The 2026 CENTER Award & Grant Recipients use photography to investigate the conditions under which people, places, and selves become visible. The projects gathered here complicate the assumption that photography is a means of evidence. They reveal that photographs organize attention, construct encounters, and determine what can be remembered or erased. In these works, the camera becomes a tool for tracing the effects of policy and extraction, challenging inherited stereotypes, creating provisional spaces of kinship, and attending to the uncertain processes through which one makes a home or comes to accept an evolving self.

The Conditions of Seeing brings together the work of Marcus DeSieno, Anna Mia Davidson, Leonard Suryajaya, Peter Teh, Ville Varumo, and Volodymyr Voznyy. Working across landscape, portraiture, staged tableaux, social practice, and intimate observation, these artists explore how photography shapes what is seen, remembered, and understood.


EXHIBITION DATES: October 23 –December 11, 2026
OPENING: October 23, 4-6pm at CENTER Space, 1570 Pacheco St, B-1, Santa Fe, NM 87505.

PUBLIC TALKS - free and open to the public
Leonard Suryajaya Oct 24, 3-4pm, LaFonda on the Plaza Hotel
Marcus DeSieno, Oct 25, 9-10am, LaFonda on the Plaza Hotel