Trust Me
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.
Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño
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.
Juana Valdés: The Deepest Blue
For The Deepest Blue, Juana Valdés immersed the ocean floor in 36 ceramic panels in cobalt, turquoise, aqua, and teal glazes. To depict the Abyssal Plain and Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the artist sourced data collected by subsea camera systems, multibeam echo sounders, and autonomous platforms engineered by General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Geographic, 3DeLorme, and NAVTEQ. The topographical relief of the seafloor, stretching from the Ivory Coast to the Caribbean, poetically depicts the complex terrain of multiple cultures and nations that constitute her Afro-Cuban American identity. The Deepest Blue stands as a poignant memorial for those who perished on transatlantic journeys. Valdés’s recontextualization of the past both sheds light on the unknown terrain and history of the ocean floor while emphasizing the unifying concept of “un solo mar” connecting us all.
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis (pronounced CARE-iss) Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with her own and enriches our understanding of the couple from her contemporary Queer and feminist perspective.
W. Eugene Smith: A Life in Pictures
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.
Wonders and Witness: Contemporary Photography from Korea
Wonders and Witness: Contemporary Photography from Korea presents more than 80 works of 12 Korean photographers, including including Bang Byoungsang, Chung Chuha, Gwon Doyeon, Kim Mi-Hyun, Kim Oksun, Kim Seunggu, Kim Taedong, Nikki S. Lee, Lee Sunmin, Oh Heinkuhn, Area Park, and Yoon JeongMee.
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature is the first exhibition to bring together nearly 60 photographic works from five series of nude self-portraits by the groundbreaking photographer Laura Aguilar (1959–2018). Co-organized by the Center for Creative Photography, the exhibition considers how Aguilar used the photographic medium and her body to subvert Western beauty standards and upend the relationship between the female form and the landscape.
Lebohang Kganye: Shall You Return Everything, but the Burden
Who owns the documents and images in an archive? Who owns the objects in a museum and what should be done with them? Such questions make the ethnological museum in particular one of the most controversial spaces of our time. And this the very space the South African artist Lebohang Kganye addresses in her work with Shall You Return Everything, but the Burden.
COUNTER IMAGES - First Pages
What image do young photographers create of the world? In the new edition FIRST PAGES of the exhibition series Counter Images | Gegenbilder international photographers take a look at their surroundings in the form of photo books.
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Memoryscapes
Memoryscapes is a solo exhibition by the German artist Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, realised in collaboration with Lucy Rogers.
Paul Jaray: The Rationality of the Streamline
This exhibition was centered on the seminal but little-known visionary engineer Paul Jaray, who designed the first truly aerodynamic automobiles in the 1920s but was ignored (and later written out of history) by the German Nazi government because he was Jewish. The exhibition includes artworks based on aerodynamic automobiles, among these the "Cadillac Ranch" public sculpture by Ant Farm. Blaise Tobia’s series of photographs of Cadillac Ranch (made in 1974 just after completion of the work) was featured. An earlier version of the exhibition took place at the Arsenale Institute for Art and Politics in Venice, in 2022.
Elisabeth Smolarz: Mélloncene
The exhibition Mélloncene serves as a symbolic reminder of our disconnection from the natural world, and the underlying grief stemming from the ongoing daily loss of hundreds of species who coexist with us on this planet. In her most recent body of work consisting of photographs and videos, Seeing a Tiger Didn't Change Who I Am, Elisabeth Smolarz grapples with the current age of mass extinction. In an effort to address the dire situation faced by the most endangered species, she inserts instructions on how to prevent their extinction into the source codes of public domain images. The resulting photographs and videos appear fragmented, evoking the sense of artifacts unearthed by future archaeologists many centuries from now.
Cities in Flux
Criss-crossing the globe from Chicago to Tokyo, via Prague and Mumbai, with a stop-over in Toronto, Cities in Flux is a wide-ranging exploration of the city told through a selection of 100 photographs from the AGO Collection. Highlighting various economic, political and cultural realities underpinning the urban experience, the exhibition showcases photographs, post cards and albums – many on view for first time - made since 1850. Berenice Abbott, Bhupendra Karia, Paul Kodjo, Diane Liverpool, Danny Lyon and Gillian Wearing are among the more than 45 artists included in the exhibition. Curated by Marina Dumont-Gauthier, AGO Curatorial Fellow, Photography, Cities in Flux invites us to consider cities and the role of images in their growth and evolution.
Ellen Carey: Struck by Light
Struck by Light represents the largest survey of Ellen Carey’s experimental photo-objects and lens-based art opening at the New Britain Musuem of American Art (NBMAA) showcasing iconic works spanning decades of her career (1991-2022), all from NBMAA collection as well as the artist’s own. In Lacock, England, home of photography, The Fox Talbot Museum, Light Struck features a solo exhibition by Ellen Carey (May 2023-March 2024); it complements the New Britain Museum of American Art. Collectively, the works trace Carey’s enormous contributions to the field of photography through her ongoing and ever-innovative experiments in light and color, dings and shadows, dark/negative versus white/positive.
Light Struck: Ellen Carey
Ellen Carey’s Light Struck takes the viewer through two centuries of photographic play and discovery. Showcasing key pieces from her career, the exhibition also features a completely new artwork (2023) created in response to one of Talbot’s 19th-century photograms titled: Crush & Pull with Hands, Penlights & Spruce Needles. Many of the artworks in Light Struck are from the artist’s collection on exhibit for the first time in England.
J. P. Ball and Robert S. Duncanson: An African American Artistic Collaboration
This installation highlights the collaboration between two free, Black artists working in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the antebellum period—photographer James Presley (J. P.) Ball and landscape painter Robert Seldon Duncanson. It features three paintings from SAAM’s collection by Duncanson alongside nine works by Ball. Eight of the photographic works were recently acquired by the museum from the L. J. West Collection and the Dr. Robert L. Drapkin Collection and are on view in SAAM’s galleries for the first time.
Defiant Visions
Defiant Visions showcases women photographers’ resistance to the apartheid regime through the lenses of their cameras. During decades of oppression, these women took photographs to expose not only racist but also gender-discriminatory social, economic and political structures. This exhibition explores the work of practitioners employing black and white imagery to focus on the women surrounding them.
Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929–1941.
In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II.
Identity Formations
Identity Formations features three artists who explore the fertile intersections of Latino/a/x identity through the fluid boundaries of history, culture, and geography. In si je meurs/If I die, Muriel Hasbun employs photography to capture the enduring legacy of her mother, investigating issues of identity, memory, and inter-subjectivity.
Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field
“Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field” is a series of photo essays created by Native photojournalists, Russel Albert Daniels, Tailyr Irvine, and Donovan Quintero, in collaboration with the National Museum of the American Indian.