Curran Hatleberg, River’s Dream, 2010-2020
Higher Pictures presents River’s Dream 2010-2020 by Curran Hatleberg, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. For the first time, the complete opus of sixty-five photographs is on view. Emerging from the photographer’s sustained presence in the South-Eastern United States, River’s Dream narrates the turbulent and unresolved coexistence of human and non-human life; the encroachment of heat, water, and vegetation on the built environment; economic precarity; and a possibility of connection across political and social differences.
Installed together, the photographs allow these themes to accumulate and echo across the gallery walls. An encounter with a reptile in one frame finds its counterpart in a figure at rest in another, while recurring motifs of water, overgrowth, and decay link people, animals, and place into a single ecosystem. The scale of the presentation mirrors the scale of Hatleberg’s commitment, a project built over a decade of return visits and personal relationships.
These rural, out-of-the-way places are often overlooked until an election rolls around, when politicians weaponize a region’s economic insecurity, racial and ethnic demographics, and attitudes towards gender and sexuality to win votes. Rather than constructing a sociological portrait of a region, Hatleberg reaches for something deeper, a personal connection, a mutual exchange: “I believe photographing people forces an interest in lives other than our own, allowing an opportunity to see ourselves reflected in someone else. Biases, judgements, and stereotypes fall away in the face of vivid experience.”
River’s Dream offers viewers the same invitation: to spend time, rather than pass through, and to encounter the American South through careful attention.
Curran Hatleberg (b. 1982) is a photographer based in Baltimore, MD. Hatleberg’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum, Mass MoCA, and the International Center of Photography. In 2019, Hatleberg was featured in the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His works are held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Hatleberg is the recipient of a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby’s Artist Grant (2024), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), a Magnum Emergency Fund grant (2015), and an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship grant (2014). Hatleberg has published 5 books, including Blood Green (TBW Books, 2025), River’s Dream (TBW Books, 2022), and Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016). Hatleberg holds a BA in painting from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MFA in photography from Yale University.
For more information please contact Milly Cai at Milly@higherpictures.com