Naples photographer Lisette Morales spent a year with her lens trained on the Navarro family. They’ve been performing Danza Azteca Guadalupana, a ceremonial Indigenous and Mexican American dance, for nearly three decades in Southwest Florida, but few know their story. Lisette zoomed in on the hands of a matriarch preparing traditional regalia, teen dancers in feathered headdresses who slipped away to text friends, ceremonial smoke rising before a Christian altar.
Each unedited frame—displayed in Aztec Dancers: A Living Tradition at Immokalee Pioneer Museum at Roberts Ranch last winter—served to add depth and dimension to the stereotypes she often sees applied to Latino people today. “My images are more like conversations. That takes labor and love and being present,” she says.
Around the same time, in another corner of Collier County, artists were exploring new modes of authorship. Marco Island photographer Jim Robellard tested different text-based prompts with an AI photo generator, orchestrating a series of digital artworks inspired by his ideas: a couple walking down the street in the rain, a woman in profile shaded by a palm frond. Some were nearly indistinguishable from traditional photographs. In a way, that was the idea behind Marco Island Center for the Arts’ (MICA) fall 2025 group exhibition, Words as Art. “We are trying to convey our vision and to open up the audience’s eyes to AI,” Jim says.
This season’s range of photography- based exhibits—from historical reviews to cultural statements to experiments with AI—points to a medium undergoing an evolution. Minority artists like Lisette and Seminole photographer Brian Zepeda are reclaiming conversations about their own communities by stepping behind the lens. Conservationists like Clyde Butcher continue using their lenses to bring viewers into the environments they hope to protect. And, MICA’s fall showcase brings AI into the frame, raising new questions about artistic ownership, the value of authentic representation and the role of the photographer in the future. “When I looked at this year’s photography exhibits as a whole, I was fascinated by how all of these global talking points were playing out on this local stage,” says our arts editor Emma Witmer. “It all seems to boil down to one big question: When it comes to the identity of photography, what will hold fast, and what will emerge?”
Jim Robellard’s Portrait (2025), courtesy Marco Island Center for the Arts
photography comes into focus swfl jim robellard ai photography
Photographer Jim Robellard organized Words as Art, an exhibit of AI-generated art at Marco Island Center for the Arts. Photorealistic images such as Portrait (pictured here) raise questions about the technology’s role as a threat or opportunity for artists.
For some photographers, the rise and ongoing refinement of AI is a new frontier to be approached with curiosity, not fear. Just as the DSLR camera eliminated some aspects of the artistic process—dark rooms, chemical baths—in favor of a more agile means of creation, AI could present new avenues for expression rather than replacement. “Experimenting with this technology doesn’t take away from photography. This is an area where we can expand our creativity,” Jim says.
But for many, that technology poses a direct threat. “AI is an incredible tool, and in the same breath, it’s really scary. When we see an image, we trust it almost without thinking,” Lisette says. “I’ve spent five days wading into water up to my eyeballs to get a sunset photo in the Everglades. There’s something in that image; it’s an experience, the feeling that somebody was there and in that place. With AI, you can just say, ‘Make me an Everglades sunset.’ Does that have the same soul?”
Lisette’s work bridges humanist and environmental concerns, building on the long history of conservationist photography championed by mid-century landscape photographer Ansel Adams and modern-day stewards like pioneering Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher and Carlton Ward, Jr. As discussions about water quality, land usage and overdevelopment persist, Carlton (best known for his Path of the Panther documentary) and Clyde carry on the tradition of preservation through exposure. “Bringing viewers in to experience these unfamiliar landscapes directly establishes a bridge of emotional connection; that which words can’t support on their own,” says Teresa Ziegler, director of museum exhibits at Clyde’s Big Cypress Gallery.
In his recent The Living Flow: The Way of Water exhibit, Clyde arranged 40 years of landscape photography in a geographic path along his gallery walls. To walk from one image to the next was to follow the natural movement of water—an image of the Kissimmee River Basin followed by Lake Okeechobee, then the Everglades, and eventually, Florida Bay. Positioning one ecosystem after another, the exhibit centered on interconnectedness, challenging viewers to consider the broader impact of development and pollution on the state’s natural beauty. Collier Museum at Government Center’s Connect and Protect exhibit echoes the connection between emotion and action. The traveling show—on view through May 9—captures the five-year land protection efforts of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act through images from Carlton and Wildpath photographers Lauren Yoho and Dean Saunders.
Ansel Adams (United States, 1902–1984), Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 1937, gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 x 10 9/16 in. (19.1 x 26.9 cm). Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Ansel Adams Archive, 84.89.348, © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
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Ansel Adams’ images of the American West proved instrumental in establishing federal protection for Kings Canyon National Park and preserving other wild lands. Artis—Naples’ Discovering Ansel Adams (through August 2) pairs his work with images from Everglades photographer Brian Zepeda.
At Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum, Brian’s work hangs alongside that of Adams, a photographer renowned for inspiring the protection of the American wilderness through the National Park System. Discovering Ansel Adams, running through August 2, began as a traveling exhibit of early-career photographs, letters and receipts that depict his compositional and printing process. But when the show arrived in Naples, the museum’s modern art curator, Dianne Brás-Feliciano, felt it needed a local counterpoint. “We have a continuous commitment to talk about issues and invite people to talk, and think and take action,” she says.
Like Adams, Brian focuses on threatened lands—namely, the Everglades. But, unlike Adams, Brian was born in the lands he captures. His lens often settles on his community, the Indigenous peoples of the Everglades, focusing on how they move through and live with the land. “Ansel Adams was one of the first photographers I was introduced to as a child. He’s a single lens. It’s very powerful, but it’s limited,” Lisette says. “We can honor him, but this is an opportunity to expand on the conversation about his work by including different voices. Brian’s work does that by reflecting the people and experiences in those landscapes.”
The relationship between photographer and subject—who gets to tell a story and why—runs through the season’s shows. Revs Institute in Naples recently acquired thousands of signed prints and negatives by the late racing photojournalist Jesse Alexander, giving rise to a landmark exhibition for the automotive museum and research center: Closer Still: Jesse Alexander At the Track—on view through May 2027. Alexander’s familiarity with the sport, its racers and patrons, allowed him to move through garages, pit lanes and paddocks with ease, capturing intimate moments of camaraderie and intense focus within the public spectacle during the sport’s Golden Age (1950-1970). “This is what photos do particularly well,” says associate curator of exhibitions Lauren Goodman. “They create the feeling of presence, of ‘being there.’”
Top photo: Clyde Butcher’s The Living Flow: The Way of Water inspires a sense of love, ownership and protection for the environment. In this way, the pioneering landscape photographer builds on the legacy of icons like Ansel Adams.