Phantom Sun
Ohan Breiding
Solo Exhibition
BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York , New York
From November 20th, 2025 to January 28th, 2026
Phantom Sun elevates landscapes as witnesses to ecological, political, and cultural issues, foregrounding what has been erased or cast aside.
In this exhibition, Ohan Breiding, an interdisciplinary artist who employs photography, video, as well as archives to examine ecological care, pulls from the “killed negatives” a trove of rejected photographs from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the government agency established in the mid-1930’s to provide aid to farmers during the Great Depression. These photographic negatives were hole punched, marking them as unprintable, often for failing to reinforce the public narrative shaped by the FSA and by Roy Stryker, Chief of its Historical Section.
Breiding revives these discarded negatives to give them new agency. By reanimating these fragmented views of the Great Depression, the artist reframes the New Deal’s vision of American farm life against today’s political climate. A combination of archival images and newly produced works, the installation overlays past and present histories of ecological precarity and resilience, exploring ways of caring for the land and its memory in the American context.
The project unfolds as a material meditation on a government information campaign, revealing how both its subject (rural dwellers) and its medium (photography) depend on natural resources and processes of extraction. Shifting the focus from the human to the nonhuman, from the social to the environmental, Breiding juxtaposes a selection of day-to-day images of terrains and agrarian activities with recent photograms, collages on aluminum, still lifes on silver gelatin and inkjet prints, and candle drips–the artist’s own experiments with light, minerals, and animal-derived products, three essential elements in the making of photography. The result is a capacious sculptural riff on the landscape tradition: a post-nature, post-industrial tableau in which the narrative of crisis extends to the land, and the nostalgia for pastoral America dissolves into the uncanny.
Conceived in dialogue with curator Mathilde Walker-Billaud, Phantom Sun deploys the motif of the black hole–floating surreally and threateningly over the photographs–to confront the failures of the public archive, while annotating and expanding the genre of social and environmental documentary photography that the FSA photographers (1) were instrumental in establishing.
(1) FSA photographers were those hired between 1935 and 1944 by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) to document life across the United States. They included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Margaret Bourke-White, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Carl Mydans, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Esther Bubley, Edwin Rosskam, John Collier Jr., Theodor Jung, Charlotte Brooks, Alan Fisher, and Paul Carter. The creators of the “killed negatives” remain unidentified, but they came from within this group.
BAXTER ST’s 2025-2026 Guest Curatorial Program
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