From Now OnCurated by Farah Al Qasimi

Morán Morán is pleased to present From Now On, an exhibition of photographs from the Yale School of Art MFA photography class of 2026, curated by Farah Al Qasimi. The nine artists featured in this show include Christian Badach, Jasmine Clarke, Faith Couch, Christopher Postlewaite, Olivia Reavey, John Shen, Em Wall, Andrew Warner, and Chen Xiangyun. The photographs in From Now On range from the punk subculture of Philadelphia to LGBT kinship, U.S. reserve officers to the limits of the body, intimate quotidien interiors to the pitfalls of the American dream. The works also explore themes of faith, family, and leisure. The artists, while diverse in their subject matter and approach, all demonstrate the breadth of possibilities within the medium of photography. From Now On is rooted in the deep investment these artists have made in each other as contemporaries, and marks the opening of a new chapter.

Christian Badach (b. 1999) is a photographer from New Jersey who works throughout the rural northeast. His work is based in the creation of pseudo-fictionalized spaces that examines elemental landscapes and their capacity to act as catalysts in the formation of paradoxical emotions that alter psychology, behavior, and movement. His work has been shown internationally at PhMusuem Days (PhMuseum, Bologna) Other Spaces (The Photographic Exploration Project, Berlin) Uchi Soto (The Contemporary of Photography, Bangkok) and his writing has been featured by Paper Journal Magazine.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Jasmine Clarke creates deceptively clear images to examine the mysteries and mythologies that underpin our notions of home and family. Clarke has shown her work at Howard Greenberg Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Blue Sky Gallery, the Park Avenue Armory, the Brooklyn Museum, the Ogden Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, and PhotoVogue festival in Milan. She was a 2022 Light Work Artist-in-Residence and received support from the 2021 Aperture and Google Creator Labs Photo Fund. She is one of twelve photographers in CULTURED Magazine’s Young Photographers 2025 issue, nominated by Stephen Shore.

Faith Couch (b. 1997) is an image maker, educator, and curator from Durham, North Carolina. Her practice illuminates Black memory and the beauty of the everyday. She earned her BFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2019 and has exhibited internationally, with presentations in Qatar, Northern Ireland, France, England, and across the United States. Her work has been shown at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, the International Center of Photography, the Nasher Museum at Duke University, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Aperture Foundation in New York, among others. Alongside her fine art practice, Couch works editorially, with photographs published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Vogue, and more. In 2021, she became the first Black woman photographer to be named a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Art & Style.

Christopher Postlewaite (b. 1993) is a photographer and musician living between Philadelphia, PA and New Haven, CT. His work consists of observational and staged photographs of queer and punk compatriots, all working in tandem to create a sense of place. He frequently collaborates with his spouse, friends and strangers, making pictures built on trust and discovery. Over the past year he began a new body of work, Mock Trial (working title) creating photographs with high school and college-age students participating in Mock Trial Invitationals. This work is an exploration of theatrics and performance, as it relates to power enacted through law. Christopher is a Gordon Parks Scholar (2013, 2014) and most recently was awarded Artist-in-Residence at Rowan University (2025).

Olivia Reavey (b. 1998) works between New York, NY and New Haven, CT. Her work is born from a curiosity into morbidness, intimacy, and representations of gender and lust. She seeks to challenge perceived limitations of the body, and in doing so, simulates a space in which those limitations are non-existent. Primarily printing in the darkroom, Olivia aligns her picture making process with the inherent physicality of making a fiber paper print. Her focus on corporeal imagery, often marred by the intervention of physical objects or choreographed movements, is reflected in her dedication to the disruption of straight photography by way of challenging the traditions of analog printing. Reavey has exhibited in galleries across New York (Yancey Richardson, Janet Borden, Helena Anrather, Independent Art Fair, Justine Kurland Studio), Baltimore, MD (The Compound), Portland, OR (Lumber Room), Richmond, VA and Newport, RI.

John Shen is an artist whose work interrogates the evolving apparatus of photography and its entanglement with vision, experience, and memory. Shen’s multidisciplinary practice straddles the tactile traditions of photography and the mediated realities of contemporary digital culture. His works have taken the form of photographic objects made from a camera hand built by the artist, comprising approximately 28,000 drinking straws. With this, Shen creates one-of-a-kind images on direct positive silver photo paper, echoing simultaneously 19th century photography while also speaking to the infinitely reproducible digital image. From 19th century processes, hand-built cameras, drones and 360 degree cameras, Shen uses his personal subjectivity to thread the link between the vast imaging apparatuses that have become active agents in the production of meaning. His photographs emerge as objects that meditate on technology’s augmentation, distortion, and displacement of human vision. They ask the viewer to reconsider photography as a site of negotiation between indexical record, illusion, and the apparatus itself.

Em Wall was born and raised in Michigan where they grew up in a large Mormon family. Wall was drawn to photography for its ability to dismantle and dissect relationships. Their current work delves into the landscape of childhood and the religious narrative of their youth. Wall wrestles with Mormon culture and teachings that don’t fit their conceptions of gender and sexuality and the way they uphold, transform, or fail to escape the domestic traditions handed down to them. Their images are not meant to be acts of rebellion but rather to quietly subvert ideas of religious patriarchy and the belief that it has a monopoly on spirituality.

Andrew Warner (b. 1994) is a photographer and ultra runner whose art spans photography, sound, video, and performance. His work interrogates the abstraction of control, investigating the nuanced interplay between pain and pleasure in endurance, the phenomenon of belief as it relates to mystery, and the roles of masculinity and individuality play in shaping identity. Warner began his artistic journey at Bard College, earning a BA in Photography in 2017. Prior to entering Yale’s graduate photography program, he spent four years in the Bay Area as a reproduction photographer and art handler.

Chen Xiangyun is a Chinese artist based in New York, NY and New Haven, CT. Their work has been shown internationally and nationally, including in the Pingyao International Photography Festival, the PhotoVogue Festival in Italy, and the Baxter Street Camera Club of New York. They were the winner of the Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers, The 99th Annual International Competition at The Print Center in Philadelphia and recipient of the En Foco Fellowship. Chen’s most recent photography project features psychologically probing portraits of their diverse queer community in the U.S.