In 1969, Richard Avedon began using an eight-by-ten inch view camera on a tripod in order to yield images with extreme detail. That same year, he set out to photograph one of his most ambitious portraits of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory. With this narrative group portrait, Avedon portrayed the complex dynamics at the core of the sexual revolution, one of the major cultural movements of the late 1960s.

Wardell Milan works in mixed media, combining elements of photography, drawing, painting, and collage. Themes of freedom of expression and safe spaces are often at the forefront of his works, especially as they apply to the marginalized body. In this piece, Milan takes inspiration from Venice (where the image that acts as a canvas for the work was made), where he was struck by the romantic and sensual nature of the city. The photograph creates a safe haven for a romantic exchange between two figures. Milan’s work often incorporates and references photographic history, in this instance with photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and an homage to an Andres Serrano nude.

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) is one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model and had her first published photographs appear in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Arbus’s depictions of couples, children, female impersonators, nudists, New York City pedestrians, suburban families, circus performers, and celebrities, among others, span the breadth of the postwar American social sphere and constitute a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity.

This rare print was made by Arbus herself, soon after she made the negative in 1968. More than five decades later it remains one of the most startling images of her career.

“Naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968, shows a man in what is most likely his own room—the trash under the bed, the discarded shoes, the hot plate. But he has parted the curtains to his bed as though revealing a mystery at once theatrical and divine, and poses with impenetrable self-consciousness, genitals concealed between his thighs as the Venus Anadyomene who sprang from the foam of the sea. Even his feet are placed like those in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Arbus’s flash accentuates the supple body, its extraordinary beauty, and the provocative pose with cocked hip—a gesture that also recalls antiquity and has long connoted sexual readiness. The man’s face, painted like that of a woman, is strangely remote. The precision and apparent artlessness of this picture is characteristic of Arbus’s later work...”

Self-portrait, Red, Zurich is one of the more direct and compelling self-portraits of Nan  Goldin’s career. Against an engulfing darkness this out-of-focus image encapsulates one of Goldin’s driving creative endeavours: self-confrontation. With her characteristic rich colors, dark shadows, and lush textures, Goldin shares a deeply personal moment of contemplation, intimacy, and introspection.

“When looking at pictures of animals, it is easy to lapse into anthropomorphism, just as it is tempting to reduce them to single human traits (the silly goose, the frightened rabbit, the dogged dog). But Hujar manages to navigate us around these obstacles, and steer us toward the ultimate mystery of animal presence, that of being confronted with a consciousness that, as far as we can ascertain, is fundamentally different in character from our own, but that nevertheless evinces our empathy and our curiosity.”

—Chris Wiley, The New Yorker (2018)

This previously unseen 1998 photograph is from Misrach’s decades-long series Desert Cantos. In this body of work Misrach explores themes of land ownership, human interference, and the conquering forces of nature. This photograph depicts Shiprock (or Tsé Bitʼaʼí in the Navajo language, meaning "rock with wings," or "winged rock,"), a monadnock on Navajo land. The formation is a sacred location for the Navajo people, and plays a strong role in their religion and legends.

Employing a soaring vantage point, Richard Misrach depicts a tiny figure, engulfed by a seemingly endless stretch of beach. By placing this solitary figure in the context of the vast ocean, Misrach pits man against nature. This photograph underscores the delicacy and precariousness of humankind.

Biernoff's Ripple confounds the viewer in multiple ways. One might think they are looking at a photograph when this is in fact a meticulously rendered painting based on a photograph. What appears as ripples is an illusion referencing the less-than-perfect processing that befell the original photograph upon which this painting is based. The back of the original photograph, and hence also the back of the painting alludes to the ripples as heat waves but more likely it is due to inadequate photographic processing. It is all a stunning illusion.

The husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing together in 1959. Their photographs of industrial structures documented the anonymous and often-disused manufacturing and domestic buildings they encountered in the abandoned wastelands of post-industrial Europe and the United States. Like technical drawings, their photographs preserve the “anonymous sculpture” of architectural forms. Water Towers, 1968-1984 is a six-part typology of industrial water towers taken during their travels in Germany, Great Britain, France and the United States.

Relying on the most primal infrastructure of photography and image making, Adam Fuss often works without a camera. Building his images with the basic ingredients of light and light-sensitive paper, he has made photographs of water, smoke, flowers, christening gowns, and birds in flight. In this work, he puts aside the ingredient of light and worked solely with mushroom spores, carefully placing mushroom caps directly on paper and allowing the dropped spores to leave their own direct mark.

Over more than four decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has explored the ways photography can be used to record traces of invisible but elemental forces. His philosophical approach asks questions about the human experience of these phenomena. 

Opticks is a new series of large-scale color photographs depicting the color of light Sugimoto observed through a prism in his Tokyo studio. Using Polaroid film, he recorded sections of the rainbow spectrum projected into a darkened chamber, paying particular attention to the spaces and gaps between hues. Opticks presents unique enlargements of these Polaroids.

Lids and Straws assembles 60 photographs made by Marclay of these nominal subjects found on the streets of London. Played back at the speed of one image per second, the plastic objects rotate like the second hand of a clock and loop endlessly, referencing Marclay’s celebrated work, The Clock (2010), a 24-hour montage of film clips appropriated from cinematic history. The flickering images recall flip-books, early cinema, and animation devices of the late nineteenth century. Marclay’s animation sets the discarded trails of rubbish in motion, giving the humble objects new life and transforming his chance encounters with trash into visual poetry.  The excerpt below shows fifteen of these images.

Over a career of more than five decades, Robert Adams has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures, reasons to hope. “The goal,” he has said, “is to face facts but to find a basis for hope. To try for alchemy.”.

In Calle’s newest series Because, the artist presents her viewers with a photograph hidden behind a felt curtain. Embroidered on each curtain are Calle’s words describing her reasons for making the photograph the viewer is about to see.  In presenting viewers with the text before the image, Calle upends the usual order in which images are read.

Since the early 1960s, Lee Friedlander has focused on the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Made in New York, San Francisco, and dozens of cities and small towns in between, Friedlander’s photographs record milk prices, cola ads, neon lights, road signs, graffiti, and movie marquees. Depicting these texts with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s approach to America transcribes a sort of found poetry of commerce and desire.

This rare, early print is part of The Little Screens series, one of Friedlander’s most influential bodies of work. Made in the early 1960s, the images depict television screens (then a relatively recent luxury appliance) in lonely motel rooms and other anonymous spaces throughout the country. The luminous boxes transmit images of pop icons, political figures, and minor celebrities. The Little Screens document not only ghost-rooms filled with bland furnishings, they also reveal an emerging reality—the omnipresence of TV screens and the drone of television voices and personalities that fill space in an increasingly isolationist culture.

Kota Ezawa’s work often references images from current events and art history in his multi-valenced oeuvre which includes prints, lightboxes, and videos. In Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Ezawa references the iconic Gustav Klimt painting that was stolen by the Nazi regime in 1938. Painstakingly recreated in two-dimensional shapes and color fields, the piece blurs the line between reality and fiction, and calls into question the dilemma of ownership of popular images.

In Medallion, a doll’s disembodied head blends into the rough texture of a wooden floor or panel, its open eyes drawn over a layer of peeling paint. The photograph transforms a child’s toy into an emblem of some unknowable event or achievement, and speaks to Sommer’s longstanding interest in including found objects in surreal tableaux.

Richard Learoyd’s color images are made with one of the most antiquarian of photographic processes: the camera obscura [“dark room” in Latin]. Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the photographic paper is exposed. The subject, whether person or still life, is in the adjacent room, separated by a lens. Light falling on the subject is directly focused onto the photographic paper without an interposing film negative. The result is an entirely grainless, unique image. Learoyd’s subjects, composed simply and directly, are described with the thinnest plane of focus, re-creating and exaggerating the way that the human eye perceives, with a tip of the hat to the Dutch Masters.  

"A photograph should have the ability to communicate the sense of humanity, especially if it’s a picture of a person. It should have an internal narrative that allows you to walk away with a question or two in your mind. And I think those are the criteria that I use for my work.”

— Richard Learoyd

“Think of it as a picture that describes boundaries: the boundary between the city and the country, civilization and wilderness, the fail-safe point between community and freedom, the frontier of restrained protest or cautious adventure...”

Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials, which coincided with the publication of his widely influential first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, Alec Soth has stood out as a vibrant and distinctive voice in contemporary photography. His iconic large-format color photographs of people and scenes from middle America have received critical acclaim. Rooted firmly in the narrative framework of traditional photographic expression, Soth has continued to push the boundaries of the medium through his long-term projects and his prolific book-publishing activities.