Exhibition: Changing the Narrative, The First 5 Years of Paula Riff Award Winners

Exhibition: Changing the Narrative The First 5 Years of Paula Riff Award Winners Featuring work by Aimee Beaubien, Minwoo Lee, Paula McCartney, Marni Myers, and Katie Shapiro Exhibition on view: June 20 - July 26 Opening Reception and artist walk-through: June 20, 4:00 - 6:00pm The Center for Photographic Art is proud to present Changing the Narrative, an exhibition featuring work made by the first 5 years of Paula Riff Award recipients: Katie Shapiro (2021), Aimee Beaubien (2022), Paula McCartney (2023), Minwoo Lee (2024), and Marni Myers (2025). It's hard to believe that it has been more than 5 years since our beloved Paula passed away.  The Paula Riff Award was created by the Center of Photographic Art and Lenscratch in 2021 as a way to celebrate and continue the legacy of artist Paula Riff. Paula was an innovator, using lensless photography and historical processes to create objects of remarkable beauty. This dynamic show will feature both the award-winning projects and new and wild creations made by these fearless artists! They are definitely pushing the boundaries of what a photograph can be. To learn more about the past winners, read their bios below. To see more of their work and learn about Paula Riff, click here. To donate to the Paula Riff Fund to keep the award going in perpetuity, click here. To submit your work for consideration for the 2026 Paula Riff Award, click here. About the artists: Aimée Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal through immersive installations, collages, and artists’ books. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at SF Camerawork (San Francisco, CA); the Art Institute of Chicago (IL); the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL); the Newport Art Museum (RI); the Houston Center for Photography (TX); the UCR Museum of Photography (Riverside, CA); Gallery UNO Projektraum (Berlin, Germany); and Virus Art Gallery (Rome, Italy). Beaubien is Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1997. https://www.aimeebeaubien.com/ Minwoo Lee is a Korean Canadian artist and educator based in Houston, Texas. Working across photography, lens-based media, and video, Lee’s practice disrupts the linear and the flatness of visual traditions. By reimagining the archive through the syntax of its apparatus, Lee renegotiates the image’s relationship to time and record—reconstituting it from a fixed document into a non-discursive, provisional, and perpetually unresolved site. Rooted in cultural and historical artefacts, this practice transforms the camera’s mechanical gaze into a question of inquiry and a gestural phenomenon. In both still and moving image, the archive is treated as an unstable surface—one where meaning accumulates, recedes, and refuses the closure that the narrative imposes. Lee has exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography (Houst...