By Lauren Kaufmann

A look at three exhibitions of photography; two of them shine a revealing light on personal and political concerns.

Bridget Jourgensen: Homeshadows; Camille Farrah Lenain: Made of Smokeless Fire; Winter Solstice 2024, on view at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA, through January 5, 2025

The advent of the smartphone camera has made us all photographers. It’s easy to document our lives with our phones since most of us carry one with us all the time. The latest generation of smartphone cameras captures images with fantastic clarity, enabling us to crop an image, adjust the brightness, and modify the colors, all within seconds.

Camille Farrah Lenain, Bouchta’s Mirror, 2020. Photo: courtesy of the Griffin Museum of Photography

So, where does all this technology leave photography as an art form? Despite fast-moving digital breakthroughs, photography remains a legitimate artistic pursuit. Art schools continue to offer photography courses, and museums still collect and exhibit photographs. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston features photography in the Herb Ritts Gallery, showcasing the work of photographers from all around the world.

Drive 20 minutes outside the city, and you get to the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA. You may not be familiar with the Griffin Museum, but if you love photography, it’s worth the trip. The museum is located inside a small building on a side street with plenty of free parking, and admission is $9, and $5 for senior citizens.

The museum is currently featuring three exhibitions; two of them highlight the work of artists who use their cameras to shine a revealing light on personal and political concerns.

Camille Farrah Lenain, a French-Algerian documentary photographer, is the recipient of the 2024 Arnold Newman Prize, awarded for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture. Newman (1918—2006) was a well-known photographer who pioneered environmental portraiture, a genre in which the setting of the sitters reveals something crucial about their life and work.

In the Griffin’s exhibition, Made of Smokeless Fire, Lenain dedicates a series of images to her late uncle, a queer Muslim who was diagnosed with HIV and died in 2013. Although there are no photographs of her Uncle Farid, the exhibition spotlights portraits of gay Muslims grappling with their complex identities. The results are stirring as they conjure up the painful experiences of people whose families, countries, and religion may reject them because of their sexual orientation.

Camille Farrah Lenain, Lalla Rami, Boulogne, 2020. Photo: courtesy of the Griffin Museum of Photography

It’s important to consider how difficult it is to be queer in many Muslim countries. In Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and some northern states of Nigeria, same-sex sexual acts are punishable by death. Male same-sex activity is illegal and punishable by imprisonment in Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. Although it is not a crime to be gay in Jordan and Turkey, many queer Muslims around the world face tremendous hostility and discrimination.

Lenain trains her lens on LGBTQIA+ Muslims in France. The wall text notes that there is a large Muslim population in France– more than five and a half million people. Yet, despite their numbers, Muslims continue to face Islamophobia in France. Facing discrimination on several fronts — sexual orientation, gender identity, and racism — many queer Muslims end up going underground. Lenain explains that her photographs explore the traumatizing impact of silence on this population.

In A., Marseille, Lenain has produced a partially obscured portrait with an accompanying label, a quotation from the sitter: “This same fear of hell to say: are we still on the right path, are we not creating the wrath of God?” The inner conflict expressed by this sentiment, combined with the concealed face, dramatically conveys the mixed feelings the sitter experiences as a queer Muslim.

In Bouchta’s Mirror, a man, shrouded by a pink veil, stares at the camera. We can make out his eyes, but the opaque portrait speaks to the sitter’s need to conceal his identity. Perhaps the sitter fears for his life and is reluctant to be photographed more openly?

In a more direct portrait, Lalla Rami, Boulogne, we see a trans woman reclining in the grass, clad in a crop top and short shorts, with long, manicured fingernails. The accompanying label reads, “It is through the eyes of others that you can tell that I am a trans, Moroccan and Muslim woman, or whatever the fuck you see. But from me to myself, I’m just a badass girl named Lalla Rami.”

Bridget Jourgensen, Headshot, 2021. Photo: courtesy of the Griffin Museum of Photography

Lenain’s work is displayed in a small room that also houses the museum’s library. The intimacy of the space makes it easy to get up close to the photographs. The images are unframed and attached to the walls with thumbtacks. There’s something raw and direct about the way in which they are displayed that invites viewers to engage with the images.

The second exhibition, Homeshadows, presents the work of Bridget Jourgensen, winner of the 2024 John Chervinsky Emerging Artist Scholarship. John Chervinsky (1961—2015) was an engineer who ran a particle accelerator at Harvard University and was a self-taught photographer. The first exhibit of his work was at the Griffin Museum; the scholarship was established after Chervinsky’s death as a way to support and encourage emerging photographers.

In this series, Jourgensen, a Rhode Island resident, captures images of light and shadow inside her new home during the Covid lockdown. In the text, she explains that she had recently moved to a new home and was spending a lot of time alone. She calls this body of work a study of solitude. The photographs are dreamy abstractions of everyday life. In Doorway, we see the light shining through the windowpanes of a doorway. In Headshot, Jourgensen inserts herself into the image by shooting her reflection on the wall.

Together, the photos explore the everyday beauty of our interior worlds, an allure of the ordinary that it is all too easy to take for granted. Alone in her new home, at a time when most of us were isolating, Jourgensen used her camera to capture the lovely images that sunlight created on the walls of her home.

The final exhibition, Winter Solstice 2024, features more than 200 photographs taken by the Griffin Member Community. In this unjuried show, unframed photographs are attached to the wall with binder clips, but the casual installation doesn’t diminish the quality of the work. There are many magnificent images of trees, leaves, mountains, beaches, architecture, animals, and people. The photographs are grouped together by subject matter, and they’re all for sale. In an effort to make the work affordable, the museum has set $250 as the upper limit. If you’re in the market for a last-minute holiday gift for an art lover, you’ll find plenty of splendid choices here in the $100-$200 range.

Lauren Kaufmann has worked in the museum field for the past 14 years and has curated a number of exhibitions. She served as guest curator for Moving Water: From Ancient Innovations to Modern Challenges, currently on view at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum in Boston.