Nick Waplington (born 1965) is a photographer known for capturing a broad spectrum of uncannily charged imagery—from British suburbanism, to life in the occupied West Bank, to a beach riot spurred by a plane crash in Southern California, to the focal point of this exhibition: the New York club scene. Immersion is key in Waplington’s process, as his nomadic approach to life and his personal attachment to varied subjects give his work a timeless, soulful vibration. The images on display were taken in various fabled venues including Limelight, The Sound Factory, Save the Robots, Body & Soul, and Paradise Garage. His club photos are not straightforwardly candid and subject engagement is often present in the eye-contact and cooperative, vampish postures that Waplington captures from on and off the dance floor. The vigor of his execution is palpable, as the acute angles from which Waplington shoots his subjects require unstinting physicality and movement. There are also images of individuals completely consumed by the moment, whom Waplington does not disrupt; rather, his photos eloquently communicate a fleeting, blissful transcendence that is difficult to describe with words alone.

Lizzi Bougatsos (born 1974) is an experimental musician (Gang Gang Dance, I.U.D.) and visual artist who employs her body, voice, and irrepressible energy as medium. Born and raised in New York, Bougatsos has been a downtown cultural figure for decades, both influencing and experiencing the various mutations of subculture that flourish in the absence of the mainstream gaze. Embracing the euphoria of bodily expression, Bougatsos's clothing and personal style are as much a part of her artistic rituals as the spontaneous movements and vocal textures for which her musical performances are known. To this presentation, she contributes a grouping of sculptures whose language borrows from the intermixing ingredients—including music, performance, and fashion—of Bougastos's prolific identity as a creator. Throughout the space, Bougatsos also scatters ephemeral and atmospheric elements of herself, with the accumulation of what remains after uninhibited revelry in mind.

Nightclubs and dance spaces are sanctuaries for those seeking freedom of self-expression, to be lost in the music, and a crowd which protects those outside of the deemed-normative. They are a space to remove the armor one erects to survive in polite society. Like any utopian idea, there will always be those attempting to undermine its principles. In the 90s, spearheaded by Mayor Giuliani, the city endeavored to demonize nightlife as a lingering and degenerative symptom of the economic hardship of the 70s and 80s, going so far as to resurrect an archaic bit of legislation called the “cabaret law” that banned more than three people dancing in a club without a license. In a twist of hypocrisy, members of the conservative right who (even more so now) crusade to control bodies and sexual identity are said to have engaged in unchecked predatory behavior① in the same clubs that Giuliani sought to scapegoat for the city’s crime and blighted reputation. This exhibition harkens to a moment before the attempted “clean-up” and intends to redeem for the present any form of rebellion against the artistic or political status-quo.

Although the title might suggest otherwise, Soth’s project is less about imparting his ideas to a younger generation and more about engaging with and learning from their creative energy. Instead of providing wisdom or guidance, he presents a fragmented and open-ended meditation on artmaking across different life stages, as well as the connections between photography, time, and aging. “I was just trying to be in the proximity of their energy,” Soth reflects. The photographs that emerged out of his visits are deeply empathetic. In his portraits of students at work or in their studios, he not only captures them as subjects but also positions them as artists in their own right. There is an implicit connection between the artist in front of the camera and the artist behind it. This is demonstrated by the ruminative and playful self-portraits that occur throughout the project: Soth situates himself not as an outside observer, but amongst his subjects.

Drawing inspiration from iconic American photographer Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, Alec Soth’s Advice for Young Artists marks a significant evolution in his practice, offering a fresh perspective two decades after the publication of his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2004. Much like Evans, who visited universities in the 1970s and photographed extensively with a Polaroid camera, Soth embraces his encounters with students as a way to understand his work from a new perspective. As he describes it, “When I was at a school and totally focused on my work, I had the experience of age falling away.” Embedded in the environment of an art school, Soth taps into the zeitgeist and rediscovers his practice anew. In Advice for Young Artists Soth allows an easy humor to enter his photographs and finds surprising juxtapositions, he adapts and reinvents his visual language in response to the dynamic energy of his subjects. In this way, the series marks a moment of innovation in the career of one America’s foremost contemporary photographers.

Denis Piel was born in France in 1944 and his family moved to Australia at the end of the war. After beginning his career in Brisbane and Melbourne, he was encouraged to move to Europe and then New York where he began to concentrate on fashion. His photographs were brought to the attention of Condé Nast and his rise began.

Immediately recognizable for their cinematic quality, his images were a sensational departure from the posed models of his predecessors. His always-sensual photographs tell a story which must be guessed at as several interpretations are possible. Often featuring reclining models lost in thought or engaged in mysterious narratives, Piel's photographs were more influenced by filmmakers such as François Truffaut and Stanley Kubrick than photographers. His star rose swiftly and he was soon the fashion photographer of the 1980s, shooting many celebrity portraits along the way.

After a decade, Piel moved on to advertising and filmmaking and in 2002 he moved his family to the Château de Padiès in southwest France where he became seriously interested in sustainable agriculture. This newfound passion resulted in his colorful and abstracted Padièscapes photographs; work which celebrates nature in flowers and gardens. These images are a departure from the fashion pictures of Piel’s early career, but reflect his continued interest in the environment and humanity.

Spanning themes of transformation, belonging, and defiance, Flowers Drink the River is an ode to trans women, queer kinship, and working-class survival in the backwoods of central Maine. Guilmoth’s photographs reject easy categorization—mud-drenched bodies intertwine in the dark of night, spider silk drifts across glowing landscapes, and nocturnal creatures move through the frame like quiet witnesses. A burning house rages in the distance with a calm white horse seemingly unawares. Friends piss from tree branches like a warm summer rain. These photographs inhabit the space between land and body, pleasure and threat, inviting viewers into a world where boundaries are blurred, and survival is a necessary act of creation.

Guilmoth’s photographic practice is rooted in collaboration—both with her human subjects and the natural world. She constructs delicate sculptures from spiderwebs, flowers, and other found materials, then waits as the environment intervenes, letting wind, water, and light reshape her compositions. This meditative approach extends to her relationship with the animals she photographs, earning their trust over weeks and months before capturing their presence on film.

“Each night for a week in August, I would sit in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard, covered in Scent Killer Gold, wearing a ghillie suit, holding a tray full of crushed apples in one hand and a 30-foot makeshift shutter release cable attached to my 4 × 5 camera in the other,” Guilmoth recalls. “The same family of deer would get more comfortable with my presence each night. Eventually, they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. The following Tuesday, I would have my first HRT consultation. I was keeping it a secret, knowing there was no way I could safely transition in this place, but also no way I could hide my changing body over the following months and years.”

Guilmoth’s use of large-format photography is both a technical and emotional choice, emphasizing patience, precision, and physical engagement with the medium. “I have always embraced slowness in my life,” Guilmoth states. “Both in the place I live and the way I aspire to be. Art and being with people I love are the things that allow me to really exist in a moment.” The intricate process of setting up each shot, from building trust with wild creatures to manipulating natural elements, reflects the broader themes of her work: resilience, adaptation, and the search for beauty in unlikely places.

At its core, Flowers Drink the River challenges the conventions of documentary photography. Rather than approaching her subjects as an outsider, Guilmoth photographs her own community—trans and queer people navigating life in a region that often denies their existence. The result is a body of work that resists voyeurism, instead offering an intimate, deeply felt portrait of chosen family, survival, and joy. “Resistance for me is saying: ‘You can try and take everything from me—healthcare, safety, affordable housing—but you can’t take away my joy and the ability to find beauty in my life,’” she explains.

Seckler’s ability to distill the essence of immense terrains into fluid, almost dreamlike visuals, challenges traditional representations of the American landscape. His lens captures the interplay of organic forms and natural forces, revealing a world where the familiar dissolves into the unexpected, and scale becomes elusive.

Like Alfred Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Carleton Watkins, and other painters and photographers of the later part of the 19th century who ventured west to depict and explore America’s vast and uncharted landscapes, Seckler documents the Rocky Mountains, the arid Southwest, and more lush scenes in California. But unlike his predecessors, Seckler is equipped with imaging technologies and means of travel allowing him to record the same landscapes from vantage points and in details incomprehensible in centuries past.

The artist’s approach bridges past and present, acknowledging the historical impulse to chronicle and celebrate the wilderness while employing a contemporary, almost abstract sensibility that shifts the focus from romantic documentation to commentary and interpretation. Seckler’s images and videos reveal rhythmic patterns and unexpected color harmonies across various sprawling western terrains now touched by man’s footprint.

The artworks embrace a surrealism of scale—where minute details, like the bend of a river or a lone animal’s tracks, become the focal points of vast, minimalist canvases. The textures of the land, shaped by erosion, water flow, and human intervention, take on a lyrical quality, transforming rugged topographies into soft, painterly gestures. Challenging the viewer’s sense of perspective, Seckler encourages an experience of the landscape as both intimate and infinite, structured yet ephemeral.

The aerial vantage offers a view transcending the limitations of the human eye, inviting a reconsideration of the land’s scale and vulnerability. His compositions, at once serene and dynamic, speak to the power of nature and the imprint of time, making visible the otherwise imperceptible rhythms that define these remote and majestic expanses.

“Florida is ghastly and very pleasant where I am,” Evans wrote to a friend during his first visit there, in 1934. Over the next forty years, he returned repeatedly, creating a large but little-known body of work depicting the state’s unique natural and cultural landscape: palm trees and pelicans, real estate billboards and souvenir stands, Gilded Age mansions and “tin can” tourist camps. In addition to photographs, the exhibition includes paintings, negatives, and postcards drawn from The Met’s Walker Evans Archive.

Samoylova has been photographing Florida since 2016, crisscrossing the state in a series of meandering road trips, from the southernmost Keys to the state’s borders with Alabama and Georgia. Building on Evans’s legacy, she creates vibrant photographs and mixed-media paintings that temper the shimmering seductions of the Sunshine State with an awareness of the troubling consequences of climate change, gentrification, and political extremism.

Over the course of six decades, Kanaga captured the urgent social issues of her time, spanning urban poverty and labor rights to racial terror and inequality. Catch the Spirit charts the artist’s outstanding photographic vision, from her pioneering photojournalism as one of the only women working in the field in the early twentieth century to her modernist still lifes and celebrated portraits of artists and anonymous sitters alike. Kanaga’s oeuvre includes key figures and moments in early 20th-century North America, with a particularly strong focus on the lives of African Americans. The Museum holds a unique and invaluable collection of works by Kanaga that features nearly 500 vintage prints, 2,500 negatives, and archival material. Two works by Kanaga are currently on view in the Museum’s recently reinstalled American Art galleries, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art.

Consuelo Kanaga began her career as a staff writer and photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1915 before moving to New York in 1922 to work for the New York American newspaper. Soon after, she met Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged her to pursue photography as an art form. After moving back to California in 1924, Kanaga met the Italian photographer, actress, and activist Tina Modotti and organized an exhibition of her photographs in San Francisco in 1926. During the early 1930s, Kanaga became associated with Group f/64 and was included in its landmark 1932 exhibition at the de Young Museum. In 1935 she returned to New York and began producing photographs for leftist journals such as Sunday Worker. She eventually joined the Photo League, where she lectured and became a leader of documentary group projects. During the 1940s and 1950s, she continued her commitment to photographing African Americans, documenting workers in the South during the Jim Crow era. In 1955 she was included in the landmark exhibition Family of Man at MoMA.

“Kanaga’s photographs shed light on some of the most critical social issues and actors of her time. Her work and legacy seem all the more important and relevant today,” says Pauline Vermare, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography. “The Kanaga prints and negatives that Barbara Millstein brought into the photography collection are one of the major treasures of the Brooklyn Museum. We are delighted that this exhibition will bring attention to an incredibly modern and generous artist, who worked alongside many well-known photographers, such as Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange. Kanaga was an invaluable mentor to many women photographers of her time. Now is a perfect moment to bring her back into the light. We hope that her life and work will inspire new generations of image makers and critical thinkers.”

The title of the show comes from a quotation by the artist: “When you make a photograph, it is very much a picture of your own self. That is the important thing. Most people try to be striking to catch the eye. I think the thing is not to catch the eye but the spirit.” The quotation encapsulates Kanaga’s use of photography to “catch the spirit” of the people she chose to focus on and of the times they lived in.The exhibition is organized largely chronologically and by bodies of work, broken into the following sections: “Photojournalism and the City,” “Portraiture,” “Americans Abroad,” “Photography and the American Scene,” “Portraits of Artists,” “Travels to the U.S. South,” and “Nature Studies.”

Using modernist visual language to address social and economic inequities, Kanaga’s work is visually arresting and unique when compared to that of her peers. The artist was committed to using photography to address difficult social issues from labor rights to discrimination, focusing on representing individuals who had either been misrepresented or ignored by mainstream media and artists. Considered modern and progressive for its time, her work—and the societal issues they capture—continues to resonate today. Catch the Spirit boldly brings history into the present to raise awareness for important contemporary issues.

New York at Its Core captures the human energy that drove New York to become a city like no other, featuring the city’s “big personalities” – among them, Alexander Hamilton, Walt Whitman, Emma Goldman, JP Morgan, Fiorello La Guardia, Jane Jacobs, and Jay Z. The stories of lesser-known New York personalities, like Lenape chieftain Penhawitz and Lower East Side denizen Susie Rocco, also figure prominently in the exhibition, as do some of the furred and shelled residents who shaped the city’s economic and daily life – among them, the pig, the beaver, and the oyster.