WINCHESTER, MASS.- The Griffin Museum of Photography announced its first exhibitions of 2025, featuring three compelling showcases: Nuclear Family, An Impossibly Normal Life, and MediĒaĒions in an Emergency. Together, these exhibitions explore themes of family, identity, and resilience through the lens of LGBTQIA+ perspectives, celebrating love, connection, and the transformative power of photography to challenge societal norms.

Nuclear Family.
Griffin Main Gallery.

The Griffin Museum of Photography opened Nuclear Family, an exhibition that explores the fundamental questions: What makes a family? How do we define community? This exhibition reimagines the concept of family through the lens of LGBTQIA+ artists, expanding our understanding beyond traditional norms.

Through photography and video, the artists offer honest and authentic portrayals of themselves, their families, and communities, challenging biases and redefining the narrative of love and connection. Highlights include Jess T. Dugan’s A Letter to My Daughter, a poignant video essay on parenthood; Mengwen Cao’s Liminal Space, celebrating the resilience of queer and trans people of color; and Yorgos Efthymiadis’ Lighthouse Keepers, intimate portraits of friendship and community. Laurence Philomene’s vibrant self-reflections, Anne Vetter’s exploration of gender and attachment in Love is not the Last Room, and Matthew Leifheit’s Queer Archives further enrich this compelling showcase.

Nuclear Family invites viewers to celebrate the diversity of modern family structures and the power of authentic storytelling.

Matthew Finley | An Impossibly Normal Life.
Griffin Gallery.

An Impossibly Normal Life imagines a more loving and inclusive world where fluidity in gender and sexuality is the norm. Created by re-contextualizing vintage snapshots, the project centers on an idealized life for the artist’s imagined Uncle Ken — an alternative history inspired by the revelation of a likely gay uncle who passed away shortly after the artist’s birth. Rejecting the shame often associated with pre-1970s queer stories, the narrative celebrates acceptance, love, and friendship, offering a vision of what could have been and what still can be. Based in Los Angeles, Matthew Finley’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. and is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Center for Fine Art Photography. This project has earned the Center Santa Fe’s 2024 Personal Award and the Center for Photographic Art’s 2024 LGBTQ+ Artist Grant.

Kevin Bennett Moore | MediĒaĒions in an Emergency.
Griffin Atelier Gallery.

MediĒaĒions in an Emergency draws from Kevin Bennett Moore’s queer experience and the ideals of mid-century American culture, creating vignettes that blur the line between reality and fiction.

Exploring themes of disaster, tragedy, and the human condition, the work reflects a quest for calm amid chaos. By constructing controlled environments, Moore crafts unconventional narratives where distant protagonists invite the viewer into a voyeuristic perspective. Influenced by 1950s and 60s cinema, gender performativity, and nostalgia, Moore’s self-portrait projects use the past to comment on contemporary politics. A Boston-based artist, Moore graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (BFA ’20) with a focus on photography.

All three exhibitions fall under the overarching idea of Nuclear Family, curated by Katalina Simon in collaboration with Crista Dix and exhibition designer Yana Nosenko. Nuclear Family invites viewers to celebrate the diversity of modern family structures and the power of authentic storytelling.