Ruven Afanador
Double Take
Photographs in Pairs
June 11 through July 18, 2026
Exhibition Reception: Thursday, June 11
The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present Double Take, an exhibition pairing photographs that share striking visual similarities yet emerge from entirely different eras, cultures, and intentions.
Photography exists in constant dialogue with the world it documents, its own history, and the images that preceded it. Double Take is built around this idea, presenting works in deliberate pairings that reframe each image through proximity. This approach reveals similarities that might otherwise be overlooked when the images are viewed individually and separated by artist, genre, subject, or chronology. Setting aside these divisions, Double Take groups photographs according to their formal qualities: the angle of a body, the geometry of a space, the relationship between figures, and the interpretation of color, regardless of when, where, or why they were created.
Though made 61 years apart, the compositions of Walker Evans’s “Parked Car, Small Town Main Street, 1932” and Lauren Greenfield’s “Mijanou and Friends from Beverly Hills High School on Senior Beach Day, Will Rogers State Beach, 1993” are nearly indistinguishable in structure. Both peer into an open convertible with figures pressed into the foreground and another vehicle sliding across the background. Evans captures ordinary American life with his characteristic spare, unflinching clarity. While Greenfield turns her lens on the youth culture surrounding wealth in Southern California. Together, the images form parallel American chronicles in which the automobile functions not merely as backdrop, but as social currency.
A shared composition links two vastly different histories in Nik Wheeler’s “Don McCullin, Hue, Vietnam, February, 1968” and Tom Bianchi’s “Untitled, NYC 079, 1975–1983”. In both photographs, a reclining figure dominates the foreground while a second person appears just behind his left shoulder. Wheeler’s image emerges from the charged atmosphere of the Vietnam War; Bianchi’s from the intimate world of downtown Manhattan in the years of sexual liberation before the AIDS crisis. Together, the photographs suggest how identical visual structures can carry profoundly different political and emotional meanings.
Repetition in photography is nearly as old as the medium itself. Double Take does not propose a new idea so much as highlight an enduring one that is impossible to ignore. The exhibition title is borrowed as an homage to Richard Whelan's Double Take: A Comparative Look at Photographs (Crown Publishers, 1981).
Double Take features over 20 pairings of photographs by Ruven Afanador, Miles Aldridge, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Peter Beard, Janette Beckman, Tom Bianchi, Julie Blackmon, Harry Bowers, Harry Callahan, Patrick Demarchelier, John Dominis, Arthur Elgort, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Flor Garduño, Lauren Greenfield, John Hamilton, Erik Madigan Heck, Teun Hocks, André Kertész, Peter Lindbergh, Herbert List, Mary Ellen Mark, Sheila Metzner, Duane Michals, Helmut Newton, Frank Ockenfels 3, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, Sandford Roth, Paolo Roversi, Steve Schapiro, Mark Seliger, Harry Shunk, Melvin Sokolsky, Alex Stoddard, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Albert Watson, Todd Weaver, Bruce Weber, Nik Wheeler, Dan Winters, and Bastiaan Woudt.
Press Photographs & Press Materials Are Available Upon Request.
