Join us at ICP for First Was the Abyss, a multi-year research initiative, creative convening, and curatorial program conceptualized by Aldeide Delgado, Founder & Director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). The project explores the intersection of feminisms and photography in the Caribbean through an archipelagic lens, challenging dominant narratives in photographic history. It traces the contributions of Caribbean women photographers and positions the region as a critical site for reimagining the medium’s intellectual discourse.
This panel discussion brings together Delgado; Pauline Vermare, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum; and artists and ICP alumni Genesis Báez and Paola Martínez Fiterre to reflect on the Caribbean as both a generative space and a critical framework for photographic inquiry. Building on conversations from the WOPHA Research Workshop held the previous day at the Brooklyn Museum, participants will share their work and research, engaging themes of identity, migration, modernity, and colonization.
The ticket includes admission to ICP’s exhibitions, Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration and Sheida Soleimani: Panjereh.
About WOPHA
Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded by Latinx art historian and curator Aldeide Delgado to research, promote, support, and educate on the contributions of women and non-binary photographers to modern and contemporary art in order to rewrite the artistic canon and provoke social change. WOPHA fosters a more diverse and equitable world by providing a permanent archive for future generations that preserves, documents, and promotes women photographers’ work while being a driving force for innovative thinking and discussion about the role of women in photographic arts.
About the Speakers
Genesis Báez
Genesis Báez is Brooklyn-based artist working in photography. Her practice merges performance, observation, and social histories of modern colonization in a conversation around placemaking. Báez’s artworks foreground the material qualities of photography, such as light, stasis, and the frame, and how they reveal the interconnections that underpin our personal and social lives. Her recent monograph, Blue Sun (Capricious Publishing, 2025), weaves a decade of photographs made in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Báez’s works are held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her photographs have been recently exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2024), Soloviev Foundation in New York (2025), Kilometro in San Juan, PR (2023), the Princeton University Art Museum (2023), and have been published in Aperture, Bomb Magazine, and The British Journal of Photography. Born in Massachusetts, Báez was raised in New England and Puerto Rico. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art, a BFA from MassArt, and is an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College, and a 2025 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University.
Paola Martínez Fiterre
Paola Martínez Fiterre is a Cuban artist based in New York, whose practice focuses on the representation of the female body as shaped by the migratory experience. She studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana and graduated from the International Center of Photography in 2019, where she received the ICP Director’s Scholarship and the ICP New Media Grant. Fiterre uses performance, photography, video, among other media, as tools of perception to inhabit the domestic, the social, and the biological, subverting their gendered meanings. She has received fellowships such as the Reed Foundation Fellowship for Cuban artists and, in 2023, the Cintas Foundation Fellowship in Photography. The work of Paola Fiterre offers an intimate reckoning with the body, identity, and the immigrant experience. Using her own body as both subject and medium; as a space of confrontation and contemplation. Her work is a reflection on the tension between personal and cultural identity, exploring themes such as migration, the female figure in a globalized society, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Fiterre’s work evokes a visceral response, drawing attention to the shared experience of “otherness” that transcends borders, cultures, and bodies.
Aldeide Delgado
Aldeide Delgado is a Cuban-born, Miami-based, Latinx art historian and curator, founder and director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). Delgado brings extensive experience in writing, curating, and presenting on photography at prominent art history forums. Her work centers on feminist and decolonial methodologies, with a focus on the histories of photography in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx contexts. She has delivered lectures at esteemed institutions, including the Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, The Clark Institute, and Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Her accolades include the 2023 Ellies Creator Award, 2019 Knight Arts Challenge Award, the 2018 School of Art Criticism Fellowship by SAPS – La Tallera, and the 2017 Research and Production of Critic Essay Fellowship by TEOR/éTica. Delgado is the visionary behind the WOPHA Congress. Held every three years at PAMM and across South Florida, this groundbreaking event has gathered nearly 100 leading art historians, curators, and women photographers,
attracting over 2,000 national and international attendees across its past two editions. She is the author of Becoming Sisters: Women Photography Collectives & Organizations (2021). Prior to founding WOPHA, Delgado created the online feminist archive Catalog of Cuban Women Photographers. She is an active member of PAMM’s International Women’s Committee, US Latinx Art Forum, the Lucie Foundation Advisory Board, and the steering committees of the Feminist Art Coalition and Fast Forward: Women in Photography.
Pauline Vermare
Pauline Vermare is the Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum. She was formerly the cultural director of Magnum Photos NY, and a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP). She previously held positions at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. Her recent exhibitions and publications include "I'm So Happy you Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now" and "Akihiko Okamura: The Memories of Others." She sits on the boards of the Saul Leiter Foundation and the Catherine Leroy Fund.
© Genesis Baez. Skyscape, 2022. Silt of Each Other series
