Featured in Gen Z, Shaping A New Gaze

Steven Molina Contreras is featured in Gen Z, Shaping A New Gaze — the 2025 exhibition catalog from Photo Élysée and Éditions Textuel. This publication presents an invigorating panorama of sixty photographers from Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and 2010, whose work reflects an urgent need for representation and a desire to tell their own stories in a rapidly shifting world.

In contrast to the continuous and ephemeral flow of images circulating on social networks, these artists create thoughtful, free, and critical bodies of work that deconstruct visual norms, question dominant narratives, and invent new iconographies. Spanning cities from Shanghai to Cape Town, Amsterdam to New York, their photographs weave together powerful personal narratives and a collective, incandescent energy.

Gen Z, Shaping A New Gaze offers a sensitive immersion into the concerns of a generation that both questions the world and seeks its place within it — a generation that, in the words of journalist Salomé Saqué, “exists without apology.”
Full details: https://www.editionstextuel.com/livre/gen_z_un_nouveau_regard

Featured in Aperture Magazine, Issue 245: “Latinx”

Steven Molina Contreras was included in the winter 2021 issue of Aperture (Issue 245), guest-edited by Pilar Tompkins Rivas. This issue celebrates the dynamic visions of Latinx photography across the United States, weaving together historical and contemporary perspectives on political resistance, family, cultural identity, and the complexity of belonging. In the “Portfolios” section, Contreras’s Adelante series, an intimate chronicle of family, migration, and resilience, was featured among other significant voices in the field.

Full details: https://aperture.org/magazines/aperture-245/

Featured in Exciting Photography Now, MATTE Magazine, Issue 62

Photographer and artist Steven Molina Contreras’s work appears in the print survey Exciting Photography Now, a 480-page anthology of current American photography edited by Eve Lyons and Matthew Leifheit. Conceived as MATTE Magazine’s first-ever open-call issue, the publication brings together wide-ranging portfolios, interviews, and commissioned texts to present a timely snapshot of artists shaping the medium today. Contreras’s inclusion situates his practice alongside a broad roster of contemporaries within this editor-curated overview of innovative image-making.

Full details: https://www.excitingphotographynow.com/

Featured in Contact Sheet 217: Light Work Annual 2022

Steven Molina Contreras’s work is featured in Contact Sheet 217, the Light Work Annual 2022, which showcases projects by the 2021 cohort of Light Work Artists-in-Residence. The issue includes work by Liz Johnson Artur, Dannielle Bowman, Sabiha Çimen, Larry W. Cook, Jeremy Dennis, Odette England, Dionne Lee, Daniel Ramos, Aida Silvestri, Marion Wilson, and Guanyu Xu. Contreras’s contribution reflects the creative experimentation and thematic depth fostered during his residency, alongside a diverse range of voices shaping contemporary photography.

Full details: https://lightwork.shop/