A new non-profit is offering a fresh look at experimental visual arts.
Photo Cleveland is led by directors Jim Szudy and Cara Gaetano. They started the organization in 2025 to offer educational programming and exhibition opportunities for photographers also working with film, video and mixed media.
Both Szudy and Gaetano are working photographers and mixed media artists who left corporate jobs to pursue the arts.
“I just realized that, at my core, this is the path to pursue,” said Gaetano. “I’ve been creating art since I was very small, and it’s not something that I can stop doing anymore. It’s just, like, not an option. So I try to do that in every single area of my life, to have a creative approach.”
As an instructor, Gaetano has led two urban-exploration photography classes with Photo Cleveland. She took attendees to the Mansfield Reformatory and the House of Wills to hone their skills. Each workshop is followed by a Zoom meeting where attendees can show off their photos and receive feedback on their work.
Earlier this year, Photo Cleveland presented exhibitions featuring the work of students at the Cleveland School of the Arts and of local street photography artist Richard K. Holmes.
‘We want everyone to experience something while they’re at our openings’
Photo Cleveland prides itself on turning art gallery shows into immersive experiences – something Gaetano said she hasn’t seen anywhere else. Gaetano spent many years curating arts exhibitions and learned what not to do.
“It’s not just a show,” she said. “You walk in, you walk out, and they have like some little cheap table with a couple crackers. I will never have a show like that.”
“We want everyone to experience something while they’re at our openings,” Szudy added.
Gaetano added more details. “We will have music, whether it’s live or just background music,” she explained. “We will have independent filmmakers showing their work that fits the theme, or we will have some multimedia thing going on. We will have lots of areas for people to sit. We ask all artists to bring food and drink, so we’ll have plenty of that so people will stick around.”
Photo Cleveland upcoming exhibitions and events
Photo Cleveland’s “Film In Focus” series presents a free public screening of David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” The event starts at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, July 31, at the Tower Press Building at 1900 Superior Ave. From 8 to 8:45, there will be a short lecture about Lynch’s films followed by a collection of video shorts of Lynch discussing “Eraserhead” p.m. The film will start at 9 p.m.
Photo Cleveland’s next exhibition, “Intentional Unconventional: Experimental Photography and Video,” opens Saturday, Aug. 1, and remains open through Monday, Aug. 31, at Unhinged Lounge, 4260 Pearl Rd.
Visitors can expect to see works using unconventional methods of photography and photo development such as double exposures, photos taken on toy cameras or with expired film, and others that experiment with lighting and blur.
“The main goal of this show is to highlight works of an experimental nature,” Szudy said, “whereas the creator has thought out of the box, from the moment of capturing the image all the way through to the final project.”
Coming up in October, Photo Cleveland will host Nocturne II, an exhibition of dark art photography and mixed media. Nocturne, last year’s inaugural event, featured a screening of the 1922 film “Nosferatu” with sound from Szudy’s art-noise project, Nihil Omnia.
