This exhibition details a history of the extensive overlap between photography and writing. If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, photographers – and users of photography – have routinely found reasons to add a few more words into the mix for good measure. The exhibition includes straight-forward pictures of signs, deconstructions of letters into lines and shapes, conceptual artworks, photos of people reading and writing, inscriptions made directly onto the surface of photographs, and a variety of approaches to choosing a title.

“Show & Tell: A Brief History of Photography and Text” considers the ways in which photography’s capacity to visually represent – or show – our world, has been enhanced, manipulated, and sometimes limited by the inclusion of written text – to tell us something else. The exhibition reflects on how those two modes of communication can work in tandem, whether a union of photography and writing might lead to a richer kind of expression or, conversely, can distort our understanding. As the artists included in “Show & Tell” have enthusiastically engaged written texts as a central part of making photographs, the works in this exhibition encourage us to approach photography, text, and their myriad combinations, with a more critical eye.