No Other Place to Go: Climate Photography at InLiquid Gallery

Four people stood in the middle of the floor at 1400 North American Street, none of them holding a drink, all of them talking with their hands. I had come for the photographs. I stayed for that. The show is called No Other Place to Go, the card by the door gives the run as September 4 through October 17, and the reception I walked into was the one on Thursday the tenth, six to nine. I love art openings. Full stop. Not for the wine, which is fine. Not for the checklist, which I almost never finish. For the fact that an opening is the one room in this city where a stranger turns to you, starts a sentence about a picture, and twenty minutes later the two of you are somewhere neither of you planned to go.

An Opening Is Where the Work Actually Happens

A photograph on a wall is finished. The room around it is not. That is the whole argument, and every opening I have ever walked out of late proves it again. Put thirty people in a space with five bodies of work and no agenda, and the pictures start doing something they cannot do alone. They give people a reason to speak to each other without the usual social scaffolding. Nobody needs a mutual friend. The wall does that job.

InLiquid has been building rooms like that since 1999, when Rachel Zimmerman started the organization out of her home in Old City because the internet was beginning to open paths for artists who were not going to be handed a gallery. It runs now out of Crane Arts, the 1906 warehouse on American Street in Kensington that has become one of the more reliable addresses in Philadelphia for seeing work you did not already know you wanted to see. Rachel was there on Thursday, which she always is. So was Isabella, who kept the room moving. That is not decoration either. Somebody has to make the introductions, and the good ones do it so lightly you barely notice it happening.

What Katie Tackman Put on the Walls

The exhibition is guest curated by Katie Tackman, a photographer and fine art printer at Gravy Studio and one of the founders of the 20/20 Photo Festival, and it is presented in step with that festival’s 2026 edition. Her premise, printed on the wall in the back, is that photography has always sat at the meeting point of art and evidence, which makes it one of the few tools we have for documenting a climate that is changing faster than our language for it. The line I keep returning to is her claim that evidence and emotion are “not opposing forces, but complementary forms of knowledge.” The five artists here are not asked to prove anything. They are asked to carry the anxiety, the grief and the plain uncertainty that comes with the data, and to put that weight into a picture.

The festival around it is worth knowing. The 20/20 Photo Festival ran September 10 through 19 across galleries and colleges citywide, ten days of free exhibitions, photo walks, workshops, artist talks and a book fair at Cherry Street Pier. It started in 2020 as a virtual month put together by Gravy Studio, The Halide Project and the former Wanderlife Gallery when nobody could gather in person, and it now draws more than two thousand people a year in its seventh year. This year the organizers built the program around 250 years of change in this country, which is the same anniversary the rest of Philadelphia is preparing for, approached from the only medium that can show you the before.

A White Line One Hundred and Sixty Feet High

Richard Boutwell’s wall stopped me first, and it is the loudest thing in the room: a false color map of Lake Mead, custom built from remote sensing imagery and terrain data, with photographs pinned around it like field notes. The work belongs to Reclamation, his long project on the Colorado River, begun to coincide with the centenary of the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The chapter on view is called Deadpool, made on and around the lake between September 2021 and January 2022. Its central image is the bathtub ring, the white mineral band on the canyon walls that his own project notes describe as 160 to 180 feet tall, left behind by a falling reservoir.

That number is the part that will not leave me. Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, and the ring is simply the receipt. The Bureau of Reclamation has recorded the lake’s surface level at Hoover Dam every month since 1935, which means the decline is not an interpretation, it is a ledger. This summer the lake fell to its lowest level on record, the lowest reading for that point in the year since the reservoir first filled. Boutwell prints with palladium and gelatin silver chloride, materials from the nineteenth century, and he has pointed the whole apparatus at a twenty first century accounting error. He gave a talk of his own on the festival calendar, Sunday the thirteenth at a quarter to two, one of the free artist talks the festival hosts at Moore College of Art and Design, and the panel around it on printed photography was moderated by Stephen Perloff, who has edited The Photo Review out of this region since 1976.

The Water Under Philadelphia

Then you turn and the same argument is made about the ground you are standing on. Kaitlin Pomerantz is a Philadelphia artist, educator and writer, and her work in this show comes out of Watermark, a socially engaged project about flooding and climate resilience she made with Naomieh Jovin for the WaterShed hub in Germantown. The material is handmade paper, flax and cotton, with quotes from neighbors who have been flooded watermarked into the sheets and lit from behind. Germantown held North America’s first paper mill, so the medium is also the history, which is the kind of rhyme you cannot invent.

The wall text puts Philadelphia’s waterways at more than three hundred miles, reduced by over eighty percent since colonial settlement. The city’s own accounting is close and just as hard: the Philadelphia Water Department counts 283 linear miles of streams that once carried runoff to the Schuylkill and the Delaware, of which only 118 miles remain above ground, with 73 percent of our historic waterways piped. We paved over a river system and then acted surprised when basements filled. Pomerantz borrows from Toni Morrison, who wrote in The Site of Memory that water keeps a perfect memory of where it used to be and never stops trying to get back there. Stand in a Germantown kitchen after a heavy August and that is not a metaphor. The Waterway Arts Initiative that the Water Department runs in Germantown exists because the water kept its appointment.

Expired Film, Glass Eyes, and a Collection of the World

The other three rooms work the same seam from different sides. Anita Allyn, who teaches at The College of New Jersey and has shown at Tate Modern and Vox Populi, brings Nature, Assembled, which turns photographs into sculptural objects and sets them among living specimens, geological material and the furniture of museum display. It asks how collecting and exhibiting shaped what we think we know about the natural world, which is a polite way of asking whether the museum taught us to see nature as already dead.

Laura Krasnow makes the fragility structural. Her series And Then There Were None is shot on expired Polaroid film that fades, bleeds and comes apart while you look at it, and the subject is forest loss to agriculture, development, mining and logging. The picture decays at roughly the speed of the thing it depicts. Nobody has to explain it to you.

Emma Ressel builds what she calls fictional habitat dioramas, staging taxidermied animals and printed backdrops into still lifes that are closer to theater than to biology. The series is Glass Eyes Stare Back, and Aperture’s feature on the work describes how it came out of a small natural history museum where her father kept an office. The idea underneath it is shifting baseline syndrome, the way each generation takes the diminished world it inherits as the normal one. Her animals sit in a third space between alive and gone, and they will not stop looking at you.

No Ads. Just Art.

Here is what I keep coming back to about that night. Five artists made work about loss on a planetary scale, and the effect in the room was not despair. It was conversation. A map of a drained reservoir in Nevada and a sheet of watermarked paper from a flooded street in Germantown were hanging within thirty feet of each other, and people who had never met were standing between them working out loud what the connection was. That is the civic function of a gallery, and it is why I keep saying culture is infrastructure rather than ornament. You cannot get that from a feed. The feed will show you the same picture and give you a button to press by yourself.

Philadelphia is about to be looked at very hard, by the World Cup, by the country’s 250th, by every visitor who thinks they already know what this city is. What they will find, if they get off the tourist path for an hour, is a 1906 warehouse in Kensington where a nonprofit that started in somebody’s living room in 1999 hangs five serious artists on a white wall and leaves the door open. No Other Place to Go runs through October 17, with a second reception on October 8 from six to nine. Go on a Thursday. Talk to somebody you do not know.

NO ADS. JUST ART.