American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams

Please join us as we celebrate the winning photographs from the 2024 Members' Juried Exhibition! Our juror selected 45 images for the gallery exhibition, from over 2,600 entries submitted by photographers throughout the United States and abroad. 45 additional juror selections will be on view on our website starting April 20. A catalog of the gallery exhibition and online images will be available for purchase. Congratulations to all the artists! Juror: Catherine Couturier is the owner and director of Catherine Couturier Gallery. Upon its inception, the gallery quickly evolved into the premier photography gallery in Houston and sits at the center of Gallery Row. Couturier has worked in the fine art photography world since 1999 and is involved in many different aspects.She reviews portfolios for organizations and festivals such as Fotofest, Photo Nola, Texas Photographic Society, and more, works with private organizations to review fine art photography including classes both public and private, builds and curates collections both private and corporate, worked as an art consultant on a nationwide healthcare project, is a juror for Critical Mass, serves on the advisory council of Houston Center for Photography, and give lectures to artists and collectors alike on a myriad of subjects. She is incredibly proud to be on the board of Aipad (Association of Photography Art Dealers), the most prestigious institute of its kind in the world. Catherine Couturier Gallery specializes in classic 20th century photography and contemporary work of the highest quality and also sells a wide range of rare and vintage books and publications by many of today's best-known contemporary artists. The Catherine Couturier Gallery is committed to excellence with a dedication to the medium in all its forms, with the goal to showcase the best fine art photography available.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) present the solo artist exhibition Janna Ireland: True Story Index, representing a landmark two-institution collaboration, presentation, and catalogue. Curated by Charles Wylie, SBMA Curator of Photography and New Media, and Frederick Janka, MCASB, this exhibition is a mid-career survey and the largest presentation of Ireland’s photographs and installations to date. The exhibition features newly commissioned works and works from the artist’s collection, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s permanent collection, and private collections. Janna Ireland’s photographic practice is primarily concerned with the themes of family, home, and the expression of Black identity in American culture. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in the major 2020 monograph, Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View. These multiple aspects of Ireland’s work will be featured and interwoven across both venues. Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. A broad selection of Ireland’s work was included in the exhibition Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Charles White Elementary School Gallery. Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Image: Janna Ireland, Hancock Park, Number 1, from the series Regarding Paul R. Williams, 2016 © Janna Ireland

For “IMHO”, Robin Rice curates David Saxe’s 25 years of work to 20 definitive photographs. Hung in her new, untraditional gallery in Hudson, NY, David’s singular photographic vision merges with Rice’s evocative yet alluring multi-room space to envelop your senses, providing a moment to reconsider what a gallery can look and feel like: sensuous, provocative, and intimate. David Saxe - “Photography has always been the simple act of looking and being inspired to strip the unnecessary elements from the scene and frame the image down in a way to discover what is not apparent on the surface. My photographs are as much about me as what I am seeing: In Southern California, 2010 is a perfect example of this process of seeing. When I first noticed this scene, it was a simple mural of a whale on a wall. After looking at it for a while I realized that by eliminating the sky and foreground from the image the whale now had an undulating rhythm and movement. In another image Restaurant Hostess, Palm Beach, FL 2012, I would go to this restaurant every week and sit in the bar behind the reception area. One day, I turned around and saw the back of a woman. Through this process of deductive framing, the image became one of dark shadows rhythmically trickling down her back interwoven with the tattoo of the lizard. David Saxe was born in Montreal, Québec, Canada in 1943 and studied fine art at l’ecole des Beaux Arts in Montreal. He started taking pictures in 1970, after being influenced by the work of Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier Bresson. About 10 years ago, he decided to take a workshop with Constantine Manos, who liked his work and encouraged him to create a book – “Unfinished Business”, in which he kindly wrote the forward. David has exhibited in Toronto, Canada, and Brescia, Italy and has been featured in the Italian Magazine Zoom, and Black + White Magazine. He has also exhibited in a number of group shows in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and Montreal. Image: Circus School Student. Havana, Cuba. 2019 © David Saxe

Participating photographers: Ansel Adams, Wolf Ademeit, Carol Beckwith & Angela Fisher, Daniel Beltra, Niki Boon, Phil Borges, Nick Brandt, Ernest H. Brooks Ii, Kevin Bubriski, Tom Chambers, Imogen Cunningham, Virgil Dibiase, Tj Dixon & James Nelson, Melinda Hurst Frye, Maurizio Gjivovich, David Gonzalez, Misha Gordin, Robert & Shana Parke Harrison, Michael Kenna, Angela Bacon Kidwell, Marla Klein, Jon Kolkin, Lisa Kristine, Joey Lawrence, Ruth Lauer Manenti, Rania Matar, Beth Moon, Nasa / William Anders, Wayne Quilliam, Chris Rainier, Antonio Aragon Renuncio, Manjari Sharma, Maggie Taylor, Joyce Tenneson, Jerry Uelsmann, Dave Walsh, Alice Zilberberg and Zoe Zimmerman. Compassion--defined as the intention to respond with kindness towards those in need, including all living things, one’s self, and Planet Earth, motivated by a a true concern for their well-being--is good for you, for everyone you come in contact with, and the the entire planet. The exhibition Shades of Compassion will guide you to intentionally evoke and sustain positive constructive emotions such as compassion. Curated to engender a nuanced experience of compassion, the exhibition invites the viewer to dig deeper in their understanding of compassion, an opportunity for growth and exploration. The photographs, fifty outstanding fine art photographs by forty-one internationally recognized photographers, are sequenced and organized into three thematic groups: Environment, Humanity and Spirituality. Meditation stations preceding and following the photographs, as well as six intervening Pause Stations, invite deeper exploration into specific images. The exhibition concludes with an Action Station where visitors are invited to express their intentions concerning acts of compassion, and take away reminders and additional online resources for continued growth and exploration. Materials for the self guided Pause Stations and the facilitated curriculum were created under the guidance of leading experts, include senior MoMA and Minneapolis Institute of Art educators, Emory University’s Social, Emotional, and Ethical (SEE) Learning program for K-12, and Life University’s Compassionate Integrity Training (CIT) for adults.

Taliesin West presents American Icons: Wright & O’Keeffe, a new photography exhibition spotlighting Frank Lloyd Wright and Georgia O’Keeffe, luminaries in American art and architecture. Over the course of their storied careers, each changed the way we see the world and left their mark on American Modernism. You may have heard these names before, but you have never seen them quite like this: Twenty images shown in an intimate setting, against the backdrop of North Scottsdale’s McDowell Mountains. The portraits give us insight to their lives and the uniquely American style that Wright and O’Keeffe brought to art, design, and culture. American Icons is a chance to see another side of these legends – a more human, personal side – and explore what they have in common. Both were born in rural Wisconsin and had careers that took them to big cities – but ultimately, they made homes in the southwest – Wright in Arizona, O’Keeffe in New Mexico. Both were deeply inspired by nature and created abstractions of the natural world in their work. They each possessed keen powers of observation and became reflections of their own art and style. They had a mutual admiration for one another’s work, but few realize they met in 1942 and exchanged letters, books, and ideas for more than 20 years. Wright and O’Keeffe were photographed by Tony Vaccaro for Look Magazine – Wright in Wisconsin, 1957, and O’Keeffe in New Mexico, 1960. When paired, the images have genuine visual symmetry, even though they were taken years apart. Image: Georgia with Her Favorite Mountain, 1960. © Tony Vaccaro. Image courtesy of Tony Vaccaro Studio and Monroe Gallery of Photography.

The exhibition Taxonomies of Power: Photographic Encounters at the State Silk Museum, Tbilisi will debut at Mishkin Gallery this spring and be on view from March 22 through June 7, 2024. The exhibition has been co-curated by Alaina Claire Feldman (Director and Curator, Mishkin Gallery) and Mariam Shergelashvili (Exhibition Curator, State Silk Museum) and features a selection of black and white historic photographs from the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia, alongside the film Raised in the Dust (2022) by Georgian artist Andro Eradze. Scientific inquiry has long relied on artists to draw evidence or produce empirical knowledge. When an early 20th century collection of microscopic glass plate negatives from the State Silk Museum (formerly known as the Caucasian Sericulture Station) was digitized in 2022, the images exposed the many ways that the Soviet Empire employed artists to extend itself into the molecular. A photography studio was set up in the attic of the science center so that artists could document the smallest living specimen that enabled the silk industry to thrive. Forty-seven of these photographs, which detail the lifecycle of the Bombyx mori (commonly known as the silk moth), are presented and re-contextualized alongside Andro Eradze’s film Raised in the Dust. The film takes the forest and its nocturnal non-human inhabitants as its central subject matter, and is heavily influenced by the Georgian writer Vazha-Pshavela’s The Snake-Eater (1901), an epic poem whose protagonist has supernatural powers allowing him to understand the language of nature. Raised in the Dust, which premiered at the 2022 Biennale di Venezia and now makes its New York debut, offers an alternative scenario to modernity’s orderly and institutionalized taxonomies. Seen here alongside the photographs, distinctions between wild vs. domestic, native vs. foreign, art vs. science, and past vs. present begin to fall apart. Coinciding with the exhibition is a publication edited by the curators and designed by Geoff Kaplan/General Working Group that includes full-page image plates and writing on this collection of photographs and the history of the State Silk Museum. Taxonomies of Power: Photographic Encounters at the State Silk Museum, Tbilisi is made possible by Friends of the Mishkin Gallery and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College (CUNY). Travel research and initial introduction between the two museums was supported by CEC ArtsLink’s Art Prospect Network Residencies with funding from the Kettering Family Philanthropies and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Additional support provided by Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery. About the State Silk Museum The Caucasian Sericulture Station was a research institute and educational center of the Caucasus region established in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1887. Its founder, biologist Nikolay Shavrov, created the institution to control the silkworm population, and to promote and develop sericulture and apiculture throughout the region. The Caucasian Sericulture Station’s various collections of specimens and books played an important role in the educational activities of the institution and contributed to the public’s awareness of the field. The Caucasian Sericulture Station changed its mission and status several times, and since 2006 it has functioned as the “State Silk Museum

Joel Meyerowitz is renowned for his fundamental role in the establishment of color photography as a fine art. His work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world and has impacted and influenced countless artists. The Tate exhibition and the new book pair Meyerowitz’s color work with his black and white images created moments apart with two different cameras. Those pairings gave Meyerowitz the idea for his fifth exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Joel Meyerowitz: Conversations focuses on how specific color images in juxtaposition speak to each other and give added meaning for contemplation, both engaging the viewer in the act of looking and offering a challenging invitation to decipher the connections. Whether comparing and contrasting the studios of Cézanne and Morandi, the camel coats and the steam rising in New York City with the haze amidst the trees in Yosemite National Park, the summertime Americana of flags and flowers on Cape Cod, or the languid pulchritude of Florida, Meyerowitz surveys ten pairs of related photographs, pointing out relationships, sometimes subtle, that exist in subject, tone, and color. Image: Joel Meyerowitz, Smithtown, Long Island, 1968 © Joel Meyerowitz

Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present PXL CTY, a new exhibition presenting for the first time in a solo show the photographs by British artist Antony Cairns. An opening reception will be held on Thursday April 25th, 2024 from 6 to 8 PM with the artist in attendance and a book signing and walk through is scheduled Saturday April 27 from 3 to 6 PM. The gallery space is located at 16 East 71st Street, New York, NY, 10021. Antony Cairns (b. London, 1980) takes photographs at night, using the available light cast by buildings in urban centers like London, Tokyo and Los Angeles. In many cases the structures that he chooses are still under construction, little more than the skeletons of the office buildings and luxury apartments of that they are destined to become. His work is resolutely non-topographic, in the conventional sense in which photography has been used to record spaces, structures and architectural styles. There is more, however, to Cairns’ work than simply his distinctive approach to picturing the urban environment. His is a practice that accepts and embraces the photographic medium in its sophisticated entirety: from the effect use of light on analogue film, through a range of experimental darkroom processes, to an innovative and highly specialized understanding of the supports available to the photographic image in the twenty-first century. Cairns presents his work in a number of complementary but contrasting ways: from painstakingly layered and assembled artists books LDN (2010), LPT (2012), OSC (2016) to translucent films of silver gelatin applied directly to sheets of aluminium, LDN2 (2013), LDN3 (2014) to experiments with electronic ink, both in working electronic Ink readers, hacked to contain his complete work, LDN EI, (2015) and on their extracted frozen screens; strange distant descendants of the daguerreotype TYO2 (2017). Cairns has recently begun to explore the prehistory of the digital age in several related ways, by printing his works and assembling them as montages on early computer punch cards OSC Osaka Station City, (2016) and by using the screens of outmoded digital cameras and equipment to screen and project his work.

The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is excited to present you A Series of Small Decisions, an exhibition about a captivating journey of moving, looking, and taking pictures by Todd Hido. I move, I move a lot. People ask me how I find my pictures. I tell them I move around. I move and move and I mostly don’t find anything that is interesting to me. But then, something calls out. Something that looks sort of off or maybe an empty space. Sometimes it’s a lovely scene. Sometimes it’s just a ray of sunlight. I like that kind of stuff. So I take the photos and some are good. And so I keep moving and looking and taking pictures. — Todd Hido Image: © Todd Hido

Solas Gallery is delighted to present Conner Gordon’s After Cassandra. Cassandra was cursed to see the future, but never to be believed. We live in a world where we often see catastrophe on the horizon but, either individually or collectively, lack the conviction to act. Taking inspiration from the story of Cassandra, Gordon weaves together fragmented photographic visions, suggesting a cataclysm lingering just beyond the threshold of perception. In doing so, the project explores a myth and a moment when the apocalypse feels both intangible and close at hand. Conner Gordon is an Oregon-based photographer exploring photography as unreliable narration. His photographs have been exhibited at venues including Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR, The Humid in Athens, GA, Filter Space in Chicago, IL, and the Laverne Krause Gallery in Eugene, OR. He was a 2019-2020 Fulbright Research Grantee to Serbia, where he photographed the legacy of Yugoslav-era modernist architecture. He received his BA in political science from DePauw University and is currently an MFA candidate in art at the University of Oregon. Image: Untitled, from After Cassandra. © Conner Gordon

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.

Studio/Archive presents photography from the Tang Museum collection—many of them recent acquisitions—that explore studio portraiture and archives. Works on view range from nineteenth century daguerreotypes and vernacular photography, to contemporary portraiture and video. Together these diverse bodies of work explore themes of agency—how people shape their own identities—and visual representation as a tool for empathy and justice. Organized to complement the Tang Museum’s presentation of Lessons of the Hour by Sir Isaac Julien, this exhibition aims to extend the conversation around the power of photography to (re)frame ourselves and the world around us through the photographic lens. Studio/Archive is organized by Dayton Director Ian Berry and is supported by the Friends of the Tang.