<![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, 13 Sep 2026 04:51:53 GMT<![CDATA[He Left His Most Famous Photograph Out of the Book]]>https://photograph.is/p/he-left-his-most-famous-photographhttps://photograph.is/p/he-left-his-most-famous-photographMon, 07 Sep 2026 13:02:36 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Central Park Zoo, New York” — Garry Winogrand, 1967

Garry Winogrand, Central Park Zoo, New York, 1967. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase, acc. 579.1973. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

A man and a woman stand at the Central Park Zoo, dressed for somewhere better than a zoo. She is white, he is Black, and each of them is carrying a chimpanzee wearing children’s clothes. Everything else in the frame — the railing, the light, the other visitors — arranges itself around that fact and declines to explain it.

Winogrand made the picture in 1967, the year John Szarkowski put him in New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander and, in doing so, redefined what American documentary photography was allowed to be about. It has since become the most reproduced image from Winogrand’s years at the zoo. It is also, tellingly, not in the zoo book. The Animals, published in 1969 to accompany an exhibition of the same name at MoMA, gathered forty-three pictures made at the Central Park Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium between 1962 and 1969. This one was left out. Tod Papageorge — Winogrand’s walking companion on the streets of New York from 1966 onward, and later the head of photography at Yale — has argued that the omission is worth reading: Szarkowski edited the book, but Winogrand did not insist, which suggests he was not sure enough of the picture to fight for it.

The uncertainty was earned. The photograph has been read, from the beginning and with force, as a picture about race — Hilton Als has written about it in the context of miscegenation and what a white viewer is being invited to see. The chimpanzees are not incidental to that reading; they are the whole of it. Winogrand’s stated position on such questions was famously, maddeningly formal — he said he photographed to find out what things looked like photographed — and Martha Rosler’s 1981 essay “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)” took Szarkowski’s whole program to task on exactly that ground, naming Winogrand as its clearest case: a photographer who refused responsibility for what his pictures meant in public.

The rest of The Animals makes the refusal harder to sustain. Szarkowski’s own text for the book described a zoo in which people and animals stare at each other through bars, each failing to notice its own predicament — a joke that only works if the photographs are about human beings. Made over the Vietnam years, on the same walks through Central Park where Winogrand also photographed antiwar demonstrations, the zoo pictures are a satire with a subject. The 1967 frame is what happens when the satire stops being general.

Winogrand died in 1984 having published five books. His archive went to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, which drew on it this summer for Animality: 100 Years of Photographs, a show of more than a hundred works that opened August 8 and takes as its hero image a different Winogrand — a New York picture from around 1963 in which an elephant’s trunk and a human hand come within an inch of touching. The gentler one.

WHY IT MATTERS

The pictures a photographer leaves out of the book are a form of testimony. Winogrand spent his career insisting that a photograph was a fact about what a camera does and not a statement about the world, and then made one that has been arguing with viewers for nearly sixty years — and quietly declined to publish it. Sixty years on, the frame is still doing what the best of his work does and what he claimed not to intend: putting a viewer in the position of the zoo-goer, and asking what, exactly, is being looked at.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter

C/O Berlin | Amerika Haus
September 12, 2026 – February 3, 2027

More than one hundred photographs, videos, and installations make this the first comprehensive retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems in Berlin, and it arrives with the opening weekend of Berlin Art Week. The survey runs from Family Pictures and Stories and the Kitchen Table Series — the 1990 sequence in which Weems cast herself at a single table under a single hanging lamp and built an entire account of intimacy, argument, and solitude out of the arrangement — through the Museums pictures, in which she stands with her back to the camera before the institutions that took a long time to let her in. New work is included in the form of Preach, made among Black communities of faith. Curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister of Aperture with Boaz Levin of C/O Berlin, in a project with Gallerie d’Italia; the opening is Friday, September 11, at 8 p.m.

Carrie Mae Weems, Welcome Home, 1978–84, from the series Family Pictures and Stories. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy the artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Lee Friedlander: Maria

Fraenkel Gallery | San Francisco
September 10 – October 24, 2026

Roughly fifty photographs, made between the 1950s and the 2020s, of one person: Maria Friedlander, the photographer’s wife, in what the gallery reasonably calls one of the longest extended portraits in the history of visual art. Much of it is the ordinary business of a life — Maria reading, driving, on the phone, lying in the sun, reading again — and much of it is unmistakably Friedlander, which is to say the picture keeps getting interrupted by the world. Her silhouette falls across a newspaper at breakfast; her face turns up among clouds reflected in a truck window; his empty suit jacket hangs on a doorknob while she sleeps, and his shadow crosses her in a doorway. Friedlander turns ninety-two this year and was in New Documents in 1967, the same year and the same room as this issue’s lead.

Lee Friedlander, Maria, New York City, 1959. Gelatin silver print. © Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Graciela Iturbide: White Fence, Los Cholos

ROSEGALLERY | Santa Monica
September 12 – December 5, 2026

Graciela Iturbide came to East Los Angeles in 1986 on an assignment for A Day in the Life of America and stayed with what she found: the neighborhood around White Fence, the oldest Chicano gang in the city, photographed not as a subject of alarm but as a place where people live, dress, mourn, and hold their ground. The pictures have been read ever since as a corrective to how the barrio was being covered elsewhere in the same decade, and they are among the few bodies of work in which Iturbide, whose great subject is Mexico, turned her attention north. The show opens the same season the Getty is running two exhibitions of Mexican photography a short drive away.

Graciela Iturbide, Cholos, Harpys, White Fence, East Los Angeles, Estados Unidos, 1986. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist and ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica.

Jean-Luc Mylayne: Reflection

Sprüth Magers | Berlin
September 11 – October 24, 2026

Jean-Luc Mylayne photographs birds, which undersells the operation considerably. Each picture is the product of months in one place — waiting, watching, learning the habits of a particular animal in a particular field until the moment the composition he has been imagining can actually occur — and the resulting images treat depth of field as an argument rather than a setting, with the bird frequently soft and the world behind it exact. Many of the works here were conceived during a residency in Marfa, Texas, and share a register of blues across water, sky, and feather. The opening is Thursday, September 10, from 6 to 10 p.m., in the first days of Berlin Art Week.

Jean-Luc Mylayne, N° 577, Février Mars 2008, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Tania Franco Klein: RAGE™

Yancey Richardson | New York
September 10 – October 17, 2026

Tania Franco Klein, born in Mexico in 1990, trained first as an architect in Mexico City and then took a photography MA in London, and her staged, saturated, cinematic pictures have always been about states of mind rather than events. Her first exhibition with the gallery takes rage as its subject — not as private feeling but as a public resource, cultivated and directed by media and political interests, and by turns destructive and generative. Each work borrows a different visual language from the history of art or of mass media, and the series presses on what artificial intelligence is doing to the reliability of a picture. The opening reception is Thursday, September 10, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Tania Franco Klein, The Scream (Self-portrait), 2025, from the series RAGE™. Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Berlin

Chicago

Cologne

Copenhagen

Dublin

London

  • William Klein: 100 — HackelBury Fine Art · Opens Sep 9 (centenary; through Feb 2, 2027)

Melbourne

Milan

New York

Riverside, CA

Toronto

Closing Soon

Amsterdam

Buenos Aires

Carmel, CA

Frankfurt

Lisbon

London

Los Angeles

Madrid

New York

Paris

Reykjavík

Santa Fe

Tokyo

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Bern

Chicago

London

New York

Norfolk, VA

Turin

Vancouver

FESTIVAL WATCH

  • Visa pour l’Image — Perpignan, France · Final week, through Sep 13 (the 2026 Visa d’Or laureates were announced Sep 4–5: Luis Tato of AFP takes the Visa d’Or News for the Gen Z protests in Madagascar; Philémon Barbier the Visa d’Or Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik for Syria: The Dawn of Ashes*; Jérôme Gence the Visa d’Or Magazine; Khames Alrefi the ICRC Humanitarian Visa d’Or)*

  • Berlin Art Week 2026 — Berlin · Sep 9 – 13 (15th edition; the photography strand runs through Weems at C/O Berlin, Mylayne at Sprüth Magers, Brassaï at Berinson, and Sieverding at Thomas Schulte)

  • BredaPhoto Festival 2026 (12th edition): Our Songs Came Through — Breda, Netherlands · Sep 11 – Oct 25 (city-wide biennial, 40+ photographers, including six Sudanese photographers curated with Ala Kheir)

  • SI Fest 2026 (35th edition): Still Standing — Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy · Sep 11 – 27 (Italy’s longest-running photography festival; Christopher Anderson, Mario Cresci, Lars Tunbjörk, Robin de Puy, Robbie Lawrence, plus the Premio Marco Pesaresi)

  • JIPFest 2026 (Jakarta International Photo Festival, 6th edition): Resilience — Jakarta, Indonesia · Sep 11 – 20 (at Taman Ismail Marzuki; curated by Chelsea Chua and Yoppy Pieter)

OFF THE PRESS

Step By Step by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

Dewi Lewis Publishing

Between 1982 and 1989 Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen followed a group of girls and their mothers through a dancing school in North Shields, on the Tyne, and kept following them after they left it. The result, first published in 1989 and long out of print, is one of the great British documentary books about class and aspiration — the dancing understood not as a hobby but as the thing that made the rest bearable, and the girls’ own accounts running alongside the photographs, funny and unsentimental about what was in front of them. The series fed directly into Lee Hall’s play Dancer, which became Billy Elliot. Konttinen came from Finland to study fillmaking in London, joined the Amber Film & Photography Collective in Newcastle in 1969, and made her name with Byker, the record of a working-class neighborhood photographed in the years before it was demolished. This edition has been extensively revised by her; a signed edition of sixty, and includes a print..

The Sound of Dirt and Beauty by Jesse Glazzard

SPBH Editions / MACK

A decade of photographs made in the UK among friends, lovers, and collaborators, and the first book by Jesse Glazzard. The pictures move between studio portraits and whatever was happening in the room — bodies, bedrooms, gatherings, pages of a diary — and they refuse the register of spectacle that queer working-class life is usually photographed in. Glazzard’s own transition runs through the sequence alongside the changing lives of everyone around him, which is the book’s real argument: identity here is not a category being illustrated but a set of relationships being lived. It is built like the zines Glazzard self-published before it, stapled and screen-printed, and reads as a record rather than a monument.

Maria by Lee Friedlander

Fraenkel Gallery

More than seventy photographs of Maria Friedlander, made across seven decades, published to accompany the exhibition opening at Fraenkel on September 10. What separates the book from the show is the interview: Maria talks to Jeffrey Fraenkel about what it took to hold a family together around a man photographing everything in it, and about her own verdict on the work she is part of. She did not like all of it. She thought he had something going. Few books about a long marriage are this unillusioned and this affectionate at once.

OPEN CALLS

ON THIS DAY

September 9, 1839 — Sir John Herschel photographs his father’s forty-foot telescope at Slough, making the earliest surviving photograph on glass. The telescope was already a ruin; William Herschel’s great reflector, the largest in the world when it was built in the 1780s, was being dismantled, and his son fixed its image on a glass plate weeks after Daguerre’s process had been announced in Paris and Talbot had shown his own in London. Herschel was a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and botanist who came to photography sideways and then gave it most of its vocabulary: photography, negative, positive, and snapshot all enter English usage through him, and it was Herschel who told both Talbot and Daguerre that sodium thiosulfate would fix an image permanently — the single piece of chemistry without which none of it would have lasted. The plate is in the Science Museum in London. Glass negatives remained standard in astronomy for a century and a half after he made it. Photo Museum Ireland

Sir John Herschel, photograph of the forty-foot telescope built by Sir William Herschel, Slough, September 9, 1839. Photograph on glass. Science Museum Group Collection, London.
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[One Photograph Got Him Into Magnum. He Spent Sixty Years Living With It.]]>https://photograph.is/p/one-photograph-got-him-into-magnumhttps://photograph.is/p/one-photograph-got-him-into-magnumMon, 31 Aug 2026 13:03:29 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Painter on the Eiffel Tower” — Marc Riboud, 1953

Marc Riboud, Painter on the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1953. © Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos

Marc Riboud died ten years ago yesterday, at ninety-three, having spent six decades photographing the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the fall of Algiers, the Watergate hearings, and the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He is remembered instead for a man with a paintbrush.

In 1953 the Eiffel Tower was being repainted, as it is every seven years, and Riboud — twenty-nine, recently arrived in Paris from Lyon, with an engineering degree from the École centrale and a factory job behind him — climbed up to photograph the crew. What he came back with was one painter alone on a girder, cap tilted, one hand on the ironwork and one hand working the brush, the city dissolving into haze several hundred feet below him. The man is neither posing nor working especially hard. He is loitering at altitude, and he looks like he is enjoying it.

The picture ran in Life that year. It was the first photograph Riboud ever published, and it was enough: Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa saw it and brought him into Magnum, which had been founded only six years earlier. Capa then sent him to England for a year on the theory that a French photographer should learn to work in a language he did not speak. Everything after — Yugoslavia in 1953, the overland crossing through Turkey and India to China in 1955, Ho Chi Minh, Mao at a Beijing banquet, the girl with the chrysanthemum facing the bayonets at the Pentagon in 1967 — proceeds from a man on a girder.

There is a detail in Riboud’s own chronology that this week makes hard to ignore. He took his first photographs in 1937, at the Paris World’s Fair, on a Vest Pocket Kodak his father had carried in the trenches of the First World War and then handed to his son. The camera that made Riboud a photographer was a Kodak — a descendant of the machine George Eastman patented on September 4, 1888, the anniversary that falls this Friday and closes this issue. Eastman’s device was built for people with no intention of becoming photographers. It made one anyway.

The print is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — a gelatin silver print, bought from Etherton Gallery in Tucson in 1999 with funds from the Mundy Companies. Riboud inscribed the back in pencil: Painter on Eiffel / Paris 1953, and signed it. In 2011 he gave 192 prints from the 1950s and 1960s to the Centre Pompidou; the bulk of his archive went to the Musée Guimet in 2019, three years after his death.

WHY IT MATTERS

A career in photography is usually described as a body of work, but it very often turns on a single frame that happened to be seen by the right two people. Riboud spent sixty years earning the reputation this picture bought him in an afternoon, and he never seemed to resent it. The photograph is also, quietly, an argument about what the medium is for: not the summit, not the view, not the monument — the man hired to keep it painted, caught in the ten seconds he took for himself.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Jamel Shabazz: New York Vibes

Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation | The Cube, Eschborn
September 3, 2026 – January 17, 2027

More than sixty photographs make this the first comprehensive account in Germany of Jamel Shabazz’s four decades on the streets of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Shabazz began working systematically in 1980, after three years in the US Army stationed in West Germany, and the portraits that followed — Black women, men, and children presenting their outfits and their stances directly to a camera held by someone from their own block — became the visual record of hip-hop’s first generation. The exhibition sets that work against the pictures he made across more than twenty years as a correction officer in institutions including Rikers Island, where the same attentiveness is turned on lives interrupted. Curated by Anne-Marie Beckmann with Galerie Bene Taschen; access is by guided tour or on the foundation’s Open Saturdays, October 31 and January 16.

Jamel Shabazz, Rolling Partners, Downtown, Brooklyn, NYC, 1982

Robert Frank: Mabou / John Cohen: Pull My Daisy

Les Douches la Galerie, Paris
September 4 – October 31, 2026

In the summer of 1958, with Les Américains already at the printer, Robert Frank decided that still photographs were too mute — that they needed words, sound, and movement — and made the film Pull My Daisy with Alfred Leslie, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. He asked his neighbor John Cohen, folk musician and founder of The New Lost City Ramblers, to shoot the stills. What Cohen produced is not a set of movie stills but an insider’s record of Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Larry Rivers, Delphine Seyrig in her first film role, and Frank’s own wife and son, made during a landmark of what became the New American Cinema. The gallery pairs them with Frank’s later Mabou pictures from Nova Scotia, where he went after the films. The accompanying text is by the photography historian Stuart Alexander.

Robert Frank, New Years Day 1981 / Be Happy, 1981 © Robert Frank Foundation. Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris.

Lee Friedlander: The Shape of Seeing. Early Vintage Prints

Zander Galerie, Paris
September 3 – 26, 2026

Ten gelatin silver prints, all shot and printed by Friedlander himself in the 1960s and 1970s — the decade that took him from obscurity into John Szarkowski’s New Documents at MoMA in 1967, alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. The selection is deliberately small and deliberately dense: faces vanishing behind advertising posters, passers-by fusing with reflections in shop windows, landscapes arriving unannounced in rear-view mirrors, the photographer himself slipping into the frame as a shadow. They read as snapshots and are nothing of the kind. Friedlander turns ninety-two this year, and the show opens the same month Fraenkel Gallery publishes Maria, his book of seven decades of photographs of his wife.

Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1968. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Zander Galerie Paris.

Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
September 4, 2026 – February 14, 2027

Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) is known for cast-concrete sculpture and for the small “shack” works memorializing self-built homes in rural Georgia, but she also photographed constantly — documenting her own covert placements of concrete pieces in the graveyards of enslaved people across the state, an auto-archival practice that has never been the subject of a show. CAMH pairs that material with the photographs, films, and sculptures of Dionne Lee, born in 1988 and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, whose work approaches the American landscape through survivalist technique and hidden history. Curated by Senior Curator Rebecca Matalon as the second in a series pairing artists across generations, with a risograph catalogue including new writing by the scholar Elleza Kelley.

(L to R): Dionne Lee, Castings (detail), 2022. Gelatin silver prints, 5 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist and Petra Bibeau, New York; Beverly Buchanan with Virginia “Gina” Templeton, Abandoned Sculpture Off Pea Ridge Road, Monroe Co., Georgia (detail), 1982. Reproduction of one hand-written page and eight photographs mounted to photobook, Beverly Buchanan papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Robert Ellis: The Forbidden Sun

Photo Museum Ireland
August 29 – October 11, 2026

Robert Ellis takes his title from Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon, a novel he read as a teenager and admired for its restraint, and the photographs work the same way. Steam rises off geothermal ground; quarry machinery grinds stone into sand bound for concrete; nothing in the frame tells you where you are. Ellis has described the work as rooted in growing up queer and closeted in rural Ireland, where identity was negotiated rather than declared, and the landscapes carry that atmosphere of things left unsaid — but the arc of the show rejects the closet rather than describing it. Supported by an Arts Council Project Award; the official opening is Thursday, September 3.

From the series The Forbidden Sun © Robert Ellis. Courtesy Photo Museum Ireland

Subscribe now

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Brussels

  • Still Lives part 2 — Stieglitz19 · Opens Sep 5 (Roger Ballen, Alexandra Catiere, Chen Wei, Pixy Liao, Yusuf Sevinçli, Wolfgang Tillmans)

Cologne

Düsseldorf

The Hague

Leipzig

Paris

Prague

San Francisco

Closing Soon

Buenos Aires

New York

Zurich

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Cambridge, MA

New York

Paris

Venice

FESTIVAL WATCH

OFF THE PRESS

Christopher Street by Sunil Gupta

Stanley/Barker

Christopher Street was a cruising ground before it was a symbol — men meeting in the backs of parked trucks, in warehouses left to rot, on jetties nobody was policing anymore — and Sunil Gupta was walking it with a camera in the mid-1970s, a few years after Stonewall, while a generation moved out of the shadows and into the daylight of the street. The black-and-white frames from that series are among the most reproduced images of gay New York before AIDS. This revised edition sets them beside the color work Gupta made alongside them, most of which has never been published, and the shift in register is the point: color makes the whole thing look less like history.

Derselbe Himmel by Ute Mahler

Hartmann Books

Ute Mahler started making fashion photographs in 1975, straight out of the HGB Leipzig, and spent the next two decades shooting for Sibylle, the East German magazine that became an unlikely style authority in a country with very little to sell. What is striking about the pictures, collected here for the first time, is where the eye lands: on the face before the clothes. Lifted out of the magazine spread, most of them read as documentary — women, and occasionally men, apparently caught mid-thought rather than posed. Mahler went on to co-found the Ostkreuz agency in 1990. The book accompanies her show at Galerie Pankow in Berlin, which opens Sept. 2.

Dark Line — The Thames Estuary by Nadav Kander

GOST Books

Nadav Kander’s first book with GOST gathers photographs made between 2015 and 2024 along the stretch where the Thames widens out of London and meets the North Sea — the same water Turner painted for its light, now known, when it is known at all, for grey marshes and mudflats. Kander has photographed the Yangtze and the American West and the faces of world leaders; the publisher calls this his most personal body of work, and it is the first time the series has been presented complete.

Subscribe now

OPEN CALLS

ON THIS DAY

September 4, 1888 — George Eastman receives patent number 388,850 for the shutter of the Kodak camera, and trademark number 15,825 for the word “Kodak.” The camera had gone on sale earlier that summer: $25, pre-loaded with enough film for 100 circular exposures, no adjustments and no prior knowledge required. The user pulled a string to arm the shutter, pointed, and pressed. When the roll was finished the whole camera went back to Rochester, where the film was developed, prints were returned, and the camera came back reloaded — a system Eastman advertised with the line “You press the button, we do the rest.” Photography stopped being a profession that week and started being a reflex; the company changed its name to Eastman Kodak in 1892 on the strength of it. George Eastman Museum

Kodak Camera, 1888. Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, Rochester, New York. George Eastman Museum, gift of Eastman Kodak Company.
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

Share The International Review of Photography

The International Review of Photography is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[She Spent Thirty Years Telling Everyone They Were Reading Her Photograph Wrong]]>https://photograph.is/p/she-spent-thirty-years-telling-everyonehttps://photograph.is/p/she-spent-thirty-years-telling-everyoneMon, 24 Aug 2026 13:03:36 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“American Girl in Italy” — Ruth Orkin, 1951

Ruth Orkin, American Girl in Florence, Italy, 1951. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Helen Kornblum in honor of Roxana Marcoci, acc. 32.2021. ©2021 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Seventy-five years ago this month, on the Piazza della Repubblica in Florence, a twenty-nine-year-old American photojournalist raised her camera twice and made one of the most reproduced photographs of the twentieth century. Ruth Orkin had met Ninalee Craig — then traveling as Jinx Allen — at a Florence hotel days earlier. Both women were alone in postwar Europe, and both were tired of being told that was a problem. They decided to spend a day documenting what it actually looked like. Orkin asked Craig to walk the length of the piazza, watched the men on the street respond, then asked her to walk it once more. It took two exposures.

The picture ran the following year in Cosmopolitan, inside a series Orkin had titled Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone, accompanying an article on money, men, and morals for the woman abroad. The title is the part everyone forgets. The photograph was made as an argument for going anyway — a young woman moving through a foreign city with her chin up and fifteen men registering her passage — and it was published as encouragement, not as warning.

Then the audience changed, and the picture changed with it. By the 1970s the image was circulating as a document of street harassment, and by the 2010s it was doing that work on posters, book covers, and the walls of college dormitories. Craig spent the last thirty years of her life objecting. “This image has been interpreted in a sinister way but it was quite the opposite,” she wrote in her own byline for The Guardian in 2015. “They were having fun and so was I.” Her expression, she insisted, was not distress but posture: “I saw myself as Beatrice of Dante’s Divine Comedy. You had to walk with complete assurance and maintain a dignity at all times.” Four years earlier she had been blunter still, telling NBC that the picture “is not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time.” She died in 2018, at ninety, having never persuaded the internet.

The print now sits in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, catalogued as American Girl in Florence, Italy — a gelatin silver print, 8½ by 11 15/16 inches, accession 32.2021, given by Helen Kornblum in honor of the curator Roxana Marcoci. It was last shown there in 2022, in an exhibition drawn entirely from Kornblum’s gift of work by women artists.

WHY IT MATTERS

A photograph does not get to decide what it means. Orkin made a picture about nerve; two generations read it as a picture about threat; the woman inside the frame spent decades telling anyone who would listen that they had it backward, and lost. That gap — between what a photographer intended, what a subject experienced, and what a public needed the image to say — is not a failure of the medium. It is the medium. Every picture in this issue is currently being read by somebody in a way its maker did not plan.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Lee Miller: Fearless

Art Institute of Chicago
August 29 – December 7, 2026

The first comprehensive survey of Lee Miller’s photographs in more than twenty-five years opens in Chicago this week, gathering roughly 150 works across a career that ran from Surrealist experiment in 1920s Paris to accredited war correspondence in 1945. Two full rooms are given to the war chapter, when Miller talked Vogue into becoming a wartime news outlet and spent two months in Germany as Buchenwald and Dachau were liberated. Several photographs from her years in Egypt — the least examined stretch of her working life — have never been exhibited. Curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky with Tate Britain’s Hilary Floe, the show takes its title from Miller’s own description of her method: it was a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.

Lee Miller, Self-Portrait with Headband (detail), about 1932. Lee Miller Archives. © 2026 Lee Miller Archives, England. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk

The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge
August 29, 2026 – May 9, 2027

Between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, working American studio photographers produced an enormous quantity of commissioned images — weddings, school portraits, corporate banquets, civic ribbon-cuttings — and in the 1970s the sociologist Barbara P. Norfleet gathered more than 20,000 of them into a single archive at Harvard. The exhibition drawn from it argues that this commercial work did more than record postwar life; it staged and refined how Americans wanted to be seen. Organized around the economic boom, the rise of suburbia, and the early struggles for equal rights, it reads the collection for absences as much as for content. Curated by Audrey Sands with Madison Brown.

Joseph Janney Steinmetz, Untitled (Family picnic on beach), Longboat Key, Florida, 1958, printed later. Gelatin silver print. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, American Professional Photographers Collection, 4.2002.4.

Inuuteq Storch: Swing by at 14:14

Wilson Saplana Gallery, Copenhagen
August 21 – September 26, 2026

Two years after representing Denmark at the Venice Biennale with Rise of the Sunken Sun, Inuuteq Storch brings two analogue series into conversation for his first solo show at the gallery: Flesh (2016–2019), made on the move in New York and composed almost entirely through glass — windows, façades, phone booths — and Swing by at 14:14 (2020–2026), made on repeated returns to Tasiilaq in East Greenland. The gallery is direct about what the second series refuses: visitors arriving expecting sublime landscape or traditional hunting culture instead get friendship, community, and the social life of young people. One image that reads as ceremonial dress turns out to be a paint-stained painter’s coverall. “East is where I found myself,” Storch says of the work.

Inuuteq Storch, Swing by at 14:14, installation view, Wilson Saplana Gallery, Copenhagen. Photo: David Stjernholm.

WATCHING — Cheryl Pagurek

Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montreal
August 22 – October 24, 2026

Seventeen years of Cheryl Pagurek’s work on surveillance are assembled here across photography, video, and interactive installation. The earliest strand, the 2009 photographic series High Value Targets, sets military footage against intimate recordings of the artist’s own garden, framing both through viewfinder crosshairs and night-vision scopes to make the point that the apparatus of looking is shared between the camera and the weapon. The newest work, Refresh, is an interactive collage that inverts the arrangement: the gallery visitor is the one being watched, and gains something by it. Pagurek came to photography by documenting her own ephemeral installations, which explains a body of work more interested in the act of watching than in any single image.

Cheryl Pagurek, from Watching, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montreal.

Alia Ali: In Light of…

Kunsthalle Helsinki (Taidehalli)
August 20 – November 1, 2026

Alia Ali’s first solo exhibition anywhere in the Nordic region is built around a condition rather than a subject: Kunsthalle Helsinki’s galleries run on natural light, and Finnish daylight will contract steadily across the run. Ali has made work that responds to that fade. Textiles, photography, sculpture, wall painting, and sound share the space, including a fully upholstered room devoted to the history and craft of batik and a new commission, Homage, of sculptural garments cut from French velvet originally designed for Moroccan royalty and modeled on Yemeni ceremonial dress. Ali’s practice draws on Yemeni and Bosnian heritage and a life shaped by movement; she is a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Presented with the Helsinki Festival.

Alia Ali, from the series Homage, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Helsinki.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Aarhus

Bern

Berlin

Chicago

Copenhagen

Cottbus

Düsseldorf

  • Eva Rubinstein — Galerie Clara Maria Sels · Opens Aug 29 (with a room dedicated to Duane Michals, 1932–2026)

Iserlohn

Johannesburg

Los Angeles

Melbourne

Olten

Oslo

Pittsburgh

Tokyo

Vienna

Closing Soon

Amsterdam

Berlin

Frankfurt

Madrid

Vienna

Washington, DC

FESTIVAL WATCH

  • Visa pour l’Image 2026 (38th edition) — Perpignan, France · Aug 29 – Sep 13 (photojournalism; professional week Aug 31 – Sep 5)

  • Ragusa Foto Festival 14 — Ragusa, Sicily · Aug 27 – Sep 27 (theme: Mediterranean Archetypes; Massimo Vitali, Evangelia Kranioti, Mous Lamrabat)

  • Kranj Foto Fest 2026 — Kranj, Slovenia · Aug 27 – Sep 27 (work sited through the medieval town; Marisol Mendez, Federico Estol, Maria Sturm)

OFF THE PRESS

Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Edited by Roxana Marcoci and Caitlin Ryan, this is the book for the MoMA exhibition opening September 20, and it starts where the German artist Marianne Wex started: with thousands of surreptitious street photographs of how men and women physically occupy public space. Wex’s 1970s taxonomy of posture — legs open, legs closed, arms out, arms in — is set against work by seven contemporary artists who take up the same question from non-binary, queer, decolonial, and intersectional positions: Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, K8 Hardy, Yuki Kihara, Joiri Minaya, Paulina Olowska, and Wendy Red Star. A previously unpublished interview with Wex anchors the volume, alongside new conversations with each artist.

Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends

National Portrait Gallery Publications, London

Five years of new work by Tim Walker, made explicitly around queer identity, love, and community, and published to accompany his National Portrait Gallery exhibition opening October 9. The sitters run from Alan Bennett and Miriam Margolyes to Ncuti Gatwa, Chappell Roan, and Harry Styles, with Bernardine Evaristo and Isaac Julien among the artists and writers photographed. Essays come from Shon Faye, Russell T Davies, Travis Alabanza, Lisa Power, and Joelle Taylor, and the book closes with conversations between Walker and the exhibition’s curator, Susanna Brown.

Lorna Simpson: Third Person

Marsilio Arte, Venice

The catalogue to Lorna Simpson’s Third Person at Punta della Dogana — the first exhibition of its scale devoted to Simpson anywhere in Europe, running in Venice through November 22 — edited by Emma Lavigne and conceived and designed by Irma Boom Office. The book follows the through-line the exhibition proposes: Simpson’s long practice of lifting archival images from Ebony and Jet and reworking them by screen printing, layering, and pictorial erasure, and the movement out of that method into painting. Its sections are organized less by chronology than by operation — cutting, pasting, reconfiguring.

ON THIS DAY

August 22, 1908 — Henri Cartier-Bresson is born at Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne. He came to photography late and by accident, abandoning painting in 1931 after seeing Martin Munkácsi’s photograph of three boys running into Lake Tanganyika; he would later say it was the picture that made him realize a photograph could fix eternity in an instant. He bought a Leica the following year, co-founded Magnum Photos in 1947 with Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, and then, in 1975, largely put the camera down and returned to drawing for the last three decades of his life. Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson's press pass, 1948. © Collection Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[They Said He Staged It. A Marine With a Movie Camera Proved Otherwise.]]>https://photograph.is/p/they-said-he-staged-it-a-marine-withhttps://photograph.is/p/they-said-he-staged-it-a-marine-withMon, 17 Aug 2026 13:03:28 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” — Joe Rosenthal, 1945

Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945. Gelatin silver print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 2008.132. Open Access.

Six men, a length of Japanese water pipe, and a wind that arrives at exactly the right moment. Joe Rosenthal was thirty-three, an Associated Press photographer rejected by the Army for poor eyesight, and he very nearly missed the picture that would outlive everyone in it. He had climbed Mount Suribachi on the fifth day of the battle and was stacking stones and a sandbag to gain a few inches of height when the men began to move. He turned, raised a Speed Graphic, and fired at 1/400 of a second without properly getting his eye to the viewfinder. He did not know what he had. The film went to Guam to be developed, and the photograph had traveled around the world before its author ever saw it.

The frame records a replacement. A smaller flag had gone up on the summit roughly two hours earlier and had been photographed by Louis Lowery of Leatherneck; a larger one was carried up so it could be seen from the beaches below. The most reproduced American photograph of the Second World War is therefore not the moment of capture but the second flag of the morning, an administrative substitution that happened to be beautiful. This is the detail people reach for when they want to call the picture a lie, and it is the wrong detail, because nothing about the substitution was performed for a camera.

The accusation came from somewhere else entirely. After the raising, Rosenthal gathered Marines beneath the standing flag for a posed group shot — the “gung-ho” picture, arms up, rifles raised. Days later a correspondent asked whether he had posed his Iwo Jima photograph. Thinking of the group shot, he said yes. A Time radio program broadcast the claim that the flag raising itself had been staged. Time retracted the story and apologized. The retraction traveled a fraction as far as the charge, which Rosenthal then spent sixty years denying. It is false, and it has always been provably false: Sergeant Bill Genaust stood at Rosenthal’s shoulder filming the same seconds in color motion picture, and his footage shows the raising unfolding exactly as the still frame describes it, unposed and unrepeated. Genaust was killed on Iwo Jima nine days later. His body was never recovered.

What happened next to the picture was less careful than what happened in it. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, the same year it was made. Within weeks it was conscripted into the Seventh War Loan drive and printed on billboards and posters. It became the model for Felix de Weldon’s Marine Corps War Memorial. And the Marine Corps has twice had to correct the record of who is actually in it, revising the identifications in 2016 and again in 2019 — the men now named as Harlon Block, Harold Keller, Ira Hayes, Harold Schultz, Franklin Sousley and Michael Strank. Rosenthal died in Novato, California on August 20, 2006, at 94 — twenty years ago this Thursday — still answering the same question.

WHY IT MATTERS

The most damaging thing ever said about this photograph was untrue, and it stuck anyway, because a correction is a weaker object than an accusation. That asymmetry has not improved with better technology; it has industrialized. The useful lesson is not that Rosenthal was vindicated — a Marine with a movie camera happened to be standing beside him, which is luck, not method — but that the picture survived on evidence that existed independently of its author’s word. As authorship itself becomes the thing in question, the photographs that will hold up are the ones with a second witness.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Monumental — Gerwyn Davies

Michael Reid, Berlin
August 17 – September 20, 2026

The Queensland-born, Sydney-based artist opens at Michael Reid’s Berlin gallery on the morning this issue lands, with a body of work photographed in Shanghai and timed to debut officially during Berlin Art Week. Davies builds elaborate costumes and then photographs himself inside them, a practice that has made him one of the more precise thinkers on queer visibility working in the medium — his images make the self hypervisible and hidden at once, exploring what he calls “the potential for queer subjects to wrest greater control through perversions of visibility and the dictating of terms by which they are exposed.” In Monumental the costume constructions echo the built environment in material and form, conjuring architectural image worlds where “character and context coalesce, and clear distinctions between figure and ground, subject and object, seen and unseen, are queerly collapsed.” He won the Olive Cotton Award in 2023 and is currently the subject of the survey Sunburn at Tweed Regional Gallery.

Gerwyn Davies, Corrugate, 2026. Archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Berlin.

Mysterium der Paare

Kunst und Kultur Monschau, Monschau, Germany
August 9 – November 1, 2026

Around 130 photographs by more than fifty photographers, on the single subject of two things found in proximity — which turns out to be a far stranger premise than it sounds. The roster is a serious one: Martin Parr’s Bored Couples is here to argue that couples are not always in loving exchange, Richard Kalvar supplies the politicians caught mid-absurdity, Elliott Erwitt the New York street coincidences, alongside Inge Morath, Willy Ronis, Herbert List, Barbara Klemm, Sibylle Bergemann, Lotte Jacobi, Ruth Orkin, Bruce Davidson, Erich Salomon and Antanas Sutkus. Some pairings are famous and intentional — Dalí and Gala; Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable on the set of The Misfits, the last film either would complete. Others exist only because the frame put them there, joined by a shared gesture, a repeated hairline, a matching coat. The show extends the conceit past people to animals and to still lifes, where objects enter into surprising relationships with one another, and takes its keynote from Erwitt: “Sometimes a glance is enough to tell a whole life.”

Martin Parr, France, Paris, From ‘Bored Couples’, 1992, © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Leaning into Trouble

Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, Berlin
August 15 – September 26, 2026

Nineteen recent positions from students in Professor Tina Bara’s Class for Photography and Moving Image at the HGB Leipzig, and a show with a clear argument about what a young photographer’s work is for. The gallery’s framing is unusually direct: we are all confronted with a restless time that pulls us into conflicts and difficulties we can neither avoid nor want to, and the nineteen respond in nineteen directions rather than one. The environment these artists move through is described as fragile, unstable and endangered, so the work is about staying in motion and practicing resistance — “regardless of whether it is angry, wild, quiet, smart, subtle, brave, funny, sad, or exaggerated.” What holds it together is an argument for photography’s banality and complexity as equally useful, a medium fit for inquiry, miscommunication and surprise. Artists include Mascha Breuer, Zina Bluhm, Esraa Dayrwan, Sally Alhindawi, Viyan Kalayci, Shary Talebian and Carla Maruscha Fellenz.

Sophie George, Signs of appreciation. Courtesy the artist and Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, Berlin.

Appearance — Thomas Gust

Buchkunst, Berlin
August 8 – 29, 2026

Three bodies of work shown together in Berlin for the first time, and the interest is in how differently each one damages the photographic surface. Appearance is made with a Polaroid camera and printed on Japanese Awagami paper hand-coated with albumen, so that landscapes, trees and water arrive with a fragile skin that oscillates between photograph and painting — places that refuse to behave as documents and function instead as shifting images of memory. Hong Kong Romance, made during a long stay in the city, reworks photographs of architecture and urban space with acrylic paint into new topographical image spaces; the gallery calls it a love letter to Hong Kong and an attempt to hold a city that eludes final description. The third group, Costumes, is the sharpest: it takes late nineteenth-century Japanese studio portraits of geishas — staged images produced in large editions for travelers, which did an enormous amount of work in forming the Western picture of Japan — and reinterprets them by hand. Together the three propose photography not as an immutable document but as a repository where experience, history and material keep renegotiating.

Thomas Gust, Appearance #4, Avalon, Miami Beach, 2024. Albumen on Awagami paper from a Polaroid original. Courtesy the artist and Buchkunst Berlin.

1911 Sunset Boulevard

Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles
August 8 – September 12, 2026

Six artists on one address: the former Taix French Restaurant in Echo Park, followed through its final months, its closing night, and the vacant ground left by its demolition. The exhibition is smart about refusing the obvious job — it does not assemble a unified portrait or treat documentation as a way of restoring the building intact. Maxfield Hegedus photographs the interiors with sustained descriptive precision, pushing past the recognizable rooms into banquet halls, corridors and dressing areas where brick, murals, patterned carpet, false arches and artificial plants become newly legible as accumulated style; Abdi Taslimi works from inside the restaurant’s social life, figures and booths surfacing unevenly through darkness and grain; Evan Whale scratches into his prints and works over them in oil pastel until description is interrupted by abrasion; Kittipong contributes an image ruined twice over, multiply exposed because the film would not advance and then fogged by an X-ray at the Mexican consulate. Arturo Soto begins only after the building is gone, and Marcel Alcalá’s painting GGNAT puts two figures behind DJ equipment against the brick. Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip hangs as the long context, Gallery Luisotti notes — a reminder that in Los Angeles, disappearance is the ordinary condition rather than the interruption.

Maxfield Hegedus, Sunrise, 2026. Fujicolor Crystal Archive Super Type C Glossy print. Courtesy of the artist and Luisotti.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Denver

  • Sites of Memory — Colorado Photographic Arts Center · Opened Aug 7, through Sep 19 (inspired by the 2026 One Book One Denver selection)

Düsseldorf

  • Dialog und Fotografie — KIT Kunst im Tunnel · Opened Aug 8, through Aug 30 (work made with children and young people from refugee families)

Helsinki

New Plymouth

  • Economies of Deferral — Govett-Brewster Art Gallery · Opened Aug 8, through Nov 15 (Fiona Clark, Ngahuia Harrison, John Miller)

Oslo

  • Kate and Carol — Fotografiens Hus · Opened Aug 13, through Sep 27 (Katharine MacDaid and Cheryl Newman)

Portland, Oregon

Tokyo

Vienna

Zarautz

Closing Soon

Antwerp

Berlin

Bonn

Budapest

Chicago

The Hague

New York

San Francisco

Washington

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Amsterdam

Berlin

  • Corbijn, Anton — Fotografiska Berlin · Through Sep 20 (fifty years, nearly 150 works)

London

New York

  • Hujar:Contact — The Morgan Library & Museum · Through Oct 25 (the contact sheets and job books)

FESTIVAL WATCH

  • Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo 2026 — “SO BRITISH!” — Baden bei Wien, Austria · Jun 12 – Oct 11 (free, on a seven-kilometer outdoor route; Don McCullin, Terry O’Neill, Robert Capa, Tony Ray-Jones, Anna Atkins; dedicated to the memory of Jane Goodall and Martin Parr)

  • Giles Duley — Artist Talk — Leica Gallery Vienna, Seilergasse 14 · Wed Aug 19, 18:30 (free, registration required; presented with the La Gacilly-Baden festival)

  • Stirling Photography Festival 2026 — “Journey” — Stirling, Scotland · free throughout (RPS Touring Documentary Awards opens Aug 21 at The Smith Art Gallery; Fabrizio Gianni’s Fab! opens Aug 22 at the Macrobert Arthouse; Michael Cook and Callum McKenzie open Aug 22 in Dunblane)

  • Organ Vida 14 — “Happy Spiraling” — Zagreb, Croatia · Jun 11 – Sep 6 (Museum of Contemporary Art and SKD Prosvjeta Gallery; Julie Béna, Kevin Osepa, Hertta Kiiski)

  • PhEST 2026, XI edition — “What if?” — Monopoli, Puglia · Aug 8 – Nov 1 (closed Mondays; Vivian Maier, Roger Ballen, Joan Fontcuberta, Juno Calypso, Nick Brandt, Deanna Dikeman)

  • Gibellina Photoroad, VI edition — Gibellina, Sicily · Jul 4 – Sep 6 (special edition for Gibellina’s year as Italian Capital of Contemporary Art; Erik Kessels, Teresa Giannico, Stefano Cerio, Alice Grassi, Jacopo Di Cera)

  • Visa pour l’Image 2026, 38th edition — Perpignan · Aug 29 – Sep 13 (opens a week Saturday; Pro Week Aug 31 – Sep 5)

  • Unseen has moved — the fair is no longer a September event in Amsterdam; the next edition runs Mar 18–21, 2027 at Rotterdam Ahoy, folded into Art Rotterdam

OFF THE PRESS

Futures Past by Spencer Lowell

Kris Graves Projects

Lowell has spent a career photographing the places where scientific ambition becomes physical plant — power stations, laboratory experiments, computational imagery, the infrastructure that most people are asked to trust without ever seeing. Futures Past gathers more than fifty photographs made between 2007 and 2024, a stretch the publisher fairly describes as a period of rapid technological acceleration worldwide, and the editing decision is the interesting one: the pictures are presented without hierarchy or chronology, so that two decades arrive simultaneously rather than as a story with a direction. The argument underneath is that technology is not a departure from the natural world but one of its emergent forms, and that within that continuum human agency is still present but diffuse, distributed across systems growing larger, faster and less legible. Edited by Alyssa Coppelman with a text by Daniel Sherrell, and bound so it opens flat under a cover image of crumpled tin foil, from Kris Graves Projects.

Ihr denkt, wir waren anders by Petra Göllnitz

Kehrer Verlag

The premise is a straight comparison, and it is unusually disciplined about it: photographs made in East and West Germany between 1945 and 1989, drawn from around two hundred of the period’s significant photographers, and hung so that each image from one side meets a counterpart from the other. What emerges from the pairing is not the expected catalog of difference but a persistent, awkward similarity — childhood and youth, work and domestic life, protest, politics, fashion, the ordinary business of a week. The sequence moves through the hardship of the immediate postwar years, the hopeful stretch of reconstruction, and the reawakening energy of both societies, and it is candid about what the division cost on each side of the wall, including the forms of freedom that existed only on the other one. Essays by Annett Gröschner, Hans-Hermann Klare and Christoph Tannert, published to accompany the exhibition by Kehrer Verlag.

Hear the World by Bryan Adams

Steidl, co-published with the Hear the World Foundation, Steinhausen

Adams has now been photographing for the Hear the World Foundation since 2007, and this is the first time the resulting archive has been gathered in one place — more than 120 portraits of the foundation’s ambassadors, drawn from film, theater, music and fashion, among them Julianne Moore, Bruce Springsteen, The Weeknd, Priyanka Chopra, Jared Leto, Léa Seydoux and Lenny Kravitz. The organizing device is a simple one and it holds the book together: each sitter strikes their own version of the Hear the World pose, a hand cupped to the ear, so that a portrait commission becomes a repeated gesture performed a hundred and twenty different ways. The foundation supports children with hearing loss in low- and middle-income countries, on the principle that every child deserves the chance to hear well, and the project’s long duration is what gives the pictures their interest — a nineteen-year run of studio sessions accumulating into an argument about a sense most people never think about until it goes.

OPEN CALLS

  • 2026 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards — Aperture with Paris Photo · Deadline September 4, 5pm EDT (books must arrive by then) · $30 First PhotoBook, $60 PhotoBook of the Year and Catalog · $10,000 to the First PhotoBook winner, with all shortlisted books exhibited at Paris Photo. The early-bird rate has closed.

  • Open Call for Solo Artists 2027: “Free Hands” — Copenhagen Photo Festival · Deadline September 1 · International; a minimum of 10 images and a 3,000-character concept in English or Danish. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition across Copenhagen and southern Sweden with a €537 artist fee, €400 travel support, €134 per diem, full production and PR.

  • Xposure International Photography Awards 2026/27 — Xposure Festival, Sharjah · Deadline September 5, extended entry to September 20 · Free · $6,000 to the overall winner plus flights and accommodation to the Sharjah awards ceremony and a festival exhibition. Film submissions have already closed.

  • Brave New Visions: Creativity as Rebellion — PhotoVogue / Condé Nast · Deadline September 11, 5:59pm · Free · $12,000 in grants split across three artists.

  • PhMuseum 2026 Women Photographers Grant — PhMuseum · Opens September 8; €25 until September 19, €30 until October 10 · The tenth edition. $11,000 in cash prizes, a solo show at PhMuseum Lab, a €5,000 MPB voucher, a Vogue Italia interview and a PhotoVogue Festival 2027 screening.

  • 2026 Lucie Scholarship Program — Lucie Foundation · Deadline September 30 · $25 professional, $15 emerging · Four grants — $3,000 and $1,000 in each of Fine Art and Photojournalism/Documentary — plus Sony equipment and a group show touring the House of Lucie galleries.

  • James Balog Earth Vision Awards — Denver Art Museum · Opens September 1, closes October 1 · Free · A new biennial award endowed by Balog: $40,000 to the winner, whose work enters the museum’s permanent collection.

ON THIS DAY

August 19, 1839 — The daguerreotype was given away. At a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the Institut de France, with the overflow crowd spilling into the courtyard outside, François Arago explained the process step by step: the silvered copper plate, the iodine vapor, the exposure, the mercury fuming that raised the latent image, the salt bath that fixed it. What made the session extraordinary was not the chemistry but the arrangement behind it. Rather than let Louis Daguerre license the invention, the French state had bought it outright and settled lifetime pensions on Daguerre and on Isidore Niépce, the son of Daguerre’s late collaborator Nicéphore, expressly so that the process could be released without patent — free, in the government’s framing, to the world. Within weeks opticians in Paris could not make cameras fast enough. There was one pointed exception, and it says a great deal about how the nineteenth century actually worked: five days before the announcement, an agent acting for Daguerre had secured an English patent, so the one country where the free gift did not apply was Britain, where practitioners had to pay for a license for years afterward. The anniversary is now marked as World Photography Day, and The Met keeps the fullest account of what was handed over.

Unknown maker, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, ca. 1844. Daguerreotype. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[He Planned Every Frame. The Best Part He Didn't See Coming.]]>https://photograph.is/p/he-planned-every-frame-the-best-parthttps://photograph.is/p/he-planned-every-frame-the-best-partMon, 10 Aug 2026 13:02:59 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Flat Iron 9/11, NYC” — Stephen Wilkes, 2010

Stephen Wilkes, Flat Iron 9/11, NYC, 2010. From the series Day to Night. Infused dyes sublimated on aluminum, 55.5 × 40 in., edition of 15. © Stephen Wilkes, courtesy Gilman Contemporary.

The Flatiron Building splits the picture down its prow, and the two halves of the city it divides are not in the same hour. On one side of that triangular edge Fifth Avenue is in daylight, full of the traffic and pedestrians of a clear September afternoon. On the other it is dark, the windows lit, the street lamps on. The building does the work of a hinge, which is exactly why Wilkes chose it — he has said he loves the compositional divide it creates — and the seam that would give the whole thing away in any other photograph is here hidden in plain sight, running straight up 22 stories of 1902 limestone and terracotta.

Nothing about this image is a moment. Day to Night, the project Wilkes began in 2009 and has been extending ever since, works by fixing a camera on a single vantage point and staying there for up to 36 hours, exposing more than 1,500 frames across a full cycle of light, then compositing them so that dawn, midday, dusk, and night occupy one frame at once. Wilkes calls each finished picture a symphony, built slowly out of countless individual moments, and the description is not modesty — the assembly takes months. By any nineteenth-century standard the result is a fabrication. By any honest account of how it was made, it is a document: every element in it was in front of that lens, in that place, on that day.

The day mattered. Wilkes made this one on September 11, 2010, the ninth anniversary, boomed out in a 170-foot lift floating over Fifth Avenue. The sky was cloudless — he has described it as reminiscent of the sky over the city in 2001, which is the detail that turns a technical exercise into something else. And then the picture got away from him. He had not known that the Tribute in Light would be switched on that evening, and when the twin columns rose over lower Manhattan they entered the frame he had spent the day building. He has said he was stunned by it.

Here is a photograph assembled over a day and a half from fifteen hundred deliberate exposures, planned to the hour, engineered from a boom lift — and the single most meaningful thing in it is the one element its author neither arranged nor anticipated. The picture leads America at 250: Through the Lens of Stephen Wilkes, at Gilman Contemporary in Ketchum, Idaho, through August 31 (see below).

WHY IT MATTERS

Photography has argued about construction since Roger Fenton moved — or did not move — a scatter of cannonballs on a Crimean road in 1855. Wilkes has taken the argument somewhere more useful by refusing to hide the seam: nobody looks at a Day to Night and mistakes it for an instant, and the honesty of the method is what licenses the artifice. That distinction is about to matter enormously. As generated images arrive that were never in front of any lens, the useful question stops being whether a photograph was assembled and becomes whether the things inside it were ever there. On a clear morning in 2010, all of this was.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Water & Light

Fotografiska Stockholm at Vattentorget beside the Golden Bridge, Slussen
August 10 – September 30, 2026

The issue opens the same morning this exhibition does: an outdoor installation of around twenty photographs going up in a public square in Slussen, timed to the Stockholm Culture Festival. Four Stockholm-based photographers — Elis Lindsten, Joakim Möller, Sara Herrlander, and Sofia Aedo Zahou — show work in which photography, light, and water are set against the character of the site itself, a stretch of waterfront the city has spent years rebuilding. It runs under Fotografiska Emerging Artists, the museum’s platform for early-career photographers, and stays up through the late summer and autumn rather than coming down with the festival. “Water & Light makes photographic art accessible in the public space, offering Stockholmers and visitors an art experience that becomes a natural part of city life,” says exhibition producer Mohamed Mire.

Joakim Möller, from Water & Light. © Joakim Möller, courtesy Fotografiska Stockholm.

Carola Lampe: Tell Me What To See

Fotografiska Berlin
August 14 – October 20, 2026

Lampe is a software developer as well as a photographer, and the show turns on that double training: she used a camera — a traditional, almost analog instrument, as she puts it — to make images that look machine-made. The work arrives in three layers. She shot classic street photography; she then staged scenes in the studio designed to leave you unsure whether you are looking at a photograph or a render; and she generated a third set outright, using AI tools, 3D screenshots, and Photoshop. Some of it declares itself on close inspection and some of it does not, which is the point. “You’re standing in front of something, simply not knowing what you’re looking at,” Lampe says. Curated by Marie-Luise Mayer for the Emerging Berlin talent program, which gives selected artists a solo show in the museum’s graffiti hall.

Carola Lampe, from Tell Me What To See. © Carola Lampe, courtesy Fotografiska Berlin.

It’s Yours, It’s Mine: Seven Relational Portraits —
Mafalda Rakoš

FOTOHOF | Salzburg
August 7 – September 24, 2026

Rakoš builds her projects over years, and the survey FOTOHOF has assembled makes the method visible: portraiture used less as a way of depicting people than as a reason to stay in a room with them. Her subjects — women and non-binary collaborators, among them friends, strangers, and the artist’s own sisters — are credited as co-authors rather than sitters, and the resulting work folds in documentary practice, art therapy, performance, and anthropological fieldwork. The gallery frames the whole thing through Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography, in which a photograph is not a finished object but a set of obligations among photographer, subject, and viewer. Against the extractive habit of treating people as content, FOTOHOF argues, Rakoš offers time, and the pictures are what time leaves behind. Organized with the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.

Daniela Romero Garduño, Finnja Willner, Luisa M. Zárate and Mafalda Rakoš, Zócalo, No al Abuso – No to Abuse, 2026. Thermal print and watercolour, 20 × 25 cm. Courtesy FOTOHOF, Salzburg.

Generation Volta — Sanlé Sory

Sakana Gallery | Donostia-San Sebastián
August 1 – October 1, 2026

Sanlé Sory opened Volta Photo in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1960, the year Upper Volta became independent, and for more than two decades he photographed the city on a Rolleiflex 6×6 against painted backdrops, with a trunk of props his sitters made their own: sunglasses, a transistor radio, a telephone, an Air Afrique flight bag, a moped. At night he followed the orchestras, shot sleeves for the city’s 45s, and staged his own bals poussière in the surrounding villages. The gallery is firm about how to read the results — not ethnographic documents but negotiated performances, in which each sitter decides how they want to be seen — and the point lands harder knowing the work was not shown publicly until 1998 and was only widely rediscovered in the 2010s. Now held by MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the V&A, and LACMA; this is his first solo exhibition in the Basque Country.

Sanlé Sory, Le vendeur sénégalais qui fume. Gelatin silver print. © Sanlé Sory, courtesy Sakana Gallery.

America at 250: Through the Lens of Stephen Wilkes

Gilman Contemporary | Ketchum, Idaho
July 31 – August 31, 2026

The show that Flat Iron 9/11 leads sets three bodies of work against each other, and the two beyond Day to Night are the reason to make the trip. The Tapestries invert everything the composites stand for — Wilkes calls them the jazz to that symphony — and they are made in four to eight seconds flat, as in-camera multiple exposures with no post-production at all, then realized here as commissioned woven textiles, so a photographic image ends up as literal thread. The third group goes back to his earlier work inside the abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant in Pennsylvania, once a titan of American industry and now silent, and it supplies the ballast the anniversary framing needs. Where the first two find the country in its rhythms and textures, Gilman Contemporary writes, the steel pictures find it in its bones — grandeur and grief, ambition and aftermath, at 250.

Stephen Wilkes, Robson Bight, B.C., 2016. © Stephen Wilkes, courtesy Gilman Contemporary.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Adelaide

Albury, NSW

Hamburg

  • Nachblüte — Walter Schels — VISULEX Gallery for Photography · Through Aug 22 (expired film and aged chemistry; part of the 9th Triennale of Photography Hamburg)

Helsinki

Portland, Maine

  • Wonderlands — Eve Biddle — Portland Museum of Art · Opened Jul 31, through Jan 24, 2027 (screenprints translated from photographic images)

Portland, Oregon

Winchester, Massachusetts

  • Rotan Switch — Lisa McCord — Griffin Museum of Photography · Opened Jul 31, through Sep 6 (Exhibition Prize, 31st Juried Members Exhibition)

Closing Soon

Amsterdam

Brussels

Eschborn

Hannover

New York

San Diego

Sydney

Tokyo

Toronto

Vienna

West Palm Beach

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Edinburgh

London

Santa Monica

Tucson

FESTIVAL WATCH

OFF THE PRESS

Grand Hotel Parr by Martin Parr

RM Verlag, with The PhotoBookMuseum, Cologne

Parr made more than two hundred books across five decades, and no photographer of his era was bound up with the form more completely — as maker, publisher, writer, editor, and one of the most consequential collectors the medium has produced. This is the first attempt at a photobook retrospective on him, assembled by The PhotoBookMuseum around its Parr collection and published in the year after his death. It carries an illustrated catalogue of every publication in that collection, essays by Frederic Lezmi, Christoph Schaden, Markus Schaden, and Thomas Weski, photographic essays by Nikita Teryoshin, and an interview between Aaron Schuman and Parr himself. It arrives in the same week that Foam closes its own posthumous Parr show in Amsterdam, per RM.

SHOOT by Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Primary Information

Between 2005 and 2008 Sepuya photocopied a zine called SHOOT at job shops and copy centers around New York, seven issues in all, each one an experiment in stretching a portrait past the single frame using contact sheets, outtakes, and text. The sitters were his friends, muses, and collaborators; one issue is given over to his own self-portrait. Original copies are now scarce and sought-after, and this is the first time all seven have been collected. The interest is not only archival — the mechanics that define his later Dark Room pictures are already here, the apparatus of photography visible inside the photograph, along with the questions about authorship, collaboration, and the singularity of the portrait that his work has pressed on ever since.

Lake Verea: Modern Barragán

Hatje Cantz

Lake Verea is Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina and Carla Verea Hernández, who have worked as a single authorial unit since the 2000s, and this book gathers two decades of their encounters with Luis Barragán’s architecture. The approach is closer to trespass than survey. Inside the architect’s own house they measured their bodies against his, sat in his chairs, opened his closets, and photographed the rooms in daylight, by full moon, under streetlight, in thunderstorms, and with flash — at one point rubbing the walls and floors with aluminum sheets to raise the textures and pull out the building’s history by hand. Texts by Daniel Garza Usabiaga and Mimi Zeiger, designed by Rutger Fuchs.

OPEN CALLS

  • LensCulture Photobook Prize 2026 — LensCulture with Nazraeli Press · Deadline August 12 · $60 · The inaugural edition. Worldwide, 18+, an unpublished body of 20–30 images, no dummy required. The winner receives a fully funded Nazraeli publication valued at more than $25,000 — a 500-copy run with worldwide distribution and 50 artist copies — plus an exhibition at SHOWLA in Los Angeles; five shortlisted photographers get $500 and consulting.

  • Preus Museum Open Call 2026: “Passion” — Preus Museum, Norway’s national museum of photography, with Oslo Negativ · Deadline August 15 · €10, waived for students and Norwegian photographers · Open to anyone, professional or amateur, single images or series. NOK 20,000, acquisition into the permanent collection, full production at Oslo Negativ 2026, and travel support.

  • Decay, Corrosion, Rust — New York Center for Photographic Arts · Deadline August 16 · Any photographic process; $4,000 in cash awards across a $1,100 grand prize and nine placed prizes, plus 20 juror selections and 20 honorable mentions. Juried by Darren Ching of Klompching Gallery.

  • Marco Pesaresi Award 2026 — Comune di Savignano sul Rubicone / SI FEST · Deadline August 17, 23:59 CET · Free · The 25th edition. Any age, any nationality, for unpublished documentary or reportage projects. €5,000 to produce the work, announced at SI FEST 35 and exhibited at SI FEST 2027.

  • The Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant 2026 — sponsored by Canon · Deadline August 31, 23:59 BST · Free · Photographers 24 or under, or enrolled full-time in a photography course; a 12-image portfolio and a proposal. £10,000, a one-year Canon equipment loan, mentorship and an assignment with Giles Duley, and publication by The Guardian.

  • VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for Photography 2026 — Virginia Museum of Fine Arts · Deadline September 1, 11:59 p.m. EST · Free · US citizens and permanent residents 18+ for whom photography is a primary vocation. Two unrestricted awards of $25,000 each.

  • Fall 2026 New York City Fellowship — Magnum Foundation · Deadline September 1, 11:59 p.m. ET · Free · NYC-based early-career photographers and photojournalists, for a production grant, mentorship, and arts administration experience.

  • Open Call for Solo Artists 2027: “Free Hands” — Copenhagen Photo Festival · Deadline September 1 · International; a minimum of 10 images and a 3,000-character concept in English or Danish. Three to five solo exhibitions across Copenhagen and southern Sweden, with a €537 artist fee, €400 travel, €134 per diem, and full production.

ON THIS DAY

August 10, 1966 — At 19:26 UT, an Atlas Agena D lifted off from Launch Complex 13 at Cape Canaveral carrying Lunar Orbiter 1, and with it one of the strangest cameras ever built. The 150-pound Eastman Kodak imaging system aboard did what no camera on Earth had to: it exposed film through wide and narrow-angle lenses, developed that film onboard, scanned the dried negatives with a photoelectric line scanner, and radioed the result back across a quarter of a million miles. Its origin stayed classified until after the Cold War — the system had been developed by the National Reconnaissance Office for the Samos E-1 spy satellite, and was pointed at the Moon only after it had finished being pointed at the Soviet Union. Four days later the spacecraft entered lunar orbit, the first American craft to do so, and by August 28 it had exposed 205 frames of nine candidate Apollo landing sites and eleven sites on the far side. The frame everyone remembers was not on the shot list. On August 23, 1966, it returned the first photograph of Earth taken from the vicinity of the Moon — a grainy crescent above a cratered horizon, made by a reconnaissance camera improvising. The orbiter was deliberately crashed into the lunar surface on its 577th orbit that October so its transmissions would not interfere with its successors. Today is the sixtieth anniversary, and NASA still keeps the mission log.

Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft, launched toward the Moon on August 10, 1966, from Cape Canaveral. Courtesy NASA.
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[Everyone Thought It Was the Dam. It Wasn't.]]>https://photograph.is/p/everyone-thought-it-was-the-dam-ithttps://photograph.is/p/everyone-thought-it-was-the-dam-itMon, 03 Aug 2026 13:01:47 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Fort Peck Dam, Montana” — Margaret Bourke-White, 1936

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936. The spillway piers of the New Deal dam on the upper Missouri — the cover of the first issue of LIFE, November 23, 1936. © Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection.

Four concrete monoliths rise out of the Montana flatland like the curtain wall of a fortress, each one crowned with a notched block that reads, unmistakably, as a battlement. Two workmen stand at the base, small enough to be missed on a first look and essential on the second — without them the structures could be a hundred feet tall or a thousand. Almost everyone who saw the picture on a newsstand in November 1936 took it for the dam. It is not the dam. It is the spillway, and the crenellations are piers built to carry an elevated highway, as The Met notes in its record of the print — a machine-age structure that looks like a medieval one, photographed from below by someone who understood exactly what the resemblance would do to a reader.

Henry Luce had sent Margaret Bourke-White to Fort Peck for construction pictures. The dam was a New Deal showpiece — funded through the Public Works Administration, built by the Army Corps of Engineers on the upper Missouri, and employing more than ten thousand people at its peak that summer. What she filed instead was the county around it: six raw boomtowns thrown up to house the workforce, with names like Wheeler and New Deal, and inside them the bars, the rented bedsprings, the taxi dancers, a woman doing New Deal’s laundry without running water. The magazine’s editors said so themselves in the issue: what they expected were construction pictures as only Bourke-White could take them, and what they got was a human document of American frontier life that was, to them at least, a revelation.

That issue was LIFE, volume one, number one, dated November 23, 1936 — ninety years ago this fall. The spillway ran on the cover; the boomtowns ran inside, and between them they set the template for the American picture magazine: a single arresting image to stop you, then a sequence of photographs doing the work that text had done before. Bourke-White was the first woman Luce hired to photograph for it. She had already been the first Western photographer admitted to the Soviet Union, in 1930; she would go on to be among the first women accredited to work in United States combat zones, and to enter Buchenwald with Patton’s Third Army. Prints of the Fort Peck picture are held by the National Gallery of Art and the Met.

Institutions are on the calendar this week too, and older ones. On Friday the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition — first staged in 1854 and now in its 167th edition — opens at Saatchi Gallery in London. On Saturday it will be 157 years since the death of Roger Fenton, who helped found the society that became the RPS and then walked away from photography altogether.

WHY IT MATTERS

A photograph made an institution here, and an institution made the photograph. LIFE needed a cover that would justify a magazine built entirely on pictures, and Bourke-White gave it one that made a federal earthworks look like a cathedral. Ninety years on, the picture-led weekly is gone and the argument it won is everywhere — that a photograph can carry the front page, that a sequence of images is a form of reporting and not an illustration of it. Every photo essay published since is working inside the frame she set that November.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen

Royal Scottish Academy, National Galleries of Scotland | Edinburgh
August 8 – November 1, 2026

Opie’s first solo exhibition in Scotland opens Saturday, bringing nearly 80 portraits north from the National Portrait Gallery in London — the show that gave her a first major UK museum survey — and setting them against a selection of portraits from Scotland’s national collection. Curated with the artist, it runs from Being and Having (1991) through the ennobling studio portraits of LGBTQ+ friends that borrow their poses and their velvet grounds from Hans Holbein, to the later baroque pictures of fellow artists, taking in surfers, high school footballers, children, and political crowds along the way.

Catherine Opie, Daniela, 2009. Chromogenic print. © Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul; and Thomas Dane Gallery

Animality: 100 Years of Photographs

Center for Creative Photography | Tucson
August 8 – December 12, 2026

The Center for Creative Photography opens a century-spanning look at what people have done with cameras and animals — more than 100 photographs and archival objects from the CCP’s holdings, arranged into eleven thematic groupings that run from companionship to spectacle to welfare. The range of formats is part of the argument: the show sets working documentary pictures beside studio portraits and vernacular material, and the animals turn out to be a reliable index of human attention. It was organized by a team of seven curators — Dylan Brown, Maya Cervantes, Emma Charles, Charles Elliott, Emily Hogg, Emma Mireles, and Shay Parchem — in the Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery.

Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1963. Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, gift of the artist. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition 167

Saatchi Gallery | London
August 7 – September 11, 2026

The longest-running photography exhibition in the world returns to Saatchi Gallery on Friday for its 167th edition, and admission is free. A guest panel selected 113 prints by 48 photographers from a field of more than 5,200 entrants; the submissions cluster around environmental change, identity, conflict, memory, community, and family, with a visible strand of alternative-process work. Marcy Palmer takes the IPE Award for Seeds of Strength and Resilience, on the history and future of reproductive rights, and Léa Chen takes the Under 30s Award for The Stars That Don’t Look Back, on three generations of women in Taiwan.

Siân Cann, The Retinopathy Forest, from the RPS International Photography Exhibition 167. © Siân Cann, courtesy of The Royal Photographic Society

Women on Waves — Elina Brotherus and Lauri Astala

Photo North | AaltoSiilo, Meri-Toppila, Oulu, Finland
August 5 – 30, 2026

Alvar and Aino Aalto’s first modernist industrial building — a grain silo on the Gulf of Bothnia, brought back from ruin in recent years by the Factum Foundation — houses a show about the domestic architecture Aalto designed later. Elina Brotherus contributes photographs including Les Femmes de la Maison Carré, her sequence made inside Maison Louis Carré, the house Aalto built outside Paris in the late 1950s; Lauri Astala’s video work threads AI-generated material through remembered interiors. The premise is fiction rather than survey: invented residents moving through real rooms. It runs for August only, as part of the Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture program and organized with Photo North.

Elina Brotherus, Piscine (Transat), 2018, from the series Les Femmes de la Maison Carré. © Elina Brotherus, courtesy Photo North

William Wegman: Private Show

Marc Selwyn Fine Art | Beverly Hills
On view through September 5, 2026

Before the Weimaraners there was a young artist in Santa Monica making deadpan black-and-white photographs alongside Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg, and this show is mostly about him. Rare vintage prints from 1970–74 anchor it: A Basic Guide to Lettering (1972) turns an instructional manual upside down; the title work stages a performance for an audience of one man and one dog, shot from behind the spectators so that watching becomes the subject; others use multiple exposures and darkroom tricks that anticipate digital manipulation by decades. Wegman’s 1970 video Singing Stomach is included, and a group of large-format Polaroids from the 1990s and 2000s closes the arc.

William Wegman, Splitting Image, 2005. Black-and-white Polaroid, 29½ × 21½ inches. Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Melbourne

  • Unbound: New Photo Zines — Centre for Contemporary Photography at ArtSpace at Realm, Ringwood · Opening event Aug 6 (self-published photo zines; runs through Sep 13)

Tampa

Closing Soon

Dublin

Milwaukee

Montreal

New York

San Francisco

Tokyo

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Amsterdam

Antwerp

Chicago

  • Prix Pictet: Storm — Museum of Contemporary Photography · Through Aug 22 (final weeks of the touring prize exhibition)

London

New York

FESTIVAL WATCH

OFF THE PRESS

Contact by Robert Adams

Fraenkel Gallery

Adams’s photographs of the American West arrive looking inevitable — the clouds, the cottonwoods, the roads under that flat Colorado light, arranged with such economy that they seem less composed than found. This book takes that impression apart. Drawing on contact sheets never published before, it pairs roughly 50 finished photographs with the sheets they came from, marked up in Adams’s own hand with cropping lines, exposure times, and working notes. The pictures span two decades, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, just before he traded the larger negatives for a nimbler 35mm camera. Jeffrey Fraenkel, who provides the introduction, writes that the sheets remind us Adams “was never looking for the perfect picture. He looked until the picture became one.”

Unknown Prophecies by Robert Polidori

Steidl

“Is it possible to photograph a past life?” Polidori asks at the opening of his new book. “To capture the unseen, the forgotten, the spectral residue of a soul’s former dwelling?” His subject is the abandoned churches of Naples — once glorious sites of Christian worship, now neglected and dilapidated relics — and his method is the same forensic, large-format patience he brought to Havana, Versailles, and post-Katrina New Orleans. The camera settles on flaking frescoes, broken sculpture, crumbling bones, and votive shrines left mid-devotion, finding in them what he calls an evaporation of faith. Among the vestiges, the cult of purgatory endures: a theology of intercession still murmuring in the margins of the city’s fractured sanctuaries.

Línea P: Los búnkers del Pirineo by Iñaki Bergera

La Fábrica

Between 1945 and 1955, Franco’s Spain fortified the Pyrenees against an invasion that never came, burying thousands of concrete positions along the French border in a scheme called the Línea P. Iñaki Bergera — a photographer who is also an architect and an architectural historian — spent 2024 and 2025 walking Sector 23, in the Valle de Tena in Huesca province, and made more than 1,500 exposures of its 185 surviving structures. Around 70 are collected here across four sections: typologies, landscape, spaces, and gazes. The machine-gun and mortar emplacements, camouflaged into rock and grass and now indistinguishable from land art, make the case that a paranoid infrastructure has become a form of accidental sculpture. Texts by José Manuel Clúa Méndez, Iñaki Ábalos, Ascensión Hernández Martínez, and Ramón Esparza.

OPEN CALLS

  • Decay, Corrosion, Rust — New York Center for Photographic Arts · Deadline August 16 · Open to any photographic process; $4,000 in cash awards across a $1,100 grand prize and nine placed prizes, plus 20 juror selections and 20 honorable mentions. Juried by Darren Ching of Klompching Gallery.

  • 2026 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards — Aperture and Paris Photo · Deadline September 4, 5 p.m. EDT · The photobook world’s marquee prize, with shortlists announced ahead of Paris Photo in November.

  • Cite the past, sight the stars — The Photographers’ Gallery, London · Deadline September 6 · A new residency in Derbyshire, open now for applications.

ON THIS DAY

August 6, 1945 — Yoshito Matsushige, a 32-year-old photographer for the Chugoku Shimbun, was at home in Midori-cho, about 1.7 miles south of the hypocenter, when the bomb detonated over Hiroshima at 8:15 that morning. He put a camera around his neck and walked toward the center of the city. What survives of that walk is five photographs — the only images known to have been made in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing. Two were taken just after eleven o’clock at the western end of the Miyuki Bridge, where the injured had gathered and police were distributing cooking oil for burns; the rest were made later in the afternoon near the West Fire Station and his family’s barbershop. He took so few because he could not make himself take more. “It was such a cruel sight that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter,” he later said of the bridge. “Perhaps I hesitated there for about 20 minutes, but I finally summoned up the courage to take one picture.” He waited twenty days to develop the roll, and did it at night in the open air, rinsing the negatives in a stream. Matsushige died in 2005, at 92. Thursday is the eighty-first anniversary.

Yoshito Matsushige, the west end of Miyuki Bridge, Senda-machi 3-chōme, Hiroshima, around 11:00 a.m. on August 6, 1945 — one of five photographs made in the city that day. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[He Spent 25 Years Photographing One Drop of Milk]]>https://photograph.is/p/he-spent-25-years-photographing-onehttps://photograph.is/p/he-spent-25-years-photographing-oneMon, 27 Jul 2026 13:02:56 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Milk Drop Coronet” — Harold Edgerton, 1957

Harold Edgerton, Milk Drop Coronet, 1957. Dye transfer print. © Harold Edgerton, MIT. Courtesy of the MIT Museum.

A single drop of milk falls onto a plate coated in a thin red film, and at the instant of impact the splash rises into a perfect crown — a ring of white pearls balanced on slender columns, symmetrical as jewelry. No one had ever seen it. The event lasts a fraction of a millisecond; the flash that caught it fired at around 1/50,000th of a second. The man behind the camera was not a photographer by trade but an electrical engineer at MIT, Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who had developed the stroboscope in the early 1930s to study the whirling rotors of electric motors — and then realized his instrument could show the world every fast thing it had been missing.

The crown did not come easily. Edgerton made his first milk-drop photographs in 1932 and kept returning to the setup for a quarter century — adjusting the height of the drop, the depth of the liquid, the timing of the flash — chasing a symmetry the physics only occasionally granted. An early black-and-white study was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark first photography survey in 1937, and the definitive color version arrived in 1957, entering the canon as both a scientific record and a work of art. Edgerton himself resisted the second half of that formulation to the end, insisting he was an engineer after the facts, as the MIT Museum, which holds the work, recounts.

The facts, though, keep looking like art — and this week the tradition Edgerton fathered is literally on the walls. When Phoenix Art Museum opens Ecstatic Time: The Alchemy of Photography on Wednesday (see EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS), the Center for Creative Photography’s prints of Edgerton’s Splash of a Milk Drop and Bullet through Banana hang among a hundred works about photography’s power to reveal what perception cannot hold — the argument, as Smarthistory frames it, that the camera’s highest calling may be showing us the world we cannot see.

WHY IT MATTERS

Every phone that freezes a splash, every high-speed sequence in a nature documentary, every crash-test frame descends from Edgerton’s strobe. Milk Drop Coronet is the founding image of the claim that photography is an instrument of knowledge — that the medium’s job is not only to remember what we saw, but to see what we can’t. Seventy years on, no photograph makes that case more elegantly than a drop of milk wearing a crown.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Todd Hido: Many Small Decisions

Center for Photographic Art | Carmel, California
August 1 – September 13, 2026

Twenty-five years after House Hunting (Nazraeli Press, 2001) fixed the glowing suburban window as one of contemporary photography’s indelible images, the Center for Photographic Art opens a Todd Hido solo that pairs the night houses with recent collages and other new work. Hido’s pictures of tract homes lit from within — melancholy, wordless, strangely comforting — have entered more than 50 museum collections and seeped into Hollywood’s visual vocabulary, from Her to True Detective: Night Country. He speaks at Sunset Center’s Carpenter Hall on opening day, August 1, followed by a reception and House Hunting book signing at the gallery.

From Todd Hido: Many Small Decisions at the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel. © Todd Hido. Courtesy of the artist and the Center for Photographic Art.

Ecstatic Time: The Alchemy of Photography

Phoenix Art Museum | Phoenix, Arizona
July 29, 2026 – January 3, 2027

Opening Wednesday, Phoenix Art Museum’s survey draws nearly 100 objects from the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography to mark the 20th anniversary of the Norton agreement between the two institutions. Spanning the medium’s history from the 1860s to the present, its four thematic sections take on photography’s strange relationship to time and vision — flash photography, time-lapse imagery, astronomical pictures, and contemporary conceptual work, with Edward Weston, Harold Edgerton, Kikuji Kawada, and Chris McCaw among the names on the walls. Curated by Emilia Mickevicius, the whole reads as a cabinet of curiosities about photography’s capacity for visual alchemy.

Harold Edgerton, Bullet through Banana, 1964. Dye transfer print. Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona: Gift of The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation, 96.71.5. © Harold Edgerton, MIT. Courtesy of Palm Press, Inc.

Jillian Edelstein: Among People

Stills Centre for Photography | Edinburgh, Scotland
July 31 – October 24, 2026

Stills opens the first major survey of the South African-born, London-based portraitist on Friday, spanning more than four decades of work — including the unflinching portraits she made at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission between 1996 and 2001. Curated by Tracy Marshall-Grant, Among People makes the case for Edelstein as one of the most compelling photographic voices of her generation, equally attentive to defining historical moments and everyday lives. It runs through the Edinburgh Art Festival as one of the season’s anchor photography shows.

Jillian Edelstein, Desmond Tutu, from the series Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1996–2001. © Jillian Edelstein. Courtesy of Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh.

Floris Neusüss & Christiane Feser: Unique Works in Photography

Von Lintel Gallery | Santa Monica, California
July 25 – August 22, 2026

In a medium defined by the multiple, Von Lintel’s summer pairing is devoted to photographs that exist exactly once. The late Floris Neusüss spent his entire career on the photogram — cameraless, one-of-a-kind images made directly on light-sensitive paper — while Christiane Feser builds “photo-objects,” three-dimensional photographic sculptures that behave like optical experiments. Bringing together Neusüss’s pioneering photograms and Feser’s intricate constructions, the exhibition foregrounds singular works that press against the limits of what a photograph is.

Floris Neusüss, ULO 4088 (Unidentifiable Lying Object), 1999. Gold-toned photogram. © Estate of Floris Neusüss. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery, Santa Monica.

Street Scenes — Í Fókus 2026

Reykjavík Museum of Photography | Reykjavík, Iceland
July 23 – September 12, 2026

Iceland’s principal photography institution has given over its SKOTIÐ project space this year to FÓKUS, the Reykjavík amateur photographers’ association founded in 1999, for a seven-exhibition survey of its members’ work — and the fifth installment, opened Thursday, belongs to the street. Six photographers take on the genre’s founding faith in the chance encounter, under an epigraph from Henri Cartier-Bresson on the creative fraction of a second. It is a modest, likable reminder that the club tradition photography grew up in is still producing pictures.

Jón Bjarnason, Havana, Cuba, 2022. From Street Scenes, part of the FÓKUS 2026 series in the SKOTIÐ project space, Reykjavík Museum of Photography. © Jón Bjarnason.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Santa Fe

  • Ruth Thorne-Thomsen — Daniel Cooney Fine Art · Opens Jul 31 (vintage pinhole photographs by the late master of the constructed landscape)

Closing Soon

Antwerp

New Orleans

Paris

  • Lee Miller — Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris · Closes Aug 2 (final week of the largest Miller retrospective ever staged in France)

Rome

Toronto

Vancouver

Venice

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Amsterdam

Antwerp

  • .tiff 2026 — FOMU · Through Aug 23 (ten emerging Belgian photographers; final month)

London

Madrid

New York

San Diego

Tokyo

FESTIVAL WATCH

OFF THE PRESS

Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1 by Collier Schorr

The Song Cave

For years, Collier Schorr has been adapting Chantal Akerman’s 1974 film Je tu il elle into a ballet made for video — casting herself among the dancers because, she says, Akerman played herself “because she knew no actress could be as awkward as she was. I feel the same.” This volume gathers a large collection of film stills from the ballet’s first act, with an introduction by the performance scholar Peggy Phelan, tracing the film’s themes of transparency, sexuality, shame, and love into movement. Published as a document of one artist in sustained conversation with another, it doubles as an argument for how queer histories are cared for — through adoration, adaptation, and repetition; The Song Cave is reissuing Akerman’s memoir My Mother Laughs alongside it.

If Emmett Till Lived: A Creative Monument, edited by Sarah Lewis

DelMonico Books

Curated by the writer and scholar Sarah Lewis from the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, this book assembles nearly 200 photographs into a fictionalized account of the life Emmett Till might have lived had he come home from Mississippi in 1955, rather than being murdered at fourteen. Dawoud Bey, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Sally Mann, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems are among the dozens of photographers whose images stand in for the childhood moments and adult milestones Till never reached. With texts by Lonnie G. Bunch III, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Vinson Cunningham, and contributions from Ava DuVernay, Amy Sherald, and Deborah Willis among others, it is both a reckoning with racialized violence across generations and one of the season’s most discussion-generating photobooks.

Marilyn. A Magical Dance by Douglas Kirkland

Damiani

On the evening of November 17, 1961, a 27-year-old Douglas Kirkland photographed Marilyn Monroe wrapped in the sheets of an unmade bed — a session that produced some of the most spontaneous portraits ever made of her. In the year Monroe would have turned 100, Damiani revisits the sitting as a leporello: an accordion-fold sequence that unspools without interruption, accompanied by Kirkland’s handwritten recollections, edited by Françoise Kirkland from the late photographer’s archive. Kirkland, who died in 2022 after six decades at the top of film and celebrity portraiture, described every session as a dance; this small, seductive object takes him at his word.

ON THIS DAY

July 28, 1851 — At the Royal Observatory in Königsberg, Prussia, a local daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski aimed a small refracting telescope at the darkened sun and held an exposure for 84 seconds during totality. The plate he developed was the first correctly exposed photograph of a total solar eclipse — and the first to record the solar corona, the ghostly atmosphere that only reveals itself when the moon blots out the disk. Earlier attempts had failed because the corona’s faint light defeated the era’s chemistry; Berkowski’s success, made 175 years ago on Tuesday of this week, gave astronomers their first objective record of a phenomenon that had until then lived only in drawings and eyewitness memory. It was also an early, decisive demonstration of the argument that runs through this whole issue: barely twelve years into photography’s existence, the medium was already seeing things the human eye could not, as Astronomy.com recounts.

Julius Berkowski, the first successful photograph of a total solar eclipse, made at the Royal Observatory, Königsberg, July 28, 1851. Daguerreotype. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[The Most Reproduced Photograph on Earth Was a Newspaper Reject]]>https://photograph.is/p/the-most-reproduced-photograph-onhttps://photograph.is/p/the-most-reproduced-photograph-onMon, 20 Jul 2026 13:03:17 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Guerrillero Heroico” — Alberto Korda, 1960

Alberto Korda, Guerrillero Heroico, Havana, March 5, 1960. Ernesto “Che” Guevara at the memorial service for the victims of the La Coubre explosion. © Korda Estate

It lasted a few seconds. On March 5, 1960, at a memorial service in Havana for the roughly one hundred people killed when the French freighter La Coubre exploded in the harbor, Alberto Korda — a fashion photographer turned staffer for the newspaper Revolución — was working the crowd below the speakers’ platform when Che Guevara stepped briefly into view at the rail. Korda made two frames with his Leica, one horizontal, one vertical, before Guevara withdrew. His editor passed over the picture; the paper ran Fidel Castro and the visiting Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir instead. Korda cropped out a stranger’s profile and a palm frond, printed the face — jaw set, eyes fixed somewhere past the horizon — and hung it in his studio, where it stayed, essentially unpublished, for seven years.

What happened next is the strangest distribution story in the history of the medium. In 1967 the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli visited Havana and left with two prints, given free. When Guevara was executed in Bolivia that October, Feltrinelli’s poster went out in the hundreds of thousands; the following year the Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick reduced the face to high-contrast black on red, and the image detached itself from photography altogether — onto murals, flags, T-shirts, and eventually the very consumer goods Guevara despised. The Maryland Institute College of Art would later call it the most famous photograph in the world; it is routinely described as the most reproduced image in the history of photography.

Korda watched nearly all of it happen without earning a cent, and mostly without objecting — as a supporter of the revolution, he said, he had no quarrel with those who spread Che’s memory. The line he drew was commerce. In 2000, when a Smirnoff vodka campaign used the image, the 71-year-old photographer sued in a London court and won a settlement he donated to Cuban children’s healthcare — establishing, one year before his death, that the world’s most copied photograph did in fact have an author, as Smithsonian Magazine recounts.

WHY IT MATTERS

In a history-minded week, Guerrillero Heroico is the cleanest case study we have of how a photograph escapes its maker: rejected by its own newspaper, released without copyright into a world that copied it billions of times, and reclaimed by its author only at the very end, and only at the point where an icon of revolution was selling vodka. Every argument about virality, authorship, and what an image owes its subject was rehearsed here first – four decades before anyone said “going viral.”

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018

Fahey/Klein Gallery
July 23 – September 26, 2026

Fahey/Klein opens a four-decade survey of American photography’s great transgressor on Thursday, with an artist reception on opening night. Witkin’s meticulously staged tableaux — built from painted backdrops, symbolic props, and bodies the tradition preferred not to see — draw on Goya, Velázquez, and Picasso, then push the prints through scratching, bleaching, and hand-toning until photography verges on painting. Bringing together seminal works and rare prints from 1973 to 2018, it is a timely chance to reckon with one of the medium’s most uncompromising careers.

Joel-Peter Witkin, The Raft of George W. Bush, New Mexico, 2006. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Linder: Danger Came Smiling

Hayward Gallery | Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool
July 18 – October 3, 2026

The Hayward Gallery’s touring retrospective of Linder — the punk photomontage pioneer who armed British feminism with scissors and glue — arrives at the Grundy in Blackpool for its seaside leg. Across five decades, from the Buzzcocks-era Manchester works that made her name to recent large-scale montages, Linder has spliced the imagery of glamour magazines, pornography, and domestic advertising into razor-edged pictures of how women are looked at. Seeing that body of work in a Victorian seaside town’s public gallery is exactly the kind of collision she has always engineered.

Linder, The Pool of Life, 2021. Photomontage. Courtesy the artist; Modern Art, London; dépendance, Brussels; Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm/Paris; and BLUM, Los Angeles/Tokyo/New York. Photo: Alexandra de Cossette

Sandra Kantanen: Bamboo Whispers in Fading Light

Persons Projects
On view through August 29, 2026

The Finnish photographer Sandra Kantanen, one of the leading figures of the Helsinki School, fills Persons Projects’ Berlin space with landscapes that behave like paintings. Trained in part through a long study of Chinese landscape painting, Kantanen photographs mist, water, and vegetation and then works the digital image — blurring, streaking, and layering — until the boundary between photographic record and painted gesture gives way. The new bamboo works are among her most atmospheric: pictures of light failing slowly, held just this side of abstraction.

Sandra Kantanen, Bamboo Whispers in Fading Light, installation view. Courtesy Persons Projects, Berlin

Florian Luthi: Meteor Ghosts

Centre de la photographie Genève
On view through October 1, 2026

The Geneva artist Florian Luthi returns to the landscapes of his childhood to investigate the wave of UFO sightings that swept France in 1954 — including the story of four children in Prémanon, in the Jura, who reported a luminous object “like a large sugar cube resting on three legs.” Mixing archive material with new photographs of mist-shrouded forests and silent mountain villages, Luthi builds a visual investigation in which memory, myth, and documentary fact refuse to separate. Curated by Aline Bovard Rudaz and Danaé Panchaud, it is a quietly seductive show about why some stories survive their own debunking.

Florian Luthi, from Meteor Ghosts. Courtesy Centre de la photographie Genève

Jon Rafman: Memento Hikikomori

Institute of Modern Art
July 18 – September 27, 2026

The IMA hosts Jon Rafman’s first institutional exhibition in Australia, and the title compresses his whole project into two words: memento mori, the reminder of death, crossed with hikikomori, Japan’s reclusive digital hermits. Rafman — best known for mining Google Street View and the internet’s forgotten corners — gathers works on the technological mediation of memory, the formation of identity online, and the unconscious of the network. It sits at photography’s outer edge, which is precisely where the questions about what an image now is, are being decided.

Jon Rafman, UV POD Interior Table. Courtesy the artist and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Just opened

New York

  • Tops — CLAMP · Opened Jul 9 (Lindsay Perryman’s first US solo; through Aug 28)

Portland, OR

Stuttgart

This week, day by day

Thursday, July 23

Friday, July 24

Saturday, July 25

Closing Soon

Berlin

New York

Santa Monica

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Amsterdam

Eschborn

Frankfurt

New York

The Hague

Winterthur

FESTIVAL WATCH

OFF THE PRESS

116 Polaroids by David Bailey

Steidl | D.A.P
160 pages

Out July 14 in North America, David Bailey’s newest book is the quietest thing the 88-year-old has ever published: nearly four decades of Polaroids of his wife, the model Catherine Bailey, made continuously since the late 1980s. The man who invented the swinging-London fashion photograph here works in the medium’s most modest format, and the accumulated tenderness is the point — “the average Polaroid takes a few minutes to develop,” Bailey writes. “This book has taken nearly 40 years.” A visual poem from a photographer better known for speed.

Genocídio do Yanomami by Claudia Andujar

Void
Hardcover with French folds, 176 pages

Previously unpublished photographs made between 1971 and 1989 among the Yanomami of the northern Amazon, by the 95-year-old Swiss-born Brazilian artist who became their most consequential ally — co-founding the Pro-Yanomami Commission and campaigning for the territorial demarcation finally won in the early 1990s. The images revisit her radical 1989 MASP installation Yanomami Genocide: Death of Brazil, using experimental techniques — high contrast, distortion, movement — to render a shamanic culture under existential threat. Newly shortlisted for the Arles Book Awards’ Prix du Livre d’Auteur, it is as urgent now as the work it reprises was then.

Atlantic Coast by Anastasia Samoylova

Aperture | Norton Museum of Art
Hardcover, 144 pages, 91 images

Published last November and still gathering serious reviews, Anastasia Samoylova’s Atlantic Coast is this history-minded week’s natural photobook: a full retracing of Berenice Abbott’s 1954 journey down US Route 1, made on the project’s seventieth anniversary. From Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Samoylova photographs in color and black and white the communities the Interstate Highway System left behind — dislocation, tenacity, and a shifting American dream, with an essay by Aruna D’Souza. It extends a storied lineage of American road-trip photography while arguing with it.

OPEN CALLS

  • Head On Photo Awards 2026 — Final deadline August 16, 2026 (early-bird pricing ends July 20). AUD$80,000 prize pool across Portrait, Landscape, and Exposure categories, judged 100% anonymously on merit alone; finalists are exhibited at Head On Photo Festival in Sydney in November and included in a hardcover catalogue.

ON THIS DAY

July 22, 1975 — Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American was riding to a routine fire call on Marlborough Street when the fifth-floor fire escape gave way. His motor-driven sequence caught 19-year-old Diana Bryant and her two-year-old goddaughter Tiare Jones in mid-fall — the young woman died of her injuries; the child, her fall broken by Bryant’s body, survived. The photographs ran in newspapers around the world the next morning, won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography, and set off two arguments that have never ended. The first was practical, and photography won it: in the photograph’s wake, Boston and cities across the United States toughened fire-escape safety codes — a rare, measurable case of a single picture changing law. The second was ethical: readers flooded editors with objections to publishing a photograph of a person’s last second of life, and the case became a staple of journalism ethics courses on the line between witness and spectacle, as the record of the photograph attests. Fifty-one years on, both arguments are still the medium’s arguments.

Stanley Forman, Fire Escape Collapse (also known as Fire on Marlborough Street), Boston, July 22, 1975. Winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. © Stanley Forman
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[The Most Expensive Photograph Ever Sold Is a Pun]]>https://photograph.is/p/the-most-expensive-photograph-everhttps://photograph.is/p/the-most-expensive-photograph-everMon, 13 Jul 2026 13:00:56 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Le Violon d’Ingres” — Man Ray, 1924

Man Ray, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924. Gelatin silver print with india ink; Kiki de Montparnasse, Paris. © Man Ray Trust / ARS

The joke took a few seconds to make and has held for a century. In his Montparnasse studio in 1924, Man Ray photographed Alice Prin — Kiki de Montparnasse, the model, performer, and unofficial queen of the quarter — from behind, her back bared, her head wrapped in a turban, in a pose lifted knowingly from Ingres’s Valpinçon Bather. Then he painted two black f-holes onto the print, rephotographed it, and turned a woman’s back into a violin. The title compounds the pun: a violon d’Ingres, in French idiom, is a hobby — Ingres famously fiddled — so the picture is at once an homage to a painter, a wisecrack about photography’s status as a sideline art, and Surrealism’s most quoted photographic image. It appeared in André Breton’s journal Littérature that June and never really left circulation.

The pun has always cut both ways. The image objectifies with total literalness — a woman rendered as an instrument — and generations of critics have read it as exactly that, while others point out that Kiki was no passive prop but an artist and cabaret star whose collaboration with Man Ray was closer to a double act. That unresolved argument is part of why the picture stays alive: it is beautiful, funny, and uncomfortable in equal measure, and it anticipates a century of debates about manipulation — the f-holes are, after all, a hand-applied special effect made decades before anyone said “Photoshop.”

Then there is the number. On May 14, 2022, the original 1924 print — kept for decades by Rosalind Gersten Jacobs and Melvin Jacobs, friends of the artist who bought directly from him — sold at Christie’s New York for $12.4 million against a $5–7 million estimate, nearly tripling the previous auction record for any photograph (Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II, $4.3 million in 2011). Four years on, it remains the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, the market’s yardstick for what a single print can be worth, as artnet News reported when the hammer fell.

WHY IT MATTERS

The most expensive photograph in the world is not a document but a joke — a staged, hand-altered, endlessly contested image whose value lies entirely in authorship, scarcity, and story. Every argument about what a photograph is worth eventually runs through this one, and with a major private collection on preview in Paris and Arles this week, the argument is live again.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

We Are Martin Parr
Photography Seoul Museum of Art (Photo SeMA) | Seoul
July 16 – October 18, 2026

Seoul’s public photography museum opens the first major Martin Parr retrospective staged in Asia — and the first anywhere since the British photographer’s death last year — gathering 14 major series and more than 500 photographs. Parr’s garish, affectionate, merciless pictures of consumerism, tourism, and leisure made him the great comic anthropologist of modern life, and the show’s title makes its thesis explicit: his subjects were never “them,” always us.

Martin Parr, Skegness, England, 1992. Martin Parr ⓒ Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Cihan Çakmak: like a warrior
Museum Morsbroich | Leverkusen
On view through November 8, 2026

Museum Morsbroich gives the German-Kurdish photographer Cihan Çakmak her first museum solo exhibition, and the title’s lowercase defiance sets the register. Çakmak’s spare, emotionally charged pictures circle questions of Kurdish identity, family, and the long shadow of displacement — work made between two languages and two homelands, where the camera becomes a way of holding ground.

Cihan Çakmak, when we leave, 2024. Digitale Fotografie auf Aludibond, courtesy the artist © Cihan Çakmak

Matthias Burba & Max Seeger: Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand
Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung | Berlin
On view through September 6, 2026

The Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung — keeper of the great German photographer-filmmaker’s legacy — pairs Matthias Burba and Max Seeger’s photomicrographs of sand with the 1930s dune studies that made Ehrhardt’s name. Magnified past recognition, single grains become planetary landscapes, and the Blake-borrowed title earns its keep: this is photography’s oldest promise, that attention to the smallest thing opens onto the largest.

Matthias Burba, Anakena Beach, Osterinseln, Inkjet-Print. © Matthias Burba

Martine Dawson: Faultlines
MEP | Paris
July 17 – September 13, 2026

In the Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s Studio space — its platform for emerging and under-shown work — Martine Dawson photographs the houses of Butte, Montana, a copper-mining boomtown that spent the twentieth century slowly subsiding into its own excavations. Dawson’s deadpan frontal views read as portraits: modest frame houses standing on undermined ground, the American West’s extraction economy written into clapboard and foundation cracks.

Martine Dawson, de la série Faultlines, 2022 © Martine Dawson

On the Road
Sundaram Tagore Gallery | New York
July 16 – August 28, 2026

Sundaram Tagore’s Chelsea gallery turns its summer over to the open road, with a Kerouac-inspired group show drawn from its photography program — a roster that includes Edward Burtynsky, Karen Knorr, Steve McCurry, and Sebastião Salgado. The premise is familiar but durable: the journey as the American picture-making condition, from roadside vernacular to landscapes seen through a windshield.

Steve McCurry, A man sweeps outside a bakery, New York, NY, USA, 1996.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Just opened

Dublin

Lisbon

Toronto

  • The Great Lakes — Stephen Bulger Gallery · Opened Jul 9 (group / landscape)

This week, day by day

Wednesday, July 15

  • Ana Mendieta opens — Tate Modern, London (first major UK exhibition)

Thursday, July 16

Friday, July 17

Saturday, July 18

Closing Soon

Boston

Kaunas

London

  • Sarah Moon — Michael Hoppen Gallery · Closes Jul 17 (fashion / fine art)

Los Angeles

Santa Monica

Seoul

Shanghai

Vancouver

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Amsterdam

Braunschweig

Madrid

New York

  • Hujar:Contact — The Morgan Library & Museum · Through Oct 25 (historical)

San Diego

FESTIVAL WATCH

  • 9th Annual Latin American Foto Festival — Bronx Documentary Center, New York · July 9–26 (large-scale prints across Bronx streets by emerging and established Latin American photographers; free)

  • Cortona On The Move 2026 — Cortona, Italy · Opens July 16, through November 1 (Italy’s major documentary-photography festival; opening days this week)

  • Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026 — “Worlds in View” — Arles, France · Through October 4 (week two of the European photography summer’s anchor; the Christie’s Thérond preview runs alongside at the Hôtel Nord-Pinus through July 17)

OFF THE PRESS

You Are Invited by Juergen Teller
Steidl, 2026 US edition · 416 pages, over 500 images

Juergen Teller’s sprawling self-survey — more than 500 images bridging fashion, portraiture, and his own unguarded domestic life — sold through its first printing at Steidl almost immediately; a new printing lands in US shops July 28. Teller’s honest, tender, deliberately unglamorous gaze made him the most influential fashion-adjacent photographer of his generation, and this is the fullest single-volume account of the work to date. It pairs neatly with his current Berlin gallery outing, per D.A.P.

Love Hotel by François Prost
D.A.P. · 224 pages

Out July 21, François Prost’s Love Hotel compiles several hundred facades of Japan’s roadside love hotels, photographed on a 2023 road trip between Tokyo and Shikoku — buildings shaped like castles, cruise ships, cakes, and faraway cities, all engineered for discreet romance. Prost, the French photographer behind deadpan typologies of gentlemen’s clubs and roadside nightspots, treats the kitsch seriously: through these flamboyant exteriors, Japan’s landscapes — from megalopolis to farm country — come into view sideways.

Hero, Father, Friend by Carlos Idun-Tawiah
Marsilio Arte · 128 pages

After losing his father at eighteen, the Accra-born photographer Carlos Idun-Tawiah was left with almost no pictures of the two of them together — so he built the archive he wished existed, staging reconstructed scenes, both real and imagined, of Ghanaian fatherhood, boyhood, and everyday tenderness. Winner of the Deloitte Photo Grant and exhibited at the Triennale Milano, the project reaches book form with texts by Denis Curti; the US edition arrives July 28.

OPEN CALLS

  • OD Photo Prize 2026 — Deadline August 11, 2026. Open Doors Gallery’s annual open call for emerging artists within the first ten years of their practice; a £2,000 grand prize plus Judges’ Picks, the AJ Page Award, and an InCadaqués Award, with exhibition at the London gallery.

ON THIS DAY

July 13, 1946 — Alfred Stieglitz died in New York at 82, and this issue publishes on the 80th anniversary. No one did more to argue photography into the museum: through Camera Work, the quarterly he edited from 1903 to 1917; through 291, the Fifth Avenue gallery where he showed photographs beside Picasso and Matisse as if the equivalence were obvious; through the Equivalents, his cloud studies that insisted a photograph could be as abstract and inward as music; and through sheer stubbornness — in 1924 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston accepted a group of his prints, among the first photographs admitted to a major American museum as works of art. He was also the great champion and husband of Georgia O’Keeffe, whose portrait he made across two decades and several hundred negatives.

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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[As Arles Opens, Photography Argues About Consent]]>https://photograph.is/p/as-arles-opens-photography-argueshttps://photograph.is/p/as-arles-opens-photography-arguesMon, 06 Jul 2026 13:02:33 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Afghan Girl” — Steve McCurry, 1984

Steve McCurry, Afghan Girl (Sharbat Gula), Nasir Bagh refugee camp, near Peshawar, Pakistan, December 1984, as refugees fled the Afghan–Soviet war. © Steve McCurry / Magnum Photos

She was about 12 years old, and no one thought to ask her name. Steve McCurry made the frame in December 1984, in a tented school at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, where hundreds of thousands of Afghans had fled the war with the Soviet Union. He noticed a girl with sea-green eyes and a torn red shawl, asked her teacher if he could photograph her, and released the shutter. It took perhaps a minute. When National Geographic put the picture on the cover of its June 1985 issue, it became — almost immediately, and then permanently — one of the most reproduced photographs on earth, a face the West came to treat as the single image of Afghan suffering.

For 17 years the woman in the picture had no name attached to it. The photograph was everywhere; the person was nowhere. That gap — between the fame of an image and the anonymity of its subject — is the reason it belongs in a week given over to ethics. She had not sought to be photographed, could not have understood what a magazine cover was, and was never paid or consulted as her face sold posters, prints, and a certain idea of the region. When McCurry and a National Geographic team finally went looking for her in 2002, they found her in a remote Afghan village and confirmed her identity through iris-recognition analysis. Her name was Sharbat Gula. She had, by most accounts, never seen the photograph.

What came after complicated the picture further. Gula’s fame did little to shield her: in 2016 she was arrested in Pakistan over fraudulent identity papers and deported; after the fall of Kabul in 2021 she was evacuated to Italy. Writers and photographers — among them Pakistani and Afghan critics who have revisited “the other Afghan girl” — have used her story to ask hard questions about who gets to make an unforgettable image of someone else’s crisis, and on whose terms. As National Geographic itself acknowledged in its account of tracking her down, the photograph gave the world a face while leaving the woman behind it to live, for decades, without a say in what it meant.

None of that lessens the picture’s power; it is part of it. The green eyes still stop you. But the more you know, the harder it is to look at them innocently — which may be the most honest thing a famous photograph can do. National Geographic

WHY IT MATTERS

The romance of documentary photography is that a single frame can make the world care. “Afghan Girl” did exactly that, and then spent 40 years showing the cost of it. A refugee child became a global icon without her knowledge, her name lost for a generation, her image working for everyone but her. In a week when Europe’s photography summer opens at Arles under the banner of documentary witness, the picture is a reminder that consent and authorship are not footnotes to a great photograph — they are the whole ethical argument, and it does not resolve.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World
The San Diego Museum of Art, California
July 11, 2026 – January 10, 2027

A touring survey of Cecil Beaton’s portraiture reaches the American West Coast, opening in San Diego on July 11. Beaton (1904–1980) was a one-man image factory of the twentieth century — photographer, fashion illustrator, Oscar-winning costume designer, diarist, and relentless self-mythologizer — and the show gathers the portraits that fixed the faces of an era, from Hollywood stars and royalty to the models who built mid-century glamour. Drawn substantially from the National Portrait Gallery’s Beaton archive, it is a reminder that the “fashionable world” he documented was also, to a large degree, a world he invented with a camera: elegance as a thing produced, lit, and retouched into permanence.

Cecil Beaton, The Second Age of Beauty is Glamour (suit by Hartnell), 1946. National Portrait Gallery, London. Courtesy The San Diego Museum of Art

Jamel Shabazz: New York Moves and Black Communities
Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, Germany
July 11 – September 13, 2026 (opening July 10)

The Museum für Photographie Braunschweig gives Jamel Shabazz his first survey in a German museum, opening with a summer festival on the evening of July 10. Shabazz (b. 1960) began photographing on the streets of Brooklyn in the late 1970s, and the pictures that made his name — young New Yorkers in the full confidence of early-eighties style, posing for a photographer they trusted — are now among the definitive records of a Black urban culture at a specific, electric moment. His method is the opposite of the stolen candid: he asks, he collaborates, he lets his subjects present themselves, which is precisely what gives the work its warmth and its dignity. Against a week thinking about consent in photography, Shabazz is the counter-argument in the room — proof of how much a street photographer can do when the picture is made with someone rather than taken from them.

Jamel Shabazz, Time of Innocence, Brooklyn, NYC, 1980. © Jamel Shabazz. Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen, Cologne, and the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig

Bertien van Manen: Les échos de l’ordinaire
Centre de la photographie de Mougins, France
July 4 – October 4, 2026

The first summer show at the Centre de la photographie de Mougins is given over to the late Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen, who died in 2024, and its title — “Echoes of the Ordinary” — is exactly right for her. Van Manen spent decades living among the people she photographed, from post-Soviet Russia to rural China to the coalfields of Appalachia, working in a loose, warm, snapshot-style color that treated intimacy as the whole point of the exercise. This posthumous survey is a welcome chance to see a body of work that quietly argued the everyday and the tender were subjects as serious as any war or monument.

Bertien van Manen, Ljalja, Odessa, 1991, chromogenic print, 25 × 38 cm, from the series Let’s Sit Down Before We Go. Courtesy the Bertien van Manen Foundation

Sayuri Ichida: Playing the Piano Upstairs
The Photographers’ Gallery, London
July 3 – September 13, 2026

The Photographers’ Gallery hands its Print Sales space to the Japanese photographer Sayuri Ichida, whose spare, exacting black-and-white pictures have built a quiet following over the past decade. Ichida works close to abstraction — bodies, objects, and shadows composed with an almost choreographic precision — and the result reads less like documentary than like a held breath. It is a small, concentrated show, and a good corrective to a week weighing photography’s louder ethical arguments: proof the medium can still be a matter of pure, disciplined looking.

Sayuri Ichida, Phoka #027, 2025, archival pigment print on kozo paper. Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Evan Roth: A Hundred Thousand Years of Light
Dorothée Nilsson Gallery, Berlin
July 3 – August 22, 2026

The American artist Evan Roth has spent his career at the seam where the internet meets the image, and A Hundred Thousand Years of Light turns that attention onto photography’s own material texture. Working with digital prints that foreground grain, signal, and the physical residue of how a picture is actually made and transmitted, Roth treats the photograph less as a window than as a surface — data given a body. It is the most medium-questioning show on view this week, and a reminder that “photography” now includes everything that happens to an image between the sensor and the screen.

Evan Roth, A Hundred Thousand Years of Light. Courtesy Dorothée Nilsson Gallery, Berlin

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, one-day events, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Monday, July 6

Wednesday, July 8

Friday, July 10

Saturday, July 11

Sunday, July 12

Closing Soon

Antwerp

  • Vivian Maier — Gallery Fifty One · Closes Jul 11 (street)

Barcelona

London

Atlanta

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Berlin

Amsterdam

Paris

  • Lee Miller — Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris · Through Aug 2

Mougins

Madrid

London

New York

Norfolk, VA

Los Angeles

FESTIVAL WATCH

  • Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026 — “Worlds in View” — Arles, France · Opening week July 6–12 (runs through Oct 4) (the anchor of the European photography summer; announced names include William Klein, Felicia Abban, Sammy Baloji, and Alfredo Jaar)

  • Cortona On The Move 2026 — Cortona, Italy · July 16 – November 1, 2026 (Italy’s major documentary-photography festival; opening days mid-July)

OFF THE PRESS

Christopher Anderson: Index
Stanley/Barker

Christopher Anderson’s career has run from conflict zones and presidential campaigns to near-death experiences and quiet domestic rooms, and Index tries to hold all of it at once. The Magnum photographer’s retrospective is built as eleven separate volumes gathered in a single slipcase — designed by Brian Roettinger — so that the eleven bodies of work read less as a chronological arc than as an argument that a life in pictures does not resolve into a straight line. It is an unusually ambitious object for a mid-career survey, and a generous one: a photographer emptying the drawer rather than curating a tidy legacy.

Walter Pfeiffer: In Good Company
Mousse Publishing

Published to accompany his show at the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, In Good Company offers an essential reading of the Swiss image-maker Walter Pfeiffer, whose exuberant, sensual, deliberately amateur-looking pictures made him a quiet influence on decades of fashion and portrait photography. Working largely outside the institutional mainstream since the 1970s, Pfeiffer built a body of work devoted to pleasure, youth, and the offhand beauty of everyday scenes; this volume is among the more considered attempts to take the full measure of it.

Mimi Mollica: Moon City
Dewi Lewis Publishing

Moon City is a hallucinatory nocturne on London, built around the silent tension between two forces — the ancient pull of the moon and the restless ambition of the city’s financial skyline. The Sicilian-born, London-based photographer Mimi Mollica threads climate anxiety, political unrest, and a general sense of civic dread through the pictures, so that a book ostensibly about a place becomes a meditation on the mood of the present. Designed by Ramon Pez and now shipping in a signed edition, it is a moody, urgent piece of bookmaking.

OPEN CALLS

ON THIS DAY

July 11, 1991 — The sky went dark over Mexico, and a documentary photographer was watching. On this day the total solar eclipse remembered as the Gran Eclipse swept a shadow more than 13,000 kilometers long across Hawaii, Mexico, and Central and South America, delivering nearly seven minutes of totality in places — among the longest of the twentieth century, and unmatched until 2132. From Chiapas, the Mexican photographer Antonio Turok — better known for his unflinching documentation of conflict and daily life across Mexico and Central America — turned his camera up and made a haunting record of the moment the sun disappeared, the corona flaring around a black disc. It is a reminder that photography’s oldest subject is still light itself, and that the medium began, and occasionally still returns, as an attempt to hold onto something that lasts only seconds.

Total solar eclipse over Chiapas, Mexico, July 11, 1991. © Antonio Turok
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[One of the Most Famous Photographs in America Took Forty Years to Finish]]>https://photograph.is/p/one-of-the-most-famous-photographshttps://photograph.is/p/one-of-the-most-famous-photographsMon, 29 Jun 2026 13:01:23 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” — Ansel Adams, 1941

Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941. Gelatin silver print. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

A row of small adobe houses, a scatter of white wooden crosses in the village graveyard catching the very last of the sun, and above them a nearly black sky with the moon hung high over the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Ansel Adams made the picture late on an afternoon in the autumn of 1941, on a roadside near the village of Hernandez, New Mexico, and for a great many people it remains the most beloved American photograph ever made — the closest the medium has come to a national landscape painting.

Adams was driving back toward Santa Fe with his son and a friend when the light fell on the crosses and he realized he had only seconds. He could not find his Weston light meter in the clutter of the car, so he set the exposure from memory, using the one value he happened to know cold — the luminance of the moon — and made a single sheet-film exposure. By the time he had reversed the film holder for a safety frame, the sun had left the crosses and the picture was gone. There is exactly one negative.

What there is not is one photograph. Over the next four decades Adams returned to that negative again and again, and the print you have seen is almost certainly not the print he made in 1941. He steadily deepened the sky toward black and darkened the foreground, pushing a quiet evening scene toward something operatic; by his own account he made well over a thousand prints, and the early ones and the late ones scarcely look like the same image. Moonrise is the clearest proof he ever offered of his own credo — that the negative is the score and the print is the performance, and that the performance can go on being revised for as long as the photographer lives.

He is, fittingly, back on museum walls this summer. Ansel Adams in Our Time continues its tour, and a new pairing, Silver & Smoke: George Masa & Ansel Adams, runs at the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum in North Carolina through October — occasions, as the Ansel Adams Gallery notes in its own account of the picture, to look again at how much of the thing we call a photograph happens after the shutter has closed.

WHY IT MATTERS

The romance of photography is the decisive moment, the single frame seized before the light changes. Moonrise honors that and then quietly contradicts it. The frame was seized in a few seconds without a meter; the picture took forty years. In a summer when our phones make “the shot” a decision the software finishes for us in milliseconds, Adams’s lifelong argument with one negative is worth sitting with — a reminder that exposure is where a photograph begins, not where it is decided.

Subscribe now

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

México y el fútbol: la mirada de Leibovitz
Casa de México / PHotoESPAÑA, Madrid
June 19 – September 13, 2026

The timing is hard to beat: as the 2026 World Cup plays out across North America this summer, PHotoESPAÑA gives over the Casa de México to Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of the game, made in and around Mexico. It is a reminder that one of the most famous portraitists alive is also, repeatedly, a photographer of spectacle and crowd — and that football, like rock and like Hollywood, is one of those subjects whose mythology a Leibovitz picture both records and helps to manufacture.

Annie Leibovitz, El Castillo, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México, 1986. © Annie Leibovitz.

Corbijn, Anton
Fotografiska Berlin
June 20 – November 1, 2026

For four decades Anton Corbijn has been the man who decides what our musicians look like — the grainy, weather-beaten black and white that shaped the public faces of Joy Division, U2, Tom Waits, and Depeche Mode, and later the films, including Control, that extended the same melancholy gaze into motion. Fotografiska’s Berlin retrospective takes the full measure of a career built at the seam between portraiture and myth-making, where the photograph is never quite a document and never quite an advertisement.

Anton Corbijn, U2, Èze, 2000. © Anton Corbijn.

Toshio Shibata: Concrete Poetry
Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles
June 20 – August 1, 2026

If Adams is this week’s reminder of the American sublime, Toshio Shibata is its cooler, more skeptical cousin. For more than forty years the Japanese photographer has trained a large-format camera on the places where engineering meets terrain — dams, spillways, slope-stabilization, the concrete netting thrown over a mountainside — and found in them a strange, flattened beauty that hovers between document and abstraction. This survey draws on three decades of black-and-white and color work, a quietly radical argument that the engineered landscape is as worthy of contemplation as any wilderness.

Toshio Shibata, Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, 2010 Fuji Crystal Archive Print Mounted to Dibond with Archival Overmat in a Custom Wood Frame. Courtesy Gallery Luisotti.

Ernest Cole: Black America Unseen
Goodman Gallery, New York
June 18 – July 24, 2026

Ernest Cole (1940–1990) made House of Bondage, the 1967 book that laid apartheid bare for the world and made it impossible for him to return to South Africa; he spent the rest of his life in exile, much of it in the United States, and died in New York at forty-nine, largely forgotten. The rediscovery of some sixty thousand of his negatives in a Swedish bank vault in 2017 has driven a steady reappraisal — a new book, Raoul Peck’s documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found — and this show gathers rediscovered vintage prints from his American years, the work of a man who had escaped one segregated society only to train his eye, unsparingly, on another.

Ernest Cole, Black Panthers, 1968. Vintage gelatin silver print. © The Ernest Cole Family Trust.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: In the Gaze of Desire
Sprengel Museum, Hannover
July 1 – October 4, 2026

Opening midweek, the Sprengel gives the American photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya a major museum survey. Sepuya rebuilt the studio portrait from the inside out — mirrors, fragments, draped backdrops, the camera and the photographer’s own body folded into the frame — to ask who is looking at whom, and on whose terms, in pictures of Black and queer desire. It is among the most genuinely original bodies of portrait work of the past decade, and it arrives in Germany as the centerpiece of the museum’s photographic summer.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Studio (0X5A5038), 2020. © Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

Subscribe now

EXHIBITIONS

Opening Soon

Berlin

Hannover

Bristol

A Coruña

Turin

Milton Keynes

Geneva

  • Minor Tides — Centre de la Photographie Genève · Opens Jul 2

Closing Soon

Rome

Los Angeles

Munich

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Amsterdam

Madrid

New York

Norfolk, VA

Paris

  • Lee Miller — Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris · Through Aug 2

  • Camille Vivier — Maison Européenne de la Photographie · Through Sep 13

OFF THE PRESS

Bruce Gilden: A Closer Look
Skira · 192 pages, hardcover; text by Denis Curti

Few photographers divide a room like Bruce Gilden, the Magnum street shooter whose flash-in-the-face method turns strangers on the sidewalk into startled, magnified apparitions. Edited by Denis Curti, A Closer Look gathers some ninety pictures — early black-and-white street work alongside newer color, made from New York to England, Mexico, Greece, and Colombia, with a recent series that, improbably, takes Raphael as its starting point. It is the most generous survey yet of a body of work that insists, abrasively, on the human face at its least composed.

Cristina de Middel: Apoteosis Now
Editorial RM (co-published with IVAM) · 160 pages, softcover

The president of Magnum, Cristina de Middel, has never been a documentarian in the literal sense, and Apoteosis Now — her sustained, restless project on the migrant route through Mexico — refuses linear storytelling on principle. Built from roughly a hundred and fifty images and threaded with the staged and the found, it asks what an honest picture of migration can even look like when the subject has been so thoroughly photographed already. Co-published with the Valencian museum IVAM, with a text by Iván de la Nuez, it is restlessly intelligent picture-making from one of the form’s sharpest minds.

World Press Photo Yearbook 2026
Hatje Cantz

The annual anthology of the year’s most consequential photojournalism, the World Press Photo Yearbook 2026 collects this cycle’s winning and nominated work into the field’s most widely seen single volume. For all the arguments about the contest — its categories, its definitions of truth, its politics of attention — the yearbook remains the most efficient way to see what the past year asked photographers to witness.

ON THIS DAY

July 5, 1833 — The inventor of photography died broke. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce suffered a fatal stroke on this day, financially ruined and almost entirely unrecognized, his partnership with the younger, more flamboyant Louis Daguerre still years from the announcement that would make daguerreotype a household word and leave Niépce’s name in the footnotes. Yet it was Niépce who, around 1826–27, had made View from the Window at Le Gras (below)— the oldest surviving photograph, an exposure measured not in fractions of a second but in the better part of a day, captured on a pewter plate now held by the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. He died believing he had failed; he had, in fact, invented the medium this newsletter exists to cover.

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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[The Grateful Dead, Queer Nightlife, and a Gold Mine in Brazil]]>https://photograph.is/p/the-grateful-dead-queer-nightlifehttps://photograph.is/p/the-grateful-dead-queer-nightlifeMon, 22 Jun 2026 13:03:20 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Serra Pelada Gold Mine” — Sebastião Salgado, 1986

Sebastião Salgado, Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil, 1986. Gelatin silver print. © Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas Images / Magnum Photos.

A vast earthen pit, and inside it perhaps fifty thousand men — caked head to foot in the same ochre mud, nearly indistinguishable from one another, swarming a wall of crude wooden ladders with sacks of earth on their backs. No machinery. Almost no color. Just bodies, and the pit. Sebastião Salgado made the picture at the Serra Pelada gold mine in the Brazilian state of Pará in 1986, and it became the defining frame of his series Workers and one of the most reproduced documentary photographs of the late twentieth century.

What gives it its force is the way the individual dissolves into the mass. Salgado spent roughly a month at the mine, where men had clawed an entire mountainside open by hand chasing a gold strike, and he photographed them not as a crowd of separate lives but as a single laboring organism — something between Bruegel and the building of the pyramids. The eye searches for one face to hold onto and cannot find one, which is precisely the point.

There is a fact about Salgado that the photograph quietly explains. Before he was a photographer he was an economist, trained and working in development economics — including a stint with the International Coffee Organization — well into his late twenties, before he ever picked up a camera seriously. The Serra Pelada pictures are, in a sense, an economist’s portrait of labor: value torn from the earth by the cheapest input there is, the human body.

Salgado died on May 23, 2025, at eighty-one, just over a year ago. Phillips held a dedicated memorial sale this spring, Sebastião Salgado: A Life’s Voyage, and his work is now being absorbed, steadily, into the museum canon. With that absorption the oldest argument about him returns: that his luminous, meticulously composed black and white aestheticizes hardship — makes suffering beautiful, and therefore bearable, even consumable. His defenders answer that the beauty is the argument; that to photograph the poorest workers on earth with the gravity usually reserved for saints and kings is to insist, unanswerably, on their dignity, as the Tate notes in its own collection record for the work.

WHY IT MATTERS

The fight over Serra Pelada was never really about exposure or composition. It is about who gets to decide what a photograph of suffering is for — the photographer, the viewer, the market, or the people in the frame, who were paid in the gold they dug and never in the pictures. As the institutions that mostly overlooked documentary photography during Salgado's working life now move to canonize it after his death, that question stops being academic. It is, this week, the whole question.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Ed van der Elsken: Up Close
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
June 19 – September 13, 2026

The Rijksmuseum gives its big summer photography slot to Ed van der Elsken, the restless, romantic street photographer and filmmaker who remains the most influential Dutch image-maker of the twentieth century. Drawn from his complete archive — the museum acquired the lot — the show moves from his noir-tinged 1950s Paris of Love on the Left Bankthrough Tokyo, Hong Kong, and his own unsparing late self-portraiture, the work of a man who pointed the camera at everyone, himself included, and rarely blinked.

Ed van der Elsken, from Up Close, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. © Ed van der Elsken / Nederlands Fotomuseum.

An American Beauty: Grateful Dead, 1965–1995
David Kordansky Gallery, New York
June 23 – August 7, 2026

Curated by Ricki and Jay Blakesberg, this is a thirty-year photographic history of the Grateful Dead — the band, the crew, and above all the crowd — that doubles as a portrait of a particular American subculture and the documentary impulse it inspired. The New York iteration of a show first seen in Los Angeles, it lands as a reminder that some of the most sustained visual archives of postwar America were built not in newsrooms but in the parking lots and pit photographers’ wells of touring rock.

Ron Rakow, Jerry Garcia, Pigpen, Bobby Weir, and Phil Lesh, Montreal, Canada, 1967 (printed 2026). Archival giclée print. From An American Beauty: Grateful Dead, 1965–1995, David Kordansky Gallery, New York.

Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to Now
The Photographers’ Gallery, London
June 24 – September 27, 2026

A genuinely overdue survey, this gathers generations of Japanese women whose work has too often been read only through the male-dominated postwar canon. Spanning the experimental 1950s to the present, it traces a parallel history of the medium in Japan — domestic, political, and formally adventurous by turns — and arrives in a London summer unusually attentive to East Asian photographic history.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2004, from the series the eyes, the ears. Courtesy the artist and Aperture. From Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to Now, The Photographers' Gallery, London.

Alfredo Jaar: Inferno & Paradiso
Photo Elysée, Lausanne
June 26 – November 1, 2026

For this immersive slide-projection installation, Alfredo Jaar — one of the most socially committed artists working with the photographic image — asked twenty reportage photographers each to choose two pictures from their archives: the most painful they had ever made, and the most hopeful. Visitors sit in a darkened room as the images cycle in twenty-minute waves of heaven and hell, a structure borrowed openly from Dante, and Jaar’s wager is unfashionable and bracing: that photography has not lost its power to move us, only our willingness to look. First shown at Cortona On The Move in 2025, it cross-rhymes neatly with Jaar’s billing as an announced artist at this summer’s Rencontres d’Arles.

Manila City Jail, Philippines, October 31, 2018 — detainees sleeping beside a small grotto of the Virgin Mary, where men with pending cases can wait months or years to be charged or tried. From Alfredo Jaar's Inferno & Paradiso, Photo Elysée, Lausanne. © Hannah Reyes Morales.

Hannah Darabi: Why Don’t You Dance?
Photo Elysée, Lausanne
Opens June 26, 2026

Opening the same evening at Photo Elysée, the Iranian artist Hannah Darabi continues her excavation of how images, books, and pop culture carry political memory — here turning to the contested place of dance and the body in recent Iranian history. Darabi works as much with the photobook and the archive as with the single frame, and the result is documentary in the expanded sense: less a record of events than an inquiry into how a society pictures, and polices, itself.

Why Don't You Dance?, 2026, from the series Cabaret Tehran, House of Legends. © Hannah Darabi. From Hannah Darabi: Why Don't You Dance?, Photo Elysée, Lausanne.

OPENING THIS WEEK

Tuesday, June 23

Wednesday, June 24

Thursday, June 25

Friday, June 26

Saturday, June 27

ON VIEW

Opening Soon

New York

Rotterdam

Winterthur

Closing Soon

Winterthur

Fort Worth

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Madrid

Paris

Amsterdam

Hamburg

Vienna

Italy

New York

Virginia

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Japan

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

OPEN CALLS

OFF THE PRESS

Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife edited by Amelia Abraham
MACK
May 2026 · 284 pages, paperback with die-cut cover

Edited by the writer Amelia Abraham, Sex, Clubs, Dissent is an expansive visual history of queer nightlife told through photographers, filmmakers, and artists — and an argument about what all that documenting has been for. Rather than a tidy chronology, it assembles an archive of possibility: the dancefloor, the sauna, the strip club, and the after-hours rendered by turns erotic, tender, violent, and euphoric. With essays and conversations from Brontez Purnell, McKenzie Wark, Legacy Russell and Tourmaline, and others, it lands as a Pride-season counterweight to the idea that nightlife only matters once it is gone.

An Abridged Dictionary of Sculpture by John Gossage
Steidl
June 2026 · 120 pages, clothbound hardcover with a tipped-in photograph

The American photographer John Gossage — best known for The Pond — turns his camera on the least promising objects imaginable: a pile of archive folders, a dirty beaker, a heap of baseball caps, a plank of wood, a tuft of grass. Each is shot against the same field of white paper and treated as a sculpture, its shadow often carrying as much presence as its form, and the book stakes a deceptively simple claim about the medium itself — that to photograph a thing is to ask it to become another kind of thing entirely. It is a dictionary, Gossage explains, because it describes its sculptures rather than being them, “as every photograph does with everything.” Co-published with The Agency in the Hudson Valley, it is a quietly philosophical late entry in a career spent probing what a picture can and cannot hold.

Órale — Love and Death in Mexico City by Michel Hurst
Hunters Point Press
May 2026 · 100 pages, hardcover

The debut and only monograph by the late photographer and collector Michel Hurst (1948–2023), Órale gathers roughly six years of pictures made in and around his adopted Mexico City — ritual and street life, beauty and degradation, danger and tenderness held in the same frame. Hurst shot with the flinty eye of a street photographer and the soft touch of an aesthete, and the book arrives freighted with affection: an introduction by Nan Goldin, an essay by the New Yorker‘s Chris Wiley, and an afterword by Hurst’s husband of forty years, Robert Swope.

DID YOU KNOW?

The man who made the most famous photograph of manual labor in the twentieth century came to the camera late, and by way of economics. Before Workers, before the Serra Pelada gold mine, Sebastião Salgado trained and worked as a development economist — including a spell with the International Coffee Organization — and did not commit to photography seriously until his late twenties. It is tempting, looking again at that pit of fifty thousand men, to see the discipline he left behind still at work in the one he chose: an unblinking study of where value comes from, and who pays for it with their body.

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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![CDATA[Cartier-Bresson, Avedon, Alex Prager, Marilyn Monroe, and Yves Saint Laurent]]>https://photograph.is/p/cartier-bresson-avedon-alex-pragerhttps://photograph.is/p/cartier-bresson-avedon-alex-pragerMon, 15 Jun 2026 13:03:57 GMTTHE PHOTOGRAPH

“Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare” — Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1932

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1932. Gelatin silver print. © Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A man leaps across a flooded yard behind a Paris railway station, one foot about to break the surface, his whole body mirrored in the water below. He never lands. For almost a century he has hung there, suspended a few inches above his own reflection, in what is probably the most quoted single frame in the history of the medium. Cartier-Bresson made it in 1932, shooting blind through a gap in a fence behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, and it became the textbook illustration of the idea he spent the rest of his life preaching: the ‘decisive moment,’ the instant when form and event align and the photographer simply has to be ready to take it.

The picture entered the canon as proof that the great photograph is caught, not made — pure timing, nothing added, nothing removed. Time later named it to its list of the hundred most influential images ever taken.

There is one inconvenient detail. Cartier-Bresson cropped it. Shooting through the fence, he caught a vertical slat at the left edge, and the version the world knows was trimmed to remove it — an edit made after the shutter, in the darkroom, by the same man who told generations of photographers that cropping was a confession of failure, an admission you had not seen clearly enough in the first place. The most famous argument for getting it right in the camera is, in fact, a crop.

We raise this now not to take the icon down a peg but because the gap between what a photograph claims to be and what it actually is has rarely mattered more. We are living through the first moment when a “decisive moment” can be generated rather than witnessed — when a model can produce a man frozen above his reflection without a man, a puddle, or a camera ever existing. Cartier-Bresson’s leap reminds us that the seam between the caught and the constructed was never as clean as the legend wanted. He believed in the unrepeatable real. He also reached for the scissors.

WHY IT MATTERS

For more than 90 years Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare has carried the purest version of photography’s promise — that the camera reports rather than invents. The crop is a small, human reminder that even the medium’s strictest realist shaped his masterpiece after the fact. In 2026, as the distance between a photograph and a fabrication narrows to nothing, that is not a scandal but a useful inheritance: the decisive moment was always part discipline and part decision.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Alex Prager: Matinee
Lehmann Maupin · New York
On view through August 14, 2026

Prager returns with new large-format work that does in color and casting what Cindy Sherman did in black and white: stage a crowd, a mood, a frame that feels lifted from a film that does not exist. Her meticulously built scenes — every extra placed, every glance directed — read this season as a knowing counterpoint to the machine-made image, a reminder that the most convincing “candid” is often the most controlled.

Alex Prager, Bonnie Hill Overlook, 2026. Archival pigment print. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Leihmann Maupin.

In the American West — Richard Avedon
Fundación MAPFRE · Madrid
On view through August 30, 2026

Avedon’s In the American West — the six-year project that sent the most celebrated fashion and portrait photographer of his era out to drifters, miners, waitresses, and slaughterhouse workers across thirteen states — gets a major museum survey in Madrid. Shot against plain white paper in unforgiving daylight, the series remains one of the most argued-over bodies of American portraiture: monumental and merciless in equal measure, depending on who is looking.

Richard Avedon, Roger Tims, Jim Duncan, Leonard Markley and Don Belak, coal miners, Reliance, Wyoming, August 29, 1979 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Yves Saint Laurent and Photography
International Center of Photography · New York
On view through September 28, 2026

The ICP turns its attention to a fashion house seen entirely through the lens, tracing how Yves Saint Laurent’s image was built and rebuilt by the photographers who shot the clothes, the runway, and the man himself. It anchors an unusually strong fashion-photography week in New York, alongside the Lillian Bassman selling show and the Avedon “Marilyn” lot heading to auction.

Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait
National Portrait Gallery · London
On view through September 6, 2026

Marking the centenary of her birth, the National Portrait Gallery gathers the photographers who made and remade Monroe’s face — from press shots to studio sittings — and asks how much of the most photographed woman of the twentieth century was ever hers to control. The show lands the same month a single Avedon portrait of her goes under the hammer in London.

The Only Blonde in the World, 1963 by Pauline Boty © Pauline Boty Estate. Photo: Tate

MORE ON VIEW

Opening Soon

Berlin

Amsterdam

Barcelona

London

New York

Lausanne / Winterthur

Closing Soon

Paris

Winterthur

Ongoing

A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.

Paris

Amsterdam

Hamburg

Vienna

New York

Virginia

Fort Worth

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Japan

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

OPEN CALLS

OFF THE PRESS

Shine Brightly: Korean Photography Since 1957
by Sunyoung Kim & Holly Roussell
Thames & Hudson
356 pages, hardcover

The first comprehensive English-language survey of Korean photography, Shine Brightly gathers more than sixty photographers and over 250 images to trace the medium from its post-war documentary roots to a contemporary scene now central to the global art world. Newly published internationally — the US hardcover follows in December — it lands the same week London previews two major Japanese photography surveys, part of a broad turn toward East Asian photographic history.

Mango Season by Jenia Fridlyand
Steidl
May 2026 · 112 pages, hardcover with a tipped-in silver gelatin print

Jenia Fridlyand grew up in the Soviet Union in the years just before perestroika, and when she traveled to Cuba decades later the visit felt, she has said, like an uncanny homecoming — the familiar grain of communist daily life unraveling under a bright tropical sun. Working with a large-format camera in the American documentary tradition, she trained her lens on moments that hold both the known and the novel: donkeys silhouetted on a hilltop, a barber’s customer, sweat on a curved back, fruit ripening in a doorway. Co-published with The Agency in the Hudson Valley, it is a quiet, exacting book about how a place can be at once foreign and remembered.

Secrets: Aperture No. 263, Summer 2026
Aperture

Aperture’s summer issue takes “Secrets” as its theme — the concealed, the withheld, the deliberately unseen — at a moment when photography’s relationship to truth is being renegotiated in public. It is a timely companion to a season preoccupied with who controls an image and what a picture is allowed to hide, threading contemporary portfolios through an idea as old as the camera itself: that every photograph keeps something out of frame.

DID YOU KNOW?

The most reproduced photograph of the Great Depression earned its maker nothing — and its subject less. Dorothea Lange shot Migrant Mother in 1936 while on the federal payroll of the Farm Security Administration, which meant the image entered the public domain the moment it was made. It has been printed, parodied, and repurposed ever since, and neither Lange nor Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in the picture, ever received a cent in royalties.

Thompson, who said she felt the photograph had been taken without her consent, spent decades watching her own face become a national symbol she did not own. Thompson later expressed that she regretted having her picture taken. In a 1978 interview with the Los Angeles Times, she stated that Lange did not ask for her name, promised the images would not be sold, and never sent her a copy. However, Thompson's family also noted that at the time, she allowed the photos because she hoped they would show the severity of the times and bring aid to starving migrant workers.

It is a useful thing to remember now, as a new generation of image-making machines is trained on exactly such freely available pictures.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, March 1936. Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress. Public domain.
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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

Subscribe now

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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![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

Share The International Review of Photography

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

Subscribe now

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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

Subscribe now

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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

Share The International Review of Photography

Subscribe now

]]><![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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

Subscribe now

]]><![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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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.”

Subscribe now

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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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

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

Published weekly by Fabrik Media | photograph.is

Subscribe now

]]><![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

Share The International Review of Photography

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.

Share The International Review of Photography

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.

Subscribe now

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

Share The International Review of Photography

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

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

Published weekly by Fabrik Media | photograph.is

Subscribe now

]]>