The Deep Element: Photography at the Beach

This exhibition brings together photographs of the beach from the late 19th century through the present day, revealing the many ways that artists have explored and been inspired by this rich subject. Drawn primarily from the Gallery’s collection and grouped around common themes—such as seascape, abstraction, and beach culture—The Deep Element features works by Harry Callahan, Mitch Epstein, Nicholas Nixon, Aaron Siskind, and Garry Winogrand, among others. The exhibition’s title, drawn from a verse by the late American poet Adrienne Rich, hints at the complex nature of the shore, at once a public theater of human leisure, a territory of natural contrasts, and the brink of a mysterious and powerful unknown. “The sea is not a question of power,” she writes, “I have to learn alone / to turn my body without force / in the deep element.”