The title of Tanyth Berkeley‘s most famous photograph carries a certain formal satisfaction, but I’ve always felt unsettled by the intimacy of its glare. “Grace in Window.” The shot broadcasts the translucent skin of its subject like a beacon flashing urgently across a moon-lit pool. But the title puts her in her place. It exemplifies Berkeley’s early work – the extraordinary among the ordinary – and it was the centerpiece of her appearance in an exhibition of new photographers that took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. A critic at the New York Times likened the model – a recurrent muse named Graciella Longoria – to “an ethereal alien” and said she exemplified Berkeley’s work inside “the Diane Arbus school.” 

Berkeley has since moved on, both from Longoria and from reviews in the Times, which last took notice in 2009 at a show in James Danziger’s old gallery in Chelsea, dedicated entirety to shots of Longoria; “a combination of Marilyn Monroe and the moon,” Berkeley told the paper then. Her latest show is in Bushwick at Transmitter, one of a collective “hub” of galleries cramped inside a former steel shop on Willoughby Avenue. The gallery hub opened in 2014, a year after “Grace in Window” had made its way across the pond and into a Charles Saatchi’s gallery in London. 

The first thing Transmitter’s copy says about the show is that its name comes from the Buffalo Springfield song “For What it’s Worth,” a tune that makes me think of the pandemic, because it was sung by Billy Porter at the all-virtual Democratic National Convention in 2020. In the video, by the time Porter gets to the line “what a field day for the heat,” a sign rises behind him that reads “Black Lives Matter.”