Since 2009, the Griffin Museum has created a gathering space bringing reviewers and photographers together from New England and beyond for two days of discussion, networking, and gaining fresh perspective on one’s work.

The New England Portfolio Reviews (NEPR) serves photographers who are just embarking on their careers and more established photographers, all hoping to reach new audiences and gain fresh perspective on their work.

The online format allows for an expansion of participants in volume and in location including reviewers such as gallerists, book publishers, museum professionals, critics, educators, and advisors from all over the world who provide guidance and potential opportunities to grow artist practices. We are grateful to our reviewers who give their time and expertise to the attendees to further their creative goals.

This online exhibition highlights the diversity of creativity found in each of our participants.

Artists featured in this online exhibition are: Adam Chapin, Amy Giese, Andrew McClees, Barbara Lewin, Carlotta Guerra, Caroline Stevens, Jeremy Chandler, Dafna Steinberg, Dan Nelken, Daniel Szabo, David Comora, Donna Oglesby, Michael Weinstein, Ellen Feldman, Eric Kunsman, Georgia McGuire, Irene Matteucci, Jaina Cipriano, Jean Francois Gosselin, Joshua Holz, Jung S. Kim, Kathleen Tunnel Handel, Kaya Sanan, Kylie Harrigan, Laila Nahar, Lee Varis, Lisa McCarty, Lisa Tang Liu, Madelyn McKenzie, Mahala Mazerov, Marcie Scudder, Marky Kauffmann, Marsha Wilcox, Megan Riley, Melinda Hurst Frye, Michael Page Miller, MK Rynne, Paul Baskett, Peggy Becker, Philip Sager, Rory McNamara, Sandra Buschow, Scott Lerman, Scott Marmer, Sophie Adams, Suzanne Williamson, Victoria Gewirz, Xuan Hui Ng.

This year we celebrate the Griffin Museum of Photography’s dedication to education with a special showcase of the incredible work realized during our Photography Atelier courses. Now in its 40th edition, this portfolio and project development program has aided in the creative endeavors of countless students. We are grateful to them for their participation on this celebratory occasion.

We are grateful to the instructors who gave so much of themselves, the artists who worked shared their creativity, and to everyone who came to openings and artist talks to celebrate these talented students. Sharing your work and ideas with us

For over twenty years, the Photography Atelier at the Griffin Museum has fostered a community of artists and educators dedicated to elevating the art of photography. Through collaborative critique, creative exploration, and personal vision, this program continues to shape compelling photographic work and advance the medium with purpose and passion.

We are so pleased to have many of the over 250 educators and artists highlighted here –

Leah Abrahams, Lisa Neville Ambler, Stephanie Arnett, Peter Balentine, Becky Behar, Emily Belz, Diane Bennett, Robin Boger, Ann Boese, Judy Brown, Michael Burka, Lisa Cassell-Arms, Craig Childs, Annie Claflin, Jamie Collins, David Comora, Lee Cott, Karen Davis, Ileana Doble Hernandez, Dena Eber, Edward, William Feiring, Ellen Feldman, Laura Ferraguto, Roger Galburt, Conrad Gees, Sarah Gosselin, Trelawney Goodell, Marc Goldring, Cassandra Goldwater, Sanford Gotlib, James Hunt, Gregory Jundanian, Alan Kidawski, Michael King, Julie Williams-Krishnan, Lawrence Manning, Bonnie McCormick, Lyn Swett Miller, Judith Montminy, Bonnie Newman, Linda Hammett Ory, Ann Peters, Astrid Reischwitz, Lisa Redburn, Margaret Rizzuto, Darrell Roak, Vanessa R, Megan Riley, Glenn Ruga, Joyce Saler, Gordon Saperia, Becca Screnock, Hope Schreiber, Andy Schirmer, Fran Sherman, Pip Shepley, Tony Schwartz, Sally, Christy Stadelmaier, Joe Staska, Betty Stone, Susan Swirsley, Mark Thayer, Donna Tramontozzi, Carol Van Loon, Amir Viskin, Piet Visser, Heather Walsh, David Whitney, Jeanne Widmer, Julie Williams-Krishnan, Nancy Nichols, Albert Lew.

Mothercraft is an ongoing body of work that uses press photographs culled from flea markets and eBay to reconsider 20th-century depictions of mothers in the US media. Typed and handwritten text, along with date stamps, creased edges, and stains, layer the backs of the photographs. These images are time capsules, showing us the event pictured and the frame through which they were received. The photographs I have collected illustrate movement, both socially and politically, as records of the shifting identity of motherhood and women’s liberation, but also durationally as physical images that were held, touched, and eventually abandoned.

Each photograph in Mothercraft is backlit as I rephotograph it, and the resulting image simultaneously reveals both the front and back of the print. With a sharp focus on the text, the image can fall further into obscurity, blurred and layered with captions and marks. The fragmented captions often slip past their descriptive roles into the more dogmatic territory and reflect the dynamic push and pull between the personal and the political. They offer information ranging from the objective, such as age and location, to the more partial and idiosyncratic details tied to tradition and duty. These images provide a glimpse into the unstable nature of truth and the complex relationship between image and word.

BIO

Toni Pepe creates prints and three-dimensional assemblages from discarded newspaper images, family snapshots, and obsolete photographic equipment, investigating how photography shapes our understanding of time, space, and self. Her practice explores the layers of information a print conveys beyond its image—whether through the presence of text, subtle stains, or crop marks—each detail offering insight into the photograph’s journey and its significance as a physical object. More than static images, photographic prints capture and suspend our likenesses and histories, bearing the marks of time and physical interaction.

Pepe is the Chair of Photography and Associate Professor of Art at Boston University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, Blue Sky Gallery, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, Fidelity, the Boston Public Library, the Danforth Art Museum, the University of Oregon, Candela Books + Gallery, The Magenta Foundation, and numerous private collections. She was a resident at Frans Masereel Centrum in 2023, a MacDowell Fellow in 2024, and was recently named a Howard Foundation and Evelyn Stefansson Nef Fellow.

In 1916 women were over 60 years into the battle of the American Suffrage Movement. Frustrated by President’s Wilson’s inaction on the matter, The National Woman’s Party decided to put their fate directly into women’s hands by launching a radical campaign that sent hundreds of Eastern suffragists out to the 12 western states where women had the right to vote. Their request was a simple one; put aside all political agendas and cast a protest vote against President Wilson and his fellow Democrats.

Inez Milholland was appointed special “flying envoy” to make a 12,000-mile swing through the west in October leading up to the 1916 Presidential and Congressional election.

Inez, traveling with her sister Vida, delivered some 50 speeches in eight states in 28 days. Battling chronic illness and lack of sleep, her four-week itinerary, brutal even by today’s travel standards, consisted of street meetings, luncheons, railroad station rallies, press interviews, teas, auto parades, dinner receptions, speeches in the West’s grandest theaters, and even impromptu talks on trains while on her way to the next destination.

On October 24th, 1916 in Los Angeles, she collapsed on stage while giving her final public words, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Her health forced her to stop the tour and she died 30 days later at the age of 30, making her the sole martyr of the American Suffrage Movement. Inspired by her devotion, the movement continued to grow, and ultimately led to the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Standing Together retraces the sisters’ journey as a determined Inez persuaded standing-room-only crowds throughout the west to vote for the enfranchisement of women.

Jeanine Michna-Bales is a fine artist working in the medium of photography. Her work explores our fundamentally important relationships – to the land, to other people and to oneself – and how they impact contemporary society. Her work lives at the intersection of curiosity and knowledge, documentary and fine art, past and present, anthropology and sociology, and environmentalism and activism. Her practice is based on in-depth research – taking into account different viewpoints, causes and effects, political climates – and she often incorporates primary source material into her projects.

Michna-Bales’s latest photographic essay on the American Suffrage Movement, Standing Together, is featured in the July/August 2020 double-issue of Smithsonian Magazine and will be released as a comprehensive publication and traveling exhibition in the Spring of 2021. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions around the United States, including The Phillips Collection, Moving Walls 23: Journeys at Open Society Foundations, the traveling exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, featured in numerous publications and online, and is held in many institutional and private collections. Among other honors, her work was selected for the 2016 Documentarian of The American South Collection Award from the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.

Jeanine Michna-Bales Portfolio

instagram: @JMBalesPhotography

In celebration of her participation as a Guest Critic for our inaugural Handmade Book exhibition (curated by Sangyon Joo from Datz Press), the Griffin Museum of Photography is pleased to present an online exhibition by Laila Nahar. The show centers on three of her projects: Rituals — a set of two books, Face to Faith and Puja — and Lost Space Living In Our Mind. With their complex book structures, vibrant imagery and print manipulation, these visual and tactile feasts take us on a meditative journey through memory, time, and place.

We are thankful to Nahar for deliberately spending time with each book of our Handmade Photobook exhibit, and selecting six of them for a spotlight feature on the Fine Art Photography Journal, LENSCRATCH.

Lost Space Living In Our Minds
Jaya Mishra, Tanveer Khonker & Laila Nahar

Lost Space Living in Our Mind is a handmade artist monograph about living in a place and the experience while revealing the place as both a subject and a collaborator. The book emerged when the novelty, particularity and excitement faded away. It was born from the feelings that seeped in the depths of our soul, into our existence. When acceptance and contradictions of the moment lost its grip on us. It is the sudden deep breath that pauses everything and the moment spreads through our existence. Just the hopping of a little bird, the sudden darkening of the sky in anticipation of monsoon rain, or the woman on the roof taking a moment of pause to look at the sky after hanging the washed clothes. Suddenly we are freed from the moment; something rises like the swelling tide. It is a book when feelings and remembrance become the reflection of each other.

The book starts with the collage from cut-out photos with pastels and text. Delving into scattered memories and realizations, we forged a nonlinear storyline of places embarking on a slow journey. The exploration pushed our inner and outer boundaries, confronting vulnerabilities. It spans across multiple spaces having been interconnected through memories or absence of it. One memory has led to the recollection of another from an entirely different time and place. The places have all bled into a single collage made of vivid yet intangible moments. Perhaps, it is not about a specific place at all, but more about the idea of the place itself. The new context of the experience is created with writings by three protagonists.

Rituals: Face to Faith and Puja
Tanveer Khondker & Laila Nahar

Face to Faith

When religion is reduced to an individual, when the religious rituals and categorizations are taken away; what remains in the heart of a pilgrim? What remains between a man* and the god? Is it still of significance what the man* is called or the God is named? The book attempts to understand and capture the sublime calmness and depth in the connection of a soul to the oneness.

I was trying to grasp and capture what is there in the shades of faith in the pilgrims of the old city of Jerusalem. To me, I see familiar expression on every pilgrim’s face – on the western wall, inside the Dome of Rock and the Church of Holy Sepulchre. It was of deep faith, vulnerability of human existence and, lamenting the loss of ancient cause. The old city has three of the world’s most important religious sites. Just behind the Wailing Wall which is considered the holiest for Jews, I could see the glittering Dome of the Rock, which houses the rock from where Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed ascended  to heaven. And only minutes away is the pilgrim-thronged Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows), which follows the Stations of the Cross to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the site where Jesus is believed to have been crucified.

By end of day, to me, all faces in the sacred sites of Christianity, Jewish and Islam became one – every pilgrim in the congregations or prayers was same to me. It is painful to conceive, for centuries, religions fight over the narratives of Jerusalem and the custody of its stones.

The outside of the book stands as a wall depicting the walled city of Jerusalem while the inside of the accordion shows the pilgrims devoted into rituals from three religion.

*The origin of the word man is gender neutral

Rituals: Face to Faith and Puja

The ritual of puja is founded in religion, but it is far more expansive in the lives of Hindu culture. It runs deep through personal, family and social life. It is the rituals of love, blessings, togetherness and health; the search for enlightenment and depth; seeking meaning to life and death. It is joyous, it is humbling and it is liberating from personal constraints. It is submission to connections to within and to without.

The rituals of puja are means to comprehend and appreciate our spiritual self and the connection to oneness. It is to understand that the pride and individuality is an illusion. It is not that homage is paid to multiple gods but it is to view and experience the oneness through multiple windows.

It is like the soothing translucent aachal of her saree that wraps as all in her warmth.

About the artist –

Laila Nahar is a lens-based artist and bookmaker in California, USA. She lived her life in stark cultural contrast, born and brought up in Bangladesh and eventually migrating to the USA. She is primarily a self-taught photographer and book-artist exploring belonging, memory, cultural and collective identity. Her background from Bangladesh continues to shape her artistic identity and her work goes back to her roots in the Indian subcontinent, namely Bangladesh and India.

Laila’s handmade photo artist booksappeared in several exhibitions, including Griffin Museum of Photography, Photobookjournal.com, UnBound13! Candela Books + Gallery Exhibit and has won several awards, including Lucie Photo Book Prize Independent Category, DUMMY AWARD24 Shortlist, Athens Photo Festival APhF:24 Finalist, 19^th Singapore International Photo Festival Finalist etc. Her books are in permanent collections of several libraries and museums, including University of Colorado Libraries (Boulder), The Fleet Library (RISD), Boatwright Memorial Library (University of Richmond, Virginia), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Harvey Milk Photo Book Center amongst others.

Laila attended CODEX 2024 with seven of her handmade artist photo books.