Giles Duley Brings War, Memory, and Survival to a Manhattan Penthouse
What happens when a penthouse view over Midtown East is interrupted by the sound of drones and the memory of war? British photographer Giles Duley (b. 1971) answers that question in Distortion/Memory/Resilience, on view until May 24 at Sutton Tower in New York.
Installed in a 4,600-square-foot space on the 77th floor, the exhibition combines photographs, archival material, and three room-sized installations that move between conflict zones and private memory. Duley, who lost both legs and an arm after stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan, has built a practice around the human cost of war rather than its spectacle. He founded the Legacy of War Foundation in 2017, and the organization now works in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Rwanda.
The most disorienting section is Youth (2026), a blackout room with a camera obscura version of the skyline. The sound of Shaheed drones, recorded live by Ukrainian journalist Yuliia Tymoshenko while she sheltered in her bathroom in Kyiv at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, turns the city outside into a visual and acoustic inversion. Duley uses that reversal to suggest how war upends ordinary life.
Childhood is built from wooden school desks filled with children’s art gathered by Gen Ukraine, an organization working with young victims of wartime trauma. In the corridor outside, Duley’s photographs of Angolan child soldiers appear as portraits of men who have outlived the world’s sympathy. Memory, meanwhile, is arranged with armchairs and a box of old photographs that are actually recent portraits of soldiers and cultural figures in Ukraine. The room is rooted in his 2021 visit to the home of Luba Sorokina in Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine.
The exhibition follows Duley’s London presentation, Where Do We Go From Here?, shown during Frieze London in 2025. It also draws a line between generations of conflict: Duley recalls his mother’s stories of nursing during the Blitz, and he places a 1940 Life magazine cover by Cecil Beaton of injured three-year-old Eileen Dunne beside his own photograph of Ivanna, a wounded girl he photographed in Beirut last year.
“For me everything is connected,” Duley says. “I am a storyteller, not a photographer.” That conviction runs through the installation, which treats war not as a sequence of isolated crises but as a shared human condition. Two salon-style benefit dinners are scheduled at the penthouse on May 19 and 21, extending the project’s humanitarian aims beyond the gallery walls.
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