A mountain, hands covered in clay and a crowd moving through confetti: the pictures in What Holds Us hardly seem to belong to the same story. That is their strength. Open in New York from September 18 to 20, 2026, the exhibition brings Jimmy Chin, Jack Davison and Alex Prager together around one question: what connects people? All three artists worked exclusively with an iPhone 18 Pro. But treating the show merely as a camera demonstration would miss what the images say about distance, touch and staging.
One tool, three visual languages
Curator Kathy Ryan, a former longtime photography director of The New York Times Magazine, chose artists whose methods differ sharply. The shared framework makes those differences more visible. The phone appears in all three projects, yet it imposes neither a single style nor a common subject. It becomes a light tool in the mountains, an unobtrusive presence in a portrait studio and a precision camera on a highly constructed set.
The commission comes from Apple and showcases the capabilities of its new device. That commercial setting should remain in view: the photographs also serve as a technology showcase. Their artistic interest, however, rests elsewhere, in decisions about framing, light and relationships with the people pictured. The fact that a camera can record a detail does not explain why that detail deserves to become an image.
Jimmy Chin: measuring trust in a landscape
Jimmy Chin traveled to the Bugaboos in British Columbia with climbers including Conrad Anker. His photographs move from close views of rock, snow and ice to panoramas in which a human body becomes almost a dot. The contrast of scale makes trust feel like a practical necessity. In such a setting, the presence of a partner is not an abstract theme. It is part of how people advance and keep one another safe.
Chin says the phone’s lightness allowed him to carry less equipment. The advantage is not merely physical. When every object in a pack matters, a simpler setup can leave more attention for the scene itself. The exhibition does not prove that a smartphone replaces every specialist camera or piece of mountain equipment. It shows a choice suited to a particular constraint, with narrative benefits of its own.
Jack Davison: keeping the face unobscured
In a former sugar warehouse in London, Jack Davison turned to hands, clay and chalk. His subjects touch the material, shape it and carry it on their skin. The strong black-and-white contrasts of his portraits emphasize relief and traces. Rather than representing connection with a familiar symbol, Davison looks for material evidence: a print left on a surface, a gesture that changes another body or an object.
The photographer explains that holding the phone lower than a camera raised in front of his face helps him maintain eye contact with his subjects. That change in posture may sound small, but it can alter a sitting. A person being photographed responds to the photographer’s presence, too. Here technology matters less as a spectacle than as a less obtrusive interface between two gazes.
Alex Prager: the crowd as an open story
Alex Prager built a world of characters and confetti on a Los Angeles soundstage, after a party the viewer never saw. Her wide views and close portraits suggest several stories without settling on just one. The triptych described by Apple lends the crowd an almost cinematic continuity. The pictures seem to contain a before and an after, although they remain still photographs.
Her approach reminds us that photography is not necessarily the opposite of staging. Costumes, direction of performers, light and timing can build fiction as deliberately as a film. Here the iPhone records a collective composition rather than accidentally catching a street moment. The mobility of the tool does not erase preparation or the work of a crew.
Beyond camera performance
The exhibition highlights the new camera system and its variable aperture. It would be tempting to frame this as a competition between a phone and professional equipment. That reading is too narrow. The three projects ask a more productive question: what can a tool enable when it changes the way an artist moves, looks and meets a subject? Chin, Davison and Prager offer answers that cannot be swapped for one another.
After New York, Apple says the show will travel to London and Shanghai in the coming months, without giving a complete schedule in this announcement. That journey will put the pictures before different audiences. On a screen, they may be read as evidence of resolution; in an exhibition space, their scale, proximity and the pauses between them invite attention to the stories they suggest. What Holds Us is most compelling in that tension: a mass-market tool in the service of singular ways of seeing.