The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College presents Storytelling: photographers making meaning | Works from the Wellin Museum’s collection, on view September 12, 2026, through June 12, 2027. The exhibition explores projects by twentieth- and twenty-first century American photographers where meaning is made through the presentation of images in series, at times juxtaposed with text, resulting in narratives that communicate a particular message. The photographers depict a range of subjects, from moments of political import, to disappearing American landscapes, with the artists often capturing the communities around them. Featured projects include Eve Arnold’s and Gordon Parks’s photojournalism of Malcolm X and the Black Muslim movement, Milton Rogovin’s moving social documentary portraits of the residents of Buffalo’s Lower West Side neighborhood, and more lighthearted work such as Bill Owens’ humorous take on suburban life, and Mike Mandel’s playful set of trading cards, where (often famous) photographers take the place of baseball players.

Storytelling includes bodies of work by eleven photographers: Eve Arnold, Rhona Bitner, Danny Lyon, Mike Mandel, Wright Morris, Bill Owens, Gordon Parks, Milton Rogovin, Keisha Scarville, Lorna Simpson, and Garry Winogrand, primarily drawn from the Wellin Museum’s extensive holdings of photography.

The photographers featured in the exhibition deploy different creative strategies in their use of images and text, to communicate specific visions of the world. While a single image can tell a story, the cumulative presentation of pictures, with or without text, often enables the generation of more layered, nuanced, and powerful ideas. One image may communicate a concept that is destabilized by the picture that follows. Similarly, a text may reinforce—or undermine—the apparent message of an image, or series of images.

Some pictures on display were created specifically for publication in magazines or photobooks, often presented alongside a text authored by the photographer, or another writer, whose voice significantly impacts a viewer’s understanding of the visual material. Moreover, decisions relating to presentation, such as scale, and graphic design, can impact the character of the message transmitted.

Explains Elizabeth Shannon, PhD, Wellin Museum Collections Curator, “The Wellin’s holdings of photographs have grown considerably in recent years, and we are excited to be able to present very different bodies of work where meaning is created through the basic elements of pictures and text. Storytelling engages with many current socio-political themes, particularly in relation to American life, and should provide abundant material for faculty and students, while also engaging our wider community. While most of us are not professional photographers, many of us regularly create carousels of images, and combine image and text, for social media posts. Visitors can bring their experience, and critical eye, to the works in Storytelling, and to the strategies utilized by these photographers, and consider how different types of meaning are constructed and communicated—from the serious to the absurd.”