The D.C. photography scene came alive in the past year after a bit of a pandemic-induced slumber. I had no trouble coming up with eight shows that merited a space on my annual list of top local photography exhibits for 2022, a ranking I’ve assembled on a (mostly) annual basis for City Paper since 2001.
Without further ado, here are my picks for the top photography exhibits of the year, plus a few hat-tips to non-photography shows or artworks that are deserving of a special mention.
1. Bahman Jalali and Rana Javadi at the National Museum of Asian Art
Living in Two Times spotlights the work of Iranian photographers Bahman Jalali (1944–2010) and his wife and collaborator Rana Javadi (1953–), and spans a long arc of hope and disillusionment for their native Iran. The optimism of student protesters during the 1979 revolution that overthrew the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi soon curdled into the grinding destruction of the Iraq-Iran War and the long-term disenfranchisement of women, including Javadi, whose activities were circumscribed for years at a time. The exhibit opened at the National Museum of Asian Art in early August, but with the onset of protests against the regime’s treatment of women in mid-September, its tale has become even more poignant. Living in Two Times runs through Jan. 8 at the National Museum of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. Free.
2. Robert Adams at the National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art mounted a retrospective of works by Robert Adams (1937–), a quintessential photographer of the American West, following Adams’ forays between pure nature imagery and chronicles of the built environment, often with nuanced reactions to each. With attention to small tufts of grass, isolated trees, and delicate milkweed plants, Adams’ images offered sweep without the grandeur, while his images of tract housing regularly questioned consumerism, industrialization, and environmental degradation. Fittingly, the exhibit concluded in Oregon, where Adams retired; there, he documented, with subtlety, the ravages of forest clear-cutting.
3. Timothy Hyde at Multiple Exposures Gallery
In his fourth solo exhibition at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Tim Hyde returned to one of his comfort zones: darkness. His most recent series tested the limits of human perception. There was simply no way to experience his low-contrast images other than seeing them in person, with your nose pressed right up to the glass. Hyde’s images reveled in their stillness, punctuated by the rare rectangle of light from a window, or occasional small figures slinking around, half unseen. Darkness, Hyde has written, “makes us aware of our limitations, of our relative place in the universe.”
4. Colby Caldwell at Hemphill Artworks
In his most recent Hemphill exhibition, Colby Caldwell used a bulky digital scanner to record nature around his Asheville, North Carolina, home. In some images, he dwelled on mosses, ferns, fallen leaves, and other woodsy detritus, embracing the wavy glitches, unreal pink-hued distortions, and adventures in broken vertical hold settings. In others, he took a more formalistic approach, looking straight up from the ground, through the treetops, and into the sky. Ultimately, Caldwell’s decision to train his electronics toward the heavens lent our digital-obsessed age a welcome sense of calm.
5. Jason Horowitz at the American University Museum
In his American University Museum retrospective, Jason Horowitz offered both monumental, hyperreal close-ups of cuts of beef and immersive, space-bending panoramas of humble streetside vegetation. But Horowitz’s most memorable images were his absurdist yet visually compelling depictions of junk foods submerged in gelatin, with eerie lighting suggestive of Andres Serrano’s controversial 1987 photograph “Piss Christ.”
6. Timeless: Historic Photographic Processes in the Digital Age at Photoworks
Timeless: Historic Photographic Processes in the Digital Age, at Photoworks, delighted in experimenting with archaic photographic techniques, from platinum-palladium printing to blue-tinged cyanotypes to the obscure Ziatype process. The standouts in the group show were Mac Cosgrove-Davies and Paige Billin-Frye. Cosgrove-Davies’ works range from tiny, jewel-like images to impressive larger ones made with the dreamy gum-bichromate process, including a hazy, extreme-horizontal landscape of the Hudson River Valley. Billin-Frye, meanwhile, uses specially toned cyanotypes to document sea urchins and seed pods, as well as a full-color version of the cyanotype process to produce some startlingly modern-looking snapshots.
7. Iké Udé at the National Museum of African Art
Between 2014 and 2016, Iké Udé made 64 large-format portraits of Nollywood figures from the Nigerian film industry; about half are on view at the National Museum of African Art. His prints are self-consciously painterly, invoking both classical paintings and high-art fashion, and his colors are wildly vivid, with royal blues, forest greens, and apple reds. Just as notable as Udé’s photographic techniques are his skills in set design, which rely on sharp men’s suits and flowing dresses, some with striking art deco patterns. Indeed, the strongest argument for Udé’s creative skills is that his photographic portrayals of his subjects’ garments are more impressive than the real-life props included in the exhibit. Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits runs through Feb. at the National Museum of African Art, 950 Independence Ave. SW. Free.
8. Gary Anthes at Studio Gallery
Gary Anthes’ latest exhibit, Partita Rustica: Life and Death in a Virginia Barn, documented a pandemic project of placing natural and man-made objects against the backdrop of a 200-year-old abandoned barn on Anthes’ property. His images are meditative, even hypnotic, in their similarity; they feature such objects as a delicate bird’s nest, a variety of flowers with unnaturally yet gracefully curving stems, fragile peelings of sycamore bark, airy milkweed pods, a tornado-shaped spiral of barbed wire, and a handful of dead animals including a cardinal, a yellow thrush, and a rabbit. The objects were carefully positioned, surrounded by aged wood in a tableau that suggests a proscenium arch. As such, his works owe much to sculpture, mixed-media combines, and even trompe l’œil painting.
A few noteworthy nonphotographic exhibits and works that made an impression on me in 2022.
Nature [Unframed] at the Phillips Collection, a one-room exhibit in which paintings by such artists as Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent Van Gogh were removed from their frames, allowing visitors to view these iconic works as humble, earthly objects with roughly fitted canvas and evenly spaced nails.
Joe Feddersen at the National Academy of Sciences, showcasing the work of Native American artist Joe Feddersen, whose minimalist geometric patterns blended ancient and modern visual archetypes, such as a high-tension electricity tower that looked like a petroglyph.
The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900 at the National Gallery of Art, an exhibit that explored the concept of “doubling” through wildly divergent definitions of the concept; its most valuable accomplishment was to pluck a number of intellectually thought-provoking works from relative obscurity, including those by Mary Kelly, Nam June Paik, Alighiero Boetti, Peter Liversidge, and Jorge Macchi.
Julie Wolfe at Hemphill Artworks, which included drawings, paintings, and prints but which, most importantly, featured an 11-story cylindrical, multicolored tower of jars filled with pigments, decaying vegetation, and polluted liquids; the jars caught the sunlight by the gallery’s window, offering an ambivalent mix of contamination and beauty.
The 50 States Project: People from Away, a U.S. road trip collaboration between photographer Tom Woodruff and painter Kate Fleming; the latter’s small, deckle-edged works impressively teased a comforting harmony from the otherwise humdrum architecture of the American highway—strip malls, billboards, painted parking lot lines, and (many, many) gas stations.
Khánh H. Lê’s homage to the vanished storefronts of Clarendon’s Little Saigon, in the American University Museum exhibit Home-Land: Exploring the American Myth. It was what Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” might look like if it were in 3D and enhanced by audio recordings of interviews.