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Public Trust, 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA (2026)

05/12/2026

Join us at Public Trust for the release of Curating Engagement, a public conversation and book launch this Thursday from 5:30-7pm exploring how public engagement practices are transforming curatorial practice in Philadelphia and beyond. Born from a convening organized by Daniel Tucker, Aaron Levy, and Abigail Satinsky in 2025 addressing the challenges and opportunities facing cultural institutions today, this publication brings together the voices of over 50 curators, educators and artists working at the intersection of public engagement and curatorial practice. The event will feature contributors Phoebe Bachman, Joyce Chung, Aaron Levy, Julian Moore-Griffin, Marina McDougall, Umika Pathak, Megan Voeller, Damon Reaves, Daniel Tucker, and Linnea West in conversation. Presented with Wagner Foundation.

Edited by Aaron Levy, Abigail Satinsky, and Daniel Tucker, Curating Engagement emerges from a national field-building retreat hosted at Public Trust in Philadelphia in June 2025. Arriving at a moment shaped by federal funding cuts, declining museum attendance, and renewed questions of institutional relevance, the book brings together the conversations, frameworks, and practices of fifty practitioners working to rethink public engagement as stakes rise and margins narrow.

The volume opens with a panel facilitated by Satinsky featuring Damon Reaves, Head of Learning and Engagement at the National Gallery of Art; Sue Bell Yank, Executive Director of Clockshop; Risa Puleo, independent curator; and Risë Wilson, Executive Director of the Painted Bride Art Center. Together, they offer candid accounts of long-term projects navigating the boundary between institutional affiliation and community partnership—from museum-based co-creation to independent, site-based work. The conversation expands through contributions from Faheem Majeed, Maori Karmael Holmes, Ryan N. Dennis, Lisa Dent, and Brittany Webb, foregrounding questions of race, scale, sovereignty, and institutional accountability.

At the center of the book are four facilitated small-group dialogues—“Alliances, Coalitions, and Solidarity” (Alliyah Allen), “Expertise, Leadership, and Organizations” (Rob Blackson), “Seasons, Sustainability, and Wellness” (Lu Zhang), and “Formality, Joy, and Ethics” (Brittany Webb)—which capture the field’s live, peer-driven thinking. Organized around tensions identified by participants, these exchanges preserve the candor, contradiction, and generative friction of collective inquiry into collaboration, power, care, and institutional life.

Five commissioned essays extend these concerns. Pablo Helguera maps the ecosystems of socially engaged practice; Ryan N. Dennis reflects on the shift from engagement to leadership; Ruth Erickson considers collective practice as interdependence; Megan Voeller examines curatorial work in academic medicine; and Risa Puleo theorizes curating as political practice in conditions of crisis.

The book concludes with three extended dialogues tracing long-term collaborations in practice: “Why Gather?”, an interview with Levy, Tucker, and Satinsky conducted by Jerome Reyes; “Gestures of Care,” on an ongoing partnership between Public Trust and The Colored Girls Museum led by Vashti DuBois; and “On Time and Ownership,” bringing together Rachel Wenrick, De'Wayne Drummond, and Charles Lomax to reflect on a decade-long, cross-sector housing and arts initiative in Philadelphia grounded in relationship-building, Black homeownership, and community-led development.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/curating-engagement-book-launch

04/30/2026

Join us at Public Trust for the release of Curating Engagement, a public conversation and book launch on May 14th, 2026 from 5:30-7pm exploring how public engagement practices are transforming curatorial practice in Philadelphia and beyond. Born from a convening organized by Daniel Tucker, Aaron Levy, and Abigail Satinsky in 2025 addressing the challenges and opportunities facing cultural institutions today, this publication brings together the voices of over 50 curators, educators and artists working at the intersection of public engagement and curatorial practice. The event will feature contributors Phoebe Bachman, Joyce Chung, Aaron Levy, Julian Moore-Griffin, Marina McDougall, Umika Pathak, Megan Voeller, Damon Reaves, Daniel Tucker, and Linnea West in conversation. Presented with Wagner Foundation.

Edited by Aaron Levy, Abigail Satinsky, and Daniel Tucker, Curating Engagement emerges from a national field-building retreat hosted at Public Trust in Philadelphia in June 2025. Arriving at a moment shaped by federal funding cuts, declining museum attendance, and renewed questions of institutional relevance, the book brings together the conversations, frameworks, and practices of fifty practitioners working to rethink public engagement as stakes rise and margins narrow.

The volume opens with a panel facilitated by Satinsky featuring Damon Reaves, Head of Learning and Engagement at the National Gallery of Art; Sue Bell Yank, Executive Director of Clockshop; Risa Puleo, independent curator; and Risë Wilson, Executive Director of the Painted Bride Art Center. Together, they offer candid accounts of long-term projects navigating the boundary between institutional affiliation and community partnership—from museum-based co-creation to independent, site-based work. The conversation expands through contributions from Faheem Majeed, Maori Karmael Holmes, Ryan N. Dennis, Lisa Dent, and Brittany Webb, foregrounding questions of race, scale, sovereignty, and institutional accountability.

At the center of the book are four facilitated small-group dialogues—“Alliances, Coalitions, and Solidarity” (Alliyah Allen), “Expertise, Leadership, and Organizations” (Rob Blackson), “Seasons, Sustainability, and Wellness” (Lu Zhang), and “Formality, Joy, and Ethics” (Brittany Webb)—which capture the field’s live, peer-driven thinking. Organized around tensions identified by participants, these exchanges preserve the candor, contradiction, and generative friction of collective inquiry into collaboration, power, care, and institutional life.

Five commissioned essays extend these concerns. Pablo Helguera maps the ecosystems of socially engaged practice; Ryan N. Dennis reflects on the shift from engagement to leadership; Ruth Erickson considers collective practice as interdependence; Megan Voeller examines curatorial work in academic medicine; and Risa Puleo theorizes curating as political practice in conditions of crisis.

The book concludes with three extended dialogues tracing long-term collaborations in practice: “Why Gather?”, an interview with Levy, Tucker, and Satinsky conducted by Jerome Reyes; “Gestures of Care,” on an ongoing partnership between Public Trust and The Colored Girls Museum led by Vashti DuBois; and “On Time and Ownership,” bringing together Rachel Wenrick, De'Wayne Drummond, and Charles Lomax to reflect on a decade-long, cross-sector housing and arts initiative in Philadelphia grounded in relationship-building, Black homeownership, and community-led development.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/curating-engagement-book-launch

04/23/2026

Join us tomorrow at Public Trust for Cults of Personality, a reception and public conversation from 5-7pm about aura, power, and the construction of memory. This event will feature artist Daniel Faust in dialogue with curators and cultural leaders Milena Kalinovska and Ksenia Nouril and will explore photography’s role in the making of political icons and the shaping of history.

Organized in conjunction with Daniel Faust: Presidents (1983–2023), an installation on view at Public Trust from April 24 through July 31, 2026 exploring the visual mythology of American political leadership through photographs of presidential wax figures. Presented in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Coinciding with Daniel Faust's installation at Public Trust, this conversation will draw from three of Faust’s long-term projects—Presidents, Wax, and Founding Father—reflecting four decades of research in wax museums across the United States and Europe. Faust’s attention to the staging and persistence of presidential power offers an opportunity to consider broader questions about how authority is imaged in society, and how representations of the figure of the leader often supersede everyday life.

Exploring the theoretical terrain of the “cult of personality” and with attention to Eastern European history and that of the former Soviet bloc, Kalinovska and Nouril will also consider how image-making operates not simply as propaganda, but as a structuring condition of power. Through repetition and circulation, representations of power come to not only depict authority but also constitute it, even as they remain susceptible to displacement and reinterpretation.

Which historical figures are collectively remembered and through what mechanisms? What forms of exclusion or violence accompany their visibility? The conversation will explore questions such as these, approaching visibility as an effect of institutional and cultural forces that shape what is seen.

The “aura” once associated with exceptional figures perhaps now circulates more broadly, implicating everyday forms of self-presentation. We are invited to reflect on how these conditions are embodied or refused in the present, and our agency in producing and sustaining them.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/cults-of-personality

Image: Daniel Faust, Museo de Cera Colon, Madrid, Spain (1988). Courtesy of the artist.

04/22/2026

Join us at Public Trust for Hunger: Kafka's Cookbook, a public conversation on Monday, May 4, 2026 from 6-7:30pm about the aesthetics and economy of hunger in the work of Franz Kafka. This event will feature a talk by philosopher Simon Hajdini, followed by a conversation with Kafka scholar and translator Mark Harman and moderator Jean-Michel Rabaté exploring the art of effacement and how hunger offers valuable insights into the structure of capitalism and modernity.

Hunger features prominently in Kafka’s work, appearing in fleeting details, narrative gaps, and decisive moments that shape the trajectory of his creaturely characters. What at first reads as incidental—a missed meal, a passing reference to appetite, a gesture of abstention—gradually takes on structural importance. Would Josef K. from The Trial have been arrested if he hadn’t missed his breakfast? Is hunger easing the subject into a state in which accusation can take hold? Does the body’s lack mirror or even produce the law’s obscure demands? Is hunger the operator of an awakening, and if so, an awakening to what? Would the canine from Investigations of a Dog have reached his philosophical apex if the path to it did not lead through voluntary starvation? Considering these and other instances of hunger in Kafka, it becomes possible to see hunger not as a secondary motif but as a generative principle that binds together questions of knowledge, authority, guilt, and sexuality.

The conversation at Public Trust will focus on Kafka’s short story A Hunger Artist, first published in 1922, which brings together several questions regarding the economy—both political and libidinal—and the aesthetics of hunger. In this text, hunger is no longer dispersed but concentrated, turned into a spectacle and a profession. Kafka’s hunger artist is an odd attraction, a figure whose presence unsettles expectations about performance, labor, and value, for his magnetism doesn’t originate in anything resembling work in the double sense of skilled activity or its tangible result. There is no product to display, no accumulation of effort that can be measured or exchanged. In fact, the audience’s interest in him has to do with the fact that he does absolutely nothing—least of all starving for attention. His fasting resists interpretation as effort or sacrifice, appearing instead as a pure endurance, a drive-like persistence without clear goal or conclusion.

By no means rehashing the old trope of the starving artist, lamenting art’s structural servility, its dependence upon external appraisal and social valorization, Kafka’s bizarre creature complicates and displaces that narrative. Rather than presenting deprivation as the cost of artistic authenticity, the hunger artist exposes the instability of the very systems, including the system of aesthetic taste, that would assign value to art. His performance exists within an economy of spectatorship, contracts, and timed exhibitions, yet it simultaneously exceeds and undermines these frameworks. Split between cultic value and exhibition value, he neither fully belongs to the world that displays him nor escapes it. As an appearance in disappearance, the hunger artist occupies a threshold where recognition and indifference, innocence and guilt, cultic traditionalism and exhibitionist individualism, the sublime and the trivial become indistinguishable. In doing so, he marks—indeed prefigures—a modernist aesthetics in which art results from the artwork’s own effacement, from a withdrawal that leaves behind no stable object but only the trace of—not even action, but mere—persistence, here reduced to the irrepressible insistence of hunger.

Kafka’s wager is to make a different use of hunger, one no longer weaponized by the right and freedom to work. Kafka’s overall idea of artistic ascension seeks, not grandeur or monumentality, but an extreme refinement of the minimal. It is an ascension grounded in reduction rather than accumulation, in the stripping away of content rather than its elaboration. His unlikely heroes are figures of an excremental ornamentality that has outlived its economic function, providing us with valuable insights into the structure of capitalism and modernity.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/hunger-kafkas-cookbook

Image: Hunger artist Papus, who was active around the turn of the twentieth century, is pictured here in his sealed glass box at the Passage-Panoptikum in Berlin.

04/20/2026

Join us at Public Trust for To Fight Against All This, a lecture and public conversation on Tuesday, April 28, 2026 from 6-8:00pm about the late work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and his resistance to fascism. This event will feature a talk by scholar Riccardo Antoniani exploring questions of embodiment and Pasolini’s final works and violent demise, followed by a discussion with Filippo Trentin. Presented in partnership with the Cinema Studies Program and Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, with support from the Center for Italian Studies.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s oeuvre is characterized by an ideological tension centered on the question of the body. Presaging what Michel Foucault would later call biopolitics, Pasolini’s approach to corporeality was ultimately to evolve into a “poetics of incarnation” that would only fully mature in the final years of his life, when he decided to “throw his own body into the fight.”

While Italian politics of the moment was marked by bodies massacred in outbreaks of neo-fascist violence, by the involutions of the culture industry and by the irreversible anthropological degradation caused by unprecedented cycles of neo-capitalism, Pasolini launched himself into a hand-to-hand fight with what he called “the New Power.” Across a series of articles appearing in Italian newspapers (later published as the Lutheran Letters), his unfinished novel Petrolio, his renunciation of his own filmic Trilogy of Life and the opening of a trilogy of death with the scandalous Salò, or the 120 Days of S***m, Pasolini maps the perimeter of “a shadowy face of the reality of a New Power whose physiognomy is still uncertain” but no less ruthless towards the living.

Examining these late works alongside public speeches and interviews given by Pasolini in the last three years of his life (1972-1975), this lecture will retrace the salient features of an extreme poetics of resistance built on the fusion of word, image and, most importantly, action. Drawing on French theory (Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault) and Italian thought (Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito), it will be shown that Pasolini’s artistic performativity developed along a parrhesiastic trajectory, speaking truth to power. Ultimately it will be argued that the “fight against all these declinations of new fascism” most likely led directly to the brutal ex*****on that took place in the night between the first two days of November, 1975, when homosexuality became a pretext for the assassination of the most provocative Italian q***r artist of the twentieth century.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/to-fight-against-all-this

Image: Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Pasolini "Si je reviens" Testaccio, 2015. Courtesy of Riccardo Antoniani.

04/10/2026

Join us at Public Trust for Cults of Personality, a reception and public conversation on Friday, April 24, 2026 from 5-7pm about aura, power, and the construction of memory. This event will feature artist Daniel Faust in dialogue with curators and cultural leaders Milena Kalinovska and Ksenia Nouril and will explore photography’s role in the making of political icons and the shaping of history.

Organized in conjunction with Daniel Faust: Presidents (1983–2023), an installation on view at Public Trust from April 24 through July 31, 2026 exploring the visual mythology of American political leadership through photographs of presidential wax figures. Presented in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Coinciding with Daniel Faust's installation at Public Trust, this conversation will draw from three of Faust’s long-term projects—Presidents, Wax, and Founding Father—reflecting four decades of research in wax museums across the United States and Europe. Faust’s attention to the staging and persistence of presidential power offers an opportunity to consider broader questions about how authority is imaged in society, and how representations of the figure of the leader often supersede everyday life.

Exploring the theoretical terrain of the “cult of personality” and with attention to Eastern European history and that of the former Soviet bloc, Kalinovska and Nouril will also consider how image-making operates not simply as propaganda, but as a structuring condition of power. Through repetition and circulation, representations of power come to not only depict authority but also constitute it, even as they remain susceptible to displacement and reinterpretation.

Which historical figures are collectively remembered and through what mechanisms? What forms of exclusion or violence accompany their visibility? The conversation will explore questions such as these, approaching visibility as an effect of institutional and cultural forces that shape what is seen.

The “aura” once associated with exceptional figures perhaps now circulates more broadly, implicating everyday forms of self-presentation. We are invited to reflect on how these conditions are embodied or refused in the present, and our agency in producing and sustaining them.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/cults-of-personality

Image: Daniel Faust, Museo de Cera Colon, Madrid, Spain (1988). Courtesy of the artist.

04/10/2026

Join us at Public Trust for Presidents (1983–2023) by Daniel Faust, an installation on view from April 24 through July 31, 2026 exploring the visual mythology of American political leadership through photographs of presidential wax figures. Organized by Milena Kalinovska and Lorenzo Balbi in close collaboration with the artist and coinciding with the U.S. Semiquincentennial, the project features a large-scale photographic tableau drawn from three of Faust’s long-term projects—Presidents, Wax, and Founding Father—reflecting four decades of research in wax museums across the United States and Europe. Presidents (1983–2023) will premier at Public Trust, and then travel nationally and internationally.

Cults of Personality, a public conversation and reception featuring Daniel Faust in conversation with scholars Milena Kalinovska and Ksenia Nouril, will take place on April 24, 2026 from 5-7pm.

Daniel Faust’s works unfold over extended durations. Presidents, spanning 1983 to 2023, is a large-scale photographic work drawn from Faust's four-decade exploration of wax. The series brings together sixty photographs of wax effigies of United States presidents, arranged in a single extended grid involving symmetry and incongruity. Created through Faust’s sustained observations of wax museums across the United States and Europe, the work examines how these institutions stage and preserve popular images of political power. Photographed with direct flash and the vantage point of an ordinary visitor, the images move between documentation and interpretation, presenting familiar national figures in an atmosphere that is at once ceremonial and strangely theatrical. Throughout, there is an element of comedy, along with a sense of tragedy—somber, sad, exquisite, and awful.

Founding Father, from 2022, stages a disquieting encounter between monumentality and estrangement. The wax figure of George Washington, rendered at a commanding scale, both asserts and destabilizes the authority it embodies. His gaze extends outward, seemingly directed toward the viewer, yet remains curiously vacant—caught between presence and simulation. Below, the modest framed portrait reiterates the same figure, but at a diminished scale and with a different orientation, introducing a subtle disjunction: looking out, yet elsewhere. This doubling produces a spatial and psychological tension—between image and replica, history and display, reverence and artifice. Faust amplifies these shifts through proportion and staging, positioning Founding Father as both an anchor and a disturbance within the exhibition. The work oscillates between the theatrical and the uncanny, where the founding image of power becomes at once imposing and fragile, familiar and estranged.

Wax, another durational work, first began in 1981 and continues through 2026. It currently consists of 2,700 images across 395 locations, and is presented at Public Trust as a prototype or model of a larger version, which will be twenty 96 x 60 in (243.4 x 152.5 cm) photographs, with an overall dimension of 8 x 100 feet (2.44 x 30.5 meters). Wax sculpture occupies a distinctive place in the cultural history of representation. Life-size wax figures of notable individuals have been used since the Middle Ages, appearing in funerary rituals and later becoming popular attractions in nineteenth-century museums. Their uncannily lifelike surfaces promise proximity to figures otherwise inaccessible, even as their artificiality invites unease. Faust treats wax museums as informal public archives—sites where collective imagination, historical memory, and spectacle converge. Within this context, the presidential figure becomes a particularly concentrated symbol of American identity, appearing variously as founder, statesman, hero, or media personality.

In Presidents, these figures—from George Washington to Donald Trump—appear frozen in staged gestures: astride horses, mid-speech, offering handshakes, or gazing into the distance. Seen together, the photographs form a collective portrait that is neither celebratory nor satirical but quietly analytical. Faust’s matter-of-fact approach allows the viewer to encounter the wax figures as cultural artifacts, revealing how political identity in the modern West often unfolds as performance—where national memory, mythology, and spectacle converge in the enduring image of the president.

Daniel Faust: Presidents, 1983-2023 is presented with support from the University of Pennsylvania History of Art Department. A 70 page publication with contributions from curators and scholars Bige Orer, Daniel Sherer, Carlos Basualdo and Jacqueline Burckhardt, will be available at the opening at Public Trust on April 24, 2026.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/daniel-faust-presidents

Image: Daniel Faust, Hollywood Wax Museum, Los Angeles 1983

04/08/2026

Join us at Public Trust for “What Does it Mean to Live Exorbitantly?,” a public conversation on Thursday, April 23, 2026 from 5-6:30pm featuring scholars Deborah A. Thomas and Jasmine E. Johnson. Centering on Thomas’s new book, Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, the discussion will explore the relationships between embodiment and sovereignty and raise questions about modes of world-building that are exorbitant to classic political frames. Presented in partnership with the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Black Performance Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

Exorbitance builds on Thomas’s earlier interrogations of sovereignty to ask questions about the interplay between the feeling of bodily freedom and the intensities of political sovereignty. The book asks what sovereignty might look like, and feel like, if we approached it not exclusively in terms of its foundational violences (conquest, imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalist extraction, and so on) but through the embodied forms of autonomy and relation we create in the realm of everyday life. Throughout the book, and drawing from a range of archives, Thomas argues that we are heir not only to colonial logics, but also to the means to refuse or retool them, and that both of these inheritances are inscribed in and on the body.

By reading sovereignty through a phenomenological notion of inheritance, one that is experiential and indeterminate though historically embedded, Thomas positions sovereignty not as a state of being grounded in instrumental rationality but as a mode of relation that is grounded in quotidian enactments of process rather than sweeping project, safety rather than security, affect and performance rather than law and dominion.

The discussion between Thomas and Johnson will focus on repair, love, and accountability, and will engage the following questions: How might enactments of exorbitance drive us toward practice-based and durational articulations of self-determination that are processual, performative, and grounded in the everyday intimacies of living together? What kinds of attunement would we need to meaningfully pursue questions about what we inherit, and about how what we inherit can generate new ways of creating community? What might a more radically humanist anthropology look like?

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/what-does-it-mean-to-live-exorbitantly

Image: Leniqueca A. Welcome, “Unbounded," Cover Collage for Exorbitance, 2025

03/27/2026

Join us at Public Trust for On Complaint and Collectivity, a conversation with independent scholar Sara Ahmed, on Thursday, April 9, 2026 from 6-7:30pm. The event, moderated by Heather Love, will explore the collective work of trying to change institutions within an increasingly hostile environment and the importance of creativity and hope in sustaining these efforts. Presented in partnership with the Penn English Department at the University of Pennsylvania.

For over 20 years, Sara Ahmed has been collecting stories about institutions told from the point of view of those who are trying to change them. From 2003, she began interviewing diversity practitioners in the UK, many of whom described the institutions that appointed them as blocking their efforts. One practitioner said, "it’s a banging your head against the brick wall job." And since leaving her academic post in 2016 in protest at the failure of her university to deal with sexual harassment as an institutional problem, she has been collecting stories of complaint.

Over that 20 year period, both in the UK and internationally, many institutions used the development of new policies on diversity and against sexual harassment to mask how they remained hostile environments, whilst also burying complaints. How do we keep doing feminist, q***r and anti-racist work on institutions when the hostile environment becomes the policy rather than the mask? How do we say no not just in institutions but to them? Refusing to comply with institutions, however risky and difficult, can lead to the forming of new collectives. We will share strategies for surviving and changing institutions, and for unburying, and learning from, past complaints.

This event has been organised as part of a small tour for Sara Ahmed’s new book, No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, published by Feminist Press on April 7th, 2026.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/on-complaint-and-collectivity

Image: Guerrilla Girls, Complaints Department, Tate, London, 2016. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls and courtesy Guerrillagirls.com

03/26/2026

Join us at Public Trust for West of Life, an installation of photographs by Zied Ben Romdhane on view from March 4 through April 13, 2026 exploring the disharmony between people and nature in post-revolution Tunisia. It features photographs taken in Gafsa, a phosphate mining region in the southwest of Tunisia, and has been organized as part of Earth Hunger, a series of public programs in Spring 2026 about the relation between photography and the history of extraction. Presented in partnership with Magnum Photos.

West of Life is a photographic series by Zied Ben Romdhane that explores the social, political, and emotional landscape of post-revolution Tunisia. Produced in the years following the 2011 uprising, the project delves into the disparity between the country’s developed coastal regions and its towns that comprise the interior Gafsa mining basin such as Redeyef, Metlaoui and Oum Laarayes —areas in the southwest of Tunisia that are integral to the phosphate industry, yet historically marginalized, economically neglected, and central to the spark of the revolution itself.

As a state-controlled company called CPG extracts phosphate from the hills, these villages and regions remain poor, and polluted, a conduit for wealth. Meanwhile, coastal towns prosper. Ethnic divisions, exacerbated by life in a harsh landscape, have produced disharmony between the people and nature. These incompatible parts remain in a state of constant flux and volatility.

Veering away from action or spectacle, Ben Romdhane’s images provide a nuanced portrait of social and environmental depletion in the pyrrhic pursuit of capital gain — sapped landscapes and urban peripheries, unfinished construction, and stark portraits of residents caught in a cycle of diminishing returns in what Ralph Waldo Emerson once referred to as “the land rendered to their toil.”

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/west-of-life

Image: Zied Ben Romdhane, Waste burning near the railway, Gafsa, Al-Mitlawi, Tunisia (2015). © Zied Ben Romdhane / Magnum Photos

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