On June 27, 2015, activist-artist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole on the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol to remove the confederate flag that it flew. The image of this act has become iconic. In fact, moments after the photographer, Adam Anderson, snapped the picture and uploaded it to his Instagram account, the image went viral. It showed up on Facebook feeds, media outlets, Twitter accounts and made its way to T-shirts and even Halloween costumes.

What does this image symbolize? What does it mean to be seen, described, and recorded? Who is visible and who is invisible? On December 12th, 2015, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts hosted a roundtable discussion titled (Just) #SAYHERNAME: Race and Gender in Social Practice to discuss these questions. Because, more than ever before, photographic images are key components of any political movement: They validate existence, promise visibility, and fuel political activism.

The panel included artists-activists-scholars Sheila Pree Bright, Aimee Meredith Cox, Michaela Angela Davis, Aurielle Marie, Bree Newsome, and Salamishah Tillet and was moderated by Cheryl Fin. Although photography as such was secondary to much of the discussion, ideas of visibility and invisibility were central. Inspired by Tillet’s New York Times article, “Female Visibility Matters,” which was published last August, the panelists discussed strategies for empowering black women to narrate their own stories and ways to make space for them to be seen.

The discussion led with a short presentation by Atlanta-based photographer Sheila Pree Bright, who has been making protest images from the streets of Atlanta, Ferguson, and Baltimore. In her photographic series 1960 Now, Bright makes images of protesters that contradict some of the photographs we see highlighted in mainstream media. She chose to make what she describes as “uplifting images” of Ferguson, rather than depicting human rage. In the presentation, Bright highlighted a November 18 photograph from an Atlanta protest by HBCU students who were standing in solidarity with students from the University of Missouri. In it, a young woman with mesmerizing eyes glares into the camera. Bright explains that when she took this picture her subject was stepping on the American flag while simultaneously waving the Black Liberation flag above her head. Bright’s final image, however, excludes both flags from the composition and instead looks like a traditional portrait. She explains that for her “there was more power in her [subject’s] eyes” then there was in the act protest itself. Here, Bright attempts to make the protestor visible; she shows the fight and the person, but she deemphasizes the demonstration. This act of photographing can be seen as a form of protest; the photographer chooses to make visible the black woman.

By the end of the panel discussion, it was clear just how central photography and art making are to the activist agenda. The panelists frequently referenced a quote by the late Nina Simone who said: “An artist’s duty…is to reflect the times.” Indeed, photography, social media, writing, and storytelling are all activist tools. The panelists challenged artists and activists alike, to create spaces for black women to be seen. After all, making something visible is a photographer’s mission—and often a validation of their subjects’ existence.

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During the Freddy Gray protests in Baltimore last year, 30-year veteran photojournalist Yunghi Kim made an image that, for her, represents photojournalism itself. The photograph does not picture a climactic moment of, say, tear gas or confrontation. Instead, it depicts four black men embracing. A single tear runs down the cheek of the figure who is largest in the frame. Although the viewer is brought into the moment and the embrace, all four men ignore the camera. In this picture, Kim captures the tension between the strength and vulnerability of her subjects and manages a balance between the intimacy and distance of the viewer.

It is typical of her way of finding human moments while documenting challenging circumstances. “For me photojournalism is more than just taking pretty pictures or creating newsworthy moments,” Kim explains. “It is about studying people and their situations and making an image in the most human way possible.”

Indeed, Kim, who has photographed in places such as Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Iraq since she began her career as a student at Boston University, finds human moments in even the most inhumane conditions. In 2003, Kim went to Iraq. “The most stressful time for me is when I am packing—when I’m taking all the information in and contemplating leaving,” she says. “At these moments, I know that I will move away from the comforts of my home and into hostile environments. Sometimes I cry thinking about it, but then, as soon as I get to airport, I am fine. I am in the zone, and my love of photography takes over.”

A couple of days after the city of Kirkuk fell, Kim took a photograph of Saddam Hussein’s old bank on fire. “I was standing there taking pictures of the dramatic fire when a father and daughter with a cart full of metal scraps walked past. They looked at me with the most casual expressions, as if they had just gone shopping, but in the background there was a storm of black smoke.” The power of this image lies in the juxtaposition between the dramatic event and the human response to it. Kim explains that “this [juxtaposition reveals] the irony of war.”

Over the course of her career, Kim has seen major changes in photojournalism. The most obvious being the shift from analog to digital photography. Although she believes that in many ways technology has made photojournalism easier, she also says “it has made people sloppy. I see it in the endless slideshows [online]—publications put up 60 images in a slideshow just because they are going for more clicks.” The editing gets lost. But the editing, she says, “is part of the art form.”

Looking back on three decades of work, Kim is most proud of her series Comfort Women, which she shot on 35mm black-and-white film in 1994. In the series, Kim photographed four grandmothers who were forced to become sex slaves to Japanese soldiers during World War II. She recalls that she originally only shot 25 rolls of film of the women, and says: “If I had shot this project digitally, I would have made a lot more pictures, and I would have approached photographing differently. But in 1994, that wasn’t an option.”

Kim recently made a new edit of the series for publication, and when she returned to the work she was initially frustrated by the number of pictures available for her edit. “I think digital [cameras] allow photographers to get deeper into their stories,” she explains, “ Photographers can shoot more freely and don’t have to worry about the cost of each picture.”

For Kim, sometimes the quiet moments, such as the ones she found while taking the portraits of her South Korean Comfort Women or the quartet of men in the midst of protest, are the most challenging to capture. “I am able to establish an intimacy with my subjects,” she says. “That’s what photojournalism is about, whether you shoot digitally or on film.”

On Tuesday, January 12th at 7:00 PM, Kim will share her work in a lecture at the School of Visual Arts. The lecture is free and open to the public.

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Cesar Lechowick‘s mother, Betty, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-’90s when Lechowick was in college, and she has been in and out of state hospitals and group homes ever since. In 2002, Lechowick launched his career as a photographer and began photographing his mother as a way to understand her illness.

“Photography gives me permission to look,” he says. “I think I am less traumatized by what I see and how she is acting if I have the camera. It allows me to interpret events, not just experience them.”

At its core, “Betty’s Sweet Tea” is a photographer’s tribute to his mother. In the majority of images, Betty stares directly into the camera, thus making the photographer’s presence palpable in every photograph. Even on a hospital bed, Betty looks into the camera her lips turned slightly up into a smile and her left eye shut in a wink.

Despite these seemingly intimate gestures that Lechowick has captured, many doctors believe that paranoid schizophrenic patients are incapable of expressing real intimacy. As a result, viewers wonder whether the warmth that is detected in these pictures and the intensity of his mother’s gaze is manufactured by the photographer or a sign of real affection shared between mother and son. This tenuous balance between the real and the fictitious is central to Lechowick’s experience with his mother and her paranoid schizophrenia.

Lechowick says that he often uses color and personal objects to express his vision of his mother’s world. His images beautifully capture the colors of southern Texas where Betty has lived her entire life—the rich yellows, browns and reds create dream-like atmospheres that simultaneously establish a mood and challenge our expectations of a documentary photograph. Lechowick often incorporates symbolic objects or visual metaphors into his images, such as the Styrofoam container of sweet tea or an ornamental mask.

“I want viewers to be stopped in their tracks, to really see my mother in multiple ways,” he explains. “At the Whataburger, for instance, she’s raging; in the fountain and by the creek, she’s seemingly peaceful; and on Christmas Eve, when she stares at me in that white hoodie, she’s beautiful and sad. She is all of these things to me, and I want people to see all these emotions in her. I am trying to create something that refuses to reveal any hard answers.”

Lechowick hopes that his images of his mother contradict many of the tropes of paranoid schizophrenia and other mental illness typically found in photojournalism, such as the woman hiding behind her hair or the man with his tongue dangling out of his mouth.

“I don’t want my photographs to look like typical images of depression and illness,” he explains. “Nevertheless, I am not trying to get rid of how sad and dirty most of her existence is.”

Ultimately, Lechowick creates a complex portrait of paranoid schizophrenia, one that asks questions instead of offering direct answers.

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In her photographic series, Backra Bluid, a name derived from both Scottish and Caribbean expressions, Brooklyn-based artist Stacey Tyrell reflects upon the legacy of colonialism and a family comprising both black and white ancestry. Tyrell, who identifies as a black woman, applies white makeup to her skin to photograph herself as her imagined forebears. She explains that her photographic process allows her to come to terms with who she is and how she sees her place in the world.

Although Tyrell’s extended family is originally from the Caribbean island of Nevis, which was a British colony until 1983, the artist grew up in Canada. Her experiences as a black woman from an immigrant family had a profound effect on shaping her vision of race. Tyrell explains that the majority of her high-school peers had little knowledge of colonialism and, as a result, doubted her claims to Scottish ancestry.

In 2011, after moving to the United States, Tyrell began shooting Backra Bluid, which offers a vision of blackness that differs from many visions presented by her African-American counterparts.

“The African-American story is the dominant narrative worldwide for the black experience,” Tyrell explains. “While this story is valid and important, it is merely one of many different narratives. I am not African-American. Thus, I work from a position slightly outside of that experience; I hope my images broaden the discussion about what it means to be black.”

Tyrell’s photographs challenge common assumptions about how race and class appear within the family portrait. Her seemingly upper-class white subjects are meticulously dressed and flawlessly composed, and yet their frozen expressions and stiff postures suggest that race and class can be performed for the camera.

It is not accidental that all of Tyrell’s figures stare directly into the camera. In fact, when she shoots her photographs, she purposefully positions the camera at waist level so that her figures can look slightly down upon the viewer.

“I want to co-opt a gaze that had been used in aristocratic art for centuries,” she says.

In one photograph, titled “Ismay, 44,” Tyrell pictures a woman in a white floral dress; her legs are crossed at her knees, and her lips are painted the perfect shade of red. Despite Ismay’s upper-crust composure, it is hard to identify whether she is supposed to black or white, passing or not, from present time or from the past. Tyrell explains that this ambiguity is the at core of her vision.

“My grandfather had a fair complexion,” she says. “If he had made the decision to shave his hair down and marry a different woman, he could have easily slipped into white society.Race and identity are not so cut and dry—we need to find new ways of talking about difference.”

Indeed, Tyrell’s subtle yet startling images encourage viewers to reconsider their assumptions about what it means to be black or white.

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In 2014 when Nina Robinson left her home in the Bronx to visit her maternal grandmother who was dying from cancer in rural Dalark, Arkansas, she intended to make it a quick visit, the first stop on a road trip down South.

After spending one week in Dalark, her grandmother passed away and Robinson decided to abandon her road trip altogether and stay in Dalark. What she thought would be a brief visit to Arkansas—a place she had not visited for nearly 15 years—turned into a three and a half month prolonged stay. During that time she started photographing, both as a way to honor her grandmother’s passing and to reacquaint herself with a community from which she had long been estranged.

The photographs she made in Dalark, Not Forgotten: An Arkansas Family Album, became some of her most personal work to-date and a selection of these images are currently on view at the Bronx Documentary Center through May 29. The show captures the power and strength of a black community living in an economically disenfranchised region and offers insight into rural people typically not pictured in photographs.

“No one knows about them,” Robinson say. “No one focuses on them. No one worries about them. People need to photograph them.”

According to Robinson Dalark, Arkansas is a proud community of landowners, the majority of residents own their homes, but like many southern towns, Dalark’s economy has suffered for over a decade. Businesses have left the area and many homes remain empty.

“I could have easily gone to Arkansas and taken pictures of abandoned homes in order to show economic decline; many photographers do just that,” Robinson says. “But I wanted to show what was still living—the richness and strength that binds people to a community.”

Indeed, Robinson’s images capture life in the midst of death and rich experiences despite economic hardship. Her photographs celebrate the human senses. In the image of the young girl who bites into a candy apple, for example, Robinson celebrates taste. In the photograph of Robinson holding her grandmother’s hand on her deathbed, she memorializes touch. And in her poignant images of her Aunts’ gospel choir, she celebrates the power of song. Ultimately, these photographs showcase human strength in life’s ordinary moments.

“My family is surprised that I want to photograph Arkansas,” says Robinson. “They think ‘Oh she is in New York; why would she want to come here to photograph? They wonder what I am doing—what I could possibly find interesting in Arkansas. But once the images materialize, they recognize the beauty and the meaning in my photographic moments”.

Robinson explains that her grandmother’s death prompted her to reflect on her life as a photographer and renewed her desire to make personally meaningful work that considers the lives of her black family. “Blackness is multilayered, ” says Robinson. “We need more perspectives of what a rural, black, southern community looks like.”

Nina Robinson will speak about her work and her exhibition Not Forgotten, An Arkansas Family Album at the Bronx Documentary Center on Saturday, April 16th at 7 PM

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In January 2012, Philadelphia based photographer, Julia Cybularz, escorted her ten-year-old niece to her doctor’s visit to get fitted for a back brace that was supposed to suppress her scoliosis and prevent back surgery. Cybularz had been photographing her niece, Hannah, for several years prior, but as soon as she made the image of Hannah with her small, petite body elevated on top of a strange, hospital contraption (Brace, 2012), she knew she had embarked on a new photographic series. That series, Breaking the Girl, spanned almost five years and traced Hannah’s transformation from girlhood into adolescence—from one body into another.

By 18 Cybularz says she knew that she wanted to pursue photography, but it wasn’t until 2000, when she was 21 and a senior at Drexel University, that she realized her interest in portraiture and the documentary tradition. After graduating from school, Cybularz took an internship with Mary Ellen Mark and later traveled with her to Oaxaca, Mexico to assist her on shoots.

Although Cybularz learned a lot from Mark, her own documentary approach differs. While Mark adheres to the documentary tradition, Cybularz intentionally bends it.

“I find it more exciting to collaborate with my subjects. For me, the traditional document is a good starting point. But it is just that—a starting point,” she says. “Obviously there is such a fine line in photography between directing subjects and collaborating with them. For me, it is always exciting to create images that question the very nature of the document, where viewers are not quite sure what they are looking at.”

Cybularz’s photographs of her niece Hannah are a mixture of fabricated and observed moments. In “Corset, 2013” Hannah is pictured against a lacy, white curtain; a corset, like a mask, covers her head, and her torso is held in by a rigid, white brace.

“I supplied the corset but Hannah activated it,” explains Cybularz. “I think this photograph reveals how Hannah felt about her condition. In the image, she almost smothers herself with the corset. She planned the shot. I did not anticipate what she would do, but when she stretched the corset around her head, I knew I had made a picture.”

In another photograph Hannah stands in the middle of a dense forest. Her hands cling to a branch, and her expression is direct and determined. Her brows are furrowed. The frame crops Hannah at the waist; thus, the viewer cannot tell whether her feet dangle in the air or are planted firmly on the ground. The image simultaneously captures Hannah’s girlish wildness and her teenage defiance. It reveals the tension that exists in most adolescents between child-like impulse and adult behavior.

“When I shot the photograph of Hannah in the forest I was originally looking at the trees in terms of their shape; the way that they bent reminded me of the way Hannah’s body bent,” says Cybularz. “But it was this picture—“Hanging, 2012”—where she was stretching out and waiting for me to get a vision that I ended up printing. It captures her determination as well as her anger toward her brace and her condition.”

In 2014, despite the fact that Hannah wore her brace almost religiously for 23-hour days, her doctors recommended her for back surgery. It took Hannah over a year to recover, but she is now fully mobile. Cybularz says that working on this project became empowering for Hannah—modeling became a way for her to express her fears and demonstrate her physical and mental strength.

“I think that the photographic process gave her a voice and sense of control,” says Cybularz. “She kept so much of what was going on with her physically a secret. She didn’t tell her classmates at school; she had so little control over her body at that time. When we made photographs, however, things were different. She had control over the kind of photos we took and made decisions about what she wanted to share.”

Indeed, Breaking the Girl is a photographic portrait of an adolescent who is determined to define herself, rather than letting her body and its limitations define her.

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In 2014, Brooklyn based Photographer Amani Willett walked into a cellphone store looking to upgrade his phone. He picked up several display phones that day and flipped through the photos in order to examine the quality of each camera phone. Almost instinctively, Willett pulled out his own phone to take pictures of the selfies he found on the display screens. When he got home that night and examined his shots, he was startled by what he saw.

The individuals in the selfies looked strangely familiar to him. The intimacy of the shots haunted him and eventually inspired him to embark on his new series, On Display, a project that features 70 portraits re-photographed from display screens in cell phone stores.

This project might seem like a departure for Willett, a photographer who got his professional start in 1997 when he worked in the Technical Department of Magnum and is best known for his book, Disquiet (Damiani, 2013), which juxtaposes documentary images and found news photos. However, in On Display, like in Disquiet, Willett isolates private moments from the noisy mess of contemporary life. On Display also considers how easy it is for us today to take pictures of ourselves and leave them behind for anyone to see and consume.

“Ultimately, I find these portraits very revealing; people let themselves be seen,” says Willett. “I want my viewers to think about all the images that people take and casually leave behind. Maybe social media has made people more comfortable with abandoning their images? I don’t know if twenty years ago someone would do that. This project calls into question the ways we are thinking about ourselves and our images.”

Although Willett constructs On Display from found imagery, he still makes a series of aesthetic decisions. He decides, for example, to convert the images from color to black and white. He chooses to crop the store environments from the frames, and he enhances the grain. While he is shooting, he also considers the screen flares that disrupt image clarity. Ultimately, however, Willett tries to remain true to the original photographs. His primary interest is to record the found images, not alter them. This strategy makes sense for a photographer who worked for Magnum and whose past work adheres to the documentary tradition.

“I am not an overly conceptual photographer,” explains Willett. “I love shooting, and I shoot almost everything in my life, I believe in the image. But it is also important to me that my work—in whatever style I happen to be photographing—has a cultural relevance and cultural tie-in. On Display is not just portraits; it is a project about how we see ourselves and how we picture ourselves today.”

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In the highly stylized and colorful images in her first book, Seen Not Heard, Heather Evans Smith captures the emotions that many women experience during their first years of motherhood, including the sometimes painful process of finding balance between caring for and controlling a child. Smith’s photographs picture adult hands that constantly guide, tug, and re-position a young girl—but the same hands also embrace and protect her.

Smith, a photographer who shoots from her home in North Carolina, worked as a graphic designer for 14 years before she rediscovered her love of photography. In 2014, after completing a conceptual photo series about the way motherhood had changed her life, Smith began to take pictures of her four-year-old daughter, Penny. She did not know it at the time, but these pictures would become the content of her first photo book.

“My initial intention was to examine society’s expectations of young girls,” explains Smith. “The mother-daughter aspect came later. I soon realized that I was interested in exploring the fine line between protecting your child and possessing your child.”

Indeed, Smith’s photographs depict a mother-daughter bond that is at times so strong that the adult and child seem to become one person. In an image titled “Let’s Stay Like This for a Little While,” the mother’s and daughter’s legs twist into a single figure. In another picture, a red sash wraps around both the adult and child binding into one body.

Smith describes herself as a conceptual photographer and an image-maker committed to telling stories. She does not shoot spontaneously, choosing instead to sketch her images months before she shoots them. Smith says she can spend half a year collecting the props, locating the family heirlooms or sourcing the fabrics that she uses in her shoots. These objects, often reminiscent of a bygone era, contribute to the timeless quality of Smith’s photographs and allow her to mix her own memories of childhood with the realities that her daughter experiences daily.

“I remember my mother constantly pulling on me when I was growing up—pulling on my tights and pulling on my hair. She had long nails, and I remember getting pinched by them,” she explains. “I pull my own daughter’s tights up every week for dance. The image of the tights is such a big memory for me; I remember being treated like a doll—having someone dress me and put me where I need to go.”

Although Smith says that she draws inspiration from her personal history and everyday experiences, she maintains that her work is not diaristic. Instead, her images speak broadly about the nature of childhood and mother-daughter relationships.

“While you do see my daughter’s face in some shots, for the most part, the photographs just show parts of us,” says Smith. “I hope that people will see parts of themselves in those parts of us.”

Seen Not Heard, a limited edition photo book available now through Flash Powder Projects, offers a complex vision of childhood, one full of beauty, pain and tradition.

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Flying High

As America mourns the deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the five officers from Dallas, Texas, racial tensions are escalating and protests surrounding police brutality continue throughout the country. Activists and leaders from Black Lives Matter are demanding reform of the United States judicial system and encouraging the public to reflect on its perception of black life in America.

Double Exposure, a photography book series published by D Giles in association with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, encourages readers to do just that—reconsider their perceptions of black America and reflect on the private and public moments that inform African American history. Picturing Children, the newest book in the series, celebrates black youth and offers a vision of black childhood that contrasts many stereotypes reinforced by images printed in mainstream media. The book does not depict Black America as sad or disenfranchised. Instead, the majority of its images picture smiling children engaged in family, play and community. Ultimately, the book encourages readers to reflect on the history and future of black lives in America.

“African Americans have had to protect their image quite a bit because a lot of the images that depict us do not place us in the most powerful light,” explains Dr Ivory Toldson, a Howard University professor and Director of QEM (Quality Education for Minorities), who contributed an essay to book.

Digital image of Venus, Serena, and Richard Williams

This collection of photographs not only celebrates black lives, play, and innovation, but it also reflects on the power of the vernacular image and the heroic gestures found in moments often seen as non-newsworthy events. The images featured in Picturing Children date from the late 1800s through the early 21st century and include shots by acclaimed photographers, such as Leonard Freed and Jamel Shabazz, as well as works by lesser known and unidentified image-makers. The book also showcases essays by Lonnie G. Bunch III, Marian Wright Edelman, and Ivory A. Toldson. In one photograph titled “Flying High,” Jamel Shabazz captures a young boy suspended in mid-air as he performs street gymnastics over a dilapidated mattress. In another photograph, Roderick Lyons pictures Serena and Venus Williams practicing on a street corner tennis court, not in a national stadium. The collection encourages viewers to consider that history can be made from everyday moments, not just publicized events.

Digital image of Venus and Serena Williams

In his essay published alongside the photographs, Toldson draws upon his research in optimal educational environments for children to help explain the significance of this photographic collection.

“Picturing Children reflects on the promise and potential of our future without the limitations of scores and statistics,” Toldson writes, “Children thrive among adults who are experts in reading facial expressions and body language, not diagrams and charts. The photographs in this book allow us to appreciate the chaos in our world and the beautiful improbability of being. At the same time, they present children as inspirational and foster a sense of hope from us all.”

Upstate New York • USA

Toldson also describes how a single image, like Jamel Shabazz’s Flying High, might motivate one viewer to advocate for public playgrounds or another viewer to study environmental biology.

Untitled

“Sometimes just the sight of an image can trigger certain emotions in you, certain thoughts that can lead to something much bigger,” Toldson says.

Double Exposure: Picturing Children encourages viewers to revisit their vision of black America and, as Toldson explains, to “understand their role in helping these children develop to their full potential.”

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Catherine Opie’s “30 Minutes After Inauguration” depicts the aftermath the celebratory moment when Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, was sworn into office. In Opie’s photograph, the Washington Monument hovers over a grass-barren lawn; people disseminate, and trash, like debris in a war zone, covers the ground. It is hard to see this image as triumphant. Instead, the photograph seems like an eerie premonition of the political and social strife that the country is experiencing today.

WE:AMEricans, a new exhibition organized by Ruben Natal-San Miguel and Leah Oates at New York City’s Station Independent Projects prominently features this Opie print alongside works by more than 60 established and emerging photographers that question what it means to be American.

The Opie image was actually pulled from curator Natal-San Miguel’s personal collection. “I wanted the print to anchor the exhibition around a historical key point,” he says. “When did the country start arguing and building such anger and resentment? In my opinion, it started boiling at the Inauguration.”

Natal San Miguel, an independent photographer and curator, teamed up with Leah Oates, Station Independent’s gallery director, to mount this ambitious exhibition that reflects the nation’s diversity.

“Initially this exhibition was designed as a reaction to all the fighting I experienced on social media,” says Natal-San Miguel. “My friends were fighting about politics and race. They were fighting when the bombs in Paris happened and during the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings. People were attacking each other, and I wanted to turn this bickering into something positive.”

WE:AMEricans brings together a diverse group of photographers and images. The exhibition installation is reminiscent of the Google Images interface and includes more than 60 photographs all printed at relatively the same scale and hung in multiple rows on the gallery walls. The show features works by well-known photographers, such as Alec Soth and Amy Arbus, that are installed alongside images by lesser-known artists who were selected from an open call for submissions. This exhibition does not try to pin down what it means to be American. Instead, it celebrates the diversity of American voices and experiences.

Although Natal-San Miguel admits that people can experience images like these online daily, he claims that exhibitions offer viewers something different.

“When you look at work online you only see image after image. Even in ascending presentation—one after the other—the images fade and go out,” says Natal-San Miguel. “The great thing about an exhibition like this one is that a viewer can look at a single image and also see the entire cornucopia of images.”

WE: AMEricans is on view through August 9th at Station Independent Projects in New York City.

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