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Louviere + Vanessa, Artist Reception Friday September 12, 5-7pm. Exhibition is on view September 12 - November 8, 2025. A photographic exhibition that explores the intrinsic connection between the celestial and the earthly through a unique medium that combines bone and water to form handmade bio plastics, symbolizing the organic and the intangible.

 

The photo-based work of Louviere+Vanessa draws on Southern Gothic traditions. They have developed a style innovatively using mixed media and photography. Their latest work, ‘Dust of the Stars’, delves into the delicate interplay between earthly life and the cosmos. Each piece is finished with a gilt varnish and homemade bioplastics, infusing the work with a subtle luminosity that is a reminder of the divine spark within all matter, connecting the mundane with the transcendent.

“Our latest series “Dust of the Stars” explores the intrinsic connection between the celestial and the earthly. We have created a unique medium by combining bone and water to form handmade bio plastics, symbolizing the organic and the intangible.”

“These images represent what the natural world is made of: bone, water, cartilage, the essence of life and a symbol of fluidity and change. Bone and water then come together again to fuse these images into a state of permanence, something the living world is not afforded.” L+V 2025

Louviere + Vanessa (Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown) make their home and art in New Orleans. Their work combines the mediums and nuances of film, photography, painting and printmaking. They use Holgas, scanners, 8mm film, destroyed negatives, wax and blood. Since they began showing professionally in 2004, they have been in over 50 exhibits and film festivals in America and abroad. They are included in the collections of the Museum of Art | Houston, the Photomedia Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as the film archive for Globians International Film in Potsdam Germany, Microcinema in San Francisco, and the George Eastman House.

In addition to producing their innovative still images, Louviere + Vanessa experiment in moving pictures. They have created the first movie, consisting of 1,900 frames, shot with a plastic Holga camera. Based on that film, they shot the animation sequence for Rosanne Cash’s short film, “Mariners & Musicians”, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. They were included in the Australian Photography Biennale.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE. 

VIEW ALL THE WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION HERE.

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Lynn Stern: Echoes of Light, Saturday, July 19, booksigning at 4pm and artist reception at 5-7pm. Lynn Stern has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career, creating works that are abstracted and filled with luminosity.

 

Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based, American photographer, has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career.  Her work is intimately tied to the history of the photographic medium through her innovative use of natural light, still life, and large-format cameras and film. Stern’s works in the Obscura Gallery exhibition, Echoes of Light, are luminous examples of her innovation. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, she veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. As a result, in both the Quickening and Force Field series, Stern highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of a shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light, her images resemble charcoal drawings.  Indeed, a viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper.

Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based, American photographer, has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career.  Her work is intimately tied to the history of the photographic medium through her innovative use of natural light, still life, and large-format cameras and film. Stern’s works in the Obscura Gallery exhibition, Echoes of Light, are luminous examples of her innovation. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, she veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. As a result, in both the Quickening and Force Field series, Stern highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of a shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light, her images resemble charcoal drawings.  Indeed, a viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper.

Influenced by abstract expressionist painting but working as a lens-based photographer, Stern defies the expectations central to photography by pulling away from the sharp focus, instead blurring, veiling, cropping, partially obscuring, and otherwise de-literalizing what is in front of her lens.

 

Lynn Stern Echoes of Light Exhibition Catalogue
Purchase the exhibition catalogue here.

 

“My photographs are not about what they are of…. I believe that photography is a medium of light, not representation. Light is to photography as paint is to painting. I think like a painter in that my concerns are largely formal: my aim is to create tension, plasticity, texture, and, especially, spatial ambiguity in which figure (or abstract form) and ground seem to merge with or emerge from one another. Above all, I want the image to feel alive and filled with energy.” – LS

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE

VIEW ALL OF LYNN STERN’S WORKS ON OUR WEBSITE HERE.

 

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We’re excited to welcome back Obscura Gallery artist Danny Lyon for a book signing of his latest release, JUNK: America in Ruins (Damiani, 2025), on Saturday, June 28, 12:30-2:30pm.

JUNK is a spectacular visual journey through the great forgotten junkyards of the West, where the historic gas-guzzling monsters of the 1950s and ’60s lie wrecked and rusting in the relentless western sun. At first with his Rolleiflex loaded with color negative film, then working with a Fujifilm medium format digital camera, Lyon pictures the cars as if they were remnants of a civilization in ruins. Junk: America in Ruins (Damiani Books, 2025) features images of more than 80 American cars that Lyon discovered in forgotten junkyards on travels through Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma.

Lyon is one of the most influential photographers of the last six decades and a key figure of New Journalism, whose immersive and groundbreaking works include The Bikeriders (1968), The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), The Southwestern Portfolio: New Mexico and Mexico (1967-1983) and the memoir This Is My Life I’m Talking About (Damiani Books, 2024). Lyon’s Civil Rights archive was acquired by the Duke University in 2024, and his photographic documentary Conversations with the Dead remains “as powerful and relevant as ever” in light of America’s ever expanding system of mass incarceration.

 

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We’re excited to welcome back Obscura Gallery artist Danny Lyon for a book signing of his latest release, JUNK: America in Ruins (Damiani, 2025), on Saturday, June 28, 12:30-2:30pm.

JUNK is a spectacular visual journey through the great forgotten junkyards of the West, where the historic gas-guzzling monsters of the 1950s and ’60s lie wrecked and rusting in the relentless western sun. At first with his Rolleiflex loaded with color negative film, then working with a Fujifilm medium format digital camera, Lyon pictures the cars as if they were remnants of a civilization in ruins. Junk: America in Ruins (Damiani Books, 2025) features images of more than 80 American cars that Lyon discovered in forgotten junkyards on travels through Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma.

Lyon is one of the most influential photographers of the last six decades and a key figure of New Journalism, whose immersive and groundbreaking works include The Bikeriders (1968), The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), The Southwestern Portfolio: New Mexico and Mexico (1967-1983) and the memoir This Is My Life I’m Talking About (Damiani Books, 2024). Lyon’s Civil Rights archive was acquired by the Duke University in 2024, and his photographic documentary Conversations with the Dead remains “as powerful and relevant as ever” in light of America’s ever expanding system of mass incarceration.

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The Photography Show Presented by AIPAD

April 23 – 27, 2025
Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, NY 10065
Booth B04

The photography show presented by aipad. April 23-27, booth b04

Opening April 23, 2025 is the 45th edition of The Photography Show presented by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The Photography Show is the longest running and foremost commercial exhibition dedicated to the photographic medium.

In our booth, we will are excited to share new work by Rashod Taylor, Douglas Miles (above photo), Lynn Stern, Louviere+Vanessa, as well as hand-painted gelatin silver prints by Brigitte Carnochan and vintage platinum prints by Laura Gilpin.

View the email with our booth preview here.

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AIPAD Talks Presents ‘Abstract as a Verb’: Lynn Stern in Conversation with Phil Taylor

Monday, April 7, 2025
11am MST

REGISTER HERE FOR THE FREE ONLINE ZOOM EVENT

This conversation will range across the full-breadth of Lynn Stern’s work, tracing connections among recent abstractions as well as early work including landscapes and still lifes. Taylor and Stern will discuss the ways in which her early landscapes and interiors may be said to depict things, but the depictions are highly abstracted: pared down and devoid of details, they create a feeling of light, space, and movement. These qualities constitute the subject of Stern’s ongoing abstractions incorporating a transparent scrim. Consideration of a selection of important historical works from the collection of the George Eastman Museum will enrich and expand the conversation.

Phil Taylor is Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. He joined the museum in 2022 in a newly created New York City-based curatorial position. At the Eastman Museum he has organized Liz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent) (2025); Scene at Eastman: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (2024); Life with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum (2024), with colleagues in the Department of Photography; New Directions: Recent Acquisitions (2024), with Louis Chavez; and Gregory Halpern: 19 winters / 7 springs (2023). Previously, Taylor was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, where he assisted Roxana Marcoci on the major survey Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (2022), and co-edited Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader (2021). At MoMA, he organized or co-organized collection exhibitions including Machines, Mannequins, and Monsters (2019) and A Modern Media World (2020). With Antawan I. Byrd and Leslie M. Wilson, he co-organized panels devoted to photography and Africa at the 2024 conferences of the College Art Association and the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.

Lynn Stern is a New York-based photographer who works with black-and-white film and indirect, natural light. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and is in public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Art Museum (OR); the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

Six monographs of Stern’s work have been published: Skull (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017); Frozen Mystery: Lynn Stern Photographs 1978-2008 (Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón / Center for Creative Photography: 2009); Veiled Still Lifes (exhibition catalogue, 2006); Animus (Tucson: Nazraeli Press, 2000); Dispossession (New York: Aperture, 1995), “Highly Commended Book,” 1995 Ernst Haas Awards; and Unveilings (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988).

Stern was co-editor of Photographic INsight from 1990-1993. She was the organizer and moderator of a two-evening symposium held at New York University in 1991 titled “Examining Postmodernism: Images/Premises” and in 2016 moderated a discussion titled “Perceptual/Conceptual: How Does Art Nourish Us?” in New York.

The Lynn Stern Archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.

A white background with three empty bottles and two plates.

Register for the free online Zoom event here.

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LUIS GONZALEZ PALMA: MOBIUS on view through June 21, reception on May 9, 2025.

Luis Gonzalez Palma is among the most recognizable Latin American photographers. The early work he is canonized for address the difficult past of his birth country of Guatemala and its people. This history of engagement spans topics from the colonial plight of the Mayan people to the legacy of the civil war and “the disappeared.” González Palma employs the intimacy of portraiture, weight of the gaze, and qualities of chosen materials to drive meaning in his work. But this is only the beginning.

Möbius is a diverse and open-ended series, which began in 2013. The artist embraces, destroys and rebuilds upon structures he built up for himself over 40 years, beginning with his own iconic work. Luis González Palma has been celebrated for symbolism, portraiture, and photography. To reduce him to these realms is to underestimate his profound dialectic. To break away from the confines of his own past, through Möbius González Palma seeks to reinvent and renew his vision and its perception by others.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW ALL THE WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE.

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A woman and man sitting on the ground in front of a bench.

While visiting Paris Photo this past November, we were thrilled to be able to meet with Coco and gather some new inventory for our gallery! We won’t be holding a formal reception for this exhibition so please visit us anytime during gallery hours 11-5pm Tuesday – Saturday to view the exhibition! Today, March 14, we are open 11-4pm!

French artist Coco Fronsac paints non-European masks onto Western vernacular photographs from the early 20th Century. A dichotomy is developed between the early forms from the continents of Africa, Oceania, America, and Asia, and the standardized nature of photographic portraits as they occurred a century ago. These surreal images plunge us into a dreamlike, comical world, contrasting ritual and tradition, to  exploit the unexpected juxtapositions with startling effect.  For the artist, the portraits seek to bring a commonality to the human experience by representing the family relationship and different stages of development for a Western person like herself (moving from birth, to communion, military service, marriage, etc.) in context with non-Western rituals she respects.’

Coco Fronsac plays with the viewers’ vision of time, to better project themselves into a new, fluctuating, living, subjective reality. The vernacular photographs on which Fronsac works themselves go back in time.  The paintings she mixes over the photographs typically go back to indigenous cultures she admires.  With the combination, she imbues a contemporary approach to both subjects, bringing a new portrayal of humanity’s present position.

 

VIEW ALL OF COCO FRONSAC’S WORK HERE.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

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A woman and man sitting on the ground in front of a bench.

Obscura Gallery presents IAN MARKUS: Fragments of the Frontier, a photographic exploration of the fading culture of ranching in Montana. With imagery created from a 4 x 5†film camera, Ian composites two or more negatives in the darkroom to create ethereal, large-format gelatin silver prints. The resulting ghostly images give a visceral interpretation of the fading cowboy culture that Ian has encountered in the contemporary ranches of Montana.

Santa Fean Ian Markus is the son of the late Obscura Gallery photographer Kurt Markus, who had a long storied career including photographing cowboy culture, and publishing three cowboy monographs since the 1980s. Ian has witnessed this subject matter since he was a young boy accompanying his father on photographic expeditions in the West and assisting Kurt for many long hours in the darkroom. This work provides an insightful perspective into the current state of ranching, showing the juxtaposition of a practice that is facing numerous challenges in our contemporary climate.

VIEW ALL THE WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION HERE.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

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Collaboration with Ski Santa Fe 2024-25 ski season

#SKIBUENO contest announcement and instructions.


A woman and man sitting on the ground in front of a bench.

We are so excited to be collaborating with our local ski basin, Ski Santa Fe this season! Here’s the deal:

1. Take a photo of your winter experience at Ski Santa Fe.

2. Post it to Instagram including hashtag #skibueno and tag @skisantafe (be sure to make your profile public so we can see it!)

3. We’ll choose one image per week to then culminate into a photo exhibition held at La Casa Lodge on the ski basin at the end of the season on April 4, 2025. We’ll then choose one ‘best-in-show’ to receive a 2025-2026 ski pass as the winner. Prints are sponsored by Rush Creek Editions in Santa Fe. Juried by Obscura Gallery.

Get to it!
#SkiBueno #SkiSantaFe #RushCreekEditions #ObscuraGallery #NMTrue

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A woman and man sitting on the ground in front of a bench.

 

Obscura Gallery presents our 2024 Holiday exhibition of small, photo-based works by gallery and guest artists including

Angie Brockey, Tulsa, OK
Brigitte Carnochan,Palo Alto, CA
Sam Elkind, Santa Fe, NM
Nicola Hackl-Haslinger,Austria
Max Kellenberger,San Francisco, CA
Louviere+Vanessa, New Orleans, LA
Jennifer Schlesinger, Santa Fe, NM
Caitlyn Soldan, Santa Fe, NM
Eddie Soloway,Santa Fe, NM
and more!

We will host a Holiday open house reception on Saturday, November 30, 2024 from 1-5pm with many of the artists present.

VIEW ALL THE WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION HERE.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

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Major institutions acquire Rashod Taylor’s work

Child laying underneath a makeshift fort.


It has been a great 2024 year for Rashod Taylor! We landed his work in three institutions this year including the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution. It was eight years ago that the museum opened its doors in Washington, D.C, where the public can learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience, what it means to their lives, and how it helped us shape this nation.

A woman and man sitting on the ground in front of a bench.

 

In addition, we were also thrilled to place Rashod’s work with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division in Washington D.C., both whom acquired work from the My America and the Little Black Boy series, all of which we exhibited at our gallery and the AIPAD fair over the past several years. Congratulations to Rashod and his poignant and beautiful work on this major milestone!

 

A woman and man sitting on the ground in front of a bench.