CPW: Fall 2025 Highlight: Len Prince

The CPW Collection of photographs provides the basis for exhibitions, study, and research. It consists of approximately 4,500 photographs covering the history of the medium as well as video works, audiotapes, slides, and photo books. The collection focuses on contemporary American photography, from 1970 to the present, with important holdings by over 400 photographers, as well as local and vernacular materials. Among the distinctive groups within the collection are the Woodstock History Anthology, the Bruce Davidson Archive, and the Woodstock AIR Collection, a unique assemblage of works by over 150 participants in the CPW artist residency that supports a critical dialogue on diversity, race, identity, and social justice. Selections from the CPW Collection can be viewed online at the Hudson Valley Visual Arts Collection Consortium (HVVACC).

Fall 2025 Highlight: Len Prince

Between 2002 and 2007, Len Prince and Jessie Mann, the daughter of photographer Sally Mann, embarked on a sustained collaboration that explores performance, authorship, and the fluidity of identity before the camera. Collected in this portfolio of 154 prints, Self Possessed records the evolution of a creative partnership rooted in trust and experimentation.

Spring 2025 Highlight: Daisy Studio

Beale Street in Memphis has long been known as the home of the blues. W. C. Handy wrote “Beale Street Blues” there in 1916, and in the 1920s and ‘30s Beale Street saloons hosted Louis Armstrong, Furry Lewis, Memphis Minnie, and other Black blues musicians. But by the 1940s, Beale Street was in decline. Amid the theaters and dive bars was an inauspicious but popular photographer’s storefront known as Daisy Studio. There, customers could get their postcard-size portraits made quickly and inexpensively, with a direct-positive film like that used in photobooths.

January 2025 Highlight: Alfonso Iannelli

Iannelli’s rigorous documentary images depict the impoverished family of coal miner Jim Perkins. After working in the Yocum Creek Coal Company mine in Harlan, Kentucky, for 42 years, Perkins, his wife, and seven children still lived in a dilapidated shack without running water.