Accra Shepp
Charlie from Arkansas, November 3, 2011
Courtesy the artist
Accra Shepp: Bearing Witness
Curated by Kevin Moore
Art Academy of Cincinnati: SITE 1212
October 9-31, 2026
Accra Shepp
East High Meadow Island, Queens, Inlet, 2026
Courtesy the artist
Accra Shepp: Bearing Witness brings together numerous bodies of work made over the past two decades, each documenting aspects of the social, environmental and economic landscape of Shepp’s native New York. In 2008, Shepp began photographing the geographical margins of New York City’s five boroughs. Using a large-format camera from the 1930s, and sequencing images in multi-frame compositions, Shepp captures the startling natural scenery of the more than forty islands on which the urban metropolis rests, while recalling New York’s maritime origins.
In 2011, when protestors flooded Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan as a response to the 2008 sub-prime mortgage housing crash, Shepp began producing a series of portraits (again, using a large-format camera) depicting participants as socially diverse and calmly defiant, in contradiction to mainstream media reports of the event as chaotic and short-lived. Occupy Wall Street, as the movement became known, established an enduring dichotomy in American political consciousness, emphasizing income inequality—the 1% versus the 99%, the haves and have-nots—as a central aspect of American economic life.
The COVID pandemic of 2020 was not only a health crisis but ushered in many social-justice causes, including Black Lives Matter and various pro-democracy movements. Shepp’s consistent use of black-and-white photography, in the tradition of August Sander and Diane Arbus, offers aesthetic unity to the diverse protestors and resistors, emphasizing a shared seriousness of purpose. As a photographer, Shepp insists on a moral responsibility to see, to make visible what might go unnoticed. “This obligation arises from the way images speak to us about our history,” Shepp has written. Photographs “eventually become the fabric of the culture they describe.”
Accra Shepp (b. 1962) is a photography-based artist living in Queens, New York. His work has been exhibited and collected widely by institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum, New York. Shepp has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and his writings have been published by The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.