Meet the Women Who Shaped Japanese Photography

Page spread from I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers From the 1950s to Now

Mickiko Kon, Sake + Karei +Haihiru (Salmon, flatfish, and high heel), 1987; Michiko Kon, Saba + Markura (Mackerel and pillow), 1979

Michiko Kon included in a landmark retrospective and Aperture Publication

A recent article in Tokyo Weekender covers the landmark retrospective, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers From the 1950s to Now, in Tokyo, Japan. Drawn from a 2024 book of the same title, the exhibition gathers over 200 works by 30 women artists from postwar Japan to today, including Michiko Kon. Eugenie Shin writes: "...while Western institutions had spent decades focusing on the grit and conceptual genius of Japan’s male photographers, their female contemporaries’ innovations had been left untranslated and unarchived abroad." This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society.

On Michiko Kon: "Kon shot highly perishable sculptures she made herself — fish scales pinned on a dress, a high heel wrapped in chicken skin, fresh vegetables and insects arranged into uncanny shapes. These eerie, tactile gelatin silver prints capture the exact threshold between beautiful artifice and organic decay." —Shin

Read the full article.

The photobook, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers From the 1950s to Now, is available for purchase on Aperture's website.

The exhibition runs from July 4 to August 26 at Hikarie Hall in Shibuya. More information here.

Cig Harvey: The Color of Life

Cig Harvey, Madeleine & Blue, Vinalhaven, 2023

A podcast interview with Cig Harvey for Right Eye Dominant

In this final episode of Right Eye Dominant’s fifth season, podcaster and artist Nick Tauro Jr. interviews Cig Harvey, as she discusses working with color photography, finding inspiration in the everyday, and merging the personal with the universal.

Listen to the full episode. 

The New York Times: History of American Utopia in 10 Acts

Mary Mattingly is featured as a key artist in the climate activism movement in an article exploring the significant experiments that have best captured the country’s idealistic spirit. 

By: Zoë Lescaze

Rethinking society requires imagination. Below are ten American movements from different eras of the country’s history and the defining works of art they produced.
....
10. Climate Activism
In the 2013 book, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World,” the philosopher Timothy Morton came up with the term “hyperobject” to describe phenomena so “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” they defy comprehension. Climate change is a hyperobject, according to Morton, which is what makes it so difficult to combat. Rather than despair at the scope of our current environmental crisis, though, the artist Mary Mattingly creates works of art that double as pilot programs in how societies might rethink broken systems. In 2016, she docked “Swale,” a barge supporting a garden of edible plants, in the South Bronx for locals with otherwise limited access to fresh produce. Anyone could come and pick as many herbs, fruits and vegetables as they wanted. Foraging in city parks is illegal, but the monumental sculpture helped local advocates and Parks Department officials establish the Bronx River Foodway, the first parkland where foraging is permitted. A new incarnation of “Swale” called “Floating Garden” is slated to return to New York City later this year.

Read the full article here.

Fragments of Light: Exploring Innovative Photography with Sandra Cattaneo Adorno

Tomasz Trzebiatowski, editor of FRAMES, Interviews Sandra Cattaneo about her Venice exhibition Fragments of Light

To mark the opening of her exhibition, Fragments of Light, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno walks Tomasz Trzebiatowski, editor of FRAMES, through the exhibition at Palazzo Bembo in Venice: exploring her series that emphasizes the interplay between light, medium, and viewer perception. Fragments of Light is presented in parallel with the 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, for the 8th Edition of Personal Structures: Confluences. The exhibition showcases Cattaneo Adorno’s transformative approach to street photography, enveloping us in a mellifluous blend of sight, sound, and motion to explore the inherent fragility and unstable experience of perception. Adorno is debuting three dimensional work, bringing together large-scale video installation, thirteen monochromatic photographs, and a new photomosaic installation of 24 prints.

Watch the interview here,

DRIFT | Featured in The Art Newspaper's Coverage of AIPAD 2026

Drift
Empire State of Mine, 2024
Archival pigment print

The Photography Show fair’s 45th edition explores medium’s full history from its origins to AI

By: Osman Can Yerebakan

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) opens the 45th edition of its annual fair, the Photography Show, today (22 April) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Around 85% of the fair’s exhibitors are members of the non-profit organisation, while a smaller contingent of non-member exhibitors was selected by the vetting members’ committee. The fair’s main section features around 65 exhibitors, most of whom hail from the US and Europe, while a new sector called Focal Point features 13 exhibitors, each offering solo presentations by artists who have pushed at the boundaries of photography in a layout designed by the Los Angeles- and Mexico City-based design firm Oficina.la.

Returning participants this year include many of New York’s longstanding photography galleries, such as Bruce Silverstein, Clamp, Danziger Gallery, Higher Pictures, Robert Mann Gallery, Yancey Richardson and Howard Greenberg Gallery. Additional US galleries at the fair include the West Coast’s Paul M. Hertzman, Von Lintel Gallery, Scott Nichols and Robert Koch Gallery, as well as Stephen Daiter Gallery from Chicago and The Hulett Collection from Tulsa.

Read the full article on The Art Newspaper's website.

Women Reframed: Staging, Surrealism, and the Politics of Image Making

ringl+pit
Petrole Hahn, Berlin, 1930
Silver print
10.25 x 11.75 inches

A Women’s History Month with Artists from Robert Mann Gallery

By: AnnaRose Goldwitz

Across generations and geographies, the women represented by Robert Mann Gallery — Holly Andres, Ellen Auerbach, Cig Harvey, Michiko Kon, and Ringl + Pit — construct images that resist passive looking. Their works do not simply depict women; they stage, fragment, obscure, and reimagine them. Taken together, these artists trace a lineage of photographic resistance — one that challenges the authority of the gaze while reclaiming authorship over the image.

What unites these artists is not a singular aesthetic but a shared commitment to rethinking how women are seen — and how they see. From the staged psychological spaces of Holly Andres to the avant-garde interventions of Ringl + Pit, from Cig Harvey’s sensory poetics to Michiko Kon’s material surrealism, each artist disrupts the expectation that images should be transparent or easily legible.

Instead, they insist on opacity, complexity, and authorship.

For Women’s History Month, this grouping does more than celebrate women photographers — it underscores the radical potential of image-making as a site of resistance. These works remind us that to photograph is not merely to capture, but to construct, question, and ultimately, to reclaim the terms of visibility itself.

Read full article on Musée Magazine's website.

The City That Appears in Fragments

Alfred Stieglitz
Old and New New York, 1910
Vintage hand-pulled photogravure
7.95 x 6.22 inches
Published in Camera Work, No. 36, 1911

By Samuel J. Abrams

Professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

The photograph is titled Old and New New York.

Made in 1910 by Alfred Stieglitz, it captures a city caught in the act of remaking itself. In the foreground the street feels modest, almost intimate. Brick buildings line the block. A few figures move along the sidewalk, grounding the scene in the ordinary scale of urban life.

Behind them rises something entirely different.

A skeletal skyscraper climbs into the sky, its steel frame exposed, its floors not yet enclosed. The structure appears almost translucent, a lattice of beams hovering above the older streets below. It is not yet a building so much as the idea of one.

I stood before the image longer than I expected. The steel frame seemed less like a structure than a question the city had begun asking itself. I had seen the picture before in books, reproduced on glossy pages alongside so many other canonical photographs. But seeing it here—fully printed, occupying its own quiet space on a gallery wall—gave it a different weight. It no longer felt like an illustration of history. It felt like an encounter with a moment when the future had not yet decided what shape it would take. The image captures the precise instant when that future begins to overshadow the past.

Standing before Stieglitz’s work at the Robert Mann Gallery, one realizes that the subject is not simply construction. It is transformation. The horizontal city of brick, cornices, and narrow streets still exists, but the vertical city of steel and elevators is already rising behind it.

The New York we now recognize - the skyline, the towers, the sheer vertical ambition of the place - was still in the process of becoming.

That tension between what already exists and what is emerging runs quietly through the exhibition Fragmentary Glimpses: Alfred Stieglitz and David Vestal in New York. The show pairs Stieglitz’s early photographs of the city with images made decades later by David Vestal. And despite being separated by half a century, both photographers grasped something fundamental about cities: Cities are rarely experienced as complete views, they appear instead through fragments.

View full essay

View Fragmentary Glimpses

Jeff Brouws | Silent Monoliths: The Coaling Tower Project

Jeff Brouws
Coaling Tower #20, 2013
Archival pigment print

In his new book, Brouws documents the concrete giants that once fueled America’s railroads and still haunt the landscape

Excerpt of Chronogram Magazine article by Brian K. Mahoney

For more than three decades, Jeff Brouws has photographed the American landscape at moments of transition—when buildings, industries, and systems are falling out of use but not yet erased. His latest photobook, Silent Monoliths: The Coaling Tower Project (MIT Press), is a concentrated expression of that long-running interest, focused on the massive concrete coaling towers that once fueled America’s steam-powered railroads.

Built primarily between the 1910s and 1930s, coaling towers were essential infrastructure, designed to rapidly refill locomotive tenders with coal. When railroads converted to diesel power after World War II, the towers became obsolete almost overnight. Yet many still stand today. Not because anyone made a sentimental choice to preserve them, but because they are extraordinarily difficult to remove. “They’re made of concrete and they’re all rebar,” Brouws says. “There’s reinforced steel that runs throughout, so they’re very hard to take down.”

Brouws came to the project almost by accident. While looking at a photobook by a younger photographer, he noticed an image of a coaling tower paired with an unrelated photograph. The image stuck with him. Curious, he searched online and discovered a Wikipedia page cataloging every coaling tower still standing in North America. The list included names, locations, and GPS coordinates. “I was just aghast,” Brouws recalls. “I thought they were mostly gone. And the number was over a hundred.”

Visit Chronogram Magazine for the full article.

View Jeff Brouw’s Artist Page

Emerging From Darkness | Spirit and Shadow

Firefly Reflections, Selangor River, Malaysia, 2017

Elijah Gowin's Interview with Yale University Radio 

In a recent podcast episode hosted by Yale University Radio, Elijah Gowin shares how Spirit and Shadow combines snow and illumination with a poetic sense of light emerging from darkness. 

Gowin explains his process of photographing in the dark, and how he uses flash to illuminate snowflakes that cannot be seen with the human eye.

For the series The Last Firefly, he traveled to Malaysia and Thailand, to capture the mystical communication of fireflies, working with scientists to find their location and timing his photograph sessions with a new moon to allow the fireflies to truly glow before the camera.

Photography's ability to illustrate and construct scenes rather than purely document is something Gowin feels strongly about, and he dives into specific images featured in the exhibition. He shares the influence of his family’s spiritual connections and southern culture in his approach to metaphysical aspects of photography.

To listen to the full interview, please visit Yale University Radio's website.

Mary Mattingly Chosen as the Teiger Mentor in the Arts and Writes “A City of Humors” in The Brooklyn Rail

Prodigies and Portents, 2025
Archival pigment print
20 x 20 inches
Edition of 5, plus 2 APs

Mary Mattingly is an interdisciplinary artist who constructs and photographs fictional gardens, co-creates floating food forests and is determined to keep imagining utopia

Mary Mattingly’s series Night Gardens has an important subtext regarding our environment. Melancholy becomes a landscape, an alchemy of light and longing, brimming with texture, color, and life.

Mattingly shares, “These photographs draw from the ancient theory of the four humors which were each once thought to govern the body’s balance, mood, and temperament. Plants appear as companions in these states, standing in for cure, portent, and symptom alike.” Mattingly recently expanded on these thoughts in an essay in The Brooklyn Rail, in which she meditates on Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, using his four humors as proposals for increasing our city’s civic spaces and social services.

We are also happy to share that Mattingly has been selected for the Spring 2026 Teiger Mentor in the Arts at at Cornell University’ College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Read “A City of Humors” in The Brooklyn Rail 
Learn More about the Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program

View Mary Mattingly’s Night Gardens: An Afterword