FotoFocus

What an incredible weekend it was for us here at FotoFocus and with the greater Cincinnati community!

Thank you for joining us for the opening of the FotoFocus Center's inaugural exhibition "Big Tent" and our gallery talks program. Here are some of our favorite moments from the weekend.

We hope to see you soon at our brand new FotoFocus Center! Stay tuned for summer programming announcements.

📸: Photos by Phil Armstrong and Angie Lipscomb

FotoFocus has launched a new digital guide on the Bloomberg Connects platform, a free mobile app that provides users with the ability to explore interactive digital guides to cultural spaces around the world.

Whether visiting our programs and exhibitions in person or experiencing them virtually, our Bloomberg Connects digital guide is intended to enhance your experience at the FotoFocus Center. This guide takes you behind the scenes with exclusive multimedia perspectives from a variety of expert voices. Use the guide to plan your visit, access supplemental materials on Exhibitions, and dive deeper into selected works.

Learn more about our free guide: https://www.fotofocus.org/2026/06/03/bloomberg-connects-digital-guide/

Today's the big day! Join us tonight for the opening reception of the brand new FotoFocus Center and its inaugural exhibition, "Big Tent" from 6-8pm.

As part of the celebration, we're also presenting a series of artists talks touching on themes that resound throughout the exhibition. Join us tomorrow, May 30 from 1-5pm, for conversations between Rico Gatson and David Benjamin Sherry, Marco Anelli and Stacy Kranitz, and Alyse Emdur and Accra Shepp.

Learn more about tonight's event at the link in bio. We hope to see you!

📸: Installation view, Big Tent. Photo: Madeleine Hordinski, 2026. Image courtesy of FotoFocus Center, Cincinnati, OH

Celebrating the inaugural exhibition "Big Tent" and the opening of FotoFocus Center, FotoFocus is presenting a series of artists talks on May 30, 1-5pm, for conversations between Rico Gatson and David Benjamin Sherry, Marco Anelli and Stacy Kranitz, and Alyse Emdur and Accra Shepp.

The artist talks will touch on themes that resound throughout the exhibition: equality, pluralism, freedom of speech, and the democratic values the United States has long championed, now perceived to be under threat.

Learn more about our talks program: https://www.fotofocus.org/event/big-tent-gallery-talks/

📸 Marco Anelli, "First American Portrait: Rogina, Bangladesh," 2018. Courtesy of the artist

Big Tent Gallery Talks | FotoFocus Cincinnati Presenting the finest in contemporary photography and lens-based art

FotoFocus: Through the Lens of Time

FotoFocus Center opens in just one week! To celebrate, we're taking a moment to look back on 16 years of history, honoring the milestones that have shaped our organization and led us to this permanent home.

For the 2016 FotoFocus Biennial, the theme was “Photography, the Undocument.” Curated by Artistic Director and New York-based curator Kevin Moore, the FotoFocus exhibitions and programming offered an exploration of alternative understandings of the documentary photograph, both questioning its claims to objectivity and observing its tendency toward subtle or explicit fantasy.

Photography is identified with objectivity, documentation, and realism. Yet the medium essentially abstracts the visible world, reducing its surfaces to two dimensions, editing down to a narrowly chosen single frame, and often presenting the world in black and white. Digital technologies of recent decades, allowing for seamless manipulation of photographs, have further eroded photography’s documentary authority. Surrealism historically played on these contradictions, conjuring from within the photographic image the eerie, the uncanny, and the outright bizarre. “The Undocument” was an exploration of alternate understandings of the documentary photograph— its claims to objective realism and simultaneous potential for pure fantasy.

📸 Ryan Elliott Freedom

Our "Big Tent" artist spotlight continues! Opening May 29 at the brand new FotoFocus Center, "Big Tent" examines the democratizing possibilities of photography through work by over fifty artists— celebrating the diverse and complex character of contemporary America.

David Benjamin Sherry lives and works in Lamy, New Mexico. He received his BFA in Photography from RISD in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007, where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010, he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. A multi-part installation of his work was exhibited in "Greater New York 2010" at MoMA PS1, New York.

After many years spent working in academia, in 2024, Sherry was appointed as the MFA Studio Advisor in Photography at the Maine College of Art & Design.

Join us for the opening of "Big Tent" next week at FotoFocus Center!

📸 David Benjamin Sherry, "Tess, near White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, July 2015," 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán

FotoFocus: Through the Lens of Time

As we count down the days until the doors to the new FotoFocus Center open, we're looking back at 16 years of FotoFocus— honoring where we've been as we step into what comes next.

In 2016, as part of the FotoFocus Biennial, we activated the FotoFocus ArtHub: Satellite Project Space; an interactive space for the community of Cincinnati to immerse themselves in the Biennial themes, located outside of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

It housed Wave Pool’s extension of their exhibition “The Peeled Eye.” Investigating the mechanisms and outcomes of contemporary surveillance, the FotoFocus ArtHub presented an installation, video work and performance that distorted and reimagined materials drawn from public archives, including surveillance footage, self-generating animation, and commercial video vignettes.

“Big Tent,” opening in just a few weeks at the new FotoFocus Center, brings together over fifty artists exploring American democracy, civic life, and the power of the photographic medium. To mark this milestone, we're spotlighting some of the artists in the exhibition.

Accra Shepp is an artist and writer based in New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. His images have been exhibited worldwide and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and the New York Review of Books as well as his artist’s book Atlas (in the collection of the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art Library, and Getty Research Institute), and “Windbook,” an artist-book installation at the National Library of Luxembourg.

His book, “Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice” was published in 2022 by Convoke. In 2025, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a Cullman Scholars Fellowship in 2023, and was a senior Fulbright Fellow to Indonesia.

Join us on May 29 as we celebrate Shepp's and so many other artists' work in our inaugural exhibition at the FotoFocus Center!

📸 Accra Shepp, "Micky, day 14 of the protest, waiting to march over the Brooklyn Bridge, October 1, 2011," 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery

We are excited to announce our Gallery Talks program for Big Tent, the inaugural exhibition at the new FotoFocus Center.

To expand the artistic and intellectual scope of Big Tent, FotoFocus will present a series of talks touching on themes that resound throughout the exhibition: equality, pluralism, freedom of speech, and the democratic values the United States has long championed, now perceived to be under threat.

Join us on May 30 and July 18 as we welcome participating artists to Cincinnati for special day-long programs in conversation with one another.

Learn more and RSVP to the May 30, 2026 event at FotoFocus.org.

📸 Asa Featherstone IV, The Gift, 2023. © Asa Featherstone IV. Courtesy of the artist

FotoFocus Announces Big Tent Gallery Talks Program FotoFocus is pleased to announce its program of talks for Big Tent, the inaugural exhibition at the new FotoFocus Center, a 14,700 square foot, purpose-built structure to house photographic exhibitions and year-round programs. To expand the artistic and intellectual scope of Big Tent, FotoFocus will

“Big Tent,” our inaugural exhibition at the new FotoFocus Center opening May 29, brings together over fifty artists exploring American democracy, civic life, and the power of the photographic medium. To mark this milestone, we're spotlighting the artists in the exhibition, starting with Stacy Kranitz.

Born in Kentucky and currently based in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee, Kranitz’s work explores the complexities of the Appalachian region and the inherent limitations of photographic representation. She has received many awards for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her photographs are in several public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and Duke University, Archive of Documentary Arts.

Learn more about "Big Tent" at the link in bio!



📸 Stacy Kranitz, "Letart, West Virginia," 2015. Courtesy of the artist.