Funny Business: Photography and Humor
Curated by Emilia Mickevicius
Phoenix Art Museum
June 14, 2025 - January 4, 2026
What do photographs and jokes have in common? Funny Business is about the mechanics and stakes of photographic humor: how it works, and why artists have turned to it as a strategy over time. Drawn primarily from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography, the exhibition explores how artists have used visual humor not only to provoke laughter and delight, but also as a means of resistance, coping mechanism, and way to interrogate norms and subvert hierarchies. It features wide-ranging examples of photographic humor that invoke a variety of comedic modes from slapstick and irony to satire, parody, self-deprecation, and subversion. Ultimately, the show proposes that humor and photography mutually illuminate the conditional nature of their meanings, which are dependent upon context and delivery.
