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

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

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

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

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

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ON VIEW
New This Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLOSING SOON…

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

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

ONGOING…

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

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

• May 31: Catherine Opie: To Be Seen — National Portrait Gallery, London.

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week

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

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

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

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

Photo London 2026
May 13 – 17, 2026

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

KYOTOGRAPHIE
Kyoto, Japan
Through May 17, 2026

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

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IN FOCUS

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

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

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

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

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OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Sangre Blanca by Mads Nissen
GOST
May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

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

IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 30

• Apr 30: Deadline — Inge Morath Award (final chance).

• Apr 30: Fotografia Europea opens, Reggio Emilia (through Jun 14).

• May 2: Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage opens, Moderna Museet, Malmö (through Sep 27).

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

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

• May 9: Bieler Fototage opens, Biel/Bienne (through May 31).

• May 13 – 17: Photo London 2026 at Olympia.

• May 17: Last day — KYOTOGRAPHIE, Kyoto.

ONE QUESTION

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

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

DID YOU KNOW?

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

ON THIS DAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE AUCTION BLOCK

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

Phillips Photographs — New York, April 11

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

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

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

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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IN FOCUS

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

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

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

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

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

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OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Life Still by Lee Friedlander
Aperture

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

Snow by Sohrab Hura
MACK

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

Absentee by Sayuri Ichida
Benrido

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

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

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

IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 30

• Apr 22: AIPAD: The Photography Show VIP opening, Park Avenue Armory, New York. AIPAD Award to Deborah Willis presented.

• Apr 22–26: AIPAD: The Photography Show open to public. 77 galleries, 15 countries.

• Apr 23: World Press Photo of the Year 2026 announced (11:00am CEST).

• Apr 23: Deborah Willis in conversation with Aperture’s Brendan Embser at AIPAD (1pm).

• Apr 24: World Press Photo Exhibition opens, De Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam (through Sep 27).

• Apr 24–26: Photobooks Switzerland, Geneva. 6th edition.

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

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

• Apr 30: Deadline — Inge Morath Award.

• Apr 30: Fotografia Europea opens, Reggio Emilia (through Jun 14).

ONE QUESTION

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

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

DID YOU KNOW?

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

ON THIS DAY

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

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Lee Miller Finally Gets the French Retrospective She Deserved

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS

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

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ON VIEW
New This Week

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

250 prints across six sections. See THE FRAME above.

Martin Parr: A Tribute
Foam, Amsterdam
Spring 2026

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

FAKE!
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Through May 25, 2026

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

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

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

CLOSING SOON

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 25: FAKE! — Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

Immediate Family — Sally Mann, 1984–1994

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS

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

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IN THE NEWS
This Week

World Press Photo 2026 Contest Winners Announced

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

Unique Photographs Are Rewriting the Rules of the Photo Market

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

THE AUCTION BLOCK
Results: Phillips New York, April 11

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

Other notable results above estimate:

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

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

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

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

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

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week and Coming Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

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

IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 30

• Apr 14: Always Running: Photography by Luis J. Rodriguez opens, Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, California.

• Apr 16: Sony World Photography Awards ceremony, London. Winners announced.

• Apr 16: Artnet Spring Photographs Sale closes.

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

• Apr 17: Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition opens, Somerset House, London (through May 4).

• Apr 18: KYOTOGRAPHIE opens, Kyoto (through May 17).

• Apr 19: LACMA David Geffen Galleries grand opening, Los Angeles.

• Apr 22–26: AIPAD: The Photography Show, Park Avenue Armory, New York.

• Apr 23: World Press Photo of the Year announced (11:00am CEST).

• Apr 30: Deadline — Inge Morath Award. Fotografia Europea opens, Reggio Emilia.

ONE QUESTION

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

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

DID YOU KNOW?

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

ON THIS DAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS

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

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IN FOCUS

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

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

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS

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

ON VIEW
New This Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLOSING SOON

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

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

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

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

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THE PHOTOGRAPH

The Perfect Moment — Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989

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

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS

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

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week and Coming Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy

Las Pelilargas by Irina Werning
GOST

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

Feliicità by Luigi Ghirri
MACK

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

Italian Story by Andrea Modica
L’Artiere

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

OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month

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

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

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

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

THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 19

• Apr 7: Deadline — CPA Artist Grants

• Apr 8: Sotheby’s Photographs Part II opens, online

• Apr 9: EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival opens, Turin

• Apr 11: Phillips Photographs auction, New York

• Apr 11: Outside Help (Christopher Richmond) opens at Moskowitz Bayse, LA

• Apr 12: Deadline — PPA Photo Award

• Apr 13: Last day — Ruby Bell: Glow, Leica Gallery, West Hollywood

• Apr 16: Sony World Photography Awards winners announced, London

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

• Apr 18: KYOTOGRAPHIE opens, Kyoto

ONE QUESTION

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

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

DID YOU KNOW?

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

ON THIS DAY

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

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

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS:

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

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ON VIEW

New This Week

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

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

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

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

Budapest Photo Festival 2026
Budapest
Through May 15, 2026

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

Closing Soon

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

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

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

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

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IN FOCUS

The Red Ceiling — William Eggleston, 1973

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS:

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

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

Coming Up in April

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

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

KYOTOGRAPHIE
Kyoto, Japan
April 18 – May 17, 2026

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

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

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

THE AUCTION BLOCK

Coming Up in April

Phillips Photographs — New York, April 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bidding opens April 8. Highlights from the catalogue:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OFF THE PRESS

New & Noteworthy

Bounty by Steve McQueen
MACK, March 2026

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

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

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

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

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

OPEN CALLS

Deadlines This Month

• Hasselblad Foundation Photo Book Grants — Deadline April 1. No fee. Two grants of SEK 100,000 (~$10,800) each. International. Submit digital dummy via Picter.

• CPA Artist Grants 2026 — Deadline April 7. Five grants of $5,000 each. Carmel.

• PPA Photo Award 2026 — Deadline April 12. No fee. $2,000 prize.

• Inge Morath Award 2026 — Deadline April 30. No fee. $7,500. Women and nonbinary photographers under 30.

THE WEEKS AHEAD

Key Dates: March 30 – April 19

• Apr 1: Deadline — Hasselblad Photo Book Grants.

• Apr 4: Last day — Come As You Are, Musichead Gallery, Hollywood.

• Apr 7: Deadline — CPA Artist Grants.

• Apr 9: EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival opens.

• Apr 11: Phillips Photographs auction, New York.

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

• Apr 16: Sony World Photography Awards winners announced, London.

• Apr 19: LACMA David Geffen Galleries grand opening, Los Angeles.

ONE QUESTION

What photograph changed how you see the world?

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

DID YOU KNOW?

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

ON THIS DAY

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

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Zanele Muholi Wins the 2026 Hasselblad Award

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS:

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

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ON VIEW

16 Exhibitions Worth Your Attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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IN FOCUS

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

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

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS:

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

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FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

This Week and Beyond

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

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

Rotterdam Photo 2026 — Rotterdam
March 25–29, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

THE AUCTION BLOCK

Preview: Spring Photography Sales

Phillips Photographs — New York, April 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY IT MATTERS:

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

OFF THE PRESS

New & Noteworthy

VISCIN by Yorgos Lanthimos
MACK, 2026

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

Mixed by Dev Dhunsi
MACK, March 2026

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

Mirage by Nick Hannes
Eyeshot, 2026

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

THE EMERGING EYE

Pablo Ramos

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

OPEN CALLS

Opportunities & Deadlines

GRANTS & AWARDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RESIDENCIES

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

THE WEEK AHEAD

Your Calendar for March 23–29

• Mar 25: Haute Photographie preview evening, Rotterdam.

• Mar 25–29: Rotterdam Photo opens — “Echoes of Silence.”

• Mar 27–29: Unseen Photo 2026 at Art Rotterdam + Book Market at Nederlands Fotomuseum.

• Mar 27: PhotoCarmel 2026 kicks off, Carmel CA.

• Mar 28: Last day — Brassaï: Secret Paris, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

• Mar 28: Center for Photographic Art Members’ Juried Exhibition opening, Carmel, California.

• Mar 28–29: Frans Lanting Creativity Workshop, Santa Cruz, California.

• Mar 29: Deadline — Centrale Festival open call (no entry fee, under 30).

• Mar 31: Deadline — Ephemere Photobook Grant (no entry fee).

• Mar 31: Deadline — KLPA Portrait Prize.

• Mar 31: Deadline — Sirmione Photo Residency (no entry fee).

• Mar 31: Deadline — iPhone Photography Awards (IPPAWARDS).

• Continuing: Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well, Grand Palais, Paris (through Jun 21).

• Continuing: Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris (through May 24).

• Continuing: Dana Lixenberg: American Images, MEP, Paris (through May 24).

• Continuing: Photography and the Black Arts Movement, Getty Center, Los Angeles (through Jun 14).

• Continuing: Catherine Opie: To Be Seen, National Portrait Gallery, London (through May 31).

• Continuing: Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation, ICP, New York (through May 4).

• Continuing: FotoFest Biennial 2026, Houston (through May 10).

• Continuing: Ruby Bell: Glow, Leica Gallery, West Hollywood (through Apr 13).

• Continuing: Binh Danh & Renee Royale, ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica (through Apr 25).

• Continuing: JR: Horizons, Perrotin, Los Angeles (through Apr 25).

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

WHY IT MATTERS:

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

ON VIEW

5 Exhibitions Worth Your Attention

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

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

Lee Miller
Tate Britain, London · 2026

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

Seydou Keïta
Brooklyn Museum, New York · 2026

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

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

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

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

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

FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH

What’s Coming Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE AUCTION BLOCK

Market Signals

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

WHY IT MATTERS:

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

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OFF THE PRESS

New & Noteworthy

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

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

Anja Niedringhaus: Photography
Steidl

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

Helen Levitt: New York Archive / Color
Steidl

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

LENS ON...

Martin Parr (1952–2025)

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

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

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

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

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

THE WEEK AHEAD

Your Calendar for March 16–22

• March 14–17: The Photography & Video Show wraps up in Birmingham, UK.

• March 15: Deadline — Musée du quai Branly Photography Award 2026 (no entry fee).

• March 18: MIA Photo Fair VIP Preview, Superstudio Più, Milan.

• March 19–22: MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas opens to public, Milan.

• March 19–21: PhotoCon Kansas City.

• March 21: Circulation(s) festival opens at CENTQUATRE-PARIS.

• Continuing: Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris (through May 24).

• Continuing: FotoFest Biennial 2026, Houston (through May 10).

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Dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you tomorrow,

Chris Davies
Publisher & Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issue No. 1 arrives Monday.

Chris Davies
Publisher & Editor

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