Sally Mann doesn’t believe in talent. She believes in hard work. The kind of work it takes to ride unruly horses, to hoist an 8×10 camera, to constantly fend off controversy, and to write an honest book about a complicated existence.

Hold Still, Mann’s recently released memoir, is culled from a collection of family documents and archival ephemera that had gone ignored in an attic for decades. During that time Mann created the work that would fill the pages of her influential monographs At Twelve, What Remains, Proud Flesh, and Immediate Family, among other projects that gracefully and provocatively confront the larger mysteries of life.

[See Also: 11 Self-Portraits From Sally Mann’s ‘Upon Reflection’ Series]

“Over the arc of my career I’ve tried to work in the quotidian, the everyday things, even when they are the big things like life and death and family, and make them revelatory and beautiful,” Mann said during a recent reading at Symphony Space on New York City’s Upper West Side. She has applied that vision, coupled with her back-breaking work ethic, to Hold Still, in which she uses the trinkets, toys, and crinkled correspondence of her and her family’s past to weave a rich and revealing story.

The book dives deep into the physical and emotional terrain that has informed much of the work she has produced over the past 30 years. The narrative moves through early childhood and her teenage years, with segues into her parent’s personal histories and a heartfelt exploration of her relationship with the Mann family’s black nanny.

Describing herself as a ‘near-feral’ child, raised by her family’s pack of boxer hounds, she recalls the first five years of her life, when she vehemently refused to wear ‘even a stitch of clothing.’ Among the attic treasures, and now reproduced in color photographs, are six dainty, hand sewn dresses, as pristine as the day a young Sally Mann likely cast them off to run wild and naked among the honeysuckles of a Virginia meadow.

An obsessive collector, Mann admitted to an enraptured audience that she had never questioned the motives behind the intense connections she has with objects, relics, and artifacts. Dog bones, baby teeth, and family photo albums are all equally worthy of preservation in Mann’s personal archives.

“Perfectionism, severe emotional attachment to inanimate objects, varying levels of anxiety, usually beginning in childhood with the saving of school papers and stubs of old pencils,” she said, reading from notes she’d taken on obsessive compulsive disorder—notes she pulled from the back pocket of her blue jeans, along with a tiny pencil stub.

“None of this seemed strange to me,” she said, despite author and moderator Ann Patchette’s repeated inquiries into her behavior, and her insistence on doing absolutely everything the hard way. “It’s like putting a lead handicap on a racehorse, but I’m saddled with self doubt,” she said, seeming to articulate the thoughts as they came to her on stage. “I don’t think that I’m so brilliant or that I’m the fastest horse and I need these handicaps so I don’t blow everyone else away. I guess I think that having all that extra weight and creating these obstacles for myself excuses me when I fail.”

Using antiquated equipment and caustic chemical processes, she says, is her safety net. Yet even from the sanctuary of her studio or the family farm in Lexington, Virginia, she’s still haunted by ceaseless criticism and scarred by rejection. But the ghosts Mann exhumes and interrogates in her memoir don’t respond to criticism, and don’t fall victim to rejection. They emerge from her fluid and rhythmic prose to defend what she called the “dignity of the work,” while resisting the urge to air grievances and spark new fires.

Sally Mann’s photography, and her motives behind it, will always be subjected to a certain knee-jerk, moral response, whether she’s photographing the scarred southern landscape or her children, running as free and feral as she did through countless summers. She has grown resilient, but she has not become bitter. The self doubt that has weighed her down has also given her a steadfast determination to keep hoisting the heavy camera for a chance at capturing a photo that she said could “make me want to drop to my knees in thanksgiving,” and those are the photos that have to be made the hard way.

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To date the conversation surrounding the opening of the new Whitney Museum has focused mostly on its exterior. The Renzo Piano-designed fortress of glimmering glass and steel on the cusp of the Hudson River is an impressive addition to New York City’s Meatpacking district, but the true value of the new Whitney is what the space will make possible for the artwork in the museum’s permanent collection. When the museum opens to the public on May 1 that is likely where the conversation will shift.

The inaugural exhibition, “America Is Hard to See,” is a staggering assembly of work that showcases the museum’s beloved and newly acquired treasures, and reasserts the institutions’ commitment to modern art of American origin. Meticulously divided across eight floors and 220,000 square feet, the exhibition is finely tuned and fully integrated, with photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and video pieces sharing multiple, themed galleries, and the effect is riveting. In a world of image-fatigue, the exhibition makes familiar work look brand new and radically relevant.

“We knew from the start that this would be an integrated exhibition, as that’s always been the Whitney’s mission,” said Elisabeth Sussman, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography. “Our core curatorial team established 23 chapters for the show, and we brought relevant things from the photography collection into those themes.”

Sussman, along with Senior Curatorial Assistant Elisabeth Sherman, had a lot more to choose from when preparing this exhibition. In September, the Whitney received a donation from longtime trustees Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla that Sussman said had a truly transformative effect not only on the collection as a whole, but on the outcome of the inaugural exhibition too. The donation includes work by Imogen Cunningham, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Frank, and the first Ansel Adams pieces ever acquired by the Whitney. Of the three new Adams photographs introduced to the permanent collection, only one is featured in the show. The presence of Adams’ 1941 print “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” next to a series of eight Chiura Obata woodcuts and watercolors is so striking, even the most jaded observer will be compelled to stop and stare.

By placing photography alongside it’s aesthetic peers, “America is Hard To See” finds new dimensions in often-exhibited work, and invites further investigation of the less familiar. From Walker Evans to Weegee, Lee Friedlander to Lewis Hine, nothing feels overexposed or pushed aside. Even where massive sculptures and neon, pop-art prints threaten to draw your attention elsewhere, Larry Clark’s black and white prints from his Tulsa portfolio, which lead the exhibition chapter “Raw War,” are alluring, provocative, and unavoidable.

Beginning at the 8th floor of the new building, “American is Hard to See” follows a loose chronology that traces the Whitney’s own lineage. In following that history, a narrative begins to emerge, and as you descend the light-filled stairways or the Richard Artschwager-inspired elevators, the lines between media and medium and process and practice intertwine and overlap, bursting from the fifth floor galleries in what is arguably the show’s image-heavy apex.

“You could say the entire fifth floor is really about photography,” Sherman said. “The Whitney has committed to collecting the work of the 20th and 21st centuries, which are really the centuries of the camera. But the 1980s and 1990s represent the bulk of our collection, which is when artists really started to explore the image in new ways.”

The ‘newness’ of photography is evident everywhere in the exhibition, as it is repeatedly reexamined, dismantled, and reborn, each time emerging with an immediacy informed and inspired by the cultural, political, and technological conditions that surround it. Nan Goldin’s landmark slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is presented in its intended form, in a darkened room and accompanied by a carefully curated soundtrack. But the power of her intimate expose is reflected again in the Whitney’s new performance space, where Yuji Agematsu’s immersive installation “Walk on A, B, C” takes viewers on a slideshow-driven geographic journey around the museum’s new neighborhood. While the intent of these pieces are drastically different, both are punctuated by the visual intensity of color slide photography, and a sense of movement, tension, and transience.

With over 400 artists represented in the show, it would be easy for Diane Arbus or Dorothea Lange to fall through the cracks, but everything is anchored, and nothing is underestimated.

“America is Hard to See” presents photography parallel to everything else, not as an art form to be considered in isolation. Through carefully curated pairings, like Man Ray photograms coupled with Louis Lozowick pen and ink drawings, the Whitney makes a strong case for the power of thoughtful juxtapositions. The photographs featured aren’t out-of-context, but in complex conversations with aesthetic peers, taking on the deconstruction of everything and playing a crucial role in its reinvention.

Scenes from the #NewWhitney on Instagram:

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David Wojnarowicz was both of his time, and way ahead of his time—an artist and activist who refused to consider the whims of the art world, and made art so beautifully abrasive and politically poignant that it feels vital over 20 years after his death.

As a young, gay man in 1980s New York, Wojnarowicz made work in response to a world filled with hate, fear, and ignorance—the era of AIDS and Reagan. As the modern gay-rights movement is celebrating historic strides and seeing massive shifts in the public perception of LGBT issues, his work is a fresh reminder of how radical queer politics and a deadly epidemic paved the way for rainbow flags, pride parades, and marriage equality.

“He was at the center of the storm when he was making his work, as part of the culture wars and the AIDS crisis and the East Village scene,” says Cynthia Carr, author of the 2012 Wojnarowicz biography Fire in the Belly. “I suppose he’s now seen as a sort of historic figure from the ’80s, but his stature has grown since then, and I think that’s because he had a real message, and people have had a chance to step back and look at the work in retrospect.”

This spring, Aperture released an expanded edition of Brush Fires in the Social Landscape. Originally published in 1994 as a single-artist issue of Aperture Magazine, the re-release features new images, essays, interviews, and excerpts that explore the lasting impact and relevance the work has had. The Whitney Museum has also taken a renewed interest in his work, and will host the first ever Wojnarowicz retrospective in 2016.

“It’s definitely time to bring his work to the forefront,” says Marvin Taylor, Director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, which holds the Wojnarowicz archives.

Taylor adds that Wojnarowicz’s work offers a sense of solace to old-school gay rights activists, as it represents a radical queerness and outsiderness that has been softened as the LGBT movement becomes increasingly corporatized and subsumed by the bourgeoisie.

Wojnarowicz was thoroughly engaged in an art scene that grew as an organic reaction to the formal gallery and museum systems, and was vehemently opposed to the rigid politics of the Reagan era, and the fear and repression it represented. His work, like friends and colleagues Nan Goldin and Kiki Smith, exposed a raw beauty in New York’s gritty underground, but never at the risk of sugarcoating the reality of that world—people were dying.

“At the time, David was really seen as a spokesperson, an angry voice for the gay population that wasn’t being helped, even as he was being victimized by the right wing,” says Wendy Olsoff of PPOW Gallery, which represents Wojnarowicz’s estate. “But he, and I think a lot of those artists from the ’80s, had an honesty and conviction that wasn’t market driven. In his AIDS work he was always looking for something real, which is why he would photograph bones and burial mounds—that felt real to him.”

Carr says Wojnarowicz was initially reluctant to even call himself a visual artist, despite the fact that he was painting, drawing, and taking photographs regularly. His earliest work was mostly stencil based, though he also produced the much-loved photo series “Rimbaud in New York,” a celebratory jaunt through pre-AIDS New York, when the city was still a playground for mischievous young men, in handmade masks. Those photographs, made in the late 1970s, remained as negatives for nearly 10 years, until the 1987 death of his closest friend and mentor, photographer Peter Hujar.

Carr, Olsoff, and Taylor all pointed to Hujar’s death from AIDS as a profound turning point in Wojnarowicz’s life, one that inspired him to revive old negatives and produce new work that addressed the AIDS crisis with a brutal and graceful honesty. His striking portraits of Hujar on his deathbed, his head, hands and feet, fragile and listless in the harsh hospital light, was where he began.

“It was devastating to him,” Carr says. “He had a very strong response to it, and when he responded emotionally to something, he wanted to make work from it. David was always an angry person, but now he was channeling his rage politically.”

Wojnarowicz moved into Hujar’s loft, where, for the first time in his career, he had access to a darkroom. He printed the Rimbaud series, and the 23 frames he shot of Hujar in his hospital bed. He photographed bones in burial grounds, and his own face nearly covered in dirt, as if peeking out from a shallow grave. His own diagnosis came a year later, in 1988, and his work, now amplified and fearless, gained a sense of fatalistic urgency.

“Photography was always a very important medium to him,” Olsoff says, “but after Hujar’s death and after his own diagnosis, he got more sophisticated with it, and started painting and collaging over it, and bringing out this work that no one had seen before. There was definitely a sense that he was running out of time.”

His 1990 piece “When I Put My Hands on Your Body,” grounded in a photograph of a Native American burial mound in Illinois, became a post-mortem love letter to everyone he had lost, as his words, printed in red ink, scrolled across the skeletons scattered in the background. Far from his vivid and at times whimsical collage and stencil work, his photo-based poems feel more like visual eulogies.

“Things are infused with meaning in an almost religious way in Wojnarowicz’s work,” Taylor says. “He had an unflinching eye, and would show things for their ugliness, but was always looking for some kind of enlightenment, or what he would call grace—I don’t think we have enough of that anymore.”

In the past 20 years, the LGBT community has survived the AIDS epidemic and successfully shifted public opinion from intolerance to acceptance. But those strides came at tremendous costs, which Taylor says that to a new generation of queer youth, seems like another lifetime entirely, a completely different battleground.

Wojnarowicz’s work, he argues, is essential for young artists and activists to fully grasp how great that leap truly was. The hope is that the reissue of Brush Fires will inspire young artists to produce a higher caliber of socially conscious work and also encourage a dialogue about sex, power, and identity in a new age of queer politics.

Wojnarowicz was a leading voice among a community that was being silenced, and to those who have championed his work, he still resonates in the era of ‘loud and proud’ gay activism. Brush Fires, and the work it showcases, is no less relevant than it was 20 years ago. It is potent, subversive, and heartbreaking. Taylor calls Wojnarowicz’s work “too thorny” and “earnest” to benefit from a sense of nostalgia, and too confrontational to be romanticized. Despite the decades that have passed there will always be an audience for Wojnarowicz’s work, because at it’s core it speaks honestly to the experiences of eternal outsiders, and the endless generations of outcasts that will follow in his footsteps.

“There’s an empathy for people—for marginal, vulnerable creatures of all kinds that comes through in his work,” Carr says. “People will always respond to that.”

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Photographer Steve McCurry has spent most of his life traveling the globe, using his camera as a window to another world. He’s wandered down alleyways and across deserts searching for what he calls a “magic” moment when color, light, composition and emotion collide, and a beautiful image is born. That search is endless, and McCurry says that of all the places he’s traveled, India has provided him with more opportunities to capture that magic than anywhere else.

“Visually I think it’s the richest country in the world,” he says. “India is really unique in that they have such a broad, deep cultural diversity, but there’s also of course a huge disparity between rich and poor, and modernity and people living in very ancient ways.”

From November 18 through April 4, The Rubin Museum, in collaboration with the International Center of Photography, will host an exhibition of McCurry’s images from India that covers nearly three decades of work. A natural fit for the Rubin, which focuses mainly on Himalayan, Indian, and Tibetan art, McCurry’s vision of India strives to cover the vast physical and cultural territory of one of the most densely populated, and most rapidly changing countries in the world.

McCurry first began traveling to India in the 1970s and remembers the people being very freewheeling and open. “There was a free press, and English was widely spoken, so you could really talk to anyone about anything,” he says. Other countries he had traveled to, like Russia and China, were more isolated and closed off to outsiders, but in its openness, India provided him with an education in humanity. He says the images in the exhibition reflect pivotal moments in his perception of the world, and opportunities to “tell stories and communicate something profound.”

McCurry admits that pursuing such a lofty goal goes deeper than taking a great photo. Technique can be learned, he says, but it takes instinct, passion, and commitment to capture an image that can really say something about what it’s like to be a human being on this planet at the exact moment you decide to snap the shutter. “We’re all existing at the same time,” he says, “I think in some ways, we’re all fundamentally the same—our blood is all red.”

While McCurry has worked hard to achieve a level of technical mastery that makes his physical process seem second-nature, he also allows himself to be enraptured by his surroundings, and in a photographic philosophy honed over decades exploring the ancient cultures of the East, to be truly present. “There is something wonderful about getting immersed in the environment, and getting in that meditative state where you’re just there, experiencing life around you,” he says. “It’s very calming, but you also become hyper-alert, because you’re taking in everything at the same time, and you’re noticing things that you wouldn’t notice if you were just walking to work.”

McCurry has returned to India multiple times, and despite years of international travel and photographic accolades, says he is still surprised by what he finds there. That sense of discovery is evident in all of McCurry’s work, but is particularly potent in the images included in the India exhibition and the imposing hardcover book recently published by Phaidon. The scenes McCurry seems to stumble upon as he journeys through India’s hidden side streets and wide open plains are vivid, candid, and thoughtful, with an air of mystery and surprise. There’s a sense, when looking at his photos of a young boy running through a multi-colored labyrinth of stone walls, or a group of crimson-cloaked girls huddled in a dusty field, that a small and beautiful slice of a large and anonymous world has just been uncovered.

It would be easy, and largely understandable, for McCurry to have developed a gruff, jaded, and world-weary disposition after years of traveling between war zones, poverty stricken slums, and ancient ruins. But to do that, he would have to admit that he’s seen it all, and the multi-award winning photographer who has been credited with shooting the ‘most recognizable photo in the world‘ says he’s barely scratched the surface.

“Everyday we learn something, we improve our eye, and that continues until you just keel over on assignment one day, like Avedon,” he says, referring to legendary photographer Richard Avedon, who died in 2004 while shooting a story for The New Yorker. “That’s really the way I think we’d all like to go. You only have one life to live and if you want to be a photographer, you have to get up, and one foot at a time go out and shoot. I don’t feel any differently about that than I did 40 years ago. Walking out the door and seeing what’s out there is just as much of a thrill now as it’s ever been.”

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River Road: Milepost 13, 2015

River Road: Milepost 16, 2015

River Road: Milepost 39, 2015

Return to Elk Rock Island, 2015

Photography has the power to capture moments and freeze memories, and photographs can be nostalgic reminders and reference points to the past. But imagery can be deceiving, and memories aren’t always reliable, leaving photographers with the power to control, manipulate, and reimagine as they please, straddling the line between fantasy and reality, and creating new narratives of foggy recollections.

Photographer Holly Andres explores this cerebral gray area in her work, turning memories into movie sets, transforming fleeting moments into elaborately staged recreations. Her most recent project, “The Fallen Fawn”, which is on display at the Robert Mann Gallery until Dec. 5, is a stylized and subtly menacing retelling of an episode in her own childhood when her two older sisters discovered an abandoned suitcase near their home. The contents would become the girls’ favorite playthings, and they spent that summer secretly dressing up in an anonymous woman’s discarded clothes, jewelry and makeup.

“When they told me this story a few years ago, we found ourselves asking ‘who was that woman? What was her suitcase doing down at the river’s edge?’,” Andres says. “Long after our conversation I found myself still thinking about this woman, and the possibility that my two sisters, then just two curious and naive girls, could have unearthed a treasure trove containing a sinister secret. This story has all the narrative motifs that most interest me.”

Once she identifies the memory she wants to recreate, Andres says she begins to visualize the story down to most intricate details. “When I gaze through the camera, I try to think like a painter and consider every aspect of the composition—the colors and textures of the fabrics, the value contrasts of the lighting, the position of the objects and characters, and the dynamic between the figure and ground,” she says. In re-staging scenes from her memory as elaborate sets, she says she tries to capture the “cognitive dissonance” that can emerge once she introduces different elements into the formal compositions she builds up from the rough storyboards she initially creates.

In this sense, Andres’ work falls within the realm of contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Cindy Sherman, who also use this method of re-staging reality to create vivid and richly composed fantasy worlds. But there’s a subliminal psychology at work in her images, one that she says comes from mining her own lucid subconscious—she keeps a journal at her bedside and says her most creative moments occur when she’s on the brink of falling asleep. She also says she is inspired by a handful of female surrealists.

“I feel a strong connection to their work, particularly because of their interests in psychoanalysis and their metaphoric depictions of fears, desires and impulses,” Andres says. “Much of their work is autobiographical and employs symbolic objects and, unlike the desolate dreamscapes of their male counterparts, their narratives often reside within domestic spaces.” She cites the “simultaneously whimsical and nightmarish” work of Dorothea Tanning, and Maya Deren’s 1943 film “Meshes of the Afternoon” as major influences in her aesthetic development.

In her photographs, Andres essentially ‘paints’ a scene by making carefully considered decisions about the things she knows she can control like light, color, and texture. The unpredictable “performance” of a subject, placed in a controlled environment that Andres has conceived, creates the kind of tension she strives to capture. Her constant teetering on the edge of fantasy and reality adds an extra layer of unease to the scenes, while her impeccable eye for detail make the images both formally beautiful and extremely complex, like a still frame from a Kubrick film.

But beyond the visuals, the psychological tension in “The Fallen Fawn” comes from the secret we share with the two young girls, always looking slightly afraid of getting caught playing dress-up in stolen clothes, and from the central question that compelled Andres to reimagine the story for herself: Who is this woman, and where is she now? While Andres never attempts to fully answer this question, her reconstructed recollections are arguably more interesting than the answer might be.

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Portraiture is a practice steeped in tradition. From oil paintings of royalty to classic black and white photographs, a portrait is an expression of identity. For Wendy Snyder MacNeil a portrait can hold an entire lifetime and carry a rich personal history.

A Harvard student who studied under Minor White at MIT in the late 1960s and went on to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, MacNeil explores portraiture from a dizzying array of angles, but with a clarity and consistency that make her calm and complicated images easily accessible.

Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto recently acquired Snyder’s entire archive and will host “The Light Inside,” from January 20 through April 10. Curator Don Snyder, who also happens to be MacNeil’s brother, hopes that the major retrospective will show a new generation the power and potential of portraiture.

“There’s a renewed interest in personal imagery, group imagery, tightly cropped photos of faces,” Snyder says. “With digital media, people are constantly wanting to reconnect with the people in their lives through photography, and that’s where I think MacNeil’s work speaks to a contemporary audience.”

Snyder says that the “physicality” of her photos—the density and luminance of her platinum prints and her Minor White-esque mastery of the grayscale, is at first startling to a generation removed from the analog era. Despite this distance, he says people seem to have no trouble picking up on the themes and ideas she presents. “She gets to a different way of approaching the question of who people really are,” he says. “She’s making a direct connection with the subject, and through that is using photography as a way of helping people see the world.”

From her documentary projects, like her 1968 Haymarket series that explores the identities of Irish immigrants working in Boston’s street markets, to her group shots of students and faculty members in the early 1980s at Wellesley College, MIT, and RISD, to her collage work that combines traditional portraits with scrapbook clippings and family photos, McNeil’s work often feels anthropological. Her images are packed with information, whether it’s in the expressions of her subjects, the setting in which she captured them, or the history behind them. It’s her combination of genuine human insight and affection for the people in the pictures that seem to push her to discovering more about who they really are.

“The contrasts she brings into her images makes you visually toggle between them to think about this question or idea of identity,” Snyder says, pointing to her collages and composite images as a prime examples. In these photos, MacNeil pairs her portraits with subjects driver’s licenses or school IDs, forcing two very different representations of one individual to coexist in a single frame. This major body was one that Snyder and others at RIC felt showed a big evolution of her practice and process.

“It was very organic, the way she moved through all these different projects, and we wanted to focus on that narrative and that evolution,” Snyder says. “She started photographing people in the market, first as individuals and then as families, which led her toward portraiture and personal histories, which led to the composite and collage work, which then led her to think about more radical abstraction.”

While that path eventually led McNeil to take portraits of people’s hands instead of their faces, and to explore antique photographic processes and complicated printing methods, it also led her to the emerging medium of video, which is now her primary focus. After initially studying video as a faculty member at RISD, mostly for the benefit of her students, she was inspired by the birth of her children to make a complete transition from still photography and into her current role as a director, producer and editor. “She said that after her daughter and son were born, the world didn’t stand still anymore, and video was the only way to capture it,” Snyder says. “From there she realized she had to fully immerse herself in it.”

In that commitment and rigorous dedication, MacNeil’s approach to video is no different than her approach to photography was—she uses them both to not just tell stories, but to explore the interior worlds individuals inhabit, and push them outward. But there’s a sense of selflessness and distance in MacNeil’s work too, where the subject is truly the only thing that matters. It’s her curiosity and concern for her subjects that shines through in her meticulous prints and vivid films. She creates luminous physical objects that serve as platforms for personal histories to emerge, and identities to be explored, admired and understood.

“The Light Inside” will be on view at the Ryerson Images Center in Toronto from January 20 through April 10.

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The Haircut, 2014

Mother and Daughter, 2014

Beneath the Bridge, 2014

Photographer Gregory Crewdson’s latest project, “Cathedral of the Pines,” sees him digging into deeply personal territory, while maintaining the same sense of uneasy stillness and subtle dread that has made his images instantly recognizable and incredibly valuable. Here, he tells American Photo how he found inspiration in the woods and the challenges he faced while producing his first new body or work in over two years.

“Cathedral of the Pines” is a much more personal body of work than your other projects, but still maintains a sense of distance and anonymity. How did you find that balance?

I think that’s essentially the core sensibility of the work, and in some ways I have no control over that. I can make certain formal decisions, and decisions about setting and place, but the psychological mood of the pictures comes from a murkier, darker place.

To me, there’s certainly an alienation or a dislocation, but also above and beyond that there is a sense of wanting to make a connection and a possibility of fulfillment. When I was making the pictures I was going through a pretty difficult time, and all those things established the general themes of the work, of searching and seeking connections. It sounds kind of funny now, but my intention was to make the most optimistic and romantic photos I could.

These images seem very much inspired by the location itself. How did it impact your vision for the project?

This entire body of work begins and ends with the location—that’s the key point of entry. All the pictures were made on location in Beckett, Massachusetts, so, unlike my other pictures, there were no sound stages, no towns or streets to close off or shut down. I made the decision early on to make pictures that felt private, and that nature would play a key role; whether looking through a window into a forest, wherever it is, there’s always a relationship between the subject and nature.

My family had a log cabin in the woods in Beckett, so there is, implicit in the entire body of work, a return to childhood, a return to something primal. There’s all these associations and connections I have to the place, and so on an emotional level, the physical location is very important. I went through a pretty dormant time preceding this work. About two years not making any pictures—I was very disconnected from the process of making pictures, but I was taking these long hikes in the woods. I stumbled upon this trail called Cathedral of the Pines and that just sprung the whole thing. I saw it all then.

Can you talk about how working outdoors, as opposed to in a studio or a soundstage, affected your process?

The biggest difference I think was that we stayed on these locations for longer periods, and because we were working on location for such long stretches of time, we had to compromise constantly, but that was the thrill of the work. Over the three productions we were faced with extreme cold, snow, heat, freezing temperatures. When we worked in actual structures or houses, we were working in very confined spaces and small rooms, but you can feel that in the work. It’s all very contained.

We were also working with a very small crew, about 15 people, and a small budget, so we had a much smaller footprint, but the positive side of that was that we all bonded. We felt like a family, like we were going through this together.

Along with the psychological tension of this project, there’s also an art-historical tension between painting and photography, where your previous projects have felt more cinematic. Is that something you were consciously thinking of when you were making these images?

First and foremost, I’m a photographer. That’s how I approach art. I always respond to the idea that photography has a privileged approach to the world, because it’s always a recording and it’s always a document. As a baseline, that’s really important to me. With that grounding the work, you can bring cinematic or painterly sensibilities to it, but in the end there is a person in that picture, and someone taking that picture, and that provides that strange sense of detachment and voyeurism that a painting would not have. I knew exactly what I wanted the pictures to feel like, and I did want them to be more painterly and less cinematic, and quieter in tone, almost like there was nothing happening.

There were a lot of discussion about the palette and the light. There’s a lot of wood paneling and earth colors in the photos. I wanted everything to feel very muted. I was also really struck by a show I saw at the Met museum about five years ago called “Rooms with a View”—it was a 19th century painting show—and how the main central light always came from the exterior. In most of those interior shots we had to make some very complicated lighting setups to give the appearance that there was no light in the interior space. We’d already done the closing down streets and putting up hundreds of lights thing. This was a much greater challenge, making a lighting palette that felt almost invisible.

You launched a social media campaign before the opening of this exhibition, a first for you. What was that like for you, and how did you determine what you would share via the internet and what you would save for the show?

To be a photographer you have to acknowledge that the medium you’ve chosen is the currency of our culture. Everyone knows how to read a photograph, but not everyone knows how to read a painting or a sculpture, which is what’s so great about it, but also what’s difficult about it, too.

We told our crew to document every aspect of the production of this project with the caveat that they would become part of an image bank, and we held onto them for a long time—two years I think—and then in anticipation of the show, we started showing them and distributing them through Instagram and Facebook. In a certain way they sort of tell you everything, and nothing.

We’re living in a time where it’s a really challenging to be a photographer, and where we all, including myself, experience pictures through screens on our cell phones and iPads, but all these images are created to be disposable. I still truly believe in the idea that a photograph can have a physical presence as an object, which is why I go through such an extraordinary amount of effort to make it feel like a beautiful object. But there’s a difference between what you see on social media and the object itself, because the object itself is the artwork.

“Cathedral of the Pines” is currently on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York. The show will remain on view through March 5.

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If downtown is dead, Peter Hujar might be its most unlikely revivalist. A photographer who captured the gritty underground of 1970s New York City in clean, graceful vignettes, Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, leaving a legacy of work that is the aesthetic opposite of what we expect of art from that moment in cultural history. A former fashion photographer, he photographed the unconventional characters of the downtown art scene in a series of classically inspired portraits, adding a touch of timelessness to an era heavy with nostalgia.

The New York City of Hujar and his friends, colleagues, and companions is all but gone now, as luxury condos and art galleries fill the squats, studios, and vacant lots that fostered the downtown movement. But in a fitting tribute to a tribe of misfits and art makers who called Chelsea home, the Paul Kasmin Gallery, in collaboration with Pace/McGill, is currently hosting “Lost Downtown,” an intimate exhibition of Hujar’s portraits.

“Hujar’s work is incredibly varied. He’s done some wonderful work of street scenes, animals and discarded cars and other ruins, but in putting this show together we really wanted to focus on his portraiture,” says Mariska Nietzman, Director of the Paul Kasmin Gallery. “He was very aware and sensitive to who was a part of the circles he was in, and how important they were.”

Andy Warhol, William S. Borroughs, Fran Lebowitz, Vince Alleti, Susan Sontag, John Waters and his muse, the legendary drag queen Divine all posed for Hujar, but in a relaxed, natural way that feels more like character studies than traditional portraits. Leibowitz casually propped up on one elbow in her bed, Waters laid back and smiling, a cigarette burning in his hand—these are images that were made in moments of trust and mutual admiration.

“He never photographed people he didn’t know, only people he had some kind of relationship with,” Nietzman says. “His posing never feels stiff or staged, and that comes from the closeness he has with his subjects.”

Hujar’s formal attention to lighting and composition, and his deep understanding of the power of the pose, are undoubtedly reminiscent of a more traditional approach to photography, but in using those techniques to photograph his brilliant and untraditional friends and lovers, he brings them into a place in photographic history reserved for supermodels, celebrities, and millionaires. The result is a series of portraits that celebrate outcasts and outsiders with quiet pride and a loving sensitivity. Sometimes it borders on heartbreak such as in his photographs of artist David Wojnarowicz and, perhaps his most recognizable image, “Candy Darling on her Deathbed.” That photo is striking, not only for its formal beauty—the way Hujar manages to make the harsh fluorescent hospital lights glow, bathing the legendary drag queen and performance artist in the kind of Hollywood lighting fitting of her perfect makeup and fashion-plate pose—but also because the reality of the image is that Candy Darling is dying, a fact that Hujar neither hides nor glorifies, but acknowledges with heartfelt affection.

A master printer, Nietzman says Hujar also had an acute understanding of his images as physical, silver gelatin prints, and worked tirelessly to achieve the kind of rich blacks and brights whites that make Candy Darling look so vivid, and the muted grays and shimmering skin tones and textures that make his portraits of Wojnarowicz feel alive. Many of the photos included in “Lost Downtown” were made by Hujar himself, and the wrinkles and minor creases in the prints, even under the slick white frames, are surprisingly refreshing to see in a Chelsea gallery in 2016. But that’s the beauty of Hujar’s work and where “Lost Downtown” truly represents an era that seems so far away. He embraces the unusual by using classic methods and techniques that have the power to erase imperfection, and instead, celebrates it. And at its core, maybe that’s what the downtown scene was all about—finding beauty in the ruins, and reverie in the wrinkles.

“Lost Downtown” is on display at the Paul Kasmin Gallery through February 27, 2016.

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Positive Ambiguity (beard, lectern, teleprompter, wind machine, confidence), 2015

Belvedere II: Joseph P. Overton Memorial Library at The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Midland, Michigan, 2013

27 Vilniaus Street, Alytus from the series (1944 – 1991) Former NKVD-MVD-MGB-KGB Buildings, 2014

Portrait of Cultivation from the series Rasen Kaigan, 2009

The Museum of Modern Art’s annual New Photography exhibition has always presented itself as a survey of contemporary photography—a showcase that serves as a temperature gage of the medium. This year, for the first time in its 30 year history, New Photography got a subtitle—”Ocean of Images,” but in a forum hosted by MoMA this week, the question seemed to be “are we drowning?”

Phrases like “traumatic,” “institutional panic” and “a post-internet world,” cut through the Founder’s Room Wednesday night at MoMA, a long-standing champion of photography and often sited as an early supporter of some of it’s most chaotic transitions (i.e. William Eggleston’s famously controversial solo show in 1976). The conversation, led by a core of artists, curators, and photography practitioners, focused on the work in “Ocean of Images,” and was the next step forward in photography’s long and at times painful evolution.

“The authority of images is at risk,” said photographer David Hartt, one of 19 artists featured in “Ocean of Images.” “So through consuming and discarding images so rapidly, are we diluting them?” Hartt, who called his own work “anachronistic” in the context of many of the pieces on display in the exhibition, was also quick to point out that he, like his colleagues in the show, saw photography as an interdisciplinary practice, with the ability to exist simultaneously across multiple platforms and extend among various other mediums.

Hartt’s “Belvedere” series, a quietly fascinating look inside The Mackinack Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan, might be the most traditional set of images in the show, but is conceptually on par with Indre Serpytyte’s photographs of sculptures made from photographs of government buildings in Germany. These projects are earnest and thoughtful, and consider not just what is in the photograph, but the transformative act of photographing. The idea of photography as a movable, pliable format and foundation for other works of art is crucial to the exhibition, which MoMA’s Senior Photography Curator Roxana Marcoci said made the show both fascinating to explore as a viewer, but unusually challenging to curate and install.

“The installation was particularly demanding for a photo exhibition because so many of the pieces explore photography outside the frame,” she said, citing Katja Novitskova’s peacock spider photo-sculpture and Katharina Gaenssler’s “Bauhaus Staircase”. “But photography is not fixed, it’s fluid, continuously developing and morphing. The question we’re asking is not what images are of or about, but what decisions constitute the creation of that image, and that involves networking, communication and connectivity.”

As much as the work included in “Ocean of Images” addresses new challenges like image sharing, reappropriation, authorship and the shifting role and responsibility of the photographer—this is not the first time photography has been confronted with enormous change and forced to redefine itself. The artists on the cusp of photography’s latest existential crisis are essentially deconstructing the medium and putting it back together, sometimes in the form of a sculpture, or an intentionally disposable zine, a mass produced print, or releasing it into the ethers of the internet—this century’s photographic Wild West. An art form that has been historically reliant on technology, contemporary image-makers examine and scrutinize photography not just in comparison to other art forms, like they have in the past, but physically and conceptually embedded in everything they create.

“The spatial and physical proportions here are very strange, and very interesting,” artist and photographer Erin Shirreff said to an enraptured crowd eager to put the pieces together as the conversation, much like the medium in question, became more frantic and fragmented. “The proposition that the work is some other being is extremely startling, and can tell us things about ourselves and how we feel things. That strange, thin sense of physicality is very contemporary.”

In an image-heavy world, it’s not enough to simply ‘make a photograph,’ and the debate among the audience reflected the complexities of what has become an increasingly layered and formidable force in contemporary art. How does photography reflect the outside world, when we can’t verify or trust where images come from? How do we observe and understand photographs that have been warped beyond recognition and turned into something else? Is there value in the banality of cell phone photos as an evolution of vernacular photography? It’s all up for debate at MoMA, from Lucas Blalock’s next-level cut-and-paste collages, to the DIS Collective’s tongue-in-cheek photos emblazoned with MoMA watermarks—the interpretive possibilities are endless. “Ocean of Images” is a deep dive into awkward and murky territory, but it’s a necessary one, and photography can handle it.

“Ocean of Images: New Photography” will be on view at MoMA through March 20.

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America’s Gilded Age was a time of social upheaval and drastic change. New technology and methods of transportation made the world accessible in ways it had never been before, and women seized the opportunities and resources suddenly available to them. Photographer Alice Austen was one of the “New Women” to emerge from the era—independent, curious, and creative, with a witty and sophisticated approach to her work and her place in a world that was on the cusp of a new century.

On March 31, the Whitney Museum will host New Eyes on Alice Austen, a panel discussion in honor of Women’s History Month and Alice Austen’s 150th birthday featuring scholars, academics, and historians who have investigated her incredible work and unconventional lifestyle.

A Staten Island native, Alice Austen’s legacy has been preserved through her photos and through her family home, Clear Comfort, which has served as a museum since 1985. With more than 7,000 images in the permanent collection of Historic Richmond Town, and hundreds of those images available for viewing at the Alice Austen House, the museum has long been a central source for Austen’s work. It provides not only a look at the people and places that captured her photographic imagination but the upper middle-class domestic life that she and so many of her female friends and colleagues grew into, and promptly grew out of.

“Alice Austen is inspiring as a woman who forged her own path when there were a lot of social restrictions for women,” says Janice Monger, executive director of the Alice Austen House. With grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Monger organized the upcoming panel, which she says is part of a larger project to re-envision the way the museum itself has represented the complex and rebellious Austen.

“She has a really fascinating personal history, and because she has such an extensive archive of images from Staten Island, we’ve always looked at her in this hyperlocal sense,” Monger says. “But she was this Victorian woman who got on her bike or got on the ferry to document immigrants in quarantine stations or street vendors in the city. So we really wanted to compile a group of scholars for this project who could place her work, not only in New York history, but in U.S. history and the history of photography, too.”

Reinforcing Austen’s legacy as one of the first female street photographers is at the core of the museum’s mission, but Monger said it was equally important for the Alice Austen House to bring her relationship with her long-time partner Gertrude Tate to the forefront. “First and foremost, Alice Austen was a photographer. However, she also had a relationship of significance to the LGBT community and that history needs to be told in an open manner,” Monger says, adding that if the museum was to fulfill its mission to tell the story of Austen and her home, it had to embrace a more inclusive interpretation of the loving, supportive, and substantial relationship that Austen and Tate had in the 30 years they shared together at Clear Comfort.

Historian Lara Vapnek explains that Austen’s relationship with Tate, and her decision to remain unmarried, made it possible for her to explore her interests and her career as a photographer in a way that would not have been possible had she chosen to live a more “traditional” life.

“She was a part of this broader social movement where women could escape the domestic sphere and live more expansive lives that weren’t dictated by marriage or motherhood,” says Vapnek. “That’s certainly what Alice Austen aspired to do—and in many ways succeeded in doing.”

In a strictly historical context, Vapnek says that Austen was capturing the excitement of the era and, in creating a document of how women were responding to rapid social and political change, has provided us with a perspective that has gone largely unacknowledged.

“She’s documenting this sense of motion, and especially women in motion, which is so interesting to me, because women of that era are so often associated with things that are stable and steady and unchanging,” she says, referencing Austen’s images of tough yet refined Victorian ladies riding bicycles—a radical and liberating act at the time. “These images really capture the thrill of this new mobility, but also give us this fascinating insight into all of the social concerns at the time about modesty and whether or not riding a bike was ‘decent’ for a modern woman.”

While bike riding was an increasingly popular hobby for women to pursue at the turn of the century, photography, specifically documentary photography and photojournalism, was almost exclusively practiced by men.

“You don’t see women engaging in photography the way that she did,” says photo historian Sarah Gillispie, who will speak on the significance of Austen’s street photography at the Whitney panel. “There were plenty of other photographers shooting in studio spaces, but this idea of going into the street and taking pictures was really radical and something you don’t see women of that time doing.”

Photography gave Austen license to explore, and a reason to interact with people from all walks of life. She would pose her subjects, waiting to capture a specific moment, taking cues from traditional studio portraiture and using them in the streets of Manhattan. In this sense, Gillispie says Austen offers an alternative view from the male contemporaries of her time, photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who used their cameras to capture the grittiest, most deplorable urban conditions they could find.

“The types of photographs she’s taking are really unusual, compared to other photographers who were taking to the street with a strong documentarian and social reform bent,” Gillispie says. “She chooses moments that are quieter, but in the way she poses her subjects in the street still gives you a sense of energy, of happy chaos. That combination is very unique.”

By turning her camera on the world, and through her coy and subversive depictions of herself and her closest friends, Austen helped changed the role of women in photography. With a goldmine of new information to share, Thursday’s panel provides a unique opportunity for a new generation of female and LGBT artists, also living in a time of great social, political, and technological change, to be introduced to a savvy and unapologetic trailblazer—a new woman, even on her 150th birthday.

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