DPI Presents, Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance at Clive Davis Gallery!

Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance, Installation View at Clive Davis Gallery

Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance, Installation View at Clive Davis Gallery

Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance 

Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance brings together artists who push photography beyond its material limits, using its grammar of light, index, and trace to examine how images operate as tools of investigation and interrogation—means through which histories are not only recorded but actively contested. The works gathered here are photograph-adjacent: sculpture, poetry, drawing, and performance inhabit photography’s conceptual terrain without adhering to its traditional conventions.

Through this expanded language, the artists cultivate an ethics of looking that acknowledges social and political devastation without replicating its harm. Drawing on photography’s syntax, they reimagine how images can function amid social and political fracture. Acts of staging, reconstruction, and generative practice probe photography’s central paradox—its ability to preserve and to unsettle, to hold absence as a form of testimony.

Their works confront inequity and erasure from multiple angles: some employ intimacy and performance as defiance; others construct fragile worlds of ruin and renewal; still others resurrect suppressed or censored images, transforming omission into evidence.

Together, these artists turn photography into a political gesture—an ethics of attention that creates space for both rupture and repair. They reclaim beauty as a mode of resistance, demonstrating that even within the debris of injustice, the photographic image can become a site of empathy, reflection, and radical possibility.

Killed Negative #22 / After Carl Mydans

Exhibition Information: 

Clive Davis Gallery, NYU (Lobby) 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Curated by: Rose DeSiano, Dept. of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Exhibition Dates: November 9, 2025 – January 28, 2026  (Closed 12/19 – 01/22)  
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday  11-6pm 
Reception: January 24, 2026 5:30pm - 7:30pm 
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Press Contact: Jasmine E. Scriven < j.Scriven@nyu.edu>
Department of Photography & Imaging
 Tisch School of the Arts, New York University   | 212-998-1930