Fifth Avenue’s northern end has a free exhibition up right now that is getting almost no noise: Lines of Survival: Living, Adapting, Imagining Tomorrow, at The Africa Center, 1280 Fifth Avenue at 109th Street in East Harlem. It is the 2026 Africa Soft Power Climate Change Storytelling Fellowship and Photo Essay Prize show — five photo essays from five countries, all on what it means to live with a changing climate.
- What: five photo essays by the winner and finalists of the 2026 Africa Soft Power Climate Change Storytelling Fellowship, presented by The Africa Center with Africa Soft Power.
- Who: Mpumelelo Buthelezi (South Africa, the prize winner), Vanessa Mulondo (Uganda), Kevin Ochieng Onyango (Kenya), Brian Ongoro (Kenya), Nicolas Vava (Togo).
- What you’re actually looking at: Soweto waste collectors who sell recyclables and keep them out of landfill; fishers at Tanzania’s Lake Eyasi adapting as seasons and water levels turn unpredictable; Kenya’s prolonged drought; recurring flooding in Kisumu County; coastal erosion along the Togo coast.
- Where: The Africa Center, 1280 Fifth Avenue (entrance on Fifth at 109th Street), East Harlem, 10029.
- When: through Nov. 1, 2026. Listings show 8 a.m.–4 p.m.
- Cost: free, no ticket, no registration. Questions: 212-444-9795.
The fellowship behind it backs African and diaspora photographers aged 18–30, and the framing is explicit: these are not disaster photographs, they are photographs of people already answering the problem — informal-economy work, changed fishing practice, flood response — at a moment when adaptation and climate finance are moving to the centre of global policy debate while the communities most affected stay out of the room.
It is a walk-in show in a neighbourhood that rarely gets one, four blocks from the Conservatory Garden at 105th Street, which makes a free upper-Manhattan afternoon that costs nothing but the walk. Go before Nov. 1.