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Museum of Contemporary Photography

Name: Museum of Contemporary Photography
Address: 600 S Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60605, US
Telephone: +13126635554
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Museum of Contemporary Photography

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The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP) cultivated a deeper understanding of the artistic, cultural, and politicL roles of the image in our world today. Founded in 1976 as the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography, the museum collaborates with artists, photographers, communities, and institutions locally, nationally, and internationally. As the leading photo

graphy museum in the Midwest, presenting projects and exhibitions and acquiring works that embrace a wide range of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, the museum offers students, educators, research specialists, and general audiences an intimate and comprehensive visual study center. The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) is a stimulating and innovative forum for the collection, creation, and examination of contemporary imagemaking in its camera tradition and in its expanded vocabulary of digital processes. Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the museum considers all elements of our mission to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the artistic, cultural and political implication of the image in our world today, within the context of public service and responsibility to the community and museum profession. The Museum is committed to broadening the visual arts by constantly searching for new national and international talent to exhibit rather than simply following suit established by larger institutions. To this end, the museum’s programming guides the public to a greater understanding of thought-provoking contemporary photography as well as an appreciation for traditional work that has not yet received critical acclaim.

08/24/2026

Please join MoCP for a day of programs in honor of the opening of the exhibition, If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground, curated byDr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Revered Wheeler Parker, Jr., Emmett Till’s cousin, best friend, and last surviving witness to his kidnapping.

Participants include:

Artist, Dawoud Bey

Founding Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Lonnie G. Bunch III

President and CEO of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Sharon L. Davies

Director and Co-founder of the Monument Lab, Dr. Paul M. Farber

Attorney, Professor, and Former President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill

Lawyer and Politician, Mitch Landrieu

President and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Brent Leggs

Guest Curator, If Emmett Till Lived, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis

Artist, Cecil McDonald, Jr.

Emmett Till’s Cousin and Friend, Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr.

Artist, avery r. young

And other guests of honor

The Opening Convening will take place at Columbia College Chicago’s Student Center located at 754 S Wabash Ave, 5th Floor Auditorium.

All are invited to MoCP for the opening reception following the convening.

MoCP is located on the ground level of 600 S Michigan Ave.

This program is free and open to the public. Registration is required, please click the link below.

08/23/2026

MoCP is closed August 24-September 9, 2026 for exhibition install. Please visit our website for updates and get in touch at [email protected].

08/20/2026

Laetitia Vancon’s work portrays Odesa, a city in Ukraine on the Black Sea of both strategic and symbolic importance. Behind the frontlines, another storm was unfolding, more intimate, rooted in daily life, survival and quiet defiance. Odesa stood at a crossroads: between land and sea, past and future, peace and war. The war was everywhere, and in every story Vançon encountered. But so was life. She turned her lens towards this space of tension. The simplest gestures—swimming, performing arts, returning to school or church, volunteering—took on a quietly heroic dimension. The photographs are a personal tribute to the people she encountered: those who stayed, who love, resist, and carry on with courage and dignity. Even in the heart of the storm, hope, tenderness, solidarity, and spirit endure.

Laetitia Vancon worked as a chemical engineer in France and South Africa, then stepped away from her defined career path, and settled in Germany, using photography as a form of healing to process personal traumas. This then evolved into long-term documentary work and completed her studies at the Danish Photojournalism School, Aarhus, in 2014. Vancon’s work primarily explores humanitarian issues, with a focus on resilience, identity, and the human condition. Since 2015 she has been a regular contributor to The New York Times.

She has exhibited her work internationally, including at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, with Fisheye Gallery (2018); La Gacilly-Baden Photo Festival, France and Austria (2019); Hunterian Museum, Glasgow (2019); Xposure Festival, Dubai (2023); Leica Gallery, Wetzlar, Germany (2023).

Vançon’s work in Odesa, Ukraine, won the Feature Photography prize from the Overseas Press Club of America in 2023. Her work has also been recognised by the Sony World Photography Awards (2019); Pictures of the Year International, United States (2020); Lucie Foundation, Los Angeles (2023); the Leica Oscar Barnack Award, Wetzlar, Germany (2023); Siena International Photo Awards, Italy (2023); and Life Framer, London (2024).

To learn more about Vancon’s work, visit https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/storm/laetitia-vancon.

08/13/2026

Badouin Mouanda’s photographs are based on events during the floods in Brazzaville, Congo-Brazzaville, during the 2020 COVID lockdown. They are a reminder of the need to respect the environment or face reprisals from nature. The seasons change, but the threat from
the rain is permanent. When thunder arrived at night, no one stayed indoors, everyone kept
watching the sky. They found a shovel, a saucepan, or a bucket to clear the sand and water. They tried to create a dam against the torrent. For the elderly, the effort seemed futile. They abandoned their homes, pointing at the sky saying, “God alone knows.” During the floods, it was impossible to get into inundated streets. Mouanda instead gathered personal testimonies to reconstruct the desolation later. Residents brought their belongings and posed in a flooded basement to recreate the situations they faced.

Baudouin Maouanda started taking photographs in 1993, using his fathers Zenit camera. He was soon working for local papers, chronicling life in Brazzaville. His work focuses on the history of his country and the consequences of the repeated wars in both Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Maouanda is equally known for photographs of daily life in Congo and wider themes including climate and education.

Work by Mouanda has been exhibited at numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including at Gasworks, London (2011); MIA Gallery, Seattle, Washington (2013) and the Breda International Photo Festival, Netherlands (2016).

He has won numerous prizes, including the Central Africa category in the 2011 African Beauty in All Its States Award, presented by the African Union and the European Union; and the Prix Roger-Pic, Paris, in 2022.

He works regularly with news publications including Jeune Afrique, Planète jeune, Afrique Magazine, Le Monde, L’Express styles, VSD and L’Humanité. Mouanda is co-founder of the Brazzaville-based community photography collective Génération Elili.

To learn more about Maouanda’s work, visit https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/storm/baudouin-mouanda.

08/11/2026

In this series, Camille Seaman chased a type of thunderstorm called a supercell, which can produce grapefruit-sized hail and spectacular tornadoes. Their clouds can be up to 80 kilometers wide and 20,000 meters high, blocking out the daylight, and creating a dark,
ominous space below. Seaman was not prepared for how overwhelming the experience
could be—the smells of the charged particles, the sweetness of the grass and the pavement before it rains, the colors of the clouds, and the light of the sky and the lightning. It was important for the artist to remember the pain and destruction these storms inflicted on local people, who never knew when a tornado could come through. But Seaman’s images speak to the duality of all things—there is no creation without destruction. A cloud can be beautiful, terrible, or both.

Camille Seaman graduated from the State University of New York, Purchase, in 1992 after studying photography. She gained widespread attention in 2006 with her series The Last Iceberg, which documents Arctic and Antarctic icebergs using a portraiture approach. Seaman continues to work on the effects of climate change and strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature.

Seaman has held numerous group and solo exhibitions, and her series The Last Iceberg has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe, including at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (2007 and 2008); the University of Delaware Museum (2008); and Hans Alf Gallery, Copenhagen (2009).

Seaman’s work has received numerous prizes including a National Geographic award in 2006 and a Critical Mass award in Portland, Oregon, for her monograph The Last Iceberg in 2007. She was a TED Senior Fellow (2011–15) and a Stanford Knight Fellow (2014), and was awarded a Fellowship by Cinereach in New York as Filmmaker in Residence (2016).

To learn more about Seaman’s work, visit https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/storm/camille-seaman

08/06/2026

On the stormy night of November 13, 2019, Venice was submerged by one of the highest tides ever recorded, transforming the city into a wounded lagoon. That catastrophic storm inspired a project in which artistic gesture and existential urgency became one. Books that Patrizia Zelano rescued from the flood—encyclopedias, scientific treatises, literary texts—became, for her, the core of an investigation into the boundary between dissolution and resistance. For Zelano, saving books is a gesture aimed at restoring the evocative power of knowledge. Each photograph is like a collective memento mori that urges us to reconsider our relationship with the earth, with culture, and with fragility itself. The photographed volumes emerge as ephemeral sculptures, lit only by natural light. The symbolic subject is transformed into regeneration, reconstructing fragments of meaning amidst the chaos of the present.

Patrizia Zelano holds a degree in pre-Columbian ethno-archaeology from the University of Bologna. She was taught by the photographer Guido Guidi at the Accademia di Bella Arti, Ravenna, and he has remained a strong influence on her artistic research and development.

Zelano’s work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including at Galleria dell’Immagine, Rimini (2007); Centro Italiano della Fotografia d’Autore, Bibbiena, Italy (2010); L’Arsenal de Metz, France (2011); Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida (2012); National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens (2013); IPP (International Photo Project), Spazio Soderini, Milan (2015); and CIBUS, Parma, Italy (2022).

She is the author of Soul Trigger: A Perceptual Oracle with 79 New Arcana — A Journey with Art and Magic, published by Pazzini editore in 2019.

To learn more about Zelano’s work, visit https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/storm/patrizia-zelano.

07/30/2026

After his home was destroyed during the war in Gaza, Belal Khaled was staying in a tent outside the morgue at Nasser Hospital. The tent overlooked an area where bodies were gathered after the morgue reached full capacity. Surrounded by the smell of death and the sound of drones, Khaled began documenting hands. Through their scars, their stillness, and their grip on life, they told stories no voice could carry. He documented the hand that was a father’s last touch with his son, the hand that searched desperately for survivors beneath the rubble, and the hand that offered joy despite overwhelming pain, as well as those that are now still forever. The images tell a collective narrative through individual details, making the hand a visual anchor for understanding reality. Each hand carries a meaning of survival, absence, and the fragile persistence of life. And each hand, like each story, is unlike any other.

Belal Khaled is an artist and war photographer, whose work sheds light on human suffering in the face of wars, conflict, and other disasters. He grew up in refugee camps in Gaza, where his creative vision was shaped by the palestinian cause and the experience of displacement, leading him to dedicate his work to documenting the struggles of refugees around the world and amplifying the voices of the marginalized through his images and art. He’s covered conflicts and wars from Gaza to Syria and Azerbaijan as well as humanitarian crises in Syria and Turkey.

Khaled’s work has been exhibited in more than a dozen countries, including at the Faces of Gaza exhibition, Nancy, France (2014); P21 Gallery, London (2014); the D'reesha Arts Festival, Doha (2022); and Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge, Connecticut (2024).
UNESCO showcased his art at its Paris headquarters to celebrate World Arabic Language Day in 2021, and Google displayed some of his work at the entrance to its offices in Paris in 2023. He has appeared as a speaker on TED Arabic, and his work has been published internationally, including in Time, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal and on Al Jazeera.

To learn more about Khaled’s work, visit https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/storm/belal-khaled.

07/28/2026

Interested in breaking up your day with photography? On Friday, August 14 at 12pm, Join MoCP and artist Brad Temkin for Photos at Noon; a public print viewing of works from the museum’s permanent collection. In theme with the current exhibition, Prix Pictet Storm, these works will showcase artists who explore and raise awareness about the environment and climate change.

Brad Temkin (American, b. 1956) is a photographer whose work examines the contemporary landscape and human impact on the environment through projects on architecture, ecology, and natural resources. He has exhibited internationally at the Field Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Museo Sivori, Southeast Museum of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. He is the author of three monographs; Private Places (Center for American Places, 2005), Rooftop (Radius Books, 2014), and The State of Water (Radius books, 2019). Temkin taught photography at Columbia College Chicago between 1984 and 2020, where he continues to mentor emerging artists.

MoCP’s Print Study Room is located on the second floor of the museum, accessible by stairs and elevator.

Museum programs are free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged. Please register online at mocp.org.

07/23/2026

Photography often documents events that have already happened. This project instead is an attempt to foresee a future catastrophe, a repeat of the floods and landslides that devastated the Dolomites in northern Italy in 1966. Marina Caneve avoids revisiting traditional sublime and monumental imagery of mountains. She rather creates new, uncertain imagery that allows us to explore, decode, and re-observe the landscape. The series oscillates between the documentary and the poetic. Its variations are a metaphor for the stratification of rocks that show the structure of mountains, revealing their geological epochs and fragility, where at various points their slopes have collapsed. Caneve’s camera is directed towards the landscapes of her childhood, towards the people who live in and with the mountains and know their dangers. For Caneve, seeing and imagining this vulnerability are a way of relating materially to it.

Marina Caneve explores the relationship between photography and research, emphasizing the stratification between disciplines and languages. Currently, she is researching the idea of ecosystems, both environmental and cultural.

In 2023, Caneve received the Italian Council fellowship for On the Ground among the Animals, promoted by FMAV (Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Italy) and UGM (Maribor Art Gallery, Slovenia). This project has toured several venues as a solo exhibition, including FMAV, UGM, and CAP Centre d’art de Saint-Fons near Lyon, France. It was also shown at Paris Photo in 2024.

Are They Rocks or Clouds? has won numerous awards including the Giovane Fotografia Italiana, now the Luigi Ghirri Award, and the Dummy Award at Cortona on the Move, Italy, both in 2018. It was published as a photobook by Fw:Books and won the Bastianelli Award for best Italian photobook in 2019. It was also nominated for the Prix du livre at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, in 2019.

To learn more about Caneve’s work, visit https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/storm/marina-caneve.
Photo carousel: Individual image, installation shot

07/16/2026

A storm discharges accumulated energy, not as mere destruction, but as a force seeking to restore balance. This image captures that essence: a thirty-meter-long frame of an Amazonian palm lying on the bed of the Madre de Dios river. While Huarcaya and his team were exposing a thirty-meter roll of photosensitized paper placed beneath the tree, a storm erupted. Four flashes of lightning imprinted their energy onto the scene and onto the paper. Nature took control.

Would the team accept the exposure had been lost or recognize that, after more than two years of seeking to capture visually the power and vitality of the Amazon, they had found the key?
They had to work with the Amazon, not despite it.

Roberto Huarcaya graduated in psychology from the Universidad Catolica del Peru and studied cinema and photography in Lima and Madrid. Known for his exploration of humanity’s relationship with the environment, he works primarily with large-scale photographic installations and specialising in the photographic technique.

Huarcaya has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, biennials, and fairs including the 6th Havana Biennial (1997); PHotoESPAÑA, Madrid (1999 and 2025); the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2024); Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), Seattle, Washington (2007); and the Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea (2014).

In Lima, Huarcaya taught photography at the Universidad de Lima (1990–93), the Gaudi Institute (1993–97), and the Centro de la Fotografía, now Centro de la Imagen, where he was founder and director from 1999 to July 2022.

To learn more about Huarcaya’s work, visit https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/storm/roberto-huarcaya

Photo credit: Roberto Huarcaya, Amazograma #1 (Detail), 2014
Photo carousel: Individual image, installation shot

Address

600 S Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL
60605

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 5pm
Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 8pm
Friday	10am - 5pm
Saturday	10am - 5pm

Telephone

+13126635554

Website

http://www.mocp.org/

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