But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World

In this exhibition curated by photographer Paul Graham, nine contemporary photographers—Vanessa Winship, Curran Hatleberg, Richard Choi, RaMell Ross, Gregory Halpern, Piergiorgio Casotti, Emanuele Brutti, Kristine Potter, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa—present images made in the 21st-century United States that reflect a movement towards a lyrical documentary practice.

Through photographs, the prism of time is illuminated and breaks to clarity. We see the components and how they fit together. They take us on unexpected paths, they bring us to other lives we could know if life were to turn another way; they foster empathy. They allow us to recognize that life is not a story that flows to a neat finale; it warps and branches, spirals and twists, appearing and disappearing from our awareness.  

This exhibition presents photography attuned to this consciousness, photography from the world, from life as it is—in all its complicated wonder—in the twenty-first-century United States: from Vanessa Winship’s peripatetic vision in she dances on Jackson through Curran Hatleberg’s gatherings of humankind in Lost Coast; Richard Choi’s meditation on the differences between the flow of life and our memory of it in What Remains; RaMell Ross’s images of quotidian life from South County; Gregory Halpern’s luminous Californian journey in ZZYZX; Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti’s Index G work on the delicate balance between economic theory and lived fact; Kristine Potter’s re-examination of the Western myth of manifest destiny in Manifest; or Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s braiding the power of images with the forces of history in All My Gone Life.

This photography is postdocumentary. No editorializing or reductive narrative is imposed. That there is no story is the story. For these artists, all is in play and everything matters—here is a freedom, hard won, sometimes confusing, but nonetheless genuine: a consciousness of life and its song. The world’s infinite consanguinity lies here: each of us and all of this exist in the fulsome now.  

Register to attend a free online Curator’s Talk with Paul Graham, who will give a presentation as well as a virtual in-gallery tour of the show, on Wednesday, February 24 at 6 PM. Reserve your copy of the book But Still, It Turns (MACK) through ICP’s shop.

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