Phil Buehler Photography

10/12/2026

Yesterday Aniya Stewart Aniya Alicia Stewart, Reven Wurman and I brought the Wall of Tears to Prospect Park for the UNRWA Gaza 5K. It poured but thousands came out and helped raise $1 million for children’s mental health in Gaza. This follows the original Wall of Tears in Brooklyn, then London, Australia, San Francisco, Dearborn, New Brunswick and Mexico City - and soon to be in Amsterdam and maybe Dallas with Abdul Elenani!

09/03/2026

25 years. 144 faces. One city.

After 9/11, New York became a landscape of remembrance-missing posters on fences, subways, and storefronts.
Photographer Phil Buehler captured more than 500 of them. For 25 years, they stayed in a box. Now, for the first time, they're on public view.
COUNTENANCE: The 9/11 Missing Posters
Curated by Sarah Celentano & Olena Speranska
144 faces across 24 translucent vellum panels, arranged in vertical pairs echoing the Twin Towers. A space built for slow walking, silence, and standing quietly before a face.
• Most Holy Trinity-St. Mary's Church
138 Montrose Ave, Brooklyn
17 Sept 5-13, 2026
All are welcome-whatever you believe, wherever you're from.


Puerto Rican Spanish 🇵🇷:
25 años. 144 caras. Una ciudad.
Después del 11 de septiembre, Nueva York se convirtió en un paisaje de memoria: carteles de desaparecidos en verjas, entradas del metro y escaparates.
El fotógrafo Phil Buehler capturó más de 500 de ellos.
Por 25 años, estuvieron guardados en una caja.
Ahora, por primera vez, se exhiben públicamente.
COUNTENANCE: Los carteles de los desaparecidos del 11 de septiembre.
144 caras en 24 paneles de vitela translúcida, colocados en pares verticales que evocan las Torres Gemelas. Un espacio hecho para caminar lento, el silencio y quedarse quieto frente a un rostro.
Todos son bienvenidos — sin importar lo que creas o de dónde vengas.

Polish 🇵🇱:
25 lat. 144 twarze. Jedno miasto.
Po 11 września Nowy Jork stat się krajobrazem
pamięci - plakaty zaginionych na płotach, wejściach
do metra i witrynach sklepowych.
Fotograf Phil Buehler sfotografował ponad 500 z nich. Przez 25 lat leżały w pudełku. Teraz, po raz
pierwszy, można je zobaczyć publicznie.
COUNTENANCE: Plakaty zaginionych z 11 września

144 twarze na 24 połprzezroczystych panelach
welinowych, utożone w pionowe pary nawiązujące do
wież WTC. Przestrzeń stworzona do powolnego
chodzenia, ciszy i stania w milczeniu przed twarzą.
Wszyscy są mile widziani — niezależnie od wyznania i pochodzenia.

.ess.ess.see

08/05/2026

Shirin Neshat shooting in our park scenes from her latest film, “Paradise Lost.”

Here’s a description from a casting website - definitely of-the-moment:

In a world of chaos, a mystic finds solace in quiet moments—until a chance meeting with young activists forces him to confront the horrors of war, transforming his mind, his art, and his destiny.

07/30/2026

It’s hard to believe it has been 25 years since I documented the 2001 demolition of the Memorial Homes in New Brunswick. Coming back to this footage and the many photos I took before the buildings were imploded showed me that the buildings were only one part of the story.

What has truly stayed with me is the resilience of the community. Even long after the site changed, former neighbors kept their bonds alive, gathering at their annual BBQ to reconnect and catch up. It’s a rare and powerful thing to witness.

“We Mean Something to Each Other” is an exhibition documenting this history is currently on view at the Mason Gross Galleries, but it is coming to a close this Tuesday, August 4th.

This project isn’t just about the architecture that was lost; it’s a space to reflect on the vital role and importance that public housing plays in our society. If you haven’t had a chance to see the show yet, I hope you’ll make the trip to 33 Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick, NJ before the doors close.

07/17/2026

Twenty-five years ago, I watched the Memorial Homes low-income housing project come down. I’d gone to college nearby at Rutgers in the seventies, and when I heard the buildings were to be imploded, I spent a day inside the now-empty buildings, looking to photograph traces of the lives lived there.

Those negatives sat on a shelf until recently, when they became the basis for a sprawling show at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art — a place I’d always dreamed of showing my work.

The exhibition spans nine galleries. Three hold mine: a rotating projection of the spaces that once held lives, a short film of the implosion that layers the cheering crowd against the commentary of past residents, and a room of photographs taken moments before the buildings fell — walls still painted, posters still pinned, a record album left behind. Signs of life once lived there.

But this show is bigger than me. Mason Gross and the Bloustein School of Urban Planning built two courses around the project. Students collected oral histories, newspapers, even bricks that once built Memorial Homes. They made sculptures and installations from what they found, dug deeper into stories I could only capture in a single frame, and curated it all into something whole. Their work gave me the chance to bring my images back to life — surrounded now by former residents’ own memories.

Then something unexpected happened. The former residents came. Many brought their children and grandchildren. They spent hours in the galleries. Some had donated the bricks, the newspaper clippings, the t-shirts from their reunions. They searched my photos for rooms they once lived in, one pointing to his childhood room painted “Barney the Dinosaur” purple, another pointing at his “street name” that he’d scrawled as an 8 year old. They FaceTimed people whose names they discovered on those same walls — voices reuniting across 25 years. That last room was never quiet. People pointed at my photographs and said, “That was where I grew up.”

This show isn’t mine anymore. It belongs to them, and to the students who helped tell their stories. A full circle I never could have imagined.

06/10/2026

Heading to Detroit to install in Dearborn two new artworks about Gaza

06/10/2026

Bound for Detroit to install two new artworks in Dearborn

03/31/2026

03/11/2026

02/05/2026

Honored and humbled to share that The Guardian featured the Wall of Tears—a 50-foot memorial at 12 Grattan Street in Brooklyn documenting 18,457 Palestinian children killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023, and July 19, 2025.

“From a distance, it reads as abstract. Up close, each name becomes visible—beginning with 14-year-old Wesam Iyad Mohammed Abu Fsaife and ending with 8-year-old Sabah Omar Saad al-Masri. Chronologically ordered. Each child named, aged, remembered.”

“This work was already behind the times before it opened—hundreds more children have been killed since July. But these names matter. They refuse erasure. They demand accountability.
Art can’t stop genocide, but it can bear witness. It can refuse to let these children become statistics or ‘collateral damage.’ ”

Created in collaboration with . Read the full Guardian piece—link in bio.