Tucked away in upstate Kingston, New York, the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) opened its summer season with three exhibitions: “Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy,” “The Rose,” and “Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print,” transforming the nonprofit arts center into a pulsing archive of documentation, resistance, and transformation, running from May 24 through August 31.
Long known for its artist-centered and community-driven mission, CPW is a nonprofit arts organization that supports photographic practices as a means of public conversation around critical issues in photography.
Larry Fink’s sensual empathy
Up the stairs of the CPW building, a world emerges where shadows dance with light, and Larry Fink’s “Sensual Empathy” unfolds like a visual symphony across the gallery walls. Black and white photographs hang alongside a bookcase containing 15 photobooks, each photo book serving as a chapter in the photographer’s restless pursuit of intimacy.
Fink’s photography moved through society’s layers, capturing everything from Manhattan’s glittering galas to Pennsylvania’s intimate gatherings, from protest lines crackling with empowerment to jazz clubs thick with saxophone dreams.
Working primarily with available light and getting remarkably close to his subjects, Fink developed a signature style that bridges documentary photography with fine art seeking to capture authentic human moments. “Larry had that effect on people. He gave you all of himself-his love and curiosity and humor and fellow-feeling and raucous high spirits-and that aura traveled with him into all kinds of alien circumstances” says Lucy Sante, curator of the exhibition.
Fink’s seminal series “Social Graces” combines civil rights documentation with jazz imagery, while quotes from his poems whisper between frames. The exhibition’s title comes from Sante’s perfect description of Fink’s unique approach. Sante discovered Fink through a 1980s postcard featuring a woman with a revolver aimed straight at the camera.
When she met the photographer fifteen years later, she understood the image’s true nature: “She wasn’t aiming her gun at some faceless magazine ghoul from the big city, they were cronies.” In that revelation lies Fink’s gift, what Sante calls “sensual empathy,” the rare ability to dissolve the distance between the photographer and the subject, transforming mere documentation into something more genuine.
Flashpoint’s archive of resistance
Down the hallway, “Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print” transforms CPW’s reading room into an electric archive of rebellion. Decades of resistance unfolds through photobooks, zines, posters, and underground journals, revealing photography’s double life as both witness and weapon across global movements from the 1950s to today.
The room breathes with organized chaos, tables arranged by urgent categories: anti-political movements, displacement, environment, war and violence, race and class. Each section creates a universe of voices demanding to be heard. Visitors trace the evolution of turmoil through their fingertips, moving from civil rights pamphlets to climate activism zines, from anti-war newsletters to immigration advocacy materials.
But it’s the towering wall of posters that stops you cold, a kaleidoscope of revolution where bold graphics from different eras and movements create a powerful message altogether. Protest slogans in a dozen languages bleed into each other, creating an immersive experience.
Born from the 2024 10×10 Photobooks anthology, this show breaks conventional gallery rules. Curators Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich have assembled a mix of art books and homemade zines that visitors can touch and examine. “We work a lot with libraries and museums so people can touch and see them and not that they’re behind glass,” Lederman said, emphasizing the intimacy that separates this exhibition from other museum displays. “We put together a team with 22 people, students who are PhDs do the research for us and write the summaries in the publication. Then we [make] a reading room that draws from what’s based on the publication and that travels around.” said Lederman
From historical Black Panther publications to contemporary responses to the Dobbs ruling, the exhibition maps how photography and print serve as both swords and shields for social movements. This marks the second stop on a three-year tour, following its Toronto debut during the Contact Photography Festival.
The Rose’s feminist collage
The final exhibition, “The Rose,” features 60 feminist artists across six decades, exploring collage as both an artistic medium and a feminist strategy. Curated by Justine Kurland and Marina Chao, the show traces collage’s evolution from the 1960s to today, examining how the practice of cutting apart and reassembling materials mirrors the work of dismantling and rebuilding social structures.
Originally conceived at Portland’s Lumber Room, the exhibition organizes works through what the curators call a “circular genealogy,” connecting pieces across different periods based on shared techniques rather than strict chronology. This approach highlights how artists have consistently used collage to transform oppressive imagery into tools for liberation.
Among the featured artists is Gina Osterloh, a Filipino American conceptual artist whose self-portraits are Death Mask Yellow Woman and Pressing Against Looking. Speaking about her portraits in the third person, Osterloh explains her interest in creating, “a state where the woman has agency or the woman has a voice and movement within a medium that is inherently still and silent.”
The exhibition’s central message is that collage is a “restorative language,” enabling marginalized voices to reclaim narratives and envision alternative futures. By dismantling existing materials to create something entirely new, the curators suggest that collage offers a practical template for breaking down and rebuilding oppressive power structures.
Together, these three exhibitions reveal CPW as more than a gallery, it’s a space where art remembers its power to transform us. This summer season offers something increasingly unique: photography with intention and the courage to challenge and break barriers between art and photography. Each show demonstrates different ways that photography can serve social justice and human understanding. Up those stairs in Kingston, transformation pulses through every frame, reminding us that great photography doesn’t just capture the world around us, it helps us imagine how to change it.
“Larry Fink: Sensual Empathy,” “The Rose,” and “Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print,” are on view until August 31, 2025, at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), in Woodstock, NY.
