Photo Assembly: Photographic Practices

Why It Matters

The assembly reveals how photography is evolving into a multidimensional, socially engaged medium, reshaping curatorial strategies and expanding opportunities for artists to address contemporary cultural and political issues.

Key Takeaways

• Photography now intersects sculpture, print, and digital media
• Artists materialize absence using burned artifacts and CT scans
• Community‑distributed “readers” blend text, image, and disability narratives
• Photo Assembly fosters interdisciplinary dialogue beyond traditional museum formats
• Upcoming sessions will expand these conversations at IFA and Whitney

Summary

The Whitney Museum hosted a Photo Assembly, a collaborative forum with Aperture and the Institute of Fine Arts, to explore photography as a creative practice that responds to urgent societal questions. The event coincided with the Whitney Biennial and featured four artists—Kelly Akashi, Mo Costello, Aaron J. Nelson, and the late Metro Ways—whose work blurs the boundaries between photography, sculpture, print, and multimedia.

Akashi presented a series of sculptural pieces derived from a house fire, including a corten‑steel recreation of her grandmother’s doily and CT‑scanned images of burned remnants, emphasizing materialized absence and the lingering imprint of loss. Costello discussed his "readers," bound collections of text and image circulated through community spaces—from convenience stores to his own porch—highlighting disability, pandemic‑era isolation, and the politics of distribution. Nelson’s ceramic‑based camera work and Metro Ways’ Polaroid‑derived assemblages further illustrated how photographic processes can be re‑imagined as tactile, memory‑laden objects.

The dialogue underscored a shared concern: the traditional language of photography feels inadequate in an era where all images converge into a single visual syntax. By integrating scientific imaging, handcrafted materials, and public dissemination, the artists propose new vocabularies that foreground presence, absence, and communal exchange.

Organizers announced a follow‑up assembly in the fall at the Institute of Fine Arts, signaling an ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary, community‑oriented conversations that expand the definition of photographic practice beyond the gallery wall.

Original Description

The Whitney Museum of American Art has joined with Aperture and the Institute of Fine Arts to engage in a series of conversations that center on photography as a creative act and means of responding to urgent questions in the world around us.

This program brings together Kelly Akashi, Mo Costello, and Erin Jane Nelson, three artists in the 2026 Whitney Biennial who work with an expansive idea of photography, using photographic ideas and practices to make work that does not necessarily take the final form of a photograph. Together with Michael Famighetti, editor of Kimowan Metchwais: A Kind of Prayer (Aperture 2023), who will speak to the innovative multimedia work of Kimowan Metchewais (1963-2011), this program will consider how contemporary artists engage with photographic methods and histories. Following brief presentations, Biennial co-curator Drew Sawyer will moderate a conversation about these expanded photographic practices and artistic interventions that continue to reinvent the medium.