Matt Black Set Out to Photograph America’s Margins. Everywhere He Went, He Found the Middle.

On January 5, 2016, in Fresno, Matt Black wrote down everything he was carrying: “One pair of pants, one long-sleeve shirt,” a Panasonic camera, a Hasselblad XPan, six lenses and 30 rolls of film. Then he got on a late-night bus to Calexico, on the Mexican border, 438 miles and ten hours away. From there he caught a bus to Bangor, Maine, 3,317 miles in one go. A year into the project, he wrote: “I once told myself that all I needed to understand was my corner of the world, but I’ve been crisscrossing the country for a year now, and all I want to do is see more.”

That corner was the Central Valley of California, and he had spent his career refusing to leave it. Black was born in 1970 and grew up on the farm edge of Visalia. His father was a car mechanic who became an irrigation engineer. In high school he worked in the darkroom of the local afternoon paper, the Tulare Advance-Register, and stayed printing past midnight. Photography, he assumed, would be his ticket out. Then San Francisco State gave him a photojournalism scholarship, and within about three months he had turned against the whole idea. “It just felt weird and fake to be photographing subjects I had no connection to,” he told Alta in September 2021. “I didn’t want to illustrate other people’s ideas; I wanted to illustrate my ideas.” In his mid-20s he decided the work had to happen at home, and in 1998 he and his wife, Melissa, moved back to the valley.

For the next 15 years he photographed the place that feeds the country. The Central Valley grows about a quarter of America’s food, yet its towns have some of the deepest poverty in California. He photographed raisin pickers paid 21 cents a bucket, and families living without electricity or hot water. His stories on drought and farm labor ran in The New Yorker and Time. Still, he kept running into the same reaction. “I get the feeling that people can dismiss it by saying that it’s happening in some weird place in the middle of nowhere in California, that it’s an outlier,” he told Time in 2015. “But I know very well that the Central Valley is not an outlier.”

Instagram gave him a way to prove it. In 2014 he started posting valley pictures with their locations attached, a project he called The Geography of Poverty, and watched them build up on a map. The account took off. Black then took the census definition of concentrated poverty, a place where at least one in five people lives below the line, and went looking for those places across the country. Between 2014 and 2020 he covered more than 100,000 miles, often by bus, through 46 states and Puerto Rico. He traveled, in his words, “coast to coast and back, without ever basically crossing the poverty line.” Early on he worked out that places like this are never more than about two hours’ drive apart. Asked how that felt, he gave a two-word answer: “Mind-blowing.”

The pictures are black and white, with bleached skies and very dark shadows. A family sits on a sidewalk in Farmington, New Mexico, at dusk, after their car has been repossessed. People line up on Main Street in Del Rio, Texas, on Thanksgiving Day to sell their plasma. Predawn passengers ride a bus out of Fresno to the fields. Black also kept what he found on the ground, nearly 3,000 objects in all: lottery tickets, plastic forks, a driver’s license, work gloves, bent nails, panhandling signs. Thames & Hudson published the photographs as American Geography in 2021 and the objects as American Artifacts in 2024. Somewhere along the way he dropped the word poverty from the title. He told the curator Fred Ritchin that he was making “not a portrait of marginalized America, but a portrait of America itself.”

The word “marginalized” still bothers him, because he knows who usually says it. “I know the feeling, that sense of shame, of being told from the outside that where you come from doesn’t matter,” he told Alta. The myths cut both ways, he added. “These myths we tell ourselves are accepted not just by the winners in a scenario but also by those who are not winning. If I’m poor in the richest country in the world, it must be my problem.”

The establishment has caught up with him on his own terms. He was nominated to Magnum in 2015, while on the road in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and became a full member in 2019. In October 2025 the MacArthur Foundation gave him a fellowship, $800,000 with no conditions, and said his work shows that poverty “is not an aberration but rather a defining feature of the American landscape.” He still lives in Exeter, 15 minutes from where he grew up. According to the foundation, he is now photographing mining across the West and using thermal cameras to record the heat coming off burned ground in the Sierra Nevada. MacArthur Foundation

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Mimi Plumb: Blazing Light
Norton Museum of Art | West Palm Beach
October 31, 2026 – March 14, 2027

Plumb was born in 1953 and started photographing as a teenager around San Francisco, where California’s hard light and fast-moving development became her subject. Blazing Light, organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, is her first museum exhibition. It brings together three bodies of work: The White Sky (1972–1978), Landfall and The Golden City (1984–2020), and The Reservoir (2021–2025), in which a drained lake looks like the scene after a disaster nobody names. Plumb talks about the work with Gregory J. Harris at the museum on October 30.

Atong Atem: Passage
NGV Australia, The Ian Potter Centre | Melbourne
October 30, 2026 – June 14, 2027

Atem was born in Ethiopia in 1991 to South Sudanese parents and lives in Melbourne. She paints her own body and dresses it in textiles and symbolic objects, drawing on African studio photography, family albums, Catholic imagery and science fiction. Passage is her first major solo exhibition in Australia, with new and earlier work. Thames & Hudson Australia publishes a monograph with the show, launched at the gallery on October 31, and entry is free.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo | Turin
October 29, 2026 – March 28, 2027

Goldin made the 126 pictures in The Ballad between 1973 and 1986, photographing her friends, lovers and herself in New York. Before it was a book, it was a slide show set to music that she ran in clubs. Aperture published the book in 1986, and it is now in its 23rd printing. The foundation owns the full set and hangs all of it to mark photography’s 200th anniversary. Goldin called it “the diary I let people read.”

Jeff Brouws: Silent Monoliths
Robert Mann Gallery | New York
October 29 – December 12, 2026

Between 1907 and 1956, American railroads built hundreds of reinforced-concrete towers to hold coal for steam engines. Diesel made them useless, and many are still standing. Over five years and more than 20,000 miles, Brouws photographed them one by one under flat, overcast skies, the way the Bechers photographed water towers. The show draws on his MIT Press book Silent Monoliths: The Coaling Tower Project and adds a grid of color pictures of empty sign frames. Brouws talks at the opening on October 29, 6–8 p.m.

Man Ray: Kiki
Museum Ludwig | Cologne
October 31, 2026 – June 13, 2027

The show is built around one picture, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), in which Man Ray turned the back of Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, into a violin by adding two f-holes. The Museum Ludwig owns a later print that Man Ray signed as an artist’s proof, made from the version where he used a stencil in the darkroom rather than painting on the print. Another print of that image sold in 2022 for more than any photograph had sold for at auction. The show also tells Kiki’s own story, from a poor childhood to model, singer and painter in 1920s Paris.

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WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Geneva

• Edmund Clark and Crofton Black: Cosmopolemos — Centre de la photographie Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève, Espace Ami-Lullin · Oct 29 – Feb 20, 2027

Hamburg

• Hito Steyerl: Deine Mudda macht Show — Deichtorhallen Hamburg · Oct 30 – Mar 29, 2027 (about eight installations from 1999 to 2025)

Iserlohn

• Trent Parke: Monument — Städtische Galerie Iserlohn · Oct 30 – Feb 14, 2027 (with Magnum Photos)

Madrid

• Sebastião Salgado: Aqua Mater — Fundación Canal · Opens Oct 28 (about 100 prints from Aqua Mater and Glaciares*, curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado)*

Marseille

• Paul Reas: Fables of Faubus — Centre Photographique Marseille · Oct 30 – Jan 30, 2027

Paris

• Park Chan-wook: Quand l’horloger immobilise le temps — Galerie VU’ · Oct 30 – Nov 28 (the film director’s photographs)

Toronto

• Molly Steels: I Am/Was/Always — The Image Centre · Oct 28 – Dec 5

Closing Soon

Adelaide

• James Tylor: Turrangka...in the shadows — Art Gallery of South Australia · Closes Nov 1

Berlin

• Katharina Sieverding: Life–Death — Galerie Thomas Schulte · Closes Nov 5

Düsseldorf

• Irmel Kamp: Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way — Linn Lühn · Closes Oct 31

• Valérie Belin: Le songe des idoles — Van der Grinten Galerie · Closes Nov 7

Johannesburg

• Mikhael Subotzky: A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick) — Goodman Gallery · Closes Oct 31

London

• Martin Parr: The Last Resort — Rocket Gallery · Closes Oct 31

Los Angeles

• Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw — David Zwirner · Closes Oct 31

• Thomas Demand — Matthew Marks Gallery · Closes Nov 7

Munich

• Ragnar Axelsson: Greenland — Kunstfoyer · Closes Nov 1

Paris

• Robert Frank and John Cohen: Mabou – Pull My Daisy — Les Douches la Galerie · Closes Oct 31

Ongoing

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

Amsterdam

• Hailun Ma: Hometown — Foam · Through Jan 20, 2027 (her first major solo show outside China)

Antwerp

• Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With — FOMU · Through Jan 17, 2027

Berlin

• Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter — C/O Berlin · Through Feb 3, 2027

London

• Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography — Tate Modern · Through Feb 21, 2027

Paris

• Raymond Depardon — Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection · Through Jan 25, 2027

Rotterdam

• Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm — Kunsthal Rotterdam · Through Mar 7, 2027 (Rob Hornstra and others)

FESTIVAL WATCH

• Photo Days 2026 — Paris and Île-de-France · Nov 2–30 (seventh edition)

• PhotoSaintGermain 2026 — Paris · Nov 5–28 (opening night Nov 5, 6–9 p.m.)

• Paris Photo 2026 — Grand Palais, Paris · Nov 12–15

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OFF THE PRESS

Richard Avedon: The Harper’s Bazaar Years
Abrams

Avedon talked his way into Harper’s Bazaar in 1944, at 21, and stayed for more than 20 years under the editor Carmel Snow. This is the first book given over to his fashion work for the magazine. It includes an oral history Avedon recorded about those years, never published before, along with an essay by Derek C. Blasberg and a foreword by the current editor, Samira Nasr. “Nobody could believe such a magazine existed,” Avedon said later. Published October 13.

Coming Soon
Stanley/Barker

In 2003 and 2004 Trent Parke drove around Australia’s coasts and found the beach towns of his childhood holidays being torn down and rebuilt. He switched to color film so he could record every price tag and billboard before they changed. The book is oversized, with gatefolds that open out to 144 cm, and its newsprint jacket is designed to age. Parke, born in 1971, was the first Australian to become a full member of Magnum. Pre-order, shipping late October, £85.

Between the Balloons: My Thanksgiving Parade
Aperture

E.A. Kahane has photographed the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from her third-floor window for more than 25 years. Her first children’s book mixes those pictures with drawings, so the balloons and marching bands turn into something a child can step into. New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro and David Zwirner Books publisher Doro Globus worked on it with her. 48 pages, 40 images, published October 20, a month before the parade.

OPEN CALLS

• Getxophoto 2027 Open Call — Nov 3, 11:59 p.m. CET · €22 per project · theme “Tide”; 12 finalists and three winners, shown at the festival in Getxo, Spain, May 27–June 20, 2027

• Ronan Guillou Grant, 4th edition — Nov 15, 6 p.m. Paris time · free · €4,000 for a project on people and the sea, with two months’ residency in Sète and a show at the Musée de l’Étang de Thau in September 2027; professional photographers from Europe and the southern Mediterranean

• Sony World Photography Awards 2027: Student Competition — Nov 27, 4 p.m. GMT · free · for photography students aged 18 to 30; five to ten images on a set brief

ON THIS DAY

October 31, 1920 — Helmut Newton is born Helmut Neustädter in Berlin.

In 1936, still a teenager, he began an apprenticeship with Yva, a Berlin photographer of portraits, nudes and fashion, and stayed in her studio for two years. In 1938, as a Jewish teenager, he fled Germany by train from Zoo station with two cameras. He landed a job at The Straits Times in Singapore, served five years in the Australian army, and later made his name at French Vogue in the 1960s and 1970s. Yva was murdered in the Holocaust. Newton came back to Berlin in the end. In 2003 he signed the agreement that set up the Helmut Newton Foundation there, which opened in 2004, a few months after his death in Los Angeles.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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Iran Bars Women From Singing Solo. Newsha Tavakolian Gave Six of Them Album Covers.

In 2011 Newsha Tavakolian opened her first solo show in Tehran on the day she turned 30. Visitors went home with a present, a CD case with a woman singer on the cover. She had 8,000 of them made, and every one was empty. Under rules in force since the 1979 revolution, women in Iran may not sing solo in public or put out their own CDs. So each empty case was a ticket to a concert that can’t take place. “I always wanted to be a singer, that’s why I did this project,” she said in a March 2011 interview.

The series is called Listen. In a small private studio in downtown Tehran, she photographed six professional singers as they performed in their heads for a large audience that wasn’t there. Then she made each woman a cover for the album she wasn’t allowed to release. The one above, for Sahar, was made on the Caspian Sea at Mahmoudabad. “For me, a woman’s voice represents a power that, if you silence it, imbalances society, and makes everything deform,” she has said of the project. Tavakolian had been a singer of sorts herself. As a girl she sang Googoosh songs at weddings and family parties for coins. In March 2025, fourteen years after the show, The Guardian reported that the ban on solo singing still stands.

She has been fighting over who gets to speak through her pictures since she was 16. Dyslexic, she had dropped out of high school and taken a job in the archive of Zan, a new women’s daily, where she spliced negatives and wrote the photographers’ names on the sleeves. “I was an aspiring amateur photographer; this skinny 16-year-old girl whom nobody knew,” she told Magnum in 2023. When the first issue needed a front-page picture and the staff photographers were out on assignment, she volunteered. She borrowed folk costumes from friends, sat the women on the stairs holding up the new paper and took the picture. Then she stayed in the editing room until the early hours to make sure her name ran with it. The staff photographers were upset. She told them nobody else had been there, and that settled it.

Zan was shut down in 1999. She moved into news work, covering the student protests in Tehran that year and the war in Iraq from 2003. After the disputed 2009 presidential election, the authorities took away her press card. “A camera became like spy equipment,” she told Aperture in 2016. “For half a year it was forbidden to carry a camera in the streets. I was a photojournalist at home. I couldn’t work.” Within two years she had made Listen, a project that needed only a studio and six willing singers.

Her next fight was with a patron. In 2014 she won the €50,000 Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award for a project about people her own age. She called it Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album, because her subjects’ family albums went empty around the time they became teenagers. Edouard Carmignac, the fund manager behind the prize, edited her pictures himself and wanted to call the work “The Lost Generation.” On September 11 she gave the prize back. Her statement said her artistic freedom and her integrity could not be bought. “Mr. Carmignac, I live in Iran, not you,” she told The New York Times that week. The foundation changed its rules so that a jury shapes the finished work, and later that month she accepted the award. She decides what her pictures say.

She has since turned that rule on her own past. And They Laughed at Me goes back to her first three years behind the camera, 1996 to 1999, and uses only pictures that are flawed in some way. It was first shown in Milan in December 2023 as the first Deloitte Photo Grant exhibition. Kehrer Verlag published it as a book this year, 240 pages with 144 color images, which came out in Europe in March and reaches the US this month. Tavakolian was born in Tehran in 1981. She became a Magnum nominee in 2015 and an associate in 2017, and her work is in the V&A, LACMA and the British Museum. This year she sat on the jury of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. She made a short film, For the Sake of Calmness, in 2019 and is preparing her first feature.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Sebastião Salgado: Fotografie della collezione Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Parigi
Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa | Bassano del Grappa
October 24, 2026 – April 4, 2027

More than 160 photographs from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris come to Italy for the first time. Among them is part of the 105 original prints that Salgado, who died in 2025, gave the museum with Lélia Wanick Salgado in 2018. Pascal Hoël’s selection runs from early series such as Other Americas, Sahel, Serra Pelada and Workers to Genesis. The show is the first official event in Bassano’s bid to be Italian Capital of Culture in 2029.

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua, History, Memory
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson | Paris
October 21, 2026 – March 7, 2027

Meiselas first went to Nicaragua in 1978, at 30, and photographed the uprising that ended the Somoza regime in July 1979. For four decades she has kept going back, following those pictures as they turned up on T-shirts, stamps, matchboxes and murals. Clément Chéroux hangs more than 100 works beside pieces by Alfredo Jaar, Joy Garnett and other artists who have answered her images. Meiselas is the foundation’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement laureate.

Stan Douglas: Parallax
Jeu de Paume | Paris
October 20, 2026 – January 10, 2027

With about 40 works, from films and video installations to photographic series made since the late 1980s, this is the largest Douglas show in France in more than 30 years. Douglas was born in Vancouver in 1960 and often restages history in his home city. For Crowds and Riots (2008) he rebuilt scenes from Vancouver’s past with actors in period clothes. Gloria Moure and Marta Ponsa curated the show, which travels to MACBA in Barcelona in 2027.

Sharon Lockhart: Fogo
The Power Plant | Toronto
October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027

Lockhart spent four summers on Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, photographing its young residents for a series called Fogo Island Portrait Studio. The same young people appear in WINDWARD, a film installation shot against the island’s landscape. Born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1964, Lockhart lives in Los Angeles. The Power Plant presents the show with The Vega Foundation.

Diana Markosian: Father
Fotografiska | Stockholm
October 23, 2026 – May 9, 2027

When Markosian was 7, her mother took her and her brother from Moscow to California and cut their father out of the family photographs. Fifteen years later Markosian found him in Armenia. “I spent ten years making these photographs, but it was never really about creating a body of work. It was about building a relationship with my father,” she says. The show, co-produced with Les Rencontres d’Arles and Foam, asks visitors to write a letter to someone they miss.

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WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Atlanta

• Sam Taylor-Johnson: She Was I — Jackson Fine Art · Oct 22 – Jan 23, 2027 (opening Oct 22, 6–8 p.m.)

Boston

• Urban Legends: A Global Perspective — RKG x SEA-DAR The Project Space, SoWa Arts District · Oct 22 – Feb 28, 2027 (Jeffrey Milstein’s city pictures and more)

Carmel

• Natural Order: Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips — Center for Photographic Art · Oct 17 – Nov 29 (spiders and their webs)

Munich

• Johnny Miller: Unequal Scenes & Salt Works — Amerikahaus · Oct 17 – Jan 9, 2027 (drone pictures of inequality)

New York

• Curran Hatleberg: River’s Dream, 2010–2020 — Higher Pictures · Oct 21 – Dec 12

Oberhausen

• Ruth Orkin: Die Welt im Fokus — Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen · Oct 18 – Feb 14, 2027

Paris

• Paul Kodjo: Photoromance — Palais de Tokyo · Oct 21 – Feb 14, 2027 (the Ivorian photographer’s photo-novels; co-produced with Les Rencontres d’Arles)

• Walid Raad: Festival of (in)gratitude — Centquatre · Oct 23 – Nov 22

Turin

• Anastasia Samoylova: Harbor — Gallerie d’Italia · Oct 22 – Feb 7, 2027 (seven European port cities)

Vancouver

• Michael Kenna: Beautiful Fukushima — Kostuik Gallery · Oct 15 – Nov 8 (50 sepia-toned silver gelatin prints)

Closing Soon

Antwerp

• Mika Horie: Ikebana — IBASHO · Closes Oct 25

• Saul Leiter: Cibachromes & Paintings — Gallery Fifty One · Closes Oct 31

Brussels

• Marina Pinsky: The Wave(s) or Newton’s Rings — Galerie Greta Meert · Closes Oct 31

Cologne

• Tina Barney: Silver Shadows — Galerie Thomas Zander · Closes Oct 30

New York

• John Edmonds: The Space Between — COMPANY · Closes Oct 24

• Abelardo Morell: Out of Paper — Edwynn Houk Gallery · Closes Oct 31

• Shelley Niro: In Her Lifetime — Hales · Closes Oct 31

Santa Fe

• Eugene Tapahe: ART HEALS — Monroe Gallery of Photography · Closes Nov 1

Warsaw

• Laurie Simmons: Uncanny Valley — IMPORT EXPORT · Closes Oct 31

Winchester, Massachusetts

• Lua Kobayashi: The Persistence of Memories — Griffin Museum of Photography · Closes Oct 25 (Cummings Residency Prize show)

Ongoing

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

Aalborg

• Frida Orupabo: Get close enough and you can’t see — Kunsten Museum of Modern Art · Through May 9, 2027 (her first solo show in Denmark)

Fort Worth

• Photography’s First Century: Masterworks from the Bibliothèque nationale de France — Kimbell Art Museum · Through Jan 17, 2027

London

• Charan Singh: Your Tongue in My Mouth — Autograph · Through Feb 13, 2027 (new portraits of Hijra, Kothi and trans people)

Los Angeles

• Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography — Getty Center · Through Jan 3, 2027 (13 photographers, from Lola Álvarez Bravo to Graciela Iturbide)

Maastricht

• Eve Arnold: All about Eve — Fotomuseum aan het Vrijthof · Through Jan 31, 2027 (130 photographs by the first woman to join Magnum)

Tokyo

• Assembling Anew: Memories, Materials, Context, Technology — Tokyo Photographic Art Museum · Through Jan 17, 2027 (Contemporary Japanese Photography vol. 23)

FESTIVAL WATCH

• Photoworks Festival 2026: Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams — Brighton & Hove, UK · Through Nov 1

• Photo Fringe 2026 — Brighton & Hove and the coast from Portsmouth to Newhaven, UK · Through October (the twelfth biennial; more than 100 exhibitions and events)

• Central Photobooks Festival — Birmingham, UK · Oct 23–24 (EH Smith Design Centre; talks and exhibits free)

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OFF THE PRESS

An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965–1995
David Kordansky Gallery

Jay and Ricki Blakesberg edited 275 pictures of the Grateful Dead taken across three decades. Stuart Krimko wrote the essay and Jay Blakesberg the afterword. The book was made for Kordansky’s 2025 exhibition of the same name, and D.A.P. lists a new US distribution date of October 20. 279 pages, $85.

Shirin Neshat: Body of Evidence
Silvana Editoriale

Diego Sileo and Beatrice Benedetti edited the catalogue of Neshat’s 2025 retrospective at PAC in Milan. The book runs from Women of Allah to The Fury. The show held almost 200 photographs and ten video installations, and the catalogue has 336 pages and 585 illustrations. Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1957. €38.

Iris Garden by John Cage & William Gedney
Magic Hour Press

The book pairs 22 of Cage’s stories from his 1959 spoken-word album Indeterminacy with 44 of Gedney’s photographs from the 1950s to 1989, several of them portraits of Cage. The loose pages come in a slipcase so readers can shuffle them, in keeping with Cage’s use of chance. Alec Soth first published it in a small run through his press Little Brown Mushroom in 2013, and this is a new edition. 63 pages, 44 duotones, $60.

OPEN CALLS

• International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2026 — Oct 31 · US$25 per image, every fifth entry free through Oct 24 · US$12,500 in prizes; photographs taken after January 1, 2021; no AI-generated images

• Month of Photography Denver: Portfolio Review Equity Scholarships — Nov 3 · no fee stated · for artists with disabilities, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists; reviews Mar 12–13, 2027, at the Slate Hotel, Denver (standard registration $396 to $672)

• Vital Impacts: 2027 Environmental Photography Fellowships — Dec 1 · no fee stated · one $20,000 and six $5,000 fellowships plus ten mentorships; one fellow shows at the Festival della Fotografia Etica in Lodi in 2027

ON THIS DAY

October 24, 1946 — A camera on a V-2 rocket takes the first photographs of Earth from space.

At White Sands in New Mexico, a team launched V-2 No. 13, a captured German rocket, with a 35mm movie camera on board that shot a frame every second and a half. The rocket climbed about 65 miles. The best earlier view, from the Explorer II balloon in 1935, had come from 13.7 miles up, so the camera saw Earth from almost five times as high. On the way down the rocket hit the ground at 500 feet per second, about 340 miles an hour. The camera was smashed, but the film survived in a steel cassette. “They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids,” Fred Rulli, a 19-year-old soldier on the recovery team, told Air & Space in 2006. Clyde Holliday, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory engineer who built the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950 that the pictures showed “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship.”

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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She Promised John Lennon the Cover. That Night He Was Killed, and She Kept Her Word.

On December 8, 1980, Annie Leibovitz went to the Dakota, the New York apartment building where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived, to make a cover for Rolling Stone. She asked them both to undress, a nod to the 1968 Two Virgins picture of the couple naked that had been their first Rolling Stone cover. Lennon agreed. Ono would not take off her pants, so Leibovitz told her to leave everything on. Lennon, naked, lay down on the floor near their bed and curled up against her. “I remember peeling the Polaroid and him looking at it and saying, ‘This is it. This is our relationship,’” Leibovitz told Rolling Stone in 2017. A few hours later Lennon was shot dead outside the building.

The next morning the magazine’s staff started on a tribute issue and began mocking up covers with Lennon on his own. “I said, ‘Jann, I promised John the cover would be him and Yoko.’ And Jann backed me up. I said it was the last promise,” she recalled in the same piece. The picture ran on the cover dated January 22, 1981. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover of the previous 40 years. It was an assignment and a promise between people who knew each other, and Leibovitz has never really separated the two.

Her first assignment for the magazine had been Lennon too. Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, she went to the San Francisco Art Institute to study painting. A summer trip to Japan with her mother got her taking pictures, and back in San Francisco she signed up for photography classes at night. In 1970 she showed her portfolio to Jann Wenner, who had recently started Rolling Stone in the city. He sent her to photograph Lennon, and her black-and-white portrait ran on the cover of January 21, 1971. Two years later she was the magazine’s chief photographer. She was the official photographer on the Rolling Stones’ 1975 tour, and the shirtless, gritty portraits of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards come from those months on the road with the band.

In 1983 she joined Vanity Fair as its first contributing photographer, and the pictures changed. They became lit, staged and planned: Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk, Demi Moore naked and pregnant on the cover. In 1991 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington gave Leibovitz her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970–1990, which toured for six years. She was the only woman, and only the second living portraitist, the gallery had shown.

The biggest influence on her was Susan Sontag, whom she met while photographing the writer for AIDS and Its Metaphors. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” Leibovitz told The New York Times in late 2006. Sontag told her, “You’re good, but you could be better.” The two stayed together until Sontag’s death in late 2004. Leibovitz went to Sarajevo during the war in 1993, a trip she has said she would not have made without Sontag, and came back with a black-and-white picture of a teenage boy’s bicycle lying on bloody pavement after a sniper killed him. Sontag also had the idea for Women (1999) and wrote its introduction: “A book of photographs of women must, whether it intends to or not, raise the question of women.”

Sontag died, and Leibovitz’s father died a few weeks later. Her answer was A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, published in 2006. It puts the famous portraits next to pictures of her parents, her brothers and sisters, her children and Sontag, and one of Leibovitz herself, naked and eight months pregnant in 2001. She made the family pictures the way she had started out, with a 35mm camera and black-and-white Tri-X film. “I don’t have two lives,” she wrote in the introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”

She is 77 now and still working that way. Last fall Phaidon published a new two-volume edition of Women, with essays by Gloria Steinem and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and new portraits that Leibovitz says came from thinking “about issues that are important today.” In Toluca, west of Mexico City, Centro Tolzú is showing Futbol 1986–2026 through January 7, 2027. It hangs the 13 pictures she made for Televisa at the 1986 World Cup next to 25 new ones made for this year’s tournament, forty years apart in one show.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Cindy Sherman
Hauser & Wirth | London
October 13 – December 23, 2026

The first showing of Fabric Matrons, a new series in which Sherman’s characters are draped in fabrics, many of them from Chanel’s archives. Her conversation with Chanel goes back to Ominous Landscapes (2010–2012). Among the works are Untitled #706 and Untitled #710, both 2026. The opening reception is shared with Lorna Simpson’s new show at the same gallery.

William Eggleston: All that goes unnoticed
The Photographers’ Gallery | London
October 14, 2026 – February 21, 2027

In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art showed William Eggleston’s Guide, chosen by John Szarkowski, a show of color pictures of ordinary Southern life. Fifty years on, The Photographers’ Gallery marks the anniversary with Eggleston’s vintage dye-transfer prints alongside the early black-and-white pictures and Brownie snapshots he made in the 1960s and 1970s. Eggleston has called himself “at war with the obvious,” and the gallery hangs his best-known pictures next to lesser-known ones. The show is organized with the Wilson Centre for Photography. Tickets are £12.

Sophie Calle: Matrimoni, Rotture e Funerali inclusi
MAXXI | Rome
October 16, 2026 – February 7, 2027

The title translates as “Weddings, Breakups and Funerals Included.” It is the first overview of Calle’s work in Rome, covering more than forty years, and it is organized around the “with” and the “without”: having a person, a love, sight or an image, and then losing it. Simona Antonacci curates the show in MAXXI’s galleria 2. There is a guided tour on October 25.

Letizia Battaglia: Works 1970–2020
CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia | Turin
October 17, 2026 – February 7, 2027

A girl with a ball in the Cala quarter of Palermo, 1980, is the picture on CAMERA’s page, and it is a good way in. Battaglia photographed Palermo and Sicily for half a century: her famous pictures from what the curators call the “Mafia years,” but also religious festivals, young faces, everyday hardship and the inside of a psychiatric hospital. More than 200 images are here, with the 22 magazines she worked for (some of which she founded and edited) and a documentary film about her life. Walter Guadagnini curates; CAMERA and Jeu de Paume co-produced the show with the Letizia Battaglia Archive after stops at the Château de Tours, the Rencontres d’Arles and the Museo Civico San Domenico in Forlì. The catalogue is from Dario Cimorelli Editore.

Carlotta Corpron: Light Is a Plastic Medium:
The Photography of Carlotta Corpron
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Washington
October 16, 2026 – March 14, 2027

Corpron moved to Denton, Texas, in 1935 to teach at Texas State College for Women. She had picked up a camera two years earlier, and for about two decades she used it to study light itself, until health problems ended her darkroom work in 1955. The show follows six bodies of work, from Nature Studies and Light Drawings to Space Compositions and Fluid Light Designs, and places her alongside Alfred Stieglitz, László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes. The show draws on 48 recent gifts to the museum from Herbert Lust. Betsy Johnson curates.

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WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Amsterdam

• Myriam Boulos — Foam · Oct 23 – Jan 20, 2027 (opens the following week; opening Oct 22, 5:30 p.m.)

Columbus

• Queer Constellations: Photographs from the Aronowitz Family Collection — Columbus Museum of Art · Oct 16 – Mar 21, 2027 (curated by Vince Aletti and Kaitlin Booher; part of FotoFocus)

Hannover

• Nikita Teryoshin: Nothing Personal: The Back Office of War — Galerie für Fotografie in der Eisfabrik (GAF) · Oct 15 – Nov 22 (opening Oct 14, 7 p.m.)

London

• Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography — Tate Modern · Oct 14 – Feb 21, 2027 (pictorialism as a worldwide movement; more than 200 prints by over 80 artists)

New York

• Laia Abril: On Rape and Institutional Failure — International Center of Photography · Oct 15 – Jan 11, 2027

• I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now — International Center of Photography · Oct 15 – Jan 11, 2027 (New York stop of the touring show)

Seoul

• Roger Ballen: The Works: Drawing meets Photography — Museum Hanmi Samcheong · Oct 16 – Feb 21, 2027

Toulouse

• Les vies de la photographie — Le Château d’Eau · Oct 16 – Feb 21, 2027 (collections of the Château d’Eau, musée Georges-Labit and musée Paul-Dupuy; opening Oct 15, 6:30 p.m.)

Closing Soon

Avilés

• Joan Fontcuberta: Corales. Lo que Darwin pasó por alto — Centro Niemeyer · Closes Oct 13

Denver

• What We’ve Been Up To: People — Denver Art Museum · Closes Oct 25 (recent photography acquisitions)

Edinburgh

• Wendy McMurdo: The Digital Mirror — Scottish National Portrait Gallery · Closes Oct 25

Heidelberg

• Elliott Erwitt: People, Places, Moments — Leica Galerie Heidelberg · Closes Oct 17 (prints from the Leica Archive, 1946 to 2003)

Lisbon

• Eikoh Hosoe: Kamaitachi — Ochre Space · Closes Oct 24 (Wednesday to Saturday, 3 to 6:30 p.m.)

London

• Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai — Japan House London · Closes Oct 18

Lower Hutt

• Ans Westra: Jeetje — The Dowse Art Museum · Closes Oct 18 (free)

Lucerne

• Shirana Shahbazi: All at Once. An Interplay with Li Tavor — Kunstmuseum Luzern · Closes Oct 18

Munich

• Ilit Azoulay: No Single View — Museum Villa Stuck · Closes Oct 18

New York

• Andy Warhol Family Album — Whitney Museum of American Art · Closes Oct 19 (Polaroids from 1972 to 1973)

Tokyo

• Lucas Foglia: Constant Bloom — T3 Photo Festival Tokyo · Closes Oct 26 (following the Painted Lady butterfly’s migration from Africa into Europe)

Ongoing

Amsterdam

• Kadir van Lohuizen: Document Netherlands: New Energy — Rijksmuseum · Through Jan 17, 2027 (the museum’s annual photography commission)

• Henry Chalfant: ART IS NOT A CRIME — STRAAT Museum · Through Mar 13, 2027 (New York graffiti, 1977 to 1987)

• Stephan Vanfleteren: Transcripts of a Sea — Het Scheepvaartmuseum · Through Apr 4, 2027

Austin

• Shadows on Stone: Portraits of Colonial Mexican Architecture — Blanton Museum of Art · Through Jan 31, 2027 (from John McAndrew’s photographs of colonial Mexican monasteries)

Belfast

• Rosy Martin: Acts of Becoming — Belfast Exposed · Through Dec 19

Houston

• Across the Americas: FotoFest, Latin America, and Latino Cultures in the United States — FotoFest · Through Nov 14

Rochester

• GAG — George Eastman Museum · Through Apr 11, 2027 (humor and the absurd in 21st-century photography and video)

Santa Barbara

• Stage Craft: Pictorialist Photography and Performance — Santa Barbara Museum of Art · Through Jan 31, 2027

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FESTIVAL WATCH

• Bristol Photo Festival: TIME MACHINE — Bristol, UK · Festival week Oct 14–18 (part of the autumn program)

• SCAN Tarragona 2026 — Tarragona, Spain · Oct 16 – Nov 29 (central exhibition in Tinglado 2, Port de Tarragona)

• Planches Contact #17: Générations — Deauville, France · Oct 17 – Jan 3, 2027 (about twenty artists at Les Franciscaines, Point de Vue, on the beach and around town; pass €13)

• Festival della Fotografia Etica — Lodi, Italy · Through Oct 25 (final two weekends)

• FotoFocus Biennial 2026: The Long View — Cincinnati and region, US · Through October (74 exhibitions at 65 venues)

OFF THE PRESS

Faces and Phases: 2006–2026 by Zanele Muholi
MACK

Since 2006 Muholi has been photographing Black lesbian and bisexual women and queer, trans, non-binary and gender-fluid people in South Africa and beyond, one black-and-white portrait at a time. “This is not art; this is life. Each and every photograph is someone’s biography,” Muholi says. The twentieth-anniversary volume holds more than 300 portraits, most of them unpublished and some made in São Paulo, London and Los Angeles, in a debossed leather hardcover with a tipped-in image.

Walking Blues by Alex Webb
Aperture

Webb was born in San Francisco in 1952 and became a full member of Magnum in 1979. His earlier Aperture books include La Calle: Photographs from Mexico; Walking Blues stays in the United States. Inspired by blues music, it gathers more than a decade of color photographs from some forty American cities.

Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Books, Prints, and Photographic Editions, 1960–2022
Steidl

Three volumes and 864 pages, the closest thing to a phone book for Ruscha’s printed work, from the photo books of the 1960s on. Siri Engberg compiled the entries and writes an essay alongside Clive Phillpot, and the set reprints Phillpot’s “The Information Man” from 1975. There are 21 black-and-white and 1,011 color illustrations.

OPEN CALLS

• Hasselblad Foundation: Fotosalongen 2027 — Oct 18 · free · open to amateurs and professionals in any genre; selected work shown at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Apr 23 – Sep 26, 2027, with a SEK 3,200 fee to each selected participant

• Praxis Photo Center: MULTIPLICITY — Oct 18, 11:59 p.m. CT · $35 for up to five images, $5 for each extra image up to ten · up to 74 photographs shown Nov 21 – Dec 12; notification Oct 28

• Kimbell Art Museum: Local Lens: Analog Photography Showcase — Oct 19 · no fee stated · six photographers working with traditional analog processes; you don’t need to live in Dallas–Fort Worth but must attend the showcase in person on Saturday, Dec 12, noon to 3 p.m.; notification Nov 13

ON THIS DAY

October 16, 1968 — Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists on the Olympic podium in Mexico City.

Smith had won the 200 meters in a world-record 19.83 seconds, with Australia’s Peter Norman second and Carlos third. They came to the medal ceremony in black socks and no shoes, and Norman wore a human rights badge in support. Carlos had forgotten his black gloves, so Norman suggested they share Smith’s pair, which is why Smith raised his right fist and Carlos his left. John Dominis of Life was about 20 feet away, roughly two car lengths, and made the best-known picture. “I didn’t think it was a big news event,” he told Smithsonian in 2008. “I hardly noticed what was happening when I was shooting.” The New York Times reported that the gesture “actually passed without much general notice in the packed Olympic Stadium.” Smith later put it this way: “We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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At Fourteen He Saw a Pair of White Legs Standing Over Five Black Men in a Trench. He Has Been Photographing That Unease Ever Since.

The picture was in a South African newspaper, and Nadav Kander was about fourteen when he saw it. The camera looked down into a trench where five Black men were digging. At the top of the frame, cropped at the knees, stood a white pair of legs. “I grew up with this injustice all around me, Apartheid was in everyones bones,” he writes in the biography on his own website. The photographs he took then, and into his early twenties, were “unaccomplished,” he says, but they “have the same sense of quiet and unease that is a part of my practice today.”

Quiet and unease covers most of what he has done since. Kander was born in Tel Aviv on December 1, 1961, and his family moved to Johannesburg when he turned three. His earliest memory is being sick on the flight. He bought a Pentax at thirteen with his Bar Mitzvah money. National service put him in the air force, printing aerial photographs in a darkroom for two years, and for the first time he was good at something he was being taught. “The air force was the first time ever in my life that I excelled in a learning environment,” he told ArtThrob in June 2002. He had no other training. He assisted the photographer Harry De Zitter, then left South Africa for England, alone, at 21.

Being the new arrival became his method. On the Yangtze he worked his way from the river’s mouth toward its source with a large-format film camera while China rebuilt itself along the banks. “My own feelings of rootlessness as an Israeli-born South African living in England evoked a strong response as I witnessed the vast scale of change under way in China,” he wrote in the statement for the series. “I felt like a complete outsider and explained this pictorially by ‘stepping back’ – by showing humans as small in their surroundings.” The picture at the top of this page is one of those: bathers standing on a rock at Yibin, in Sichuan, with a bridge, a factory and a smoking stack going soft in the fog behind them. Yangtze – The Long River won the Prix Pictet in 2009.

The same year, shortly after the inauguration, The New York Times Magazine commissioned him to photograph the new Obama administration. He made fifty-two portraits, which Foam describes as the largest number by a single photographer ever published in one issue of the magazine. The plan, worked out with the magazine’s Kathy Ryan, was “to work in a similar way to how the Bechers work, where if you photograph multiple things in a very similar way you will very accurately see the differences,” he told the critic Jörg Colberg in a conversation from 2011. Every sitter got the same treatment, so the small differences between them stand out. “It certainly didn’t glorify people,” he said.

The places he picks have the same edge. For the series Dust he photographed the radioactive ruins of secret Cold War cities on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia, including the Polygon nuclear test site. “I suppose I always look for places on the edge of uneasiness, I’ve called them troubled lands in the past,” he told Colberg. The pictures are often lovely to look at, and he means them to be, up to a point. “I seem to reside in this area of making quite beautiful pictures but which have a discomfort to them that asks questions,” he told Slate in August 2014.

The newest troubled land is close to home. Dark Line – The Thames Estuary, published by GOST in September, collects pictures he made between 2015 and 2024 on the estuary where London’s river widens into the sea, a place “out of sight of the capital,” as he puts it. He works slowly there, often for hours until dusk, making long exposures, and back in the studio he reprints each image again and again, sometimes for years, until it reaches what he calls “feeling like water.” In some frames the river and sky are so close in tone that the horizon is barely a pencil line. GOST calls it his most personal work. “These are pictures that don’t divulge much and this is true of all my work,” he says in the book.

You can see the whole arc in Amsterdam now. Foam is showing The edge of things, a survey curated by David Campany, the creative director of the International Center of Photography, with the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography. It runs from the Yangtze to the Thames, takes in Chernobyl and the portraits, and is on view through January 31, 2027. Foam

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Gregory Crewdson: Eveningside
Fondazione Palazzo Magnani, Chiostri di San Pietro | Reggio Emilia
October 10, 2026 – January 17, 2027

A shop window at night, a bar, an ATM canopy, a hardware store. The last part of Crewdson’s small-town trilogy is set among storefronts, and he made it, for the first time, entirely in black and white. Reggio Emilia hangs it with the two earlier chapters, Cathedral of the Pines (2012–2014) and An Eclipse of Moths (2018–2019), and screens the film Making Eveningside. Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo commissioned the series and first showed it in Turin in 2022; Jean-Charles Vergne curates.

Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan
High Museum of Art | Atlanta
October 9, 2026 – February 7, 2027

Three photographers who taught as much as they photographed, shown with the people who learned from them or worked beside them, among them Emmet Gowin, Roy DeCarava, Linda Connor, Arthur Siegel and Ming Smith. The show comes from the Princeton University Art Museum, home of the Minor White Archive, and includes unpublished color and black-and-white prints and rare slides. The High is the only venue in the Southeast. Brendan Fay curates.

Richard Yee: Between Two Shores
Robert Klein Gallery | Boston
October 10 – December 12, 2026

In 1949 Richard Yee, then thirteen, photographed Guangzhou from above on the eve of liberation. Three years later he left Guangdong for the United States, and he kept photographing. He won first prize in the Boston Globe photo contest three years running, and in 1959 he took the grand award in the All U.S. Army Photo Contest. The show covers four decades across China, Hong Kong and the US, in gelatin silver prints Yee made himself, many of them vintage prints from the 1960s. The Chinese title, 此岸彼岸, means “this shore, that shore,” a Buddhist phrase.

Russell James: It’s About Time
CAMERA WORK | Berlin
October 10 – November 14, 2026

More than thirty nudes, portraits and landscapes, many of them from 2025 and 2026 and shown here for the first time. The gallery places James in the line of Herb Ritts and Patrick Demarchelier. A new monograph with the same title comes out alongside the show, and James signs copies at the gallery on October 10 at 2 p.m.

Šejla Kamerić: EX YOU
Fotografiska Tallinn | Tallinn
October 9, 2026 – March 7, 2027

The title points two ways: to ex-Yugoslavia, the country that came apart around the Bosnian artist, and to being “exed,” pushed out of someone’s life. Kamerić works across photography, sculpture, installation and sound, and Marina Paulenka has curated the show. “Identities are not simple and they are not fixed positions, identity is a process of becoming,” Kamerić says in the museum’s text. The opening and a tour are on October 8 at 18:00.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Aalborg

• Frida Orupabo: Get close enough and you can’t see — Kunsten Museum of Modern Art · Oct 8 – May 9, 2027

Barcelona

• Emancipations: Foto Colectania Collection — Fundació Foto Colectania · Oct 8 – Feb 7, 2027 (curated by Florian Ebner; opening Oct 7, 8 p.m.)

Gothenburg

• Hasselblad Award 2026: Zanele Muholi — Hasselblad Center · Oct 10 – Apr 4, 2027 (the award exhibition for the 2026 laureate)

London

• Charan Singh: Your Tongue in My Mouth — Autograph · Oct 8 – Feb 13, 2027

Melbourne

• LOOK! Prize 2026 — Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) · Oct 7 – Dec 7 (launch Oct 13)

Online

• Jung Lee: LOVE — Christophe Guye Galerie, online exhibition · Oct 7 – Jan 23, 2027

Paris

• Remember Me — Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection · Oct 7 – Jan 18, 2027 (curated by Matthieu Humery; about 700 works, Gustave Le Gray to Cindy Sherman)

• Françoise Huguier: L’œil voyageur — Galerie Art Absolument · Oct 8 – Nov 28

• Guillaume Herbaut: Ukraine, le mal qui reste — Académie des beaux-arts · Oct 8 – Nov 29 (work from his 2024 Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière photography prize)

São Paulo

• Círio de Nazaré: do sagrado ao profano, uma extensão do Brasil — Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS) · Oct 6 – Nov 15 (Fabricio Augusto, Nova Fotografia 2026)

Closing Soon

Amsterdam

• Diana Blok: Time Tells — Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter · Closes Oct 18

Boston

• Lorna Simpson — Krakow Witkin Gallery · Closes Oct 10

London

• Carrie Mae Weems: The Long Goodbye — V&A East Museum · Closes Oct 18 (a new film commission)

• Rene Matić: HEARD — V&A East Museum · Closes Oct 18 (sculpture built from photographs taken across east London)

New Orleans

• George Dureau: Selected Photographs — New Orleans Museum of Art · Closes Oct 11

Palafrugell

• Sergio Larrain. El vagabundo de Valparaíso. Retrospectiva — Museu del Suro de Catalunya, with Foto Colectania · Closes Oct 18

Shanghai

• Thomas Sauvin: Beijing Silvermine: Archive Anthology — Fotografiska Shanghai · Closes Oct 18

Shkodër

• Gjon Mili: Retrospective — Marubi National Museum of Photography · Closes Oct 18

Valencia

• Cristina de Middel: Apoteosis Now — IVAM · Closes Oct 12

Ongoing

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

Cincinnati

• Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power — Cincinnati Art Museum · Through Jan 3, 2027 (her first career retrospective)

• Widline Cadet: Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance) — Contemporary Arts Center · Through February 2027

Jacksonville

• Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light) — MOCA Jacksonville · Through Mar 21, 2027

New York

• Allan Sekula: Fish Story — Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University · Through Dec 20 (all nine chapters)

• Hannah Altman: Not a Circle but a Spiral — The Jewish Museum · Through Feb 7, 2027

• Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony — New Museum · Through Jan 3, 2027

Paris

• PENN & FASHION — Maison Européenne de la Photographie · Through Jan 17, 2027

FESTIVAL WATCH

• Oslo Negativ — Oslo, Norway · Oct 10–25 (three weekends in the old National Gallery building; this year’s theme is Passion; festival pass NOK 600)

• T3 Photo Festival Tokyo 2026 — Tokyo, Japan · Oct 3–26 (24 days across Yaesu, Nihonbashi, Kyobashi and Ginza, built around the Japanese word と, “and”)

OFF THE PRESS

I Want To See A Lighthouse by Gary Briechle
Charcoal Press

Most days Briechle drives around Rockland, Maine, in an SUV loaded with chemicals, photographing the same neighbors, children and backyards on wet collodion glass plates, one plate at a time. He makes a single gelatin silver print from each plate and then puts the plate away in the attic, under a bed or in a closet; he has no interest in exhibiting or selling. I Want To See A Lighthouse gathers thirty years of that routine. Briechle, a Guggenheim fellow in 2015, has two earlier monographs. Linen hardcover with a tipped-in image, 224 pages, from $85; Charcoal Press says it ships in October 2026.

Chris Killip: North
Thames & Hudson

“I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered,” Killip said of his work in the north of England. Chris Killip: North covers 1975 to 1986, from Huddersfield to the fishing communities of the North Yorkshire coast to the miners’ strike, with pictures from Ireland and the Isle of Man. Mark Holborn edited it with exclusive access to the archive, and nearly half of the 224 illustrations, something like a hundred pictures, are published here for the first time. 304 pages, $95, out October 6.

Tina Barney: Fashion
Aperture

Barney’s mother was an in-demand model in the 1940s who made the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and sat for Horst P. Horst and George Hoyningen-Huene. Tina Barney: Fashion starts with that family history and its photo albums, then follows clothes and what they signal through Barney’s career, including a large body of editorial work for Muse, Nest, Arena Homme +, Vogue, Gucci and Bottega Veneta. Short texts by Barney tell the stories behind the pictures, and Vince Aletti and Alistair O’Neill contribute. 256 pages, 150 images, $65, published October 6.

OPEN CALLS

• Fine Art Photography Awards — Oct 11 (early deadline; final deadline Feb 14, 2027) · $19–$29 per entry at early rates · $5,000 in cash prizes across professional and amateur sections

• LensCulture Black & White Photography Awards — Oct 14 · one single image free, five singles for $35 · $10,000 in cash grants; winners shown at Photo London 2027

• 1839 Awards: Photographer of the Year — Oct 17, 11:59 p.m. ET · $20–$35 per single image and $30–$50 per series, by entry level · cash prizes; winners announced Nov 18

• Wellcome Photography Prize 2027 — Oct 21 · free · three categories, £10,000 to each category winner and £1,000 to 22 further entries

• Chromatic Photography Awards — Oct 25 · fee not shown on the awards site · grand prizes of $2,000 (professional) and $1,000 (amateur)

• Pride Photo Award 2027 — Oct 31, 23:59 CET · free · €500 for each work selected for the Pride Photo Exhibition 2027

• Environmental Photography Award 2027 — Nov 1, 23:59 CET · free · five categories via Photocrowd; €5,000 grand prize, €1,000 to each category winner

• VMFA Visual Arts Fellowships — Nov 6, 5 p.m. · free · Virginia residents only (US citizens or permanent residents living in Virginia for 24 months, 12 for students); $8,000 professional, $6,000 graduate, $4,000 undergraduate

• The City Series: London (Shutter Hub) — Nov 12, 5 p.m. UK · pay what you can, £15 minimum · up to ten images; 100 chosen for a photobook with Battersea Power Supplies

• Monochrome Photography Awards — Nov 15 · $22 amateur, $27 professional per single entry · $3,000 in prizes

ON THIS DAY

October 7, 1959 — Luna 3 sends back the first pictures of the far side of the Moon.

At 03:30 UT a Soviet probe that had just swung past the Moon turned its cameras back toward the sunlit far side, which no one had ever seen. Over forty minutes, less time than a lunch break, it took 29 photographs covering about 70 percent of that hemisphere. Then it processed its own 35mm film on board, developing, fixing and drying it, scanned each frame with a moving spot of light and radioed the signal home. Seventeen noisy but readable pictures reached Earth by October 18. They showed a mountainous face quite unlike the side we know, with only two large dark patches, one of which was named the Sea of Moscow.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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

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He Bought His First Camera Out of Boredom. Forty-Seven Years Later He Still Refuses to Call It Documentary.

The impulse arrived in a midtown Manhattan hotel room in September 1979, and it arrived as an escape. The Police were breaking in America, and Andy Summers, at thirty-six the oldest man in the band by a decade, was bored. “We were surrounded by photographers,” he wrote in a statement Leica published in January 2024, “girls from Manhattan who encircled us with big black cameras, oversized lens and exploding flashguns … I was seduced by their sexy camera handling and the stark monotone imagery they made.” He asked one of them where to buy a camera. She took him to B&H Photo. He came out with a Nikon FE. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he told PetaPixel in November 2023, still. He had decided, as he put it in that interview, “I am going to get a very good camera and become a photographer. I’m gonna study it.”

What earns Summers forty-seven years of attention is what he immediately declined to do with the camera. Every incentive pointed one way: he was inside the most photographed rooms in popular music, and the obvious book was the tour diary. He wrote the opposite ambition down instead and has never revised it. “I found that I was not really interested in the idea of the photograph as documentary evidence,” he wrote in that same statement, “but rather as an act of the imagination making the real — unreal.”

The place he went to do it was the corridor. Summers’ early work is set in the architecture nobody photographs — hotel passages, stairwells, the pastel dead space between a room and an elevator, almost always after midnight. He has been unusually precise about why. “Chasing surrealism led me to make many crazy pictures in American hotel corridors and bedrooms very late at night,” he wrote. “Maybe I would be on stage playing a song like Roxanne and at the same time pre-visualizing a surrealist tableau in the corridor outside my hotel room.” The stage energy, by his account, had to go somewhere: “That energy dis-assembling into a weird camera shot in a pastel-colored corridor at 2 am.” He read his way into Surrealism, and names Man Ray and de Chirico as the entrance.

The books bear it out. Throb (William Morrow, 1983) arrived while the band was still a going concern and is not a band book. Desirer Walks the Streets followed from Nazraeli Press in 2009, The Bones of Chuang Tzu from Steidl, and in 2019 the retrospective A Certain Strangeness appeared simultaneously from the University of Texas Press and, in France, from Éditions Hazan with an essay by Gilles Mora. The tour archive, I’ll Be Watching You: Inside The Police 1980–83, did not reach print until Taschen published it in 2007, twenty-four years after he bought the camera and long after the art work had settled what he wanted one for.

The institutions caught up in 2019, which was a crowded year. Mora gave him the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier in February; the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht followed in June; the Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar showed the work in 2022. A Series of Glances, a 324-page selection spanning 1982 to 2019, came from teNeues in 2023 and toured Leica’s galleries in London, Munich, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Kyoto. By then he had grown impatient with the label reviewers reached for. “I don’t like street photography,” he told PetaPixel. “I’m not looking for like the essence of street. I’m just not interested. … No, I’m an art photographer. That’s what I’m interested in. I don’t really see doing documentary.”

The technique is the least romantic part of the story. Thousands of rolls of Kodak Tri-X, pushed to 800 or 1600, and Ilford Delta 3200 when the corridor was truly dark, fast enough to shoot by an exit sign, which is roughly what he was doing, since he has never used flash and dislikes it. Ralph Gibson, whom he met in New York and describes as both a close friend and “very musical,” pointed him toward the Leica M4-2 that became his film camera; he went digital in 2012 and now shoots an M10 and an M10 Monochrom. He built a darkroom while living as a tax exile in Ireland during the Police years and then abandoned it. And he insists the two disciplines are one problem. “All great art should be musical in quality,” he told Ultimate Classic Rock in August 2023. “A lot of the terms of music translate across into light, line, shape, form, what you don’t put in … You’re trying to give a photograph a quality that’s musical, like a great chord you might find on guitar.”

Which brings him, at eighty-three, into a cinema. Summers is one of the featured figures in Reiner Holzemer’s Leica — A Century of Vision, a history of what the 35mm format did to photography; Gibson appears in it too, and Summers contributed some of the music. The film has its world premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival on October 17, with Summers attending, and reaches German cinemas from November 12. Meanwhile the practice has quietly resolved into a single form: The Cracked Lens + A Missing String, the solo show he has toured through the United States, Australia and Japan, in which he projects sequences of his photographs, plays guitar against them, and reads from the books. Leica

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

I had the pleasure of working with Andy Summers in the spring of 2014, when I presented the first edition of Photo Independent — a photo fair dedicated to independent photographers — at Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles. Andy was our featured exhibition: about forty photographs, most of them corridors, shot at night.

They were noir, and they earned the word. The work came out of twenty-five years of touring, 1983 to 2008, and it goes where the tours went: the Alto Plano in Bolivia at one end, the alleys of Golden Gai in Tokyo at the other. Black and white, almost all of it after dark, and the pictures tend to open in the middle of something you never get the rest of. Summers describes it in musical terms: a minor key, a dark chord with a few stray notes left in. Photography and music are both nonverbal, he says, so the vocabulary crosses over.

Andy was a gentleman throughout the fair — a great artist and a gentleman he is.

— Chris Davies

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Bill Henson
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery | Sydney
September 25 – October 17, 2026

New photographs, shown as large archival pigment prints. Henson has spent five decades on a narrow band of subject matter: adolescence, dusk, the European landscape treated as a kind of weather system. It is printed so dark that galleries routinely warn visitors about the lighting levels in the room. The work sat at the center of Australia’s fiercest argument about photography and the body, and the pictures themselves have never much altered their temperature: figures emerging from and dissolving back into an underexposed ground, lit as though by a fire just outside the frame. Roslyn Oxley9 has represented him since the 1980s.

Martin Parr: The Last Resort
Rocket Gallery | London
September 25 – October 31, 2026

Rocket’s fifteenth Parr solo returns to the series that made him notorious: the flash-lit, saturated pictures of working-class holidaymakers at New Brighton, made between 1983 and 1985 and published in 1986 to accusations of cruelty that took decades to subside. Lost in the argument was how radical the work was technically: Parr had abandoned black and white for ring-flash color at the moment British documentary photography considered color frivolous. The prints hang alongside Dewi Lewis’s fortieth-anniversary edition of the book, so the pictures can be seen at the two sizes they were made for.

Rodney Smith: Die Alchemie des Lichts
Kunsthalle Vogelmann | Heilbronn
September 26, 2026 – January 24, 2027

Smith, who died in 2016, made some of the most disciplined fashion and portrait photographs of his generation and declined almost every advantage his era offered him: no digital capture, no retouching, no artificial light, and for most of a forty-five-year career one camera and one lens. The results — men in suits on rooftops, women balanced on hedges, figures dwarfed by topiary and sky — look like Magritte executed by a documentarian, which is roughly what they are. This is a substantial German survey of a body of work still better known through advertising than through museums.

The School of Los Angeles
Fahey/Klein Gallery | Los Angeles
October 1 – November 28, 2026

Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman and Matthew Rolston, hung together as what the gallery proposes was a school rather than three parallel careers: the Los Angeles studio photographers who took the West Coast’s light, its bodies and its industry and built a style that dominated magazine and album covers through the 1980s and 1990s. Fahey/Klein has represented all three and is unusually well placed to make the argument. There is a reception on October 1 and an artist talk on October 3.

GAG
George Eastman Museum | Rochester
October 2, 2026 – April 11, 2027

A Main Galleries group exhibition that takes the word “gag,” the joke and also the thing that stops the mouth, as a framework for reading twenty-first-century photography. A great deal of the strongest recent work sits in the narrow band where absurdity and dread turn out to be the same gesture, and museums have struggled to name that without either sanitizing it or overselling it. Eastman, of all institutions, has the collection depth to put the contemporary work into an argument with the history.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Amsterdam

• Foam x Middle East Archive: Al Nisa / In Her Own Way — Foam, off-site at MAQAM and Mercatorplein · Opens Oct 1 (Al Nisa through Dec 20; In Her Own Way through Oct 29)

Braunschweig

• People and Images: Käthe Buchler on her 150th Birthday — Museum für Photographie Braunschweig · Oct 3 – Nov 29 (opening Oct 2)

Fort Worth

• Photography’s First Century: Masterworks from the Bibliothèque nationale de France — Kimbell Art Museum · Oct 4 – Jan 17, 2027

Graz

• Valérie Jouve: The Outside Inside — Camera Austria · Sep 25 – Nov 22 (curated by Walter Seidl)

Kansas City

• American Prospects and Landscape Photography, 1839 to Today — Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art · Opens Oct 3 (opening date listed as tentative; 80 works built around Joel Sternfeld, Watkins through Sambunaris)

Kraków

• Zofia Kulik: Zamiast rzeźby. Przypisy — MuFo Rakowicka · Oct 3 – Dec 20 (vernissage Oct 2)

Milan

• Carla Cerati: Plurale femminile. Fotografia e scrittura, 1926–2026 — Palazzo Reale · Sep 26 – Jan 10, 2027 (centenary; about 200 photographs across ten rooms)

Paris

• René Burri: Traversées — Magnum Gallery · Through Dec 12 (30 prints, 1950–1971)

Rotterdam

• Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm — Kunsthal Rotterdam · Oct 3 – Mar 7, 2027 (Rob Hornstra with Arnold van Bruggen, part of The Europeans)

Tokyo

• Assembling Anew: Memories, Materials, Context, Technology — Contemporary Japanese Photography vol. 23 — Tokyo Photographic Art Museum · Sep 30 – Jan 17, 2027

Closing Soon

Brooklyn

• Dakota Mace: Sǫʼ Baa Hane’ 2023–2025 — Higher Pictures · Closes Oct 3

New York

• Yves Saint Laurent and Photography — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 28

• Photobooks USA 2000–25 — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 28

Turin

• Harry Gruyaert: Retrospective — CAMERA · Closes Oct 4 (his first major Italian retrospective, curated by François Hébel)

• Werner Jeker: Photo Typo — CAMERA · Closes Oct 4

Zurich

• Ola Kolehmainen: Memoria Mundi — Christophe Guye Galerie · Closes Oct 3 (online only)

Ongoing

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

Dublin

• Rhiannon Adam: Rhi-Entry — International Centre for the Image · Through Dec 23

Los Angeles

• Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Views of Pagan, Burma, 1976/78 — Gallery Luisotti · Through Oct 31 (US debut)

New York

• Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror — Jack Shainman Gallery · Through Nov 6

San Francisco

• Raymond Meeks: Assemblage — Casemore · Through Nov 14

Toronto

• Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits — Stephen Bulger Gallery · Through Oct 17

Vienna

• Zanele Muholi: We Are Here — Foto Arsenal Wien · Through Jan 10, 2027 (her first Austrian solo)

FESTIVAL WATCH

• PhMuseum Days 2026: Archipelago — Bologna, Italy · Oct 1–4 (the only festival inside the publication week; core venue the Ex Ospedale dei Bastardini, with Photobook Mania at Serra Madre Oct 3–4)

• Festival della Fotografia Etica — Lodi, Italy · Sep 26 – Oct 25 (17th edition)

• Salon Photo & Vidéo — Paris, France · Oct 8–11 (Grande Halle de la Villette; includes a bicentenary survey of cameras from 1826 with the Musée Nicéphore Niépce)

OFF THE PRESS

Sheila by John Divola
TBW Books

Divola is best known for work he made by breaking into abandoned buildings around Los Angeles in the 1970s, spray-painting the walls and photographing what he had done to them, a practice that sat awkwardly between vandalism, performance and the dry conceptualism of the period, and has aged into one of the essential bodies of West Coast photography. Sheila is the private counterweight: portraits of his wife made between 1976 and 1984, the same years and much the same rooms and light, with none of the intervention. Fifty-one plates across 86 pages, hardcover, arriving from TBW in October.

The White Wood by Andrew Nadolski
RRB Photobooks

A decade spent inside one square mile of ancient woodland on the edge of Dartmoor, a square mile being about the area of Regent’s Park, walked over and over for ten years. Nadolski built his reputation on The End of the Land, the long project on Cornwall’s Hayle estuary, and the working method is consistent: return until the place stops performing for the camera. Published by Raft in October and distributed by RRB, in a signed first edition of 84 pages.

A Set of Tapes by Bharat Sikka
Deadbeat Club

Two road trips Sikka took to Los Angeles with his daughter as she looked at film schools, made into a book that behaves like a cassette: sequenced Side A and Side B, bound with an open spine and a folded J-card cover, the unspooled ribbon running through it as a motif. Sikka has spent twenty-five years photographing India without reaching for either the exotic or the documentary, in Matter, Space In Between, and the long study of his father. The American pictures carry the same reticence into a genre, the father-and-daughter road trip, that usually invites the opposite. Co-published with Fw:Books; 192 pages, 10 × 12.5 inches, listed for this fall.

OPEN CALLS

• Earth Partner Prize 2026 — Oct 7 · free · open to ages 14–30; eight finalists share $10,000, $5,000 and $2,000 awards, with 20 honorable mentions

• Travel Photographer of the Year 2026 — Oct 12, 23:59 UK · £14–£59 depending on entry type, and free for Young TPOTY entrants aged 18 and under

• The W. Eugene Smith Grant for Student Photographers — Oct 12, 11:59 p.m. EDT · $10, with fee waivers through some nineteen partner organizations · two grants of $5,000 each; recipients announced December 15

• Raccont’Arti: Contemporary Photography Award 2026 — Oct 15 · free · theme “Beyond the visible: the image of absence”; €3,000 open prize and a €500 student prize, with a group exhibition in Castelfiorentino

ON THIS DAY

October 2, 1932 — “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” is published in the New York Herald Tribune.

Eleven ironworkers eating on a girder, boots hanging over eight hundred feet of Manhattan, no harnesses and no visible concern. It ran in the Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement under the title "Builders of The City Enjoy Luncheon" and became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century, and almost nothing it appears to document is reliable. The sitting was staged on September 20, one of several publicity shots made to sell office space in a half-finished skyscraper during the Depression; other frames from the same session show the men napping on the beam or hoisting a flag, and there was very probably a finished floor just out of shot. Authorship is the longer argument. Charles C. Ebbets, William Leftwich and Thomas Kelley were all photographing the site that day, and after Ebbets's daughter produced his paycheck and a picture of him at work with a camera, Corbis credited him in 2003, then withdrew the credit once it was clear the other two had been there too. The picture circulates now under an archive credit and no photographer's name.

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Nothing in an Alex Prager Photograph Is Real. She Builds All of It Anyway.

In the winter of 1999 a twenty-year-old drummer in a Los Angeles band walked into the J. Paul Getty Museum and saw William Eggleston and the Color Tradition. What stopped her was a photograph of dust-covered brown shoes under a bed. “I had a physical reaction,” Alex Prager later told Filmmaker Magazine, “like I had found meaning in my life.” She had no art training behind her and would acquire none — MoMA’s curators would eventually describe her, flatly, as self-taught — and at the time she could not account for the feeling. “I was really moved by his work,” she said in 2011. “I didn’t really understand why, because I was just looking at something so seemingly ordinary.”

Nothing Prager has made since has been ordinary, and that inversion is the most revealing thing about her. Eggleston found his pictures. Prager builds hers, down to the last object in the frame.

The early series set the vocabulary — Polyester (2007), The Big Valley (2008), Compulsion (2012): women in synthetic wigs and period clothing, lit like a 1962 studio portrait, stranded inside narratives nobody ever explains. It could have been read as pastiche, a Hollywood daydream about Hollywood. MoMA’s New Photography 2010, curated by Roxana Marcoci, took it more seriously, and included her short film Despair, starring Bryce Dallas Howard — the first time film had appeared in that series at all. The year after, The New York Times Magazine commissioned Touch of Evil, a suite of short films with Clooney, Chastain, Gosling, Glenn Close and Brad Pitt. It won a News & Documentary Emmy in 2012.

Then came Face in the Crowd, which turned the method into the subject. Prager took over a Hollywood sound stage and directed between 150 and 200 extras a day for four days, casting, costuming and placing every one of them; the airport concourses and beaches and lobbies were built from nothing and populated by hand. The Corcoran Gallery of Art gave the work her first solo museum exhibition in the United States in November 2013. What reads from across a room as a documentary photograph of a crowd is, at every single point in the frame, a decision somebody made.

That rule has never been broken. Her gallery’s current language states it plainly: every element in the frame “is created practically and captured physically and entirely in-camera.” She storyboards with the artist Joel Venti before a shoot. There is no compositing, no crowd generated in software, no set extended afterward. And the discipline’s origin is not art-historical but professional — as a child Prager acted in an episode of Tales from the Crypt directed by the special-effects artist Kevin Yagher, and she has credited that set, and a two-headed animatronic man on it, with a conviction she has never let go of: that an illusion ought to be a thing you can walk up to and touch. “It’s important for me,” she told Filmmaker, “that in a fictionalized world full of artifice you know that everything you see you can touch, feel and interact with.”

The logic has carried her steadily toward film. The Opéra national de Paris commissioned La Grande Sortie for its 3e scène platform in 2015; Play the Wind (2019) starred Riley Keough; Run (2022), with Katherine Waterston, was the first of her films to play a festival. Her feature debut, Dreamquil — co-written with her sister, the artist Vanessa Prager, and produced by Elizabeth Banks — premiered at SXSW on March 16, 2026, with Banks, John C. Reilly, Juliette Lewis and Sofia Boutella, shot by Lol Crawley, its near-future world built in miniature by Chris and Gene Warren. Reviews were mixed, and split along a telling line: the trades admired the picture-making considerably more than the story.

Which leaves the question of where the photographs go next. Matinee — four large-scale new works with Los Angeles as subject and muse — closed at Lehmann Maupin in New York on August 21, 2026. The gallery framed it as “a prelude to Prager’s solo presentation in New York in 2027, which will coincide with a major museum exhibition by the artist, to be announced in the coming months.” In the meantime she took a commission that ought to be a contradiction: a triptych for Apple, Prospect Avenue Triptych (9:20pm–9:25pm), shot entirely on a phone — and what she praised about the device was how convincingly it simulates the halation of film.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies
Fotografiska Berlin | Berlin
Opens September 26, 2026

Thirty Los Angeles teenagers from ten high schools handed Greenfield their phones: 150 days of filming and more than 2,000 hours of screen recordings — private posts, group chats, drafts, the things sent and deleted. The result fills 5,000 square feet with photographs, wall-scale grids of social feeds, immersive installations and a screening room running all five episodes of the FX documentary series drawn from the same material. Greenfield has spent thirty years photographing American girls arranging themselves in front of mirrors, from Fast Forward to Girl Culture; this is the first body of work she has made from inside the phone, and it treats the device as a studio rather than a symptom. Curated by Greenfield with Trudy Wilner Stack.

Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial
Smithsonian American Art Museum | Washington, DC
September 18, 2026 – April 18, 2027

In 1976 the National Endowment for the Arts funded more than seventy photographic surveys of American places, sending over 200 photographers out to document the country in its two hundredth year; about a thousand of the resulting prints came to the Smithsonian in 1983 and have never been shown together. This exhibition reunites 225 of them, organized by John Jacob with Krystle Stricklin, and the roster is the argument for going — Friedlander, Davidson, Meyerowitz, Klett and Verburg among them. The title comes from Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal,” which is the right register for a project that was commissioned as celebration and came back as something considerably more ambivalent. It opens in the country’s 250th year, which gives the ambivalence a second life.

Nadav Kander: The edge of things
Foam | Amsterdam
September 18, 2026 – January 31, 2027

Four decades of Kander’s work assembled for the first time, guest-curated by David Campany and organized with the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography. Kander built his reputation on scale — the Yangtze series, the Chernobyl-adjacent Soviet sites, fifty-two portraits of the incoming Obama administration in a single magazine issue — and the survey’s interest is in showing how consistently the landscape work and the portraits share a temperament: distance held deliberately, weather doing much of the emotional labor. A Thames & Hudson publication accompanies it, and it arrives the same month as Dark Line, his Thames Estuary book from GOST.

Minor White
Fundación MAPFRE, Recoletos Hall | Madrid
September 24, 2026 – January 10, 2027

Fifty years after his death, White gets what Fundación MAPFRE bills as the first major exhibition of his work in Europe, curated by Carlos Gollonet. White is the figure modern photography keeps half-forgetting: co-founder of Aperture, the most influential teacher of his generation, and the photographer who insisted that pictures be read in sequence rather than singly. Several of those sequences are shown in Europe here for the first time, which is the real event — White’s sequences are the part of his work that resists reproduction and has therefore traveled worst.

A Human Pace: Robert Doisneau | Paolo Ventura
Peter Fetterman Gallery | Santa Monica
September 12, 2026 – January 9, 2027

A broad Doisneau career survey — Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville, the 1952 Picasso and Françoise Gilot portrait, Jacques Tati in 1949 — hung alongside Paolo Ventura’s constructed tableaux. The pairing is the idea: Doisneau’s most famous pictures were themselves staged, a fact that scandalized people when it emerged and now reads simply as the working method of a photographer who understood that the street rarely performs on schedule. Ventura builds his scenes outright, from paper and paint. Seen together, the distance between the two is smaller than the century between them suggests.

Henry Horenstein: Miles and Miles of Texas
Catherine Couturier Gallery | Houston
September 12 – October 3, 2026

Drawn from Horenstein’s 2025 Honky Tonk Editions book of the same title, this is the Texas end of the country-music work he has been making since the early 1970s — dance halls, roadhouses, the people who filled them on a Saturday night before either the buildings or the audience thinned out. Horenstein went in as a fan rather than a documentarian, which is why the pictures have so little of the condescension that afflicts photography of American vernacular leisure. The gallery is screening his short film Spoke alongside the prints.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Denver

• Mary Ellen Mark: Indian Circus — Colorado Photographic Arts Center · Opens Sep 25 (her first solo exhibition in Colorado; reception Oct 1)

La Jolla

• Declan Haun: Between Fact and Feeling — Joseph Bellows Gallery · Opens Sep 19 (through Oct 31; 24 vintage prints)

London

• Daido Moriyama: Ink — Hamiltons Gallery · Sep 15 – Oct 30 (silkscreens, unique or in small editions)

Los Angeles

• Katie Shapiro: The Other Side of the Moon — Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory · Opens Sep 26 (photographs printed on glass, set in obsidian and jade; reception 3–5 p.m.)

Maastricht

• Eve Arnold: All about Eve — Fotomuseum aan het Vrijthof · Sep 19 – Jan 31, 2027 (130 photographs, with Magnum Photos and CAMERA, Turin)

New York

• Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives — The Museum of Modern Art · Opens Sep 20 (Marianne Wex with Nona Faustine, K8 Hardy, Wendy Red Star and others; through May 2, 2027)

• Lucien Clergue: Written by the Sun — Mouraux Durand-Ruel · Sep 23 – Oct 24 (the gallery’s inaugural show; forty prints, 1950s–2000s)

San Francisco

• Power of Mystery: 100 Years — Robert Koch Gallery · Sep 17 – Nov 28 (Sudek, Drtikol, Kertész, Koudelka, Levitt, Webb, Ballen and others)

Toronto

• Static and Noise — Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography · Sep 18 – Nov 7 (Aliyah Aziz, Bret Parenteau, Kite, Nathan Ivanco)

Tucson

• Lou Peralta: Expanded Portraiture, The Matter of the Invisible / Elizabeth Z. Pineda: MAÍZ — Etherton Gallery · Sep 22 – Nov 28 (with Yu Yu Shiratori in the cases; reception Sep 26)

Closing Soon

Boston

• Rania Matar: Where Do I Go? لوين روح — Robert Klein Gallery · Closes Oct 3

London

• Bob Carlos Clarke: The Last Dolls — Atlas Gallery · Closes Sep 26

• Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to Now — The Photographers’ Gallery · Closes Sep 27 (the ICP version opens Oct 15)

Los Angeles

• Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018 — Fahey/Klein Gallery · Closes Sep 26

New York

• Yves Saint Laurent and Photography — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 28

• Photobooks USA 2000–25 — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 28

Paris

• Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection — Jeu de Paume · Closes Sep 24

• Madeleine de Sinéty — Jeu de Paume · Closes Sep 24

• Daido Moriyama: Lettres d’amour à la photographie — Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson · Closes Oct 4 (pairs with the Hamiltons show above — one photographer, two continents)

• Eboro: Nuits Balnéaires — Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson · Closes Oct 4

Ongoing

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

Antwerp

• Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With — FOMU · Through Jan 17, 2027 (~160 works; originally organized by C/O Berlin)

Berlin

• Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter — C/O Berlin · Through Feb 3, 2027

Chicago

• If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground — Museum of Contemporary Photography · Through Dec 19 (Parks, Bey, Weems, Frazier and others)

Los Angeles

• Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography — Getty Center · Through Jan 3, 2027 (both Álvarez Bravos, Héctor García, Iturbide, Ortiz Monasterio)

New York

• Aperture Loves New York — Aperture · Through Nov 1 (Arbus, Frank, Goldin, Lawson, Weems, Shore)

Tallinn

• Vivian Maier: Unseen Work — Fotografiska Tallinn · Through Jan 17, 2027

Toronto

• Richard Avedon: Immortal — Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004 — The Image Centre · Through Dec 5

FESTIVAL WATCH

• FotoFocus Biennial 2026: The Long View — Cincinnati, US · Opening Program Sep 30 – Oct 3, events through October (8th edition; 74 exhibitions at 65 venues, free Biennial Pass; Trevor Paglen, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and the first Nancy Rexroth retrospective)

• T3 Photo Festival Tokyo 2026 — Tokyo, Japan · Oct 3 – 26 (city-wide across Yaesu, Nihonbashi, Kyobashi and Ginza)

• Click! Photography Festival: The Click! 120 Experience — Durham, North Carolina · Oct 3 – 4 (Durham Convention Center)

• Cortona On The Move 2026: Beautiful Country — Cortona, Italy · Through Nov 1

• PhotoMidwest Biennial Festival 2026 — Madison, Wisconsin · Sep 17, 2026 – Feb 26, 2027 (14th edition; photographers from 13 Midwest states)

• Bristol Photo Festival: TIME MACHINE — Bristol, UK · Opening events from Oct 14 (3rd edition; runs through autumn)

OFF THE PRESS

Papyrus by Jessica Backhaus
Kehrer Verlag

Papyrus, released September 2 and Backhaus’s tenth book with Kehrer, is a tribute to paper as one of the oldest surfaces humans used to hold a thought. Backhaus has been moving toward abstraction for years — arranging colored paper, light and shadow into compositions that read as photographs of nothing in particular and turn out to be photographs of attention — and this is the furthest she has taken it. The conceit is that papyrus was the first medium of inscription, and that a photograph of folded, lit, torn paper is an inscription too: communication without words. Stiff softcover, 168 pages, 75 color plates, with texts by Sophie-Charlotte Opitz and Andrei Zavadski and a design by Hannah Feldmeier.

Catching the Tide: Salmon Net Fishing in Scotland by Colin McPherson
Dewi Lewis Publishing

For thirty years McPherson photographed the men who caught salmon and sea trout off the Scottish coast with traditional nets and traps, under laws written in the nineteenth century and worked to the rhythm of the tides. By the mid-1990s a mix of economic and environmental pressure had put the industry into steep decline, which turned a documentary project into a race — McPherson was photographing the last generation to do the work at all, and he knew it. A founding member of the Document Scotland collective, he covered the story across three decades for the Independent, the Guardian and the Times; the book is the long-form version those assignments never had room for.

Drag Queens by Martin Schoeller
Steidl

Schoeller built a career on a single unforgiving format: the head-on close-up, flat light, no context, every pore available. He has applied it to presidents, prisoners, Olympians and the Hadza of Tanzania, and the method’s whole argument is that it flattens status — everyone gets the same lighting. Turning it on drag performers is the sharpest test he has set himself, because drag is an art of constructed distance and Schoeller’s camera is built to close it. The book collects 82 portraits across 176 pages of a subculture that has moved from the margins to prime-time television, and asks what the face is doing behind an art form organized around the face.

OPEN CALLS

• F/262 Photo Book Award 2026 — Sep 30 · Caldas da Rainha, Portugal · €35 per project; unpublished photobook projects, open internationally

• 2026 CPA International Juried Exhibition — Oct 1, 11:59 p.m. MDT · Center for Photographic Art, Carmel · $45 members / $65 non-members for three images; any still photographic medium, no theme, 18+

• The Photobook From Start to Finish — Oct 6 · Penumbra Foundation with Image Threads Collective, New York · $75 application fee; a one-year program covering every stage of making a photobook

• 30th Luis Valtueña International Humanitarian Photography Award — Oct 11, 23:59 GMT+2 · Médicos del Mundo, Spain · €12,000 total prize fund, €6,000 first prize

• Howard Chapnick Grant 2026 — Oct 12, 11:59 p.m. EDT · W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund · $7,500 for programs rather than individuals, advancing documentary photography; $25 voluntary donation

• LensCulture Black & White Photography Awards 2026 — Oct 14 · free for a single image, $35 for five or more singles, $45 for a series · $10,000 in cash awards plus a London exhibition during Photo London 2027

• PhMuseum 2026 Women Photographers Grant — Oct 15 (early-bird Sep 24) · $35 early / $40 regular · 10th edition; open to female and non-binary photographers of all ages and nationalities

• Les Mesnographies 2026: The Pursuit of Happiness — Oct 15 · Les Mesnuls, France · 7th edition of the open-air festival

• Wellcome Photography Prize 2026 — Oct 21 · Wellcome, London · up to £10,000; images exploring urgent health challenges and scientific discovery

• Environmental Photography Award 2027 — Nov 1, 23:59 CET · Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, via Photocrowd · five categories, 36 photographs selected

ON THIS DAY

September 24, 1977 — Pictures opens at Artists Space, New York.

Organized by the critic Douglas Crimp and running through October 29, Pictures showed five artists — Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith — whose work was built from imagery they had not made themselves. The show was small and its immediate audience was smaller, but Crimp’s catalogue essay, expanded two years later in October, gave the tendency its name and its argument: that the photographic image had become the culture’s raw material, and that the artist’s job was now selection rather than production. Almost every subsequent fight about authorship, appropriation and the copyright of a photograph runs back through this room. Artists Space

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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For the First Time, the Guggenheim Gives Its Entire Rotunda to a Photographer

Taryn Simon has spent twenty-five years making photographs that behave like evidence. The Innocents (2000) returned men exonerated by DNA to the scenes that had been used to convict them, and let the camera demonstrate exactly how unreliable it is. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) photographed the things US institutions had decided the public would not see. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008) traced bloodlines across continents and arranged the results in rows, like a ledger. The method has always been the same: gain access, photograph the thing plainly, and let the caption carry the weight the picture cannot. Simon is a conceptual artist who happens to use a camera, and she has never made the camera do the arguing.

On Friday, September 18, that method takes over Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda. Father Country I Do Love You, opening at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and running to March 14, 2027, is the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist to fill the entire spiral, and the largest debut of new work the museum has ever staged. Nearly a decade in the making, it follows the real life of one unnamed federal agent across 42 individual artworks — photographs, text, video and sculpture assembled into a single interactive installation. The agent is a middleman: a man who witnessed events large and small, collected the evidence, and handed it to someone else to fit into a larger picture he never saw. Simon follows what happened next — to victims, to predators, to survivors, to the machinery of justice — as visitors climb the ramps. The show is organized by Nat Trotman, and the works will enter the Guggenheim’s permanent collection.

What makes this a turning point is that Simon has finally pointed the method at herself. Father Country I Do Love You is dedicated to her father, who lived in Thailand and traveled to Russia, Iran, Israel, China, Afghanistan and Korea working for the US government, then came home and manufactured arcade games. She never got the full story out of him, and when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s she understood she never would. What survives is a line she quotes: “But America,” he always said, “was the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it.” The exhibition opens in the 250th year of the United States, which is either the most obvious framing available or the whole point — an artist who built a career on the gap between the official record and the thing that actually happened, given the most conspicuous room in American museum architecture in the year the country is meant to be admiring itself.

The Guggenheim and Hatje Cantz are copublishing an artist book to accompany the exhibition, as the Guggenheim confirms.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Unnatural Habitat

Lisson Gallery | New York
September 15 – October 24, 2026

Fifty years of the Dioramas series, the project Sugimoto began at the American Museum of Natural History in 1976 when he realized that a taxidermied animal in a painted habitat, photographed with enough patience, reads as a living thing. The show includes Polar Bear (1975), the first work he made, alongside prints from rediscovered negatives and four new color diorama byōbu screens on washi — the first time Sugimoto has taken the series into color and onto folding screens.

Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979)

Howard Greenberg Gallery | New York
September 18 – October 31, 2026

Before the Southern work that made his reputation in 2019, Baldwin Lee spent the late 1970s photographing New York — the city he had grown up in, seen through the training he had just finished with Minor White at MIT and Walker Evans at Yale. These large-scale black-and-white photographs have never been exhibited. They arrive as the missing first chapter of a body of work most people only discovered forty years late.

David Lynch: LA

Pace Gallery | Los Angeles
September 19 – October 24, 2026

Five photographic series in conversation — Figures and Smoke, the Los Angeles architecture pictures, the Kits — in the first Los Angeles presentation of Lynch’s photographs since his death in 2025. The architecture work is the argument: Lynch photographed the city’s back lots, industrial corners and unglamorous frontages with the same attention he gave to film sets, and the pictures make clear that the atmosphere in his films was found before it was built.

Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw

David Zwirner | Los Angeles
September 19 – October 31, 2026

DeCarava designed, wrote and sequenced the sound i saw in the early 1960s — a book of jazz photographs and his own prose poem — and then it sat unpublished for almost half a century. This presentation, curated by Ebony L. Haynes, follows the maquette DeCarava made: Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Ellington and the Harlem street life that produced them, printed in the low, deliberate register he spent his career defending against every editor who asked him to open up the shadows. It is only the fourth solo presentation of his work in Los Angeles.

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WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Amsterdam

• Hailun Ma: Hometown — Foam Fotografiemuseum · Opens Sep 18 (through Jan 20, 2027)

Berlin

• Animals — Galerie Springer Berlin · Opens Sep 15 (Burtynsky, Odermatt, Ute and Werner Mahler, Loredana Nemes, Ursula Böhmer)

Bristol

• Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic — Martin Parr Foundation · Opens Sep 17 (Brandt, McCullin, Anna Fox; part of Bristol Photo Festival)

Gentilly, Paris

• Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful — Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau · Opens Sep 17 (through Mar 14, 2027)

Houston

• In the Between / Venessa Monokian: Sprawl — Houston Center for Photography · Opens Sep 17

Lille

• Bérangère Fromont: République — Institut pour la photographie · Opens Sep 18 (through Jan 16, 2027)

London

• Wanda and Marion Wulz: Avant-garde Photography in 20th-Century Italy — Estorick Collection · Opens Sep 16 (historical)

• Roots — The Photographers’ Gallery, Print Sales · Opens Sep 18

Los Angeles

• Thomas Demand — Matthew Marks Gallery · Opens Sep 19 (new work including Parsifal V*, 2026)*

New York

• Sophie Delaporte: The Thread Between — Sous Les Etoiles Gallery · Opens Sep 17 (opening reception with the artist, 6–8 p.m.)

• Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory — Bruce Silverstein Gallery · Opens Sep 17 (woven photographs)

• Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You — Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum · Opens Sep 18 (through Mar 14, 2027)

Paris

• Raymond Depardon — Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection · Opens Sep 16 (through Dec 1)

West Palm Beach

• Visible Fictions: Photography and Artifice — Norton Museum of Art · Opens Sep 19 (Crewdson, Laurie Simmons and others from the collection)

Closing Soon

Barcelona

• So Many Reports. So Many Questions. — Max de Esteban — Foto Colectania · Closes Sep 20

Berlin

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

Halle

• Helga Paris: Häuser und Gesichter, Halle 1983–85 — Kunstmuseum Moritzburg · Closes Sep 20 (open until 8 p.m. on Sep 18 and 19)

London

• Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire — Autograph · Closes Sep 19

Paris

• Polynesia 66, carnet de constellations — Véronique Caye — Jeu de Paume · Closes Sep 17

Tucson

• Callahan, Gowin and Sommer — Etherton Gallery · Closes Sep 19 (53 vintage and rare prints)

Vilnius

• Ukrainian Dreamers: The Kharkiv School of Photography — Radvila Palace, Lithuanian National Museum of Art · Closes Sep 20 (33 artists, four generations)

Washington, DC

• Niagara Falls: Mist and Majesty — National Gallery of Art · Closes Sep 20

Ongoing

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

Amsterdam

• Zanele Muholi: Hlanganani — Galerie Ron Mandos · Through Nov 1

Berlin

• Alix Cléo Roubaud: Si quelque chose noir — Galerie Buchholz · Through Oct 31 (first German solo; curated by Hélène Giannecchini)

Eschborn / Frankfurt

• Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026 — The Cube · Through Jan 17, 2027 (Rene Matić, winner)

Fort Lauderdale

• Joel Meyerowitz: Aftermath — NSU Art Museum · Through Feb 14, 2027 (28 large-scale photographs of Ground Zero, gifted to the museum in 2025)

New York

• Deana Lawson — Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street · Through Oct 24 (first solo with the gallery)

Rome

• Frank Horvat at the Baths of Caracalla — Terme di Caracalla · Through Jan 10, 2027 (72 photographs across seventy years)

Santa Monica

• Fabiola Menchelli: our sharp line of sight — Marshall Gallery · Through Nov 7 (camera-less chromogenic works folded in total darkness)

FESTIVAL WATCH

• 20/20 Photo Festival — Philadelphia, US · Sep 10 – 19 (7th edition; city-wide exhibitions and the Photo Book Fair at Cherry Street Pier — closes Saturday)

• Noorderlicht: Thinking Hands — Groningen, Netherlands · Sep 12 – Nov 1 (curated by Musoke Nalwoga; Groninger Museumnacht Sep 19)

• Encontros da Imagem: Territory and Identity — Braga, Portugal · Sep 18 – Nov 1

• Fiebre Photobook Fest XIII — Madrid, Spain · Sep 18 – 20 (at La Casa Encendida; Spain’s only photobook-dedicated festival)

• MODE by Flickr — Minneapolis, US · Sep 18 – 20 (first edition; masterclasses, photowalks, gear floor)

• Les Photaumnales, 23rd edition: La Photographie et après — Beauvais, France · Sep 19 – Nov 29 (inaugural weekend Sep 26 – 27)

• Filter Photo Festival, 18th edition — Chicago, US · Sep 23 – 26 (portfolio reviews, workshops and lectures at the Columbia College Chicago Student Center)

• BredaPhoto Festival 2026: Our Songs Came Through — Breda, Netherlands · Through Oct 25

• SI Fest 2026: Still Standing — Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy · Through Sep 27

OFF THE PRESS

Subrosa and the Cult of Aphrodite by Jason Langer

Kehrer Verlag

Five years inside the nighttime performance scene of Portland, Oregon, photographed and reported at once: Langer made pictures of more than a hundred exotic and burlesque dancers, drag queens, clowns and aerialists, and interviewed all of them. He worked in the backs of strip clubs and in private homes, which is the difference between this and a book of nightlife portraits — the subjects are photographed in the rooms where the persona is assembled and taken off again. Langer’s color work here is warmer and more frontal than the noirish black-and-white he is known for, and the interviews, edited with Marlena Gittleman, keep the book from reading as a visitor’s account of someone else’s subculture.

Courir by David Simpson

Flee Project

Simpson, a native Louisianian, photographed the courir de Mardi Gras — the rural Cajun and Creole tradition in which masked and costumed riders go house to house, singing and begging for the ingredients of a communal gumbo. It is the Mardi Gras that has nothing to do with Bourbon Street, and the version most likely to be misrepresented when outsiders photograph it. Flee Project, which builds each of its titles around a single vernacular cultural form, is a new publisher for these pages.

Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California by David Jacob Kramer & Michael Schmelling

Edition Patrick Frey

Half a century ago one of the largest urban-to-rural migrations in American history sent young idealists out of the cities, and Northern California became its epicenter — communes that produced radical, handbuilt, frequently otherworldly houses. Schmelling photographed what is left of them, driving hidden dirt roads into the redwoods to find structures that have been concealed for decades; Kramer collected oral histories from thirty-eight of the people who built them, now in their seventies and eighties. The buildings were anti-capitalist to their foundations and were never made to be resold, which is precisely why they are disappearing. The book treats them as artworks and photographs them before they go.

OPEN CALLS

• Artadia Boston Awards 2026 — Sep 15, 11:59 p.m. ET · unrestricted awards to Boston-area visual artists; no fee

• Innovate Grant — Summer 2026 Cycle — Sep 17, 11:59 p.m. PST · photographers and visual artists 18+ worldwide, duos and collectives eligible; two unrestricted $1,800 grants plus 18 honorable mentions

• Prix Yzza Slaoui de la Découverte — Sep 21 · no fee; for Moroccan photographers; €2,000 plus a solo exhibition or screening at Les Rencontres de la Photographie de Marrakech 2027

• PhotoVogue 2026 Regional Open Call: MENA Panorama — Sep 24 · no entry fee; $8,000 in grants; open to artists from the MENA region and its diaspora

• Prémio NARRATIVA – FUJIFILM, 2nd edition — Sep 30 · no fee; €3,500 plus a solo exhibition; contemporary photography

• Filter Photo: Field Notes from the Middle — Sep 30, 11:59 p.m. CT · lens-based artists in twelve Midwestern states; juror Nathaniel M. Stein of the Cincinnati Art Museum; $2,000 purchase award with the work entering the museum’s collection

• Tom Stoddart Award for Excellence × GOST Books Photobook Grant 2026 — Sep 30 · £5,000 toward production expenses plus print publication with GOST

• W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography 2026 — Oct 12, 11:59 p.m. EDT · $30,000 main grant plus two $10,000 finalist grants; $50 fee; open to photographers 18+, professional and non-professional

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Berlin

• Brassaï (1899–1984) Retrospektive — Galerie Berinson · Opens Sep 12 (vintage prints; opens three days after Brassaï’s birthday)

• Katharina Sieverding: Life–Death — Galerie Thomas Schulte · Opens Sep 11 (Berlin Art Week)

• Roger Eberhard: Meanwhile — Robert Morat Galerie · Opens Sep 11

Chicago

• If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground — Museum of Contemporary Photography · Opens Sep 10 (110+ artists; curated by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis with Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.)

Cologne

• August Sander: On His 150th Birthday — Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur · Opens Sep 11 (through Jan 24, 2027)

Copenhagen

• Photography Now! Contemporary Danish Photography Today — Royal Danish Library, The Black Diamond · Opens Sep 11

Dublin

• International Centre for the Image — opening program — Opens Sep 11 (PhotoIreland’s new permanent museum; Rhiannon Adam, Lewis Bush, Female in Focus)

London

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

Melbourne

• Bowness Photography Prize 2026 + Sarah Rhodes: The inner sky — Museum of Australian Photography · Opens Sep 12 (winner announced Sep 17)

Milan

• Galeria Asymetria: Jerzy Lewczyński and Henryk Waniek — MiCamera · Opens Sep 8 (opening talk 6:30 p.m.)

New York

• Mark Armijo McKnight: Cut the World — Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery · Opens Sep 9

• Thomas Ruff: jpegs ny — David Zwirner · Opens Sep 10

• Andrea Modica: Italian Story — Alice Austen House, Staten Island · Opens Sep 12 (first US presentation; platinum prints)

Riverside, CA

• Dispatches: The Photography of Douglas McCulloh, 1990–2025 — UCR ARTS / California Museum of Photography · Opens Sep 12

Toronto

• Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004 — The Image Centre · Opens Sep 9 (curated by Paul Roth)

Closing Soon

Amsterdam

• Ed van der Elsken: Up Close — Rijksmuseum · Closes Sep 13

Buenos Aires

• Imagen técnica y cultura material I: Jorge Luis Borges — Rolf Art · Closes Sep 10

Carmel, CA

• Todd Hido: Many Small Decisions — Center for Photographic Art · Closes Sep 13

Frankfurt

• Unterströmung — Nathalie Grenzhäuser — Kunstverein Familie Montez · Closes Sep 13

Lisbon

• Michael Najjar: Heterotopic Turbulences — Galeria Filomena Soares · Closes Sep 12

London

• The Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition 167 — Saatchi Gallery · Closes Sep 11

• Sayuri Ichida: Playing the Piano Upstairs — The Photographers’ Gallery, Print Sales · Closes Sep 13

Los Angeles

• 1911 Sunset Boulevard — Gallery Luisotti · Closes Sep 12

Madrid

• México y el fútbol: la mirada de Leibovitz — Casa de México / PHotoESPAÑA · Closes Sep 13

New York

• Allen Ginsberg and Vivian Maier: Notes from the Margins — Howard Greenberg Gallery · Closes Sep 12 (centennial of both; c. 80 prints)

• Andrea Hernández Briceño: Fire Becomes Spirit — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 13

Paris

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

• Photography from A to Z — Maison Européenne de la Photographie · Closes Sep 13

• Martine Dawson: Faultlines — MEP Studio · Closes Sep 13

Reykjavík

• Street Scenes — Í Fókus 2026 — Reykjavík Museum of Photography · Closes Sep 13

Santa Fe

• Ruth Thorne-Thomsen — Daniel Cooney Fine Art · Closes Sep 11

Tokyo

• The Joy of Honeybees — Masami Sasaki — FUJIFILM SQUARE · Closes Sep 10

Ongoing

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

Bern

• Fokus. Florence Henri (1893–1982) — Zentrum Paul Klee · Through Jan 10, 2027

Chicago

• Lee Miller: Fearless — Art Institute of Chicago · Through Dec 7

London

• Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now — The Photographers’ Gallery · Through Sep 27

New York

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

Norfolk, VA

• Ilse Bing: Between Paris and New York — Chrysler Museum of Art · Through Oct 18

Turin

• Harry Gruyaert: Retrospettiva — CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia · Through Oct 4

Vancouver

• Greg Girard: Photographs 1972–2026 — The Polygon Gallery · Through Oct 25

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

• Innovate Grant — Summer 2026 Cycle — Sep 17, 11:59pm PST · photographers and visual artists 18+ worldwide, duos and collectives eligible; two unrestricted $1,800 grants plus 18 honorable mentions

• Prix Yzza Slaoui de la Découverte — Sep 21 · no fee; for Moroccan photographers; €2,000 plus a solo exhibition or screening at Les Rencontres de la Photographie de Marrakech 2027

• PhotoVogue 2026 Regional Open Call: MENA Panorama — Sep 24 · no entry fee; $8,000 in grants; open to artists from the MENA region and its diaspora

• Tom Stoddart Award for Excellence × GOST Books Photobook Grant 2026 — Sep 30 · £5,000 toward production expenses plus print publication with GOST

• Filter Photo: Field Notes from the Middle — Sep 30, 11:59pm CT · lens-based artists in twelve Midwestern states; juror Nathaniel M. Stein of the Cincinnati Art Museum selects five artists; $2,000 purchase award with the work entering the museum’s collection; exhibition Dec 4, 2026 – Feb 13, 2027

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

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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

• August Sander: Facetten eines Werkes — Landschaft. Architektur. Portrait. — Galerie Julian Sander · Opens Sep 5 (through Dec 19)

Düsseldorf

• Irmel Kamp — Linn Lühn · Opens Sep 4 (DC Open; architectural photography)

• Valérie Belin: Le songe des idoles — Van der Grinten Galerie · Opens Sep 5

• Eva Rubinstein: Proof of Life — Schloss und Park Benrath · Opens Sep 4 (her first solo museum show in Germany)

The Hague

• Eva Besnyö: The Liberated Camera — Fotomuseum Den Haag · Opens Sep 5 (through Jan 31, 2027)

Leipzig

• Heidi Specker: DamenzimmerHerrenschnitt. Eine Hommage an Aenne Biermann — GfZK · Opens Sep 5

Paris

• Wolfgang Tillmans: Glade / Clairière — Galerie Chantal Crousel · Opens Sep 5 (through Oct 10)

Prague

• Adam Holý: Afterglow — Fotograf Gallery · Opens Sep 4 (ten years after the photographer’s death)

San Francisco

• Eternal Paris: Photographing the City of Light — Legion of Honor · Opens Sep 5 (some 50 works, Marville and Atget onward)

Closing Soon

Buenos Aires

• Imagen técnica y cultura material I: Jorge Luis Borges — Rolf Art · Closes Sep 10

New York

• Book Wall: Fuego Camina Conmigo — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 1

• Andrea Hernández Briceño: Fire Becomes Spirit — International Center of Photography · Closes Sep 13

Zurich

• The Everyday Sacred — Anna Gerasimova — Photobastei · Closes Sep 6

Ongoing

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

Cambridge, MA

• Freezing Time: Edgerton and the Beauty of the Machine Age — MIT Museum · Through Nov 29

New York

• Yves Saint Laurent and Photography — International Center of Photography · Through Sep 28

• Photobooks USA 2000–25 — International Center of Photography · Through Sep 28

Paris

• Daido Moriyama — Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson · Through Oct 4

• Nuits Balnéaires — Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson · Through Oct 4

Venice

• Lorna Simpson: Third Person — Punta della Dogana · Through Nov 22

FESTIVAL WATCH

• Biennale Images Vevey 2026 (10th edition): We Are Family! — Vevey, Switzerland · Sep 5 – 27 (roughly 50 site-specific indoor and outdoor installations; Siân Davey, Cristina De Middel, Sunil Gupta, JR, Erik Kessels, Pacifico Silano)

• Landskrona Foto Festival 2026 (10th edition) — Landskrona, Sweden · Sep 4 – 20 (ten large-scale outdoor exhibitions across public space, plus an indoor program; Thu–Sun, 12–17)

• Stirling Photography Festival 2026: Journey — Stirling, Scotland · Through Sep 30 (ninth edition, free throughout; includes Jill Furmanovsky’s Rebels and Renegades at the Tolbooth)

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.

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OPEN CALLS

• Magnum Foundation Fall 2026 New York City Fellowship — Sep 1, 11:59pm ET · free to enter; NYC-based early-career photographers and photojournalists; production grant, mentorship, and arts administration experience

• PhotoPlace Gallery: Quiet Landscape — Beauty, Stillness, and Connection — Sep 7 · juried by Kat Kiernan of the Morgan Library & Museum; $39 for five images; up to 35 works in the gallery plus 40 online

• FORMAT27 Open Call: Play — Sep 7 · €27; up to five projects exhibited at FORMAT27 in Derby with a £1,000 artist fee plus production

• VSCO — The Fifty: 50 Billboards, 50 States — Sep 10 · no fee; US residents 18+; one photographer per state gets a billboard, with licensing and compensation

• Praxis Gallery: The Streets — Sep 13, 11:59pm CT · juried by Jonathan Pavlica; $35 for up to five images, fee waivers on request; exhibition Oct 17 – Nov 14 in Minneapolis

• PH21 Gallery Barcelona: Monochrome — Sep 14 (early bird Sep 7) · curated by Zsolt Bátori and Borbála Jász; from €25, €15 concessions; exhibition Nov 14 – Dec 8 in the Gothic Quarter

• RSA Elizabeth Lornie Photography Award 2026 — Sep 20, 5pm · £5,000 plus exhibition and acquisition into the RSA Permanent Collections; Scottish-born, Scottish-trained, or three years’ residency

• Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture 2026 — Sep 23, 11:59pm EST · $20,000 to the winner, $500 to each of three finalists, Top Ten published

• 2026 Lucie Scholarship Program — Sep 30 · $25 professional / $15 emerging; four cash grants across Fine Art and Photojournalism/Documentary plus a touring group show

• James Balog Earth Vision Awards — Oct 1 · newly announced biennial endowed by James Balog; $40,000 first prize, $25,000 finalist prize, winning work enters the Denver Art Museum collection; still photography only, no video or AI

• PhMuseum 2026 Women Photographers Grant (10th edition) — opens Sep 8; early bird Sep 19, final Oct 10 · $11,000 in prizes and a solo show at PhMuseum Lab; jury of Elisa Medde, Mariela Sancari, Yagazie Emezi, and Myriam Boulos

• The Photographers’ Gallery Open Call — Future of Archives: Whose Archive is it Anyway? — Nov 1

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

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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“American Girl in Italy” — Ruth Orkin, 1951

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Opening This Week

Aarhus

• Heat Wave: Contemporary Brazilian Photography — Galleri Image · Opens Aug 21

Bern

• Fokus. Florence Henri (1893–1982) — Zentrum Paul Klee · Opens Aug 29 (one-room display, included with the collection ticket)

Berlin

• Die Augen weit offen — Thomas Billhardt — Fotografiska Berlin · Opens Aug 28 (through Feb 7, 2027)

Chicago

• Light Slip: Archive, Abstraction, and Phenomena — Sonja Thomsen & Aaron R. Turner — Filter Space · Opens Aug 21

Copenhagen

• 30th Anniversary: A Centre for Photography — Fotografisk Center · Opens Aug 28

Cottbus

• Ungebremste Selbstbewegungen: Kunst mit Fotografie in der DDR — BLMK Dieselkraftwerk · Opens Aug 29

Düsseldorf

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

Iserlohn

• Skandinavien. Unberührte Wildnis — Florian und Lisa Marie Smit — Städtische Galerie Iserlohn · Opens Aug 21

Johannesburg

• A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick) — Mikhael Subotzky — Goodman Gallery · Opens Aug 27

Los Angeles

• Timeline: A Record of The Moment — Los Angeles Center of Photography · Opens Aug 28 (reception Aug 29)

Melbourne

• The Weight of Silence — Nathanael Edwards — Vivien Anderson Gallery · Opens Aug 19

Olten

• PHOTOVILLE4600 (5th edition) — IPFO Haus der Fotografie · Opens Aug 21

Oslo

• The Island, the Mine, and the Resistance Gardens — Crystal Bennes — Fotogalleriet · Opens Aug 20

Pittsburgh

• Ryan Frigillana: Tears, Blood, Sweat — Silver Eye Center for Photography · Opens Aug 27

Tokyo

• Twilight and Evening Bell — Seung-Woo Yang, Haruto Hoshi, Brian Sergio — Zen Foto Gallery · Opens Aug 21

Vienna

• Kamera an Bord. Zwischen Arktis und Südsee 1855–1917 — Photoinstitut Bonartes · Opens Aug 21 (viewing by appointment)

Closing Soon

Amsterdam

• Foam Talent 2026 — Foam · Closes Aug 26

Berlin

• Juergen Teller: Guten Morgen Sonnenschein — Contemporary Fine Arts · Closes Aug 29

Frankfurt

• GEN Z: Shaping a New Gaze — Fotografie Forum Frankfurt · Closes Aug 30

Madrid

• Richard Avedon: In the American West, 1979–1984 — Fundación MAPFRE · Closes Aug 30

• Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules — Fundación MAPFRE · Closes Aug 30

Vienna

• Katherine Hubbard: The Great Room — Wiener Secession · Closes Aug 30

Washington, DC

• The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today — National Portrait Gallery · Closes Aug 30

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

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

• du soleil, que ça existe — Charlotte Clermont — Hippolyte Studio · Opened Aug 7, through Sep 6 (two-channel analog projection)

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

• Real But Not True — Dawn Surratt — Blue Sky Gallery · Opened Aug 6, closes Aug 29 (found and self-made photographs layered with leather, thread, paper and wood)

Tokyo

• The Joy of Honeybees — Masami Sasaki — FUJIFILM SQUARE · Opened Aug 14, through Sep 10

Vienna

• ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst. aber ich mach die augen zu — Photo Cluster · Opened Aug 14, through Aug 30

Zarautz

• Una historia después del eclipse — Photomuseum Zarautz · Opened Aug 7, through Sep 27 (Colección Modus Vivendi; includes Thomas Ruff)

Closing Soon

Antwerp

• The Heart of the Matter — Carrie Mae Weems — FOMU · Closes Aug 23

• .tiff 2026 — FOMU · Closes Aug 23 (ten emerging artists working in Belgium)

Berlin

• Why These? — Bruce Gilden — Fotografiska Berlin · Closes Aug 23, 18:00

Bonn

• Eyes Open in the Dark — Peter Hujar — Bundeskunsthalle · Closes Aug 23

Budapest

• Report on Hungary, 1948 — Robert Capa — Capa Center · Closes Aug 23

Chicago

• Prix Pictet – Storm — Museum of Contemporary Photography · Closes Aug 22

The Hague

• Life, Love and Death in Sicily — Letizia Battaglia — Fotomuseum Den Haag · Closes Aug 23

New York

• Becoming Marilyn — Staley-Wise Gallery · Closes Aug 21

San Francisco

• Too Many Products — Janet Delaney — EUQINOM Gallery · Closes Aug 22

Washington

• Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography — National Gallery of Art · Closes Aug 23

Ongoing

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

Amsterdam

• World Press Photo Exhibition 2026 — De Nieuwe Kerk · Through Sep 27

Berlin

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

London

• Nice Day For It! The British Summer in Technicolour — Photofusion · Through Sep 5 (Anna Fox, Daniel Meadows, Martin Parr, The Caravan Gallery; Tue–Sat)

• Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now — The Photographers’ Gallery · Through Sep 27 (27 artists)

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.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Adelaide

• Turrangka…in the shadows — James Tylor — Art Gallery of South Australia · Opened Jul 31, through Nov 1 (Becquerel daguerreotypes, hand-tinted digital work, and Kaurna cultural objects)

Albury, NSW

• National Photography Prize 2026 — Murray Art Museum Albury · Opened Aug 8, through Nov 22 (12 finalists)

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

• Leavetaking — Christian Langenskiöld — Photographic Gallery Hippolyte · Opened Aug 7, through Sep 6 (seven works, five of them diaviewers built for large-format transparencies)

Portland, Maine

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

Portland, Oregon

• Against the Grain — Mark Maio — Blue Sky Gallery · Opened Aug 6, through Aug 29 (artist talk and book signing Aug 29)

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

• Martin Parr: Very Modern and Rather Ugly — Foam · Closes Aug 12 (posthumous; Parr 1952–2025)

Brussels

• Picture Perfect: Beauty through a Contemporary Lens — Bozar · Closes Aug 16 (65 artists)

Eschborn

• Human Topographies — Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation · Closes Aug 16

Hannover

• Toby Binder: Wee Muckers — Jugend in Belfast — GAF Galerie für Fotografie · Closes Aug 16

New York

• Alex Prager: Matinee — Lehmann Maupin · Closes Aug 14

San Diego

• Chanell Stone: Undulation of a Rupture — San Diego Museum of Art · Closes Aug 16

Sydney

• Julie Rrap: Un-Becoming Monuments — Roslyn Oxley9 · Closes Aug 15 (a 12-part photographic series shown alongside bronze and video)

Tokyo

• Michio Hoshino: NANOOK — Tales of Polar Bears and Ice Floes — FUJIFILM SQUARE · Closes Aug 13

• Taipei No Goodbye — Lin Hsuan-Lang — Photographers’ Gallery, Shinjuku · Closes Aug 16 (157 rolls shot in Taipei in 2015; part of “PHOTO ONE”)

• Linder: Goddess of the Mind — CHANEL NEXUS HALL, Ginza · Closes Aug 16 (free)

Toronto

• Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo Beta — MOCA Toronto · Closes Aug 16

Vienna

• Barbara Pflaum: Showcases of Everyday Life — MAK · Closes Aug 16

• Richard Prince — the Albertina · Closes Aug 16 (around 150 works, weighted toward the photographic work)

West Palm Beach

• 60 Seconds: Polaroids from the Collection — Norton Museum of Art · Closes Aug 16

Ongoing

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

Edinburgh

• Catherine Opie: To Be Seen — Royal Scottish Academy, National Galleries of Scotland · Through Nov 1

London

• Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now — The Photographers’ Gallery · Through Sep 27 (27 artists, a full building takeover)

• The Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition 167 — Saatchi Gallery · Through Sep 11 (free)

Santa Monica

• Floris Neusüss & Christiane Feser: Unique Works in Photography — Von Lintel Gallery · Through Aug 22

• Holly Roberts: Witness — Craig Krull Gallery · Through Aug 29 (paint applied directly onto photographic prints)

Tucson

• Animality: 100 Years of Photographs — Center for Creative Photography · Through Dec 12

FESTIVAL WATCH

• PhEST 2026 — International Festival of Photography and Art, 11th edition — Monopoli, Puglia · Aug 7 – Nov 1 (theme “What if?”; Vivian Maier, Roger Ballen, Joan Fontcuberta, Juno Calypso, Marek Kita, Chloé Azzopardi)

• Gibellina Photoroad, VI edition — Gibellina, Sicily · Through Sep 6 (tenth-anniversary edition of the open-air festival, inside Gibellina’s year as Italian Capital of Contemporary Art; Erik Kessels, Teresa Giannico, Alice Grassi, Jacopo Di Cera, Stefano Cerio)

• PHotoESPAÑA 2026, 29th edition — Madrid · Through Sep 13

• Visa pour l’Image 2026, 38th edition — Perpignan · Aug 29 – Sep 13 (27 free exhibitions and six Campo Santo evening screenings; Pro Week Aug 31 – Sep 5)

• Ragusa Foto Festival 14 — Ragusa, Sicily · Aug 27 – Sep 27 (theme “Archetipi mediterranei”; Massimo Vitali, Evangelia Kranioti, Zied Ben Romdhane, Mous Lamrabat, Anna Di Prospero, Alessio Mamo; opening days Aug 27–30)

• Kranj Foto Fest 2026 — Kranj, Slovenia · Aug 27 – Sep 27 (Marisol Mendez, Federico Estol, Maria Sturm, Ian Cheibub, Chiara Ernandes, plus a PhMuseum Grant screening)

• Landskrona Foto Festival 2026, 10th edition — Landskrona, Sweden · Sep 4–20 (ten large-scale outdoor exhibitions)

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.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• Through Their Lens: A Journey of Self-Exploration — Florida Museum of Photographic Arts · Opens Aug 4 (emerging Tampa Bay student photographers)

Closing Soon

Dublin

• New Irish Works 2026 — International Centre for the Image · Closes Aug 9

Milwaukee

• Widline Cadet: Currents 40 — Milwaukee Art Museum · Closes Aug 9

Montreal

• Richard Avedon: Immortal — Montreal Museum of Fine Arts · Closes Aug 9 (final week; portraits of aging, 1951–2004)

New York

• Manifest and Sublime — Yancey Richardson · Closes Aug 7

• Matt Saunders: On an Overgrown Path — Marian Goodman · Closes Aug 7

San Francisco

• John Chiara: Bay Panel — SF Camerawork · Closes Aug 16

Tokyo

• Izuru Takeya: Anon — Zen Foto Gallery · Closes Aug 8

Ongoing

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

Amsterdam

• Martine Gutierrez: Wunderkind — Huis Marseille · Through Oct 18

Antwerp

• Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter — FOMU · Through Aug 23 (final month)

Chicago

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

London

• SPLASH: Sea, Beach and Pool — Atlas Gallery · Through Aug 30

New York

• Allen Ginsberg and Vivian Maier: Notes from the Margins — Howard Greenberg Gallery · Through Sep 12

• Yves Saint Laurent and Photography — International Center of Photography · Through Sep 28

FESTIVAL WATCH

• 42nd Higashikawa International Photography Festival — Higashikawa, Hokkaido · August 1–31 (running all week in Japan’s “Town of Photography”; home of the Higashikawa Awards)

• Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026 — “Worlds in View” — Arles · Through Oct 4 (week five of the European photography summer’s anchor)

• Fotosommer Stuttgart 2026 — Stuttgart, citywide · Through Sep 13 (UNORDNUNG continues at THE GÄLLERY, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart)

• Cortona On The Move 2026 — Cortona · Through Nov 1 (Italy’s major documentary-photography festival)

• Visa pour l’Image 2026 — Perpignan · Aug 29 – Sep 13 (on the horizon: the 38th edition of photojournalism’s flagship gathering)

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.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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“Milk Drop Coronet” — Harold Edgerton, 1957

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• Miho Kajioka: so it went, goes, and will go… — IBASHO · Closes Aug 2

• Christopher Thomas: Bittersweet — IN-DEPENDANCE by IBASHO · Closes Aug 2

New Orleans

• Wendi Schneider: Held Light — A Gallery for Fine Photography · Closes Aug 1

Paris

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

Rome

• Francesca Woodman: Lately I Find a Sliver of Mirror Is Simply to Slice an Eyelid — Gagosian · Closes Jul 31

Toronto

• Larry Fink: Social Graces & Runway — The Image Centre · Closes Aug 1

• Scotiabank Photography Award: Dawit L. Petros — The Image Centre · Closes Aug 1

Vancouver

• Burtynsky: Human/Nature — Paul Kyle Gallery · Closes Aug 1 (his first major Vancouver show in over a decade)

Venice

• Dayanita Singh: ARCHIVIO — Archivio di Stato · Closes Jul 31

Ongoing

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

Amsterdam

• World Press Photo Exhibition 2026 — De Nieuwe Kerk · Through Sep 27

Antwerp

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

London

• Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now — The Photographers’ Gallery · Through Sep 27

Madrid

• Richard Avedon: In the American West, 1979–1984 — Fundación MAPFRE · Through Aug 30 (final month)

New York

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

San Diego

• Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World — Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art · Through Jan 10, 2027

Tokyo

• Idemitsu Mako: What a Woman Made — Tokyo Photographic Art Museum · Through Sep 21 (full retrospective of the pioneering video artist)

FESTIVAL WATCH

• 42nd Higashikawa International Photography Festival — Higashikawa, Hokkaido · August 1–31 (opens Saturday in Japan’s “Town of Photography”; Artists Forum August 2, and home of the Higashikawa Awards)

• Fotosommer Stuttgart 2026 — Stuttgart, citywide · Through Sep 13 (the flagship UNORDNUNG exhibition continues at THE GÄLLERY, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart)

• Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026 — “Worlds in View” — Arles · Through Oct 4 (week four of the European photography summer’s anchor)

• Cortona On The Move 2026 — Cortona · Through Nov 1 (Italy’s major documentary-photography festival)

• Visa pour l’Image 2026 — Perpignan · Aug 29 – Sep 13 (on the horizon: the 38th edition of photojournalism’s flagship gathering)

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.

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

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“Guerrillero Heroico” — Alberto Korda, 1960

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• An Honest Day’s Work: Photographs of Labor — Portland Art Museum · Opened Jul 18 (collection)

Stuttgart

• UNORDNUNG — Fotosommer Stuttgart 2026 — THE GÄLLERY, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart · Opened Jul 17 (festival flagship; through Sep 13)

This week, day by day

Thursday, July 23

• Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018 opens — Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Friday, July 24

• Ragnar Axelsson: Greenland opens — Kunstfoyer, Munich (60 works by the Icelandic chronicler of the melting Arctic; through Nov 1)

• Marlo Pascual: Making Something Out of Something opens — National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (found-photography sculpture; through Feb 28, 2027)

• Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes opens — Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (members’ preview Jul 24–26; public from Jul 28)

Saturday, July 25

• Private Collections Salon & Sale opens — Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta (100+ works from private collections; through Oct 10)

Closing Soon

Berlin

• Thomas Demand — Sprüth Magers · Closes Aug 1 (new works)

New York

• Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002) — New York Life Gallery · Closes Jul 24 (historical)

• Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination — MoMA · Closes Jul 25

• Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures — El Museo del Barrio · Closes Aug 2 (first museum survey)

Santa Monica

• Elger Esser: My Days at Ray’s — ROSEGALLERY · Closes Jul 25

Ongoing

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

Amsterdam

• Martine Gutierrez: Wunderkind — Huis Marseille · Through Oct 18 (new Guggenheim Fellowship work)

Eschborn

• Human Topographies — Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, The Cube · Through Aug 16

Frankfurt

• GEN Z: Shaping a New Gaze — Fotografie Forum Frankfurt · Through Aug 30

New York

• Allen Ginsberg and Vivian Maier: Notes from the Margins — Howard Greenberg Gallery · Through Sep 12 (both born 1926 — a double centennial)

• Yves Saint Laurent and Photography — International Center of Photography · Through Sep 28

The Hague

• CAN LOVE BE A PHOTOGRAPH — 40 Years of Inez & Vinoodh — Kunstmuseum Den Haag · Through Sep 6

Winterthur

• Shadow Creatures — From Spirit Photography to the Ghosts of the Algorithm — Fotomuseum Winterthur · Through Oct 11

FESTIVAL WATCH

• Experimental Photo Festival 2026 — Barcelona · July 22–26 (runs inside the issue week; workshops, lectures, residencies, and a parallel online edition devoted to experimental processes)

• Fotosommer Stuttgart 2026 — “UNORDNUNG” — Stuttgart, citywide · July 17–26 (32 exhibitions across the city on the theme of disorder; the flagship UNORDNUNG show at the Staatsgalerie’s THE GÄLLERY continues through September 13)

• 9th Annual Latin American Foto Festival — Bronx Documentary Center, New York · Final week — closes July 26 (large-scale prints across Bronx streets; free)

• Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026 — “Worlds in View” — Arles, France · Through October 4 (week three of the European photography summer’s anchor)

• Cortona On The Move 2026 — Cortona, Italy · Through November 1 (Italy’s major documentary-photography festival)

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.

THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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

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

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“Le Violon d’Ingres” — Man Ray, 1924

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD

Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.

Opening This Week

Just opened

Dublin

• Afterimage: Photography in the Digital Age — Photo Museum Ireland · Opened Jul 11 (group / computational image)

Lisbon

• Michael Najjar: Heterotopic Turbulences — Galeria Filomena Soares · Opened Jul 8 (space-age hybrid photography)

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

• We Are Martin Parr opens — Photography Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul

• On the Road opens — Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York

• Cortona On The Move 2026 opening days begin — Cortona, Italy (festival)

Friday, July 17

• Martine Dawson: Faultlines opens — MEP Studio, Paris

Saturday, July 18

• Richard Learoyd: Shark opens — Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (camera obscura)

• A Brief History of Photography: The Portrait opens — Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (collection)

Closing Soon

Boston

• Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography — Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · Closes Jul 13 (street)

Kaunas

• Aria Shahrokhshahi: Wet Ground — Kaunas Photography Gallery · Closes Jul 19 (documentary)

London

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

Los Angeles

• Double Take: Photographs in Pairs — Fahey/Klein Gallery · Closes Jul 18 (group)

Santa Monica

• A Simple Game: Celebrating Football During the World Cup — Marshall Gallery · Closes Jul 18 (group)

Seoul

• Robert Mapplethorpe: The Poetics of Form — Kukje Gallery · Closes Jul 19 (historical)

Shanghai

• Vivian Maier: Unseen Work — Fotografiska Shanghai · Closes Jul 19 (street / historical)

Vancouver

• Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places — Vancouver Art Gallery · Closes Jul 26 (color / historical)

Ongoing

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

Amsterdam

• World Press Photo Exhibition 2026 — De Nieuwe Kerk · Through Sep 27 (photojournalism)

Braunschweig

• Jamel Shabazz: New York Moves and Black Communities — Museum für Photographie Braunschweig · Through Sep 13 (street / portraiture)

Madrid

• In the American West — Richard Avedon — Fundación MAPFRE · Through Aug 30 (portraiture)

New York

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

San Diego

• Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World — The San Diego Museum of Art · Through Jan 10, 2027 (fashion / portraiture)

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

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“Afghan Girl” — Steve McCurry, 1984

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.