FotoFocus

07/16/2026

Several artists from "Big Tent" were asked a series of questions about their work included in the exhibition. Learn more about selected works by Madeleine Hordinski, Alyse Emdur, Marco Anelli, Melvin Grier, David Benjamin Sherry, Stacy Krantiz, and Asa Featherstone IV in the artist interviews on The Lens. Follow along as we continue to post excerpts from the individual artists!

Madeleine Hordinski, Melvin Grier, and Asa Featherstone IV, among others, will be on-site at FotoFocus Center for a series of Big Tent Gallery Talks this Saturday, July 18, beginning at 2pm. We hope to see you there!

📸: Melvin Grier, "Urban Ninja," n.d. Courtesy of the artist

Several artists from Big Tent were asked a series of questions about their work(s) included in the exhibition. Learn more about selected works by Madeleine Hordinski, Alyse Emdur, Marco Anelli, Melvin Grier, David Benjamin Sherry, Stacy Krantiz, and Asa Featherstone IV in the artist interviews below

06/16/2026

FotoFocus is pleased to announce its list of featured exhibitions and venues for the 2026 Biennial: "The Long View," taking place during the month of October with the Opening Program scheduled for September 30–October 3. The largest of its kind in America, extending across museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces in Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky, the Biennial celebrates photography and lens-based art while uniting artists, curators, and educators from around the world. The Biennial returns with 74 exhibitions presented at 65 venues, including the newly opened FotoFocus Center.

In addition to its returning venues, the 2026 Biennial includes 9 new venues: ArtsConnect, Cincinnati Art Club, Delhi Event Center, FotoFocus Center, Miami University: Hiestand Galleries, Here and Now, MOTR Pub, Oxford Community Arts Center, and Swell Art Cafe.

📸: Trevor Paglen, "It Began as a Military Experiment" (detail), 2017. © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of The Artist and Fellowship, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York)

An ambitious collaboration between FotoFocus and the region’s museums, galleries, universities, and alternative spaces, the Biennial is a month-long celebration of photography that unites artists, curators, and participants from around the world. Now in its eighth iteration, the 2026 Biennial enco...

06/04/2026

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

06/03/2026

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/

05/29/2026

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

05/28/2026

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

Presenting the finest in contemporary photography and lens-based art

05/22/2026

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

05/20/2026

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

05/18/2026

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.

05/15/2026

“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