The current shows at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, the winners of their annual Contemporary Photography Competition, despite their formal differences, are strangely alike—and entirely by accident. 

Christine Elfman’s Even Amaranth, an eerie selection of nature scenes and images of Classical sculpture plays off Mark Jayson Quines’ companion exhibition NOBODY, which comprises snapshots of people and objects in everyday settings, interwoven with actual examples of these valuable artifacts of daily life: smartphones and Air Jordans sneakers. Despite the vastly different nature, style, and subject matter of Elfman’s and Quines’ practices, Even Amaranth and NOBODY cannily come together to form the two halves of the answer to the question what lasts? What is eternal? What will outlive us after we are gone?

Exhibition review by Deborah Krieger