THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Iran Bars Women From Singing Solo. Newsha Tavakolian Gave Six of Them Album Covers.
In 2011 Newsha Tavakolian opened her first solo show in Tehran on the day she turned 30. Visitors went home with a present, a CD case with a woman singer on the cover. She had 8,000 of them made, and every one was empty. Under rules in force since the 1979 revolution, women in Iran may not sing solo in public or put out their own CDs. So each empty case was a ticket to a concert that can’t take place. “I always wanted to be a singer, that’s why I did this project,” she said in a March 2011 interview.
The series is called Listen. In a small private studio in downtown Tehran, she photographed six professional singers as they performed in their heads for a large audience that wasn’t there. Then she made each woman a cover for the album she wasn’t allowed to release. The one above, for Sahar, was made on the Caspian Sea at Mahmoudabad. “For me, a woman’s voice represents a power that, if you silence it, imbalances society, and makes everything deform,” she has said of the project. Tavakolian had been a singer of sorts herself. As a girl she sang Googoosh songs at weddings and family parties for coins. In March 2025, fourteen years after the show, The Guardian reported that the ban on solo singing still stands.
She has been fighting over who gets to speak through her pictures since she was 16. Dyslexic, she had dropped out of high school and taken a job in the archive of Zan, a new women’s daily, where she spliced negatives and wrote the photographers’ names on the sleeves. “I was an aspiring amateur photographer; this skinny 16-year-old girl whom nobody knew,” she told Magnum in 2023. When the first issue needed a front-page picture and the staff photographers were out on assignment, she volunteered. She borrowed folk costumes from friends, sat the women on the stairs holding up the new paper and took the picture. Then she stayed in the editing room until the early hours to make sure her name ran with it. The staff photographers were upset. She told them nobody else had been there, and that settled it.
Zan was shut down in 1999. She moved into news work, covering the student protests in Tehran that year and the war in Iraq from 2003. After the disputed 2009 presidential election, the authorities took away her press card. “A camera became like spy equipment,” she told Aperture in 2016. “For half a year it was forbidden to carry a camera in the streets. I was a photojournalist at home. I couldn’t work.” Within two years she had made Listen, a project that needed only a studio and six willing singers.
Her next fight was with a patron. In 2014 she won the €50,000 Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award for a project about people her own age. She called it Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album, because her subjects’ family albums went empty around the time they became teenagers. Edouard Carmignac, the fund manager behind the prize, edited her pictures himself and wanted to call the work “The Lost Generation.” On September 11 she gave the prize back. Her statement said her artistic freedom and her integrity could not be bought. “Mr. Carmignac, I live in Iran, not you,” she told The New York Times that week. The foundation changed its rules so that a jury shapes the finished work, and later that month she accepted the award. She decides what her pictures say.
She has since turned that rule on her own past. And They Laughed at Me goes back to her first three years behind the camera, 1996 to 1999, and uses only pictures that are flawed in some way. It was first shown in Milan in December 2023 as the first Deloitte Photo Grant exhibition. Kehrer Verlag published it as a book this year, 240 pages with 144 color images, which came out in Europe in March and reaches the US this month. Tavakolian was born in Tehran in 1981. She became a Magnum nominee in 2015 and an associate in 2017, and her work is in the V&A, LACMA and the British Museum. This year she sat on the jury of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. She made a short film, For the Sake of Calmness, in 2019 and is preparing her first feature.
WHY IT MATTERS
Tavakolian keeps getting into arguments over who controls what a photograph means. At Zan it was staff photographers who resented a teenager’s front page. In 2014 it was a sponsor who wanted a different title. Each time she kept her own words on the work. Listen turns that habit outward. Six women who cannot release records got covers with their names on them, and 8,000 people carried the cases home.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Sebastião Salgado: Fotografie della collezione Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Parigi
Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa | Bassano del Grappa
October 24, 2026 – April 4, 2027
More than 160 photographs from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris come to Italy for the first time. Among them is part of the 105 original prints that Salgado, who died in 2025, gave the museum with Lélia Wanick Salgado in 2018. Pascal Hoël’s selection runs from early series such as Other Americas, Sahel, Serra Pelada and Workers to Genesis. The show is the first official event in Bassano’s bid to be Italian Capital of Culture in 2029.
Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua, History, Memory
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson | Paris
October 21, 2026 – March 7, 2027
Meiselas first went to Nicaragua in 1978, at 30, and photographed the uprising that ended the Somoza regime in July 1979. For four decades she has kept going back, following those pictures as they turned up on T-shirts, stamps, matchboxes and murals. Clément Chéroux hangs more than 100 works beside pieces by Alfredo Jaar, Joy Garnett and other artists who have answered her images. Meiselas is the foundation’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement laureate.
Stan Douglas: Parallax
Jeu de Paume | Paris
October 20, 2026 – January 10, 2027
With about 40 works, from films and video installations to photographic series made since the late 1980s, this is the largest Douglas show in France in more than 30 years. Douglas was born in Vancouver in 1960 and often restages history in his home city. For Crowds and Riots (2008) he rebuilt scenes from Vancouver’s past with actors in period clothes. Gloria Moure and Marta Ponsa curated the show, which travels to MACBA in Barcelona in 2027.
Sharon Lockhart: Fogo
The Power Plant | Toronto
October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027
Lockhart spent four summers on Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, photographing its young residents for a series called Fogo Island Portrait Studio. The same young people appear in WINDWARD, a film installation shot against the island’s landscape. Born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1964, Lockhart lives in Los Angeles. The Power Plant presents the show with The Vega Foundation.
Diana Markosian: Father
Fotografiska | Stockholm
October 23, 2026 – May 9, 2027
When Markosian was 7, her mother took her and her brother from Moscow to California and cut their father out of the family photographs. Fifteen years later Markosian found him in Armenia. “I spent ten years making these photographs, but it was never really about creating a body of work. It was about building a relationship with my father,” she says. The show, co-produced with Les Rencontres d’Arles and Foam, asks visitors to write a letter to someone they miss.
WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD
Opening This Week
Atlanta
Sam Taylor-Johnson: She Was I — Jackson Fine Art · Oct 22 – Jan 23, 2027 (opening Oct 22, 6–8 p.m.)
Boston
Urban Legends: A Global Perspective — RKG x SEA-DAR The Project Space, SoWa Arts District · Oct 22 – Feb 28, 2027 (Jeffrey Milstein’s city pictures and more)
Carmel
Natural Order: Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips — Center for Photographic Art · Oct 17 – Nov 29 (spiders and their webs)
Munich
Johnny Miller: Unequal Scenes & Salt Works — Amerikahaus · Oct 17 – Jan 9, 2027 (drone pictures of inequality)
New York
Curran Hatleberg: River’s Dream, 2010–2020 — Higher Pictures · Oct 21 – Dec 12
Oberhausen
Ruth Orkin: Die Welt im Fokus — Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen · Oct 18 – Feb 14, 2027
Paris
Paul Kodjo: Photoromance — Palais de Tokyo · Oct 21 – Feb 14, 2027 (the Ivorian photographer’s photo-novels; co-produced with Les Rencontres d’Arles)
Walid Raad: Festival of (in)gratitude — Centquatre · Oct 23 – Nov 22
Turin
Anastasia Samoylova: Harbor — Gallerie d’Italia · Oct 22 – Feb 7, 2027 (seven European port cities)
Vancouver
Michael Kenna: Beautiful Fukushima — Kostuik Gallery · Oct 15 – Nov 8 (50 sepia-toned silver gelatin prints)
Closing Soon
Antwerp
Mika Horie: Ikebana — IBASHO · Closes Oct 25
Saul Leiter: Cibachromes & Paintings — Gallery Fifty One · Closes Oct 31
Brussels
Marina Pinsky: The Wave(s) or Newton’s Rings — Galerie Greta Meert · Closes Oct 31
Cologne
Tina Barney: Silver Shadows — Galerie Thomas Zander · Closes Oct 30
New York
John Edmonds: The Space Between — COMPANY · Closes Oct 24
Abelardo Morell: Out of Paper — Edwynn Houk Gallery · Closes Oct 31
Shelley Niro: In Her Lifetime — Hales · Closes Oct 31
Santa Fe
Eugene Tapahe: ART HEALS — Monroe Gallery of Photography · Closes Nov 1
Warsaw
Laurie Simmons: Uncanny Valley — IMPORT EXPORT · Closes Oct 31
Winchester, Massachusetts
Lua Kobayashi: The Persistence of Memories — Griffin Museum of Photography · Closes Oct 25 (Cummings Residency Prize show)
Ongoing
A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.
Aalborg
Frida Orupabo: Get close enough and you can’t see — Kunsten Museum of Modern Art · Through May 9, 2027 (her first solo show in Denmark)
Fort Worth
Photography’s First Century: Masterworks from the Bibliothèque nationale de France — Kimbell Art Museum · Through Jan 17, 2027
London
Charan Singh: Your Tongue in My Mouth — Autograph · Through Feb 13, 2027 (new portraits of Hijra, Kothi and trans people)
Los Angeles
Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography — Getty Center · Through Jan 3, 2027 (13 photographers, from Lola Álvarez Bravo to Graciela Iturbide)
Maastricht
Eve Arnold: All about Eve — Fotomuseum aan het Vrijthof · Through Jan 31, 2027 (130 photographs by the first woman to join Magnum)
Tokyo
Assembling Anew: Memories, Materials, Context, Technology — Tokyo Photographic Art Museum · Through Jan 17, 2027 (Contemporary Japanese Photography vol. 23)
FESTIVAL WATCH
Photoworks Festival 2026: Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams — Brighton & Hove, UK · Through Nov 1
Photo Fringe 2026 — Brighton & Hove and the coast from Portsmouth to Newhaven, UK · Through October (the twelfth biennial; more than 100 exhibitions and events)
Central Photobooks Festival — Birmingham, UK · Oct 23–24 (EH Smith Design Centre; talks and exhibits free)
OFF THE PRESS
An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965–1995
David Kordansky Gallery
Jay and Ricki Blakesberg edited 275 pictures of the Grateful Dead taken across three decades. Stuart Krimko wrote the essay and Jay Blakesberg the afterword. The book was made for Kordansky’s 2025 exhibition of the same name, and D.A.P. lists a new US distribution date of October 20. 279 pages, $85.
Shirin Neshat: Body of Evidence
Silvana Editoriale
Diego Sileo and Beatrice Benedetti edited the catalogue of Neshat’s 2025 retrospective at PAC in Milan. The book runs from Women of Allah to The Fury. The show held almost 200 photographs and ten video installations, and the catalogue has 336 pages and 585 illustrations. Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1957. €38.
Iris Garden by John Cage & William Gedney
Magic Hour Press
The book pairs 22 of Cage’s stories from his 1959 spoken-word album Indeterminacy with 44 of Gedney’s photographs from the 1950s to 1989, several of them portraits of Cage. The loose pages come in a slipcase so readers can shuffle them, in keeping with Cage’s use of chance. Alec Soth first published it in a small run through his press Little Brown Mushroom in 2013, and this is a new edition. 63 pages, 44 duotones, $60.
OPEN CALLS
International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2026 — Oct 31 · US$25 per image, every fifth entry free through Oct 24 · US$12,500 in prizes; photographs taken after January 1, 2021; no AI-generated images
Month of Photography Denver: Portfolio Review Equity Scholarships — Nov 3 · no fee stated · for artists with disabilities, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists; reviews Mar 12–13, 2027, at the Slate Hotel, Denver (standard registration $396 to $672)
Vital Impacts: 2027 Environmental Photography Fellowships — Dec 1 · no fee stated · one $20,000 and six $5,000 fellowships plus ten mentorships; one fellow shows at the Festival della Fotografia Etica in Lodi in 2027
ON THIS DAY
October 24, 1946 — A camera on a V-2 rocket takes the first photographs of Earth from space.
At White Sands in New Mexico, a team launched V-2 No. 13, a captured German rocket, with a 35mm movie camera on board that shot a frame every second and a half. The rocket climbed about 65 miles. The best earlier view, from the Explorer II balloon in 1935, had come from 13.7 miles up, so the camera saw Earth from almost five times as high. On the way down the rocket hit the ground at 500 feet per second, about 340 miles an hour. The camera was smashed, but the film survived in a steel cassette. “They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids,” Fred Rulli, a 19-year-old soldier on the recovery team, told Air & Space in 2006. Clyde Holliday, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory engineer who built the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950 that the pictures showed “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship.”
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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