Best Photography Exhibitions of Summer 2016 By Lindsay Comstock June 29, 2016

2016 Aperture Summer Open: Photography is Magic | Aperture Gallery, New York, NY

Untitled 023224, 2016. Tabitha Soren Nothing quite says “of the moment” as much as Aperture’s annual summer open, and this year is no different. Including the images from 50 contemporary artists who are thinking about the medium in a new way, this exhibition is all about the magic that the act of making a photograph imparts upon the viewer and the maker, in both its analogue and tangential forms. This year Aperture brought in a guest curator, Charlotte Cotton, to arrange the exhibition (she also curated the ICP exhibition on display concurrently).

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency | Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Nan and Brian in Bed, New

York City, 1983 Have you ever really seen Nan Goldin’s iconic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency? We don’t mean the book; we’re talking about the 42-minute multimedia presentation composed of 690 slides and a soundtrack from her documentation of life around Boston, New York and Berlin in the 1970s and ’80s. In this special

exhibition at MoMA, one can take a trip down memory lane, revisiting the trials and triumphs of the human condition—of love, sex, drugs, the AIDS epidemic and all tomorrow’s parties—through the slideshow complete with a soundtrack made in 1986, photographic prints and an original mock-up of the Aperture book. “This is the diary I let people read,” Goldin wrote of the series.

Danny Lyon: Message to the Future | Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Maricopa County, Arizona, 1977 "Now I don't know that much about prisons but I know enough to realize I wouldn't want to put my dog in one," Danny Lyon said after photographing those incarcerated in Texas State prisons in the late 1960s. "Working toward the liberation of my fellow countrymen," Lyon hitchhiked to photograph the Civil Rights Movement and then turned his lens toward prisoners, migrant workers, tattoo artists, coal

workers in China, and, recently, the Occupy Movement in California. Shaped in collaboration with the artist, the exhibit chronicles 50 years of Lyon’s advocacy journalism and the diverse array of artistic contributions he’s made to American culture, including 16mm films, writings, and photo montages.

Liz Deschenes | Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA

Moiré #2, 2007 Continuing with conceptual photo-based practices comes a new exhibit of work from Liz Deschenes who has been called “one of the quiet giants of post-conceptual photography,” by the New York Times. Her work continues to look at the relation of color, atmosphere, and light and how it is experienced as subject in photograms; the installation of images as performative and immersive experiences for the viewer; and the experimentation with the cameraless photo. But rather than taking her work to a contemporary art realm that dismisses photographic history, she embraces its fundamentals: light, paper, chemicals, and time.

According to exhibition curator Eva Respini, “Defying traditional photographic representation throughout her various bodies of work––mirrored surfaces, brightly hued monochromes, highly polished black façades, and carefully designed installations of hybrid photo-sculptures––Deschenes addresses and complicates the very act of perception.” This is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work, taking in the past two decades of her practice.

Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life | The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Untitled #92, 1981 Cindy Sherman has long held the gaze of the public, turning her gaze back on herself over and over again for the past four decades. With work that is part performance art, part photographic practice, Sherman has spent her artistic career recreating herself through various identities, including roles off-screen—as stylist, makeup artist, and director.

In series such as her famous Untitled Film Stills, she comments not only on media culture but also on the ways in which we choose to represent ourselves when we take the stage daily in our public lives, or more accurately, in social media. This exhibit, which isthe museum’s first special exhibition and the first time it will charge visitors for entrance since its opening in September, also includes new photographs and site-specific installations.

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