©Nick Ortoleva, Looking Over the Hills, Towards the Lonely Tree

In celebration of its 50th Anniversary, the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) launched a six- month mentorship program pairing four early-career photographers with four established artists for sustained one-on-one mentorship, critical feedback, and professional development.

The 2026 Mentorship Fellows are alina balseiro, Jaypix Belmer, Libby O’Neill, and Nick Ortoleva, who were paired with mentors Jess T. Dugan, Rashod Taylor, Jillian Guyette, and Tommy Kha. Throughout the program, each fellow met regularly with their mentor to develop their work, strengthen their artistic voice, and receive guidance on their professional practice. The program culminates in an exhibition at the PRC gallery, on view September 11–October 18, 2026, featuring work developed by the fellows during their mentorships.

The program will also be celebrated at PRC’s 50th Anniversary Gala on October 17, where all four mentors and four fellows will be present as honored guests. Created as part of PRC’s 50th Anniversary, the program celebrates the importance of mentorship in photography while fostering meaningful relationships between emerging and established artists and supporting the next generation of photographers.

Today we share feature the work of Mentorship Fellow Nick Ortoleva and a conversation with Mentor Tommy Kha.

©Nick Ortoleva, Into the Meadow

Adapting the routines and the rituals of celebration and connecting to a place’s histories is what moves me. I find with each visit, in the reenacting and reunion, that I begin to make sense of belonging and find myself thinking about identity in new ways with each pass. 

The archive I have assembled consists of a handful of photographs sent with a four month old version of myself from Korea and the stories passed down under the roof of a home that has been in the family for four generations. These are the only anchors of memory and connection to a place that I wield from my very beginnings. 

I  am deeply interested in the back and forth conversation between ethnic and cultural upbringing. Between the two , intergenerational storytelling is a way of connecting my past to my present and how I allow for connection to place to be fostered. What began as an exploration of birthplace and homeland has shifted into a larger mission focused on representation and documenting a complex visual experience between here and home. My work situates itself as a visual record within the diaspora and acts as an ongoing observational and participatory investigation on cultural and ethnic rituals, communal experience, connectedness, and isolation, all while reflecting on routines, past histories and storytelling. It welcomes the new and embraces the old, joining the two in an intertwined exchange, echoing the back and forth, the pushing and pulling between here and home.  I work slowly with a digital camera and tripod, chasing the warm golden light and the long, warped shadows casted as the sun approaches the horizon. I craft scenes of the landscape, in an attempt to make sense of fleeting memories and outward questions that disorient and envelop the peripheral. Making portraits of extensions of community and family are informed through looking back into this archive I have collected. The archive fades in and out and feels segmented, as if there are gaps in time, or spaces were left blank. Amongst those interludes I find it mesmerizing how time passing warps and distorts what we do see, what we notice. It affects the perception of distance in the landscape, potency of memory, and the forming of connections to place. It is in playing with scale and the work’s relationship to space, where the vibrant pigment prints live as portals, into familiar and new spaces between here and home. – Nick Ortoleva

©Nick Ortoleva, Mum, the Keeper of Green, with a Bundle of Flowers from the Lake

Tommy Kha shares:

My every day is finding ways to defer talking about myself, almost becoming an Olympic sport how quickly I can divert attention away from myself. A little after Other Things Uttered–my first museum solo show, opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art, in my inbox was my first correspondence with Nick Ortoleva. He brings up meeting when I visited Mass Art at the invitation of my former critic and fellow Asian American artist, Laurel Nakadate. She and I would check-in at what it means for us to continue the Chain, the thing that links us as artists of color through shared experiences, histories, familial customs, and the desire to cast a net to find others who speak the same dialect. A while after, we were paired together through the Photographic Resource Center.

After centuries of silk and maritime trade, Asian American experience arguably began with a death marker remembering “Chow Manderien” who became the first Chinese person to be buried in the New World—Boston, Massachusetts in 1798. Asian and Asian American, immigrant and first generation, Older, Old and New Worlds. My own failures to adhere to a seriality resulted in constant feedback of “not being enough. Not Asian enough. Not gay enough. Not photography enough.”

Today, much of Asian American experience has only began to be defined, encompassing fragmented stories and trajectories. Meeting Nick, we shared many of the same concerns, what does it meant to make work that is visibly Asian and synthesizing the past to create something new. Part of this is choosing to prioritize how time is spent and celebrate the communal aspects that have always been at the beginning of photography. The collective efforts of Dr. Elizabeth Fahume, Niepce, Daguerre, Foxwood-Talbot, Bayard, and many others who contributed to photography should serve as a reminder that it isn’t a medium of singular, lone gunmen but the collective. Photography is a language, and language is a communal activity that required more than one person to create dialogues. 

©Nick Ortoleva, Wandering in the Meadow, Under the Moon

Tommy Kha: Nick, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your photographic practice?

Nick Ortoleva: My name is Nick Ortoleva and I am a Korean American, photo-based artist based in the greater Boston Area. I am currently working as a Fine Art Printer and Digitization Specialist. I graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA in Photography in 2024.

In my most current work I have turned towards my Korean heritage and began to explore the roots of my ethnic identity, that as a first generation Korean Adoptee (KAD) I had not spent much time with growing up.

My photographic practice currently involves working both collaboratively with my subjects (which often are those close to me, like family and friends) and slowly with my immediate environment making landscape images and self portraits.

I have always found a likeness between my immediate environment and those in my community– they have always been two things that I have looked closely towards and have always been the most impactful on how I am shaped and formed.

©Nick Ortoleva, A Moment During Dusk

Tommy Kha: How has your personal history or lived experience influenced the photographs you make?

Nick Ortoleva: I often reflect on my lived experiences and my upbringing are shaped by those in proximity to me and where I find myself in the built or natural environment. Routines and the rituals; particularly different means of celebration are sort of my initial and most vivid touch points in both memory and in my photographic practice. It always interested me and documenting and recording in a diaristic way has always been how I have worked.

©Nick Ortoleva, The Scar of the Stream Behind the House

Tommy Kha: Over the past six months, how has your work evolved, either conceptually or visually? Was there a piece of feedback or a conversation during our mentorship that shifted the way you think about photography or storytelling?

Nick Ortoleva: Over the last few months the direction and visuals of my work has changed pretty dramatically. As I have set off to visualize and marry the isolating, inward facing and community based, outward looking, all while trying to grapple and understand myself better I have learned to roll and pivot and be fluid with both my personal life and art making practice. It is odd to have the two feel so synonymous or simultaneous. I feel like they follow the same ebbs and flows and offer lots of room for play and experimenting. It has been a lot of learning and re-learning, a sort of all encompassing journey. It is honestly such an odd new balance I have been working through. I think with how we had developed a working practice/monthly routine (between Tommy and I’s meetings), I have grown a lot to take a step back and overall just get a bit looser in terms of my working practice.

One of the most impactful things you (Tommy) and I have worked on together and had conversation about was about Corita Kent’s Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules, particularly Rule no. 8 “Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.” That separation, while simple, was hard to remember in the active making. So to hear it and have a printout of the rules posted on the pinboard at my main workspace was a good reminder.

©Nick Ortoleva, The Field I Used to Look for the Moon

Tommy Kha: How has this mentorship influenced your creative process, confidence, or career goals?

Nick Ortoleva: The mentorship process fostered a really great space for open dialogue between Tommy and I. We spent lots of time getting real close to things and taking big steps back. To be able to do so with Tommy’s great insight and experience from an entirely new perspective and experience from my own, we were able to tackle and sit with lot of new things. Just being able to do that allowed for me to feel a lot more confident in letting things unfold and taking liberties to step in and re-direct or make more informed intentional decisions.

©Nick Ortoleva, Pop, Like the Blue the Water Holds, at the Cove

Tommy Kha: What has been the most valuable aspect of working one-on-one with a mentor through the PRC program?

Nick Ortoleva: I think naturally just being able to have conversations about the work in progress has been infinitely beneficial. To have this back and forth exchange week to week and month to month as I work through developing and adjusting, having conversations that push beyond what would be expected in a critique or someone giving a once over to the work (that truly has changed dramatically over the course of our time working together) was what I felt was hugely helpful. To have you [Tommy] bring fresh eyes and your own unique experience as a person, as an artist, as a historian and re-situate and prompt me to think about the larger (and smaller) specificities that I might have glanced past was integral to my working process.

Overall I am very fortunate that we were able to have this ongoing conversation; where both you and I could really get into the weeds and flip everything on its head in a productive and transformative way.

©Nick Ortoleva, Me, in Periwinkle, Along the Edge of the Woods

Tommy Kha: What challenges have you encountered in your practice recently, and how have you worked through them?

Nick Ortoleva: I think with the content I am working with and how new some of it is, I have had my fair share of roadblocks, particularly in trying to articulate everything I want the work to encompass. I think because there is so much that has led up to the conceptualization of the pictures I am making and so many life experiences and personal relationships have informed it, I think it has been a challenge to figure out what should be said, and what can fade away. I think that has always sort of been the challenge at hand, particularly in my own practice. You make work, plan for certain situations, make specific pictures, then it comes times to edit down, cut, the articulation step.

©Nick Ortoleva, Untitled (Self Portrait, under 30 seconds of Moonlight)

Tommy Kha: Are there photographers, artists, or experiences that continue to inspire your work?

Nick Ortoleva: I think at my very baseline, as just a person, artists and experiences inspire and shape me, how I work and the work I make. I have been thinking a lot recently about how experiences, conversations, and people play a very crucial role in what I like to think of as an ever-evolving additive process that influences and inspires how I move forward.

Recently I have been really fortunate to connect with people situated within the diaspora or who are other adoptees and have been able to have some wonderful conversations which has been the most impactful/inspirational to the work. To build relationships and connect with people and hear how they are thinking about identity, relationships, even just their own curiosities and what they attribute to what has shaped them, has truly shaped and opened my eyes to all things considered.

I also recently picked up a copy of Liminal FIgures, a collaborative book published with Gyopo, the volunteer-led, non-profit centered around platforming and leading programs, connecting the Korean Diaspora arts and cultural in LA and Hyunjoo Byeon and Dohko Shin of The Floorplan, a publishing house and organization aiming to map and lay out a new means of approaching contemporary art in it’s global context, rather than as the singular locality. In the book, of extensive interviews with Korean Artists all of the globe they speak of collective and individual memory, experiences and looks to dissecting and understanding an “in-between-ness”.

Recently I had turned to a lot of artists exploring relationships with those they hold close or reflecting on their upbringing and memory. I have enjoyed looking through work that touches on these things in varying quantities, while trying to see how someone with an entirely different experience might even begin to visualize their stories, their histories, in new contexts. I think in wanting to find varying works and artists working with communities, or people and their environments, while also in moments weaving in the personal connections/experiences I have widened my viewing to artists working at what I would call varying distances. To list a few, I spent lots of time with Tina Barney, Pao Houa Her, Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Zhang Xiao’s, William Camargo, and Greg Halpern.

Nick Ortoleva (b. Seoul) is a photography based artist working as a means to document and compose an ongoing investigation exploring relationships to cultural and ethnic identity, what place can hold, and collective communal histories. 

Inspired by the routines and rituals of those in his community, he documents in a diaristic approach, reflecting on passage of time and through recontextualizing his experiences to advance his understanding of self. 

Ortoleva received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2024, where he was awarded the Gertrude Kasebier Palmer/Tourlentes travel grant. With the grant, he traveled to his birthplace, to begin the ongoing body of work “to you, from seoul”, reflecting on birthplace and personal histories. This grant yielded for the body of work “to you, from seoul” to be exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography in conjunction with the “New Horizons: Korean Contemporary Photography Exhibition”. He has also exhibited work in group shows at Abigail Ogilvy SoWA, the Distillery Gallery, Panopticon Gallery, Candela Photographic Arts and the Photographic Resource Center Boston. 

Nick is currently based in Boston and was recently selected as a fellow for the six month Photographic Resource Center Boston’s Mentorship Program. 

Instagram: @nickortoleva

Portrait of Tommy Kha by Jay Amrahs, 2025

Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, TN) is a photographer currently based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2023, Aperture published his first monograph, Half, Full, Quarter, following his solo exhibitions, Má at Higher Pictures, and Ghost Bites, curated by Dawn Chan, at BAXTER ST. In addition, he has exhibited at Blue Sky Gallery, Paris Photo’s Curiosa, the Hyeres Festival, SFMoMA, George Eastman House, High Museum of Art, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Kha holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University, where he currently teaches. He is a past recipient of the Hayes Prize, Next Step Award, and Foam Talent, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography. He is a former resident at KinoSaito, Light Work, Camera Club of New York, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program. His first museum show, Other Things Uttered, opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA in September 2025. He joined Higher Pictures in 2022.

He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow.

Instagram: @tommykha

©Tommy Kha, Sheepshead (II), Echo Park, Los Angeles, 2018