39th Center Annual: Living Creatures

The Center Annual exhibition, formerly known as the “Juried Membership Exhibition,” is Houston Center for Photography’s yearly group exhibition that seeks to illuminate current themes, technologies, and practices in photography. The exhibition features work from our diverse global photography community, selected by a leading curator, editor, or artist. HCP’s Center Annual provides viewers with critical insight into our current moment within the field of photography and society at large. This year’s juror is Kristen Gaylord, Associate Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

She writes, “The word “portraiture” can sound staid and outdated, but photographing another living creature is a powerful and fraught interaction. The aggressive, metaphor-laden words we use for this moment—“shoot,” “capture,” “take”—have long been acknowledged as indicators of photographers’ ability to control their subjects’ representation, a privilege that can be accompanied by care or cruelty.

The fifteen photographers in this year’s Center Annual understand the stakes of these intimate exchanges. They approach them with a range of emotions from joy and curiosity to sorrow and rage, but in all examples, they teach us about what it means to be a creature whose life is intimately intertwined with millions of others on earth.”

Participating Artists

Hannah Altman (Providence, RI)

Megan Bent (West Hartford, CT)

Melanee Brown (Houston, TX)

Jessica Buie (Austin, TX)

Margaux Crump (Houston, TX)

Austin Cullen (Lincoln, NE & Houston, TX)

Diane Durant (Fort Worth, TX)

Jake Eshelman (Houston, TX)

Adrian Martinez Chavez (New Haven, CT)

Allan Maxwell (Orlando, FL)

Robyn Moore (Wellington, KY)

Erin Neve (Houston, TX)

Nasrah Omar (Queens, NY)

Reid+Factor (Brooklyn, NY)

Amir Saadiq (San Diego, CA)