Monroe Gallery of Photography specializes in 20th- and 21st-century photojournalism and humanist imagery—images that are embedded in our collective consciousness and which form a shared visual heritage for human society. They set social and political changes in motion, transforming the way we live and think—in a shared medium that is a singular intersectionality of art and journalism.
— Sidney and Michelle Monroe
“The public should assume responsibility for creating an accurate record of what’s happening. It’s a big job that requires participation from all of civil society, including the local press, religious and community groups, librarians and teachers. Everyone. In every city. This is not an act of protest. It is record-keeping. There will come a time when people will want to know what it was like to be here, now. What was it like to work in a food truck or at a Home Depot when federal agents showed up? What was it like to be randomly stopped or followed on the sidewalk while walking home from a store? What’s it like for Native Americans to be accused by ICE of being undocumented?”
Congratulations to Joe McNally on receiving the International Award from The American Society of Photographers.
Joe McNally’s journey began in New York City in 1976 as a copyboy at the Daily News, earning the lowest pay grade in the newsroom and living in a cheap Manhattan hotel. What followed was not instant glamour, but decades of relentless drive, curiosity, and commitment to the craft. Joe stepped onto the tightrope of freelance photography and never looked back.
The ASP International Award is presented annually to an individual or organization whose contributions have meaningfully advanced the ideals of professional photography as both an art and a science on a global scale. This distinguished honor reflects ASP’s commitment to recognizing those whose influence transcends borders, elevating the craft and inspiring excellence within the international photographic community.
Ron Haviv is one of the most consequential conflict photojournalists of our era. He has spent over three decades on the frontlines of history, photographing more than 25 conflicts in over 100 countries. His work has not only documented history but actively influenced it —from serving as evidence in war crimes tribunals to helping trigger shifts in US foreign policy. We first sat down with him at the iMEdD International Journalism Forum to explore the full range of his career, focusing on the enduring ethical mission of photojournalism and the forces currently reshaping it: from the critical educational role of the VII Academy to the way we perceive and verify visual truth. We later met at this year’s Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25), where we expanded our initial conversation to reflect how these questions continue to evolve. As he put it during his GIJC25 “Investigative Visual Journalism” workshop, “Visual journalism is a field of practice that incorporates reporting, visual documentation, narrative storytelling, and public accountability,” a definition that underscores both the gravity of the work and the moral imperative that accompanies it.
Over several decades, Haviv’s images have spanned the full spectrum of photojournalism’s impact—from the war crimes courts in The Hague, where his photographs were part of the evidence, to his coverage in Panama that may have influenced US policy, and his ongoing documentation of humanitarian crises in places such as Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Taken together, these different outcomes naturally lead to a central question:
How have these different outcomes ultimately defined your view of photojournalism’s core purpose and its enduring ethical responsibility in the contemporary media landscape?
Now having the ability to look back at my work and its impact —and also its lack of impact— over the course of the last 40 years or so, I can see that not only my work but the work of visual journalism plays a role in society, that it partners with society in its ability to inform, to educate, to cajole, to embarrass people into action.
I think that the overall goal has always been, relatively from the beginning of my career, to create work that has the ability to have an impact, to push, to motivate people into some action, or at the very least to have understanding and awareness of what’s going on, especially in terms of places where their governments are often complicit, responsible, or have a play in what’s going on in a faraway place.
As an American, often that’s almost the entire world, so I feel that responsibility as an American visual journalist.
The overall goal has always been to create work that has the ability to have an impact or at very least to have understanding and awareness of what’s going on, especially in terms of places where their governments have a play in what’s going on in a faraway place. I feel that responsibility as an American visual journalist.
Opposition candidate Guillermo Ford in Panama, on the election day, 1989. Photo: Courtesy of Ron Haviv/ VII Foundation.
What was the most defining moment in your career that made you realize the power of photography, the power of the image?
I think it’s probably just a combination of two things. The first would be right at the beginning of my career, my first real foreign assignment in the Central American country of Panama, where a dictator held elections, lost the elections, nullified the elections, and then had the would-be victors beaten.
I photographed the vice president-elect [editor’s note: Guiellermo Ford], covered in the blood of his bodyguard, who was killed trying to protect him, being beaten up by a paramilitary supporter of the dictator. That photograph was featured on the front pages of newspapers and magazines around the world. Later that year, when the United States invaded Panama to overthrow the dictator, the president of the United States [editor’s note: George H. W. Bush] referenced the photograph as one of the justifications for the invasion.
It wasn’t whether I agreed with the invasion, and I certainly didn’t believe the invasion was solely due to the photograph, but the photograph did play a role in the discussion that led to the invasion. It was discussed in Congress, used by the opposition on the ground in Panama, and utilized to raise awareness and garner more support for overthrowing the dictator.
Then, three years later, in the third war in former Yugoslavia, I was in Bosnia, and I was able to document a Serbian paramilitary group known as the Tigers, executing unarmed Muslim civilians. I managed to take a photograph, basically documenting what later became known as ethnic cleansing. The photograph was also published around the world, but this time there was no reaction. The same president who reacted to the photograph in Panama was in power during the war in Bosnia and did nothing. And so, while I was, I don’t think naive, to believe that the Panama picture succeeded on its own, including the foreign policy of the American government, when a similar photograph came into play a few years later, it was not part of the American foreign policy, and therefore, nobody was going to react to it, and nobody did. It was only after time that the photograph began to take on its own power.
It was in those two instances that I realized both the power and the limitations of what a photograph could do.
You’ve often said your work “documents history.” Thinking about all the historical moments you’ve covered, which one feels most crucial for your archives, and how does your role as a witness influence your continued drive to document history?
First of all, the work that I do is not completely altruistic, right? It is because I have this interest in history. For me, starting early on, to be in Berlin when the wall came down, to watch Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, to be at Baghdad when the statue came down, to witness these things for myself, real history, it’s remarkable, it is incredible, what an amazing way I think to live my life.
Now, when you add the fact that I’m able to take photographs and share my subjective interpretation of these events with people, showing them what I saw and what I think, it is an incredible privilege. That itself is a motivating factor in continuing to do this, because the world continues to change.
In the time since I started, the world changed in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, in 2001 with the Twin Towers, then the War on Terror, then the Arab Spring, all these different things that need documentation and have had an incredible impact on the lives of people in the world.
For me, to be able to see it, document it, and experience it is quite incredible.
Photography allows for multiple interpretations, and framing is critical. Have you ever had your photos misinterpreted or presented in a way that distorted their meaning?
The biggest one and probably the most impactful one was from a photograph in Bosnia. I took a photograph of ethnic cleansing, and it was a very well-known photograph, and it’s been continuously published around the world. But what’s important about the photograph, aside from what you see in the image, is the caption, so you know what’s going on, who’s who, what does the symbol on the soldier’s arm say, who are the civilians that are dying, and so on.
During the first part of the war in Ukraine in 2014, a well-known Russian blogger with millions of followers took the photograph and let the image stand on its own. All he did was change the captions and say, “Ukrainian soldiers kill Russian civilians”. And then the photograph goes viral in Russia. Τhen somebody made an exhibition and used the same caption. So, I think to this day, if you show that photograph to people in Russia, they won’t identify the victims as Muslims and the assailants as Serbs.
The work that I do is not completely altruistic, right? It is because I have this interest in history […] In the time since I started, the world changed in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, in 2001 with the Twin Towers, then the War on Terror, then the Arab Spring. For me, to be able to see [the impact on lives of people], document it, and experience it is quite incredible.
You’ve often said your work “documents history.” Thinking about all the historical moments you’ve covered, which one feels most crucial for your archives, and how does your role as a witness influence your continued drive to document history?
First of all, the work that I do is not completely altruistic, right? It is because I have this interest in history. For me, starting early on, to be in Berlin when the wall came down, to watch Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, to be at Baghdad when the statue came down, to witness these things for myself, real history, it’s remarkable, it is incredible, what an amazing way I think to live my life.
Now, when you add the fact that I’m able to take photographs and share my subjective interpretation of these events with people, showing them what I saw and what I think, it is an incredible privilege. That itself is a motivating factor in continuing to do this, because the world continues to change.
In the time since I started, the world changed in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, in 2001 with the Twin Towers, then the War on Terror, then the Arab Spring, all these different things that need documentation and have had an incredible impact on the lives of people in the world.
For me, to be able to see it, document it, and experience it is quite incredible.
Photography allows for multiple interpretations, and framing is critical. Have you ever had your photos misinterpreted or presented in a way that distorted their meaning?
The biggest one and probably the most impactful one was from a photograph in Bosnia. I took a photograph of ethnic cleansing, and it was a very well-known photograph, and it’s been continuously published around the world. But what’s important about the photograph, aside from what you see in the image, is the caption, so you know what’s going on, who’s who, what does the symbol on the soldier’s arm say, who are the civilians that are dying, and so on.
During the first part of the war in Ukraine in 2014, a well-known Russian blogger with millions of followers took the photograph and let the image stand on its own. All he did was change the captions and say, “Ukrainian soldiers kill Russian civilians”. And then the photograph goes viral in Russia. Τhen somebody made an exhibition and used the same caption. So, I think to this day, if you show that photograph to people in Russia, they won’t identify the victims as Muslims and the assailants as Serbs.
The work that I do is not completely altruistic, right? It is because I have this interest in history […] In the time since I started, the world changed in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, in 2001 with the Twin Towers, then the War on Terror, then the Arab Spring. For me, to be able to see [the impact on lives of people], document it, and experience it is quite incredible.
Photojournalists who cover conflicts and civil unrest have long been challenged to decide whether to put the camera down and offer help when faced with a victim. How do you grapple with that ethical dilemma, and how difficult is it to make such a profound decision under pressure?
It’s a personal decision. Everybody has to make their own choice. So, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer, but I had to decide early on in my career what I would do when it would happen. On paper, it’s simple.
If I’m the only one there that can help and I’m not going to get killed, I’ll help. If somebody else is there, if there’s a doctor, a medic, somebody else who can do the same thing I could do, then I’m going to do my job, because I am there as your eyes. I have a responsibility; I’m not there as an aid worker. There is no question I’ve had the ability and opportunity to save people, and I’ve had times when I felt there was nothing I could do or I would be killed, and I was left with the only thing I could do, which was to try to document the aftermath. There have been times when I wasn’t allowed to do even that because I had a gun put to my head.
There have been times when my colleagues and I have taken wounded people to hospitals and feeding centers. The only thing I don’t do is insert myself into the situation once I’ve interacted. Then, I’m no longer a journalist, and I stop taking photographs. I don’t photograph things that I influence.
Following Jean Baudrillard’s reasoning that “a war that is not broadcasted is a non-existent war”: Do you find that some conflicts become more real or “existent” than others simply because they receive more media coverage?
Absolutely. There was a Reuters correspondent who was killed in Sierra Leone named Kurt Schork. He was one of those journalists who would look for these non-existent wars and realize, “Oh, nobody’s paying attention to this.” And when he would show up, everybody else would follow, because this was something we needed to pay attention to.
There’s a lot going on in the world, and the audience is often completely burned out, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be documented or that we shouldn’t pay attention to it.
If I’m the only one there that can help and I’m not going to get killed, I’ll help. If somebody else is there, who can do the same thing I could do, then I’m going to do my job, because I am there as your eyes.
Since we are talking about documenting history and you have covered so many war zones, how do you feel about the fact that history in Gaza was not fully documented?
I don’t know if I like the phrase of that, because it would be unfair to the Palestinian journalists who risked their lives and did an incredible job of documenting it.
At the same time, while we saw the impact of Israel’s attacks on Gaza civilians, which was one part of it —and a very, very big part of it—, we only saw a very small glimpse of Israeli soldiers, almost nothing of them in action, and we didn’t see Hamas at all; it’s like Hamas was a ghost. So, you can say two-thirds of that conflict was not documented. If you want to use the word “fully” in that way, then I think yes, it’s very difficult to say it was fully documented.
But we have the same thing to some degree in Ukraine, right? The Russian side is probably a little bit more documented than Hamas, but still very limited. It’s very hard as a foreign journalist to get to the Russians to document what they’re doing.
In most wars, all sides are becoming very aware of the value or importance of outside imagery. All sides document themselves with citizen, government and military “journalism”. In cases like Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, there is always a need for independent journalism to be done on the ground. It would fill the story out in a different way. But again, that being said, in the war in Gaza the amount of powerful and, as far as I’m concerned, believable material that has come from the Palestinian journalists can’t be denied, and it’s what we have.
In about 1999 through 2000, 2001, Mark Getty from the Getty family and Bill Gates from Microsoft made an assumption that whoever controls imagery in this new digital world would be in very good shape in terms of finances. So, they both started photo agencies, one called Getty Images, the other called Corbis. Then they proceeded to acquire all of these smaller photo agencies, effectively cornering the market and controlling the imagery used on the internet.
Three colleagues —Gary Knight, John Stanmeyer, and Antonín Kratochvíl— and I were represented by a small agency called Saba, run by a guy named Marcel Saba. And then Chris Morris was with Blackstar, James Nachtwey was with Magnum, and Alexandra Boulat was with SIPA. All of us felt that the agencies were going to be bought up by these conglomerates, except for Magnum, and we were not going to have much of a say in how our work was represented, we would be part of a multinational corporation, and we basically wouldn’t have any control over the business side of our photography and the distribution of our photography.
So, Gary Knight and John Stanmeyer thought it was a good time to break away from these corporate entities and start something where we could control our own destiny. It was primarily a decision driven by business, but one that also emphasized independence in terms of our work, including where our work could be seen, who we work for, and having control over our own destiny.
As the United States moves into a second Trump administration, the idea of “fake news” remains deeply rooted, from the highest political offices down to everyday conversations on the street. At the same time, economic pressures on traditional media have reduced the number of employed visual journalist.
A man is detained outside a Federal courtroom in New York City by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be sent for deportation (2025). Photo: Courtesy of Ron Haviv/ VII Foundation.
Given the current economic pressures, rapid technological change, and deep political polarization in the United States, how do you think these forces will shape the future of journalism and photojournalism, both in terms of working conditions and the kind of stories that will be told?
As the United States moves into a second Trump administration, the idea of “fake news” remains deeply rooted, from the highest political offices down to everyday conversations on the street. At the same time, economic pressures on traditional media have reduced the number of employed visual journalists—pushing audiences and newsrooms to rely more heavily on “new” and alternative media for everything from politics to war coverage. Yet there is often a growing disconnect between the role of a trained visual journalist and the amplification of certain narratives circulating through these newer platforms.
This raises ongoing and essential questions: Who is a journalist? Who is their audience? And how is reporting being produced, verified, and distributed? In visual journalism especially, the departure of experienced practitioners has created space for the rise of the citizen journalist—often providing immediate and invaluable perspectives, but also further blurring the boundaries of expertise, credibility, and responsibility.
What is your general view on the future of journalism and photojournalism? What gives you hope, and what keeps you up at night most of the time?
What continues to give me hope is that you still see instances where imagery can rise above the noise, still have an impact, and still have people remember photographs. Let’s just start with the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, “the child on the beach”. Several photographers took that photograph, which went around the world. Most importantly, the then-Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, spoke about that photograph and talked about how it changed her opinion about migration. So, it had a dramatic impact alongside the other millions of people who saw that photograph.
We had a Getty photograph from the US border with a child crying. Being separated from his mother, she was being questioned by border police, which went viral and became a talking point for the conversation about the border. There are times when photographs can rise above the discussion and engage people. This gives me hope that it can continue to happen.
On the other hand, we have so many images taken that what if these images are no longer able to rise above the noise, and people become overwhelmed by photojournalism, or simply don’t care or don’t want to pay attention to it. That’s fearful. When that happens, especially when photographers are risking their lives to tell these stories, it’s a waste of that energy and effort; most importantly, it is completely disrespectful to the stories we’re trying to tell.
My fear is that it will reach a point where people are only looking inward and won’t care, even if they are somehow responsible for other people’s lives. They just don’t want to acknowledge it, adjust to it, change it, or make it better. That’s one of the reasons why this work exists: to remind them we’re all interconnected.
The diversity of voices is one of the biggest changes, certainly from when I started. In an era where anyone can capture and share moments on social media, how has this reshaped the role of the photojournalist?
I don’t think it’s changing anything. You’re talking about places and people photographing things that I was never going to see, or any of us ever going to ever see before. So, this is great. This is an extra layer of visual information. But these are often just snapshots. These are like moments in time, which can be very dramatic, incredible, and powerful; no question about it. But in terms of this idea about authorship, integrity, telling a story, narrative, the citizen journalist is not doing that; that’s still our job. It’s still what we’re trained for. So, they’re different things.
But again, this idea of citizen journalists, people wanting to take photographs with their phones, or small cameras, and becoming more interested in photography, is great for the idea of photography, because people are starting to appreciate it even more, and then they become engaged not only as content providers, but also as content consumers.
Through VII Academy and Foundation, you teach the next generation of photographers. Do you observe significant differences in how younger photographers approach and value their work compared to previous generations?
Well, I think now because of technology and the affordability of cameras, whether motion or still, they have the ability to tell their own stories of their own communities and so on, in a way that they never had before. Through many of our students, we’re seeing stories from Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan and Peru and Colombia.
I think the diversity of voices is one of the biggest changes, certainly from when I started. [Back then] it was still mostly male-dominated —mostly western male and certainly mostly white. I think that there’s room for multiple voices; I think now we’ve reached that point. Something that the Foundation through the Academy is very conscious of ensuring is that they are able to learn and to tell their stories with authorship, with integrity and with the principles of proper photojournalism.
If you had to choose two photos that characterize you, which ones would they be and why?
As a photojournalist, I would have to go back to the two early photographs, one from Panama, and one from Bosnia, because they basically created these two pillars. One of the possibility of affecting change and the other the limitations of what you can do. So, it would be the vice president being beaten and the civilians being killed.
As a person, maybe there would be a picture from Bosnia of this Albanian guy from North Macedonia, a guy named Hajrush Ziberi, who’s been taken prisoner, and his hands are like this, and he’s asking me basically to help him. He knows he’s going to be killed. And I couldn’t help him. That picture has a lot of impact on me, because I also met the family, spent time with them, and am still in touch with them. I had thought that when I was going to meet them, they would blame me for not saving their son, and they were exactly the opposite and thanked me, which I thought was so kind; it’s hard to believe. His death didn’t go unnoticed, and it had an impact.
There’s a photograph from Darfur, of a young girl with her two friends. She’s about to walk seven to eight hours in the desert to get firewood for her family. Her life was very difficult. I tried to find her after the picture was taken, but I was never able to find her. I don’t know if she survived or not. But the way she holds her body, the clothing and color of the clothing that she’s wearing, it’s a very resilient yet resigned image. She was trying to be helped by the international community, and to this day, 20 years later, Darfur still is not helped, so it’s very symbolic of kind of my approach or my feeling that in the end, I think there was some good done with some of my work, but most of the time the work failed.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned during your long and distinguished career?
That I can’t be everywhere at once. The world continues to change, so there’s always another story to come. I strive to do the best that I can, always with utmost respect and dignity for the subjects I am photographing.
Ron Haviv, Co-Founder and Director of the VII Foundation, was a speaker at 2025 iMEdD International Journalism Forum, where he led a workshop titled “If I can’t see it, I can’t document it” together with photojournalist Nicole Tung.
This interview is published by iMEdD and is made available under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). This licence does not apply to the images by Ron Haviv included in this publication, which are published courtesy of Ron Haviv and the VII Foundation for the purposes of this piece. Any other use of these images by third parties requires their prior permission.
From a thriving miniature city inside a Cairo cemetery to a goat sacrifice in Nigeria, the photojournalist’s eye-opening images are celebrated in a new book.
Related Exhibition: Ed Kashi A Period In Time celebrated Ed Kashi's most recent book, A Period in Time: Looking Back while Moving Forward: 1977–2022, a stunning and expansive retrospective of photographs spanning the world and his prolific career. One of the world's most celebrated photojournalists and filmmakers, Ed Kashi has dedicated the past 45 years to documenting the social and geopolitical issues that define our era.
Steve Schapiro: Andy Warhol, Cow Wallpaper, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1966
PUBLIC IMAGE AS ART
By Logan Royce Beitman
Show at Monroe Gallery shows how pre-social media artists immortalized themselves through photography
SANTA FE — I bet you can picture Pablo Picasso — bald head, striped boating shirt — but not fellow cubists Georges Braques or Juan Gris. You can probably identify pop artist Andy Warhol’s signature silver wig and black turtleneck, but what did Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist look like? When it comes to the surrealists, more people recognize Salvador Dalí, who was kicked out of the movement, than André Breton, who founded it.
What did Picasso, Warhol and Dalí have in common? Besides being artists, they were celebrities — household names whose fame extended far beyond the artworld. Their media-ready personas and larger-than-life antics played into stereotypes of what people expected artists to look and act like. Picasso — part of the original European avant-garde — fancied himself a Bohemian bullfighter against mainstream society. Warhol was a Bohemian, too, with his ever-present coterie of disaffected “superstars,” but, in contrast to Picasso’s tempestuousness, Warhol was the quintessence of cool, speaking only in irony-soaked monosyllables. Dalí, for his part, played “the crazy artist,” saying outrageous things like, “I don’t do drugs; I am drugs,” and bringing a live anteater onto “The Dick Cavett Show.”
“Artists Behind the Art” at Monroe Gallery presents photographic portraits of artists — these and others. Some shots are posed, some are candid and some, purporting to show the artists at work, lie somewhere in between, with the artists enacting their signature gestures for the camera. Seeing so many photographs of artists in one room got me thinking about how photography contributed to the mythologization of many 20th century artists.
In the 19th century, even after the invention of photography, few artists turned the camera on themselves or cultivated media-ready personas. Artists like Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas used photography mainly as a preparatory aid for their paintings, a way of capturing reality more quickly and accurately than ketching. The 21st century saw the democratization of celebrity through the internet and social media, and now anyone with a smartphone can turn themselves into a brand.
But between the 19th century, when photography was new, and the 21st, when it is everywhere, photo portraitists of the 20th century helped artists turn their faces into icons and their lives into legends.
Steve Schapiro photographed the surrealist painter Rene Magritte for LIFE magazine in 1965 at a time when the magazine reached nearly a quarter of the U.S. population.
Steve Schapiro: Rene Magritte at MOMA., 1965
The setting is Magritte’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Magritte and Schapiro collaborated on the shoot, brainstorming creative poses that would erase the distinction between artist and art. In one, Magritte, wearing his signature bowler hat, stands in front of “Golconda,” a painting that shows scores of men in identical hats levitating heavenward.
By cropping out the painting’s frame, shooting from a slight upward angle and using a fairly shallow depth of field that keeps the painter’s face in focus while fuzzing-out the brushstrokes, Schapiro makes it appear as though Magritte has stepped through a looking glass into the image-world of the painting.
Men around him are floating away, and he may lift off, too, at any second. In another photograph from the series, Magritte rests on a museum bench, using his bowler hat as a pillow, and “dreams” the painting behind him. Schapiro’s photographs of Magritte interacting with the paintings blur the line between reality and fiction even better than the paintings do.
The following year, Schapiro photographed Warhol in front of his “Cow Wallpaper” at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Giant pink cow heads covered the walls of the gallery’s main room, while the artist’s helium-filled “Silver Clouds” floated aimlessly in an adjoining room. The exhibition, which Warhol announced in interviews as his “farewell to painting,” paved the way for the Instagrammable, Meow Wolfstyle immersive art experiences of today. In the photo, Warhol crosses his arms and holds his left hand to his face in an oddly stylized gesture, his middle finger pressing his lip into a slight smirk. This is the image of a deadpan artist-provocateur, whose ironic self-presentation was inseparable from his art.
The left edge of the painting nearly touches that of the photograph, and the precision of the alignment reflects O’Keeffe’s perfectionism. Visitors wishing to see that particular painting in the flesh, by the way, can walk just a few blocks to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, where it currently hangs in the “Tewa Nangeh” exhibition. In another of Vaccaro’s photographs, O’Keeffe, riding in the backseat of a car, holds a piece of Swiss cheese to her eye. The oblong hole in the cheese mirrors the hole in the painted pelvis bone.
But if the first image makes the artist look serious, the second undercuts the O’Keeffe myth, showing her to be self-effacing and silly. But which image is more accurate?
Martha Holmes’ 1949 photographs of Jackson Pollock depict the artist dribbling paint across an unstretched canvas on his studio floor while a cigarette dangles from his lips. These widely reproduced photographs of Pollock, along with Hans Namuth’s from 1950, helped inspire the art critic Harold Rosenberg to rechristen the abstract expressionist movement “action painting” in his influential 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,” reframing the painters’ processes, not as compositional strategies, but as dance-like physical improvisations.
Martha Holmes/Life Picture Collection
Jackson Pollock painting in his studio, Springs, New York, 1949
Ernst Haas’ photographs of Helen Frankenthaler pouring buckets of paint onto her canvases are not as well known as Holmes’ photographs of Pollock, but they should be. The one in this show has a vertical orientation, which emphasizes the weight of the falling paint and its relationship to the artist’s body, and to gravity.
Ernst Haas: Helen Frankenthaler, NY, 1969
Many young artists around the world, seeing photographs like these of Frankenthaler and Pollock, came to consider the performative quality of “action painting” more important than the finished work. The result was a proliferation of performance art in the 1960s and ’70s: Gutai, Fluxus, happenings, body art, process art, the Viennese Actionists and so on.
Lucien Clergue’s portrait of Salvador Dalí from 1969 — a straight headshot — is one of the least theatrical images of Dalí I’ve ever seen. Dalí frequently collaborated with the Latvianborn photographer Philippe Halsman on outrageous artist portraits, including “Dalí Atomicus” (1948), depicting the artist leaping through the air, paintbrush in hand, alongside three live cats and a bucket of water. Clergue’s close-up headshot, taken two decades later, is the antithesis of that. Where Halsman created superhuman fictions, Clergue shows us Dalí’s tired eyes, rumpled hair and five-o’clock shadow — in other words, his human frailty.
The only 21st-century work in the show is Gabriela E. Campos’ photograph of Judy Chicago from 2023. The artist poses behind one of her “Moving Parts” sculptures — clear acrylic forms, similar to chess pieces, which rest on a translucent pink acrylic base.
Although the artist has been artificially posed, the portrait reveals truths about her work, including the centrality of color and the intrinsic relationship between her sculptural forms and her body.
Alexander Calder, Annie Leibovitz, Gordon Parks, Francis Bacon and Joan Miró are among the many artists whose portraits appear in “Artists Behind the Art.”
Vaccaro has two eye-catching photographs of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, as well. In one, she wears a flamboyant pair of sunglasses as she floats down a Venetian canal.
Tony Vaccaro: Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, 1966
Guggenheim’s public image was as bold and memorable as those of the artists whose work she collected.
The artists in “Artists Behind the Art” rarely reveal their inner lives to us. More often, they show their canniness for curated self-presentation. Such branding tactics, now ubiquitous among social media users, are ones they perfected in close collaboration with their savvy photographic portraitists. In the best of these photographs, the artists become the art. Today, millions of ordinary people do the same.
Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal. com.
While we admire the work of famed and influential artists of our time, we don’t often see images of the artists themselves. The Monroe Gallery’s Artists Behind the Art exhibition gives the viewer a peek at the people behind some of the 20th century’s most iconic works, including Picasso (1881-1973), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Man Ray (1890-1976), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and many more, as seen through the eyes of a select group of photographers who were granted access to the studios and work spaces, galleries, and candid moments of the artists in their elements.
On such photographer is Steve Schapiro (1934-2022), whose work is part of the exhibition and who didn’t just capture high-profile artists and celebrities in his portfolio, he also bore witness to significant moments in American and civil rights history, a particular focus of his.
Some of those images are part of the exhibition, and in addition, the gallery is hosting two special screenings of the new documentary Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere at Sky Cinemas on Monday, December 29, and Tuesday, December 30. Both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Maura Smith, moderated by Michelle and Sid of Monroe Gallery. — B.S.
Artists Behind the Art; Through January 25, 2026, Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar; 505-992-0800; monroegallery.com
Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere; 7 p.m. Monday, December 29, and 5 p.m. Tuesday, December 30; Sky Cinemas, 1606 Alcaldesa Street; $16; 505-216-5678; santafe.violetcrown.com
View of the 2025 edition of AIPAD's Photography Show.
Photo Erica Price
The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) has named the 77 exhibitors that will participate in the upcoming edition of the Photography Show. The annual fair will return to the Park Avenue Armory in New York, running April 22–26.
This year’s fair will include a number of the world’s top photography-focused galleries, including Edwynn Houk Gallery, Yancey Richardson, Robert Mann Gallery, and Higher Pictures. First-time exhibitors, including Ruiz-Healy Art, Leica Gallery New York, and Galerie Sophie Scheidecker, will also feature in the fair.
The 2026 iteration of the fair will also focus on increasing its gender parity, per a release; a third of the exhibitors are women-led, women-founded, or both.
The fair will also introduce a new section, titled “Focal Point,” which will be dedicated to solo presentations for artists focused on lens-based photography to “showcase how artists have historically expanded our collective understanding of what photography is and how contemporary artists continue to show us what it can become,” per a release. This section of the fair will be designed by architecture firm Oficina.la.
Additionally, AIPAD will give artist, scholar, and NYU professor Deborah Willis its 2026 AIPAD Award, which will be presented during the VIP opening on April 22. A winner of both the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Willis joined NYU in 2000 and has chaired the Department of Photography and Imagining in the Tisch School of the Arts for nearly two decades. She is the author or editor of several landmark publications on Black photography, including Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (1996), Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present (2000), and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009).
The full exhibitor list follows below.
Main Sector
Exhibitor Location(s) 19th Century Rare Book & Photograph Shop New York, NY Alta Anyós, Andorra Augusta Edwards Fine Art London, UK Bildhalle Zurich, Switzerland | Amsterdam, the Netherlands Bruce Silverstein New York, NY Catherine Couturier Gallery Houston, TX Cavalier Galleries New York, NY | Greenwich, CT | Nantucket, MA | Palm Beach, FL Charles Isaacs Photographs New York, NY CLAMP New York, NY Curatorial Gallery London, United Kingdom Daniel / Oliver Gallery Brooklyn, NY Danziger Gallery New York, NY Deborah Bell Photographs New York, NY Echo Fine Arts Cannes, France Edwynn Houk Gallery New York, NY Form. Gallery Dinard, France Galerie Olivier Waltman Miami, FL | Paris, France Galerie XII Los Angeles, CA | Paris, France Galerie Esther Woerdehoff Paris, France Galerie Sophie Scheidecker Paris, France Gana Art Seoul, South Korea | Los Angeles, CA Gilman Contemporary Ketchum, ID Gitterman Gallery New York, NY Gregory Leroy Madrid, Spain HackelBury London, United Kingdom Hans P. Kraus Jr. Inc. New York, NY Higher Pictures Brooklyn, NY Holden Luntz Palm Beach, FL Howard Greenberg Gallery New York, NY The Hulett Collection Tulsa, OK IBASHO Antwerp, Belgium Ilaria Quadrani Fine Art New York, NY
IN-DEPENDANCE by IBASHO Antwerp, Belgium
INTHEGALLERY Copenhagen, Denmark | Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Jackson Fine Art Atlanta, GA
Janet Borden Inc. Brooklyn, NY jdc Fine Art San Diego, CA Keith de Lellis Gallery New York, NY LARGE GLASS London, UK Leica Gallery New York New York, NY Marshall Gallery Los Angeles, CA
Michael Hoppen London, United Kingdom Michael Shapiro Photographs Westport, CT Momentum Miami, FL Monroe Gallery of Photography Santa Fe, NM Nailya Alexander Gallery New York, NY Obscura Gallery Santa Fe, NM Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc. San Francisco, CA POLKA Galerie Paris, France Robert Klein Gallery Boston, MA Robert Koch Gallery San Francisco, CA Robert Mann Gallery New York, NY Rolf Gallery Buenos Aires, Argentina Ruiz-Healy Art New York, NY | San Antonio, TX Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd. Santa Fe, NM Scott Nichols Gallery Sonoma, CA Staley-Wise Gallery New York, NY Stephen Bulger Gallery Toronto, ON Stephen Daiter Gallery Chicago, IL Throckmorton Fine Art New York, NY Toluca Fine Art Paris, France Vasari Buenos Aires, Argentina Von Lintel Gallery Los Angeles, CA Yancey Richardson New York, NY
Focal Point Sector Exhibitor Location(s) Artist(s) Be Fine Art Gallery Chiayi and Taipei City, Taiwan Hsu-Pin Lee Central Server Works Los Angeles, CA Lenard Smith Duncan Miller Gallery Los Angeles, CA Jacqueline Woods ELLEPHANT Montreal, Quebec, Canada JJ Levine Glaz Gallery Moscow, Russia Zhenya Mironov Galerie Catherine et André Hug Paris, France Susan Burnstine L. Parker Stephenson Photographs New York, NY Ray Mortenson LAS Contemporary Nashville, TN Chrissy Lush M77 Gallery Milan, Italy Nino Migliori Obscura Gallery Santa Fe, NM Paul Caponigro + John Paul Caponigro Roland Belgrave Vintage Photography Ltd Brighton, UK Baud Postma SoMad New York, NY Yi Hsuan Lai Thomas Erben Gallery New York, NY Olivia Reavey
Assistant Chief Patrol Agent David Kim runs down an alleyway after a caravan of federal agents pulled up on people in southwest Chicago, Nov. 6, 2025. Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson/VII for Hammer & Hope
The immigrant catchers, faces covered, chase the workers down the street in broad daylight. The enemy is the landscaper, the day laborer, the high school student born in Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela. In the masks and guns of the federal agents, we see the riot gear of the Ferguson cops, the billy clubs of the Alabama state troopers, the Klansman’s hood. And in the brave crowds who gather to confront them, we see the power of solidarity. --click for full article
“That was my neighbor!” the woman screamed through tears at federal agents. “He’s just my neighbor!”
I tried to talk to the woman pictured above. She gave me permission to use her photograph, but she didn’t want to provide her name. Like so many people around ICE, she’s scared. Usually the stories I work on are filled with quotes, but the feds won’t talk to the press, and neither will anyone else. --Ashley Gilbertson
Women Photograph is proud to share our 2025 Year in Pictures — a collection of images that once again shows us a world on the brink of political turmoil, climate crisis, and an extensive range of human-made disasters. This year’s annual retrospective takes us from Malaysia to South Sudan to Peru, from the ongoing immigration raids happening across the U.S. to efforts to control the spread of malaria in Uganda. As our planet continued to emerge from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and wars raged on in Ukraine and Congo, we also were buoyed by images of birth, family, celebration, and connection. This year’s Year in Pictures was curated by Women Photograph board member and former National Geographic magazine editor Elizabeth Krist — you can pre-order the 2025 Women Photograph Annual here, and donate to Women Photograph here to support our ongoing work to diversify the visual media industry.
TRACY BARBUTES
A fired park ranger and friends hang an upside-down American flag from El Capitan (Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La), a granite monolith in Yosemite National Park, Calif., on February 22, 2025. This act of protest against the thousands of federal job cuts by the current administration coincided with the “firefall” event, which draws thousands of spectators and photographers annually.
The image went viral and ignited protests on public lands throughout the United States. I stood under El Cap—something I’d done hundreds of times—and as I documented the unfurling of that upside down flag, an act signaling distress, I couldn’t help but observe that we were gathered on colonized Indigenous land.
An abandoned stroller sits at a crossing where Ukrainians fled Russian forces advancing through the town of Irpin, Ukraine, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of Ron Haviv/ VII Foundation.You co-founded the VII Photo Agency. What was the vision behind starting an agency? And how has it adapted to the continuously evolving landscape of photojournalism and visual journalism? 
