From the Juror, Marvin Heiferman:
The sighted among us look at all sorts of things and for all sorts of reasons. We scan our surroundings to process data to get from one place to another. We glance and stare – at each other, as events unfold, at odd things here and there – because we want or need to know more about one thing or another. Looking can be a pleasure, a problem, a solution, and a measure of engagement.
“In my opinion you cannot say you have thoroughly seen anything,” the French writer Emile Zola wrote in 1900, “until you have got a photograph of it, revealing a lot of points which otherwise would be unnoticed, and which, in most cases could not be distinguished.” And photography continues to function that way for so, so many of us and for similar reasons. The making and sharing of lens-based imagery enables us to distinguish, question and think though things personally and, in a juried exhibition like this one, collectively.
In this instance, image makers were invited to look outward, to interface with and picture “the social, political, and environmental forces that shape our world” and submit work that “confronts how we see, what we overlook, and the truths that demand our attention.” Many did, and the works presented were chosen to survey an array of realities, concerns, and visual strategies. Each of them asks each of us to consider not only what we look at, but when and how and where that happens and – most importantly – why.
Marvin Heiferman – a curator, writer, editor and producer – organizes exhibitions and online projects about photography and visual culture for venues that have included: The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, Castelli Graphics/Photography and LIGHT Gallery. Author of 15 books including Photography Changes Everything (2012 Smithsonian/Aperture) and Seeing Science (2019 Aperture/UMBC), Heiferman has contributed essays and articles to numerous artist monographs, museum catalogs, trade publications, magazines and media outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Artforum, Gagosian Quarterly, Aperture, Art in America, and BOMB. Books edited include Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images by Maurice Berger (Aperture/New York Times) 2024 and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, (Aperture) 1986.
