“Islands,” closing April 4 at Gallery VERY, presents the work of Lee Wormald and Kevin Foley, two photographers who both studied photography at Lesley University and primarily shoot in black and white. There, the similarities end. Foley photographs the rough textures and work of his family’s asphalt business, while Wormald takes in the landscapes and candid scenes of Flores Island in the Portuguese Azores. In the space between these disparate subjects, the show succinctly explores the discipline of black-and-white photography and its ability to offer insight into islands of work, community, and landscape.
The show opens with Wormald’s Mosteiro, Flores, Azores (2023), a tight shot which presses an architectural ruin into a wall of texture. The creeping lichen atomize into the nooks and crags of the wall, creating a surface that is almost static. This plane of texture takes up a majority of the composition, with a few blips (a dark square window, seven white hydrangea heads, and a wedge of sky) subtly placing the setting. Without color, the contrasts of the wall become pure value, the structure humming with fading light. Instead of simply capturing and reproducing a scene from Flores with the complete verisimilitude of color film, the picture becomes an object of the island in its own right: composition, light, and form distilled down to their purest, most potent essence.
While Wormald’s photos encounter land, Foley’s create it. Block (2025) shows two workers hoisting a block of concrete from a crumbling slope of rock. Shot from below, the titular block hovers above (I hope Foley’s wearing a hard hat), cleaved in half by a shadow that leads my eye up the slope to a stretch of pale sky. The composition is weight; the weight, composition. It’s not just a workyard snapshot, but an image as a product of the asphalt plant, a block native to it, which Foley hoists from the rubble and hangs here in the gallery.
Moving through the show means navigating these islands—of work, community, and landscape—in the footpaths left by Foley and Wormald. Intimate moments parade around the gallery: a burst of spirit from a Flores marching parade, the rise of heat off freshly laid asphalt, the Atlantic sun creeping slowly up a wall.
Though there is quite a separation between a grumbling asphalt plant and a windswept Atlantic island, pairing these two subjects and photographers together encourages the wonder of seeing the world without color. Our color-filled reality is reinforced by the thousands of images encountered each day and, with such a wealth of color, each image is weakened by quantity, tricking the eye into passing over and onward to the next. “Islands” presents photography not as a reproduction of life, but as a practice of proportion, perspective, and weight. Here, distant moments of community and work are not just illuminated through color film, but balanced between darkness and light. Gallery VERY becomes the space in between, where both the asphalt plant and Flores Island shine through discrete scenes of land, community, and the work which brings them together.
“Islands” is on view through April 4, 2026, at Gallery VERY, 59 Wareham Street, Boston, MA.
