From March 11 to April 7, 2026, Milan becomes a temporary gateway to the American frontier. Inside the gallery of 10 Corso Como, the exhibition The New American West: Photography in Conversation explores how photographers have shaped — and reshaped — the mythology of the American West across nearly a century.
Curated by Alessio de’ Navasques, Howard Greenberg, and Carrie Scott, the exhibition brings together historic masters and contemporary voices. The result feels less like a traditional photography show and more like a visual conversation about memory, territory, and imagination.
Moody Corridor at Night, The Hotel Paisano, Marfa, Texas, USA, 2024
Image and Paper size 110 x 165 cm
Pigment print on archival cotton rag
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery and the artist
Presented as part of the MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas Circuito Off, the project reveals how photography transformed the West into one of the most powerful visual narratives of modern culture.
From Monumental Landscapes to Fragile Territories
Few places have been photographed as intensely as the American West. Yet its meaning has constantly shifted.
Early twentieth-century photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston framed the West as a monumental landscape. Their images of vast deserts, luminous skies, and dramatic mountains defined a visual language that still shapes how we imagine the region today.
But the West did not remain frozen in heroic grandeur.
Later photographers — including Robert Adams, Lee Friedlander, and Joel Meyerowitz — turned their attention to the subtle transformations of the landscape. Suburbs spread into open land. Roads cut through deserts. The frontier slowly became an inhabited environment rather than an untouched wilderness.
Through these images, the American West begins to appear less like a myth and more like a living, changing space.
US 50 Near Eureka, Nevada, 2002
Image size 21.6 x 27,9 cm
Toned gelatin silver print on vellum
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery and the artist
The Human Presence Behind the Myth
While landscapes dominate the mythology of the West, the exhibition also highlights the human stories embedded within it.
Photographers such as Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Danny Lyon, and William Gedney shifted the narrative from territory to people. Their photographs explore communities, identities, and moments of vulnerability.
In their work, the West becomes a stage for human experience. The frontier transforms into a social and cultural landscape shaped by migration, counterculture, and everyday life.
This human dimension deepens the mythology rather than dissolving it.
Los Angeles, California, 1976
Image size 36.8 x 54.9 cm
Paper size 50.8 x 61 cm
Dye transfer print; printed later
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery and the artist
A Contemporary Journey Across the West
At the center of the exhibition is a photographic journey undertaken in 2024 by Maryam Eisler and Alexei Riboud.
The two photographers travelled across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, photographing the same territories independently. They never shared images during the process. Instead, each developed a personal visual response to the landscapes they encountered. 00_10 Corso Como_The New Americ…
Their results feel strikingly different.
Eisler’s photographs carry a cinematic tension. Her images are intuitive and emotionally charged. Riboud’s work moves in the opposite direction. His compositions feel precise, architectural, and contemplative.
Together, their perspectives transform abandoned towns, desert interiors, and roadside landscapes into psychological spaces.
The journey also follows traces of Georgia O’Keeffe in the landscapes of Ghost Ranch and reaches the desert refuge known as The Hill in western Texas. In these locations, art, myth, and geography converge.
Car wreck, Shafter Ghost Town, Texas, USA, 2024
Image and paper size 120 × 150 cm
Pigment print on archival cotton rag
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery and the artist
When the West Becomes an Idea
Ultimately, The New American West suggests that the West is not simply a place on a map.
It is an idea.
For generations, the American frontier symbolized freedom, reinvention, and possibility. Yet those ideals often existed alongside exclusion and hardship. Photography preserves these contradictions.
The exhibition therefore invites visitors to reconsider the West not as a distant landscape but as an evolving cultural narrative.
A Dialogue Between Fashion, Culture, and Photography
Since its founding in 1991, 10 Corso Como has been a landmark of Milan’s creative scene. Often described as the world’s first concept store, the space merges fashion, design, publishing, and contemporary art into a single cultural ecosystem.
Its gallery program reflects that interdisciplinary spirit.
By hosting The New American West, 10 Corso Como reinforces its role as a platform where photography enters into dialogue with fashion, cinema, and visual culture.
And perhaps that is the most interesting paradox of the exhibition: a story about the American frontier unfolding in the heart of Milan — a city that understands the power of image, style, and myth.
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