Photo by Jacob Drabik

The Lens

The Lens is the FotoFocus editorial platform, highlighting our programming and featuring in-depth conversations on photography and the moving image drawn from perspectives and insights in our community, throughout our region, and around the globe.


On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith

Posted on June 6, 2022

The works in this exhibition address a range of topics, spanning performance and the body, climate change, power, colonialism and identity, heritage, and territory. Collectively, they portray complex and contested relationships humans have with notions of environment, wilderness, nature, and place. The "line" metaphor is an organizing principle as well as reference to the precarity of this moment: at serious risk; caught, captured; following the path of a line. The exhibition emphasizes photography, in all its forms, as delivering a special charge to document while also grappling with historical expectations, enlarged geographies, and contemporary urgencies. The photographic documentation of various artistic interventions... Continue


Ian Strange: Disturbed Home

Posted on June 3, 2022

Ian Strange: Disturbed Home is a survey of the artist’s architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those structural works. Highlighting projects of the past twelve years and spanning geographies from Strange’s native Australia, to New Zealand, Japan, Poland, and the United States, including Cincinnati, Ohio, Strange’s provocative transformations of damaged or abandoned homes unlock themes of social upheaval and geographic displacement caused by a variety of factors—economic blight, environmental disaster, and social migrations.

In response to the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial: World Record, Strange is creating a new body of work in Cincinnati, highlighting the effects of environmental... Continue


Sun Dogs

Posted on June 2, 2022

FotoFocus and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra present Sun Dogs. Named after an atmospheric optical phenomenon, the program features pairs of composers and filmmakers in collaboration, each offering a unique perspective of the natural world through short-format films fused with new music performed by the CSO, conducted by CSO Creative Partner, Matthias Pintscher. Produced in collaboration with Liquid Music as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial: World Record, Sun Dogs seeks to understand the natural world that cannot be touched or measured. Typically a composer responds to a director’s ideas in a film scoring capacity, or a filmmaker is given music to respond... Continue


Liz Roberts: Post Blonde

Posted on

FotoFocus and Weston Art Gallery present Liz Roberts: Post Blonde at CampSITE Sculpture Park. This new site-specific commission presents an uninhabited drive-in tableau in which one automobile is left and others are repeatedly disembodied to form a large movie screen made from salvaged windshields. Nostalgic and thirsty for typical road movie tropes, the installation references the resurgence of drive-ins and the pining for collective voyeurism of movie screenings.

The projections of a winding Cincinnati road within the vehicle’s windows move slowly, almost at the pace of walking. The video on the screen alludes to the notion of an afterlife,... Continue


‘Free as they want to be’: Artists Committed to Memory

Posted on June 1, 2022

‘Free as they want to be’: Artists Committed to Memory considers the historic and contemporary role that photography and film have played in remembering legacies of slavery and its aftermath and examines the social lives of Black Americans within various places including the land, at home, in photographic albums, at historic sites, and in public memory.

This exhibition acknowledges artists’ constant involvement with efforts to explore the possibilities of freedom and their relationship to it. Their quest to be ‘as free as they want to be’ is envisioned in the subject matter they explore as well as in their... Continue