HAMBURG.- With American Cycles, the Temporary House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (PHOXXI) has unveiled the first large-scale institutional solo exhibition dedicated to Mexican-American photographer Philip Montgomery—a powerful, unsettling, and timely portrait of the United States in the 21st century. Featuring around 110 works created between 2014 and today, the exhibition plunges viewers into a decade marked by political unrest, climate-driven disasters, social upheaval, and the enduring question of how communities survive fragmentation.

Montgomery’s stark black-and-white photographs will be familiar to readers of The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, where his images have become hallmarks of contemporary photojournalism. Yet inside PHOXXI, freed from the constraints of the printed page, these photographs radiate an even more visceral intensity. The exhibition, curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, is not arranged chronologically. Instead, it unfolds in thematic clusters—echoes of a nation cycling through recurring tensions.

At the exhibition’s entrance, visitors are confronted with a symbolic ruin: a fragmented architectural structure at the center of the gallery. Photographs are embedded into its façade and tucked into its inner chambers, inviting viewers to search, discover, and piece together a narrative. This visual environment mirrors Montgomery’s central question: How do people remain in solidarity with those they perceive as “others”?

From the early days of Donald Trump’s populist rise to the protests following the murder of George Floyd, Montgomery’s lens captures both the raw urgency of the moment and a timeless sense of struggle. His images from Minneapolis—smoke thick in the air, faces illuminated by firelight—are exhibited alongside photographs taken in Miami during Hurricane Irma, where water, wind, and chaos blur into a kind of apocalyptic choreography.

Montgomery refuses the notion that documentary photography must be neutral. Instead, his approach is direct, emotional, and meticulously constructed. Using flash and dynamic compositions, he illuminates what he calls the “fragile, surreal beauty” embedded in crisis. The effect is haunting: reflections shimmer on wet pavement; smoke dissolves into white light; faces appear carved out of shadow. His aesthetic recalls the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank, yet remains unmistakably his own—a contemporary American iconography forged in turbulence.

A major section of the exhibition confronts the compounding disasters of climate change: floods swallowing streets, fires consuming communities, storms flattening homes. Another addresses the opioid epidemic, the crisis for which Montgomery won the National Magazine Award for Feature Photography in 2018. Elsewhere, portraits of political and cultural figures punctuate the show, offering moments of stillness amid the storm.

One of the most striking sections resembles a “control room,” where images of emerging political networks and social movements are displayed as though part of a live system mapping the country’s shifting emotional terrain. The design underscores the central theme: America is not a fixed landscape but an ongoing, volatile process.

Montgomery’s photographs, many of them previously unpublished, reveal the physical and psychological toll of living in a nation perpetually on edge. Yet the exhibition is not without hope. Through his camera, moments of solidarity, care, and human resilience emerge—quiet but unmistakable.

With American Cycles, PHOXXI has created an exhibition that is as visually arresting as it is socially urgent: a decade of American life distilled into images that demand to be seen, felt, and remembered.