Joseph Maida’s photographic collage series, “Born Free, Born Equal,” reconstructs Ansel Adams’ 1944 MoMA exhibition catalog by layering Adams' vintage negatives and prints onto the catalog pages while obscuring specific faces, names, ethnicities, and dates. This work illuminates the past's timely relationship to the present and punctuates the far-seeing power of Adams' documents as they intersect with issues of equality, social justice, and photography’s impact in the 21st century.

Maida's overlays and interventions onto the catalog's original sequence amplify the prophetic nature of this historic story. It is both a sensitive reanimation of a still-resonant chapter in American history and a hard-hitting meditation upon photography’s complicity with its outplaying. — CHARLOTTE COTTON

www.bornfreebornequal.com