East of Our Youth, West of Our Future

About

East of Our Youth, West of Our Future brings together work by Alexander Iglesias, Helena Ernst, and Jonah Saffran-Johnson in a group exhibition centered on the uncertainty, intensity, and shifting perspective of youth.

Curated by Iglesias, the exhibition draws from each artist’s early projects and places the images in conversation with one another. Rather than presenting a single story, the work moves through fragments—moments of closeness, movement, risk, solitude, and transition that feel both immediate and already half-remembered.

Across the exhibition, adolescence appears less as a defined stage than as a condition of change. The photographs hold the tension between being inside an experience and looking back at it, between what feels vivid in the moment and what becomes altered through memory.

Together, the three artists create a loose, emotionally charged narrative about growing up, where meaning is often found in brief encounters, uncertain gestures, and moments that seem ordinary until they begin to disappear.

Frame 1A presents East of Our Youth, West of Our Future as part of PhotoCarmel 2026, a regional celebration of photography organized by the Center for Photographic Art.