THE PHOTOGRAPHER
For the First Time, the Guggenheim Gives Its Entire Rotunda to a Photographer
Taryn Simon has spent twenty-five years making photographs that behave like evidence. The Innocents (2000) returned men exonerated by DNA to the scenes that had been used to convict them, and let the camera demonstrate exactly how unreliable it is. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) photographed the things US institutions had decided the public would not see. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008) traced bloodlines across continents and arranged the results in rows, like a ledger. The method has always been the same: gain access, photograph the thing plainly, and let the caption carry the weight the picture cannot. Simon is a conceptual artist who happens to use a camera, and she has never made the camera do the arguing.
On Friday, September 18, that method takes over Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda. Father Country I Do Love You, opening at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and running to March 14, 2027, is the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist to fill the entire spiral, and the largest debut of new work the museum has ever staged. Nearly a decade in the making, it follows the real life of one unnamed federal agent across 42 individual artworks — photographs, text, video and sculpture assembled into a single interactive installation. The agent is a middleman: a man who witnessed events large and small, collected the evidence, and handed it to someone else to fit into a larger picture he never saw. Simon follows what happened next — to victims, to predators, to survivors, to the machinery of justice — as visitors climb the ramps. The show is organized by Nat Trotman, and the works will enter the Guggenheim’s permanent collection.
What makes this a turning point is that Simon has finally pointed the method at herself. Father Country I Do Love You is dedicated to her father, who lived in Thailand and traveled to Russia, Iran, Israel, China, Afghanistan and Korea working for the US government, then came home and manufactured arcade games. She never got the full story out of him, and when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s she understood she never would. What survives is a line she quotes: “But America,” he always said, “was the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it.” The exhibition opens in the 250th year of the United States, which is either the most obvious framing available or the whole point — an artist who built a career on the gap between the official record and the thing that actually happened, given the most conspicuous room in American museum architecture in the year the country is meant to be admiring itself.
The Guggenheim and Hatje Cantz are copublishing an artist book to accompany the exhibition, as the Guggenheim confirms.
WHY IT MATTERS
Photography has hung in the Guggenheim for decades, but never on these terms — one living photographer, one new body of work, the full spiral, six months. Museums signal what they take seriously by what they are willing to clear the building for. That Simon’s work is conceptual, text-dependent and institutionally skeptical makes the gesture sharper, not softer: the museum has handed its most recognizable space to an artist whose subject is what institutions choose to keep out of view.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Unnatural Habitat
Lisson Gallery | New York
September 15 – October 24, 2026
Fifty years of the Dioramas series, the project Sugimoto began at the American Museum of Natural History in 1976 when he realized that a taxidermied animal in a painted habitat, photographed with enough patience, reads as a living thing. The show includes Polar Bear (1975), the first work he made, alongside prints from rediscovered negatives and four new color diorama byōbu screens on washi — the first time Sugimoto has taken the series into color and onto folding screens.
Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979)
Howard Greenberg Gallery | New York
September 18 – October 31, 2026
Before the Southern work that made his reputation in 2019, Baldwin Lee spent the late 1970s photographing New York — the city he had grown up in, seen through the training he had just finished with Minor White at MIT and Walker Evans at Yale. These large-scale black-and-white photographs have never been exhibited. They arrive as the missing first chapter of a body of work most people only discovered forty years late.
David Lynch: LA
Pace Gallery | Los Angeles
September 19 – October 24, 2026
Five photographic series in conversation — Figures and Smoke, the Los Angeles architecture pictures, the Kits — in the first Los Angeles presentation of Lynch’s photographs since his death in 2025. The architecture work is the argument: Lynch photographed the city’s back lots, industrial corners and unglamorous frontages with the same attention he gave to film sets, and the pictures make clear that the atmosphere in his films was found before it was built.
Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw
David Zwirner | Los Angeles
September 19 – October 31, 2026
DeCarava designed, wrote and sequenced the sound i saw in the early 1960s — a book of jazz photographs and his own prose poem — and then it sat unpublished for almost half a century. This presentation, curated by Ebony L. Haynes, follows the maquette DeCarava made: Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Ellington and the Harlem street life that produced them, printed in the low, deliberate register he spent his career defending against every editor who asked him to open up the shadows. It is only the fourth solo presentation of his work in Los Angeles.
WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD
Opening This Week
Amsterdam
Hailun Ma: Hometown — Foam Fotografiemuseum · Opens Sep 18 (through Jan 20, 2027)
Berlin
Animals — Galerie Springer Berlin · Opens Sep 15 (Burtynsky, Odermatt, Ute and Werner Mahler, Loredana Nemes, Ursula Böhmer)
Bristol
Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic — Martin Parr Foundation · Opens Sep 17 (Brandt, McCullin, Anna Fox; part of Bristol Photo Festival)
Gentilly, Paris
Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful — Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau · Opens Sep 17 (through Mar 14, 2027)
Houston
In the Between / Venessa Monokian: Sprawl — Houston Center for Photography · Opens Sep 17
Lille
Bérangère Fromont: République — Institut pour la photographie · Opens Sep 18 (through Jan 16, 2027)
London
Wanda and Marion Wulz: Avant-garde Photography in 20th-Century Italy — Estorick Collection · Opens Sep 16 (historical)
Roots — The Photographers’ Gallery, Print Sales · Opens Sep 18
Los Angeles
Thomas Demand — Matthew Marks Gallery · Opens Sep 19 (new work including Parsifal V*, 2026)*
New York
Sophie Delaporte: The Thread Between — Sous Les Etoiles Gallery · Opens Sep 17 (opening reception with the artist, 6–8 p.m.)
Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory — Bruce Silverstein Gallery · Opens Sep 17 (woven photographs)
Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You — Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum · Opens Sep 18 (through Mar 14, 2027)
Paris
Raymond Depardon — Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection · Opens Sep 16 (through Dec 1)
West Palm Beach
Visible Fictions: Photography and Artifice — Norton Museum of Art · Opens Sep 19 (Crewdson, Laurie Simmons and others from the collection)
Closing Soon
Barcelona
So Many Reports. So Many Questions. — Max de Esteban — Foto Colectania · Closes Sep 20
Berlin
Corbijn, Anton — Fotografiska Berlin · Closes Sep 20 (fifty years, nearly 150 works)
Halle
Helga Paris: Häuser und Gesichter, Halle 1983–85 — Kunstmuseum Moritzburg · Closes Sep 20 (open until 8 p.m. on Sep 18 and 19)
London
Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire — Autograph · Closes Sep 19
Paris
Polynesia 66, carnet de constellations — Véronique Caye — Jeu de Paume · Closes Sep 17
Tucson
Callahan, Gowin and Sommer — Etherton Gallery · Closes Sep 19 (53 vintage and rare prints)
Vilnius
Ukrainian Dreamers: The Kharkiv School of Photography — Radvila Palace, Lithuanian National Museum of Art · Closes Sep 20 (33 artists, four generations)
Washington, DC
Niagara Falls: Mist and Majesty — National Gallery of Art · Closes Sep 20
Ongoing
A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.
Amsterdam
Zanele Muholi: Hlanganani — Galerie Ron Mandos · Through Nov 1
Berlin
Alix Cléo Roubaud: Si quelque chose noir — Galerie Buchholz · Through Oct 31 (first German solo; curated by Hélène Giannecchini)
Eschborn / Frankfurt
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026 — The Cube · Through Jan 17, 2027 (Rene Matić, winner)
Fort Lauderdale
Joel Meyerowitz: Aftermath — NSU Art Museum · Through Feb 14, 2027 (28 large-scale photographs of Ground Zero, gifted to the museum in 2025)
New York
Deana Lawson — Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street · Through Oct 24 (first solo with the gallery)
Rome
Frank Horvat at the Baths of Caracalla — Terme di Caracalla · Through Jan 10, 2027 (72 photographs across seventy years)
Santa Monica
Fabiola Menchelli: our sharp line of sight — Marshall Gallery · Through Nov 7 (camera-less chromogenic works folded in total darkness)
FESTIVAL WATCH
20/20 Photo Festival — Philadelphia, US · Sep 10 – 19 (7th edition; city-wide exhibitions and the Photo Book Fair at Cherry Street Pier — closes Saturday)
Noorderlicht: Thinking Hands — Groningen, Netherlands · Sep 12 – Nov 1 (curated by Musoke Nalwoga; Groninger Museumnacht Sep 19)
Encontros da Imagem: Territory and Identity — Braga, Portugal · Sep 18 – Nov 1
Fiebre Photobook Fest XIII — Madrid, Spain · Sep 18 – 20 (at La Casa Encendida; Spain’s only photobook-dedicated festival)
MODE by Flickr — Minneapolis, US · Sep 18 – 20 (first edition; masterclasses, photowalks, gear floor)
Les Photaumnales, 23rd edition: La Photographie et après — Beauvais, France · Sep 19 – Nov 29 (inaugural weekend Sep 26 – 27)
Filter Photo Festival, 18th edition — Chicago, US · Sep 23 – 26 (portfolio reviews, workshops and lectures at the Columbia College Chicago Student Center)
BredaPhoto Festival 2026: Our Songs Came Through — Breda, Netherlands · Through Oct 25
SI Fest 2026: Still Standing — Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy · Through Sep 27
OFF THE PRESS
Subrosa and the Cult of Aphrodite by Jason Langer
Five years inside the nighttime performance scene of Portland, Oregon, photographed and reported at once: Langer made pictures of more than a hundred exotic and burlesque dancers, drag queens, clowns and aerialists, and interviewed all of them. He worked in the backs of strip clubs and in private homes, which is the difference between this and a book of nightlife portraits — the subjects are photographed in the rooms where the persona is assembled and taken off again. Langer’s color work here is warmer and more frontal than the noirish black-and-white he is known for, and the interviews, edited with Marlena Gittleman, keep the book from reading as a visitor’s account of someone else’s subculture.
Courir by David Simpson
Simpson, a native Louisianian, photographed the courir de Mardi Gras — the rural Cajun and Creole tradition in which masked and costumed riders go house to house, singing and begging for the ingredients of a communal gumbo. It is the Mardi Gras that has nothing to do with Bourbon Street, and the version most likely to be misrepresented when outsiders photograph it. Flee Project, which builds each of its titles around a single vernacular cultural form, is a new publisher for these pages.
Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California by David Jacob Kramer & Michael Schmelling
Half a century ago one of the largest urban-to-rural migrations in American history sent young idealists out of the cities, and Northern California became its epicenter — communes that produced radical, handbuilt, frequently otherworldly houses. Schmelling photographed what is left of them, driving hidden dirt roads into the redwoods to find structures that have been concealed for decades; Kramer collected oral histories from thirty-eight of the people who built them, now in their seventies and eighties. The buildings were anti-capitalist to their foundations and were never made to be resold, which is precisely why they are disappearing. The book treats them as artworks and photographs them before they go.
OPEN CALLS
Artadia Boston Awards 2026 — Sep 15, 11:59 p.m. ET · unrestricted awards to Boston-area visual artists; no fee
Innovate Grant — Summer 2026 Cycle — Sep 17, 11:59 p.m. PST · photographers and visual artists 18+ worldwide, duos and collectives eligible; two unrestricted $1,800 grants plus 18 honorable mentions
Prix Yzza Slaoui de la Découverte — Sep 21 · no fee; for Moroccan photographers; €2,000 plus a solo exhibition or screening at Les Rencontres de la Photographie de Marrakech 2027
PhotoVogue 2026 Regional Open Call: MENA Panorama — Sep 24 · no entry fee; $8,000 in grants; open to artists from the MENA region and its diaspora
Prémio NARRATIVA – FUJIFILM, 2nd edition — Sep 30 · no fee; €3,500 plus a solo exhibition; contemporary photography
Filter Photo: Field Notes from the Middle — Sep 30, 11:59 p.m. CT · lens-based artists in twelve Midwestern states; juror Nathaniel M. Stein of the Cincinnati Art Museum; $2,000 purchase award with the work entering the museum’s collection
Tom Stoddart Award for Excellence × GOST Books Photobook Grant 2026 — Sep 30 · £5,000 toward production expenses plus print publication with GOST
W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography 2026 — Oct 12, 11:59 p.m. EDT · $30,000 main grant plus two $10,000 finalist grants; $50 fee; open to photographers 18+, professional and non-professional
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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