Norton Museum opens “Visible Fictions”: more than 20 works by Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson and Sophie Calle on fiction in photography

On Saturday, September 19, 2026, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach opened the exhibition “Visible Fictions: Photography and Artifice”, which will remain on view through February 21, 2027.

The exhibition brings together more than 20 works from the museum’s collection, including new acquisitions, with works by Sophie Calle, Renée Cox, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Demand, Tania Franco Klein, Nikki S. Lee, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Hans Bellmer and Yasumasa Morimura.

Through staged scenes, constructed environments, performed identities and invented narratives, the exhibition presents photography as a medium of fiction as much as documentation. Some works openly embrace artifice — elaborate sets, imaginary settings, mannequins, prosthetics and carefully choreographed figures; others appear rooted in the documentary tradition, yet reveal how identities, social customs and spaces are themselves constructed and performed.

At a time when generative artificial intelligence has intensified debates about the authenticity of images, the exhibition shows that artists have long questioned photography’s claim to truth. “Long before the appearance of AI-generated images, artists were showing that photographs are carefully constructed visual statements, not transparent records of reality,” said curator Lauren Richman, Ph.D., William and Sarah Ross Soter Senior Curator of Photography at the Norton Museum of Art.

Source: Palmer PB / Norton Museum of Art