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.


Ian Strange: Disturbed Home

Posted on May 22, 2023

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 reading Ian Strange: Disturbed Home


Ian Strange: Annex

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As part of Ian Strange’s artist residency at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Strange developed a site-specific installation that offers further dimension to the artist’s longstanding engagement with ideas of home and domestic disturbance. This intervention at the Art Academy Annex complements his SITE 1212 survey exhibition, Ian Strange: Disturbed Home, presenting projects of the past twelve years and includes a new body of work produced in Cincinnati, highlighting the effects of environmental and economic conditions on homes in the region.

Download the Ian... Continue reading Ian Strange: Annex


Tony Oursler: Crossing Neptune

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Water remains our most elemental unknown. It is a trans-cultural and historical symbol of mythologies ranging from childbirth, miracles, purification and healing rituals, to mysterious sea creatures, falling icicles, and invisible toxins. Belief in water is strong and its powers both benevolent and deadly. Water can wash away sins, cure disease, and offer eternal youth. Or it can harbor “blobsters,” freeze explorers, and swamp cities, depending on the teller and the listener, the fraudster and the rube.

Crossing Neptune is an exhibition featuring archival works on the theme of water from the personal collection of artist Tony Oursler—photographs, mostly... Continue reading Tony Oursler: Crossing Neptune


Liz Roberts: Post Blonde

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FotoFocus and Weston Gallery present Liz Roberts: Post Blonde at CampSITE Sculpture Park. Post Blonde brings together new iterations of two works. In this site-specific work, the auto is immobilized and repeatedly disembodied to form a large movie screen made from salvaged windshields. The video projections in car windows and on screen question the notion of an afterward and what it means to try and create a record through video documentation.

Download the Liz Roberts: Post Blonde Gallery Guide as a PDF.

Continue reading Liz Roberts: Post Blonde

American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs

Posted on March 22, 2022

David Levinthal creates photographs that probe the recesses of American memory and imagination, and the stereotypes that inhabit familiar cultural touchstones. Levinthal, who spent his childhood engaging with classic American myths and legends through televised Westerns and plastic playthings, has never strayed far from these formative influences, dedicating his 40-year career to photographing toys in constructed scenarios. The exhibition American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs showcases more than 60 color photographs, created between 1984 and 2018, from two recent gifts to the Smithsonian American Art Museum of more than 400 photographs... Continue reading American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs