The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Kingston has launched its inaugural Upstate Photography Biennial, assembling work from 39 artists rooted across the Hudson Valley and surrounding regions. The exhibition, which runs until September 6, 2026, was co-curated by Marina Chao and Adam Giles Ryan and explores how contemporary photographers in the region document everything from political resistance to intimate domestic moments.
The show draws its strength from the sheer range of what these artists choose to witness and preserve. Some work with history, others with the present moment. Some are documenting their own communities; others are excavating archives that have been buried for decades.
Morgan Gwenwald's photographs trace a path through the radical 1970s. In the early part of that decade, when Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Gwenwald taught members of a lesbian feminist collective to shoot rifles in nearby woods and documented them. That experience became the foundation for her BFA thesis project, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." After leaving art school, Gwenwald turned her camera toward the lesbian and queer rights movements, creating a photographic record of activism that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.
Other artists in the biennial explore identity through entirely different frameworks. Robert Kalman's portraits begin with a single question posed to each subject: "What's it like for you to be an American?" He pairs photographs with handwritten responses, creating a dialogue between image and voice. Lyle Ashton Harris recently rediscovered images from his own past, photographs taken before and during college and graduate school from the late 1980s through 2000. His series, "Ektachrome Archive," comprises self-portraits and images of friends and lovers that capture a specific moment in his life and artistic development.
The exhibition includes work that challenges how we see domestic space and the female body. Allison DeBritz creates collages designed to counter the way mainstream media objectifies women. Elizabeth Pedinotti Haynes arranges and alters everyday kitchen objects in her family table series, recasting the home as a performance space shaped by personal expectation.
Memory and loss emerge as central themes. Allie Tsubota combined photographs of herself with fictional letters attributed to Tamiki Hara, a writer who witnessed the Hiroshima bombing. The pairing of her contemporary images with this correspondence reflects on how time, memory, and loss interweave. Ann Burke Daly and Marion Belanger worked with digitized glass plate negatives from Harvard College Observatory, originally produced by women called "computers" who cataloged the night sky. Their new work layers these historical images with contemporary exposures, hand-printing and annotating each photograph to merge past and present.
Place and migration drive several bodies of work. Kevin Williamson photographed in his birthplace, the Hudson Valley, viewing the region as a territory caught between urban and rural, past and present. Luis Manuel Diaz's series "Canta y No Llores" spans decades of images made between rural Michoacán, Mexico, and suburban New York, exploring what people carry when they migrate and what they leave behind. Viktorsha Uliyanova's suspended textiles printed with photographs of Soviet panel buildings and family archives serve as resistance to conformity, a counter-narrative to state propaganda.
Meryl Meisler's photographs document the nightlife she has inhabited for decades, capturing behind-the-scenes moments, performances, and pauses in a community where she remains embedded. Seth David Rubin constructs fractured realities through mirrors, arguing that his incomplete, refracted images more accurately represent how human perception actually works.
Author James Rodriguez: "This biennial proves that photography's real power isn't in capturing what is, but in asking what we're willing to see about ourselves and our communities."
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