Citing Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison’s 1948 collaboration Harlem is Nowhere as an influence, Frazier utilized mass media as an outlet to reach a broad audience, publishing her images of Flint in conjunction with a special feature on the water crisis in Elle magazine in September 2016. Like Parks, Frazier uses the cameras as a weapon and agent of social change. The exhibition is part of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Exhibition Series, which addresses issues of race, diversity, social justice, and civil rights.

'Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment' opens at Forest Lawn Museum at Forest Lawn—Glendale, California, on December 11, 2018. Highlighting the influential photography of 11 award-winning female photojournalists, the traveling exhibition is on view in Glendale until April 7, 2019. The exhibit features nearly 100 photographs, including moving depictions of far-flung cultures; compelling illustrations of conceptual topics, such as memory and teenage brain chemistry; and arresting images of social issues.

Over the past four years, Burke has amassed almost 800,000 followers on Instagram and his photos have been published in Backpacker Magazine and on the cover of National Geographic Magazine.  Along his journey, the avid athlete can be found walking slacklines over canyons, freediving through caves in the ocean and pushing himself and the boundaries of his craft. He’s enjoyed living in the van his grandmother gave him, which he converted into the ultimate “adventure mobile” -- affectionately known as Betty the Grey Wolf.   

The eye moves warily over images that at first feel disjointed, even disorienting. The black and white photos are intentionally left uncropped, their black borders adding to their mystery and power.  Even the dates the shots were taken and produced are a noteworthy item of interest to the artist.  A series of clouds seen from a plane window; aerial images of a New York City landscape, somehow make the grid of buildings below appear removed and anonymous from the life that you know pulsates below. 

An homage to both contemporary photographic theory and the black and white binary that defined early photography, the intensely argent surfaces of Danh’s works present a secondary imagery resembling a double exposure, a vibration of shadow and light around the composition’s edges. Whether in the stark chambers of injustice or the luminous expressions of monumental gods, Danh’s images record a secret energy at play in all human endeavors. 

The show features more than 60 photographs including gelatin silver prints plus an archival trove of personal letters, telegrams, printed magazines, and assorted ephemera documenting the artist’s career. The photographs in this exhibition span more than 50 years, from Gruber’s groundbreaking reportage of the Soviet Arctic in the 1930s and iconic images of Jewish refugees from the ship Exodus 1947, to her later photographs of Ethiopian Jews in the midst of civil war in the 1980s.

It’s easy to see Goldin as the heir apparent to Diane Arbus.  Both precocious, both raised by Jewish parents preoccupied with their own successes or obsessions, as young women they were, more often than not, left to their own devices.  Free to seek outlets to a world beyond the narrow scope of their upbringing, they chose a descent into a netherworld.  Whether through an insatiable curiosity in Arbus’ case or an obsessive dependency in Goldin’s, it was a dangerous journey.  

A decade after her untimely death by suicide in 1971 at the age of 48, a trove of never-before-seen images were unearthed, stored in a basement darkroom on Charles Street in the West Village. And two-thirds of those images on display have been generously produced by her daughters, Doon and Amy Arbus for this exhibit.   What a viewing experience it is.   

Unquestionably, this is one exhibition that gives the viewer plenty to look at.  As a walk along history’s treadmill, it divvies up a rich array of humanity—replete with all its smiles and snarls.  Samuel G. Szabo (1854-61) was an early bird who snagged shoplifters, wife beaters, pickpockets, burglars and highwaymen in his lens, then meticulously placed them in an album with oval cutout frames and descriptions in the finest calligraphy.