A family with water dripping from the tips of their hair walks down 74th Street, away from the sandy shores of North Beach. Another man driving a scooter pulls up to the curb and carefully parks his red bike before walking away.
The intersection is busy. But for a brief moment, pedestrians — even those driving by — are treated to a slice of public art thanks to the large windows of the local Walgreens and Oolite Arts.
As part of its mission to support local artists, Oolite Arts and pharmacy-store chain Walgreens have partnered to bring art to the community through the large window displays at stores throughout Miami Beach. Oolite has been programming the work since 2000.
Part of its "Windows at Walgreens" series includes a takeover by Miami-based photographer Phillip Karp at the North Beach location. Utilizing the window space along both 74th Street and Collins Avenue, Karp is showing 14 prints of work from 2012-2023.
For as long as he can remember, Karp has used a camera to document life around him. His father was a photojournalist, and his mother was a hobby photographer, so the New York native grew up surrounded by cameras and photographs. One of his first cameras as a kid was a 110-film camera.
"I always work through time," Karp says as he tightly grips the bottle of his cold kombucha. "I photograph in my life, and the images are sometimes made, and sometimes they're revealed to me. And then a big part of my process is the editing aspect of it."
He's constantly taking pictures, but not every image he captures gets printed and seen. Some of the photos featured in the "Windows at Walgreens" exhibition are being displayed for the first time.
Phillip Karp considered the space when planning what to display in the exhibition.
Photo by Phillip Karp
"This is not a room, right?" It's these windows that you're coming across, either driving by or walking up to," he says. "So [when putting the works together], I was thinking about how people would approach this window and how they were going to view it."
He separated the work to fill both window spaces, some with photos hanging on their own, others paired with seemingly opposite images.
Karp likes to grapple with questions about truth and reality as part of his process. "I question truth a lot," he says. "And how our perspective is shaped by that truth in images. Questions I think about are whether truth is in the literal description of what we know, or is truth in how it appears to us that depends on context?"
He's referring to the relationship between images, as well as between the viewer and the image. A photo of a cold, rough chainlink fence hangs adjacent to a portrait of a vase full of soft tulips. A photograph of dark mangrove roots takes up part of a wall while a small, framed image of a bird flying over the ocean hangs to its right.
"Because [these images] are arranged in this way, they bring upon certain meanings [for the viewer]," says Karp as he walks past his window display.
The photographer pauses in front of a large black-and-white print of a wave. "Seeing this image by itself and then seeing this same image in a grouping would read very differently," he adds.
The white foam of the wave's crest is caught in motion and yet feels as if it's still moving on the page. The image is perfectly placed along the window on 74th Street, which is a route most pedestrians take to get to the beach. It's a beautiful precursor to the waters that await just one block over.
"Phillip Karp: The Way Out Is Through." On view through September 3, at the Walgreens window, 7340 Collins Ave., Miami Beach; oolitearts.org.
