Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance

Curated by: Rose DeSiano, Dept. of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU

Exhibition Dates: November 9, 2025 – January 28, 2026  (Closed 12/19 – 01/22)  

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday  11-6pm 

Reception:  January 24, 2026 5:30pm – 7:30pm 

Press Contact: Jasmine E. Scriven < j.Scriven@nyu.edu>  Department of Photography & Imaging

 Tisch School of the Arts, New York University   | 212-998-1930

Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance an exhibition brings together artists who expand photography beyond its material limits, using its grammar of light, index, and trace to examine how photography functions as a methodology of investigation and interrogation—a means through which histories are not only recorded but contested. The works gathered here are photograph-adjacent: sculpture, poetry, drawing, and performance inhabit the conceptual terrain of photography without adhering strictly to its material conventions. 

Through poetry and meticulous drawings of discarded negatives, Joel Daniel Phillips and Quraysh Ali Lansana confront the problematized gaps within photographic representation. Rose DeSiano’s luminous photographic fabric sculpture hosts AI-generated photo-hallucinations from data mining. Both interrogate image systems and the politics of representation.

Two collaboratives transform artifice and staged photography into acts of resistance. Lori Nix & Kathleen Gerber use constructed photography to celebrate beauty amid apocalyptic futures—their large-scale and sublime qualities reclaim power in representation. In a large group collaboration, Samantha Nye, Annie M. Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and Vanessa K. Rees use film stills and performance to confront queer representation of intimacy and the devastating failure of society to support women’s healthcare.

With a quiet reverence for the photograph as both relic and revelation, Lorie Novak, Deb Willis, and Hank Willis Thomas explore the porous terrain of memory, time, and perception, constructing visual dialogues that reconsider what it means to look, to challenge, and to inherit a visual past. Together, these artists transform the act of photography into a political gesture—an ethics of attention that creates space for both rupture and repair.