Josef Koudelka Wins the Brussels Street Photography Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award
Plus a new US photography biennial in the Hudson Valley and the Tank Man at 37
THE FRAME
A Lifetime Achievement for the Photographer Who Spent Sixteen Years as a Pseudonym
This past Saturday, May 30, 2026, at Brussels City Hall, the Brussels Street Photography Festival presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Josef Koudelka — and marked the festival’s tenth-anniversary edition with the recognition of an artist whose career began the way few careers do: under a fictional initial. The event drew a capped audience of two hundred and featured a long-form interview with Koudelka alongside the announcement of this year’s competition winners.
The choice is unimpeachable. Koudelka, born in Moravia in 1938, trained as an aeronautical engineer before turning seriously to photography in the early 1960s, when he began the long project on Czech and Slovak Romani communities that would become Gypsies (1975). When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague on the morning of August 21, 1968, Koudelka was in the streets with his camera; the photographs he made over the following week — soldiers, crowds, watches checked against zero hour, hands held up to tank barrels — were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and published in the Western press under the initials P.P., for “Prague Photographer.” He would not allow his name to be attached to the work for sixteen years.
That arc — anonymity, exile, then the slow gathering of a body of work whose authority compounds with every decade — is what the Brussels prize acknowledges. Koudelka has received the Prix Nadar, the Robert Capa Gold Medal, the Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. He is, at this point, one of the very few living photographers about whom there is no serious argument. The Brussels award is less the conferral of stature than the catching-up of an institution.
WHY IT MATTERS
Koudelka's life is the story of a photographer who decided early that the work was the only thing that mattered and protected it accordingly — from the regime that would have punished it, from the market that would have bought it lightly, and from his own name for as long as he could. That Brussels now formally crowns him at the festival's tenth anniversary is exactly the right symmetry: a young institution honoring an artist whose first major prize was awarded to a pseudonym.
ON VIEW
New This Week
Upstate Photography Biennial
Center for Photography at Woodstock
May 30 – September 6, 2026
The first edition of a US biennial that finally gives the Hudson Valley a recurring institutional photography event. Curated by Adam G. Ryan and Marina Chao, the Upstate Photography Biennial gathers thirty-nine artists across multiple venues around Woodstock and the broader Hudson Valley, organized around questions of identity, healthcare access, climate, and inhabited space. The curatorial framing makes a deliberate case for analog processes — tintype, pinhole, cyanotype — as forms of political resistance to a flattening digital image economy.
WHY IT MATTERS
A new US biennial is, all by itself, rare. A US biennial that arrives with a curatorial argument this clear — about who photography is for, what bodies and places it documents, and what its slow processes mean in the age of generative image-making — is almost unheard of.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Focus. Desire.
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
February 28 – June 26, 2026
Sepuya’s first major Swiss solo museum exhibition continues at Fotomuseum Winterthur through the end of June. Structured around Sepuya’s enduring concerns — the studio as social space, the dark room as both technical workshop and intimate site, and the archive as a living constellation of friends and collaborators — the show foregrounds a queer and Black subject position in photography that has been quietly redefining American studio practice for over a decade. Final month to see.
FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
The international festival calendar opens one of its busiest stretch of the year.
La Gacilly Photo Festival opens Sunday June 1, the vast free open-air festival in Brittany running through October 4.
Belfast Photo Festival opens Thursday June 4 — Northern Ireland’s flagship event, with the international competition exhibition at the Ulster Museum.
The 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg opens Friday June 5 under the title Alliance, Infinity, Love — eleven exhibitions across eight institutions through September 22.
Mesnographies 2026 opens Saturday June 6 in Les Mesnuls, France, through July 19.
Athens Photo Festival opens Wednesday June 10 (just after this issue mails).
Looking into mid-June:
Copenhagen Photo Festival runs June 11–21, themed Forestillinger / Scenarios ·
photo basel runs June 16–21 during Art Basel week
Fotofestiwal Łódź marks its 25th edition June 18–28
GU.PHO 2026 in Guiglia (Italy) runs June 18–26
ZeroNegativo 2026 in Santeramo in Colle runs June 18–21.
PHotoESPAÑA 2026 continues across Madrid through September 13.
OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy
Double Exposures by Sophie Rivera
Aperture
In association with El Museo del Barrio
Bilingual English / Spanish
The first major monograph on Sophie Rivera, the Nuyorican photographer whose intimate, formally exacting portraits of Puerto Ricans in 1970s New York have spent the last decade re-entering the canon. Co-published with El Museo del Barrio in a bilingual English/Spanish edition, the book gathers Rivera’s defining series — including the large-format Bronx portraits she made between 1978 and 1982 — alongside new scholarship situating her practice inside the Nuyorican cultural moment and the longer history of Latina photography. A long-overdue corrective.
Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings by Larry Sultan
MACK
The first collected edition of writing by the late Larry Sultan — California-born conceptualist whose Evidence (with Mike Mandel, 1977), Pictures from Home (1992), and The Valley (2004) remain among the most influential American photobooks of the past half-century. Water Over Thunder gathers essays, lectures, interviews, and unpublished material from across his teaching practice at California College of the Arts and beyond. Sultan died in 2009 at sixty-three; this volume is, in effect, the artist’s missing fourth book.
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
(Sir John Herschel’s Copy)
Steidl
Hardcover facsimile edition
A facsimile of Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae (1843) — widely regarded as the first book illustrated entirely with photographic images — reproduced from the personal copy held by Sir John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype process. Atkins, who learned the process from Herschel through her father, self-published the volume in installments to a tiny subscriber list. Surviving copies are now among the most valuable objects in photography’s history. Steidl’s facsimile is the first time most readers will hold the book in their hands.
IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Opening, Closing and Ongoing Exhibitions from Around the World
OPENING SOON
Lausanne
Hannah Darabi: Why Don’t You Dance? — Photo Elysée · Opens Jun 26 (documentary)
Los Angeles
Daido Moriyama: The Hunter — Peter Fetterman Gallery · Opens Jun 6 (fine art)
Paris
Photography in all its letters — MEP · Opens Jun 10 (group show)
Madeleine de Sinéty: A Life — Jeu de Paume · Opens Jun 12 (documentary)
CLOSING SOON
Berlin
Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With — C/O Berlin · Closes Jun 10 (retrospective)
Los Angeles
Miles Davis: A Century of Cool — Musichead Gallery · Closes Jun 13 (music photography)
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 — Getty Center · Closes Jun 14 (historical)
Stockholm
Static Motion — Carl Ander — Centrum För Fotografi · Closes Jun 6
ONGOING
Amsterdam
World Press Photo 2026 — De Nieuwe Kerk · Through Sep 27 (photojournalism)
Brooklyn / NYC
Photoville 2026 — Brooklyn Bridge Park · Through June (festival)
Fort Worth
Black Photojournalism — Amon Carter Museum · Through Jul 5 (photojournalism)
Le Locle (Switzerland)
Pour tout faire, il faut une fleur — MBAL · Through Sep 6 (group)
Los Angeles / Santa Monica
Catherine Opie: Holding Blue — Regen Projects · Through summer 2026 (fine art)
Marilyn Monroe: A Silent Life — Peter Fetterman Gallery · Through summer 2026
New York
Hujar:Contact — Morgan Library · Through Oct 25 (historical)
Victoria Sambunaris: Fall Line — Yancey Richardson · Through Jul 2 (landscape)
Mary Ellen Bartley: Color Anthology — Yancey Richardson (Project Gallery) · Through Jul 2 (still life)
Paris
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well — Grand Palais · Through Jun 21 (retrospective)
San Francisco
Slice of the Pie — Fraenkel Gallery · Through Aug 15 (group)
Feel the Beat: Dance in Photographs — SFMOMA · Through Jan 31, 2027
Stockholm / Malmö
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage — Moderna Museet Malmö · Through Sep 27 (fashion / fine art)
Winterthur
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Focus. Desire — Fotomuseum Winterthur · Through Jun 26 (portraiture)
OPEN CALLS
European Photography Awards 2026 — international photography awards · Deadline June 3
Booooooom Art & Photo Book Award 2026 — Booooooom · Deadline June 5 (this Friday)
URBAN Photo Awards 2026 — international photography competition · Deadline June 14
LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2026 — street photography competition · Deadline June 17
Abbey Road Music Photography Awards 2026 — free global music photography awards · Deadline June 30
Lucie Photo Book Prize 2026 — Lucie Foundation photobook prize · Deadline September 15
Lucie Foundation Scholarship Program 2026 — scholarships for emerging photographers · Deadline September 30
ONE QUESTION
A vintage Henri Cartier-Bresson print can clear six figures at auction; a contemporary photojournalist covering the same kinds of moments often earns less than a U.S. living wage. The market we have decided to build around photography pays the past more than the present and pays for documentation only after the photographer has stopped working. Is this how it has to be — or is there a market we haven't yet built that would make the work that matters at the moment it is made worth what it is actually worth?
Reply with your view. The most interesting responses appear in next week’s issue.
DID YOU KNOW?
Josef Koudelka's foundational photographs of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague were published under the pseudonym P.P. — for "Prague Photographer" — and the "P.P." byline won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for war reporting in 1969. Koudelka would not allow his name to be attached to the work for sixteen years; he gave permission only in 1984, after his mother and father had both died. Which is to say: the first major prize for photography that defines Josef Koudelka's career was awarded to a name that did not technically exist, given for a body of work whose author the awarding committee did not know.
ON THIS DAY
June 5, 1989 — On Chang'an Avenue, near Tiananmen Square, an unidentified man stands in front of a column of Type 59 tanks. He is photographed from upper-floor balconies at the Beijing Hotel by, at minimum, six photojournalists: Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, Charlie Cole of Newsweek, Stuart Franklin of Magnum, Arthur Tsang Hin Wah of Reuters, Terril Jones of the AP, and the Hong Kong photographer Sin Wai Keung. The man's identity has never been definitively established. The photograph that became canonical — Widener's, taken with a borrowed lens and shot through a head wound from the day before — was named one of Time's 100 most influential photographs ever made. Thirty-seven years later, Tank Man remains both the defining image of the protest and a touchstone in the longer argument about what photography can and cannot do at the edge of state violence.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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