Surprising pairings and hidden dialogues in photography

Punkt (Hungry) 

June 23, 2026 

by Liza Sas 

Surprising pairings and hidden dialogues in photography– You can also view pictures pairs online at Fahey/Klein Gallery

What makes a Vietnam War Record, a New York Street scene or a classic nude next to each other? The exhibition of the Los Angeles Fahey/Klein Gallery attempts to read photography not by topic, creator or era, but through the visual connections between the images. Unexpected pairings open up new reports and remind us that the most exciting dialogues in photography are often the subject of images.

The history of photography is essentially a series of internal answers and echoes, in which successive works inevitably come into contact with the images of the past. The exhibition of the Los Angeles Fahey/Klein Gallery is based on this recognition, which, unlike the usual chronological or thematic division, organizes the works in pairs solely on the basis of a pure formal affinity. Double Take: Photographs in Pairs will be open from June 11 to July 18, and the opening reception will be held on Thursday, the opening reception will take place on the starting day. The concept is a direct tribute to Richard Whelan’s volume of the same name, published in 1981, thus providing a tangible theoretical anchor for the visual experiment on the exhibition. According to the principle of the curatorial arrangement, the consciously seized of photographs of radically different eras, cultures and creative intentions reveals aesthetic matches and hidden structures that would remain invisible during the unique, isolated presentation. Thus, the selection focuses primarily on the inclinations of the bodies, the interior geometry of the spaces, the system of relation between the shapes and the use of colors.

One of the most vivid examples of the more than twenty photo pairs of more than twenty photographs in the exhibition are Walker Evans’s 1932 Parked Car, Small Town Main Street, and Lauren Greenfield’s 1993 film, Mijanou and Friends from Beverly Hills High School on Senior Beach Day. Although sixty-one years have passed between the making of the two works, their compositional structure is almost identical: both pictures give an insight into the interior of an open car, where another vehicle passes behind the figures in the foreground, in the background. While Evans records the everyday life of rural America with his lean and clear light, Greenfield examines the world of the wealthy youth of Southern California. The two works thus function as a parallel chronicle, in which the car becomes a fundamental means of expressing the social situation and the prevailing.

A similarly powerful visual identity is linked to Nik Wheeler's 1968 military correspondence (Don McCullin, Hue, Vietnam) and Tom Bianchi's 1968 untitled New York nude (Untitled, NYC 079). In both shots, a lying figure dominates the foreground, while behind the left shoulder a second person appears. Behind the formal similarity, however, there are radically different layers of meaning: Wheeler’s image comes from the tense and shocking atmosphere of war, and Bianchi’s work captures an intimate era of sexual liberation in downtown Manhattan, even before the AIDS crisis appears. This pairing shows how identical pictorial structures can have a completely different political and emotional charge. The rich material of the exhibition, which includes the works of artists such as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, André Kertész, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Sam Taylor-Johnson, the exhibition can discover these timeless formal rhymes themselves.