Silver Eye Center for Photography
A Conversation With Leo Hsu
Photography Courtesy of Silver Eye Center for Photography
Interview By Sophie Dixon, February 10th 2026
Their current exhibition, FIERCE Pittsburgh, is in collaboration with Rainbow Serpent and featuring the work of Ajamu X. The exhibition is open to the public and ongoing until May 2nd, 2026.
Leo Hsu: Thanks for inviting me, and Silver Eye, to connect in this way. Photography has always been a part of my life, and I’m really happy and honoured to be engaged with so many of the organizations and people who informed how I came to learn about photography when I was younger. Just last month I spoke at a program at the McKeesport Historical Society, on vernacular photography, with the person who taught me how to develop film when I was 14. As a teenager, I would visit Silvery Eye Center for Photography. At the time it was in a different location than it is now. I had been to The Carnegie Museum of Art, but going to Silver Eye was really my first instance of seeing artists at ground level, and it was largely a volunteer organization at that time. There were artists whose work was on the walls, and they’d be there sitting in the gallery too. It was really a kind of mind-shifting experience to realize that the people whose work was on the walls of the gallery were also there in the room with me. And that has always influenced the way I think about art. I see it more as people committing to their community in supporting organizations and other artists. I’m really happy that this is still a value at the Silver Eye today.
Silver Eye Center for Photography was originally two different projects, one being the Blatent Image photographers’ collective. This was a group of photographers who had a space where they would show one another their work, and the artwork of others too. This was in the late 70s and into the early 80s. And then the Silver Eye Photographic Workshop, which was a program where artists brought photographers in from other parts of the country to Pittsburgh to run workshops and give talks. Those face-to-face opportunities were really important, and I think at that time, nationally, you saw a lot of these kinds of organizations emerging where photographers had access to this kind of circuit, where they were able to see what was happening elsewhere in the country. Blatent Image and Silver Eye merged into what eventually became Blatent Image Silver Eye, and finally Silver Eye Center for Photography. About ten years ago, the organization relocated to where we are now, which is on one end of the Penn Avenue Arts Corridor, which includes several smaller arts organizations and studios, many of which might only be open for the monthly gallery crawl.
Meanwhile in Detroit - As It Is, Opening reception, Photography courtesy of Silver Eye
L: When I was even younger, I was taking art classes at the museum every Saturday morning and you had this feeling that somebody has decided that the work here in the museum is important, and the way that signification happens isn’t always clear. We learn that these certain things are valued and they are important. But being at that kind of ground level gallery, I guess it just made me realize that there were a lot more people making art than I had thought, and that being famous wasn’t really why people were making work, and that making work was uniquely each person’s own.
S: Then all of the sudden art becomes about people again, everything is more dynamic, and these value structures that be are not so certain anymore. I’ve always valued that too. It’s important for people to learn they can have a challenging critique of the structures that are inherited or taught, and you can sort of discover for yourself what your values are as an artist. Could you tell me a bit more about the labs and how this space works?
L: The Lab is our facility for producing our exhibitions. We do some service work for institutions and we also have a lab membership program, where artists can come in and print their work, print a show, or scan their negatives. We have these evening hours where people come just to hang out and it’s a really supportive environment, so that’s something that we’d like to expand. We also have a monthly salon, which is the last Friday of every month, and that’s where we get together to talk about photography, and it’s kind of an open conversation where people might show work in progress. Between the salon, the lab evening hours, and the workshops that will be coming, we’re supporting creative growth not only for the artists that are exhibiting in the gallery but also for those in our community.
S: I’d love to hear more about your particular role at Silver Eye, and how your relationship to the gallery has changed.
L: Silver Eye is a very small organization. I have been the executive director for three years, going on four, and I was on the board before that. We have a Deputy Director and Director of Programs, Helen Trompeteler, who is my partner in developing our exhibitions program and working with exhibiting artists. We have a Lab Manager Sean Stewart, who is an expert printer. We have our Communications and Operations Manager, Mackenzie O’Connor, who does our communications and graphic design. And we have Jacob Woodyard who is our lab member facilitator. We also have our interns, who are called the Scholars @ Silver Eye. This is a year-long internship program with undergraduates and seniors at universities and colleges in the area. But we are very small and we do a lot, so it can be very busy here.
S: What kinds of collaborations has Silver Eye worked on, in and outside of the gallery?
C: We had a collaboration with Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership to put the work of emerging artists in empty storefront windows downtown. That was great as a way to introduce art into the daily lives of the people who live and work downtown. And actually our next exhibition is a collaboration with Rainbow Serpent to show the work of Ajamu X in FIERCE Pittsburgh.
Exhibition of Ajamu X, Fierce Pittsburgh, at Silver Eye Center for Photography
The artist Ajamu X is from the UK, and he works in traditional photographic processes; shoots digitally but prints in historic processes like salt prints or platinum or palladium prints. His work is very tonally beautiful and materially present in the prints. He was in Pittsburgh as a resident with an organization here called Rainbow Serpent, which is led by Dr. Marques Redd and Mikael Owunna who are great friends of Silver Eye. We met Ajamu when he was here, and he was doing a series of portraits of members of the Black queer community in Pittsburgh. FIERCE Pittsburgh is just one of a series of projects, including FIERCE Toronto and FIERCE Bristol, where he engages with each community in doing these portraits, which in some ways are in the technique and style of a 19th Century portrait, and are also celebrating visibility and presence for Black queer creatives and other people in those communities who historically have not received this kind of public visibility.
S: I get the sense that there are people in the arts who are part of a small community of artists already, but there isn’t the same kind of resource or infrastructure, that arts organizations have, available to them. If someone is trying to cultivate their own interest in organizing within the arts, like to put on a group show for example, what could be some helpful aspects of your own experience in the arts as advice to that person?
L: Silver Eye is very fortunate in that Pittsburgh has these arts communities that include supportive institutions, a wide range of types of organizations from museums to smaller arts organizations like ourselves to even smaller grassroots organizations, which is perhaps more like what Silver Eye was in its earliest years. The advice I would give somebody who is looking for their place in the arts would be to find your people first, and find the people who you align with and who maybe have had a bit more experience navigating the ecosystem. To recognize where you want to go and trying to be open to making connections, and also to see where that can lead. I know this all sounds incredibly general, but I do think that’s important.
S: I think having a community really does change everything. When you are conceptually drawn to certain work, are there ever particular characteristics or qualities that strike you the most?
L: Photography has changed a lot. In contemporary photography we embrace this expanded view of photography which materially could mean mixed-media, fabric, sculpture, sound, video, but the reason why anybody might include any of those aspects is that there is something that they want to say from their lived experience which acknowledges that images exist in our lives in so many ways. Our canniness about visual culture - I think people are more canny about visual culture than they’ve ever been - the amount of speed and nuance in the way visual culture is being communicated, that’s a way that artists are really invited to engage with visual culture not as a fixed medium that has specific properties, but as a part of a bigger picture. I think of photography as the photographic and not as photography the medium. It could involve anything from the question of memory or witnessing, or, acknowledgement of ones own experience of moving through the world, or, about a specific thread through the history of photography. As an example we have an artist here, April Friges, who made abstract sculptures which were tintypes, they were exposed according to this 19th Century process but they were spectacularly colourful objects. We’re interested in voices that come from experiences that might not be part of the mainstream of art history. Generally the artists we show here may be less visible, or may be perhaps starting to come into visibility. I don’t think there is a particular kind of story that we are looking for, more toward an engagement that really comes from a deeply felt drive and curiosity.
April Friges, Brake: 12 Aluminum Panels, 2022 Tintypes on magenta, green, and gold (bright and satin) aluminum
S: Plainly speaking, to be making from felt experience with a personal point of view. I think it’s interesting when artists are also engaging with history, and the history of their medium, along with their experience in this critically parallel way.
S: It’s really interested to hear, Silver Eye - and models for galleries like yours - really tear down the traditionalist conception of galleries, which is not always actually being flexible and creative in the ways the space thinks about serving artists and communities
L: We are proud of the quality of our exhibitions and when we are working with artists here, they can hopefully be assured that they will be shown in a very thoughtful and respectful way.
S: I think often artists don’t arrive with the assumption that the gallery will always be working in their favour. What advice would you give to young curators now?
L: I do think it’s really important that artists have a space to be vulnerable in. Curating is not really a matter of taste, it is something that is necessarily in dialogue with other people, the public, and other artists. It just becomes a position from which you are having a conversation. And from there it’s also about setting a certain tone, and in working with artists, we are keen to get to a point with them where they can really trust us and to be vulnerable with us.
S: As a curator, you also have to arrive with some level of vulnerability within yourself too. Or at least a permeability in your own thinking and reactions.
L: There’s really a responsibility too.
L: I’m always excited to see people’s work, and to see people really growing a practice around some experience that I’m never going to have. It’s always so exciting to see good work, we might not be able to show all of it, but I’m really happy to share that enjoyment with other people. We have our annual upcoming Fellowship 26 May. This is a program where we have an open call and we invite jurors to select an International Awardee and a Keystone awardee, someone living or working in Pennsylvania, and then four honourable mentions. They are all recognized as the annual Fellowship awardees and then we have a more traditional group show, that will open at the end of May. Our jurors were Melissa Catanese from Pittsburgh, Anthony Francis in San Antonio and Jessica Johnston who is the director of Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester.
Photography courtesy of Silver Eye
Article and interview by Sophie Dixon
Photography Courtesy of Silver Eye Center for Photography