A photography show about connection

“What Holds Us” focuses on the people, places, and ideas that connect and ground humanity. The exhibition brings together work made by three artists with distinct visual practices: Alex Prager, Jack Davison, and Jimmy Chin. Their images examine connection through different subjects and settings, from high-altitude landscapes to tactile studio scenes and exuberant crowds.

The exhibition opens Friday, September 18, in New York City. Apple says the project is intended to explore the evolving language of visual storytelling while demonstrating the creative range of the iPhone 18 Pro camera system.

Kathy Ryan, the exhibition’s curator and former longtime director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, said the theme reflects an increasingly fragmented world. She described the show as an opportunity for the three artists to explore what connects people while working with a device that is widely carried and used every day.

Apple emphasizes the new camera system

Apple describes iPhone 18 Pro as having its most advanced iPhone camera system yet. The company says the phone introduces variable aperture for the first time, enabling better-quality low-light photography, crisper details, and additional creative control.

Those capabilities form the technical foundation for the images in “What Holds Us.” Ryan said the immediacy of the iPhone allows people to see, experiment, and create without separating the act of photographing from the surrounding experience. In her view, the artists’ work shows how photography can retain the values of the craft while adopting new tools and possibilities.

The artists also discussed how the phone affected their working methods. Their comments, as presented by Apple, focus not only on image quality but also on the way a compact camera can change interactions with subjects and reduce the equipment needed in demanding environments.

Jimmy Chin takes the camera into the mountains

Jimmy Chin created a series of images in the Bugaboos of southeastern British Columbia, Canada, earlier this summer. The mountain climber, adventure photographer, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker used the location to explore trust and connection in an extreme environment.

His work combines tight close-ups, sweeping aerial views, and action images. The series includes legendary climber Conrad Anker, who appears as a small figure at the center of an immense panoramic image anchoring Chin’s contribution to the exhibition.

Chin said the resolution and sharpness of iPhone 18 Pro allowed him to photograph both small details in rock and ice and the scale of a massive panorama. He also emphasized the practical value of carrying minimal equipment in the mountains, where every item adds weight and has to be considered carefully.

Ryan said reaching such heights in winds of up to 70 miles per hour would make traditional equipment difficult to use. She presented Chin’s experience as an example of how technology can remove barriers to creative work.

Jack Davison focuses on hands and clay

Jack Davison approached the exhibition’s theme through the relationship between people and clay. His images feature subjects interacting with clay and chalk in a former sugar warehouse in London, creating scenes that are physical, textured, and deliberately messy.

Some participants smeared clay on themselves and became human sculptures, while others left fingerprints and traces of their actions. The resulting photographs reflect Davison’s interest in human touch and his established use of strong black-and-white contrasts.

Davison said using iPhone 18 Pro helped him maintain a closer connection with the people he was photographing. Because he could hold the phone lower rather than placing a larger camera in front of his face, he said he was able to maintain eye contact during the session.

He also praised the camera’s image quality and its ability to support lens switching, slower shutter speeds, and RAW capture. Davison said those tools expanded the phone’s potential for artistic and surreal imagery.

Alex Prager rethinks the crowd scene

Alex Prager brought her interest in staged, kinetic crowd scenes to the project with colorful images made on set using iPhone 18 Pro. She moved between bird’s-eye views, which create the illusion of a continuous crowd, and closer images that focus on individual subjects within the larger group.

Prager said the camera system influenced where she took the work. She compared the device’s role in contemporary image-making to a video stream, reflecting the way photography increasingly overlaps with video across photo albums and social media.

For the exhibition, she paired that contemporary approach with the idea of a timeless crowd winding down after a celebration. Her installation uses the movement of people and saturated color to draw viewers into the scene while shifting between the collective image and the experiences of those inside it.

Sources

• Apple NewsroomCelebrating “What Holds Us” on iPhone 18 Pro