PHANTASM!
The Fictive Image

A Juried Photography Show
Feb 28 — Apr 4, 2026

Artists’ Reception February 28th, 6-8PM

The invention of photography ushered in a new era of visual veracity. The medium promised objectivity, a claim reinforced by science itself. Images produced through optics, chemistry, and light implied proof of existence – an accurate depiction of the world as it was presumed to be. Details of nature and everyday objects appeared crisply delineated. Likenesses of people proved precise and often unforgiving.

Yet almost from its inception, photography’s documentary authority was disrupted. Beginning with the first fictive image, Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, the photograph revealed itself as a site of invention as much as evidence. Alongside straightforward representations of people, objects, and landscapes emerged fictional narratives, spirit photographs, staged scenes, and other imagined constructions.

Phantasm! – The Fictive Image invited artists to consider how fiction, fantasy, illusion, ambiguity, and obfuscation operate within their work – conceptually, materially, emotionally, or experientially. The exhibition features imagery that unsettles certainty and expands perception, revealing how the imaginative photograph can prompt us to see the world otherwise.

Juror: Michael Paris Mazzeo

Michael Paris Mazzeo: Michael Paris Mazzeo is an artist, educator, and curator who has long traversed the line between art and commerce, having maintained an art practice and teaching studio since 1994 as well as a highly regarded gallery in New York City from 2005 to 2012, and since 2023, an art gallery in Red Bank, NJ. As founding director of the Michael Mazzeo Gallery, specializing in contemporary photography, he launched the careers of many emerging artists, awarding fifteen with their first New York City solo exhibitions and exhibiting the work of more than 130 others in group shows. The gallery is noted for having produced critically recognized exhibitions, publications, and events and for placing artists' works in prominent museums and private collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Michael’s most recent venture, Galerie Lucida, in Red Bank, NJ, has become an important art venue for Monmouth County and beyond, providing the community with curated exhibitions, artist talks, and a monthly art salon, all free and open to the public. Since opening in November of 2023, the gallery has presented three solo and nine group exhibitions.