Through September 26, 2026

Nicole White’s exhibition of photographs, “An Unending Path,” appropriately begins with “View,” a soft-filtered image of a window frame with a small, framed photograph, captured through a secondary gridded window, itself yellowed and scratched with time. The camera cannot decipher the framed image on the wall, nor does it reveal what lies beyond the adjacent window. In a motif that repeats throughout the show, “View’s” layers of mediation call attention to the act of seeing, the refusal of its complete fulfillment, and the desire to make meaning with what is ascertained.

“An Unending Path” retraces the steps of the artist’s great uncle, Frederick Holden Buck, who left rural Massachusetts on a boat for Champtocé-sur-Loire in 1931, having accepted a position as a tutor at the 12th-century Château du Pin. Buck’s framed drawing of the château’s garden pond hung on the wall of White’s living room growing up. Upon learning the drawing’s provenance as an adult, White visited the château grounds, ostensibly recreating her relative’s steps. The exhibition provides a portrait of the place, pulling us through the woods of memory as the camera becomes a surrogate for the eyes of White’s long-dead relative.

This effect is perhaps most pronounced in “Self at Le Pin 1/3)” (2022/2025), a large self-portrait of the blue-haired artist in a blue shirt reflected in an antique, pockmarked mirror on the mantel of the same château. The image is almost entirely captured via reflection and — except for the edges of a few glass-cut bottles on the mantle that appear both in the foreground and in its immediate reflection — is subject to the imperfections of old glass. As is common with antique mirrors, the oxidation of the reflective metal backing the glass mottles and distorts the entire image. This is the artist, one thinks, the grand-niece, the photographer — or in Roland Barthes’ terms, the Observer. She gazes back at us, disrupting the veils of history through a mirror that likely reflected the great-uncle.

The exhibition is divided into four oeuvres: photographs of dense foliage such as “Brush (1/3)” (2023-2025), “Late Afternoon (1/3)” (2023/2025), or “Tangle 1 (1/3)” (2023-2026), that capture dense foliage without a horizon line. Two duotone silk screens, “Cloche (1-3)” (2024) and “Exercices de l’aime (1/3)” (2024) focus on specific objects. A set of four cliché verre prints reenact Buck’s original drawing of Le Pin’s garden pond. And a set of still life compositions with variously reflective surfaces. Any glimpse of human referent or architecture is cropped, overgrown, filtered through another reflective surface, or cast as a shadow on the ground.

The latter group has a happenstance quality. “Feather (vintner’s cottage)” (2023-25), for instance, depicts a feather stuck in a brick abutting a frosted window. The image would look straightforward save for the reflection of a tree line cast over the top third of the photo, illustrating that the camera is not capturing its subject directly but rather shot through an otherwise invisible plane of glass.

“Greenhouse Glass (1/3)” (2023/2025) shows layered panels of clouded glass, set irregularly in the ribbing of greenhouse window frames, the lot of which is further bound by the diagonal grid of a net. Debris clumps on the surface of the netting. Green foliage is visible but blurry in the background. Light reflects on the different angles of the glass and its edges, which in turn cast shadows. In this image, as with others, the surface pattern — whether the netting, scratches in stone, or glass — feels analogous to the narratives one produces to create cohesion and meaning. In this case the image projects an imaginary specter of White’s uncle. For this show, however, the role of Buck’s biography is unimportant. He remains consistently elusive, though he is undoubtedly relevant enough to catalyze White’s work.

I suddenly was able to see that the image itself is consistently bound, interrupted by the antique mirror or confused through tertiary planes of semi-reflective surfaces. If Barthes found the epitome of photography’s achievement in the Winter Garden picture of his mother when she was a child, White’s photographs conjure her uncle’s presence by way of his absence. We submit to the camera’s frame, imagining ourselves in his shoes as a young man leaving America shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. Upon arriving in Europe, the young man reads “Exercises de L’Ame (Exercises of Light),” a book on devotional prayer and the sacrament. In this way White calls for a meditation on how history itself is inherently filtered, framed, and distorted. “An Unending Path” is thus about a sensation of not yet existing alongside what is long gone. The marked off area is the discordant coexistence of these imaginings.

In his 1931 “Short History of Photography” Walter Benjamin anticipates White’s aesthetic: “While it is possible to give an account of how people walk, if only in the most inexact way, all the same we know nothing definite of the positions involved in the fraction of a second when the step is taken … Photography, however, with its time lapses, enlargements, etc., makes such knowledge possible.”

Among the central suite of four photographs, “The Pond, circa 1935” (2024) is the centerpiece of the show. Here, the artist reenacts Buck’s hand, reproducing the same pond drawing for a psychoanalytic effect. The images are produced using candle soot (literally an exercise in light) to create single-edition prints that, over the course of the series, grow saturated with the smudge of soot.

What is most effective about these images is the continued erasure or blackening of the otherwise carefully rendered depiction of the pond, and the history of marks each print carries forward from the last. Contextualized and therefore influenced by White’s photographs of foliage, one has a sense of backing away from the scene, withdrawing from an almost uncanny reenactment of the uncle’s gesture into the smudge of darkness, the foliage of obscurity, as one might a hedge. Here, we return to the present, restored from those early days of photography when it was believed that the camera, via double exposure and plays of light, could capture the spirit world. Instead, one cannot help but doubt Benjamin’s claim that anything certain can be gleaned from photography.