On August 10th the exhibition, ¡Proof Proof!, opened at the Joseloff Gallery, Hartford Art School. The exhibition runs through August 15th with a Closing Reception on August 14, 7-9pm. Congratulations to all of the artists on their art and MFAs!

¡Proof Proof! brings together the culminating work of ten photographers from the University of Hartford’s MFA Class of 2026. Developed over two years, the exhibition is accompanied by artist photobooks and features Mark Cáceres, Olive Froman, Jason Hendardy, Aidan Klimenko, Nicolas Mirzayantz, Lori Ordover, Sarah Samaan, William Stith, Daniel Trese, and John Waller.

Somewhere between declaration and doubt, ¡Proof Proof! takes its name from
photography’s oldest promise: that the image is evidence, that to photograph something is to make it real. Yet these artists question that premise as much as they rely on it.

Their work moves through landscapes swallowed by sprawl, through bodies under pressure, through the textures of kin and community, grief and desire. There are intimate meditations, ancient manuscripts, disappearing ecosystems, places that feel like home and places that do not.

The title can be read as insistence, as irony, as desperation. At a moment when the photographic image is openly in question, each body of work oSers its own way of navigating the relationship between image, memory, truth, and time. ¡Proof Proof! is less a resolution than an exposure: a gathering of images that insist on being seen even as they question what seeing can prove.

Aidan Klimenko

©Aidan Klimenko

©Aidan Klimenko

Aidan Klimenko is a photographer based in Los Angeles, CA. With his project, “A Barely Lit Path”, Klimenko’s images are created in intimate moments—glimpses abstracted and stripped of the context needed to locate them comfortably within the narrative they were pulled, and set among scenes of nature, exposed in varying degrees of balanced perspective and light. These mysterious pairings call upon metaphor and metonym to lead the viewer beyond photography’s practiced association of surface description to meaning, and explore something less discernible or tangible, like a forgotten memory or distant feeling, hiding somewhere in the shadows, or just beyond the edge of frame. 

Instagram: @aidan.klimenko 

©Aidan Klimenko

Daniel Trese

©Daniel Trese

©Daniel Trese

Daniel Trese is a New York–based artist and photographer whose work moves between the personal and the political, the body and its world, using photography to transform subjects and connect histories. His ongoing project, Good Karma, combines photograms and camera-based photographs to examine the material and psychological effects of contemporary pharmaceutical regimes within queer life.

Instagram: @danielctrese

©Daniel Trese

Jason Hendardy

©Jason Hendardy

©Jason Hendardy

 Jason Hendardy is a multidisciplinary artist living in Seattle whose practice questions how meaning is built through images. NFS uses over one hundred estate sales across Washington state as a site where the human need to construct certainty in an uncertain world becomes visible. It is a space where strangers move through rooms, picking things up and turning objects over, projecting a life onto belongings left behind, deciding what it might all mean. What we assemble says as much about ourselves as it does about the life we imagine. 

Instagram:  @jasonhendardy 

©Jason Hendardy

John Waller

©John Waller

©John Waller

 John Waller’s photography begins by walking in the post-industrial landscape. These intuitive ambulations form the basis of a practice that oscillates between the poles of straight photography and in-studio experimentation. His thesis project Demesne looks at a planned industrial city whose history is inextricably linked to the river, textile production, and paper manufacturing. 

Instagram: @imjohnwaller

©John Waller

Lori Ordover

©Lori Ordover

©Lori Ordover

Following the death of my husband in 2021 and the subsequent loss of my home in the California fires in 2025, my understanding of home underwent a series of fundamental ruptures. Still is a photographic investigation of the feeling of home. The title refers both to stillness and the search for it, reflecting an attempt to locate moments of quiet, presence, and continuity within states of emotional and physical displacement.

Lori Ordover is a lens-based artist whose work explores memory, loss, and the search for equilibrium between the body and place. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at the Danforth Art Museum, the Oceanside Museum of Art, the Brand Library & Art Center, the Dallas Center for Photography, the International Center of Photography, and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. She is the author of the artist books Still and Silence. 

Instagram: @lordover 

©Lori Ordover

Mark Cáceres

©Mark Cáceres

©Mark Cáceres

There are names for what binds us explores themes of injury, resilience, and intimacy in the face of our mortality. The series conjures an enigmatic world that blurs the lines separating fact from imagination.

Mark Cáceres is an Atlanta-based photographer working primarily in the Southeastern U.S. His work explores human communion and resilience.

Instagram: @markcaceresphotos

©Mark Cáceres

Nicolas Mirzayantz

©Nicolas Mirzayantz

©Nicolas Mirzayantz

Nicolas Mirzayantz is a photographer based in Athens, Greece. For thirty-four years he worked with scent and taste, two invisible senses, in the fragrance industry. Now, in the manuscript library of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on Patmos, he photographs what survives: books he cannot read, in a language he does not speak. His thesis project, Harbour of the Soul (ΨΥΧΗΣ ΙΑΤΡΕΙΟΝ), asks what survives across centuries when made with meaning, and what doesn’t.

Instagram: @nicolas.mirzayantz

©Nicolas Mirzayantz

Olive Froman

©Olive Froman

Olive Froman is a photographer based in New York City, working with themes of family, grief, and the inevitable passing of time. Her practice is rooted in personal experience, returning to familiar places, gestures, and people as a way of understanding what it means to hold on and let go. 

Driven by a persistent fear of loss, her project Concept of Holding explores the intersection of psychoanalysis and photography within her family. The work functions as both a case study and a shared language between her and her family, one that is not always visual, but felt deeply. 

Instagram: @olivefroman

©Olive Froman

Sarah Samaan

©Sarah Samaan

©Sarah Samaan

Sarah Samaan is a photographer based in North Texas whose work is grounded in landscape, presence, and the subtle magic of the natural world. Born in London of Egyptian and English heritage, she has spent most of her life in the American South and Southwest. Her thesis project, Remanence, considers the vanishing remnants of the critically endangered Blackland Prairie within the suburban expansion of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex.

Instagram: @bysarahanndipity

©Sarah Samaan

Will Stith

©Will Stith

©Will Stith

William Stith based in Tallahassee, FL is a photographer and musician who likes working out, house music, and ants. He makes photos of the street and himself. He has a deep fascination with improvisation and surprise in photography. His current project is interrogating how change and the inevitable force of entropy dominate our lives. 

Instagram: @willdabeast215 

©Will Stith