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Photolucida

@photolucida

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Photolucida exists to support and promote the work of emerging and mid-career photographers. We are an arts nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon.
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Congratulations Critical Mass Top 50 finalist Abbey Hepner! @abbeyhepner About the project: In Dairy for the Downwinders, I explore my ancestors' experience living downwind of the Nevada Test Site. Between 1951 and 1992, over one thousand nuclear tests were detonated in the desert in Nevada. My ancestors lived and worked on a dairy farm and consumed milk from the cows that grazed on the land contaminated by nuclear fallout. Two of my great-uncles died of myeloid leukemia, a cancer with known ties to nuclear testing. The impacts of nuclear harm echo for generations, provoking detriments to our health, socioeconomic displacement, environmental contamination, and cultural and psychological trauma. This series explores where the land meets the body and the challenge of truth-telling in a community of secret-keepers. In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of children across the country were exposed to radionuclides through milk because of nuclear testing. The portraits refer to campaigns from the 1980s that featured images of missing people on milk cartons. Although the campaign was largely unsuccessful, it left a mark on our collective memory. Using family photographs, I create portraits on glass milk jars with liquid light by applying silver-gelatin emulsion directly to the surface and developing each piece by hand in the darkroom. This materially fragile process allows the image to emerge through physical contact with archival images, chemistry, and time. I work with 19th-century photographic processes to reflect on how histories persist, recur, and resurface, embedding the past materially within the present. Dairy for the Downwinders examines the intergenerational health, memory, and cultural consequences of nuclear fallout. It situates private grief within a broader national legacy that remains unresolved, as renewed attention to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act underscores the continuing scale and urgency of nuclear harm. by @photolucida
Congratulations Bill Hao, Critical Mass Top 50 finalist! @hao.bill About the project: I made an Ultra Large Format Camera(32X48inch) and using Wetplate Collodion Process to captures the breathtaking landscapes. I converted a 50 seats tour bus into an off grid mobile darkroom because this process requires immediate development after exposure. I have photographed the Rocky Mountains hundreds of times over the past decade, I observed how the landscape changes, how beautiful natural features disappear. my collodion glass photograph may last for two hundred years, but some landscapes may not, they are disappearing and face severe damage from wildfires, melting glaciers, and tourism pressures. Athabasca Glacier has retreated by more than 1.5 kilometers over the past century. In July 2024, the largest wildfire in a century destroyed half of the town of Jasper and 32,000 hectares of forest. Jasper National Park was closed due to severe wildfire damage, leading to a massive influx of tourists into Banff National Park. The excessive visitor numbers caused further damage. The Wetplate collodion Process was invented in the 1850s, It is drect photography by camera, the negative is final works, can't enlarge or print, so every works is unique. I am using a very old Goerz Red Dot Artar 47.5-inch lens and a Carl Zeiss Tessar 1200mm lens this time. I want to use my Rocky Mountains on Wetplate Collodion series to warn the world to protect the precious natural. through the oldest form of photography. by @photolucida
Congratulations Julie Mack, CM26 Top 50 finalist! @juliemack_esque About the project: Family photographs are supposed to prove something: that people belong to one another, that a room is safe, that love has a shape, that the pose can hold. My work begins with suspicion of that agreement. "Evidence & Fiction" uses constructed portraiture to treat the family photograph as evidence, fiction, and contract. Across two decades, the project moves through three kinds of family — the one I was born into, the one I entered through partnership, and the one made through chosen queer kinship. I stage portraits in cars, hotel rooms, dining rooms, backyards, and other spaces where family performs itself for the camera. The images are directed, performed, and composited from multiple frames of medium- and large-format film, but they borrow the authority of the family album: this happened, these people belong together, this is what love looks like. That authority fails slowly. A pose is held too tightly. A room behaves like an inheritance. A face refuses the role assigned to it. Whiteness appears not as subject but as atmosphere — taste, order, safety, silence. Queerness enters not as rescue, but as another form of staging: a fiction with its own rituals, loyalties, exclusions, and tenderness. As a butch dyke, I am inside the room, outside the script — implicated in all of it, never fully absorbed. Family is never simply found. It is arranged, desired, inherited, and performed. In sequence, the three families contaminate one another rather than resolve; the image becomes both evidence and cover story. by @photolucida
Congratualtions CM26 Top 50 finalist Marcy Palmer! @marcy_palmer Reproductive rights have become one of the most contested issues in the United States, prompting questions about history, autonomy, and access to care. This work began with a questions into what existed before modern medicine and how reproductive restrictions have shaped women's lives across time. Through this research, I encountered the long history of herbal abortifacients—plants historically used to regulate reproduction. The project centers on photographs of these botanicals, beginning with plants found near the site where Roe v. Wade originated. By layering botanical imagery with historical context, the work explores the intersections of place, memory, and reproductive history. Material choices are integral to the work's meaning. Each photograph is printed on kozo paper, known for its delicacy and strength; a metaphor for women and this issue. The application of 24-karat gold leaf symbolizes hope and references the Japanese practice of kintsugi, in which broken objects are repaired with gold, a symbol of resilience and strength. Occupying a space between beauty and unease, the work acknowledges those whose lives have been shaped by reproductive restrictions while expressing hope for a future in which reproductive healthcare is safe and accessible. It invites viewers to reflect on reproductive rights through both historical and contemporary perspectives. Note: This project examines the historical use of herbal abortifacients as a subject of research. It does not endorse their use, as these methods are often unsafe and unreliable. Modern medical care is the safest option. by @photolucida
Congratulations to Critical Mass 2026 Top 200 finalist Rebecca Congleton, Maine Museum of Photographic Arts Solo Show recipient! Denise Froehlich, MMPA Director selected Rebecca's project, "Rebecca is Uncomfortable" during jurying Critical Mass. We'll keep you updated on the exhibition schedule. Looking forward to seeing Rebecca's work on the gallery walls in Portland, Maine! @rebecca.congleton @mmpagallery Congleton's “Rebecca is Uncomfortable” is an ongoing self portrait project, through which she explores and sometimes humorously confront her internalized ideas about femininity, performance and identity as a woman in midlife, often utilizing discomfort or anonymity as a metaphor. by @photolucida
Congratulations Eric Kunsman, CM26 Top 50 finalist! @eric_kunsman About the project: The American landscape has long served as a record of the nation's ambitions, struggles, and transformations. Across the United States, evidence of economic change, shifting identities, and competing visions of the future can be found embedded within the built environment. Small towns, industrial cities, commercial corridors, residential neighborhoods, and rural communities all bear visible traces of a country navigating a period of uncertainty and transition. What Will Remain of US? is an ongoing photographic exploration of these places and the stories they reveal. Traveling throughout the Rust Belt and beyond, I document landscapes where economic realities, cultural values, and individual expressions have become woven into the physical environment. The photographs focus on ordinary spaces that often go unnoticed yet collectively provide insight into the social and economic conditions shaping contemporary America. Influenced by traditions of social documentary photography and topographic landscape studies, the work emphasizes observation rather than conclusion. Signs, flags, businesses, homes, aging infrastructure, and overlooked spaces appear as visual artifacts of a particular moment in history. Rather than presenting definitive answers, the photographs invite viewers to consider how communities define themselves, how they adapt to change, and how larger national conversations become visible at the local level. At its core, the project asks what traces of the present will endure in the future. Long after public debates fade and current events pass from memory, the landscape remains. Buildings are repurposed or abandoned, industries emerge and disappear, and communities continue to evolve. The physical environment becomes an archive, preserving evidence of the values, conflicts, aspirations, and challenges that shaped a particular era. by @photolucida
Congratulations CM26 Top 50 finalist Michael Bednar! @michaelbednarphotography About the project: The Condor & The Bull is a long-term photographic exploration of the rich cultural traditions of the Indigenous Quechua communities in the Andes Mountains, presented at a pivotal moment of transformation. As globalization, environmental pressures, and climate change reshape traditional ways of life, Quechua communities exhibit remarkable resilience and ingenuity in safeguarding their cultural heritage and stewardship of the land. Through a nuanced visual narrative, this project illuminates contemporary Quechua experiences and foregrounds the vital interplay between culture, identity, and environment. By documenting the Quechua’s profound connection to their ancestral lands and vibrant spiritual traditions, The Condor & The Bull offers audiences an opportunity to engage with narratives of continuity and adaptation. This work aspires to enrich curatorial and editorial dialogues on Indigenous knowledge, ecological sustainability, and cultural resilience—essential themes as global communities confront urgent questions about identity, heritage, and the future of our planet. by @photolucida
Congratulations Edward Boches, CM26 Top 50 finalist! @edwardboches About the series: Most people encounter an oyster at the end of its story. It arrives on a tray of ice. A shell is lifted, tipped back, tasted, and discarded. What remains unseen is the work that came before: years of tending cages, sorting seed, hauling gear through mud, repairing equipment, working in cold water, and following a schedule dictated not by a clock but by the tide. Along the shores of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, oyster farmers live by nature's centuries-old rhythms. The tide determines when they work, when they wait, when they capture spat, tend seed, move cages, harvest, and prepare for winter. The lives of individuals and their families are organized around the water's continual rise and fall. These photographs explore how the tide shapes work, community, and daily life. They document the labor required to grow food, the care required to sustain a fragile marine environment, and the work of growers whose labor remains largely invisible to those who enjoy the final product. This is a story about oysters and the people who grow them. It is also a story about lives, livelihoods, and relationships shaped by the tide. by @photolucida
Congratulations CM26 Top 50 finalist Magda Biernat! @magdabiernat_studio About the project: In the great river deltas and estuaries, there is a constant pull between freshwater effluence and the saline tide. Fresh water meets the sea to create a brackish borderland—an in-between state that is neither fully salt nor entirely fresh water. This gradual transition becomes a model for lives lived between cultures, languages, and places. As migration, travel, and technology reshape our relationships to one another and to place, identity becomes increasingly fluid—formed through movement, exchange, and overlap rather than defined by fixed boundaries. We become less river or sea than estuary. I mark this transformative state through the process of salt printing. Water collected from different points within an estuary is incorporated into each print, allowing variations in salinity to subtly influence the chemistry of the image. These shifts affect its tonal range, density, and clarity, embedding the estuary directly within the work. The landscape is present not only as a subject, but as a material component of the photograph itself. Like the estuary, the photographs depict scenes of encroachment and incongruous elements influenced by cultural cross-pollination. Historically significant places become ordinary, while introduced forms are absorbed into local landscapes. Foreign and indigenous histories converge within a single frame, where traces of conflict and collaboration coexist and boundaries become increasingly porous over time. Salt Front approaches the estuary as both landscape and metaphor for contemporary experience. The project is a portrait of that brackish in-between—a place of transition and exchange. by @photolucida
Congratulations CM26 Top 50 finalist Amy Sacka! @amysacka About the project: At age 50, I started following the rock band, Bleachers, around the country. Not merely because I was a fan. Or because I was chasing nostalgia. I was chasing a question. Somewhere along the line, youth became something I spoke about in the past tense. We treat wonder, recklessness, possibility, and freedom as if they belong to a vanished version of ourselves. We call it growing up. I wanted to know if that was true. So I bought concert tickets. I slept in hostels. I carried a notebook. I shot film. I stood in line with teenagers and twenty-somethings waiting for the doors to open. I interviewed them about their dreams, their fears, and the futures they imagined for themselves. I began keeping a journal the way I had as a child. The strange thing was that I wasn't documenting them. I was documenting the distance between who I had become and who I once imagined I might be. Following Bleachers became a framework for something larger: an investigation into vitality itself. The photographs move between ecstatic crowds, quiet hotel rooms, portraits of young fans, handwritten notes, and the lonely spaces that exist between destinations. Together they form a visual diary about longing: not for youth, but for possibility. Again and again, the same questions surfaced: When do dreams become memories? What happens to wonder? Is freedom something we lose, or something we stop practicing? The young people I met were standing at the beginning of their stories. I was standing in the middle of mine. Yet the closer I looked, the less different we seemed. We were all searching for belonging. We were all trying to imagine a future. We were all trying to hold onto something that felt alive. This project is not about growing younger. It is about refusing the idea that becoming ends. Through photographs, journals, conversations, and miles of American road, I Want to Find Tomorrow asks whether youth is an age, or whether it is the courage to remain unfinished. by @photolucida
Congratulations Briar Pine @briarmpine, Critical Mass 2026 Top 50 finalist! About the project: Camouflaged explores my patriarchal lineage to investigate how masculinities are formed and performed. Throughout the photographs, I use personal artifacts such as hair, hunting trophies, testosterone, and family photographs to trace my relationships and history. In making each portrait, I undergo transformations to question how I dismantle, uphold, or complicate the white masculine ideologies often idealized and mythologized within rural American culture. Through this process, I investigate the visibility of my identity as a transmasculine person, exploring the constraints of assimilation and imagining new possibilities for masculinity. Rather than using camouflage as a tool to disappear into an environment, I use it to become hypervisible, confronting the viewer with the expectations and limitations placed on gender presentation. by @photolucida
Selections are in for Nature. Nurture. Curator Stacy Swiderski has selected work by artists from the Critical Mass 2026 Top 200 for this exhibition at Wynter Gallery in July 2027! @wynter.gallery Congratulations to the following artists: Andrew Epstein Andria Nanativio Bryce Olsen Franciso Gonzalez Camacho Hanna Wolf Jeremiah Dine Pamela Sherlock riel Sturchio Sanghyeok Bang Sarah Hood Salomon Xuan Hui Ng We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Wynter Gallery in the heart of Lambertville, New Jersey. Curated by Critical Mass juror and gallery owner Stacy Swiderski, this exciting exhibition has been selected from the 2026 Critical Mass Top 200 finalists. Wynter Gallery will collaborate with its trusted printing partner in San Diego to produce the artwork for the exhibition, ensuring a professional presentation of each selected artist’s work. The exhibition will be on view for eight weeks during the summer of 2027. Images top left to bottom right: Sanghyeok Bang @bang.sanghyeok, Bryce Olsen @bryceolsenphotography, riel Sturchio @rly_riel, Jeremiah Dine @jeremiah.dine by @photolucida

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