout the Southwest, where he portrayed individuals and families in outdoor settings or in their homes surrounded by belongings, tabletops filled with religious statuary and curios, and at times, rooms absent of people that nevertheless express the tenor of the lives lived within them. In a relatively short career that spanned the 1970s and 1980s, Bernal demonstrated his profound gift for magnifying the lives of his subjects and for capturing the essence of their character in a single image. In addition to the photographs made in Southwestern barrio communities, the exhibition will also include examples of Bernal’s early experimental work, photographs he made during his frequent trips to Mexico, and a selection of never-seen images he produced in Cuba. It is curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, a specialist in the history of Latinx photography, and will be accompanied by a catalog to be co-published by the Center for Creative Photography and Aperture. Image: ​​Louis Carlos Bernal, El Gato, Canutillo, New Mexico, ​1979, Gift of Morrie Camhi, ​© Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Bernal
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