At 10 Corso Como Gallery this spring, photography becomes a site of reflection, tension, and reinvention. From March 11 through April 7, 2026, The New American West: Photography in Conversation opens a nuanced visual dialogue that traces how the idea of the American West has been shaped, questioned, and reimagined over nearly a century. Presented in collaboration with MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas as part of MIA OFF, the exhibition brings together historic masterworks and contemporary perspectives in a carefully calibrated exchange that feels both intimate and expansive.
The exhibition unfolds as a meditation on photography’s unique ability to function simultaneously as document and projection. Across generations, photographers have returned to the West as both a physical territory and a psychological horizon, a place where ideals of freedom, ambition, and reinvention have long been inscribed onto the land. At 10 Corso Como, these inherited visions are neither frozen in nostalgia nor treated as distant artifacts. Instead, they are activated through proximity, conversation, and contrast.
Maryam Eisler, Hotel Paisano Signage at Dusk, Marfa, Texas, USA, 2024
Anchoring the exhibition are contemporary works by Maryam Eisler and Alexei Riboud, produced during a 2024 journey through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Traveling together yet working independently, the two artists photographed the same landscapes without sharing images, allowing intuition and perception to guide their responses. The result is a striking duality. Eisler’s photographs unfold with cinematic intensity and emotional charge, evoking interior states as much as external scenes. Riboud’s images, by contrast, are restrained and architectural, attentive to structure, rhythm, and silence. Shown side by side, their works reveal how the same terrain can generate radically different visual and psychological readings.
Alexei Riboud Car wreck, Shafter Ghost Town, Texas, USA, 2024
These contemporary visions are placed in dialogue with an extraordinary constellation of historic photographs drawn from the Greenberg archive. From early twentieth-century modernism to postwar social observation and late-century conceptual approaches, the exhibition traces the West as an evolving idea rather than a fixed geography. Sculptural landscapes, unvarnished portraits, and moments of quiet human presence collectively map a region shaped by beauty and contradiction, aspiration and displacement. The West emerges here as a layered construct—one continually rewritten by those who pass through it and those who attempt to define it.
Esther Bubley At the local amateur rodeo, Tomball, Texas, April 1945
Installed specifically for the Milan gallery, the exhibition marks an important evolution from its previous presentations in New York and Paris. The 10 Corso Como iteration deepens the art-historical framework, allowing connections across time to surface with clarity and restraint. Without overt declaration, the exhibition acknowledges that the ideals once projected onto the American West are shifting. Promises of opportunity and self-determination are reconsidered through images that preserve complexity rather than certainty.
Alexei Riboud Central El Paso. El Paso, Texas, USA, 2024
Photography, in this context, becomes a tool for holding unresolved questions. What remains compelling about the West is precisely its instability as an idea—its capacity to absorb myth, critique, longing, and doubt. By placing historic and contemporary works into conversation, The New American West resists a singular narrative and instead offers a space for reflection, one in which the landscape is understood as both subject and metaphor.
Joel Meyerowitz Los Angeles, California, 1976
Free and open to the public, the exhibition aligns seamlessly with 10 Corso Como’s longstanding commitment to cultural dialogue at the intersection of art, fashion, and visual culture. As viewers move through the gallery, they are invited to reconsider not just how the West has been photographed, but why it continues to exert such a powerful imaginative pull.
