In the early 1970s, the optometrist and photographer Milton Rogovin began making portraits of residents of the Lower West Side, a working-class neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. He then photographed them twice more, a decade apart each time. Families grew. Some endured losses. The surrounding architecture changed. Rogovin created a time capsule — an ode to a community in transition.

That series, Lower West Side Revisited, anchors a new exhibition at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. Storytelling: Photographers Making Meaning | Works from the Wellin Museum's Collection examines how photographers use series of images, sometimes with text, to create new narratives. Rogovin's work appears alongside nine other series and a site-specific installation by photographer Keisha Scarville.

The show's premise rests on a paradox. A single photograph encapsulates a moment, and the narrowing of the aperture works inversely to the imagination, which gains space to speculate. But a series of photographs, especially accompanied by text, fills in the blanks.

The exhibition opens at a moment of image saturation. "We are bombarded with a barrage of imagery on a near-constant basis," Tracy L. Adler, the museum's Johnson-Pote Director, told Hyperallergic. "This exhibition encourages us to bring a new criticality to the imagery we are exposed to in our everyday lives … It's in our nature to make mental connections to visual stimuli, to tell stories."

Collections Curator Elizabeth Shannon organized the show. She described Rogovin's series as "endlessly moving" and said she has "long been fascinated with how different photographers have used the building blocks of image and text to create very different projects." For Storytelling, she selected works by 20th- and 21st-century American artists.

The roster includes Lorna Simpson, whose 1996 series Details combines photographs with text in the museum's installation views. Scarville contributes a new site-specific work, Look/Back/Here (2026), built from the archive of Luther C. Williams, Jr., Esq.

Shannon notes a second aim: the exhibition highlights works that Hamilton College students and faculty might not have known belonged to the collection, potentially prompting further study. The show doubles as an argument for what a teaching museum's holdings can do when brought out of storage and sequenced with intent.

In a visual culture defined by the scroll, Storytelling bets on the opposite mechanism — slow, cumulative looking across series and decades — as a way of sharpening how its audience reads every image afterward.