One, Unseen — Now at City Hall
The same portrait. A new context. And what it means when a jury says yes.
If you followed this image to TILT — if you stood in the Crane Arts Building and looked at her standing before that flag — you already know what One, Unseen asks. You know about the hard light, the unnamed subject, the question Kensington poses to the idea of America. I wrote about all of that when the Philly Photo Day exhibition opened. I am not going to repeat it here.
What I want to write about now is something different: what happens when an image you believe in gets chosen — not by an open submission process, but by a jury — and what that changes about where the work lives and who gets to see it.
One, Unseen has been selected by an independent jury for Philadelphia Stories 250: Out of Many, One — A Photographic Journey, an exhibition running June 8 through August 8 at Philadelphia City Hall. It will hang on the 4th Floor near City Council Chambers and on the 1st Floor near the Office of Immigrant Affairs.
That last detail matters more than it might appear.
Location as Meaning
The Office of Immigrant Affairs sits on the first floor of City Hall. It is where people navigate the bureaucratic realities of belonging to this city — paperwork, services, questions about status and rights and what this place owes them and what they owe it back. It is, in the most literal sense, an office that deals with the same questions this portrait raises.
To have this image on the wall nearby — a woman, unnamed, standing before the American flag in Kensington with her gaze steady and unasking — feels like something more than coincidence in curation. It feels like the photograph found the room it was always supposed to be in.
The 4th Floor, near City Council Chambers, is the other location. The people who make policy for this city will pass this image on their way to make decisions about the people who live here. I find that meaningful. I hope they do too.
On Being Jury-Selected
Philly Photo Day was an open call — anyone with a camera and a vision of Philadelphia could submit. That openness is one of the things I love most about the project. One, Unseen found its audience there through the democratic logic of collective participation.
A jury selection works differently. Someone looked at this photograph — looked at it critically, alongside many others — and decided it belonged in this particular exhibition, in this particular building, in this particular moment in the city’s history. That is a different kind of affirmation, and I want to be honest: it means something to me.
This is not my first time being recognized at City Hall. I was a juror selection for the Philadelphia Reveal exhibition at the Art Gallery there. But familiarity does not dull the weight of it. Every time work of mine is placed on those walls, I think about the subject — the woman who trusted me with her image and asked only that her name be withheld. She is the one being seen there. I am just the one who held the camera.
The jury did not select me. They selected her - a singular presence in a frame, holding a question that the building around her has been trying to answer for 250 years. — Steven Weisz
Philadelphia at 250
The exhibition is part of the city’s Semiquincentennial — 250 years since independence was declared in Philadelphia. That anniversary has generated a lot of ceremony, and ceremony is not nothing. But I am more interested in what photography does with a milestone like this than what speeches do with it.
Speeches describe the version of history the speaker wants you to believe in. Photographs show you something that actually happened in an actual place with an actual person. The two things are not in opposition — but they are not the same thing either.
Philadelphia Stories 250 as an exhibition title acknowledges the plural: not one story, but stories. Not a monolithic civic portrait, but a photographic journey made of many individual moments. The subtitle — Out of Many, One — borrows the same phrase I borrowed from the coin and the Constitution when I made this image. That overlap is not something I manufactured. It is what the image was always about.
Come See It
The Mayor’s Reception is June 12th, 5 to 7 p.m., in Room 202. I will be there. If you have seen the image at TILT and want to talk about it — or if this is your first encounter with it — I would genuinely like to have that conversation.
For the run of the exhibition, City Hall is open Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. No ticket. No reservation. You walk in, you take the elevator or the stairs, and you stand in front of work that was made because a photographer went to Kensington and a woman agreed to be photographed and the light fell exactly the way it did.
That is all it ever is, and somehow it is always enough.
Exhibition Information
Philadelphia Stories 250: Out of Many, One — A Photographic Journey
Closed weekends & holidays
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