Art Gallery | Retold: Altered Photography, Cut and Paste, and Open for Interpretation Exhibitions

The mission is impressed by historic newsroom prints from the George Stephanopoulos Collection at Pace that retain seen marks of guide enhancing, together with pen strains, white‑out, and incisions. Created within the mid-Twentieth century, these alterations replicate editorial judgment and the technical constraints of newspaper manufacturing, shaping interpretation whereas assembly the calls for of replica and format.

For up to date audiences accustomed to digital manipulation and totally fabricated photos, these analog edits seem strikingly overt. Yet their transparency reveals a foundational reality: images have all the time been formed, edited, and constructed. Removed from their authentic context, these photos immediate renewed consideration to what’s revealed or omitted in producing visible which means.

Curated by Sarah Cunningham, Art Gallery Director and Associate Clinical Professor, with Roger Sayre, Professor and Associate Chair of the Art Department, the exhibitions embody:

• Retold: Altered Photography (Pace University Art Gallery): an exhibition that includes work by six up to date artists—Nouf Aljowaysir, Garth Amundson and Pierre Gour, Juyon Lee, Negin Mahzoun, and Wendel A. White—who use photographic alteration to reclaim and reframe private narratives and social histories, difficult images’s authority as a impartial file.
• Cut and Paste (Student Exhibition Lab): a CMS 338: Media Criticism student-curated collection of historic newsroom images from the George Stephanopoulos Collection analyzing seen proof of guide enhancing in print media.
• Open for Interpretation (Student Exhibition Lab): a show of ART 356: Experimental Photography pupil digital works responding to those historic practices, exploring how photos could be reinterpreted via building and deconstruction.

By inserting up to date artworks in dialogue with historic newsroom images, the exhibitions spotlight photographic alteration’s twin capability: to claim authority and to query it. Across all three, acts of slicing, enhancing, layering, and erasure reveal that images are by no means impartial; they’re constructed, contingent, and open to interpretation.