You Have to See It to Believe It

You Have to See It to Believe It brings together photographs encountered by artists through their own research and practice, gathered from public archives and personal collections. Each contributor has chosen an image they feel compelled to share: something overlooked, unfamiliar, surprising, or at odds with the stories we think we know.

Inspired in part by the New York Public Library's Picture Collection and Ken Jacobs's film Capitalism: Slavery (2006), the exhibition considers the photograph as a way of finding, questioning, and circulating knowledge. At a moment when the authority of images is increasingly uncertain, these photographs invite us to look more closely—not only at what they depict, but at where they come from and the histories they carry.

Taken together, the images remind us that the past is often stranger, more complicated, and more difficult to imagine than we might expect. What we believe to be possible, both historically and in the present, depends in part on what we have been given the opportunity to see.

Artists
Yasi Alipour, Mimi Bai, Gabo Camnitzer, Matthew Deleget, Filipe de Sousa, Delphine Fawundu, Ellen Harvey, Gustavo Murillo Fernández-Valdés, Francisco Ramirez Barrera, Tyler Rowland, Ben Salesse, Emily Shanahan, Rachel Stern, and Christian Widmer

Organized by
Kate Gavriel and Dana Buhl

Opening Reception
Saturday, November 7th
3:00 - 5:00pm

A book launch connected to the exhibition will take place later in November. More details to come

Images:
1. Family snapshot from the 1939 New York World's Fair. Courtesy Christian Widmer
2. Harold Edgerton, Initial stages of atomic bomb explosion at one ten-millionth of a second, c. 1940s. ©2010 MIT. Courtesy National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
3. Lecture on Astronomy. Courtesy Matthew Deleget
4. Grapefruit, after being washed in vat, are carried by incline conveyor to machine for scrubbing. They are shown here just before dropping into scrubbing machine. Weslaco, Texas. From The New York Public Library.
5. Pressey Teaching Machine, 1925. Courtesy National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Location

454 Seneca Ave, Ridgewood, NY

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