A World Unfolding In Frames: Photographic Geography
PANGEAOGRAPHY at PDNB Gallery, Dallas TX
When you step into the quiet, sunlit rooms of PDNB (Photographs Do Not Bend) Gallery, the title of its latest exhibition, PANGEAOGRAPHY, immediately commands my attention. The all-caps rendering is not a mere typographic choice; it is a declaration, a signal that this show intends to make a statement as bold as its name. The word itself is a union, combining “Pangea”, the supercontinent that once unified all landmasses, and “geography,” the science of mapping the world’s terrains. This fusion is more than clever wordplay; it is a conceptual framework that asks viewers to consider how photography, like the shifting continents, can both connect and divide, unify and fragment, reveal and obscure. These are comparisons that I found myself contemplating during my two visits to PDNB. This led me to the idea that the exhibition is not just a survey of global photography, but a meditation on the very nature of borders, physical, cultural, and perceptual.
Curated by Burt Finger to commemorate the 30th anniversary of PDNB Gallery, PANGEAOGRAPHY brings together work by artists from Argentina, China, Spain, and the Netherlands, among others. This is not a superficial attempt at diversity, but a deliberate act of curation that foregrounds the multiplicity of photographic voices. Each artist brings a distinct visual dialect, yet all share an urgency to make viewers see the world from different points of view. The exhibition’s ambition is clear: to challenge assumptions about what photography is and what it can do, and to propose that the medium is uniquely equipped to map the shifting relationships between people and place in a globalized era.
From the moment I entered, the diversity of style and substance was apparent. The gallery’s walls are lined with images that range from surreal conceptual compositions to raw documentary scenes and delicate alternative-process prints. These are not photographs that bend to expectation or convention. Instead, they challenge the viewer to step out of the familiar and consider new geographies, not just of land, but of meaning. The exhibition resists the spectacle and high-saturation trends that dominate much of contemporary visual culture. Instead, it leans into subtlety, craft, and concept. Each image is an invitation to slow down, ask questions, and cross a border that might be physical, cultural, or psychological.
One of the most visually and conceptually exciting contributors is Chema Madoz, a Spanish artist renowned for his surreal, black-and-white still lifes. At first glance, his work reads like an unsolved riddle. In one piece, a pencil is bent into a perfect circle; in another, a pair of scissors mimics the wings of a bird. There is humor here, but also disruption. Madoz forces me to reevaluate the objectness of objects, stripping away their utilitarian roles and transforming them into symbols. His work builds on a tradition of photographic illusionism that recalls Man Ray and the Dadaists, but with a contemporary edge that makes each image feel like a visual poem. The technical precision of his gelatin silver prints, traditionally associated with documentary truth, heightens the sense of unreality. In Madoz’s hands, the camera becomes a tool not for recording the world as it is, but for imagining the world as it could be. This interplay between form and content is central to the exhibition’s argument: photography’s power lies not in its ability to document, but in its capacity to transform.
If Madoz’s images exist in the mind’s landscape, Wu Jialin’s work anchors viewers firmly to the earth. A documentary photographer from China, Wu presents sweeping, large-format photographs of rural Yunnan Province. One arresting image captures a mountain town from above, the rooftops clustered like islands in a sea of mist. The photo is technically stunning, but it is also deeply emotional. There is a quiet reverence in how Wu photographs his homeland, each image a form of memory-keeping, of cultural witnessing. The scale of his prints demands that viewers step back, mirroring the photographer’s position as both participant and observer. Wu’s work reminds me that photography is not just about representation; it is about preservation and presence. In an era of rapid urbanization and cultural erasure, his images become acts of resistance, insisting on the value of local knowledge and lived experience.
Esteban Pastorino Diaz, an Argentinian photographer with a background in engineering, takes the idea of perspective to new heights, literally. Diaz builds his camera systems and attaches them to kites, creating sweeping aerial views of the landscape below. His images stretch the land into mesmerizing patterns: rivers become brushstrokes, roads become threads, fields become abstract compositions. There is a strange detachment in these views, and yet an intimacy. By allowing viewers to see the world as birds might, Diaz invites a perspective that is both literal and metaphorical. Sometimes, the only way to understand something is to rise above it. The technical innovation of his kite-mounted cameras is not just a gimmick; it is a statement about the possibilities of photographic form. The slight blurring and chance markings introduced by the wind serve as reminders that even the most “objective” perspectives are shaped by human invention and the unpredictability of nature.
One of the most emotionally charged pieces in the exhibition comes from Jan van Leeuwen, a Dutch artist who uses 19th-century printing processes, including cyanotype, to explore themes of memory and trauma. In his “Barbed Wire” series, van Leeuwen recalls a childhood memory of seeing Nazi soldiers transport Jewish people during World War II. The resulting prints are haunting and blurred, each wire fence like a scar across the image’s surface. The cyanotype’s deep blue tones evoke both the cold efficiency of engineering diagrams and the melancholic weight of history. The printing style adds layers of historicity and decay, making the photographs feel like they have lived through time. Van Leeuwen’s images do not simply illustrate trauma; they embody it. By choosing an obsolete photographic method, he resists the digital culture’s demand for immediacy, arguing that some histories require slow, tactile processes to be understood.
What unites these vastly different artists is a shared commitment to rethinking how photography interacts with time and place. Each image in PANGEAOGRAPHY asks viewers to consider photography not merely as a means of documentation, but as a tool for reimagining our relationship to the world. The exhibition pushes against the assumption that photography’s value lies solely in its ability to record reality. Instead, it proposes that the medium is most powerful when it challenges our habits of seeing, when it asks viewers to question what we take for granted. The curatorial strategy of the exhibition mirrors the tectonic shifts suggested by its title. Works that might otherwise be siloed by geography or genre are placed in conversation with one another. A Madoz photograph of a lightbulb filled with water hangs beside Diaz’s aerial view of a river delta, using circular forms to explore ideas of containment and flow. This visual rhyming challenges nationalist art histories and encourages viewers to find connections across differences. The gallery’s modest size becomes an asset, its white walls functioning as a laboratory where boundaries dissolve and new relationships emerge.
The exhibition’s centerpiece, Paola Ferrario’s “Border Crossings,” literalizes this philosophy of connection. Her grid of 36 ambrotypes documents objects confiscated at the U.S.-Mexico border: a child’s teddy bear, a rusted lock, a folded love letter. Displayed in antique glass plates typically used for portraiture, Ferrario elevates these fragments to the status of heirlooms. The wet plate collision process’s 20-minute exposure time for each image becomes a durational protest against border policies that prioritize speed over humanity. The result is a meditation on migration, loss, and how objects can carry the weight of personal and political histories.
In reviewing this exhibition, the criteria that emerge are craft, conceptual rigor, and cultural resonance. Every artist in this show demonstrates a meticulous dedication to their medium, whether through process, invention, or composition. But beyond technical mastery, they offer something deeper: a connection to place, story, and something universally human. The show persuades not through argument, but through visual evidence, a kind of slow revelation that lingers long after you have left the gallery space.
The stakes of PANGEAOGRAPHY are not merely academic. In an age when images are ubiquitous and often disposable, this exhibition insists on the continued relevance of photography as a means of critical engagement. It asks: What does it mean to look, to remember, to imagine, in a world where borders are both more porous and more fiercely defended than ever? How can photography help me navigate the complexities of our world’s interconnectedness without erasing the specificity of local experience? The exhibition does not offer easy answers, but it does provide a space for contemplation, for empathy, for the possibility of seeing the world, and each other, differently.
The gallery’s name, Photographs Do Not Bend, takes on meaning in this context. These photographs do not bend to market pressure or cultural convenience. They stand as documents of perspective and purpose, refusing compromise. They are, in a sense, the tectonic plates of a new Pangea, distinct yet connected, shifting yet enduring. The gallery’s name becomes a declaration of intent: to uplift work that is unyielding in its integrity, that insists on complexity over simplicity, and that values the slow, sometimes difficult work of seeing and understanding. These images do not bend to the easy logic of the marketplace or the fleeting tastes of the moment. In gathering these works under one roof, PDNB Gallery becomes a site of creative tectonics, where the collision of ideas and aesthetics generates new landscapes of meaning, just as the ancient plates of Pangea once did.
As a viewer, I found the show challenging my habits of seeing. In a world so saturated with images, PANGEAOGRAPHY is a reminder of photography’s original power: to invent, to remember, to imagine. It asks viewers to consider what happens when artists from across the globe bring their fragments together like the continents of Pangea shifting again into contact. In doing so, the exhibition becomes more than a collection of photographs; it becomes a cartography of connection, a map of the possible.
Ultimately, PANGEAOGRAPHY succeeds not by offering a single narrative about global connectedness, but by using photographic form to ask better questions. The show’s title becomes its thesis: just as Pangea’s breakup created diverse continents while maintaining connections, these photographers demonstrate that localized perspectives gain power when understood as a universal visual language. The works on display refuse to bend to algorithmic trends, geopolitical divisions, or reductive narratives. They stand, instead, as waypoints in photography’s ongoing journey to map the human experience in all its fractured beauty.
What emerges is a vision of photography not as a mirror to the world, but as a compass, one that guides me toward deeper engagement with both the familiar and the foreign. In doing so, PANGEAOGRAPHY achieves what all great exhibitions should: it leaves viewers not just seeing differently, but thinking differently about how images shape our understanding of the world and our place within it. This is why the exhibition matters, and why, long after the gallery lights dim, its images continue to resonate.