Photography is typically understood as a tool for seeing the world as it is, but it is equally valuable for imagining what it could be. This exhibition explores the visionary potential of photography through the lens of design. Spanning a century, from the 1920s to the present, this exhibition introduces the concept of “photo-design” to describe how graphic designers, architects, and artists use photography to imagine new ways of living in times when the future seems uncertain and not guaranteed.

Works by artists and designers including Marshall Brown, the Guerrilla Girls, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Eduardo Paolozzi, Jorge Rigamonte, Grete Stern, and many others illuminate how photo-design shapes our experiences of the modern world.  Photo-Design offers radical ideas about how to live, taking advantage of photography’s strong association with reality, and combining it with equally radical and disruptive techniques including collage, montage, and experimental printing, in order to envision new futures. Today, as a century ago, one way we begin to emerge from disaster is to imagine our way out of it.