Rescuing History

Kurdistan, Somaliland, and Kosovo have rich histories, but decades of conflict jeopardize their preservation. These unsung heroes persevere to save their cultural heritage.

Kwëtkihëna Lënapehòkink: We Will Return to the Land of the Lenape

A photo essay about the Lenape people who are indigenous to the land New York City was built upon.

Albee Square Mall and Downtown Brooklyn 1980-1989 | Celebrating 50 Years of Jamel Shabazz Photography

A reflective memoir capturing the golden era of Hip-Hop culture through the lens of renowned, iconic documentarian photographer, Jamel Shabazz.

BALTIC WAY – SOFT RESISTANCE

Baltic Way as Soft Resistance commemorates the 35th anniversary of the Baltic Chain—a peaceful political demonstration that united approximately two million people across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in a human chain spanning over 600 kilometers.

USA 3.0

USA 3.0 is a visual journalism project that captures and interprets American history in real time, marking this historical period and preserving a record of the past and present and for future generations.

Heritage in Focus

Heritage in Focus was launched in 2022 as an innovative fellowship offering emerging photographers the opportunity to document historic places and their stewards.

70 Years of World Press Photo

Unpacking seven decades of photojournalism through the World Press Photo archive in six themes: women weeping, fire and smoke, MEN RESCUING, Black Skin, Silhouettes and Shadows, and The Wow Moment.

Legacy of Lies, El Salvador 1981-1984

This collection of photographs offers a visual historical record of the first years of El Salvador’s civil war, the foundational period forcing Salvadoran civilians to flee north that created the chaos and confusion at the border with Mexico and the United States.

Perception & Representation: Reframing “Modernity”

A dialogue between two independent, conceptually entwined projects, by a group of Dutch photographers and by American artist Kennedi Carter.

The Dutch photographers’ work features prominent models of color, in the style of Rembrandt and his contemporaries, to counter the erasure of non-white people throughout Dutch history. Similarly, Carter’s work brings focus to Blackness, belonging, wealth and power, through the visual style of European royalty combined with contemporary Black aesthetics.

100 Years of WNYC

This multimedia installation celebrates the one-hundred-year history of WNYC – beginning as New York City’s Municipal Broadcasting Station in 1924 and continuing as the City’s beloved public radio station today.

In This Brief Life

Eugene Richards draws from his latest book, In This Brief Life (2023), a collection of more than 50 years of mostly unseen photographs.

Moonsongs For Earth

Moonsongs for Earth offers a musical exploration of a decade-long war in Nepal: the dream for a just, egalitarian society and the subsequent betrayal.

RezMade: Photographs by student photographers from Our Community Record Two Eagle River School

RezMade is an exhibition of current work by student photographers from the all-Tribal Our Community Record Two Eagle River School, Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, in collaboration with A VOICE-Art Vision & Outreach In Community Education

Children of Indigo

Indigo cultivation helped fuel American slavery. Today, women artists and homesteaders in South Carolina are writing a new chapter in indigo’s painful history.

Britain’s Stone Age Building Boom

It’s not just Stonehenge: New discoveries reveal an era when awe-inspiring monuments were all the rage.

Greetings from Pandemic Island

A personal record of the pandemic experience on the island of Manhattan connecting the 1918-19 influenza and COVID-19 outbreaks. Spanning a century, this visual essay documents the crises by questioning issues of individual and collective responsibility but also highlights new and long existing racial and socioeconomic disparities catalyzed by the epidemic.

Picturing Health: Highlights from the World Health Organization archives

On WHO’s 75th anniversary, this exhibition looks back at some of the highlights from our archives, with a focus on images and stories produced from the 1950s to the 1970s by some of our most prolific contributing photographers.

Sowing Rice With Salt

Sowing Rice with Salt explores the impact of immigration on intergenerational relationships, through diptychs of archival images of immigrant parents and recreations of their children with written reflections.

Dear Mr. Welles

Dear Mr. Welles investigates the impact of the radio broadcast: ‘The War of the worlds’ by Orson Welles by visualizing letters written to Orson Welles the days after the broadcast was aired.

The Gay Space Agency

The Gay Space Agency confronts the American space program’s historical exclusion of openly queer astronauts, reimagining a history of the space program that celebrates queerness and highlights LGBTQIA+ role models.

A Love Letter To Barbados

Photographic images that encapsulate the stories, the people and the powerful landscape of Barbados, the Southeastern island in the Caribbean sea.

NYC Undercover: Post-War Sound and Vision from NYPD Surveillance and WNYC Radio

Surveillance films of individuals and events made by the NYPD in the 1960s and ’70s are matched with vintage audio excerpts from City-owned WNYC radio programs, creating unique and dynamic new content.

The Legacy of Korean “Comfort Women” and Their Continued Fight for Justice

Presented by Photoville

This work seeks to preserve the legacies and share the testimonies of Korean “comfort women,” a euphemism for women (mostly teenagers at the time) who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.

Made in Land: Spoken Memories

Presented by The 400 Years Project and Photoville

Indigenous artists Dakota Mace and Tahila Mintz engage alternative photographic processes and use soil, plants, water, and sun directly in the image-making process to tell stories about the past, present, and future of the land — stories that connect them to their ancestors, and to themselves.

Where the Birds Never Sing

Presented by Magnum Foundation

Where the Birds Never Sing reenacts the memories of survivors from the 1979 Marichjhapi massacre in Sundarbans, West Bengal, India, weaving together perspectives on a painful history that faces slow erasure from collective memory.

In A Time of Panthers: Early Photographs

Presented by Henson Scales Productions, Clair Oliver Gallery, SPQR Editions, and Photoville

These images serve as a time capsule of sorts — not only of my adolescence and political awakening, but also of the country whose ongoing struggle with racial inequality, police brutality, and resistance is as urgent and timely as ever.

Reclaiming History

Monuments examine passive relics of America’s racist past in the Confederacy, the dynamic changing of these landscapes, and who will be honored now.

The Port Authority Of NY&NJ: Moving The Region For A Century

A chronicle of the centennial of the Port Authority, including the creation of container shipping, the raising of a bridge to accommodate newer, larger ships, and the Port Authority’s continuing investment in port facilities that remain as vital for commerce today as they did 100 years ago.

The Museum of the Old Colony

Family Incarceration: Never Again is Now

Viewfinder: The Art and Craft of the Film Still

Un/Settled

The New Amsterdam Koffiehuis

Spanish Harlem: El Barrio in the ’80s

Past Tense: DUMBO Before Instagram

ASMP’s 75th Anniversary

NYC Work and Working: Photographs from the WPA Federal Writers’ Project

The Municipal Archives presents an exhibition drawn from a collection of more than 5,000 photographs taken or collected by the New York City Unit of the Federal Writers’ and Art Projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Ebifananyi, The Photographers Trilogy

In presentations of historical photographs from Africa, Uganda was—until recently—only mentioned in relation to photographs produced by non-Ugandans or members of the Ugandan diaspora. The first three books in the Ebifananyi series change this status quo by presenting photographs produced by Deo Kyakulagira (1940-2000), Musa Katuramu (1916-1983) and Elly Rwakoma (ca.1938).

Federal Project 2

Over the course of 2018, and into 2019, Topic Studios has commissioned 50 artists from across the United States to explore and showcase the diversity of contemporary life in America. Federal Project No. 2 will consist of artistic pairings, where we ask world-class photographers, visual artists, musicians, etcetera, to pick a work from the vast WPA archives that speaks to them, and then make new work in response to it.

Priya Ramrakha – the recovered archive

Ramrakha’s iconic images defied stereotype, censorship and editorial demand, capturing key moments from segregated colonial oppression in his home in Kenya, and tying those to moments of black struggle and surprising solidarities in the US in the 1960s.

Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78

Living in the City: An Inside Look at Four Decades of Changing Housing in New York City

New York City is constantly changing. Cycles of growth, decay, and renewal have altered the bricks and mortar of its physical environment and the humans who live here. “Living in the City” vividly illustrates how the housing landscape in New York City changed during the four decades from 1961 to 2001.

Lost Rolls America

“Lost Rolls America” is a new and unique kind of Americana archive. In the age of image saturation, this archive slows the pace of our instantaneous digital world and commemorates the role that analog photos have played in all of our lives.

The Patriots Story

“The Patriot Story” is a portrait series that tells the rarely told stories of the living Ethiopian Patriots, who proudly fought against the Italian army during the five-year occupation (1935-1941) in Ethiopia under the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.

Signs of Your Identity

Generations of Canada’s First Nations forgot who they were. Languages died out, sacred ceremonies were criminalized and suppressed. These double exposure portraits explore the trauma of some of the 80,000 living survivors who remain. Through extensive accompanying interviews, they address the impact of intergenerational trauma and lateral violence, documenting the slow path toward healing.

The New Europeans

These portraits illustrate Europe’s long and complex history of immigration. Algerians came to France while their homeland was a French colony, surging in the 1954-1962 war of independence. Since the 1990s, some 40,000 Somalis fleeing civil war have settled in Sweden. Indians are among the three million South Asians who’ve come to Britain from former British colonies. About as many Turks live in Germany. They came as guest workers in the 1960s and ’70s—but stayed and had families.

Pretty Girl Charged with Clever Swindle

These images capture a rich cross-section of the city’s population, depicting dress and social status in addition to possible criminal behavior. Focusing solely on women captured by police camera, this exhibit examines how these unique portraits offer a fascinating window into the lives of women in early 20th-century New York.

Finding Humanity for 75 Years

A Century on the Brooklyn Waterfront

The NYC Municipal Archives invites you to explore a hundred-year history of the Brooklyn waterfront through photographs dating from 1870 to 1974.

WWII Chinese Veterans

Chinese documentary photographer Li Qiang spent nearly one month in July 2015, visiting ten places in four Chinese provinces to shoot around 50 veterans.

Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down

Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down speaks of life in the Arkansas Delta forty years go and today. Black-and-white photographs made long years ago are interwoven with recent color photographs and, in turn, with a short story.

Reframe: An Exploration of Memory and Nostalgia

Throughout history, photography has been upheld as a source of truth.

Reframe: An Exploration of Memory and Nostalgia examines those histories which are unclear, questioning our belief in what was and re-interpreting what can be learned from the past. The show includes work from 10 international photographers and artists who are taking work created long ago and making it their own.

Views From A City

Work In Progress On In Progress Work

The photographs in Work In Progress On In Progress Work have been made in downtown Brooklyn between 2011-2014, a time when changes in the architecture of the area alone became a monumental manifestation of the rapid socioeconomic shifts in the area.

Documenting the Build of Brooklyn Bridge Park

Julienne Schaer’s photos of the build of the Brooklyn Bridge Park comprise a visual documentary that illustrates the transformation of Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront into a world-class park.

Raskols: The Gangs of Papua New Guinea

In “Raskols: The Gangs of Papua New Guinea,” Australian photographer Stephen Dupont presents a series of portraits that explores the world of cults, custom and tribal culture in Papua New Guinea.