PHOTOGRAPHY NEWS
September 29, 2024 – August 3, 2025
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the evolution of photography in Cuba from the 1960s to the 2010s.
The exhibition looks at contemporary Cuban photography from its role in promoting the Cuban Revolution after Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government to engaging in social and political critique following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In subsequent years, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the changing prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.
Showcasing 100 images, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography celebrates the Museum's acquisition of some 300 photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker. Read more »
September 14, 2024 – March 15, 2025
Louis Carlos Bernal. El Gato, Canutillo, New Mexico, 1979, Gift of Morrie Camhi, © Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Ann Bernal
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
Luis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva
The Center for Creative Photography presents Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva, a landmark survey of one of the most significant American photographers of the twentieth century.
Born in Douglas, Arizona, and based in Tucson, Louis Carlos Bernal (1941–1993) 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.
Featuring more than 140 original photographs and archival objects from the Center’s collection, the exhibition also includes examples of Bernal’s early experimental work, photographs from his trips to Mexico, the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and a selection of never-seen images he produced in Cuba. A companion book, Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía, is co-published by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography.
Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva is curated by Elizabeth Ferrer and organized by the Center for Creative Photography. Read more »
December 9, 2024 – March 7, 2025
Steven Molina Contreras, Abigail’s Portrait, United States, 2019
Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI. Traveling Exhibition curated by Aperture Foundation
You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography
You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography celebrates the dynamic photography of Latinx artists across the United States. The exhibition brings together established and emerging artists, who tackle themes of political resistance, family and community, fashion and culture, and the complexity of identity in American life.
Artists in the exhibition contribute to a vast visual archive of the Latinx experience as pluralistic, nuanced, and fluid. They illustrate a range of histories and geographies, contextualize and reinterpret watershed social and artistic movements, stake space for queerness, and articulate the importance of photography within the larger field of Latinx art.
You Belong Here explores contemporary photography that sheds light on social spaces—from intimate portrayals of home and family to collective experiences of the streets and nightlife—as well as the in-betweenness, or nepantla, of transnational, multiracial, and postcolonial identities. It generates an expansive dialogue about visibility and belonging for Latinx people.
Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator and deputy director of Curatorial and Collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, You Belong Here originates from Tompkins Rivas’s work as guest editor of “Latinx,” the Winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine. Read more »
September 28, 2024 – February 15, 2025
Center for Creative Photography @ University of Arizona
Chicana Photographers LA!
Chicana Photographers LA! features the work of five Chicana artists from Los Angeles who share common concerns about families, neighborhoods, sacred spaces, and body and identity politics.
Featuring 41 photographs produced from the early 1980s to 2024, this exhibition considers domestic and environmental transformations occurring across the artists’ home turf, some cultural, demographic, and diasporic, others directly confronting the impact of gentrification on Chicanx communities.
From Christina Fernandez’ suburban landscapes to Sandra de la Loza’s archaeological ruins of a beloved neighborhood to the situated biographical and autobiographical portraits by Laura Aguilar (1959–2018), Amina Cruz, and Star Montana, the vast cultural terrain of Southern California, is depicted and infused with family narratives, memory, and belonging. Read more »
August 23, 2024 – January 26, 2025
History Miami Museum
SANCTURARY: Our Secret Place
SANCTUARY: Our Sacred Place, a captivating photography exhibition by Little Haiti photographer, Woosler Delisfort, delves into the spiritual origins of Miami’s Indigenous, African and Caribbean communities by capturing moments of divine connection in temples, churches, and mosques. The more than 100-piece exhibition highlights how these cultures are harnessing sacred spaces in Miami as vital sources of life, both politically and spiritually.
Our sacred spaces hold more than comfort, assurance, and community. These locations are vortexes for revolution, healing, congress, and justice. It is where our forces, united, embolden the spirits of weakened bodies and tortured minds. It is the sanctuary from a world contaminated by injustice, confusion, and greed.
You are invited to bear witness to the human condition in search of peace manifested as Mawu-Lissa, Gran Mèt, Allah, God, and Almighty. This photo series documents sanctuary rituals, venerations, and commemorations created by the human condition as a portal into the depths of our multiverse and the spirit world. Read more »
October 4 – November 29, 2024
Juan-Si González, Looking for Cuba Inside Project (detail), 2003–2018. Digital print, constructed photography, and documentary photographs, 30 x 30 inches each.
Antioch College: Herndon Gallery
Juan-Si González: Looking for Cuba Inside
Years ago, Cuban-born artist Juan-Si González embarked on a journey through Missouri, where he encountered a sign that read, “Burger King, Cuba, 3 Miles.” This ironic juxtaposition ignited his curiosity and led him on a quest to explore towns named Cuba across the United States. He eventually discovered 16 such towns, most established during the Spanish-American War. Inspired by this discovery, González created Looking for Cuba Inside, a multimedia installation that functions like a travel diary, weaving together documentary images, absurd chronicles, and a mix of memory, reality, reportage, and fiction.
The installation features archival photographs of Cuba, alongside images from González’s travels to these American towns, combined with road maps, satellite images from Google, climate data, built objects, and videos and text from his navigation diary. This dynamic collage forms a visual narrative that reflects the artist’s search for Cuba—both within the U.S. and within himself. By documenting these towns, González engages in a process of self-healing, reclaiming his sense of identity through the creation of a new, imagined psychological and emotional territory. The project becomes a meditation on displacement, belonging, and the search for cultural roots in a fragmented and hybridized world. Read more »
September 24 – October 31, 2024
New Jersey City University Center for the Arts Gallery
Lente Latine/Latin Lens
Lente Latine/Latin Lens sheds light on recent works by Latin American photographers based on the East Coast: Manuel Acevedo, Carlos Alejandro, Lizzy Alejandro, Jacqueline Herranz Brooks, Monica Flores, Juan C. Giraldo, Orestes Gonzalez, Cesar Melgar, Qiana Mestrich, Josefina Fernandez Moran, William Riera, Gabriel Garcia Roman, and Dakota Santiago. Curated by the photographer Natali Bravo-Barbee, the exhibition highlights these artists’ exploration of their ancestral roots, cultural identity, and diasporic communities through varied photographic techniques. Read more »
September 26 – October 30, 2024
The Annex Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
Willy Castellanos: Exodus; Alternate Documents
(1994-2024)
Willy Castellanos’ post-documentary practice emerged from questioning the discursive limits of the photographic record he made from the coasts of Havana, Cuba, during the 1994 Rafter’s Crisis. Castellanos photographed complete sequences of events that included everything from the construction of the rafts and farewell rituals to scenes of crowds launching into the sea, marking the end of the last utopia of the 20th century. A decade ago, the exhibition Exodus: Alternate Documents (2014) at the Centro Cultural Español Miami was conceived as a laboratory to expand the narrative and conceptual boundaries of the initial photographic body of work. The exhibit merged artistic installations and participatory documentary techniques. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Rafters’ Exodus, the curatorial concept designed for the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: Backstories unveils new pieces, artistic installations, and documents collected in the 2014 edition. Read more »
September 20 – October 27, 2024
Bronx Documentary Center, New York
El Salvador: Legacy of Violence
The Bronx Documentary Center’s exhibition, El Salvador: Legacy of Violence, pairs two important and historic photographic projects done three decades apart–one by American Robert Nickelsberg, the other by Salvadoran photographer Fred Ramos–bodies of work that mirror, inform, and resonate, each with the other. The two projects define El Salvador's troubled Cold War history, document today's political evolution, and focus on the US complicity and negligence in the small Central American country's troubled past and present.
Together, Ramos’ and Nickelsberg’s photos reflect on this often ignored history, triggering questions about US foreign policy and the legacy of the Cold War. Their work also looks at issues of dictatorship versus democracy at the ground level, as Salvadoran’s struggle to live daily lives filled with dignity and peace. Read more »
October 23 – 26, 2024
Pérez Art Museum Miami
WOPHA Congress: How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now
The WOPHA Congress is a pioneering photography conference, exhibition series, and creative gathering hosted at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and virtually, with concurrent activations across South Florida. This congress seeks to establish a critical forum for photography by convening global organizations of women photographers, along with art historians, theorists, and curators, to critically enrich and more accurately represent the dynamic history of women photographers from the nineteenth century to the present. The event highlights both foundational and emerging research in the field, facilitating national and international dialogues on women and feminist perspectives in the history of photography. Additionally, the WOPHA Congress serves as a vital platform for celebrating women in the photographic arts, fostering an unprecedented network within the international community dedicated to advancing the role of women in photography. Read more »