Unrest, the first solo exhibition by Louisville native, New York-based photographer Urban Wyatt, is a coming-of-age story of leaving home for personal pursuits and artistic growth. While best known as the photographer behind musician Jack Harlow’s album covers, including the viral cover for Harlow’s 2023 album “Jackman,” the photographs in Unrest represent a body of work with deep personal meaning to the artist.

 

The spotlight on counterculture recalls photo essays like Bruce Davidson’s 1959 Brooklyn Gang, a landmark series that cemented the photographer as journalist, artist, and confidant of outsider groups. Wyatt’s work, however, resists the academic rigidity of mid-century documentary photography and instead reflects the diaristic, snapshot style function of the shared image on social media. Embracing the marks left by dust and dirt in the film developing process, Wyatt’s photographs welcome the spontaneity of analog processes considered obsolete in lieu of the digital.

 

Mediating the spaces between the confidence and uneasiness of newfound independence and opportunities, Wyatt’s photographs are as varied as the artist’s own experiences. A range of banal to memorable, the work presents an intimate look of a subculture through the artist’s personal perspective. This exhibition is in conjunction with the Louisville Photo Biennial and the release of Wyatt's first monograph, Unrest.