NEW LONDON, CONN.- Lyman Allyn Art Museum announces the opening of Photography and the Painted Image, an exhibition exploring the long and creative exchange between photography and painting, highlighting the ways in which the two mediums have overlapped and complemented each other. This exhibition is on view Jan. 17 through Apr. 12, 2026.

The first gallery (Miles) introduces the painted backdrop, a hallmark of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portrait studios. These elaborate hand-painted scenes framed sitters within idealized interiors or imaginary landscapes.

The second gallery (Powers) turns to the painted photograph itself — images enhanced, tinted or radically transformed through the application of pigment. Ranging from subtle hand-coloring to bold overpainting, these works blur the line between photography and painting.

The third gallery (Hazlewood) focuses on the painted foreground, featuring carnival and arcade photographs in which participants posed behind humorous or fantastical cutouts, playfully transforming their identities through caricature and painted figures.

Together, the works in this exhibition show how painting shaped not only the settings and surfaces of photography, but also expanded the capacity for imagination, spectacle and self-representation in photographic images — offering new ways of seeing and being seen.

This exhibition was curated by Professor Christopher B. Steiner and students in his Fall 2025 course AHI 250: Perspectives on Photography at Connecticut College. The course explores alternative approaches to the history of photography, moving beyond canonical “greatest hits” to consider overlooked practitioners, vernacular traditions, and everyday photographic practices. By emphasizing amateur and commercial forms of image-making, students examine the wide range of technologies, processes, and social contexts that have shaped photography’s role in daily life.