Anne-Marie Dannenberg - "A Certain Slant of Light"

RIVAA presents Anne-Marie Dannenberg’s Solo photography Exhibit at The Octagon “A Certain Slant of Light” beginning on December 22, 2025 to March 22, 2026. 

“Using the unpredictable alchemy of light as her primary medium, Dannenberg’s photographs are visually rich and poetically resonant. They transform ordinary experience into images that hover between recognition and ambiguity.” Fran Kaufman Nyc Dec. 2025.

Join us for the reception in the New Year on January 17th, 2026 from 5- 8 pm at the Octagon, 888 Main st. Roosevelt Island, NY 10044

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A Certain Slant of Light*

Photographs by Anne-Marie Dannenberg

Through the lens, through layers, we find illumination—a particular clarity, a slice of light that allows us not simply to see, but to notice what is often right before our eyes. Photography arrests time, holding a moment still even as the world continues to move. Dannenberg’s generous observations draw from this tension, recording the textures of daily life through reflection and refraction, capturing fleeting moments that most of us pass by without paying attention.

We are often unable to fully decipher what is happening in her photographs or even exactly where we are. In this uncertainty, the work reflects the disorientation many of us experience as we navigate a fast-changing, increasingly challenging and unsettling world. The ground shifts: architectural fragments dissolve and re-form, shadowy images hover. The camera’s capacity to fix a moment does not resolve this instability but renders it visible, underscoring photography’s peculiar relationship to time and memory, perhaps recalling Roland Barthes’s understanding of the photograph as both evidence and enigma.

Dannenberg’s photographs are not manipulated; they are not composites or layered images. What we see is what the artist sees as she turns her discerning eye toward the urban landscape, whether built or natural. Deeply rooted in the real world, the images reference a specific place and time, yet they resist straightforward interpretation. They shift attention away from subject matter toward shape, light, and color—toward moments of unusual radiance or deeply shadowed space—inviting us to linger on the act of seeing itself.

Using the unpredictable alchemy of light as her primary medium, Dannenberg’s photographs are visually rich and poetically resonant. They transform ordinary experience into images that hover between recognition and ambiguity. At once records and meditations, they are deeply personal, transforming the literal into images that hover between clarity and uncertainty. Rooted in ordinary experience, they evoke curiosity, invite contemplation, or prompt a smile of recognition, even as they quietly speak to the precarious condition of being alive.

 -Fran Kaufman NYC, December 2025

Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light”

About the Artist

 Anne-Marie Dannenberg’s photographs explore perception, light, and the subtle dislocations of everyday experience within the urban landscape, using reflection, refraction, and natural light to transform familiar environments into images that hover between representation and abstraction. Her photographs emphasize attention, presence, and the act of seeing itself. For her, making a photograph is akin to writing a poem.

Dannenberg’s photographs have been exhibited since 1996 in galleries in New York City, France, and Spain. Her recent publications include Attachments, which received a Silver Medal for “Most Original Concept” from the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2009, and Grass Lines (2016), which draws parallels between grasses and Japanese calligraphy. She is a member of both RIVAA Gallery and the Salmagundi Club in NYC.

About the Author

 Fran Kaufman is an accomplished art advisor, curator, and cultural strategist with over three decades of experience shaping exhibitions, collections, and market strategies for galleries, institutions, and private collections worldwide. She is a principal in Kaufman Vardy Projects, an international consultancy focused on strategic marketing and curatorial practice.

She was the founding Curatorial Director of the Liu Shiming Art Foundation and was previously a partner in Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Art, a contemporary gallery with an international roster of artists and a dedicated center for dialogue between visual art, literature, and music. She launched the premier International Houston Fine Art Fair and served as Director of the palmbeach3 contemporary art fair. She has been a frequent lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, NYU’s Graduate School of the Arts, and Pratt Institute, among other venues, and often writes about art for catalogues and publications. Her curatorial projects have been presented in the United States, Italy, Germany, and Latin America.