“Both Marina and I have an expansive idea of what photography is, and what it can be,” explains curator Adam Ryan of CPW in Kingston. He and co-curator Marina Chao are mounting the first “Upstate Photography Biennial,” which opens May 30.
This is the museum’s first biennial, and hopefully will begin a tradition. It’s a snapshot, if you will, of photography in our region today.
This show has a democratic spirit. The vast majority of artists were chosen from an open call; there were more than 400 submissions, which Chao and Ryan pored over meticulously. Some of the camera-slingers are world-renowned; for others, this is their first major show. In the modern world, one can imagine photographs moving soundlessly from one computer to another, but these curators had studio visits with every artist, partly to see the scale of the work, and also to get to know the photographers.
One would expect nature to be a theme in the Hudson Valley, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Andrew Moore’s large-scale landscape (50” x 60”), from his “Whiskey Point” series, draws influence from the Hudson River School painters. The scene is a small, hilly town at dusk, glimpsed through a screen of bare trees. Moore calls his style “eco-Gothic.” An-My Le offers muted images of Trap Rock, a basalt quarry outside Poughkeepsie where stone has been mined for over a century. Shoot III shows either dense fog at the quarry or explosions of dynamite—it’s hard to tell which.
Le is a professor of arts at Bard College. Her colleague Stephen Shore, who famously was the first living photographer to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, in 1971, is also represented.
When you put out an open call, a lot depends on the phrasing. The curators chose not to define “upstate,” and to include those who live here part-time. “People just kind of self-identified,” Chao remarks. As it turned out, nearly everyone is from the Hudson Valley. All the photographers included are alive, but the work need not be recent. Some dates back to the 1970s.
There are photograms, cyanotypes, tintypes—even images, by David La Spina, shot on an iPhone. And sculpture! Viktorsha Uliyanova makes large-scale cyanotypes on fabric suspended from the ceiling, creating chambers that may be entered. “Camera” means “room” in Latin, and Uliyanova has created a literal room of hanging photographs. Cyanotypes are an early form of photography, in which iron salts are exposed to light, creating a characteristic blue image.
Jack Platner makes pinhole cameras out of clay—clay that he gathers from the creek near his house in the Greene County hamlet of Lanesville. The show will include these pottery cameras, some of which resemble modernist Ohio courthouses, plus prints Platner made with them. Ben Sloat, a Woodstock sculptor, will contribute a replica of a Fotomat kiosk made of rebar. At one time these distinctive structures, like drive-in pagodas, dotted the American landscape; there were roughly 4,000 in 1980. Fotomat died in 2002, but Sloat’s skeletal sculpture lingers like a ghost-kiosk.
There’s one pair of collaborators in the show. Ann Burke Daly and Marion Belanger reinterpret glass plate photographs from the Harvard astronomy collection. Originally taken through telescopes in the 19th century, and recently digitized, the series also refers to a group of women known as the “Harvard computers,” who did complex astronomical calculations for the university. Night Studio: Temporal Dislocations—365 Days; January is 32 black-and-white photographs of astral phenomena arranged in an eight-by-four grid, with a few graffiti-like additions—including the word “dawn”—as if outer space were a black wall for feminist vandals to write on.
This article appears in May 2026.
