Expand and Contract: American Documentary Photography in the 21st Century – Virtual Exhibition Opening Reception

The third edition of Expand and Contract marks USA’s 250th anniversary and the second quarter of this century by focusing on American documentary photography today. Expand and Contract is a series of exhibitions that explore the transformations of contemporary photographic practice, and its meeting points with both conceptual legacies and technological innovations. (See the 2024 edition here and 2025 here). By turning its attention to documentary photography, it suggests that documentary is a highly complex, historically and socially contingent field of vision. The exhibition turns a documentarian lens toward life in America and invites an understanding of the collective through a kaleidoscopic view of the everyday. It also asks to observe a photographic tradition that prioritizes a connection—between photographers and their subjects, whether those are human or part of the natural world. At this moment, which seems to have been defined by a sense of fragmentation and alienation, documentary seems to carry a critical potential for a needed point of contact.