Hillman Photography Initiative

What does the future of photography look like? Since its start in 2013, the Hillman Photography Initiative has showcased dynamic new artworks, exhibitions, publications, online experiences, and conversations transforming our relationship to the photographic medium. The Hillman Photography Initiative connects Carnegie Museum of Art with diverse audiences to exchange new ideas about photography.

The Initiative presents a series of programs over two-year cycles centered around a concept or theme in which photography impacts our contemporary world. For each cycle, we collaborate with artists and creative thinkers to create innovative and insightful projects.

Cycle 4: Widening the Lens
2024–2025

Photography has dramatically altered our access to, understanding of, and impact on the natural world. Through programming that includes the exhibition Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, a podcast series, and publication, Widening the Lens examines environmental history and degradation, particularly in the American landscape, as well as urgent concerns surrounding climate change, through the camera lens.

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A desert landscape
Victoria Sambunaris, Untitled (Dune buggy), All American Canal, CA, 2021, inkjet print, 55 x 77 in. (139.7 x 195.6 cm). Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Cycle 3: Mirror with a Memory
2020–2021

How are images being utilized to gather data on our daily activities? With the development and advancement of artificial intelligence, there has been a radical change in the way surveillance systems capture, categorize, and synthesize photographs. Mirror with a Memory explores the worlds of AI, photography, and surveillance—their past, present, and future—to underscore concerns about implicit bias, right to privacy, and police monitoring embedded in corporate, military, and law enforcement applications.

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a computer generated image of a person on their knees.
Zach Blas, SANCTUM (detail), 2018, mixed-media installation. Courtesy of the artist

Cycle 2: Lightime
2016–2017

How can we employ the essential elements of photography to create a new definition of the medium? At its most basic, photography records light over time to create an image. But what if we use it to record light over time to create something different? These four artist projects, as well as the Light Clock on the museum’s front plaza, push the envelope on what is photographic. With this new definition, photography becomes a springboard to investigate and participate in contemporary social issues.

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Video still of wood frame of house overlooking airborne debris and small floating island off in the distance
Still from Styles and Customs of the 2020s, 2017, Virtual reality, variable duration, By Kim Laughton, based on text from DIS creative brief by Marvin Jordan, A Scatter X DIS Collaboration, Supported by the Hillman Photography Initiative at Carnegie Museum of Art

Cycle 1: Life Cycles of Images
2014–2015

What is the lifecycle of an image—from creation and transmission to consumption, storage, potential loss, and reemergence? We live in a world of image sharing, and these four projects investigate the boundaries and possibilities of photography through the ways it is circulated. Technology accelerates this circulation, and often alters or redirects the trajectory of an image in unexpected, powerful ways.

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Digital artwork depicting a glitch screen with bands of color and a partial profile of a persons head
Detail Sara Cwynar, Girl from Contact Sheet 2 (Darkroom Manuals), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production, New York.