On View: October 13 - November 6, 2026

Opening Reception: Oct 15, 7-9 PM

Artist Talk: Oct 25, 3-5 PM

📍ATLANTA PHOTOGRAPHY GROUP

Eyes on Atlanta: Subverting the Gaze, curated by Charlotte Woolf, explores the ways artists challenge, complicate, and reclaim systems of looking that have historically shaped how people are represented and understood. While the concept of the gaze is often associated with the male gaze, a term film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced in the 1970s, the idea has expanded to examine broader relationships among power, visibility, and representation.

Building on and challenging existing conversations around the gaze, bell hooks introduced the concept of the oppositional gaze, a critical, resistant way of looking that recognizes systems of power. Her work examined how Black women were often excluded from dominant conversations around representation and expanded feminist theory through an intersectional lens. The oppositional gaze recognizes that looking is not passive, but a way of engaging with, questioning, and challenging the images and narratives created within systems of power.

This exhibition considers the many gazes that artists may choose to subvert, including but not limited to the male gaze, white gaze, colonial gaze, cis gaze, Western gaze, and medical gaze. Through photography and related practices, artists challenge the power dynamics inherent to the camera itself, question cultural expectations around beauty and identity, and take the depiction of self into their own hands.

Subverting the gaze can take many forms. It may mean disrupting familiar ideas of who is worthy of being seen, challenging the expectation that a photograph of a person must function as a traditional portrait, or creating images that resist easy interpretation. Abstraction, fragmentation, and alternative forms of representation can also become acts of subversion by refusing familiar ways of seeing.

At its core, Subverting the Gaze asks: Who is looking? Who is being looked at? Who controls the image? And what possibilities emerge when artists challenge the systems that have historically shaped visibility and representation?

The flyer featured Gender Fail’s Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries Font.

FEATURING:
Haylee Anne @hayleekitties
Natalie Arrué @nataliearrue
Gabrielle Barnett @gabrielle_jbarnett
Nydia Blas @neeksiebeeks
Melissa Hope Sarah Brown @melissa.hope.sarah.brown
Jamil Fatti @jamilfatti
Emily Greenslade @boneyardgrl
Sule Indigo @suleindigo
Ross Landenberger @rosslandenberger
Natasha Lehner @tashwl
Mads Nunes @madison__nunes
Jordan Putt @jputtphoto

(L-R from Top) Haylee Anne, Natalie Arrué, Gabrielle Barnett, Melissa Hope Sarah Brown, Ross Landenberger & Nydia Blas