ON THE SHELF 2026

In conjunction with the 2026 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to present, On the Shelf, a photo book exhibition, juried by Nick Larsen of Radius Books.

"In truth, I’m slow to things. I miss chunks of films or lectures, group conversations even, while processing all that I’m seeing and hearing, all that is being shared with me, and all that is being called to mind. Photobooks are different. Good ones—the best combination of visual and tactile, content and container—are immersive, keeping me from drifting elsewhere. I can navigate them at my own pace, and they remain one of my favorite conduits for learning, understanding, commiserating, engaging, cracking up, or tearing up. The combination of images (in all forms), text (sometimes), paper (or whatever), and binding (or not) is timeless; it’s one of the technologies humans got right. I’ve looked at hundreds, and I’m still enamored with all of the decisions, big and small, that it takes to realize one. The selected projects, like the best photobooks in my collection, were a joy to sit with, to revisit multiple times, to come back to days later after a particular image got stuck in my head, and to “flip through” from front to back and then back to front, all the while imagining their physicality and materiality, what they would be like to hold.

While I’m hesitant to make any sweeping characterizations about the breadth of the submissions, there were a few things that were undeniably present as I worked my way through them. First, grief. So much grief. Sometimes for the person closest to the photographer, sometimes for a relationship to a person they never knew. Similarly, there was a strong sense of reflecting on place, whether that be a place the photographer is seeing for the first time through a camera or a place that’s so deeply embedded in who they are that it’s become a character in their story. Many also mined, referenced, recreated, or challenged an archive—found or personal, fictive or scarily real. I will be thinking about a number of the projects for some time, and I can’t wait to see, and touch, the selected books in person during the exhibition. Thank you for sharing your work with me."

—Nick Larsen

Featured Artists

Henri Airo

Courtney Allen

Claire Beckett

Joshua Cavalier

Angela Chen

Robin Dahlberg

Beau Devereaux

Everything Is Collective

Rich-Joseph Facun

Matthew Finley

Jessica Hays

Moeko Ishiguro

Casey Joiner

Siri Kaur

Lisa Kereszi

Mehreen Khalid

Takako Kido, Juror's Choice

Nick Meyer

Mark Peterman

Omar Pierce

Jordan Putt

Francisco Javier Ramirez

Lara Shipley & Antone Dolezal

Charlie Simokaitis

Daniela Spector

Cristina Velásquez

Claire Warden

Judson Womack

Kyle Worthy

Theo Zeal, Honorable Mention

About the Juror

Nick Larsen is an artist and book editor living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He studied at the University of Nevada, Reno and the Ohio State University, where he received his MFA in Sculpture. Larsen has had over a dozen solo and collaborative exhibitions, including Old Haunts, Lower Reaches at the Nevada Museum of Art, and been a part of a number of notable group exhibitions, including several editions of New American Paintings. Since 2022, he has been the managing editor at Radius Books, a nonprofit art book publisher in Santa Fe, where he has overseen the publication of over seventy photography, fine art, architecture, and poetry books.