08 Jul Staff Picks: Desa
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Three Shows I’m Looking Forward to
March is always a good month to be reminded that photography is not simply about images, but about attention. At its best, a photograph interrupts the automatic way we move through the world. It asks us to look again: at a face, a landscape, a family archive, a disappearing place, a gesture we might otherwise overlook.
This year’s Month of Photography offers an especially rich field of work, from documentary projects rooted in social history to more experimental exhibitions. Here’s what I want to see.
After the Fireline
a group exhibition exploring landscapes altered by wildfire, drought, and human intervention. What interests me most is that the show does not appear to treat the environment as a distant subject or an abstract crisis. Instead, the participating photographers seem focused on aftermath: the blackened tree line, the rebuilt home, the strange beauty of regrowth, the emotional residue left in places that have endured disaster. I am drawn to work that resists the easy drama of catastrophe and instead asks what it means to live with change after the news cycle has moved on. Photography is uniquely suited to this kind of slow looking. It can hold both devastation and resilience in the same frame.
Michael Warren Gallery, address here
Soft Proof
a quieter exhibition centered on family photographs, inherited images, and the instability of memory. The premise feels intimate and deceptively simple: artists working with personal archives, snapshots, letters, and found photographs to examine how families construct their own histories. I am always fascinated by the tension between what a photograph seems to promise and what it actually delivers. A family picture can look like proof, but proof of what? That someone was there? That a version of happiness existed? That a story has been preserved accurately? The artists in this show appear to be working in that uncertain space between documentation and invention, which is often where photography becomes most emotionally powerful.
CPAC, address here
Signal/Noise
An exhibition focused on contemporary image culture, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and the overwhelming circulation of pictures in daily life. This is the show I expect to feel most unsettled by, which is precisely why I want to see it. Photography has always had a complicated relationship to truth, but that relationship feels especially unstable now. We live inside a constant stream of images: security cameras, social media feeds, screenshots, facial recognition systems, family photos, marketing campaigns, and machine-generated pictures all competing for attention. I am interested in how artists are responding to that saturation. Are they resisting it? Mimicking it? Breaking it apart? Turning the tools of surveillance and automation back on themselves? A show like this feels necessary because it recognizes that photography is no longer confined to the gallery wall or the printed page. It is the visual atmosphere we all inhabit.
Redline, address here
What connects these three exhibitions, at least from a distance, is their shared interest in photography as more than representation. These are not simply shows about beautiful images, although I expect there will be beauty in all of them. They are shows about evidence, fragility, inheritance, technology, and the ways images shape what we believe to be true.
This March, I’m looking forward to being surprised — What are you looking forward to?
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