“EMANI AND TANGINA”: This photograph by Naima Green is part of “Photography is also an act of love,” on view through April 8 at the Anne Reid ’72 Gallery at Princeton Day School. Works by Allen Frame and Zachary Lucero are also featured in the exhibition.

The Anne Reid ’72 Gallery at Princeton Day School presents “Photography is also an act of love,” an exhibition of artwork by Naima Green, Allen Frame, and Zachary Lucero, through April 8. The exhibition takes its title from the opening sentence of Ghost Image (1981) by Hervé Guibert, a book of 63 prose poems about photography that reference Guibert’s observations and experiences as a gay artist relating to family, friendship, memory, and desire.

The three featured artists in this exhibition speak to very different geographically-based experiences of queerness and belonging. They center sensitivity in their work and move fluidly between mediums, both found and created, to speak to memory and to unpack histories of chosen and inherited family.

Green explores community and identity in New York City and beyond through portraiture, sculpture, installation, and text. Her project, “Pur·suit” (2018), features friends, other artists, strangers, and activists, including the QTBIPOC collective bklyn boihood and womxn of color collective BUFU among others. “Pur·suit” is displayed as large format prints and as a deck of playing cards. In this exhibition, the deck is situated in an installation meant to allude to the artist’s living room where many of her portraits from the series MumboJumbo (2016) were photographed. The living room provides a comfortable, intimate place within the gallery for visitors to interact with each other and the artwork.

Frame grew up in Mississippi in the 1950s and ’60s. After being educated at Harvard University, Frame moved to New York where he came of age as a photographer in the downtown art scene. Frame’s early collaborations with artists such as Nan Goldin and Bill Rice set the groundwork for a photographic practice as rooted in human experience as in poetics and theory. Having grown up in a time with little blatant evidence of gay identity in mainstream culture, Frame sought to create it himself — photographing people (queer and otherwise) in intimate and public spaces around the world and transforming found ephemera into personal artifact.

Lucero uses diaristic writing and photography to investigate his Indigenous, Chicano, and Spanish American heritage. His family is from the New Mexico-Colorado border; in his words “an amalgamation of towns and deserts that is referred to as the San Luis Valley.” Lucero employs archival modalities to reflect on aspects of his identity. Without depicting himself in the literal sense, Lucero offers a dynamic self-portrait collaged from a wide array of imagery and text.

Exhibition events and COVID-19 safety protocols will be updated at pds.org/the-arts/anne-reid-gallery. To schedule a private viewing email, annereid72gallery@pds.org.