Description

WATERMARK: A Photography Retrospective

WATERMARK was curated by Asheville photographers Kai Lendzion and Naomi Lee as a major photography retrospective of the aftermath of Hurricane Helene—a collective portrait of Western North Carolina at a moment of rupture and rebirth.

Featuring the photographs of 21 photographers, the exhibition gathers an impressive visual record of loss, resilience, and community:

Mike Belleme · Corey Biskind · Erin Brethauer · Paola Chapdelaine · Alex Diaz · Robbie Francis · Brody Hartman · Jacob Higgs · Jess Hopkins · Tim Hussin · Kai Lendzion · Naomi Lee · Juan Diego Reyes · Katie Richard · Nathan Robbins · Ariel Shumaker · Hannah Sommer · Rene Treece · Tanya Triber · Ezra Varied · Tiffany Womack

The title Watermark refers to both the visible line left by floodwaters and the invisible impressions disasters leave on people and places. Every photograph is a testament to survival—a fragment of a collective memory written in the land.

The images move between devastation and beauty: rivers reclaiming their courses, houses ripped open to let in light, faces turned toward what remains. Some photographs bear witness to the devastation; others chart the quiet work of reconstruction and the acts of care that carried communities forward.

Together, they form something more than an archive. Watermark is a meditation on how we disfigure and are disfigured by calamity, and the way beauty persists even in the slow work of recovery.

It is not a record of the storm itself, but of everything that followed—the long, human pulse of healing that continues long after the receding waters.

— Curated by Kai Lendzion & Naomi Lee