@ the Pictorial Foundation artspace:
OCULA OBSCURA

September 12 — November 1, 2026

A Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation grant brings an immersive photographic experience to Newburgh, bringing together ten accomplished artists and leaders in camera obscura and pinhole photography.

KOLKATA MONSOON

For more than a decade, Abir Choudhury has spent the rains outdoors in Kolkata, photographing what four months of water does to the city he grew up in.

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PICTORIAL STORY

PROSCENIUM GHOSTS
Said Manseur honors these young actors, their courage, and the unseen work they give to keep theater alive against the odds.

THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN

Ten years after first seeing Larung Gar, Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, finding continuity in faith, memory and the lives held within it.

New York, New York!

PICTORIAL STORY

NYC SUBWAY RIDERS BEFORE THE INVASTION OF SMARTPHONES
Hiroyuki Ito’s subway photographs reveal a vanished intimacy.

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presents THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN by Jing Wei @jing_wei_visuals
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“Larung Gar taught me to look beyond the visible symbols of religion. I became more interested in the relationship between religious practice and everyday human experience, how belief appeared to shape the way people lived, studied, related to one another, and understood their place within a community.”
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There is a mountainside in eastern Tibet, its slopes covered by thousands of small dwellings in deep red, stacked so densely that, from a distance, they read less as architecture than as texture, like fish scales forming a second skin over the land. This is Larung Gar, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist academies in the world. Ten years after first encountering Larung Gar, documentary photographer Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, tracing the continuity of faith, memory and the lives sustained within it.
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View Jing Wei’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents CONTOURS OF ABSENCE
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in conversation with // SERHII FETT
@serhiifett
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Serhii Fett is a Ukrainian photographer based in Germany whose practice examines the relationship between constructed reality and psychological experience. Working with staged figures, concealed faces, ordinary objects, and controlled spatial arrangements, he investigates how identity and presence can be communicated beyond direct recognition. The body functions as a conceptual structure through which questions of memory, alienation, and absence are explored, while interiors, landscapes, and architectural elements operate as active components in the production of meaning. Serhii’s work is defined by a tension between visual precision and interpretive openness, allowing each photograph to sustain ambiguity without relinquishing conceptual coherence.
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“The starting point for me is usually not an object or a location, but an internal state. I am interested in experiences that are difficult to describe directly.”
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Read the full interview with Serhii and see more of their photography on the website.
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#serhiifett #newyork #visualstoryteller #documentinglife

presents PROSCENIUM GHOSTS by Said Manseur @said.manseur
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“In a country where institutional support for the arts is scarce and cultural policies remain stagnant, these young artists refuse to wait for permission. They craft their own path. They write, direct, build, and perform every aspect of their production. Mékanizma is theirs, in every sense.”
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The project follows four young Algerian performers who give themselves fully to theatre. Said Manseur looks closely at the world that surrounds their practice: the waiting, the labour, and the shared purpose that gathers before an audience arrives.

His photographs move beyond the stage to consider what is required for art to exist before it is publicly seen. They hold the quieter spaces where discipline develops, where community becomes a working structure, and where meaning is built through collective effort. This is a story about young artists creating the conditions for their own visibility, and the quiet determination required to keep culture alive.
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View Said Manseur’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents THE ART OF ATTENTION
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in conversation with // LEN IRISH
@_lenirish
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Len Irish’s photography asks the viewer to look past the surface of an image and into the space where presence begins to form. His practice has continued to move outward, following intuition, memory, structure, and the unexpected life of objects and places.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Len studied photography at ArtCenter College of Design before establishing his career as a portrait photographer in New York City, photographing figures including Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Oprah Winfrey, and B.B. King. This interview considers the ideas behind a lifelong practice shaped by observation, discovery, and the willingness to let each image lead.
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“At the age of eighteen, I first called myself a photographer. It was a time without a defining purpose, a period of freedom to see and discover through the camera without intention or specific aspiration. It was simply a time to see and feel the camera.”
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Read the full interview with Len and see more of their photography on the website.
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#lenirish #newyork #visualstoryteller #documentinglife

presents WHERE EMOTIONS BREATHE
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in conversation with // IRINA SEDLETSKAYA
@s_rina_cezar
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A quiet melancholy moves through Irina Sedletskaya’s photographs, but she does not see black and white as a language of sadness. For her, monochrome removes distraction and allows light, silence, and emotion to become more visible. What may first appear melancholic is, in Irina’s view, closer to resilience. Her work is shaped by personal experience without becoming directly autobiographical. Childhood, motherhood, loneliness, hope, and the search for belonging inform the way she looks at the world.
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“I constantly observe the world around me. A landscape, the movement of the wind, the way a model stands still, a branch, a shadow, or an empty road can suddenly become the beginning of a story in my mind.”
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Read the full interview with Irina and see more of their photography on the website.
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#irinasedletskay #kazakhstan #visualstoryteller #documentinglife

presents REGINA: BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AND DREAMS by Cleopatra Joint
@cleopatrajoint
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“Very few people are willing to accept an unstable or precarious life in pursuit of their dreams. Many of us become trapped by the logic of the capitalist system, and I don’t deny that, in the kind of society we live in, money is undeniably necessary. But life cannot be reduced to that alone.”
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Visual artist Cleopatra Joint begins with the facts of a room: a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a window, a few square metres. A temporary space in a boarding school in Bari becomes the setting for a young woman caught between study, modeling, love, uncertainty, and the wish to become someone closer to herself.

The young woman, Regina, left Rome years ago and now lives in Bari, dreaming of leaving university behind to make modeling her career. In this project, Cleopatra photographs the ordinary facts of Regina’s afternoon and allows the emotional weight of the situation to surface slowly.
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View Cleopatra’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents LIFE ALONG THE RIVER by Shubhodeep Roy @shubhodeeproy.in
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“These ghats have witnessed the ebb and flow of life for centuries, and it is remarkable how little they have changed. As I perched on the steps, camera in hand, I felt a deep sense of nostalgia sweep over me.”
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Shubhodeep Roy photographs Kolkata from the edge of the Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges that has shaped the city’s history, labour, faith, and daily life. The project unfolds around the ghats, ferries, bridges, and open stretches of water that form Kolkata’s relationship with the river. Shubhodeep is looking at a place that has shaped him, while also asking what it means for such places to survive into the present.
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View Shubhodeep’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents A HOME OF MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT by Davide Santangelo @davide_sant_foto
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“I like to think that this place — both physical and mental — can continue to be a source of dialogue, exchange, and reconciliation; a space for clarity and renewal for the future.”
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Davide Santangelo turns toward the family home and its surrounding land as a place of return, but also as a place where absence has altered the meaning of everything once familiar. Since the passing of his mother, this domestic landscape has become charged with another kind of presence. Trees, rooms, sounds, meals, and conversations remain as imprints of a shared life, forming a quiet architecture of memory that continues to shape the present. Captured entirely by moonlight, the project enters the home through a slower and more uncertain way of seeing.
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View Davide’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents THE PULL OF THE EARTH by Sayan Biswas
@the_iron_mask
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“Every time I return — camera in hand, software engineer by profession, Bengali by everything else — I am attempting to cross that distance. Maatir Taan is what that crossing looks like.”
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Sayan Biswas returns to rural Bengal not as an outsider, and not simply as a son of the place, but as someone pulled back by something older than memory. Maatir Taan (The Pull of the Earth) is a record of return, but also a question about responsibility. It asks what happens to knowledge when the hands that hold it grow older, and when younger generations are drawn toward cities, work, and other futures. For Sayan, the answer begins with looking.
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View Sayan’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents BETWEEN SEA AND SKY by Massimo Lupidi
@massimolupidiphotographer
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“I walk and fly to discover new horizons, to observe and document with both body and mind.”
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In CINQUE TERRE, Massimo Lupidi offers more than a view of the Ligurian coast. He gives us a new and inspirational way of seeing it. He walks its paths and flies above it by paraglider, allowing the body and the air to become part of the photographic process. The view is expansive, but it remains intimate. For those who know Cinque Terre, the book opens the landscape again. For those who do not, it offers an encounter beyond the postcard image. This is for anyone drawn to photography and the fragile relationship between land and human presence. To hold the book is to enter Massimo’s bond with Cinque Terre, and to see why this landscape continues to demand attention.
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View Massimo’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents THE VILLAGE by Virginia Cassano @virgi__cassano
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“Being a ‘Piaggista’ meant sharing work shifts, shopping at the staff shops and spending leisure time together. I wanted to seek them out, to make them the protagonists of a story that belongs to them and has not yet been told through photography. A story that has also become my own.”
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Some neighborhoods are not simply lived in. They are inherited through stories, families, work, grief, habit, and the memories that continue to shape them. Virginia Cassano enters Villaggio Piaggio from a position of personal inheritance, as the daughter of a factory worker who died too soon. Through this intimate connection, she examines how labor and collective memory remain embedded in the life of a place. The project unfolds in Pontedera, the Tuscan town that adopted Virginia ten years ago. Within it sits Villaggio Piaggio, a neighbourhood built in 1934 for the workers of the Piaggio factory and still physically present yet suspended within its own history.
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View Virginia’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents TÜRKIYE: A secular republic in the shadow of the minaret (Vol I & II) by Rpnunyez @rpnunyez_photographer
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“Suddenly everything fell into place and the current project took shape as a book.”
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Rpnunyez is a photographer who approaches his subjects with honesty and integrity. What stays with us is not only the photographs themselves, but the values that make them possible. They encourage us to look closely, to think critically, and to recognise ourselves in the lives of others. He is guided by the conviction that a photograph should not extract or reduce, but allow another’s presence to be seen.

TÜRKIYE (Vol I & II) is not only a portrait of a country but also a reflection on how societies live with complexity, negotiating between past and present, belief and secularism, continuity and change. In these pages, Türkiye appears both singular in its particulars and universal in its questions, reminding us that the truths of a nation are inseparable from the lives of its people.
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View Rpnunyez’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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presents MUTABLE MORPHOGENESIS by Emma Varga @emmavargaarchive
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“I’m interested in what happens when the boundaries between human, animal, and environment start to blur, because that makes the body feel less fixed and more relational.”
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Working at the intersection of photography, biology, and material experimentation, Emma Varga uses the photographic image to question how we understand the living world. Through microscopy, organic matter, light, and decomposition, she reveals connections between bodies, environments, and systems of knowledge that often remain unseen. Guided by scientific inquiry and the grotesque as both visual language and provocation, her work examines vulnerability, existence, and the unstable boundaries that separate human from non-human.
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View more of Emma’s photographs and read their interview on the website.
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#EmmaVarga #ThePictorialList #ContemporaryPhotography #artandscience

presents THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Chad Coombs @itschadcoombs
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“What feels permanent within the mind, is often the result of an ongoing process of construction.”
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Chad Coombs approaches the image as a constructed field, where identity, perception, and consciousness are not presented as stable conditions but examined as systems under pressure. Working across photography, collage, and painting, his practice resists the idea of the medium as a passive tool. Instead, process becomes central to meaning. Analog photography, hand-built imagery, direct mark-making, distortion, fragmentation, and recontextualization function as methods of inquiry, allowing the work to question how identity is shaped, interrupted, and read.

In The Architecture of Consciousness, Chad extends this investigation through a Polaroid-based body of work structured across four interconnected series: Dear Diary, Interior Architecture, Reconstruction, and Foundation.
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View more of Chad’s photographs and read their interview on the website.
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#chadcoombs #canada #thepictoriallist #pictorialfoundation

presents ARE THOSE WINDS by Ci Demi @ci_demi
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“The tradition will be erased, and we will have been mere helpless witnesses. Will what I’ve been trying to show help? ‘At least there will be documents,’ I keep telling myself.”
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Along Istanbul’s northern edge, Ci Demi photographs the city’s last water buffalo herders as they keep working, remembering, and staying put while the city closes in. His ongoing project Are Those Winds traces a landscape shaped by wetlands, animals, labour, and disappearance. First commissioned by Climavore x Jameel at RCA, the work has developed into an independent documentary story about Istanbul’s expansion and the communities it threatens. Through portraits of herders and buffaloes, Demi records affection, dependency, and resistance in a place where time is running out and documentation becomes both insufficient and necessary.
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View Ci’s photographs and read their story on the website.
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#cidemi #istanbul #thepictoriallist #pictorialfoundation

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CONTOURS OF ABSENCE

Where concealment unsettles recognition and ordinary spaces turn psychological, the photographs of Serhii Fett suspend identity between presence and absence.