Photo Forum Gallery

Past Exhibitions

Jerry Uelsmann: Collector's Sale

October 12, 2014 - December 8, 2014
Press      Jerry Uelsmann

Special discounts on selected photographs from our collection


Photo Forum Gallery: Summer break: A Reawakening

August 1, 2014 - September 6, 2014
Press      Photo Forum Gallery

Visualize a conversation of fine art inspired by master photographers exhibited at The Photo Forum Gallery from 1986 to the present.

We will be "on the road" through Labor Day.


Group Show: Collector's Exhibition

September 13, 2013 - December 27, 2013
Press      Group Show

Featuring the works of Gallery Artists including:

Harold Edgerton
Aaron Siskind
George Tice
Aaronel deRoy Gruber
Joyce Tenneson
John Pfahl
And more


Ed Massery: Last Light -"The Civic Arena"

August 3, 2013 - September 7, 2013
Press      Ed Massery

Architectural photographer Ed Massery has spent close to twenty years traveling the U.S. photographing the majestic and subtle places where people live, work and play. A true appreciation of art, architecture, and nature are at the core of his passion for his craft. Intense, curious, adventurous and creative, he approaches each project with a fresh sensitivity to the physical, elemental and cultural influences that are intrinsic to each and every structure. Best known for his mastery of natural light, he also embraces logistical challenges that can limit others in his field. This exhibit, shot before and during the demolition of Pittsburgh's Civic Arena, is likely the last view of one of Pittsburgh's most iconic structures.


: A Collector's Forum

May 2, 2013 - June 25, 2013
Press      

Featuring works by:
Aaron Siskind
Edward Steichen
Aaronell de Roy Gruber
and others.


Robert Henshaw-Suder: Infrared and Radiation

February 4, 2013 - May 1, 2013
Press      Robert Henshaw-Suder

The artist, a recent cancer survivor, initiated the six-month project on the day he realized he had outlived his mother who died of cancer at 55. Regarding a statement on the series, Henshaw-Suder summarizes Infrared & Radiation as a collection of simple images with complex lighting featuring dramatic and unique angles. All of the images were shot with an IR converted Nikon D 200 DSLR and Nikon f2 with HIE film.


Chris Rolinson: Our State Parks

September 1, 2012 - September 30, 2012
Press      Chris Rolinson

“Our State Parks” is not meant to be a guide, but rather an incubator and motivator. Above anything else, I hope the images will inspire readers to become even better stewards of our wild places by putting on their shoes and taking a hike or a bike or a boat in search of beauty within Pennsylvania.


Rebecca Droke and Bill Wade: Two Shots

June 25, 2012 - August 12, 2012
Press      Rebecca Droke and Bill Wade

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette photographers Bill Wade and Rebecca Droke follow in the big footprints of African American photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, with their present day portraits of people Harris photographed years ago.


Louisa Yee: Light Unfolding

January 20, 2012 - March 17, 2012
Press      Louisa Yee

We live in a world of dynamic energy fields. In fact, the whole universe appears as a web of inseparable energy patterns. Through this living sea of energy, we get nourishment and support. And with it, we sense each other.


Tim Fabian: Color Works

October 1, 2008 - December 21, 2008
Press      Tim Fabian

The earliest works in this color project were landscape images. They were of generally recognizable scenes that gave the pictures a strong sense of place. While prowling for those images I began photographing (digi-graphing?) reflections of buildings in other buildings. Those pictures were somewhat abstract and therefore began losing the sense of place so evident in the earlier works.


Rick Byerly: Blue Ice and Figures.

September 1, 2007 - October 21, 2007
Press      Rick Byerly

"I elevate the smaller elements in the natural world to center stage, illuminating patterns of light, shape and color for the onlooker to appreciate and discern." - Rick Byerly


Burt Glinn: A Pittsburgher Abroad

June 26, 2000 - August 18, 2000
Press      Burt Glinn

"I got my first serious camera as a gift from my aunt Fanny Parker. This event led to photography jumping ahead of cooking as a hobby. Eventually this led to the treaty of Negley Ave. in which I promised not to tell Fanny howto make a rib roast and in turn she would not tell me how to make pictures, I learned about photography by reading the instruction sheets in the Kodak Film box and then by going to the Carnegie Library on Forbes Ave" -Burt Glinn


Holly Gessler: The Color of Light

July 20, 1999 - August 21, 1999
Press      Holly Gessler

Chakras (wheels in Sanskrit) are internal energy centers within the body. The Kundalini (the coiled serpent within) awakens and rises through these energy centers causing them to spin. When the idea was first conceived, of painting the chakras, the works took on their own form as she painted her inner vision.


Imogen Cunningham: Flora

October 8, 1998 - November 12, 1998
Press      Imogen Cunningham

Her unerring eye for powerful images was not limited by stylistic preconceptions or directed by a social agenda. Rather, she delighted in capturing the immediacy of striking moments of light, mood, or gesture in the world around her. She found equal satisfaction in photographing an artisan's hands, an oil derrick, a snake curling over stones, a gnarled tree, or children at play - as long as she was able to recreate in the darkroom the momentary magic of light, shadow, shape and texture that had first captured her eye.


Imogen Cunningham: On The Body

September 25, 1998 - October 9, 1998
Press      Imogen Cunningham

Openness to explore the possibilities of any photographic image is in part why Imogen Cunningham had such a strong and continuing influence on American photography throughout her seventy-five year career. Her work never grew stale. The photographs of her last years have a dramatic vitality and freshness equal to her work of half a century earlier.


Herb Snitzer: Such Sweet Thunder

June 26, 1998 - August 9, 1998
Press      Herb Snitzer

Snitzer is an experimental photographer using various methods to enhance his photographs. He has splintered photos and then superimposed parts from each upon one another as well as using a broken serial format which makes it appear as though we are observing frames lifted from a filmed sequence.


Aaronel deRoy Gruber: Pittsburgh: Passages

November 20, 1997 - January 4, 1998
Press      Aaronel deRoy Gruber

Many of the photographs exemplify Aaronel’s fascination with her hometown of Pittsburgh and the surrounding countryside. Her artistic eye and use of infrared and digital technology transforms everyday images into magical, extraordinary scenes.


Stephen Glickman: Visual Insights: Up 50%

October 8, 1997 - November 14, 1997
Press      Stephen Glickman

A Stephen Glickman exhibition that was shown at The Photo Forum Gallery.


George Tice: Stone Walls - Grey Skies: A Vision of Yorkshire

July 31, 1997 - September 13, 1997
Press      George Tice

George Tice is one of America's greatest photographers of the urban landscape. In 1990, he visited Yorkshire for the first time as Fellow in Photography at the National Museum of Photography in England. His camera discovered the legendary, literary landscape of the county: the setting of the Brontes, JB Priestley, and Bram Stoker.


Leonard Schugar: look and SEE

July 16, 1997 - August 30, 1997
Press      Leonard Schugar

Leonard Schugar was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. He was one of the kids who rode the street car every Saturday morning to attend art classes at the Carnegie Museum. You could say that his career in photography began while at Oliver High School, when he took pictures of children and local events which he offered for sale to his neighbors.


Howard Bond: The Art of Howard Bond

February 10, 1995 - March 19, 1995
Press      Howard Bond

With sunlight and shade, Bond transforms a few lines into powerful geometric forms, straight and curved, richly black and white. His tonal ranges evoke a muscular sophistication from the simplest forms. Bond has opened a world of abstraction within the natural world, finding pitch black triangles among the sunbleached walls of ruins in the Cyclades Islands, and stark whites in the gloomy corners of English crypts.


Aaronel deRoy Gruber: Strange Encounters

October 29, 1994 - December 6, 1994
Press      Aaronel deRoy Gruber


Jerry Uelsmann: Photo Synthesis

May 21, 1994 - July 5, 1994
Press      Jerry Uelsmann

The art of Photomontage is now a widely accepted practice, but few artists have had the historical impact and continuing influence that Uelsmann gives to the medium. He is considered to be the modern master of this process. He will juxtapose as many as six images with such clarity that the result seems to be a simple record of a complex dream. His fairyland of dreams, nightmares and fantasies comes to life with alarming lucidity, creating an environment all its own.


Harold Edgerton: Capturing Time

May 1, 1994 - May 28, 1994
Press      Harold Edgerton

A group show featuring work by Harold Edgerton, Rodger Kingston, Seth Dickerman, Edward Steichen, and Jerry Uelsmann.


Joyce Tenneson: Transformations

March 5, 1994 - April 23, 1994
Press      Joyce Tenneson

Using a graceful formal structure and delicately beautiful subjects against painted backdrops, Joyce Tenneson creates enigmatic and distant images with a mythic quality. These ethereal photographs evoke forgotten memories and speak to the fragility of life, its poignant beauty and pain.


Wynn Bullock: Wynn Bullock & Edna Bullock

October 27, 1993 - December 4, 1993
Press      Wynn Bullock

Wynn Bullock belonged to the school of West Coast photographers, including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, who used photography as a means of developing an expressive language of nature that often focused on the more intangible aspects of the natural world: light and darkness, rhythms, reflections, and the abstractions and anthropomorphisms found in nature. Edna Bullock is the wife of Wynn Bullock and a photographer in her own right. She has chosen a more subject direct approach to photography and is largely concerned with form and texture within the confines of reality.


John Pfahl: John Pfahl A Retrospective

September 1, 1993 - October 16, 1993
Press      John Pfahl

John Pfahl is a color landscape photographer whose images go beyond exultation of the landscape itself to comment on our relationship with nature. He succeeds in photographing ingenious couplings of beauty with the picturesque and makes reference to historical art influences.


Tony Mendoza: Tony Mendoza "Cats, Dogs, Kid and Pig"

May 15, 1992 - June 30, 1992
Press      Tony Mendoza

"The ability to empathize in humorous pictures has always been rare. Judging by Tony Mendoza's slyly funny pictures of dogs and cats, the photographer either has an extraordinary feeling of empathy for these favored domestic creatures, or he is a dog or a cat." -Owen Edwards, Photographer


Barbra Kasten: Barbara Kasten A Retrospective:1980-1990

October 30, 1991 - December 4, 1991
Press      Barbra Kasten

Kasten's photographs transform the visual environment and reorganize one's perceptions. She is an artist who dissects and reconstructs space and form through the manipulation of light and color. Using a system of colored gels, lighting and mirrors, Kasten creates collage-like architectural "portraits" and constructed environments.


Herb Snitzer: Jazz and Movement

September 7, 1991 - October 20, 1991
Press      Herb Snitzer

Snitzer has focused much of his photography on the relationship of jazz and the civil rights movement. He shows his subjects as both victims and leaders within American culture. His implication is that these jazz artists have had an important impact on and continue to make an important contribution to the American political and cultural scene. Jazz has played a central role in Herb Snitzer's creative process as the metaphor for freedom, individuality, and spirit.


Aaronel deRoy Gruber: The Photography and Sculpture of Aaronel de Roy Gruber

July 21, 1991 - August 24, 1991
Press      Aaronel deRoy Gruber

A Aaronel de Roy Gruber show feature both her sculpture and photography exhbited at The Photo Forum in the summer of 1991.


Aaron Siskind: "Harlem Document" and "The Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation"

May 18, 1991 - July 10, 1991
Press      Aaron Siskind

With his passion for abstraction, Aaron Siskind was the first photographer to have distilled such a great number of exquisite images from the commonplace. He sees a "concrete, specific form, with a character that is special" in his subjects, and through photography, he isolated these characters from the real world and presented them to the viewer as isolated abstractions.


Jill Enfield: The Photography of Jill Enfield

March 23, 1991 - May 12, 1991
Press      Jill Enfield

Things that aren't there -- or are at least invisible to the human eye -- are the subjects of Jill Enfield's photographs. Beaches with black skies, stark white plants and people that glow eerily are the images of her photographs taken with infrared film.


Howard Bond: The Photography of Howard Bond and "American Icons" by Roger Kingston

December 7, 1990 - January 23, 1991
Press      Howard Bond

A show featuring artists Howard Bond and Rodger Kingston exhibited at The Photo Forum in December of 1990.


Seth Dickerman: The Photography of Seth Dickerman

October 27, 1990 - December 4, 1990
Press      Seth Dickerman

Seth Dickerman's photographs have moved through several distinct phases, but throughout, he has tampered with time. Time is always compressed in his work. Dickerman's worlds are atmospheric, fluid, dissolving. He is interested in "getting inside of time, finding more time in a moment." Through extended exposures, grainy high-speed film, moving subjects, and inconsistent light, Dickerman stretches seconds.


O. Winston Link: "Steam, Steel, and Stars"

September 8, 1990 - October 24, 1990
Press      O. Winston Link

In 1953 Photographer Winston Link saw a newspaper headline that stated, "Maine Central Loses Steam." Link realized he had to persue his dream; to capture steam generated trains on film before diesel trains replaced them.


Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait of Imogen

May 19, 1990 - July 10, 1990
Press      Imogen Cunningham

This exhibition included a unique collection of platinum prints; some which represented the very first images she photographed using the platinum process. The prints were no larger than 8" X 10" and many were even smaller. Also shown was a thirty minute documentary film directed by her granddaughter, which was nominated for an academy award in 1998.


James Crable: James Crable "People And Architecture"

February 9, 1990 - March 27, 1989
Press      James Crable

James Crable's photo collage series "People and Architecture" places people in relationship to their urban architectural environment. The artist creates vibrant, almost mesmerizing images by making a collage of color photographs of the same architectural structure at various time intervals, showing different people moving in and out of the same backdrop. Within these large color photographs, geometric patterns are formed by the repetitive spaces, and there exists a seemingly endless journey for the people photographed within them.


Harold Edgerton: Stopping Time

December 9, 1989 - January 31, 1990
Press      Harold Edgerton

In the early 1930's Harold Edgerton began working on the development of the strobe light. He was using photography to record and analyze high-speed events; art was not the motive. But the quality of his photographic results is so high, the images so startling, that they can't fail to be fascinating. And they fulfill every criterion by which art can be defined.


Ruth Bernhard: The Photography of Ruth Bernhard

October 14, 1989 - December 2, 1989
Press      Ruth Bernhard

Frequently called "the Ansel Adams of nude photography," Ruth Bernhard's images explore the order and harmony evident in the visual world. The ability of light to reveal the essence of form is central to her work. Up until her death, Ms. Bernhard continued to remain active through workshops and seminars around the country.


Aaron Siskind: The Photography of Aaron Siskind

August 25, 1989 - October 11, 1989
Press      Aaron Siskind

One of the most respected master photographers today, Aaron Siskind is regarded as a major figure in the history of American photography. Born in New York City in 1903 he spent his early years searching for a final means of expression. After experimentation with social reform, then music, literature and poetry his search ended one day when he was given a camera as a wedding gift.


Edward S. Curtis: The Photography of Edward S. Curtis

July 7, 1989 - August 16, 1989
Press      Edward S. Curtis

At the turn of the century, Edward Curtis undertook the massive task of compiling a twenty volume record of all the major native tribes of North America. It took Curtis over two decades to complete this set of volumes which consisted of text and photograveurs. During his twenty-five years immersed in varying tribal cultures, Curtis faced both the amusing frustrations of cultural differences, and the often life-threatening tasks and rituals of native American life.


George Tice: The Photography of George Tice A Retrospective: 1961-1988

May 19, 1989 - July 5, 1989
Press      George Tice

His images communicate an overlooked connection between the everyday, commonplace aspects of living with the underlying truth about humanity's existence. Living, seeing, and experiencing life are recorded as the profound and wondrous phenomena they are.


Geir Jordahl: The Collector's Exhibition

April 6, 1989 - May 17, 1989
Press      Geir Jordahl

Gier Jordahl instinctively searches for emotional landscapes where the human and the natural meet and merge. Upon choosing a location, he relies upon his feelings to guide his eye and his Widelux lens. What Jordahl does is flattens out what is real to create emotionally empowered images. A travel bug, he loves to explore new places. With the speed and accessibility of modern travel, the whole world is his shooting ground and intuition, and spiritual instinct are his compass.


Geir Jordahl: The Photography of Geir Jordahl

December 17, 1988 - February 1, 1989
Press      Geir Jordahl

Geir Jordahl searches for photographs from the highlands of northern Scotland to the ruins of the Yucatan Peninsula. Photographing with a Widelux, a panoramic wide field camera which approximates the 140 degree vision of the human eye, he creates imagery that exists between the physical reality of a landscape setting and his perceived reality. Using his emotional and visceral responses to the world as guides and film sensitive to invisible infrared light as a catalyst, Jordahl presents a vision that is in fact, spiritual.


Paul Caponigro: Dreams Locked in Silver

October 29, 1988 - December 14, 1988
Press      Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro sees photography as being more of a spiritual experience than a physical process. His landscapes are born from intuition rather than reason. Each photograph contains a specific emotion, a link between the physical world of nature and the spirit world of the mind.


Andre Kertesz: Eyes of Reflection

September 10, 1988 - October 26, 1988
Press      Andre Kertesz

"When I photograph, I look neither left nor right." From a man whose career has extended over 60 years, such a comment may seem over-simplified or disingenuous, but on closer consideration it reveals the awesome struggle that an artist confronts in trying to do justice to his vision.


Bernard Plossu: Travelogue and Still Life

July 16, 1988 - September 7, 1988
Press      Bernard Plossu


Harvey Stein: Passing Through

May 21, 1988 - July 6, 1988
Press      Harvey Stein

This is an ongoing, open-ending sequence; tomorrow it will be different. It shifts and moves and is as kinetic as a car speeding down an Isolated country road. "Passing Through" is a journey through life toward ever present death, a non-chronological, consistenly moving passage through present (and past) time, space, and existence. It deals with light, shadow, and energy forces, the very nature of photography. These are slices of instants caught, frozen slivers of time that paradoxically superced stillness to parallel the motion and energy that propel me to live, to create, and to become. I am on my way, passing through, hoping to leave my mark. Somewhere. And hoping to find some clue, with heart full and eyes wide open, to the constant mysteries that are everywhere about me. - Harvey Stein April, 1983


David Aschkenas: The Photography Of David Aschkenas

March 19, 1988 - April 30, 1988
Press      David Aschkenas

The Photo Forum's show featuring the work of David Aschkenas.


Edward Steichen: Edward Steichen A Master Of The Camera

January 30, 1988 - March 16, 1988
Press      Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen's most famous and recognizable images represent the stars of American stage and screen in the 1920s and 30s, when he worked for Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair. He made, for mass circulation publication, portraits of actors, authors and producers, and such celebrities as Marlene Dietrich, Merle Oberon and Lillian Gish. For each sitting, he demanded of himself the task of producing images that revealed something he had not shown before.


Greg Savage: Photographs By Greg Savage

December 19, 1987 - January 27, 1988
Press      Greg Savage

Photographs By Greg Savage


Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: Artists Of Our Time

October 24, 1987 - December 2, 1987
Press      Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Artists Of Our Time The Portraiture of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders


Tony Mendoza: Stories

September 5, 1987 - October 21, 1987
Press      Tony Mendoza

Yeye's sisters, Magda, Tota, and Manana, used to make me nervous. Every time I saw them, they were always laughing. I was afraid to talk to them and run the risk of not being considered funny. -Tony Mendoza about the attached photo.


Jerry Uelsmann: Process and Perception

July 11, 1987 - August 29, 1987
Press      Jerry Uelsmann

"Ironically, transcendent art such as Uelsmann's is created by people who are themselves not quite transcendent, people who yearn for an ideal but have not yet plunged permanently into the void. Their art is a tapestry of longing, invaluable because it comes to us from fellow human beings" -John Ames