<![CDATA[The International Review of Photography]]>https://photograph.ishttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pIDb!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdaece80a-adc0-4806-b2c6-3a2ec8199ef6_256x256.pngThe International Review of Photographyhttps://photograph.isSubstackSun, 14 Jun 2026 22:59:17 GMT<![CDATA[Before Deepfakes, Cindy Sherman Was Already Faking Every Face]]>https://photograph.is/p/before-deepfakes-cindy-sherman-washttps://photograph.is/p/before-deepfakes-cindy-sherman-wasMon, 08 Jun 2026 13:03:15 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

"Untitled Film Still #21" — Cindy Sherman, 1978

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Gelatin silver print. © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth / MoMA.

A young woman in a tailored suit and hat looks up and off to the side, the city rising behind her, her expression caught between aspiration and unease. It looks like a frame lifted from a late-1950s film — a career girl arriving in the big city. There is no film. There is no career girl. There is only Cindy Sherman, who in 1978 set up a camera in her own studio, put on the wig and the suit, and played the part herself.

Untitled Film Still #21 belongs to the Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), the seventy black-and-white photographs in which Sherman impersonated the stock heroines of postwar cinema — the ingénue, the seductress, the housewife, the runaway — none of them drawn from any actual movie. She was the director, the stylist, the makeup artist, the model, and the photographer at once. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the complete set in 1995. The series is now among the most studied bodies of work in postwar art, precisely because it refuses to let you locate the “real” person inside the picture.

We feature it this week not for an anniversary but for a resonance. We are living through the first moment in history when anyone can manufacture a convincing human being from nothing — a face, a voice, a biography, a feed. Sherman got there first, by hand, with a shutter cable and a thrift-store wardrobe, decades before the algorithm. She understood that identity, once photographed, is a performance the camera is happy to certify as true.

WHY IT MATTERS

Sherman's whole project is an argument that the photograph does not record a self so much as construct one — and that the construction is the meaning, not a flaw to see past. In 2026, when the distance between a real face and a fabricated one has collapsed to nothing, the Untitled Film Stills read less like art history and more like instructions. She has been telling us for almost fifty years that the person in the picture is a decision someone made.

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ON VIEW
New This Week

HIGHLIGHT

Madeleine de Sinéty: A Life
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Opens June 12, 2026

The first major retrospective of the French documentary photographer who spent decades inside a single Breton village, building one of the most patient and humane bodies of rural documentary work in postwar France.

Madeleine de Sinéty. Poilley, 1974. © Succession Madeleine de Sinéty. Courtesy Jeu de Paume.
HIGHLIGHT

Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection
Jeu de Paume, Paris
June 12 – September 27, 2026

One of the most significant private photography collections in the world arrives in Paris. Built over more than thirty years by Sir Elton John and David Furnish, Fragile Beauty gathers landmark images across fashion, portraiture, reportage, and the body — from mid-century masters to contemporary names — under a theme of beauty as something precarious and passing. After its run at the V&A in London, the Jeu de Paume presentation is the collection’s major continental showing.

FRAGILE BEAUTY: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection. The Palisades Fire ravages a neighborhood amid high winds in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope). Courtesy Jeu de Paume.

MORE ON VIEW
Openings, closings, deadlines, and one-day events — June 8 through June 14.

© Graciela Iturbide. Mujer Ángel, Sonoran Desert, 1979. Courtesy C/O Berlin.

Wednesday, June 10

Thursday, June 11

Friday, June 12

Saturday, June 13

Sunday, June 14

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

Richard Avedon. Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1987 © The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy PHotoESPAÑA.

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Currents by Dionne Lee
Aperture • 160 pages, softcover • US$70

The first monograph from Dionne Lee (b. 1988), the 2025 Guggenheim Fellow whose photography, video, and collage examine land, power, survival, and Black identity in the American landscape. Working with darkroom interventions — rephotographing wilderness-survival manuals, inscribing graphite onto her landscapes — Lee threads dispossession and resilience through a decade of work, with essays by poet Camille T. Dungy and curator Eric Booker. A reckoning with the great outdoors as a site of both refuge and loss.

Silent Springs by Michele Borzoni & Rocco Rorandelli
Loose Joints • 208 pages, softcover • US$70

A radical portrait of youth climate activism across Europe. The Italian documentary duo behind the collective TerraProject follow non-violent direct action — Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände, Last Generation, Soulèvements de la Terre — through planning, encampment, and police confrontation, paired with a glossary of the movement’s tactics and ethics. Borrowing its title, pluralized, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, it reads as a contemporary manifesto for a generation defending a shared horizon.

Passports by Keisha Scarville
MACK • 280 pages, hardcover • US$70

A new book from the Brooklyn-based photographer whose work mines identity, transformation, and the Guyanese diaspora through which she came to the medium. Passports turns the most bureaucratic of identity documents into a meditation on migration, belonging, and the self that travels between places and states.

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IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Opening, Closing and Ongoing Exhibitions from Around the World

Nan Goldin, Untitled, 1982. From the exhibition, ‘This Will Not End Well’ at the Grand Palais. © Nan Goldin. On view through June 21. Courtesy Grand Palais.

OPENING SOON

Lausanne

Paris

CLOSING SOON

Berlin

Los Angeles

ONGOING

Installation view of Catherine Opie. ‘Holding Blue’. Regen Projects, Los Angeles. On view through July 3, 2026. Courtesy Regen Projects.

Paris

Amsterdam

Winterthur

Le Locle (Switzerland)

Stockholm / Malmö

New York

Brooklyn / NYC

Fort Worth

Los Angeles / Santa Monica

San Francisco

OPEN CALLS

DID YOU KNOW?

Cindy Sherman made every one of the seventy Untitled Film Stills herself — not just as the model but as the director, stylist, hair-and-makeup, and photographer, mostly alone in her apartment with a shutter release cable in her hand. None of the “stills” comes from an actual film; she invented the movies they appear to be from. When MoMA bought the complete set in 1995, it paid a reported $1 million — for a body of work she had begun making, on cheap black-and-white film, for almost nothing.

ON THIS DAY

"The Terror of War" — widely known as "Napalm Girl." Phan Thị Kim Phúc, nine, flees a napalm strike with other children on Route 1 near Trảng Bàng, South Vietnam, June 8, 1972. Photograph by Nick Út / The Associated Press.

June 8, 1972 — On Route 1 outside Trảng Bàng, South Vietnam, a South Vietnamese plane dropped napalm on its own civilians, and a 21-year-old Associated Press photographer photographed a naked nine-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, running toward the camera with her arms outstretched, her skin burning. The Terror of War — known everywhere as "Napalm Girl" — won the Pulitzer Prize, became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century, and is often credited with hardening American opinion against the war. The credit went to Huỳnh Công "Nick" Út. In 2025, the documentary The Stringer publicly disputed that authorship, arguing the picture may have been made by a Vietnamese freelancer, and the AP opened an investigation that — after months — found no definitive evidence to strip Út of the credit while acknowledging the questions could not be fully resolved. Fifty-four years on, the most famous photograph of the war has become a case study in the very thing this week's lead is about: who, exactly, makes an image.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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]]><![CDATA[Josef Koudelka Wins the Brussels Street Photography Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award]]>https://photograph.is/p/josef-koudelka-wins-the-brusselshttps://photograph.is/p/josef-koudelka-wins-the-brusselsMon, 01 Jun 2026 13:04:00 GMTTHE FRAME

A Lifetime Achievement for the Photographer Who Spent Sixteen Years as a Pseudonym

Josef Koudelka, Invasion 68: Prague. Warsaw Pact tanks invade Prague, Czechoslovakia. August 1968. © Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos. Courtesy of the Josef Koudelka Foundation

This past Saturday, May 30, 2026, at Brussels City Hall, the Brussels Street Photography Festival presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Josef Koudelka — and marked the festival’s tenth-anniversary edition with the recognition of an artist whose career began the way few careers do: under a fictional initial. The event drew a capped audience of two hundred and featured a long-form interview with Koudelka alongside the announcement of this year’s competition winners.

The choice is unimpeachable. Koudelka, born in Moravia in 1938, trained as an aeronautical engineer before turning seriously to photography in the early 1960s, when he began the long project on Czech and Slovak Romani communities that would become Gypsies (1975). When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague on the morning of August 21, 1968, Koudelka was in the streets with his camera; the photographs he made over the following week — soldiers, crowds, watches checked against zero hour, hands held up to tank barrels — were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and published in the Western press under the initials P.P., for “Prague Photographer.” He would not allow his name to be attached to the work for sixteen years.

That arc — anonymity, exile, then the slow gathering of a body of work whose authority compounds with every decade — is what the Brussels prize acknowledges. Koudelka has received the Prix Nadar, the Robert Capa Gold Medal, the Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. He is, at this point, one of the very few living photographers about whom there is no serious argument. The Brussels award is less the conferral of stature than the catching-up of an institution.

WHY IT MATTERS

Koudelka's life is the story of a photographer who decided early that the work was the only thing that mattered and protected it accordingly — from the regime that would have punished it, from the market that would have bought it lightly, and from his own name for as long as he could. That Brussels now formally crowns him at the festival's tenth anniversary is exactly the right symmetry: a young institution honoring an artist whose first major prize was awarded to a pseudonym.

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ON VIEW
New This Week

Upstate Photography Biennial
Center for Photography at Woodstock
May 30 – September 6, 2026

The first edition of a US biennial that finally gives the Hudson Valley a recurring institutional photography event. Curated by Adam G. Ryan and Marina Chao, the Upstate Photography Biennial gathers thirty-nine artists across multiple venues around Woodstock and the broader Hudson Valley, organized around questions of identity, healthcare access, climate, and inhabited space. The curatorial framing makes a deliberate case for analog processes — tintype, pinhole, cyanotype — as forms of political resistance to a flattening digital image economy.

WHY IT MATTERS

A new US biennial is, all by itself, rare. A US biennial that arrives with a curatorial argument this clear — about who photography is for, what bodies and places it documents, and what its slow processes mean in the age of generative image-making — is almost unheard of.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Focus. Desire.
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
February 28 – June 26, 2026

Sepuya’s first major Swiss solo museum exhibition continues at Fotomuseum Winterthur through the end of June. Structured around Sepuya’s enduring concerns — the studio as social space, the dark room as both technical workshop and intimate site, and the archive as a living constellation of friends and collaborators — the show foregrounds a queer and Black subject position in photography that has been quietly redefining American studio practice for over a decade. Final month to see.

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
The international festival calendar opens one of its busiest stretch of the year.

Looking into mid-June:

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Double Exposures by Sophie Rivera
Aperture
In association with El Museo del Barrio
Bilingual English / Spanish

The first major monograph on Sophie Rivera, the Nuyorican photographer whose intimate, formally exacting portraits of Puerto Ricans in 1970s New York have spent the last decade re-entering the canon. Co-published with El Museo del Barrio in a bilingual English/Spanish edition, the book gathers Rivera’s defining series — including the large-format Bronx portraits she made between 1978 and 1982 — alongside new scholarship situating her practice inside the Nuyorican cultural moment and the longer history of Latina photography. A long-overdue corrective.

Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings by Larry Sultan
MACK

The first collected edition of writing by the late Larry Sultan — California-born conceptualist whose Evidence (with Mike Mandel, 1977), Pictures from Home (1992), and The Valley (2004) remain among the most influential American photobooks of the past half-century. Water Over Thunder gathers essays, lectures, interviews, and unpublished material from across his teaching practice at California College of the Arts and beyond. Sultan died in 2009 at sixty-three; this volume is, in effect, the artist’s missing fourth book.

Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
(Sir John Herschel’s Copy)
Steidl
Hardcover facsimile edition

A facsimile of Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae (1843) — widely regarded as the first book illustrated entirely with photographic images — reproduced from the personal copy held by Sir John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype process. Atkins, who learned the process from Herschel through her father, self-published the volume in installments to a tiny subscriber list. Surviving copies are now among the most valuable objects in photography’s history. Steidl’s facsimile is the first time most readers will hold the book in their hands.

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IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Opening, Closing and Ongoing Exhibitions from Around the World

OPENING SOON

Lausanne

Los Angeles

Paris

CLOSING SOON

Berlin

Los Angeles

Stockholm

ONGOING

Amsterdam

Brooklyn / NYC

Fort Worth

Le Locle (Switzerland)

Los Angeles / Santa Monica

New York

Paris

San Francisco

Stockholm / Malmö

Winterthur

OPEN CALLS

ONE QUESTION

A vintage Henri Cartier-Bresson print can clear six figures at auction; a contemporary photojournalist covering the same kinds of moments often earns less than a U.S. living wage. The market we have decided to build around photography pays the past more than the present and pays for documentation only after the photographer has stopped working. Is this how it has to be — or is there a market we haven't yet built that would make the work that matters at the moment it is made worth what it is actually worth?

Reply with your view. The most interesting responses appear in next week’s issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

Josef Koudelka's foundational photographs of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague were published under the pseudonym P.P. — for "Prague Photographer" — and the "P.P." byline won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for war reporting in 1969. Koudelka would not allow his name to be attached to the work for sixteen years; he gave permission only in 1984, after his mother and father had both died. Which is to say: the first major prize for photography that defines Josef Koudelka's career was awarded to a name that did not technically exist, given for a body of work whose author the awarding committee did not know.

ON THIS DAY

June 5, 1989 — On Chang'an Avenue, near Tiananmen Square, an unidentified man stands in front of a column of Type 59 tanks. He is photographed from upper-floor balconies at the Beijing Hotel by, at minimum, six photojournalists: Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, Charlie Cole of Newsweek, Stuart Franklin of Magnum, Arthur Tsang Hin Wah of Reuters, Terril Jones of the AP, and the Hong Kong photographer Sin Wai Keung. The man's identity has never been definitively established. The photograph that became canonical — Widener's, taken with a borrowed lens and shot through a head wound from the day before — was named one of Time's 100 most influential photographs ever made. Thirty-seven years later, Tank Man remains both the defining image of the protest and a touchstone in the longer argument about what photography can and cannot do at the edge of state violence.

Tank Man, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, June 5, 1989. Photograph by Jeff Widener / The Associated Press.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

To advertise an exhibition, book, fair, or open call to photography collectors, curators, and gallerists worldwide, email internationalphotographynews@gmail.com

The International Review of Photography is a Fabrik Media publication | photograph.is

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]]><![CDATA[Marilyn Posed. Capa May Have. Does It Matter?]]>https://photograph.is/p/marilyn-posed-capa-may-have-doeshttps://photograph.is/p/marilyn-posed-capa-may-have-doesMon, 25 May 2026 13:03:22 GMTTHE FRAME

Fourteen Photographers, One Face: What Marilyn Monroe Understood About the Camera

Sam Shaw, Marilyn Monroe – Amber Beads – New York, 1957. © Shaw Family Archives. Courtesy of Peter Fetterman Gallery

This coming Saturday, May 30, Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica opens Marilyn Monroe: A Silent Life, a major photographic exhibition that gathers the work of the photographers who shaped — and witnessed — the most photographed woman of the twentieth century. The roster is extraordinary: Eve Arnold, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cornell Capa, André de Dienes, Elliott Erwitt, Allan Grant, Philippe Halsman, Douglas Kirkland, Milton Greene, Inge Morath, Lawrence Schiller, Sam Shaw, and Bert Stern, among others. Few subjects in the history of the medium have been photographed by so many of its masters.

What makes the exhibition more than a parade of famous images is its argument about performance. Monroe is often remembered through the unguarded frame — searching, alone, caught between takes. But A Silent Life gives equal weight to the artifice: the studio sessions, the magazine assignments, the constructed photographs in which a performer acutely aware of the lens shaped and reshaped herself in real time. The exhibition moves fluidly between the two registers, and refuses to treat one as more truthful than the other.

The result is a layered portrait — not a single narrative but a study of the space between the composed and the candid, the myth and the inner life that flickers beneath it. A publicity still carries an unexpected stillness; a snapshot feels quietly staged.

WHY IT MATTERS

A show about the most photographed woman of the century is really a show about authorship — about who makes an image when a subject knows exactly how to be seen. Fourteen photographers, one face, and a reminder that the camera never simply records: it negotiates. Visit: Peter Fetterman Gallery

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

The Falling Soldier — Robert Capa, 1936

Robert Capa, The Falling Soldier (Death of a Loyalist Militiaman), Córdoba front, Spain, September 5, 1936. © Robert Capa / Cornell Capa. Courtesy Wikipedia

No single image defined twentieth-century war photography more completely — or more contentiously — than Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier. Made on the Córdoba front during the Spanish Civil War and first published in the French magazine Vu in September 1936, then in Life the following year, the photograph appears to capture a Republican militiaman at the precise instant of death, arms flung back, rifle slipping from his hand as he collapses on a grassy slope. It became the photograph of the Spanish Civil War, and one of the most reproduced war images ever made.

It has also been argued over for the better part of a century. Researchers have debated whether the image was made under fire or staged during a lull, whether the location was Cerro Muriano or Espejo, and whether the soldier was Federico Borrell García, a militiaman from Alcoy. The International Center of Photography, which holds Capa’s archive, presents the image with that scholarship attached rather than resolved. We feature it this week with a particular date in mind: Capa was killed on May 25, 1954, when he stepped on a landmine while covering the First Indochina War — seventy-two years ago today. The photographer who gave the century its image of a soldier’s death met his own in the field.

ON VIEW
New This Week

Catherine Opie: Holding Blue
Regen Projects
Los Angeles · Opens May 28, 2026

One of the most influential American photographers of the past four decades opens a new exhibition at Regen Projects. Opie built her reputation on portraits of queer communities, on studies of American social architecture — freeways, houses, high-school football — and on a restless willingness to move between subjects. Holding Blue is her latest, and arrives in an LA gallery season unusually rich in photography.

Slice of the Pie
Fraenkel Gallery
San Francisco · May 28 – August 15, 2026

A new summer exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, one of the longest-standing and most respected photography galleries in the United States. Fraenkel’s group shows have a reputation for wit and unexpected juxtaposition, drawing across the gallery’s deep nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century holdings.

Victoria Sambunaris: Fall Line
Yancey Richardson
New York · May 29 – July 2, 2026

For two decades Victoria Sambunaris has photographed the American landscape at the seam where geology meets industry — rail lines, mines, borders, the engineered terrain of the continent — in meticulous large-format color. Fall Line takes its title from the geographic boundary where upland gives way to coastal plain, and continues her inquiry into how land is shaped, crossed, and claimed.

Mary Ellen Bartley: Color Anthology
Yancey Richardson (Project Gallery)
New York · May 29 – July 2, 2026

Opening the same day in Yancey Richardson’s Project Gallery, Mary Ellen Bartley’s Color Anthology continues her quietly radical practice of photographing books as physical objects — stacked, splayed, abstracted into fields of color and edge. Bartley turns the most familiar object in any reader’s life into a study of form, light, and the materiality of print.

Feel the Beat: Dance in Photographs
SFMOMA
San Francisco · Through January 31, 2027

A new exhibition drawn from SFMOMA’s collection exploring how photographers have confronted one of the medium’s oldest problems: how to hold motion still. Spanning rhythm, gesture, and the charged pause between movements, Feel the Beat runs through the coming winter — a generous window for one of the season’s most ambitious Bay Area photography shows.

Miles Davis: A Century of Cool
Musichead Gallery
Los Angeles · May 16 – June 13, 2026

Marking the centennial of Miles Davis’s birth, Musichead Gallery presents a photographic retrospective of the trumpeter whose image was as carefully composed as his sound. The exhibition gathers the work of photographers who captured Davis across the decades — a study of how one of the twentieth century’s defining musicians was seen, and how he chose to be seen.

THIS WEEK
Openings, closings, launches, talks, and one-day events — May 25 through May 31

Monday, May 25

Wednesday, May 28

Friday, May 29

Saturday, May 30

Sunday, May 31

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
The international festival calendar is dense this week and into June.

Looking into June:

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer by Brooke DiDonato
Thames & Hudson

The first monograph from Brooke DiDonato, an American photographer whose surreal domestic tableaux have built a substantial following well beyond the gallery world. DiDonato’s images unfold in ordinary rooms — kitchens, bedrooms, backyards — and then quietly break the rules of those spaces: a figure folded into wallpaper, a body half-vanished into a lawn, faces turned away or obscured. The book gathers a decade of this dreamlike, unsettling domestic theatre into a single volume.

Archipelago by Yolanda del Amo
Kehrer Verlag

Yolanda del Amo builds her photographs the way a playwright blocks a scene. Archipelago collects her staged portraits of figures arranged in domestic and natural settings — together in the frame yet held apart by carefully measured distances, gazes that do not quite meet, bodies that occupy the same space without touching. The result is a quiet, exacting study of intimacy and its absences, of how families and couples are bound and separated at once.

Made of Smokeless Fire by Camille Farrah Lenain
Loose Joints

Camille Farrah Lenain’s Made of Smokeless Fire is a portrait of queer Muslim life in France — a body of work built through proximity and trust rather than spectacle. The title draws on the Qur’anic description of the jinn, beings created from smokeless fire, and Lenain uses it to frame a community living between identities that the wider culture often treats as irreconcilable. A tender, politically charged debut from one of Loose Joints’ most distinctive recent signings.

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IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Opening, Closing and Ongoing Exhibitions from Around the World

OPENING SOON

Los Angeles

CLOSING SOON

London

New York

ONGOING

Berlin

Fort Worth

London

Los Angeles

New York

Paris

Santa Monica

OPEN CALLS

ONE QUESTION

Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier has been argued over for ninety years: made under fire, or staged in a quiet moment between them? Suppose, for the sake of the question, that it was staged. If a photograph’s historical weight and emotional truth are undiminished — if it still tells us something true about that war and about war itself — does it matter whether the instant it depicts was authentic? Where should documentary photography draw the line between an image that records a moment and an image that represents one?

Reply with your view. The most interesting responses appear in next week’s issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

Robert Capa was, in a sense, invented. In Paris in the mid-1930s, the Hungarian photographer Endre Friedmann and his partner, the German photographer Gerda Pohorylle, were struggling to sell their work. So they created a character: “Robert Capa,” a famous, successful, and entirely fictional American photographer whose pictures — they told editors — commanded premium prices. The ruse worked until it was discovered, at which point Friedmann simply became Robert Capa for the rest of his life. Pohorylle, meanwhile, took the name Gerda Taro and became a celebrated war photographer in her own right before she was killed covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937, at twenty-six.

The invented photographer became real in every sense: in 1947 Capa co-founded Magnum Photos, the photographer-owned cooperative that remains the most influential agency in the medium — and his close-in, in-the-action style became a template for modern visual storytelling. The marketing fiction did not just come true; it reshaped the craft.

ON THIS DAY

May 26, 1895 — Dorothea Lange is born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey. At seven she contracted polio, which left her with a lasting limp; she later said of it, “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.” Lange went on to become the defining documentary photographer of the Great Depression, her work for the Farm Security Administration — above all Migrant Mother (1936) — fixing the era in the American imagination. She would help found the magazine Aperture in 1952 and become, in 1966, the first woman granted a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

To advertise an exhibition, book, fair, or open call to photography collectors, curators, and gallerists worldwide, email internationalphotographynews@gmail.com

The International Review of Photography is a Fabrik Media publication | photograph.is

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]]><![CDATA[A 29-Year-Old Just Won Britain's Biggest Photography Prize]]>https://photograph.is/p/a-29-year-old-just-won-britains-biggesthttps://photograph.is/p/a-29-year-old-just-won-britains-biggestMon, 18 May 2026 13:03:26 GMTTHE FRAME

Britain’s Longest-Running Photography Prize Catches Up with the Work

Portrait of Rene Matić by Heather Shuker. ©Heather Shuker. Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery.

The 2026 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize was awarded Thursday evening at The Photographers’ Gallery in London to Rene Matić, the 29-year-old Peterborough-born artist who has become, in the space of three years, one of the most consequential voices in British photography. The £30,000 prize — Britain’s longest-running annual photography honor — was given for AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, Matić’s solo exhibition at CCA Berlin which ran from November 2024 through February 2025.

The shortlist read as the foundation’s strongest in a decade: Jane Evelyn Atwood for the bilingual reprint of Too Much Time / Trop de Peines; Weronika Gęsicka for Encyclopaedia, published by BLOW UP PRESS; and Amak Mahmoodian for One Hundred and Twenty Minutes at the Bristol Photo Festival. Each shortlisted artist receives £5,000.

Matić’s win is significant on multiple counts. They are among the youngest winners in the prize’s 40-year history and the first British recipient in more than a decade. Their practice — diaristic photographs of friends and chosen family, presented alongside sound, film, and found objects — sits at the intersection of subculture, class, and queered domesticity, exactly the territory the British photography establishment has historically circled without entering. As The Art Newspaper noted in its coverage recently, the choice signals a generational and political shift in what the foundation, and by extension the gallery, takes seriously.

WHY IT MATTERS

When a prize this canonical lands on an artist this young, working on these subjects, it's not just a prize — it's a course correction. The Deutsche Börse's shortlist this year, and the Sony World Photography Awards' choice of Citlali Fabián in April, suggest the institutional center of photography is finally catching up to the work that has been quietly redefining the field for half a decade.

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas —
Graciela Iturbide, 1979

In 1979, Graciela Iturbide began what would become a seven-year documentary engagement with the Zapotec women of Juchitán de Zaragoza, a small town in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca where matriarchal social structures had endured against the gendered grain of broader Mexican society. The image that emerged from that first year — a portrait of a market vendor named Zobeida Díaz, head crowned with live iguanas she had been selling — would, within a decade, become one of the defining photographs of twentieth-century Mexican art. It is now held in the collections of SFMOMA, the International Center of Photography, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, and has been reproduced as a statue in Juchitán itself, where the original subject is still remembered by name.

Graciela Iturbide: Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán, Mexico, 1979. Image Courtesy Etherton Gallery

Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas belongs to a body of work — Juchitán de las Mujeres, 1979–86 — that earned Iturbide the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund grant in 1987 and, eventually, the Hasselblad Award in 2008. It is also a useful counterpoint to this week’s other major photography news. The Sony Photographer of the Year for 2026, announced last month, is Citlali Fabián, an artist from the Yalalteca Indigenous community in Oaxaca whose series Bilha, Stories of my Sisters takes up the documentation of Indigenous Mexican women’s lives that Iturbide began nearly half a century ago. The line from Juchitán to Bilha is direct, and the institutional photography world has finally caught up with what Iturbide saw first.

ON VIEW
New This Week

Hujar:Contact
The Morgan Library
New York · Opens Friday, May 22, 2026 – through October 25

The Morgan’s Hujar exhibition opens this Friday, pairing contact sheets with finished prints across the photographer’s career — from the Portraits in Life and Death (1976) series to the East Village photographs that defined a downtown generation. Accompanies the MACK / Morgan Library publication Hujar:Contact by Joel Smith.

Photoville 2026
Photoville
Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York · Through June

The free open-air photography festival’s opening weekend wrapped Saturday at Brooklyn Bridge Park; the broader festival continues through June. This year’s banner exhibition from the International Center of Photography, ICE in Communities, addresses the experience of immigration enforcement under the current federal administration.

Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage
Moderna Museet, Malmö
May 2 – September 27, 2026

The exhibition concentrates on Turbeville’s personal experiments in photo-collage — the cutting, taping, and reassembly that gave her fashion editorials their distinctive air of unreality. A long-overdue Scandinavian survey of work that has been more cited than seen.

THIS WEEK
Talks, openings, fairs, and closings — day by day, May 17 through May 24.

Monday, May 18

Friday, May 22

Friday, May 22 – Sunday, May 24

  • The Phair 2026 at Turin · Three-day photography fair with equal-space gallery format and a three-day talks programme

Saturday, May 24

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Month

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Josef Koudelka: Diaries
Aperture
May 2026 · Hardcover

For half a century, the Czech Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka has built a body of work — Gypsies (1975), Exiles(1988), the panoramic landscapes of Chaos (1999) — that operates at the scale of nations and centuries. Diaries offers something rarer: the artist’s own workbook. Diary-page facsimiles, contact-sheet photographs, and self-portraits trace the daily, private practice that produced those public masterworks. Particularly rewarding for readers who have lived with Koudelka’s prints for years and are now invited to see the thinking behind them.

LAMF: Three Days in Berlin, 1987 by John Gossage
Magic Hour Press
May 2026 · 80 pages · 44 tritone images with silkscreen UV varnish

A historical artifact of the highest production caliber. In November 1987 — two years before the Wall came down — the American photographer John Gossage spent three days in West Berlin and made the photographs that, almost forty years later, MACK now presents as a deluxe tritone edition. Gossage’s The Pond (1985) is widely regarded as one of the most influential American photobooks of its decade; LAMF extends the same disciplined attention to the surface of late-Cold-War Berlin — its graffiti, its grey buildings, its specific quality of pre-collapse stillness.

Traces by Ishiuchi Miyako
Aperture
May 2026 · Hardcover

The first comprehensive English-language survey of one of Japan’s most important contemporary photographers, Tracesgathers more than four decades of Ishiuchi Miyako’s work — from the gritty, dye-stained portraits of Yokosuka that opened her career in the late 1970s to the cellular intimacy of Mother’s (the photographs of her mother’s clothes and possessions, made after her mother’s death) and the ひろしま/hiroshima series, in which the surviving garments of atomic-bomb victims are presented with an attention reserved, in another tradition, for relics. Ishiuchi (b. 1947) won the Hasselblad Award in 2014; this volume positions her work, finally, for the English-language readership it has long deserved.

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IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Opening, Closing and Ongoing Exhibitions from Around the World

OPENING SOON

Buenos Aires

Malmö

New York

Turin

CLOSING SOON

Chicago

Costa Mesa

London

Paris

Turin

ONGOING

Amsterdam

Antwerp

Berlin

Brooklyn / New York

Houston

Innsbruck

London

Los Angeles

Paris

Rome

The Hague

Tucson

ONE QUESTION

The Deutsche Börse went to Rene Matić, a chronicler of British working-class life. The Sony Photographer of the Year went to Citlali Fabián, an Indigenous Mexican photographer. Both prizes now consistently honor photographers from positions traditionally outside the institutional center. Has the international photography prize landscape finally caught up with the work that matters — or are these awards still two beats behind the artists they’re supposed to recognize?

Reply with your view. The most interesting responses appear in next week’s issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

Joel Meyerowitz, named this year's Sony Outstanding Contribution to Photography honoree, was one of a small group of American photographers who insisted on color in the early 1960s — at a moment when the Museum of Modern Art treated color as a vulgarity reserved for advertising. His 1962 New York street photographs predate William Eggleston's landmark MoMA show Photographs by William Eggleston by fourteen years. The recognition the photography establishment finally gave Eggleston in 1976 was something Meyerowitz had been quietly practicing since the Kennedy administration.

ON THIS DAY

May 18, 1980 — Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington State at 8:32 a.m. local time. Among those killed in the lateral blast is Robert Landsburg, a 48-year-old volcano photographer who, recognizing he could not outrun the pyroclastic flow, used his last seconds to rewind the film in his camera, place it in his backpack, and lie down on top of the backpack to shield it with his body. The film was recovered seventeen days later and the photographs published in National Geographic the following year. The David Powell UPI image of the eruption itself, made the same morning from a chartered plane, became one of the defining photojournalistic images of the 1980s.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

To advertise an exhibition, book, fair, or open call to photography collectors, curators, and gallerists worldwide, email internationalphotographynews@gmail.com

The International Review of Photography is a Fabrik Media publication | photograph.is

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]]><![CDATA[The Lost Master of London Photography Returns]]>https://photograph.is/p/the-lost-master-of-london-photographyhttps://photograph.is/p/the-lost-master-of-london-photographyFri, 15 May 2026 11:49:59 GMTPHOTO LONDON: SPECIAL EDITION

We’re at Photo London this week. The 11th edition opened Wednesday and runs through Sunday, May 17, at Olympia’s National Hall in Kensington — the fair’s first year at its new home. This is a special issue, separate from our regular Monday edition, is focused on a single presentation that has earned the room.

THE FRAME

The Lost Master Returns

E.O. Hoppé — Hands, 1922. United Kingdom, 1878–1972. Platinum palladium print, printed later. Signed and stamped by the Estate (verso). Copyright The Artist.

Cecil Beaton called him “The Master.”

For decades — through the 1910s, 20s, and 30s — Emil Otto Hoppé (1878–1972) was the most sought-after portrait photographer working in London. Joseph Conrad sat for him. So did Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Albert Einstein, Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky — the artists, writers, dancers, scientists, and political figures who defined the era. At his peak, his reputation stood alongside Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Sander, Weston, Cunningham, and Renger-Patzsch.

Then he vanished.

By the mid-1950s, Hoppé’s entire archive had been absorbed into a London picture library and filed not under his name but by subject — portraits in one drawer, landscapes in another, industry in a third. The history of photography was being written without him. He didn’t merit a line.

This week at Photo London, Curatorial Gallery — the exclusive representative of the E.O. Hoppé Estate — presents a substantial selection of vintage and estate prints from the recovered archive, including many images being shown publicly for the first time. The gallery has spent decades doing the slow work of reassembly, attribution, and reintroduction.

E.O. Hoppé — Feeding the Birds in Winter, St. James’ Park, London, 1919. United Kingdom, 1878–1972. Platinum palladium print, printed later. Signed and stamped by the Estate (verso).
E.O. Hoppé — Men Playing Cards (Advertising Study), 1922. United Kingdom, 1878–1972. Vintage gelatin silver print. Signed and stamped by the Estate (verso).
E.O. Hoppé — Nude Study, 1934. United Kingdom, 1878–1972. Platinum palladium print, printed later. Signed and stamped by the Estate (verso). Copyright The Artist.

The range is what surprises. Psychologically acute portraits of the period’s central figures. Sophisticated street photography from London, New York, Berlin. Modernist studies of industry, machinery, and the architecture of a new century. Images from sustained travel across India, Africa, and the Americas, made with an empathy for the people in front of the camera that almost no travel photographer of the period bothered with.

What you’re looking at, walking up to the stand, is one of the great twentieth-century bodies of work — assembled, identified, and shown together for the first time since the 1950s.

WHY IT MATTERS

The history of photography is mostly a history of who got curated and who didn’t. Hoppé didn’t, for reasons of accident and archive politics rather than anything to do with the work. The current rehabilitation isn’t a discovery. The work has always been there. It’s a correction.

The fair returns him to the city where the career happened. Worth the visit.

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THE DETAILS

E.O. Hoppé · presented by Curatorial Gallery Photo London 2026 · Stand A06 14–17 May 2026. For more information, visit curatorialgallery.com

Photo London 2026 National Hall, Olympia · Hammersmith Road, London W14 8UX Open today through Sunday, May 17.

Kensington (Olympia) station sits directly next to the venue.

Our regular Monday edition resumes May 18. If you're in London this weekend — check out Photo London at the National Hall, Olympia in Kensington.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

To advertise an exhibition, book, fair, or open call, email internationalphotographynews@gmail.com

Published weekly by Fabrik Media | photograph.is

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]]><![CDATA[Everything That Was Wrong With America, in One Frame]]>https://photograph.is/p/everything-that-was-wrong-with-americahttps://photograph.is/p/everything-that-was-wrong-with-americaTue, 12 May 2026 00:09:22 GMTTHE FRAME

The Morgan Library Opens the Most Intimate Exhibition in Peter Hujar’s History

On May 22, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York opens Hujar:Contact — an exhibition offering something that has never been possible before: more than 110 of Peter Hujar’s original contact sheets and 20 enlargements, drawn from the Morgan’s extraordinary archive of over 5,700 contact sheets spanning his entire career from 1954 to 1987.

Hujar (1934–1987) photographed the overlapping worlds of artists, writers, drag performers, and underground luminaries in downtown New York. His portraits of Marsha P. Johnson, Candy Darling, Patti Smith, David Wojnarowicz, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and Paul Thek are among the defining images of their era. He was largely ignored by the mainstream art world during his lifetime. He died of AIDS in November 1987, 53 years old. His work is now recognized as among the most significant American portrait photography of the 20th century.

Contact sheets show what a photographer chose — and what they didn’t. They reveal the editing mind at work, the frame before the decisive frame, the hesitations and instincts behind the work we know. The Morgan’s archive of Hujar’s contact sheets is one of the most significant photographic archives in America. Hujar:Contact is the first exhibition to make that archive public at this scale. The accompanying catalogue, co-published by MACK and the Morgan Library, with texts by Joel Smith, arrives the same day. On view through October 25, 2026.

WHY IT MATTERS

Throughout his career, Hujar recorded more than a thousand photo shoots in job books — handwritten logs of every session. Those books are transcribed and annotated in the catalogue, illuminating the contact sheets alongside never-before-seen images and the earliest iterations of his most iconic works. Hujar photographed people the art world passed over — and the art world spent 40 years catching up. This exhibition is the reckoning.

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

American Gothic, Washington D.C. — Gordon Parks, 1942

In 1942, Gordon Parks was a young photographer working for the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.C. His supervisor, Roy Stryker, asked him to document the conditions facing Black Americans in the capital. Parks met Ella Watson, a government charwoman who cleaned the federal buildings at night for a wage that barely covered her rent. She had grown up in poverty, lost her husband and a daughter, and was raising a grandchild and an adopted daughter on her cleaning salary.

Parks placed Watson in front of an American flag — broom in one hand, mop in the other — and photographed her. The composition directly mirrors Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930). Stryker saw the contact sheet and told Parks it was the greatest photograph he had ever seen — then quietly removed it from the FSA archive, fearing it too politically charged for the times. The image circulated anyway. When Parks joined LIFE magazine in 1948 as its first African American staff photographer, he brought American Gothic with him. It became one of the defining images of American documentary photography.

Parks later said Watson’s story represented “everything that was wrong with America.” The photograph is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library of Congress, and dozens of other institutions worldwide. Watson herself appears in several other photographs Parks made that day — at church, at home, with her grandchildren — that were never suppressed. But it is American Gothic that history kept.

WHY IT MATTERS

The photograph holds two ideas at once: the promise of America and the reality of it, in the same frame. Parks did not need to editorialize. He simply put Ella Watson in front of the flag and pressed the shutter. The genius is in the restraint — the trust that the image, correctly composed, would say everything. Like Hujar, Parks photographed people who were routinely overlooked, with an attention that refused to simplify what it found. The subjects survived. The photographs outlasted almost everything else.

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OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Hujar:Contact by Joel Smith
MACK + The Morgan Library & Museum
364 pages • Flexicover with linen spine

The catalogue accompanying the Morgan Library’s landmark exhibition, arriving on the same day the show opens — May 22. Texts by Joel Smith establish a chronology of Hujar’s contact sheets from 1954 to 1987, presenting an artist developing and refining his practice against the tumultuous cultural politics of Stonewall and AIDS. Hujar’s handwritten job books — over a thousand entries — are transcribed and annotated throughout. Digital Camera World: “A love letter to the contact sheet, and what 5,700 of them reveal about one of photography’s most essential names.”

Holy Cow! by Melonie Bennett
GOST
176 pages • 66 images

Twenty years of family photographs made between 1990 and 2011 on a dairy farm in Maine — the rituals, dramas, laughter, gatherings, drunken exploits, and quieter moments of reprieve. Bennett grew up under constant financial stress but found her groove in the high school darkroom, becoming the designated driver at family parties so she could photograph what everyone else was doing. Intertwined with the images are recollections by her brother, Merritt. An unconventional family album, humane and funny, heavy and light at once.

Easy Days by Sage Sohier
Nazraeli Press
76 pages • 56 duotone plates

Made between 1978 and 1986, the 56 photographs in Easy Days capture the prosaic moments of ordinary people in the open spaces of parking lots, front yards, and public streets. This is the third title in Sohier’s trilogy, alongside Americans Seen and Passing Time, with an introductory interview by fellow Nazraeli alumnus Mark Steinmetz. Sohier’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. “These pictures describe a long-ago time, and yet in looking at them I become once again the young photographer who took them on a hot summer day.”

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ON VIEW
New This Week

Photo London 2026
Olympia, Kensington, London
May 14 – 17, 2026
VIP Preview May 13

Photo London opens its first edition at Olympia this week — the most significant annual photography fair in the UK. Steven Meisel as Master of Photography; a dedicated Screening Room featuring Sarah Moon, Alys Tomlinson, and Luka Yuanyuan Yang; the Source Section curated by Tristan Lund; and a Talks Programme including conversations on truth, AI, and visual journalism.

Hujar:Contact
The Morgan Library & Museum | New York
May 22 – October 25, 2026

110+ contact sheets, 20 enlargements. See THE FRAME above. Catalogue published by MACK ships the same day.

Callahan, Gowin and Sommer
Etherton Gallery | Tucson
Through July 11, 2026

53 iconic, rare, and vintage photographs tracing a lineage: Gowin studied with Callahan, befriended Sommer. Together the backbone of American photographic modernism.

Mixedness Is My Mythology — Farren van Wyk
Fotomuseum Den Haag
Through August 23, 2026

South African-Dutch photographer Farren van Wyk examines the legacies of colonialism, migration, and apartheid through black-and-white portraiture, redefining her “coloured” classification and reclaiming her family’s heritage.

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Week

  • Arles Book Awards 2026 — Deadline May 13. No fee. Three categories: Author’s Book, Historical Book, Photo-Text Book. Prize: €6,000 per category, split between publisher and author. Eligible books published May 2025–May 2026.

  • Singapore International Photography Festival 2026 — Deadline May 17. Fee: €25–38. 10th biennial edition. Three prizes of SGD$2,000 each: Best Portfolio, Best Published Photobook, Best Dummy Photobook.

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DATES & EXHIBITIONS
Openings, closings, and what’s on now

OPENING SOON

CLOSING SOON

ONGOING

ONE QUESTION

Gordon Parks photographed Ella Watson in front of the American flag in 1942. His editor called it the most powerful image he’d ever seen — then pulled it from the archive, fearing it was too politically charged. Is there such a thing as too political for a photograph — or is that exactly when photographs matter most?

Tell us what you think in the comments. We’ll highlight the best responses next issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

Gordon Parks was the first African American photographer hired by LIFE Magazine, in 1948. He went on to work there for over 20 years, shooting fashion, crime, celebrity portraits, the civil rights movement, and the Black Panthers. In 1971, he directed Shaft — making him the first African American director to helm a major Hollywood studio picture. When he died in 2006 at 93, the New York Times described him as “one of the most versatile figures in American arts and letters.”

ON THIS DAY

May 17, 1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell delivered a lecture at the Royal Institution in London in which he demonstrated, for the first time in history, the principles of color photography. The image — a tartan ribbon — had been photographed three times by Thomas Sutton, inventor of the single-lens reflex camera, using red, green, and blue-violet filters. Three black-and-white glass plates were then projected through those same filters using separate lantern slides, creating a composite color image on a screen. Maxwell’s purpose was not to invent photography but to prove his theory of three-color vision: that all colors visible to the human eye can be created by combining red, green, and blue light. The demonstration proved the concept — imperfectly, as the photographic plates of the era were not sensitive to red light, and the “red” in the tartan image was captured partly through ultraviolet reflectance by accident. But the additive RGB color model Maxwell established that evening in 1861 is the foundation for every color photograph, every digital screen, and every camera sensor in existence today. The three original glass plate separations survive at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge.

The tartan ribbon, 1861. Photographed three times by Thomas Sutton using red, green, and blue-violet filters, then projected as a composite — the first demonstration of color photography. The RGB model it proved is the foundation of every color image made since.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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Published weekly by Fabrik Media | photograph.is

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]]><![CDATA[Photo London Arrives Next Week — Plus the Story Behind One of the Most Famous Fashion Photographs Ever Made.]]>https://photograph.is/p/photo-london-arrives-next-week-plushttps://photograph.is/p/photo-london-arrives-next-week-plusMon, 04 May 2026 13:03:47 GMTTHE FRAME

Photo London Opens Next Week. Here’s Everything Worth Knowing.

The 11th edition of Photo London opens for its VIP preview on Wednesday, May 13, followed by four public days through Sunday, May 17 — the first edition at the fair’s new home at Olympia, Kensington. The expanded footprint makes room for something the fair has never had before: a dedicated Screening Room, presenting a full programme of artist films daily throughout the week.

The Screening Room brings together moving image work spanning documentary, portraiture, performance, archive, ritual, landscape, and experimental film. Highlights include:

  • Vera by Alys Tomlinson — a poetic portrait of Sister Vera and the Orthodox community that has been her home for 20 years

  • Katabasis by Justus de Rode — myth, memory, and ambiguous loss

  • There Is Something About Lillian by Sarah Moon — a homage to pioneering fashion photographer Lillian Bassman

  • Four films by Luka Yuanyuan Yang, including The Lady from Shanghai and Tales of Chinatown

The Talks Programme (curated by Thames & Hudson) includes:

  • When Seeing Might Not Be Believing — CatchLight and the Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant on truth, trust, and the future of visual journalism

  • Alejandro Cegarra and Alfredo Jaar in conversation (Prix Pictet / Leica Oskar Barnack Award) — on the ethical and political force of the image

  • Cut Out: A Feminist History of the Photo Collage — Justine Kurland and Fiona Rogers

  • Jill Furmanovsky on photographing Oasis; Jess T. Dugan and Charlotte Cotton on Love Pictures

One of the centerpieces of this year’s edition is Steven Meisel as Master of Photography — the American fashion photographer who has produced over 300 Vogue Italia covers and collaborated with Madonna on Sex, and who rarely exhibits publicly. For Photo London he presents images from his first professional assignment in London: portraits of Stella Tennant, Plum Sykes, Bella Freud, Honor Fraser, and Lady Louise Campbell, shot with stylist Isabella Blow.

Photo: Courtesy of Steven Meisel and Photo London

The Source Section (curated by Tristan Lund) presents solo artist presentations including Rosalind Fox Solomon’s Portraits in the Time of AIDS (first shown in New York in 1988); Tom Wood’s previously unseen photographs from the summer of 1975; Alfredo Jaar’s Searching for Africa in LIFE, 1966/2022; and Deutsche Börse Prize nominees Weronika Gęsicka and Jane Evelyn Atwood. Autograph presents We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For featuring Zanele Muholi, Carrie Mae Weems, Poulomi Basu, and Ingrid Pollard, among others.

WHY IT MATTERS

Alongside Paris Photo in November and AIPAD’s Photography Show in April, Photo London has established itself as one of the leading photography fairs in the world — and its first year at Olympia represents a significant step forward. The Screening Room is new. The Olympia venue is new. Steven Meisel exhibiting publicly is new. And the Talks Programme, which now includes the photojournalism ethics conversation that is impossible to avoid in the age of AI, reflects exactly what the medium is arguing about right now. Worth the trip. Full programme

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

Dovima with Elephants — Richard Avedon, 1955

Richard Avedon, Dovima with Elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955. Published in Harper’s Bazaar, September 1955. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

In August 1955, Richard Avedon took the model Dovima to the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. The circus was in town. The elephants — named Trilby and Suzie — were chained. Avedon put Dovima between them in an evening gown by the young Yves Saint Laurent, then working at Dior. She extended her arms, one toward each animal. He took the picture.

The photograph ran in Harper’s Bazaar in September 1955 and became, immediately, the most analyzed fashion image ever made. The smooth silk against wrinkled skin. The model’s serenity against the elephants’ struggle. The evening gown in a circus tent. Luxury and captivity in a single frame. It was unlike anything that had appeared in fashion photography before: a photograph that placed fashion inside a context charged with tension, history, and meaning, rather than removing it from the world entirely.

Lillian Bassman, who as art director of Harper’s Bazaar had championed Avedon’s career since the late 1940s, gave him the creative freedom that made this image possible. This week, Photo London’s Screening Room presents Sarah Moon’s film There Is Something About Lillian — a homage to Bassman and a reminder that behind the most celebrated images in fashion photography, there was almost always an editor who let a photographer run. The image is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and dozens of other major institutions worldwide.

WHY IT MATTERS

Dovima with Elephants is the photograph that proved fashion photography could be art — not despite being commercial, but through it. Avedon did not abandon beauty or elegance; he placed them in a context that demanded interpretation. That tension — between the glamorous and the political, the decorative and the meaningful — is the argument that fashion photography has been making ever since. The fact that this week in London, Steven Meisel, Deborah Turbeville’s photocollages, and a Sarah Moon film about Lillian Bassman are all on the same program suggests the conversation is still going.

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OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

FASHION by Mark Power
GOST

Fashion [fash-uhn] v., transitive: to make or construct out of constituent parts; to form, mould, or shape. Not a book about clothing. Mark Power spent 27 years photographing construction sites, factories, quarries, shipyards, foundries, and recycling facilities across 23 countries — places where things are made, or fashioned. The images are sequenced by visual links of color, form, and light, not by location or chronology. Captions and dates are deliberately absent. Weighs nearly 3kg. Influenced by Sultan and Mandel’s Evidence (1977).

Remembering the Future by Mark Klett and William L. Fox
Radius Books

It is estimated that nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s put four tons of plutonium into the stratosphere. Everyone born after the BRAVO test has been exposed. Mark Klett — a former geologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and professor emeritus at Arizona State — uses his camera to explore landscape, history, and the passage of time across the American West, photographing nuclear testing sites as a form of stratigraphic record. Text by William L. Fox, founding director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. Signed edition available.

New York and the American Flag by David Hurn
RRB Photobooks

Magnum photographer David Hurn first visited New York in 1962, on the advice of Bruce Davidson. Decades later, browsing his contact sheets, he noticed how many images featured the American flag — and returned twice more (2007 and 2017) to finish the thought. The result spans black-and-white to color, documenting a symbol that has accumulated layers of meaning across civil war, civil rights, protest, mourning, and polarized politics: the flag revered, worn, commercialized, and ambiguous. A special edition includes two signed 7×5” prints.

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ON VIEW
New This Week

Callahan, Gowin and Sommer
Etherton Gallery | Tucson, Arizona
Through July 11, 2026

Fifty-three iconic, rare, and vintage photographs tracing a lineage: Emmet Gowin studied with Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design and later formed a lasting friendship with Frederick Sommer. Together they represent the backbone of American photographic modernism — Callahan’s formal rigor and intimate seriality, Sommer’s Surrealist-inflected desert experiments, and Gowin’s sustained attention to family, landscape, and the tension between beauty and violence. Callahan: “I think photography is an exploration. You start from scratch and learn things as you go along.” A rare opportunity to see these three bodies of work in serious dialogue.

A Light Exists in Spring
Center for Photographic Art | Carmel, California
May 7 – June 23, 2026

Opening reception Thursday, May 7, at the Marjorie Evans Gallery, Sunset Center. Curated by Ann Jastrab, this group exhibition takes its title from the Emily Dickinson poem — a light peculiar to spring that makes things visible that were there all along.

Mixedness Is My Mythology — Farren van Wyk
Fotomuseum Den Haag
Through August 23, 2026

South African-Dutch photographer Farren van Wyk examines the historical ties between South Africa and the Netherlands — the legacies of colonialism, migration, and apartheid. Born in the final year of apartheid and raised in the Netherlands, van Wyk uses black-and-white photography to navigate her “coloured” classification and mixed identity, redefining the term “person of color” and reclaiming her family’s heritage.

Above the River and Under the Sky — Maciej Markowicz
Inn Situ | Innsbruck
Through July 18, 2026

© Maciej Markowicz

Marking the bicentennial of photography, Markowicz transforms a boat and a van into functional camera obscura darkrooms to capture large-format, directly exposed color negatives on chromogenic paper across the Alpine rivers of Tyrol and Vorarlberg. Each work is unique and unreproducible. Photography, painting, and performance in a single exposure.

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week and Next

Bieler Fototage
Biel/Bienne, Switzerland
May 9 – June 7, 2026
Opens Saturday

Theme: Forever Happy — the multi-faceted nature of happiness from fleeting personal moments to societal pressure and cultural marketing. Open-air gallery integrated into the fabric of Biel/Bienne and surrounding Aarau. Exhibiting artists include Rafał Milach and Dominic Nahr.

Les Boutographies
Montpellier, France
May 9 – 31, 2026
Opens Saturday

Three weeks of exhibitions showcasing emerging European talent at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, with walking and cycling exhibition routes through the city.

Photo London 2026
May 13–17, 2026
Olympia, Kensington
VIP Preview May 13

See THE FRAME above.👆🏻
Full programme at photolondon.org

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DATES & EXHIBITIONS
Openings, closings, and what’s on now

OPENING SOON

CLOSING SOON

ONGOING

ONE QUESTION

Richard Avedon photographed Dovima with Elephants in 1955 for Harper’s Bazaar — arguably the most famous fashion photograph ever made. Today, thousands of photographers produce billions of fashion images annually. Has the explosion of fashion photography made it more or less significant as an art form?

Tell us what you think in the comments. We’ll highlight the best responses next issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

Richard Avedon dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine in 1942. His first job as a photographer was taking ID photographs of sailors — hundreds of faces, one after another, without context or narrative or creative direction. He later said it taught him more about portraiture than anything else in his career. He was 19 years old. By the time he joined Harper’s Bazaar three years later, he already knew how to make a person’s face the entire photograph.

ON THIS DAY

May 6, 1937: The LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire while attempting to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. Thirty-six people died. Photojournalist Sam Shere of International News Photos had been reluctant to take the assignment — a routine airship landing. When the Hindenburg erupted in flames at 7:25pm, he had no time to raise his Speed Graphic to his eye. “I had two shots in my big Speed Graphic, but I didn’t even have time to get it up to my eye,” he said later. “I literally ‘shot’ from the hip — it was over so fast there was nothing else to do.” His photograph won the Editor and Publisher Award for Best News Picture of 1937. In 1969, Jimmy Page used it as the basis for the artwork on Led Zeppelin’s debut album.

Sam Shere, Crash of the Hindenburg, Lakehurst, New Jersey, May 6, 1937.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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]]><![CDATA[A Photographer Was Allowed Into a Federal Courthouse. What She Captured Won the World Press Photo of the Year.]]>https://photograph.is/p/a-photographer-was-allowed-into-ahttps://photograph.is/p/a-photographer-was-allowed-into-aMon, 27 Apr 2026 13:00:52 GMTTHE FRAME

In a Democracy, the Camera’s Presence in That Hallway Was Not Incidental. It Was Essential.

2026 World Press Photo of the Year. Carol Guzy, Separated by ICE. ZUMA Press / iWitness for the Miami Herald. Courtesy World Press Photo.

The 2026 World Press Photo of the Year was announced on April 23. The winning image was made by Carol Guzy of ZUMA Press and the Miami Herald on August 26, 2025, at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City — one of the very few US federal courthouses where photographers had been granted access. It shows Luis, an Ecuadorian migrant with no criminal record and the sole financial provider for his family, being detained by ICE agents following a routine immigration court hearing. In the hallway behind him, his wife Cocha and their three children — ages 7, 13, and 15 — are left inconsolable.

The jury’s statement was precise and unambiguous: “What Guzy records here is not an isolated moment of grief, rather, it is evidence and documentation of a government policy being applied systematically to people who followed the rules they were given. In a democracy, the camera’s presence in that hallway is not incidental, it is essential.”

Two photographs were named finalist. Saber Nuraldin of EPA Images photographed Palestinians climbing onto an aid truck entering Gaza via the Zikim Crossing during a brief suspension in Israeli military operations — a single image the jury said “offers visual evidence of famine.” And Victor J. Blue, photographing for the New York Times Magazine, documented Maya Achi women outside a Guatemala City court on the day three former civil defense patrollers were sentenced to 40 years in prison for rape and crimes against humanity — the conclusion of a 14-year legal battle begun when 36 Indigenous women broke their silence in 2011. The jury noted Blue’s “classical, restrained approach emphasizes the women’s dignity and authority, deliberately countering historical visual narratives that frame women—particularly survivors of sexual violence—as powerless subjects.”

Selected from 57,376 entries across 141 countries. The exhibition opens April 24 at De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam and travels worldwide through 2027. World Press Photo

WHY IT MATTERS

Carol Guzy has now won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography four times — 1991, 1995, 2000, and 2011 — more than any photographer in history. She is 69 years old. She began her career as a nurse before switching to photography at 25. The photograph of Luis and his family is not a photograph about immigration as an abstract policy debate. It is a photograph of a specific man, a specific family, and a specific hallway. That specificity is what makes it a great photograph. And that specificity is why the camera needed to be there.

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ON VIEW
New This Week

Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Through July 26, 2026

Lillian Bassman was the art director at Harper’s Bazaar who championed and promoted Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Paul Himmel before becoming a landmark photographer in her own right. Her high-contrast black-and-white images of women — defined by gesture, silhouette, and abstraction rather than literal representation — challenged the conventions of fashion photography between the 1940s and 1960s. Rare vintage prints, layout designs, and darkroom experiments on view. Bassman once said her contribution to the genre “has been to photograph fashion with a woman’s eye for a woman’s intimate feelings.”

Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire
Autograph, London
April 16 – September 19, 2026

Surreal, imaginative portraiture that probes the limits of communication and memory. Nhu Xuan Hua’s parents immigrated to France from Vietnam; her work restages scenes from archival images, obscuring faces and identities with garments, flashes of light, and digital manipulation. The body exists between eras and places — suspended in displacement, resisting resolution. Previously shown at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam and Les Rencontres d’Arles.

New Woman, New Vision: Women Photographers of the Bauhaus
Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin
April 17 – October 4, 2026

Works by Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Grit Kallin-Fischer, and Lucia Moholy, among many others — photographers who used the medium as one of the few accessible pathways through the Bauhaus’s patriarchal structure. Their experimental methods were central to the New Vision movement and captured the contradictions of Weimar modernity: between craft and industry, emotion and function, the collective and the individual.

Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage
Moderna Museet, Malmö
May 2 – September 27, 2026

The great iconoclast of 1970s fashion photography alongside Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, concentrated here on her personal photocollage experiments: xeroxing, cutting, blurring, scratching, and pinning prints to heighten an air of unreality where fashion and fiction coalesce. Turbeville rejected the glossy sex appeal of the era and replaced it with something stranger and more unsettling.

Deborah Turbeville, Comme des Garçons, Escalier dans Passage Vivienne, from the series ”Comme des Garçons”, Paris, France, November, 1980 Courtesy of MUUS Collection & Moderna Museet. © Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection.

Johny Pitts: Black Bricolage
MEP, Paris
Through May 24, 2026

Twenty years of documenting the African diaspora in Europe — London, Lisbon, Brussels, Berlin. “Being Black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant.” Pitts assembles photographic archives, ephemera, and personal testimony into an Afropean identity that is, in his words, “whole and unhyphenated.”

Francesca Woodman: Lately I Find a Sliver of Mirror Is Simply to Slice an Eyelid
Gagosian, Rome
April 29 – July 31, 2026

The exhibition centers on Woodman’s preoccupation with classical themes and archetypes — the body as sculpture, allegory as photographic language. Woodman photographed from 1972 until her death in 1981 at age 22, producing a body of work of extraordinary formal invention: blurred self-portraits, bodies merging with architecture, figures partially obscured by wallpaper and furniture. Her work was largely unknown during her lifetime and has since been recognized as one of the most original photographic projects of the late 20th century. Presented in Rome, the exhibition draws on the city’s deep connection to classical mythology and the ruins she inhabited as a student. An accompanying conversation features Brooke Holmes (Princeton, Classics) and representatives of the Woodman Family Foundation.

Francesca Woodman: Untitled or #4 from a Series “Dissection of a Portrait”, 1976. Lifetime gelatin silver print mounted on mat board, sheet: 5 ⅞ × 5 ⅞ inches (14.8 × 14.8 cm), mat board: 14 × 11 inches (35.6 × 27.9 cm)<br>© Woodman Family Foundation/SIAE, Rome

Anton Roland Laub: Mobile Churches in Ceaușescu’s Bucharest
The Wende Museum, Culver City, California
April 25 – October 11, 2026

A documentary project combining recent photographs with archival material to reveal a remarkable episode in Cold War urbanism: seven Orthodox churches in Bucharest secretly relocated — some moved at night — to conceal them behind Communist-era apartment blocks during Ceaușescu’s forced redevelopment of the Romanian capital. Architecture, religion, and state power seen through the documentary lens.

CLOSING SOON…

ONGOING…

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week

Fotografia Europea
Reggio Emilia, Italy
April 30 – June 14, 2026
Opens this Thursday

21st edition. Theme: Ghosts of the Moment. City-wide exhibitions, portfolio reviews, screenings, and workshops across Reggio Emilia.

Bieler Fototage
Biel/Bienne, Switzerland
May 9 – 31, 2026

Theme: vulnerability as a social and political condition. Exhibiting artists include Rafał Milach and Dominic Nahr, among others.

Photo London 2026
May 13 – 17, 2026

First year at its new Olympia venue. Master of Photography: Steven Meisel — the American fashion photographer who has produced an extraordinary volume of Vogue covers and collaborated with Madonna on Sex rarely exhibits publicly. For Photo London he presents images from his first professional assignment in London: portraits of Stella Tennant, Plum Sykes, Bella Freud, Honor Fraser, and Lady Louise Campbell, shot with stylist Isabella Blow. There is also a new “Source” sector curated by Tristan Lund with strong South Asian and Latin American representation.

KYOTOGRAPHIE
Kyoto, Japan
Through May 17, 2026

Anchored by a major Daido Moriyama retrospective spanning almost sixty years. Also: Ernest Cole, Pieter Hugo, Lebohang Kganye, Thandiwe Muriu, and work honoring Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian photographer-activist killed in Gaza in April 2025. Closing in three weeks.

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IN FOCUS

Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. —
Diane Arbus, 1967

Diane Arbus, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

In December 1967, Diane Arbus attended a Christmas party for twins and multiples in Roselle, New Jersey. Among the children there were two sisters — Cathleen and Colleen Wade, seven years old — wearing matching dresses, matching bows, matching expressions, almost. Arbus photographed them head-on. One girl faces the camera with a cautious, slightly formal gaze. The other has a look of mild discomfort, a shadow across her face that the other doesn’t share. The dresses are identical. The children are not.

The photograph has been reproduced so many times and in so many contexts that it is now lodged in the visual unconscious of anyone who has paid attention to photography. Stanley Kubrick used it as the visual inspiration for the ghost twins in The Shining. It appeared this spring at Sotheby’s with an estimate of $70,000–100,000. It is held in the collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and dozens of other institutions worldwide. It is, by almost any measure, one of the ten most recognized photographs of the 20th century.

Arbus made it with a twin-lens reflex camera, looking down through the viewfinder — which gave her a different relationship to her subjects than a camera held to the eye. She is below them, slightly. They look down into the lens. The power dynamics are ambiguous in a way that feels deliberate. Arbus had been photographing people on the margins of mainstream American life since the late 1950s — nudists, transvestites, circus performers, the developmentally disabled — with an attention that was neither condescending nor voyeuristic but somehow both intimate and estranging. She died in 1971 at 48. This photograph was made three years before her death.

WHY IT MATTERS

The photograph presents a paradox at the center of Arbus’s entire project: two people who appear to be the same, shown at the moment that reveals they are not. Her work is consistently described as “disturbing” — but what disturbs is not the subjects. What disturbs is the quality of attention. She looked at people who were routinely not looked at, and she looked at them for a long time, and she printed what she found. The Roselle twins are a case study in how a single image can carry the weight of an entire philosophy of seeing.

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OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Sangre Blanca by Mads Nissen
GOST
May 2026

A decade in the making, Sangre Blanca (White Blood) is the most comprehensive photojournalistic exploration of the global cocaine industry ever published — tracing the supply chain from Colombian fields through processing, trafficking networks, distribution, addiction, and the violence and corruption that pervade every link in the chain. Nissen’s access is remarkable, his photographs unflinching. A book that connects a globalized industry to its human consequences at every scale.

Oslo Arkiv by Ole John Aandal
MACK
April 2026 · Limited edition of 750, signed

For a decade following the July 22, 2011 bombing by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, Aandal photographed the view overlooking Oslo’s Government Quarter — the administrative heart of Norway, which bore the brunt of the attack. The photographs trace how a city learns to look at a place that has been broken: scaffolding, demolition, new construction, the slow erasure of the wound. A study in collective memory and the urban landscape of loss. Available in signed and unsigned editions.

Song of Silent Water by Mathieu Chaze
L’Artiere
Preorder, ships May

A poetic meditation on nature born from walking — rolling hills, trees reflected in still water, solitary herons. Chaze’s photographs pursue sincerity over style, expressing the artist’s presence in a landscape without imposing on it. Preordered copies are signed by the artist.

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

  • Inge Morath Award 2026 — Deadline to apply is this Thursday, April 30. No fee. $7,500 from the Magnum Foundation for women and nonbinary photographers under 30. Last chance to apply.

IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 30

ONE QUESTION

The World Press Photo of the Year was made in a federal courthouse — one of the only US federal buildings where photographers were granted access. Should photographers have guaranteed legal access to document government actions in public spaces?

Tell us what you think in the comments. We’ll highlight the best responses next issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera — the type Diane Arbus used to photograph the Roselle twins — was introduced in 1929 and became the camera of choice for documentary and street photographers through the 1960s. Looking down into the viewfinder rather than through the lens changed the relationship between photographer and subject: the camera no longer sat between their faces, and the photographer's gaze went downward, not forward. Many photographers credited the Rolleiflex with making their subjects less guarded."

ON THIS DAY

April 29, 1992: The Los Angeles riots began following the acquittal of four LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King. Over six days, 63 people died and approximately $1 billion in property was damaged across South LA. The photographers who covered those six days — among them Kirk McKoy and Hyungwon Kang of the Los Angeles Times, both of whom won Pulitzer Prizes for their work — produced some of the most significant documentary photographs in the city’s history. Their images appeared on front pages worldwide and became the visual record of a rupture in American life that the city has still not fully resolved. The riots are now referenced in photography schools as a defining case study in what documentary photography can and cannot do in the face of structural injustice.

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]]><![CDATA[From the Moon to the Armory — This Week in Photography]]>https://photograph.is/p/from-the-moon-to-the-armory-thishttps://photograph.is/p/from-the-moon-to-the-armory-thisMon, 20 Apr 2026 13:03:03 GMTTHE FRAME

From 240,000 Miles Away, Four Astronauts Took Some of the Most Significant Photographs in History

At 6:41 p.m. EDT on April 6, 2026, the Artemis II crew watched Earth set behind the Moon’s horizon — the first time humans had witnessed an Earthset from this vantage point in over fifty years. In the foreground is Ohm crater, its terraced walls and central peaks formed by the rebound of an ancient impact. Australia and Oceania are visible in the fading light. Image credit: NASA.

On April 6, 2026, the four-person crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission completed a seven-hour flyby of the Moon — the first time humans had traveled that far from Earth since Apollo 17 in December 1972. What they brought back, transmitted digitally to Earth the following day, was not just mission data. It was a new chapter in the history of photography.

The crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — had undergone weeks of photography training with an array of Nikon digital cameras and iPhones. The Orion spacecraft was equipped with five live-streaming cameras and twice as many windows as the Apollo capsules. What they captured during 54 minutes of totality, as the Moon completely eclipsed the Sun from their vantage point above the lunar surface, had literally never been seen before: the Sun’s corona visible in full detail against a dark disc, stars appearing in the background, the near side of the Moon faintly lit by light reflected off the Earth from a quarter million miles away.

They also updated one of the most viewed photographs in history. In 1972, Apollo 17 geologist Harrison Schmitt captured the Blue Marble — Earth fully illuminated by the Sun, approximately five hours into the mission. It became one of the defining images of the 20th century, used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth and reproduced billions of times. The Artemis II crew captured Earth at the same mission milestone, but illuminated by the Moon’s glow instead of direct sunlight. That’s Earth 2026 alongside Earth 1972 — both singular documents of a moment in our planet’s long history.

The images are now part of NASA’s Artemis II gallery, with more expected as the mission archive is processed. In an era of AI-generated deep fakes, the space historian Jennifer Levasseur notes, the authenticity of these images matters in a new way: “Entire generations born after Apollo 17 may hardly believe the reality of Artemis II.” The photographs are real. Four people made them, pressing the shutter from a window above the Moon.

WHY IT MATTERS

Photography has been to the Moon before. But the Artemis II images arrive in a different moment — when the credibility of images is under sustained attack, when AI can fabricate anything, and when the question of what photographs can be trusted has never been more urgent. These images are unrepeatable. They were made by four people, with cameras, from a spacecraft, above the surface of the Moon. That fact matters to photography in ways that go beyond space exploration.

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THE AUCTION BLOCK

The spring photography auction season is now complete. Across Phillips and Sotheby’s, the market delivered strong signals at the top — led by one result that no one saw coming.

Phillips Photographs — New York, April 11

Total realized: $5,038,224. The standout result of the season: Tina Modotti’s Bandolier, Corn, Sickle (1927) sold for $645,000 — four times its high estimate of $150,000. A 1927 gelatin silver print of a rifle strap, an ear of corn, and a sickle became the most talked-about photograph at auction this spring. Other confirmed results above estimate: Sally Mann’s Vinland at $41,280 (est. $20,000–30,000); Thomas Ruff’s phg.11 at $47,730 (est. $25,000–35,000). Wolfgang Tillmans’s Freischwimmer 123, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #49, and the Richard Avedon The Family are all confirmed sold; final prices pending Phillips’s complete press release. Phillips results

Sotheby’s Photographs Part II — Online, closed April 16

Over 100 lots across a wide range of photographers, led by Diane Arbus’s Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. and Helmut Newton’s Blonde and T.V., Hotel Gallia, Milan. Full results pending publication. Sotheby’s results

Sally Mann, Vinland, 1992. Gelatin silver print, 18⅝ × 22⅞ in. (47.3 × 58.1 cm). Signed, titled, dated, numbered 19/25 in pencil on the verso. Sold at Phillips New York, April 11, 2026: $41,280 (est. $20,000–30,000).

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week

AIPAD: The Photography Show
Park Avenue Armory, New York
April 22–26, 2026

45th edition. 77 galleries from 15 countries. New “Focal Point” single-artist sector. AIPAD Award to Deborah Willis presented at the VIP opening April 22. Willis in conversation with Aperture’s Brendan Embser on April 23 at 1pm. Aperture Portfolio Prize awarded during the fair.

World Press Photo Exhibition
De Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam
April 24 – September 27, 2026

Flagship Amsterdam venue for the 2026 contest winners. The World Press Photo of the Year is announced April 23, one day before the exhibition opens. All regional and category winners on view. Free entry.

Photobooks Switzerland
Bibliothèque de Genève, Geneva
April 24–26, 2026

6th edition. Switzerland’s leading annual photobook fair, with a new partnership with the Bibliothèque de Genève. Publishers, artists, and collectors.

Fotografia Europea
Reggio Emilia, Italy
April 30 – June 14, 2026

21st edition. Theme: Ghosts of the Moment. City-wide exhibitions, portfolio reviews, screenings, and workshops across Reggio Emilia.

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IN FOCUS

Deborah Willis Has Been Correcting the Historical Record for Four Decades. AIPAD Just Gave Her Its Highest Honor.

Deborah Willis, Ph.D., MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and 2026 AIPAD Award recipient. Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging, NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Photo: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn. Courtesy NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

When Deborah Willis began researching the history of Black photographers in the 1970s, she found almost nothing in the existing literature — not because Black photographers didn’t exist, but because the institutions that maintained the canon had largely ignored them. Willis spent the next five decades fixing that, one archive at a time.

Her landmark publication, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000), documented over 1,000 Black photographers for the first time in a single volume — a project that required decades of primary research across libraries, private collections, community archives, and family albums. Reissued in 2025 with 130 new images, it remains the definitive work in the field. Before Willis, the standard histories of photography barely registered the contributions of Black photographers at all.

Willis is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she has shaped generations of photographers over nearly twenty-five years. She is a recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her other publications include Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (1996) and Posing Beauty (2009). She is also a working photographer — her images exploring representations of the Black body, women, family, and identity.

This Wednesday, April 23, Willis receives the 2026 AIPAD Award at The Photography Show’s VIP opening at the Park Avenue Armory — AIPAD’s highest honor, presented to individuals who have made an exceptional contribution to the field. She will be in conversation with Brendan Embser, Senior Editor at Aperture, on Thursday, April 24 at 1pm. AIPAD

WHY IT MATTERS

“Deb’s work and influence have meaningfully altered how photography and photographers are viewed, discussed, and represented both behind and in front of the camera,” said AIPAD executive director Lydia Melamed Johnson. “Spanning scholarship, curatorial work, artistic practice, and her tireless support of and mentorship to the defining voices of previous generations and our present moment, her contributions to our medium, in the broadest possible sense, cannot be overstated.” The canon Willis reshaped is not a minor revision. It is the foundation on which any serious history of photography now rests.

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OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Life Still by Lee Friedlander
Aperture

Since the 1960s, Lee Friedlander has created incisive, often witty photographs of the American social landscape, shaping our appreciation of the quirks, charms, and idiosyncrasies of everyday life. In his latest monograph, he brings together rarely seen and never-before-published images from his vast archive alongside new work, staging a visual dialogue between past and present. Fractured reflections in shop windows, deadpan domestic scenes, roadside signage. Friedlander’s polychronic vision of American ubiquity is as comforting as it is alienating — the irony, humor, and self-conflict of the American consciousness, as vivid today as it ever was.

Snow by Sohrab Hura
MACK

Kashmir has been at the center of disputes between India, Pakistan, and China since 1947. Sohrab Hura photographed the Indian-administered region over five years, tracing the three distinct phases of its winter: Chillai Kalan (harsh cold), Chillai Khurd (small cold), and Chillai Bache (baby cold). The snowmelt evokes the wearing down of illusions. Picturesque landscapes give way to residual markers of conflict and violence. Kashmir has been marketed to Indian tourists as a place to experience snow — all the while remaining one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world. Hura’s book holds that contradiction without resolving it. The first in a pair of publications; a forthcoming volume will explore Barwani, Madhya Pradesh. Signed edition available.

Absentee by Sayuri Ichida
Benrido

UK-based Japanese artist Sayuri Ichida uses her own body as the sole subject in this intimate portfolio — exploring what the word “absentee” suggests: a sense of detachment from oneself, from reality, from presence. After more than a decade in commercial photography, Ichida completed her MA in Photography Arts at the University of Westminster and is now based in Margate, England. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the VERBUND COLLECTION and Museum Voorlinden. A quiet, necessary counterpoint to the maximalism of contemporary image culture.

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

  • Inge Morath Award 2026 — Deadline April 30. No fee. $7,500 from the Magnum Foundation for women and nonbinary photographers under 30. One finalist also receives $1,000.

IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 30

ONE QUESTION

Vivian Maier made over 150,000 photographs. She showed them to almost no one. Her estate was sold at auction after her death — and the buyers became the custodians of her legacy. Who should own a photographer’s archive when the photographer is gone?

Tell us what you think in the comments. We’ll highlight the best responses next issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

There are 12 Hasselblad cameras sitting on the Moon right now — and they’ll be there essentially forever. During the Apollo missions, astronauts had strict weight limits for their return journey. So they left the camera bodies behind, taking only the film magazines. The cameras remain on the lunar surface, sealed in their original configurations, in a near-perfect vacuum. No rust, no decay. They are almost certainly the best-preserved cameras in existence.

ON THIS DAY

April 22, 1970: The first Earth Day was observed across the United States, with 20 million people participating in rallies, teach-ins, and cleanups. The day galvanized the modern environmental movement — but environmental photography predates it by more than a century. Carleton Watkins photographed Yosemite Valley in the 1860s; his images were presented to Congress and directly contributed to Abraham Lincoln signing the Yosemite Grant in 1864, the first time the federal government protected land specifically for public use. Ansel Adams continued that tradition for decades, lobbying Congress with his prints. By the time Earth Day arrived in 1970, photographers had been making the environmental argument for over a hundred years.

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916), Piwyac, the Vernal Fall, Yosemite, 300 feet, 1861. Albumen silver print.

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]]><![CDATA[She Photographed Dachau, Bathed in Hitler's Bathtub, and Was Forgotten for Thirty Years. Not Anymore.]]>https://photograph.is/p/she-photographed-dachau-bathed-inhttps://photograph.is/p/she-photographed-dachau-bathed-inMon, 13 Apr 2026 13:03:48 GMTTHE FRAME

Lee Miller Finally Gets the French Retrospective She Deserved

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris opened its Lee Miller retrospective on April 10 — the largest devoted to her in France in twenty years, and the most comprehensive to date. Initiated by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition brings together approximately 250 vintage and modern prints, some of which have never been exhibited, and follows her entire career across six sections combining chronological and thematic approaches.

The arc of Miller’s life reads like a novel someone made up: a Vogue model turned Surrealist artist, portraitist, and fashion photographer who then became a U.S. Army-accredited war correspondent, photographed the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald, and famously bathed in Hitler’s Munich bathtub the day he died — a photograph taken by David E. Scherman of LIFE magazine. Her post-war years were quieter: she mostly stopped shooting, struggled with PTSD and depression, and didn’t show her children the boxes of war photographs stacked in the attic until the 1970s.

Lee Miller, Charlie Chaplin with Light Fixture, Saint-Moritz, 1932. On view in Lee Miller, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, April 10 – August 2, 2026. © Lee Miller Archives England 2026. All Rights Reserved.

For decades she was remembered primarily as Man Ray’s muse and collaborator. The solarization technique she co-developed with him — accidentally discovered in 1929 when a cat ran into the darkroom and the lights came on — was often attributed to him alone. The rehabilitation of her reputation as a photographer in her own right has taken most of the last thirty years. This exhibition, running through August 2, 2026, is part of that ongoing reclamation.

WHY IT MATTERS

Miller’s career is a case study in how history chooses who to remember — and who to relegate to the footnotes. She was one of the first photographers to document the Holocaust from inside the camps as a witness, not a journalist at a distance. Her images from Dachau remain among the most disturbing and morally necessary photographs ever made. The fact that it took until 2026 for France to give her this kind of retrospective is itself part of the story. If you’re anywhere near Paris before August, this is not optional.

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ON VIEW
New This Week

Lee Miller
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
Apr 10 – Aug 2, 2026

250 prints across six sections. See THE FRAME above.

Martin Parr: A Tribute
Foam, Amsterdam
Spring 2026

In commemoration of his passing last December, Foam presents a tribute to Parr’s legacy: a selection from his extensive oeuvre including his celebrated self-portraits taken in local studios worldwide and a survey of his photobook work. Made in collaboration with Magnum Photos and the Martin Parr Foundation.

FAKE!
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Through May 25, 2026

Fifty historical images revealing how photographers have manipulated pictures since 1860 — cutting, pasting, drawing, and re-photographing before Photoshop existed. Works by John Heartfield, Martin Post Card Company, and others. A reminder that the debate over image manipulation didn’t begin with AI.

Always Running: Photography by Luis J. Rodriguez
Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park
Apr 14 – Jun 13, 2026

Rare and unpublished photographs by Chicano poet and community leader Luis J. Rodriguez, marking the 30th anniversary of his memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA. Portraits of the people and neighborhoods that shaped his early life in East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley.

CLOSING SOON

Apr 16: Sotheby’s Photographs Part II closes online.

Apr 25: Binh Danh & Renee Royale — ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica.

Apr 25: JR: Horizons — Perrotin, Los Angeles.

May 4: Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition — Somerset House, London.

May 16: Outside Help — Christopher Richmond, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

May 24: Sophie Calle: Overshare — OCMA, Costa Mesa.

May 25: FAKE! — Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

Immediate Family — Sally Mann, 1984–1994

Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Sally Mann photographed her three children — Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia — at their family farm in Lexington, Virginia. She used an 8×10 view camera, the cumbersome equipment of an earlier era, and made images that were technically exquisite and emotionally raw: children sleeping, swimming, bleeding, playing, staring, dreaming. The photographs were made during the summers, which at the Mann farm were long and unsupervised and occasionally dangerous in the way summers should be.

When Aperture published Immediate Family in 1992, it sold out immediately and ignited a controversy that reached Congress. The FBI investigated. Libraries removed the book. Mann was accused of exploiting her own children, of creating child pornography, of irresponsibility toward the very subjects she most loved. The children — who were part of the process, who often suggested the images — were not consulted by the critics. Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia grew up to be artists themselves. None of them has expressed regret.

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989, from Immediate Family

Mann was 36 when the project began. “The borders of our selves were not clearly fixed,” she wrote later. “We overlapped.” The images are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney, and dozens of institutions worldwide. Immediate Family is now regularly cited as one of the most important photography books of the 20th century — and one of the most debated.

WHY IT MATTERS

The controversy around Immediate Family forced a reckoning with questions photography still hasn’t finished answering: Who owns a child’s image? Can a parent be both witness and author when photographing their own family? Where does intimacy end and exposure begin? Those questions feel more urgent now than they did in 1992, in an era when millions of parents photograph their children daily and post them online without a second thought. Mann did it with a large-format camera, on film, for art. We are all doing it now, for Instagram.

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IN THE NEWS
This Week

World Press Photo 2026 Contest Winners Announced

The 2026 World Press Photo Contest winners were announced on April 10, selected from 57,376 photographs submitted by 3,747 photographers across 141 countries. The awarded works span conflict and crisis, resilience, resistance, and cultural traditions. Jury chair Kira Pollack: “This is a critical moment — for democracy, for truth, for the question of what we as a society are willing to see and call out and what we are willing to ignore. The photographers recognized here have done their part. They have made the record.” The World Press Photo of the Year will be announced April 23. World Press Photo

Unique Photographs Are Rewriting the Rules of the Photo Market

A new Artnet analysis finds that collectors are increasingly seeking photographs that cannot be reproduced — photograms, hand-painted prints, camera-less works. Artnet’s Spring Photographs Sale, live for bidding through April 16, features one-of-a-kind works by Peter Beard, Adam Fuss, Andy Warhol, Eggleston, and Cartier-Bresson. The shift is driven by a new generation of collectors seeking rarity and “wall power” — bringing the photography market closer to painting. Read the full analysis

THE AUCTION BLOCK
Results: Phillips New York, April 11

The spring’s most anticipated photography auction delivered a genuine surprise. Tina Modotti’s Bandolier, Corn, Sickle (1927) — a spare, formally perfect composition of a rifle strap, an ear of corn, and a sickle, among the most recognized images in the history of the medium — sold for $645,000, more than four times its high estimate of $150,000. It was the clear top lot of the sale and one of the most significant results for a photograph at auction this spring.

Tina Modotti, Bandolier, Corn, Sickle, 1927. Gelatin silver print, signed and dated in pencil on the mount. Created in Mexico. Sold at Phillips New York, April 11, 2026: $645,000 — more than four times the high estimate.

Other notable results above estimate:

  • Sally Mann, Vinland — $41,280 (est. $20,000–30,000)

  • Thomas Ruff, phg.11 — $47,730 (est. $25,000–35,000)

  • František Drtikol, Nude — $20,670 (est. $10,000–15,000)

  • Jenny Holzer, AND HATE — $12,255 (est. $7,000–9,000)

Results for the anticipated top lots — Wolfgang Tillmans’s Freischwimmer 123 (est. $150,000–250,000), Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #49 (est. $120,000–180,000), and the Richard Avedon The Family (est. $150,000–250,000) — are confirmed sold. We’ll have the full breakdown, total sale figure, and market analysis in next week’s issue. Phillips results

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week and Coming Up

Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition — London
April 17 – May 4, 2026 · Somerset House

Winners announced at the April 16 ceremony open in exhibition the following day. Over 300 images including all national award winners and the Open Competition category winners. Free to visit.

KYOTOGRAPHIE — Kyoto, Japan
April 18 – May 17, 2026

Theme: Edge. Daido Moriyama, Anton Corbijn, Pieter Hugo, Ernest Cole. Set across Kyoto’s temples and machiya townhouses.

AIPAD: The Photography Show — New York
April 22–26, 2026 · Park Avenue Armory

45th edition. New “Focal Point” single-artist sector. Aperture Portfolio Prize awarded during the fair. The most important photography market event of the spring in North America.

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

A Color Legacy by Fred Herzog
November 2025 · 144 pages, 100 photographs
Hatje Cantz

In the 1950s and 1960s, when serious photographers shot in black and white, Fred Herzog was shooting Kodachrome in the streets of Vancouver. The results — warm reds and oranges, precise observations of people in motion, neon signs and storefronts bathed in saturated color — look nothing like documentary photography of the era. They look like now. Herzog photographed Vancouver from 1953 until his death in 2019, and also traveled to the United States, Barbados, Curaçao, Guatemala, and Mexico. Selected by the Special Trustee of his estate in conjunction with Equinox Gallery. A direct predecessor to Eggleston’s color revolution.

Glacial Optics by Tristan Duke
180 pages, 90 images
Radius Books

In 2022, Duke sailed to Svalbard — the fastest-warming place on the planet — and made photographs using camera lenses he had carved from Arctic ice. The photographs made with those lenses are unlike anything else: dreamlike, distorted, refracted through water that is disappearing. The ice itself becomes both instrument and subject. Foreword by Michael Govan, Director of LACMA, which opens its monumental new building this week. Texts by Lucy Lippard, Mark Cheetham, and William L. Fox. Duke’s work has been exhibited at the Getty, MIT Media Lab, LACMA, and C|O Berlin.

Summertime by Mark Steinmetz
Remastered Edition · 100 pages, 76 duotone plates
Nazraeli Press

Portraits of children and teenagers in distinctly American settings, made between 1984 and 1991 — when kids still rode bikes without helmets and roamed their neighborhoods without digital interruptions. This remastered edition adds 30 previously unpublished images and is printed in duotone on natural art paper, limited to 2,000 copies. A Guggenheim Fellow, Steinmetz’s work is held at MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago, and LACMA. Time: “Summertime is what we yearn for most.”

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

  • Inge Morath Award 2026 — Deadline April 30. No fee. $7,500 from the Magnum Foundation for women and nonbinary photographers under 30.

IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 30

ONE QUESTION

World Press Photo selected its 2026 winners from 57,376 entries. With AI-generated images now indistinguishable from documentary photography, should photojournalism competitions require technical proof that no AI was used — or does that miss the point entirely?

Tell us what you think in the comments. We’ll highlight the best responses next issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

Photographs have been manipulated since 1860 — long before Photoshop, long before AI. The Rijksmuseum’s FAKE! exhibition (through May 25) reveals that early photographers used scissors, glue, and ink to create photomontages and collages that appeared entirely real. One of the most famous examples: a widely circulated portrait of Abraham Lincoln was actually the head of Lincoln placed on the body of John C. Calhoun, a Southern politician. It was created decades before anyone thought to question it. As the Smithsonian puts it: “We’ve been manipulating images since the invention of photography.”

A man carries a giant head in a wheelbarrow. This photo from the early 1900s depicts a man carrying a giant head in a wheelbarrow. Rijksmuseum

ON THIS DAY

April 18, 1906: The San Francisco earthquake struck at 5:12am. Arnold Genthe’s studio and all his professional equipment were destroyed in the disaster. He made his way to a camera shop owned by George Kahn, borrowed a small 3A Kodak Special hand camera, filled his pockets with film, and spent the next several hours and days walking the burning city. He made over 180 images, including the iconic Looking Down Sacramento Street — a wide view of dazed residents standing in the rubble with smoke rising in the distance. In his autobiography, As I Remember (1936), Genthe wrote that it was one of the few times he worked entirely on instinct: the intensity of the scene meant he was “photographing without thinking about technique.” His work is now recognized as one of the founding examples of real-time photojournalism — a photographer responding to catastrophe as it happened, without a studio, without his equipment, and without a plan.

Arnold Genthe, Looking Down Sacramento Street, San Francisco, April 18, 1906

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]]><![CDATA[The Photography Market Has Its Biggest Week of the Year. Are You Watching?]]>https://photograph.is/p/the-photography-market-has-its-biggesthttps://photograph.is/p/the-photography-market-has-its-biggestMon, 06 Apr 2026 13:02:48 GMTTHE FRAME

Wolfgang Tillmans’s Freischwimmer 123 (2004)

Tillmans, Sherman, Arbus, Eggleston — All Going Under the Hammer Before Sunday

Two major dedicated photography sales take place this week — one live in New York, one online. Together they represent the most concentrated photography buying opportunity of the spring, with a combined presale estimate above $1.5 million and works by some of the most consequential photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Bidding opens Wednesday on the Sotheby’s sale; Phillips takes the floor Saturday.

Sotheby’s Photographs Part II opens for bidding this Wednesday, April 8 and closes online April 16. Over 100 lots, tightly curated. Led by Diane Arbus’s Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. ($70,000–100,000) and Helmut Newton’s Blonde and T.V., Hotel Gallia, Milan ($70,000–100,000). Also: Richard Misrach, Nan Goldin, Graciela Iturbide, Peter Beard, and Albert Watson.

Phillips Photographs takes place this Saturday, April 11, in New York — the most significant dedicated photography sale of the spring season. Over 260 lots spanning 150 years of the medium, from 19th-century salt prints to contemporary large-format works.

The headline lot is Wolfgang Tillmans’s Freischwimmer 123 (2004), estimated at $150,000–250,000 — a large-scale abstract work from his landmark series that used the darkroom itself as subject, exposing light directly onto photographic paper without a camera. Two Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills are among the strongest lots: Untitled Film Still #49 at $120,000–180,000 and Untitled #471 at $70,000–90,000. Edward Weston’s Nude (Tina on the Azotea) carries an estimate of $100,000–150,000, as does Tina Modotti’s Bandolier, Corn, Sickle and Sebastião Salgado’s Gold Mine.

Watch also for Robert Frank’s Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey ($70,000–100,000), Catherine Opie’s Untitled #4 ($40,000–60,000), and two lots by William Eggleston — Untitled (Memphis) ($100,000–150,000) and Untitled (Louisiana) ($30,000–50,000).

WHY IT MATTERS

Two high-profile photography sales in five days — and with AIPAD bringing collectors to New York on April 22, this is one of the most concentrated buying windows of the year. The Tillmans estimate signals confidence at the top of the market. The Cindy Sherman lots, the Eggleston prints, and the Modotti/Weston pairing test whether the mid-market can sustain the momentum of 2025. This week will tell.

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IN FOCUS

Sophie Calle: “I Follow Strangers. I Photograph Them. I Am the Work.”

In 1979, Sophie Calle asked strangers to sleep in her bed and be photographed. She called the project The Sleepers. Most people said yes. That has been the central surprise of her career ever since: people participate in things they probably shouldn’t, and Calle keeps finding ways to make art from that willingness.

Born in Paris in 1953, Calle spent much of her twenties traveling — living in the United States, hitchhiking across North Africa — before returning to France and beginning to make work from the raw material of her own life and the lives of strangers she encountered. She followed people on the street, photographing them without their knowledge. She took a job as a hotel chambermaid and documented guests’ belongings. She asked a private detective to follow her, then published both their accounts side by side. The question of who is watching whom runs through everything she makes.

Installation view Sophie Calle: Overshare, 2025. Photo by Eric Mueller. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

Overshare, the first major North American survey of her work, is currently on view at the UC Irvine Langson / Orange County Museum of Art through May 24, 2026. Organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Henriette Huldisch, the exhibition spans five decades — photography, text, video, and installation — and is divided into four sections: the Spy, the Protagonist, the End, and the Beginning. Calle reportedly handed the entire curatorial decision to Huldisch: “It’s the first time in my life there’s been an exhibition as if I had passed away and someone curated a show about me.”

The title is pointed. Long before social media normalized the conversion of private life into public content, Calle was doing it by hand — with a camera, index cards, and a forensic attention to detail. Her 2003 installation Journey to California documents the months she shipped her own bed to a heartbroken San Francisco artist who had written asking to sleep in it. She is, in the words of The Art Newspaper, “alternately described as a conceptual artist, photographer, video artist, and even detective.” In 2024 she received Japan’s Praemium Imperiale — one of the most prestigious art prizes in the world.

WHY IT MATTERS

Calle’s work asks the questions that photography keeps circling: Who has the right to photograph whom? What does documentation do to the person being documented? What happens when the photographer puts herself in the frame? These were avant-garde provocations in 1979. In 2026, they describe Instagram, surveillance culture, and the ethics of street photography — which means her career looks less like a body of art and more like a forty-year prophecy. Overshare is worth the drive to Orange County.

ON VIEW
New This Week

The Girls: Sabiha Çimen & Mary Ellen Mark
Howard Greenberg Gallery | New York
Opened April 2, 2026

A two-person show pairing Mark’s landmark black-and-white portraiture with Çimen’s color work from her award-winning Hafiz series — photographing girls’ Qur’an schools in Turkey. Documentary precision meets poetic surrealism.

Mary Ellen Mark, Sisters, Central Park, New York City, 1968. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Outside Help — Christopher Richmond
Moskowitz Bayse | Los Angeles
April 11 – May 16, 2026

Christopher Richmond builds worlds that redefine themselves within and against the conventions of film, story, and shared human experience. Handmade props and highly technical photographic techniques accentuate the distance between the imaginary and the real. His practice spans film, video, photography, and drawing.

Sophie Calle: Overshare
OCMA | UC Irvine Langson – Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa
Through May 24, 2026

Five decades of Calle’s career. First major North American survey. Photography, text, video, and installation. See IN FOCUS above.

Fortuitous Encounters — Lenard Smith
UCR Arts | California Museum of Photography, Riverside
Through July 26, 2026

The first solo museum exhibition of Ghanaian-American studio photographer Lenard Smith.

CLOSING SOON

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

The Perfect Moment — Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989

Tomorrow — April 7 — marks the anniversary of one of the most dramatic confrontations between photography and the law in American history.

On April 7, 1990, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati opened Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, a touring retrospective organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. That same morning, while visitors lined up outside, a Hamilton County grand jury indicted the museum and its director, Dennis Barrie, on two counts of obscenity — one for displaying photographs deemed sexually explicit, another for displaying images of children that prosecutors argued constituted child pornography. It was the first time in American history that a museum had been criminally prosecuted for exhibiting art.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-portrait with Cigarette (1980). Donation of Hans van Manen and Henk van Dijk, 2019. ©Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.

The exhibition had already been at the center of a national controversy. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington had canceled its presentation months earlier, fearing the political climate — a decision that triggered protests and a guerrilla projection of Mapplethorpe’s images onto the gallery’s exterior. In Cincinnati, the trial drew international attention and became a referendum on the First Amendment, public funding for the arts, and the definition of obscenity. The defense called art experts who argued that Mapplethorpe’s photographs belonged in the tradition of classical figure studies. The jury — eight people with no particular background in art — acquitted on all counts.

Mapplethorpe had died of AIDS-related illness the year before, in March 1989, at age 42. He never saw the trial.

WHY IT MATTERS

The Mapplethorpe trial established a precedent that has protected museums and galleries ever since. It also changed what photography could say in public. Before 1990, the legal and institutional lines around explicit photographic content were blurry and untested. After Cincinnati, the principle that art must be considered as a whole — and judged by its serious artistic, literary, political, or scientific value — had been upheld in a courtroom. The trial is studied in law schools and art schools today. And his work — flowers, portraits, figure studies, and the photographs that shocked Cincinnati — is now held by the Getty, MoMA, and dozens of major collections worldwide.

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week and Coming Up

EXPOSED
Torino Foto Festival — Turin, Italy
April 9 – June 2, 2026 · Opens this Thursday

Third edition. Theme: Laying Bare — exploring identity, representation, and the body through photography. 18 indoor and outdoor exhibitions across Turin under the artistic direction of Walter Guadagnini. Friday night: large-scale outdoor projections across the city’s buildings and courtyards. Free entry with digital pass.

KYOTOGRAPHIE
International Photography Festival — Kyoto, Japan
April 18 – May 17, 2026

Theme: Edge. Daido Moriyama, Anton Corbijn, Pieter Hugo, Ernest Cole. Set across Kyoto’s temples and machiya townhouses.

AIPAD
The Photography Show — New York
April 22–26, 2026

45th edition at the Park Avenue Armory. New “Focal Point” single-artist sector. Aperture Portfolio Prize awarded during the fair.

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Las Pelilargas by Irina Werning
GOST

For 18 years, Werning traveled across Latin America seeking out women with exceptionally long hair — putting up signs in schools, hospitals, and markets, organizing hair competitions in remote mountain towns. Her project uncovered something deeper than she expected: for many Indigenous communities, hair is a physical expression of thought, an extension of the self, connected to ancient customs now spreading beyond their original communities. Winner of the Eugene Smith Grant 2023, World Press Photo 2022, and a Pulitzer Reporting Grant. Featured in the Observer and Aesthetica.

Feliicità by Luigi Ghirri
MACK

Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and artist Alessio Bolzoni present an idiosyncratic path through Ghirri’s work — from images of discarded magazine cuttings to domestic spaces and sunlit travels around Italy. Produced on the occasion of their co-curated exhibition. Three essays by Ghirri open new vistas into his thinking. “An involuntary prophet,” said Il Manifesto. Bilingual English and Italian.

Italian Story by Andrea Modica
L’Artiere

“The title reflects the complexity of the Italian word storia, which holds meanings as diverse as history, story, situation, issue, fuss, hassle, tale, or lie.” Modica began traveling to Italy as a young woman from a third-generation Italian-American family, building a visual archive across four decades using an 8×10 view camera. A lyrical exploration of identity, memory, and belonging.

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

  • CPA Artist Grants 2026 — Deadline April 7. $30 fee. Five grants of $5,000 each. Center for Photographic Art, Carmel.

  • PPA Photo Award 2026 — Deadline April 12. No fee. $2,000 prize for US-based emerging photographers.

  • Aperture Portfolio Prize — Awarded at AIPAD (Apr 22–26). All five finalists exhibited at the fair.

  • Inge Morath Award 2026 — Deadline April 30. No fee. $7,500 from the Magnum Foundation for women and nonbinary photographers under 30.

THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 19

ONE QUESTION

Which living photographer do you think is most underrepresented in major museum collections?

Name one photographer whose work deserves more institutional attention than it currently gets — and tell us why. Answer in the comments. We’ll highlight the responses in the next issue.

DID YOU KNOW?

The most viewed photograph in history is almost certainly Bliss — the rolling green hills and blue sky Charles O’Rear shot in Sonoma County, California, in 1996 on a drive from Napa to San Francisco. O’Rear, a former National Geographic photographer, used a medium-format camera and Fujifilm Velvia slide film. Microsoft purchased the rights in 2000 for an undisclosed sum. It served as the default Windows XP wallpaper for over a decade. The image is completely unmanipulated. The hill, Licatalsi Ranch in Sonoma, was later converted to a vineyard.

Charles O’Rear: Bliss — shot in Sonoma County, California, in 1996

ON THIS DAY

April 8, 1974: Hank Aaron hit his 715th career home run off Al Downing at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, breaking Babe Ruth’s record that had stood for 39 years. Photographer Neil Leifer was positioned in the stands and captured Aaron rounding second base, arms raised, two Dodgers fielders retreating behind him. The image ran on the cover of Sports Illustrated on April 15, 1974 — one of the defining sports photographs of the 20th century. Leifer, who had also photographed Muhammad Ali’s first-round knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965, remains one of the most celebrated sports photographers in American history.

Atlanta Braves outfielder Hank Aaron congratulated by the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Bill Russell and Davey Lopes as he rounds the bases during a game at Atlanta Stadium. Aaron hit his 715th career home run and to break Babe Ruth’s record. Atlanta, Georgia, April 8, 1974. Photograph by Neil Leifer

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]]><![CDATA[One of the Most Important Living American Photographers Just Got a Landmark Show]]>https://photograph.is/p/one-of-the-most-important-livinghttps://photograph.is/p/one-of-the-most-important-livingMon, 30 Mar 2026 13:03:04 GMTTHE FRAME

Carrie Mae Weems Opens Her First Belgian Retrospective — and It’s a Landmark

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror), 1990; from the series Kitchen Table

The Heart of the Matter, the first retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems in Belgium, opened at FOMU — Fotomuseum Antwerp on March 20 and runs through August 23, 2026. Curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister and organized by Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo in collaboration with Aperture, the exhibition brings together more than 100 photographs and videos spanning five decades of one of the most influential careers in contemporary photography.

The show includes landmark works: Kitchen Table Series (1990), the project that first announced Weems as a major voice; Museums (2006), her meditation on institutional power; and Preach (2024), a new immersive installation created specifically for this exhibition that connects Weems’s spirituality with the history and vitality of Black worship in the United States. Throughout, Weems appears in her own photographs — as subject, guide, and muse — using her experiences as a Black woman to illuminate histories that the mainstream has often left in shadow.

Her work is held by MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate, Centre Pompidou, the Barbican, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others. This exhibition eschews chronology in favor of a framework that centers Weems as a creative form — asking us to confront urgent political events and persistent social cycles, with her perspective and ethics as the compass.

WHY IT MATTERS:

Weems is arguably the most important living American photographer. Her work has shaped how we think about race, gender, power, and memory in images — and she has done it while insisting on beauty, narrative, and emotional directness. The FOMU show is the latest stop in a year that has placed photography’s political and social dimensions at the center of museum programming worldwide (Muholi’s Hasselblad, Opie in London, the Getty’s Black Arts Movement show in LA). For collectors: Weems’s market has been strong and steady; this kind of institutional touring only deepens it.

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ON VIEW

New This Week

100 Photographs to Inherit the World
MUDEC — Museo delle Culture, Milan
Through Jun 28, 2026

Curated by Denis Curti, this exhibition charts two centuries of photography across six sections — from daguerreotypes to the digital age. 100 images spanning Man Ray, Kertész, Cartier-Bresson, Mapplethorpe, Joel Meyerowitz, Claude Cahun, Sandy Skoglund, and Newsha Tavakolian, among others. Not a greatest-hits anthology but a critical journey through photography’s cultural legacy — and what it means to inherit the world through images. MUDEC

Maryam Firuzi, Reading on Teheran Streets (2017). Courtesy of Pier Luigi Gibelli & MUDEC. ©Maryam Firuzi

Laura Aguilar: Body and Landscape
The Huntington, San Marino
Through Sep 7, 2026

Drawn from recent acquisitions from the artist’s estate, this exhibition traces Laura Aguilar’s groundbreaking use of self-portraiture within the natural environments of Southern California and the Southwest. A Chicana and queer artist who died in 2018, Aguilar reframed the Western landscape as a site of personal power, resilience, and reclamation. A second rotation, Day of the Dead, follows in September. The Huntington

Budapest Photo Festival 2026
Budapest
Through May 15, 2026

The 10th anniversary edition of Hungary’s leading photography event features a major exhibition dedicated to René Burri alongside a survey of contemporary Hungarian photography. City-wide programming across galleries, museums, and cultural institutes. Budapest Photo Festival

Closing Soon

Apr 4: Come As You Are: Grunge, Counterculture, and the Seattle Sound — Musichead Gallery, Hollywood.

Apr 13: Ruby Bell: Glow — Leica Gallery, West Hollywood.

Apr 25: Binh Danh & Renee Royale — ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica. JR: Horizons — Perrotin, Los Angeles.

May 4: Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation — ICP, New York.

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IN FOCUS

The Red Ceiling — William Eggleston, 1973

A bare lightbulb hangs from a blood-red ceiling. White electrical cords snake across the surface. That’s it. The photograph is formally titled Greenwood, Mississippi, but the art world knows it simply as “The Red Ceiling.” William Eggleston made it in 1973 using the dye-transfer process — a printing technique borrowed from advertising that saturated color to an almost hallucinatory intensity. It became his signature.

Three years later, on May 25, 1976, Eggleston’s work went on view at The Museum of Modern Art in New York — the first solo exhibition of color photography in MoMA’s history. John Szarkowski, the museum’s legendary photography director, selected 75 prints and wrote the accompanying monograph, William Eggleston’s Guide. The reception was divided and passionate. Critics called the work “banal” and “boring.” The New York Times review was withering. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had become a friend, told Eggleston flatly: “You know, William, color is bullshit.”

Eggleston described his method as “photographing democratically” — every subject held equal significance, whether an empty living room, a dog drinking from a puddle, or a woman perched on a curb. The photographs depicted the American South without grand narratives: modest homes, flat landscapes, local strangers, dining rooms, and odd souvenirs, all rendered in saturated color that made the ordinary feel strange and the mundane feel sacred.

William Eggleston, Untitled, (Red ceiling) Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973

WHY IT MATTERS:

That 1976 MoMA show broke the color barrier in art photography. Before Eggleston, serious photography meant black and white. After him, color was no longer a compromise — it was a language. Szarkowski wrote that Eggleston and his generation worked “as though the world itself existed in color, as though the blue and the sky were one thing.” The exhibition and the Guide are now considered among the most important events in the history of the medium. Eggleston, who is 86 and still lives in Memphis, won the Hasselblad Award in 1998 — the same prize that went to Zanele Muholi this year. An Eggleston print, Untitled (Louisiana), is among the lots at Phillips on April 11, estimated at $30,000–50,000.

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

Coming Up in April

EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival
Turin, Italy
April 9 – June 2, 2026

The third edition of Turin’s international photography festival. This year’s theme, Mettersi a nudo (My Heart Laid Bare), is curated by CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia under the artistic direction of Walter Guadagnini. EXPOSED

KYOTOGRAPHIE
Kyoto, Japan
April 18 – May 17, 2026

Theme: Edge. Thirteen photographers from eight countries including Daido Moriyama, Anton Corbijn, Pieter Hugo, and Ernest Cole. Set across Kyoto’s temples and machiya townhouses. KYOTOGRAPHIE

AIPAD: The Photography Show
New York City
April 22–26, 2026

The 45th edition at the Park Avenue Armory. New “Focal Point” single-artist sector. Aperture Portfolio Prize awarded at the fair. AIPAD

THE AUCTION BLOCK

Coming Up in April

Phillips Photographs — New York, April 11

The spring’s marquee photography auction. Highlights from the catalogue:

  • Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 123 — Est. $150,000–250,000

  • Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #49 — Est. $120,000–180,000

  • Edward Weston, Nude (Tina on the Azotea) — Est. $100,000–150,000

  • Tina Modotti, Bandolier, Corn, Sickle — Est. $100,000–150,000

  • Bernd and Hilla Becher, Winding Towers — Est. $100,000–150,000

  • William Eggleston, Untitled (Memphis) — Est. $100,000–150,000

  • Sebastião Salgado, Gold Mine — Est. $100,000–150,000

  • Robert Frank, Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey — Est. $70,000–100,000

  • Cindy Sherman, Untitled #471 — Est. $70,000–90,000

  • Thomas Ruff, substrat 21-I — Est. $50,000–70,000

  • Catherine Opie, Untitled #4 — Est. $40,000–60,000

  • William Eggleston, Untitled (Louisiana) — Est. $30,000–50,000

Sotheby’s Photographs Part II — Online, Closing April 16

Bidding opens April 8. Highlights from the catalogue:

  • Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. — Est. $70,000–100,000

  • Helmut Newton, Blonde and T.V., Hotel Gallia, Milan — Est. $70,000–100,000

  • Richard Misrach, Untitled (#328-02) — Est. $50,000–70,000

  • Albert Watson, Kate Moss, Marrakech, January 1993 (III) — Est. $25,000–35,000

  • Peter Beard, Heart Attack City — Est. $20,000–30,000

  • Nan Goldin, J. and Richard in Bed, Chicago Ill. — Est. $12,000–18,000

  • Graciela Iturbide, Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México — Est. $6,000–9,000

OFF THE PRESS

New & Noteworthy

Bounty by Steve McQueen
MACK, March 2026

The artist and filmmaker continues his exploration of colonial history through meditative photographs of Grenada’s flora — studying the island’s plant life as permanent markers of beauty in a land ravaged by exploitation. The title alludes to both the generosity of nature and the sum paid to slave catchers. Designed by Irma Boom. Includes Derek Walcott’s poem “The Bounty” and a new text by Dionne Brand. MACK

Lonely Are All the Bridges by Robin Hinsch
GOST, February 2026

“This is not a war book. Not exactly.” Robin Hinsch photographed Ukraine over more than a decade — from his first visit in 2010 to the present. Soviet ruins and historical monuments sit alongside misty, rain-soaked landscapes. A melancholic vision of a country caught between a contested past, a brutal present, and an uncertain future. 76 images. Essay by Julian Stallabrass. GOST

Album, 1969–82 by Guido Guidi
MACK, February 2026

Rediscovered negatives from the beginning of Guidi’s career — his family, friends, and the deserted streets of 1970s Italy. High contrast, disorienting framing, and the anarchic energy of youth, revisited with the shrewd instincts of a master editor. The second of three volumes engaging with Guidi’s black-and-white work. Limited edition of 1,000 signed copies. MACK

OPEN CALLS

Deadlines This Month

THE WEEKS AHEAD

Key Dates: March 30 – April 19

ONE QUESTION

What photograph changed how you see the world?

Not the most famous. Not the most expensive. The one that changed something for you. Tell us in the comments — we’ll feature the best responses next week.

DID YOU KNOW?

Female collectors are changing what gets bought — and what gets valued. According to the Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting, women high-net-worth collectors are outspending men in photography, digital art, and installations. In fact, female collectors averaged USD $519,960 on art and antiques in 2024 — 46% more than their male counterparts. They're also more likely to support female artists, with women holding a higher share of works by female artists in their collections (49%) compared to male collectors (40%). And with a tendency to seek out unknown artists and work with personal meaning, female collectors are quietly but powerfully reshaping the art world's canon.

ON THIS DAY

April 1, 1960: NASA launched TIROS-1, the first weather satellite — and the first spacecraft to photograph Earth from orbit. The grainy, black-and-white images it sent back weren’t art, but they changed how we see our planet forever. Photography’s reach extended beyond the surface of the Earth for the first time.

One of the first images from the TIROS-1 satellite, April 1, 1960. Credit: NASA

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]]><![CDATA[The Most Prestigious Prize in Photography Just Named Its 2026 Winner]]>https://photograph.is/p/the-most-prestigious-prize-in-photographyhttps://photograph.is/p/the-most-prestigious-prize-in-photographyMon, 23 Mar 2026 13:03:16 GMTTHE FRAME

Zanele Muholi Wins the 2026 Hasselblad Award

Zanele Muholi: Julile I, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2016

The Hasselblad Foundation has named South African visual activist Zanele Muholi as the recipient of the 2026 Hasselblad Award — the world’s most prestigious photography prize. The award carries a purse of SEK 2,000,000 (~$216,600), a gold medal, and a Hasselblad camera. Born in 1972 in Umlazi, South Africa, Muholi joins a lineage of laureates that includes Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Muholi is best known for Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), a self-portrait series that drew massive audiences at Tate Modern in 2024 and has become one of the defining photographic projects of our time. Across decades of work, Muholi has combined visual storytelling with activism — asserting visibility for Black queer people in South Africa through portraiture, documentation, and sheer force of presence. A solo exhibition opens at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg on October 10, 2026, running through April 24, 2027.

WHY IT MATTERS:

This is the photography world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Muholi’s selection signals the field’s ongoing reckoning with who gets seen, who gets honored, and what photography is for. Their work has always insisted on visibility as a political act — and the Hasselblad Foundation has now placed that insistence alongside the medium’s most celebrated names. For collectors, Muholi’s market has been climbing steadily; this award will accelerate it.

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ON VIEW

16 Exhibitions Worth Your Attention

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen
National Portrait Gallery, London · Through May 31, 2026

The first major UK exhibition of Catherine Opie’s work spans 30 years of portraiture exploring LGBTQ+ identity, home, intimacy, and power. Opie’s subjects — from leather-clad figures to suburban houses to surfers — form one of the most sustained and searching portrait projects in contemporary photography. National Portrait Gallery

Circulation(s) 2026
CENTQUATRE-PARIS · Through May 17, 2026

Now in its 16th edition, this annual festival showcases 26 emerging European photographers from 15 nationalities, curated by the all-female Fetart collective. The best discovery-oriented show of the spring — consistently the place to find names before the rest of the market does. Circulation(s)

Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs
Onassis Stegi, Athens · Through May 17, 2026

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker reveals 182 images from his parallel photographic practice — strange, disquieting, and unmistakably Lanthimos. Coincides with the release of his new MACK photobook VISCIN. A rare look at a major director’s visual universe beyond cinema. Onassis Stegi

Sabotage by Salvatore Vitale
Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland · Through May 31, 2026

Salvatore Vitale’s investigation into surveillance, infrastructure, and the invisible systems that shape contemporary life. A timely show at one of Europe’s leading photography museums. Photo Elysée

FotoFest Biennial 2026: Global Visions — FotoFest at 40
Sawyer Yards, Houston · Through May 10, 2026

FotoFest marks its 40th anniversary with more than 450 artists from 58 countries spanning the organization’s four-decade archive. One of the most ambitious photography biennials anywhere this year. FotoFest

Martin Parr: Global Warning
Jeu de Paume, Paris · Through May 24, 2026

The first major posthumous survey of Parr’s work continues to draw crowds. 180+ images across 50 years, curated by Quentin Bajac. If you haven’t been yet, go. Jeu de Paume

Steidl Book Culture: Magic on Paper
DECK, Singapore · Opened Mar 12, 2026

A showcase of the legendary Göttingen publisher’s craft and legacy — exploring how Steidl has shaped the photobook as an art form for more than four decades. DECK

Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well
Grand Palais, Paris · Through Jun 21, 2026

The first French retrospective devoted to Goldin’s videos and slideshows — what the artist calls “films composed of photos.” Six major works spanning 50 years, including The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, The Other Side, and Sisters, Saints, Sibyls. After Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Milan, Paris is the final stop on a touring exhibition that has become a cultural event in every city it touches. Installed across buildings designed by architect Hala Wardé, forming a village within the Grand Palais. Grand Palais

Dana Lixenberg: American Images
Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris · Through May 24, 2026

The first major retrospective of the Dutch photographer’s three-decade exploration of American communities — focusing on resilience, identity, and everyday life. Intimate portraits and documentary series that capture social, cultural, and economic landscapes with empathy and nuance. MEP

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985
Getty Center, Los Angeles · Through Jun 14, 2026

How African American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora artists used photography as a tool for social change. Works by Carrie Mae Weems, Gordon Parks, Billy Abernathy, and Harry Adams, among others. Organized by the National Gallery of Art. An essential show for anyone interested in the medium’s political power. Getty Center

Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation
International Center of Photography (ICP), New York · Through May 4, 2026

Curated by David Campany, this is the first deep dive into how Atget’s reputation was built — and the pivotal role of Berenice Abbott in championing his legacy. A show about photography history that doubles as a story about how canons are made. ICP

Brassaï: Secret Paris
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York · Through Mar 28, 2026

Nearly 40 photographs from Brassaï’s celebrated Paris by Night alongside selections from The Secret Paris — images of brothels, bars, and illicit encounters originally withheld from the 1933 book as too risqué, not published until 1976. Jointly presented with Grob Gallery, Geneva. The show coincides with a new Flammarion edition of Paris by Night and a parallel exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Closing this week — last chance. Howard Greenberg Gallery

Ruby Bell: Glow
Leica Gallery, West Hollywood · Through Apr 13, 2026

Ruby Bell captures the luminescent energy of her subjects behind the scenes on motion shoots — from music videos to galas to narrative films. A vibrant show at Leica Gallery Los Angeles. Leica Gallery LA

Binh Danh & Renee Royale
ROSEGALLERY, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica · Through Apr 25, 2026

Through materially driven photographic processes and historically grounded imagery, Royale and Danh examine how bodies, land, and memory are shaped by colonial legacies and extraction. A strong two-person show at one of LA’s leading photography-focused galleries. ROSEGALLERY

JR: Horizons
Perrotin, Los Angeles · Through Apr 25, 2026

JR’s first solo show at Perrotin Los Angeles presents four bodies of work created across California — drawing from border walls, prison yards, and city facades to explore visibility, community, and the shifting meaning of perspective. Perrotin

Sony World Photography Awards 2026 Exhibition
Somerset House, London · Apr 17 – May 5, 2026

Thirty professional finalists from ten categories — the annual survey of contemporary photography at its broadest. Winners announced April 16. World Photography Organisation

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IN FOCUS

Catherine Opie:
“All People Have the Right to Exist”

Catherine Opie (2025). Photo: Heather Rasmussen

Catherine Opie is having the kind of year most photographers never get. Her first major UK museum exhibition, To Be Seen, opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London on March 5. A second solo show, The Pause that Dreams Against Erasure, opens at the Fridericianum in Kassel in July. And she’s hinting at a new body of work about cowboy culture.

Born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio, and based in Los Angeles for decades, Opie has built one of the most sustained portrait practices in contemporary photography. Her subjects range from leather-clad figures and queer communities to surfers, high school football players, suburban houses, and Elton John. The through line is a belief she articulated to CNN at the London opening: “Without representation, there is no visibility.”

Three self-portraits anchor the exhibition and, in many ways, her entire career. Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) shows a childlike scene of a house and two figures holding hands carved into her back. Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) depicts her in a leather gimp mask with the word “pervert” etched into her chest. A decade later, Self-Portrait/Nursing captures her feeding her infant son — the scar from “pervert” still visible. Together, the three images trace a personal and political arc that few artists have matched.

In the CNN interview, Opie was blunt about the current political climate. “There’s absolutely no way the Smithsonian will show me right now,” she said. Asked what she’d call herself, she didn’t hesitate: “I’m a disrupter.”

WHY IT MATTERS:

Opie’s work has been in major institutional collections for years — LACMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney — but the London show arrives at a moment when the questions she’s been asking for three decades feel newly urgent. Her commitment to photographing people as they are, not as others wish them to be, puts her at the center of ongoing debates about identity, visibility, and the role of art in public life. For collectors: Opie’s market has been steady, but two simultaneous European museum exhibitions will raise her international profile significantly. The show at the National Portrait Gallery runs through May 31.

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

This Week and Beyond

Unseen Photo 2026 — Rotterdam Ahoy, Netherlands
March 27–29, 2026

The 13th edition of Unseen joins forces with Art Rotterdam for the first time. Main Section plus Solo/Duo programs, and the Unseen Book Market at the Nederlands Fotomuseum with ~40 publishers. The anchor event in a week that transforms Rotterdam into Europe’s photography capital. Unseen Photo

Rotterdam Photo 2026 — Rotterdam
March 25–29, 2026

This year’s theme is “Echoes of Silence” — exploring the psychological landscapes of war and conflict through photography. A timely, sobering counterpoint to the fair energy across the city. Rotterdam Photo

Haute Photographie 2026 — Rotterdam 4H District
March 25–29, 2026

The 11th edition brings 50 photographers into an immersive layout that replaces traditional fair booths — a format that foregrounds the work over the gallery. Preview evening March 25. Haute Photographie

PhotoCarmel 2026 — Carmel, California
March 27 – May 10, 2026

A six-week celebration of photography across multiple venues on the Central Coast. Keynote speakers include Dr. Rebecca Senf and Kelli Connell. A destination event for West Coast collectors. PhotoCarmel

THE AUCTION BLOCK

Preview: Spring Photography Sales

Phillips Photographs — New York, April 11

The spring’s marquee photography auction features several six-figure lots. Highlights from the catalogue:

  • Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 123 — Est. $150,000–250,000

  • Tina Modotti, Bandolier, Corn, Sickle — Est. $100,000–150,000

  • Bernd and Hilla Becher, Winding Towers — Est. $100,000–150,000

  • Sebastião Salgado, Iceberg Between Paulet Island and the South Shetland Islands — Est. $40,000–60,000

  • Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack in the Pulpit — Est. $30,000–50,000

  • William Eggleston, Untitled (Louisiana) — Est. $30,000–50,000

Sotheby’s Photographs Part I & II — New York, April

Sotheby’s runs its spring photography auctions in two parts. Part II (online, closing April 16) features works by Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Graciela Iturbide, Peter Beard, and Masao Yamamoto.

WHY IT MATTERS:

April is shaping up to be the biggest month for photography auctions in 2026. With Phillips and Sotheby’s both running dedicated sales, and AIPAD bringing collectors to New York the same month, there’s a rare concentration of buying energy. The Tillmans estimate alone — up to $250,000 — signals confidence at the top of the market. We’ll report the results in the weeks ahead.

OFF THE PRESS

New & Noteworthy

VISCIN by Yorgos Lanthimos
MACK, 2026

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker’s latest photobook reveals the unsettling, carefully composed images that run parallel to his cinematic work. Published by MACK to coincide with his exhibition at Onassis Stegi in Athens. A crossover event for the photography and film worlds. MACK

Mixed by Dev Dhunsi
MACK, March 2026

Norwegian artist Dev Dhunsi explores mixed heritage through photographs, archival fragments, and text in a hybrid work where tenderness and defiance coexist. Made possible by the Nordic Photobook Award, presented by Fotogalleriet Oslo. A debut that announces an original voice. MACK

Mirage by Nick Hannes
Eyeshot, 2026

A visual reflection on the contemporary neo-liberal city — spaces shaped by entertainment, mass tourism, and artificial architectures. Hannes photographs the constructed landscapes we inhabit without questioning, turning street photography into a critique of spectacle. Pre-orders open through March 31. Eyeshot

THE EMERGING EYE

Pablo Ramos

How do you photograph someone who has been erased? Mexican photographer Pablo Ramos answers that question with The Black Album, a project shortlisted in the Creative category of the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards. Ramos takes archival photographs of Mexico’s disappeared — the tens of thousands of people who have vanished in the country’s ongoing crisis — and transforms them into silhouettes, stripping away individual features to create a haunting collective portrait of absence. The result is both monument and protest: each blacked-out figure simultaneously represents a specific person and the impossibility of recovering them. It is political photography at its most formally inventive — using subtraction to make loss visible. The Atlantic

OPEN CALLS

Opportunities & Deadlines

GRANTS & AWARDS

  • Ephemere Photobook Grant 2026 — Deadline March 31. No entry fee. Tokyo-based. Full production coverage for a debut monograph plus airfare to Tokyo for the launch.

  • KLPA 2026 Portrait Prize — Deadline March 31. Entry fee €15–65.

  • iPhone Photography Awards (IPPAWARDS) — Deadline March 31. From $7.50. The longest-running international mobile photography competition, now in its 19th year.

  • Centrale Festival (Fano, Italy) — Deadline March 29. No entry fee. Open to photographers and video artists under 30. Exhibition at the Rocca Malatestiana, June 2026.

  • CPA Artist Grants 2026 — Deadline April 7. $30 fee. Five grants of $5,000 each — emerging, mid-career, and landscape categories. Center for Photographic Art, Carmel.

  • PPA Photo Award 2026 — Deadline April 12. No entry fee. $2,000 prize for US-based emerging photographers.

  • Aperture Portfolio Prize — Awarded at AIPAD (Apr 22–26). All five finalists exhibited at the fair.

  • Inge Morath Award 2026 — Deadline April 30. No entry fee. $7,500 grant from the Magnum Foundation for women and nonbinary photographers under 30. One finalist also receives $1,000. Named for the first woman to join Magnum Photos. Recipient announced July/August 2026.

RESIDENCIES

  • Sirmione Photo Residency — Deadline March 31. No entry fee. Two-week residency on Lake Garda, Italy (October 2026). €2,500 allowance + €1,000 travel reimbursement + published book. Supervised by Magnum’s Andréa Holzherr.

THE WEEK AHEAD

Your Calendar for March 23–29

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]]><![CDATA[Photography Turns 200 — and Its Greatest Satirist Has Left Us]]>https://photograph.is/p/photography-turns-200-and-its-greatesthttps://photograph.is/p/photography-turns-200-and-its-greatestSun, 15 Mar 2026 16:23:38 GMTTwo hundred years ago, Nicéphore Niépce captured what is widely regarded as the first permanent photograph from his window in Burgundy. In 2026 — the bicentennial of the medium — the photography world is responding with an unprecedented concentration of major exhibitions. Lee Miller at Tate Britain, Seydou Keïta at the Brooklyn Museum, FotoFest marking 40 years in Houston — photography is receiving the kind of wall-to-wall institutional attention usually reserved for painting and sculpture.

But the year’s most anticipated show carries a weight no one expected. Martin Parr — the great British satirist who spent five decades documenting the absurdities of modern life — died on December 6, 2025, of myeloma. He was 73. His career-spanning retrospective “Global Warning” at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, curated by Quentin Bajac, opened in January as both celebration and elegy. It is now the first major posthumous survey of his work.

WHY IT MATTERS:

The concentration of museum-scale photography shows in a single year — the bicentennial year — signals a permanent shift in how the art establishment values the medium. For collectors, it means rising visibility — and rising prices. For photographers, it means a wider audience than ever before. And Parr’s posthumous retrospective gives the bicentennial a bittersweet anchor: photography has never been more celebrated, even as we’ve lost one of its most vital voices. Meanwhile, MIA Photo Fair opens in Milan this week and FotoFest marks four decades in Houston — further proof that photography’s moment is now.

ON VIEW

5 Exhibitions Worth Your Attention

Martin Parr: Global Warning
Jeu de Paume, Paris · Jan 30 – May 24, 2026

Now the first major posthumous survey of Parr’s work, this career-spanning retrospective of 180+ images across 50 years feels even more essential. Curated by Quentin Bajac — satirical, colorful, uncomfortable, and unmissable. Jeu de Paume

Lee Miller
Tate Britain, London · 2026

The most extensive retrospective ever mounted for the surrealist-turned-war-correspondent. Over 250 vintage and modern prints charting an extraordinary life from Man Ray’s muse to Vogue photographer to witness at Dachau. Tate Britain

Seydou Keïta
Brooklyn Museum, New York · 2026

The most expansive North American exhibition of the Malian portrait master’s silver prints. Studio portraiture as high art — luminous, composed, timeless. Brooklyn Museum

FotoFest Biennial 2026: Global Visions
Sawyer Yards, Houston · March 7 – May 10, 2026

FotoFest turns 40 with a celebration spanning artists from 58+ countries across its four-decade archive. Curated by co-founder Wendy Watriss and executive director Steven Evans. FotoFest

Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well
Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan – 2026

Goldin’s unflinching visual diary continues. Raw, intimate, political — and worth pairing with a visit to MIA Photo Fair, just across town. Pirelli HangarBicocca

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

What’s Coming Up

MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas — Milan, Italy
March 19–22, 2026 (VIP Preview: March 18)

Italy’s leading international photography fair returns to Superstudio Più for its 15th edition. Artistic director Francesca Malgara brings curated sections including “Beyond Photography — Dialogue” and a new Special Focus on a TBA country. Last year: 114 exhibitors, 77 galleries, 13,000 visitors. MIA Photo Fair

MIA Photo Fair, Superstudio Più, Milan. Courtesy MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas. March 19-22, 2026

The Photography & Video Show — Birmingham, UK
March 14–17, 2026

The UK’s biggest photography event. Gear, talks, portfolio reviews, workshops — wrapping up this weekend. The Photography Show

Circulation(s) — CENTQUATRE-PARIS
March 21 – May 17, 2026

Annual festival spotlighting young European photography. A strong discovery-oriented program and one of the best values in the spring photography calendar. Circulation(s)

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THE AUCTION BLOCK

Market Signals

Heritage Auctions ran three photography-dedicated sales in early 2026. Their "Depth of Field: Photographs" auctions on February 11 and March 11, plus "Photographs from The Abe Frajndlich Collection: A Photographer Collects" on February 18, collectively realized over $275,000 across hundreds of lots — a steady pulse at the mid-market level where most collecting actually happens. Heritage Auctions

WHY IT MATTERS:

The photography auction market remains modest compared to painting and sculpture — total sales from 2005 to 2024 were $3.07 billion, according to Artnet — but the bicentennial year could shift that. With institutional attention at an all-time high, dedicated photography sales at Phillips (April) and Christie's (October) will test whether 2026 becomes a breakout year for the medium at auction. The all-time record remains Man Ray's "Le Violon d'Ingres" at $12.4 million (Christie's, 2022). We'll be tracking every sale.

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OFF THE PRESS

New & Noteworthy

Aperture Magazine No. 262: “The End of Nature?”
Released March 12, 2026

Aperture’s spring issue is out this week. Featured photographers include Mitch Epstein (imperiled US old-growth forests), Hashem Shakeri (drought in Balochistan — the cover), Rinko Kawauchi (Japanese landscapes), and César Rodríguez (Mexico’s flooded fishing towns). Essays by Pico Iyer and Lydia Millet. A sweeping, urgent issue. Aperture

Anja Niedringhaus: Photography
Steidl

A comprehensive monograph honoring the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, killed covering the 2014 Afghan elections. Essential. Steidl

Helen Levitt: New York Archive / Color
Steidl

Previously unseen color work from Levitt’s legendary New York street archive. A gift for street photography devotees. Steidl

LENS ON...

Martin Parr (1952–2025)

Martin Parr in Conversation, V&A, May 2024. Photo: Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Martin Parr didn’t photograph the world — he diagnosed it. The British photographer, who died on December 6 at age 73 from myeloma, spent five decades turning his saturated, close-up lens on the things most of us look past: the queues, the buffets, the sunburns, the souvenirs. In Parr’s hands, the banal became a critique of everything.

Born in Epsom, Surrey, and raised on his grandfather’s love of photography, Parr studied at Manchester Polytechnic before embarking on a body of work that would redefine documentary photography. The Last Resort (1986), his unflinching portrait of a crumbling New Brighton seaside, announced a new voice. Small World and Common Sense extended the project globally — mass tourism, consumer excess, and the quiet absurdities of late capitalism, all shot in ring-flash color that made the uncomfortable impossible to look away from.

He joined Magnum Photos in 1994 by a single vote — and served as its president from 2013 to 2017. He published over 60 photobooks, co-authored the essential The Photobook: A History with Gerry Badger, curated Rencontres d’Arles, received a CBE, and founded the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol to champion photography beyond his own. He is survived by his wife Susie and daughter Ellen.

His retrospective “Global Warning” at the Jeu de Paume — 180+ works curated by Quentin Bajac — runs through May 24. He also features in this week’s Aperture No. 262. Go see it. He made serious photographs disguised as entertainment; the least we can do is take them seriously. Jeu de Paume · Full biography

Further Reading: Susie Parr, Martin’s wife and partner of four decades, wrote a beautiful remembrance for the cover of i-D Issue 376, reflecting on their life together, his genius, and the reopening of the Martin Parr Foundation with The Last Resort.

THE WEEK AHEAD

Your Calendar for March 16–22

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]]><![CDATA[Introducing The International Review of Photography]]>https://photograph.is/p/introducing-the-international-reviewhttps://photograph.is/p/introducing-the-international-reviewSun, 15 Mar 2026 16:22:23 GMT

Dear Friends,

I’m writing to share something I’ve been building for the past several months.

Today, I’m introducing The International Review of Photography, a new weekly newsletter from Fabrik Media covering the global photography world.

Every Monday morning, we deliver the essential photography news — exhibitions, fairs, auctions, photobooks, and photographer profiles — in a concise format you can read in 5 minutes. A weekly briefing for collectors, gallerists, curators, artists, and devoted enthusiasts who care about photography as a serious art form.

Why this, why now? Because the photography world has excellent publications — L’Oeil de la Photographie delivers essential daily coverage, Aperture and Foam publish deeply considered quarterly issues, and the British Journal of Photography has been a vital voice since 1854. But if you’re a busy collector, gallerist, curator, artist, or devoted enthusiast who wants to stay informed about what matters this week — which shows to see, which books to read, what’s moving at auction, who’s emerging — there hasn’t been a single place to get all of that in one sitting. Until now.

Who is it for? Photography collectors. Gallerists and gallery directors. Museum curators. Art advisors. Publishers and editors. Fair directors. Artists. And anyone who believes photography is one of the defining art forms of our time.

Rather than just tell you about it, I’d rather show you. Our first issue is below.

It’s free. If you know someone who lives and breathes photography, I’d be grateful if you’d share this with them.

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The International Review of Photography joins LA Insider and The Intentional Artist in the Fabrik Media family. We’ve been connecting audiences with art and culture since 2008 — first in print with Fabrik Magazine, and now through curated digital newsletters reaching over 37,000 subscribers. This is the next chapter.

Thank you for being part of this from the very beginning.

See you tomorrow,

Chris Davies
Publisher & Editor

]]><![CDATA[Welcome to The International Review of Photography]]>https://photograph.is/p/welcome-to-the-international-reviewhttps://photograph.is/p/welcome-to-the-international-reviewSun, 15 Mar 2026 14:28:30 GMT

I’ve spent 25 years in the photography world... It was time.

After seeing the extraordinary Man Ray: When Objects Dream exhibition at The Met last year, I was reminded — in a room full of rayographs, paintings, and some of the most inventive photographs ever made — how powerful a single image can be. How it can stop time, rearrange how you see the world, and stay with you long after you’ve left the gallery.

Man Ray is probably my favorite artist. Not just photographer — artist. He refused to be confined by medium. He painted, sculpted, made films, and then walked into a darkroom and invented an entirely new way of making photographs, placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper and letting chance and light do the rest. Tristan Tzara called them captures of the moments “when objects dream.” That restlessness, that refusal to accept boundaries between art forms — that’s what has always drawn me to photography. It’s never just one thing.

Man Ray, Kiki with African Mask, 1926. Gelatin silver print. National Gallery of Victoria.

That exhibition crystallized something I’d been feeling for a long time.

I’ve been involved in the photography world in many ways over the past 25 years — as a publisher, a gallerist, an art fair producer, an exhibitor. In 2008 I launched Fabrik Magazine, a print publication out of Los Angeles built on the belief that if you put beautiful work in front of people and wrote about it with care, they’d show up. In 2014 I founded Photo Independent, a curated international showcase for high-caliber independent photographers — because the artists doing the most exciting work deserved a direct line to the collectors, curators, and professionals who could change their careers. Then the pandemic came, print stopped making sense, and we moved everything digital. LA Insider. The Intentional Artist. Each one built on the same idea: curation matters. What you choose not to include matters as much as what you do.

Now we’re turning that lens — literally — to photography.

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The International Review of Photography is a weekly newsletter covering the global photography art world. Exhibitions, fairs, auctions, photobooks, emerging photographers. The entire landscape, distilled into something you can read in five minutes on a Monday morning.

Why photography, why now? Because it’s the most democratic art form in history, and yet the world that surrounds it — the galleries, the collectors, the fairs, the market — can feel impossibly scattered. There are excellent publications doing deep work. But nobody is pulling it all together into one concise, weekly read. That’s what this is.

This isn’t another photography magazine. The world has those, and they are brilliant. This is the thing you read before you read those — the weekly scan that tells you what’s happening, what matters, and what you might be missing. Five minutes on a Monday morning. Then you go deeper wherever you want.

Oh, and you may have noticed our logo — a P with a blinking cursor? It's not decorative. Photography never stops. Every week there's a new story, a new image, a new voice. The cursor is always waiting for what comes next. So are we.

Issue No. 1 arrives Monday.

Chris Davies
Publisher & Editor

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