In the Fold | Special Presentations

On view through October 15th
Gallery hours: Monday–Friday 2–6PM or by appointment.

2026 Dummy award

In collaboration with The Photobook Museum, Germany

The Dummy Award is an international open call for the best unpublished photobook dummies of the year. A total of 325 books from over 45 countries were submitted for the 2026 Dummy Award. The shortlist selection this year resulted in 48 photobooks that are part of a world-wide traveling exhibition now on view in Penumbra’s Exhibition Space.

Learn more about the Dummy Award and this year’s shortlisted titles here.

2026 Susan McLaughlin Risograph Photobook Award

Shortlist and featured publications

The inaugural Susan McLaughlin Risograph Photobook Award supports the work of artists, printers, and publishers in working with the risograph process. One publication will be selected to receive a $5,000 award. Seven publications were selected by Miwa Susuda (Dashwood Books) from the close to 150 submissions received from every continent. Six additional publications were selected by Penumbra Foundation for special feature in the Exhibition Space.

Learn more about the shortlist, featured titles, and the first ever awardee here!

Mango Season & The AGENCY

John Gossage, Raymond Meeks and Jenia Fridlyand present their books recently published by the Agency, an imprint project co-founded by Gossage and Fridlyand, and produced in collaboration with Steidl.

Jenia Fiedlyand
Mango Season

Jenia Fridlyand grew up in the Soviet Union in the years just prior to perestroika. Visiting Cuba in the second decade of the 21st century, then, felt like an uncanny homecoming. While both tangible and familiar, the grim fabric of the communist quotidian kept unraveling for Fridlyand under the bright, tropical sun. With a large format camera and a photographic practice rooted in the American tradition, Fridlyand traveled around the island during several extended trips. She intuitively trained her lens on moments and scenes with the potential of holding both the known and the novel--from a pair of donkeys silhouetted against hilltops, a customer at a barber shop and a pair of rocking chairs seen through an open door, to drops of sweat on a man's curved back and sweet fruit hanging ripe on a tree.

Raymond Meeks
A Commonplace Book

Raymond Meeks' newest photobook edited by John Gossage. Untethered from sequence or narrative, Gossage's image selection unveils a breadth of visual style and approach, varied in form but unified by Meeks' singular sensibility. Gossage's initial impetus for the book was his realization that Meeks had "made some of the most stylistically various single pictures that I had ever seen in a serious photographer's work." And so was born, in Gossage's words, this book "of remarkable things, pictures that are as rich individually as they are in the narrative of Ray's books, but in a different way. They stand convincingly in a style of variation with certainty, always having the feel and thought of a single author."

John Gossage
An Abridged Dictionary of Sculpture

American photographer John Gossage is renowned for his engaging, subversive and crafted artist's books and other publications. Across over 50 black-and-white images, Gossage considers the changes objects undergo when they are photographed. Whether a pile of archive folders, a dirty beaker, a heap of baseball caps, a plank of wood or a tuft of grass, he photographs these objects against the same background of white paper, their shadows often asserting as much presence as their concrete forms. With so much of the objects unclear (their volume, scale, weight, three-dimensionality), and each having lost its original purpose, Gossage questions how much of the sculpture's essence has been preserved in his photographs. Positioned as a dictionary of sorts, this book describes the sculptures rather than embodying them.

Penumbra's Exhibition Space is supported in part by the Lawrence Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Ruth Arts, and Joy of Giving Something.