There's a particular jolt that comes from seeing color in old photographs, a feeling that black and white, however beautiful, never quite gives you. It's the difference between knowing the past happened and feeling like you could walk into it. MK Gallery's new exhibition, Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Color, provides that jolt in spades. And for photographers who spend their working lives thinking about light, tone and the gap between a record and a memory, it's well worth paying attention.

Born in Paris, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) is best known for his black-and-white work: elegant, playful images of Belle Époque Paris, motor racing, aviation and the French Riviera set. He moved in a social circle that included Jean Cocteau, Grace Kelly and Pablo Picasso, and he's widely credited as a pioneer of the unposed, spontaneous snapshot.

What's far less known is that around a third of his preserved images were shot in color, and the bulk of that work, representing nearly 40% of his 100,000-image archive, has barely been seen until now.

This show puts that material front and centre, with over 150 works spanning his earliest experiments as a teenager through to fashion-world commissions in the 1960s and abstract floral studies in the 1970s. And the effect of seeing it together is less academic and more visceral than it sounds.

Startling intimacy

Lartigue first picked up autochrome, an early color process developed by the Lumière brothers, in 1912, and his earliest color pictures of family and friends have a startling, almost contemporary intimacy.

A striped tablecloth, a red and white curtain, a child's headscarf all read as color does today: specific, warm, slightly imperfect. Strip the same scene back to gray tones and it slides instantly into a section of your brain tagged "history". Leave the color in, and it feels closer to a memory you didn't know you had.

At the risk of stating the obvious, color carries information that monochrome discards: the exact pink of a hibiscus floating in a swimming pool, the red and white canopy of a parachute against Mediterranean sky, the warm orange of a sun-faded jacket. Lartigue understood this instinctively, decades before it became fashionable, or even technically straightforward, to think this way.

A lesson in patience

For today's photographers – used to easy, instant color – there's something humbling in remembering what this approach cost Lartigue. Gruelling exposure times running into several seconds, equipment that fought against spontaneity, and a process he eventually abandoned for nearly two decades before color photography became practical enough to suit his way of working. He kept at it anyway, on and off, for over 60 years.

The reward for that persistence is on the walls at MK Gallery now: a body of work that seems less like an archive, more like a window onto past time. If you've ever tried to capture a fleeting moment of family life, a beach afternoon or the specific quality of evening light on a river, you'll recognise exactly what Lartigue was chasing. And you're likely to come away from this show seeing your own color work a little differently.

Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Color runs at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK, until 4 October. Admission from free to £15.95.

Nature’s beauty never fails to amaze me, and the British Wildlife Photography Awards certainly captures the best of it. From the cutest of snoring ducks to fairytale woodlands and pond-skating frogs, the crowned images from the 2026 competition were spectacular, to say the least.

Now the awards will display its latest crop of winners in an extended exhibition at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London, England. From July 19 to February 27, you can look upon these beautiful works of art absolutely free of charge.

In total there will be 72 images and videos on display, including overall British Wildlife Photographer of the Year Paul Hobson’s perspective-bending shot of a pond-skating frog (above) – which was also the Black & White category winner.

Alongside this will be Ben Lucas’ frame of a dreaming cygnet snoozing on its sibling’s back, which earned him the title of Young British Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and also snagged the 15-17 Young Photographer category.

“This year’s winners celebrate the wonder, diversity and character of British wildlife in truly exceptional ways,” says Will Nicholls, director of the British Wildlife Photography Awards.

While the panel of expert landscape and wildlife photographers certainly chose deserving overall winners, the standouts for me were the Botanical Britain category winner (a shot of tiny mushrooms enveloped in a water droplet) and the runner-up shot in the Black & White category (of a seemingly larger-than-life fox).

“The portfolio showcases the skill and passion of the photographers behind the lens,” added Nicholls. “Together, they offer a joyful celebration of Britain’s natural world, while also reminding us why these places and species are so deserving of our care and protection.”

As a Brit, it’s great to see my fellow photographers being recognized for their outstanding work – and what an excellent opportunity for enthusiasts to cast an eye over some of the finest nature shots from the past year. Free of charge, too.

Visit the Horniman Museum and Gardens website for more info.

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Photography in Japan has historically been male-dominated, with entrenched cultural norms and strict gender expectations often sidelining women’s contribution to the craft while elevating the work of male photographers.

However, an upcoming exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London, England, is set to help change the narrative.

Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now will shed much-needed light on the pioneering women photographers of the mid-20th century to present-day Japan.

The exhibition will cover an array of themes, from identity and nature to motherhood and everyday life, highlighting the work of renowned as well as lesser-known women photographers who’ve helped shape Japan’s photographic history.

Among the better-known names whose work is featured is Ishiuchi Miyako, whose intensely personal black-and-white and color photography explores the intersection of political history, memory and the human body.

As one of Japan’s most celebrated contemporary photographers, Miyako has won many accolades. Perhaps the most pioneering, however, is the Kimura Ihei Award.

This is Japan’s most prestigious recognition of emerging photographers, but one which, in its first 25 years of running, was awarded to just three women photographers.

New-wave Japanese photography from the 1990s features heavily in the upcoming exhibition, too, with work from photographers such as Hiromix on display.

Hiromix was a driver of the everyday photography that came to the forefront in Japan toward the end of the last century, but which was dismissed by some of the older male generations simply as “girls’ photography”.

Ironically “girl photography” is perhaps one of the pillars of modern portraiture, which often takes a more provocative approach to the everyday.

Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now runs at The Photographers' Gallery, London, from June 24 to September 27. Standard tickets cost £12 (£9 concessions) or £10 if booked in advance online (£7.50 concessions), while gallery members enter for free.

For more information, visit the exhibition page on The Photographers' Gallery website.

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More than 5,200 photographers entered. Just 48 made the cut. That's a success rate of less than one per cent. Which makes getting a place in the Royal Photographic Society's International Photography Exhibition feel more like getting into an Ivy League university than entering a photography content.

But IPE167, which opens at London's Saatchi Gallery on August 7 and runs until September 11, is far more than a competition. Now in its 167th consecutive year, it's the world's longest-running photography exhibition, and it's as vital as ever.

The 113 selected prints span everything from 19th-century wet-plate collodion processes to motion picture film and thermal imaging, and the themes running through the work are anything but comfortable.

The show lands at a moment when photography's social and political power feels particularly charged. So it's no surprise that this is an exhibition about the world as it actually is, made by people paying very close attention.

Female perspectives

The two award recipients this year are both women whose work tackles the female experience head-on, but in very different registers.

Marcy Palmer, a US-based artist, receives the IPE Award for Seeds of Strength and Resilience, a series that uses botanical photography to explore the history and contested future of reproductive rights.

The plants she photographs, printed on delicate Japanese Kozo paper and highlighted with gold leaf, are historical herbal abortifacients; plants women have used for centuries when other options were unavailable to them. The gold leaf carries a double meaning: hope, and a reference to kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken objects with gold to make the repair part of the beauty.

The Under 30s Award goes to Léa Chen, a Taiwanese artist currently based in London, for The Stars That Don't Look Back. This series weaves together family archive photos, historical events and Taiwanese literature to document the private memories shared by three generations of women navigating colonial trauma and everyday life.

The images range from a close-up of white hair, shot so tight it becomes almost abstract, to a grainy, spotted black-and-white snapshot of women playing outdoors: fragile, precious, irreplaceable. Chen's ambition is to help viewers find inner peace in the safety net women have woven through history.

Worlds of water

Beyond these two winners, the range of photographic approaches on display is quite staggering. Take Abbey Hepner's portrait of Jane, a third-generation resident of the erased Colorado uranium town of Uravan, made using wet-plate collodion. That's a process more commonly associated with the 1850s, and brilliantly, the plates were washed with water from the river that still flows through the buried town.

That approach is subtly echoed by Siân Cann, a visually impaired photographer, who created her Retinopathy Forest series by decaying Polaroid photographs in saltwater and post-surgical eye drops. The resulting images mirror the visual disturbances of her own condition.

Elsewhere, Attilio Fiumarella's Swimmers gathers more than 100 people in the drained pool of Birmingham's Grade II*-listed Moseley Road Baths to protest its threatened closure. And Thomas Mandl's 5 Superheroes depicts kids displaced from eastern Ukraine, wearing homemade superhero costumes, standing in the rubble of a roofless ruin during a project trip with NGO ArtHelps. The costumes are improvised and the setting is bleak, but the impulse behind the image, that growing up amid war requires a particular kind of heroism, lands with real force.

Why this matters

In an era when everyone with a phone thinks they're a photographer, and images are produced and discarded at a near-incomprehensible rate, a show that selects 113 prints from more than 5,200 submissions, anonymously, with a panel that argues about what matters, is doing something worthwhile. IPE167 is a reminder that photography isn't just documentation. Done well, it's one of the sharpest languages we have for saying what needs to be said.

Last year's show at Saatchi Gallery attracted over 65,000 visitors, and this edition returns to the same venue, so the work will reach a larger audience than most art photography ever does. After London, the exhibition will tour to Taunton Museum (October 2026 to January 2027) and the Royal Geographical Society (April 2027).

RPS International Photography Exhibition 167 is at Saatchi Gallery, London, 7 August – 11 September 2026. Free entry. Details at rps.org.

Photographs from the lens of artists like Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Nan Goldin have helped both document and shape New York City’s history, so it only seems fitting that a new gallery and home for a longstanding New York-based photography organization will open with an exhibition of those images.

Aperture, a New York nonprofit known for its magazine, books, galleries, prints, and programs, is moving to a new home this fall – and it's bringing an inaugural exhibition celebrating iconic New York artists with it.

The longstanding publisher and nonprofit, founded in 1952, will open a new location on September 18 in New York City’s Upper West Side. The location at 380 Columbus Ave. and the intersection of 78th Street puts the multi-purpose building directly across from the Museum of Natural History, as well as close to the New York Historical and Central Park.

But the move isn’t just a home for Aperture staff working on the nonprofit's books, magazines, and prints. The space will house a gallery, which will open with Aperture Loves New York, an exhibition featuring a collection of photographers who have helped shape New York’s history.

While Apeture's current location on West 28th Street in Chelsea also had a gallery and store (now closed ahead of the move), the change will create a space with ground-floor visibility near some of NYC's most popular destinations.

The gallery exhibition will feature artists like Diane Arbus, Tina Barney, Dawoud Bey, Awol Erizku, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, Stephen Shore, Coreen Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.

The move will also house an event space for artist talks and public events, as well as a retail store with books and collectibles.

Aperture Executive Director Sarah Meister, who is also curating the gallery opening, says that the move focuses on “creating an open, dynamic space for encountering photography—one that invites dialogue, fosters discovery, and brings us into closer engagement with our community.”

The new space is inside a 10,000 square foot building originally built in 1886. Aperture says that the building has been “thoughtfully adapted” for its new purpose while honoring the building’s historic character.

“Aperture is a publisher, but it is also a cultural platform with a legacy that spans more than seventy years. This new space enables us to build upon this history and expand our audiences and activities while remaining committed to nurturing a vibrant culture around photography,” said Aperture board chair Cathy M. Kaplan.

Aperture will continue to rotate galleries after the inaugural New York exhibition. Additional public events are also being planned for the September opening.

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Few people know that Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) had an intimate relationship with photography that went beyond capturing his creations on the runway or for fashion magazines.

The famous French couturier and designer saw the camera as much more than just a marketing tool; he viewed it as a powerful creative device, collaborating with the 20th century’s most renowned fashion photographers such as Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn, to define his brand’s iconic image.

Now the International Center of Photography in New York will honor Saint Laurent’s close ties to photography, forged over a period of some four decades, with Yves Saint Laurent and Photography – an exhibition featuring nearly 300 images and other archival materials from the photographers he knew and collaborated with.

Along with works from the aforementioned names, creations by a wider array of fashion’s most famous figures – including Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, and Helmut Newton – will also be on display.

Saint Laurent recognized the power of photography early on, understanding its importance in shaping both his own persona and the identity of his fashion house, with his use of the artistic medium evolving in two key phases.

In 1957, Saint Laurent grasped the medium’s impact on personal branding, most famously exemplified by a portrait taken by Irving Penn when Saint Laurent was just 21 years old. A photograph of him following Christian Dior’s funeral cemented Saint Laurent’s image as Dior’s successor.

Later, in 1971, Saint Laurent demonstrated how photography could challenge boundaries and provoke scandal when he posed nude in a Jeanloup Sieff portrait to promote his men’s fragrance, Pour Homme.

Yves Saint Laurent and Photography will take place at the International Center of Photography Museum in New York from June 11 through September 28, with materials on display coming from the vast collections of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, dedicated to the late fashion designer and his legacy.

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The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has received an unprecedented gift of nearly 2,000 images spanning almost 200 years of photographic history. The donation arrives as the museum prepares to open 5 dedicated photography galleries in 2027.

This latest gift further expands VMFA's already extensive photography collection and could see it held in the same nationally recognized regard as other major US photography collections.

The 1,986-image donation forms what is essentially a survey of photographic history from the 19th century to the present day.

The extensive collection represents around 200 bodies of work from more than 450 artists, including some of the most celebrated photographers in US history, such as Alfred Stieglitz (1865-1946), Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) and Walker Evans (1903-1975).

French photographers are strongly represented, too, with the collection also featuring rare daguerreotypes by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892) and prints by Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884).

The donation was made by the non-profit foundation, Joy of Giving Something (JGS), and draws from the extensive photography collection of Howard Stein, a financier who began acquiring photographs in the 1980s and founded JGS in 1998.

Stein's collection has long been recognized as one of the most significant private photography holdings in the United States.

JGS previously made a donation to VMFA in 2023 that included Paul Strand's Photographs of Mexico (1940) and Larry Clark's Tulsa (1980), and the latest gift means that the majority of the Stein collection now belongs to the museum.

VMFA hopes that the timely donation will help it tell a more comprehensive story of the medium – one that stretches from the earliest days of photography to contemporary practice.

An exact opening date for the new galleries is yet to be given, but they form part of the museum’s wider renovation plans slated for completion by 2029.

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150 photos depict 185 years of the US mining industry in world-first historical exhibition.

I recently spoke to Toby Smith, the director of development and fundraising for the Belfast Photo Festival – which this year is hosting probably the most controversial photography exhibition in history.

Camera Obsolete will give visitors the choice between smashing up a camera, carefully dismantling it or buying it for a small fee, saving it from a violent death, with Smith saying the idea is to confront the rise of AI “so that we don't just happily slide quickly into a computational era,” forgetting all about mechanical cameras.

The announcement of this exhibition, as you can imagine, had the photography community up in arms, with people angry at the destruction of perfectly good cameras that could otherwise go to collectors or be put to working use.

While I stand with the wider community, when I take my love for cameras and distaste for unnecessary destruction out of the equation, the bigger issue that this exhibition represents becomes glaryingly clear.

The core reason these cameras are up for sacrifice is because of the frightening rate at which tech churn sees products become relics of history, quickly being replaced by newer models just a few years after their release.

Smith told me that among the doomed are older film cameras such as Ricoh 35mm rangefinders and a host of “wonderfully functioning Zenits”. There are also DSLRs including Canon EOS 300Ds, released in 2006, and even lots of “really nice Pentaxes from like 10 years ago.”

It might not seem like it now but, at one point, these cameras were all state-of-the-art, and the thought of smashing them up with a mallet would have been ludicrous.

But if these cameras were made obsolete, in some cases by just a decade later, what's to stop us from mashing up, say, a Sony A7R VI in ten years from now – as by then this model will surely be in such low demand because of its outdated specs?

I can’t deny how incredible modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras are, and that it is exciting to see how developments like AI-powered autofocus have taken photographic possibilities to new heights. However, we all are going to have to admit at some point that this incessant stream of bigger and better can't go on forever.

When do camera manufacturers decide that there are enough models on the market and that instead of releasing new ones, perhaps we retrofit older ones with newer specs – or even design cameras in a modular way that enables them to be refitted with minimal waste?

I’m not going to turn this into an environmental rant, and I certainly don’t have all the answers, but at the core of this discussion is the undeniable reality that the production and consumption of new cameras uses up irreplaceable natural resources that end up having a surprisingly short shelf life once the next model comes out, usually just three to four years later.

As for the cameras that will be destroyed during the Camera Obsolete exhibition, Smith said that a sculpture using the material waste will be made by participants, and that the event organizers are in talks with the Belfast Botanic Gardens for this sculpture to be on public display there for 50 years.

Despite this, I still see the exhibition as a bit of a silly one, needlessly promoting destruction instead of inviting people to use the cameras in the way they are designed – to capture beautiful images.

I think this would do much more for stoking the fire of mechanical photography that Smith and his colleagues think generative imagery is slowly putting out. But will the exhibition worsen the rate at which we are filling the world with new cameras and subsequently making current models obsolete? Also no.

This is the bigger issue here, and one that the photography (and tech industry as a whole, for that matter) has to answer for – as well as consumers.

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We very rarely see the faces of the men and women working in the industries that quite literally power our economies, and perhaps even rarer is photojournalism documenting these laborers at work, especially those carrying out their jobs in remote, often dangerous places such as oil fields or deep underground.

While challenging to create, this sort of photojournalism does exist and, for the first time ever, a photographic exhibition dedicated to industrial natural resource extraction in the US will be displayed.

Organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Beneath the Surface will depict 185 years of these industries in some 150 images from 100 different photographers, with their subjects spanning black-faced coal miners to oil-drenched field operators.

Many of the featured images are drawn from the National Gallery’s collection, spanning early daguerreotypes taken during the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s to the unprecedented industrialization of the 20th century, with the works highlighting the range of visual strategies employed by photographers operating in trying conditions.

Among the more notable photographers included are Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), especially known for her iconic Depression-era image Migrant Mother; and pioneering ‘muckraker’ photographer Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940), notable for documenting young children working in harsh conditions during the Progressive Era.

While the exhibition shines a light on individuals who worked within US natural resource extraction industries and the photographers who immortalized them, it also reveals the complex industrial processes involved in these lines of work — processes, ironically, needed in order for cameras to be produced.

Beneath the Surface is free to enter and will be on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, from May 23 - August 23, 2026. The exhibition then moves to the Milwaukee Art Museum from October 23, 2026 - January 18, 2027, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art from February 15 - May 9, 2027.

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A US photography archive has announced that it plans on digitizing a behemoth collection of work by Todd Webb (1905–2000), the renowned US photographer best known for documenting the streets of New York and Paris in the immediate years following World War II.

The extensive body of work, which includes some 15,000 prints and a staggering 50,000 negatives created by Webb, was acquired by MUUS Collection, a New Jersey-based archive and platform dedicated to 20th-century photography, who made the announcement last week.

Webb’s post-war photography is celebrated for intimately depicting life spanning wartime austerity through to post-war optimism, with a focus on urban environments.

He was an advocate of “straight photography,” a modernist movement that championed unmanipulated photographs in sharp focus, pioneered by figures including Ansel Adams, a contemporary and friend who influenced Webb.

However, unlike many contemporaries who preferred smaller 35mm cameras, Webb used a large-format camera to capture stark detail, especially architectural lines. His subjects ranged from downtown skyscrapers to children playing in suburban neighborhoods, documenting New York from 1945 onward and Paris between 1949-1953 as the cities transitioned back to peacetime.

Later, in the 1950s, Webb received Guggenheim Fellowships enabling him to document the pioneer trails of early American settlers as he crossed the US on foot from New York City to San Francisco.

Active into the 1980s, Webb also photographed fellow renowned artists and friends, including painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), and photographers Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) and Dorothea Lange (1895–1965).

MUUS Collection also said Webb's archive includes journals and ephemera documenting the photography community of post-war New York, with plans to also digitize these alongside the newly-acquired prints and negatives.

In November, MUUS Collection will exhibit works by Todd Webb alongside those of pioneering documentary photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) at Paris Photo.

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Acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been at the forefront of documenting the environmental impact of industrial mineral extraction for more than 40 years.

Burtynsky's work, often created from high above the landscape, tells a sobering yet somehow visually beautiful story of humanity’s ever-growing levels of consumption.

Fueled by a seemingly insatiable demand for natural resources, this relentless extraction leaves permanent scars on landscapes, destroys fragile ecosystems, degrades habitats and threatens biodiversity across vast regions of the planet, which Burtysnsky captures in large-format frames.

This year the photographer has returned to Photo London, a prominent UK photography and image-based arts fair, to exhibit his latest project documenting industrial resource extraction in Western Australia from the air.

The exhibition revisits many of the same locations featured in the series Australian Minescapes, Burtynsky’s first entirely aerial project, in which he covered the environmental damage caused by sites including iron ore operations in the Pilbara region and gold mining in the Eastern Goldfields.

Returning to locations such as nickel extraction operations at Lake Lefroy, Burtynsky continues to chronicle the ongoing and accelerating rate at which humanity is consuming materials that cannot be replaced.

This time, however, the aerial work focuses on the natural resources fueling the global shift toward electrification, including aluminum, lithium and silver.

The collection delivers a stark warning about capitalism’s increasingly damaging impact on nature, while also prompting conversations about sustainability, responsible consumption and the environmental cost of technological progress.

Edward Burtynsky: Western Australia – Recent Works is exhibiting today at Booth HO1 of The Flower Gallery, as part of Photo London’s Public Programme.

Today is the last day of the fair, which for the first time has been taking place at Olympia London – the historic events venue in Kensington. For more information, visit the Photo London website.

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Behind the Berlin Wall, fashion photography in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the Seventies and Eighties developed a visual language shaped by everyday life rather than consumption or spectacle.

At Photo London, a selection of 22 rare vintage prints by Ute Mahler from 1978 to 1989 is on view until tomorrow, presented by Galerie Peter Sillem – showing a defining body of work by one of the most influential figures in German photography.

Originally published in the East German magazine Sibylle, the images place fashion within ordinary streets, courtyards and urban settings.

Many of these photographs have since been widely regarded as iconic, reflecting a distinctive visual language that moves between editorial presentation and observation, capturing a society in which style, identity and social reality were closely intertwined.

Fashion photography in the GDR

In the GDR, fashion operated within a planned economy rather than a consumer-driven market.

Clothing was produced in a limited variety, with access to international brands, trends and advertising culture restricted. As a result, fashion did not function the same way as in Western Europe, where mass consumption shaped visual culture.

Instead, personal style emerged through constraint. Fashion became less about consumption and more about personal interpretation within existing limits.

Within this framework, Ute Mahler developed an observational approach to fashion photography rooted in everyday life.

Ute Mahler: between fashion and observation

The prints presented at Photo London are part of a rare surviving group of works that have become significant. They reflect a fashion culture shaped by the conditions of a restricted environment, where everyday life unfolded behind the Berlin Wall.

Seen today, the photographs offer a layered view of life in East Berlin at the time, positioned between editorial fashion and documentary photography.

Alongside this series is Monalisen der Vorstädte (Mona Lisas of the Suburbs, 2008–2010) by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. This series presents young women in a pared-back, classic style referencing Leonardo da Vinci's portrait to explore themes of identity, transition and belonging.

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler have worked together for decades and co-founded the Ostkreuz photography agency in Berlin in 1990. Their shared practice continues to focus on portraiture and everyday life, positioned between documentary observation and careful visual construction.

For more information, visit the Photo London website.

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Rosalind Fox Solomon (1930-2025) was an American fine art photographer renowned for her often intimate black-and-white portraits depicting human suffering, rituals and resilience in a stark manner.

During a career spanning almost 60 years, Fox Solomon traveled far and wide to tell visual stories of the harsher realities of life, while managing to build genuine connections with her subjects – epitomized by her 20-year-long project photographing a shepherdess in the Ancash region of Peru.

This year, Fox Solomon’s work is debuting at Photo London, a prominent British photography and image-based arts fair, exhibited by Julian Sander Gallery. The exhibition, which is taking place until May 17 at Olympia London in Kensington, focuses on 30 years of Fox Solomon’s career from the Seventies to the Nineties.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curated selection of 15 rare, large-format prints from Fox Solomon’s series Portraits in the Time of AIDS. Perhaps the artist’s most celebrated project, she undertook it during 1987-88 when the AIDS epidemic reached its peak.

The photographer’s aim was to humanize the individuals suffering from the deadly disease during a time when it was heavily misunderstood and stigmatized.

Among the subjects depicted in this intimate collection of portraits are AIDS patients as well as their loved ones, which was Fox Solomon’s attempt at highlighting the devastating impact of the disease.

Wider works from Fox Solomon on display include portraits taken in the mid-Seventies in the southern United States, as well as an “extensive” series of photos depicting her friend and fellow photographer William Eggleston – who is widely credited with increasing recognition of color photography as a legitimate artistic medium.

You can view Julian Sander Gallery’s presentation of three decades of Rosalind Fox Solomon’s work at Photo London now. Entrance to the event requires a ticket, but the exhibition itself is free to enter at booth C01.

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Look beyond the alluring models taking center stage in many Helmut Newton photographs, and you’ll see an equally dazzling car playing into the luxurious narrative that his work typically embodied.

While Newton (1920-2004) wasn’t an automotive photographer by specialty, he had a passion for cars – especially expensive cars, as they embodied the decadent, free-spirited lifestyle he led.

Now, an Italian designer brand, Larusmiani, and Italian automotive and “highlife” event, FuoriConcorso, have organized a world-first exhibition of Newton’s car-focused imagery.

Helmut Newton. Cars will display a selection of images crafted by the artist between 1956-2001, and will take place in the garden of the empathic Villa Olmo, on the shores of Lake Como, Italy – where Newton worked repeatedly from the Seventies onwards.

While the open-air exhibition runs from May 15 to June 30, and is free to enter for 2 days, it forms part of this year's edition of FuoriConcorso, KraftMeister, itself taking place May 16-17 – and for which you'll need to buy tickets.

Visitors can admire some of Newton’s most iconic portraits featuring cars, from the 1985 shot of Princess Caroline of Monaco in a Mercedes-Benz 280 SL, to actor Nicolas Cage seated behind the wheel of a Lamborghini Miura in Hollywood, 1998.

The exhibition comes more than 20 years after Newton’s death. The artist’s impact has been described as “transformative"; his photographic and artistic style revolutionized fashion photography with themes of voyeurism and eroticism portrayed in high-contrast, narrative-driven scenes.

A longtime Vogue contributor, Newton’s daring, often controversial black-and-white images depict glamorous, powerful women rather than passive subjects, challenging traditional norms of fashion photography. Cars often played into this narrative, with many saying they represented Newton’s wild streak.

Helmut Newton. Cars, a world-first exhibition dedicated to the late photographer's more automotive-focused work, runs from May 15- June 30 at Villa Olmo, Lake Como. The event opens at 10:00 on the first day, with opening hours of 07:00-23:00 thereafter.

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There's a quote in the press release for Sophie Green's forthcoming exhibition that will resonate with any photographer who's been told their work is a bit much. A friend, she recalls, once described her aesthetic as looking like "a kid who ate loads of Skittles and vomited them back up". Her response: "It's the best compliment I've ever received."

That chromatic fearlessness is immediately evident in the images Green has shared ahead of Tangerine Dreams: Rituals of Belonging in Contemporary British Life, which opens at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol this summer.

There's a racegoer at Ascot with a miniature horse paddock, complete with white fencing and model horses, built into the brim of her hat. There are twin boys at a horse fair, slicked back hair and Polo shirts, almost mirror images of each other. There's an Irish dancer's crystal-encrusted collar catching the sun at the Kent Championships. All of it shot on film; all of it saturated and alive.

This is all the result of spending more than a decade embedded in communities that rarely receive documentary treatment without a trace of condescension: banger racers, traveller families, modified car enthusiasts, dog show devotees, church congregations. Her engagement with the banger racing world alone spans 11 years. She doesn't turn up, shoot and leave; she comes back again and again, until people stop performing for the camera and simply live.

The Martin Parr connection

The exhibition carries an additional layer of meaning from its venue. The Martin Parr Foundation, which supports photographers working in Britain and Ireland, holds Parr's archive following his death in 2025. Green had a close working relationship with him in his final years, inviting him to review her archive in 2024 as she prepared this very project.

Parr's enthusiasm was particularly strong for her five-and-a-half-year series on life and death rituals across Britain's multicultural communities; he noted the near-total absence of funeral photography from our visual culture and urged her to keep going. "Shoot more," he told her.

Green was subsequently invited to document Parr's own funeral. Those photographs will be shown alongside Tangerine Dreams in a vitrine display, making this exhibition both a debut and a tribute.

What photographers can learn

Green's practice is a useful counterpoint to the increasingly rapid churn of documentary photography. In an era when a project can feel complete after a single weekend's shooting and a well-curated Instagram grid, she's spent years building trust with people who've every reason to be wary of cameras. The banger racing crowd, traveler communities, Afro-Caribbean church congregations she's photographed since 2018: these are communities that have often been misrepresented, reduced to cliché or simply ignored.

Her technical approach is equally considered. The images have the warm, slightly unpredictable quality of medium-format film, all grain and tonal richness. Color here isn't just a stylistic choice; it's almost an ethical position. To photograph Britain's margins with the same chromatic generosity usually reserved for fashion shoots is its own kind of manifesto.

She's also clear-eyed about the stakes. Council restrictions, gentrification and prejudice are eroding the spaces many of these communities depend on. Photography can't stop that, but it can leave a record. "Gatherings that persist in spite of these pressures," she says, "become acts of cultural resistance."

Tangerine Dreams was self-published as a photobook in 2025 and sold out within a week. A second edition will be released to coincide with the exhibition. If you missed the first run, don't make the same mistake twice.

Tangerine Dreams: Rituals of Belonging in Contemporary British Life is at the Martin Parr Foundation, 316 Paintworks, Bristol, BS4 3AR, UK, from June 4 to September 6, 2026. Entry is free. An artist talk and book signing takes place on June 17. Gallery opening times: Thursday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm; Monday to Wednesday, open on request.

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Photographers have been finding creative ways to stylize images with color since long before digital RGB.

Back in the late 19th to early 20th century, one of these techniques was orotone, which involved printing an image on glass backed with gold-colored paint to create a shiny and luxurious golden appearance.

Perfected by ethnologist and photographer Edward S. Curtis around 1918, orotone – also known as Curt-Tones – were high-end prints that appealed to followers of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Now, Robert Mann Gallery in New York is displaying a collection of almost 100 of these exuberant creations in an exhibition called Gold Standards: The Art of the Orotone.

The orotone images on display cover all sorts of subjects, from beautiful landscapes to interesting architecture.

While the identities of many of the authors have been lost to time, some of the works were created by photographer and scientific inventor Arthur Clarence Pillsbury.

In 1906, Pillsbury set up shop in the newly established Yosemite National Park, where he photographed sites such as Vernal Falls and El Capitan, glorifying them with a golden glow. Ansel Adams would later immortalize these same sites, albeit in black-and-white images.

It’s fascinating to see how photographers were able to achieve such creative and lavish-looking images back when post-processing technologies were in their infancy.

Of course, these days, the orotone aesthetic can be easily achieved using tools such as Lightroom, although it’s the shiny effect that plays a large part in the viewing experience.

Gold Standards: The Art of the Orotone can be viewed in person and online until May 16. Public visiting hours at Robert Mann Gallery are Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m., and Saturday from 11 a.m.–6 p.m. For additional hours, please make an appointment with the gallery.

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Planes might not be the only thing you see taking flight Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport over the next few weeks. That’s because a renowned dog photographer is currently exhibiting a series of adorable photos of canines quite literally flying through the air.

Dogs in Flight features 10 images of the cutest canines running in nature, snapped at the precise moment all four legs are off the ground. The artist behind it is Jack Jackson, a Toronto-based, award-winning dog photographer who forged an unparalleled bond with his own rescue dog, Jet, who sadly passed away in 2025.

Jackson is presenting Dogs in Flight in partnership with Toronto Animal Services—the government-run agency that manages the care of stray animals and pet adoptions in the city, with a view to promoting rescue dog adoption.

Commenting in a press release, Jackson said: “I’ve always believed that dogs have a way of changing our lives, and rescue dogs, perhaps more than any, remind us that we too can change.”

“So often, rescue dogs help us just as much, if not more, than we help them,” said Jackson in the press release, adding: “When surrounded by love, we all have the chance to fly—every one of these photos represents a dog with a story and a chance at a new beginning.”

Jackson is also the founder of Rescued by Love (formerly Don’t You Want Me), a photographic storytelling project documenting the transformative relationships between LGBTQ+ people and their rescue dogs. His work has toured across Canada and been widely recognized in Canadian media.

Dogs in Flight is exhibiting now until May 20 within the atrium at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. The final day of the exhibition, May 20, coincides with National Rescue Dog Day, with a rescue dog adoption event being held in the airport atrium. Further details about that event will be shared closer to the date on Jackson's website.

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In some ways, every photographer has a unique process, from the way they eye up a composition to the choices they make in post-production. However, never have I come across a photographer who transforms street scenes into gold and silver metallic works of art, nor one who presents these in 3D books that add an immersive dimension to experiencing their work.

But this is how Sandra Cattaneo Adorno, a street photographer from Brazil who, in fact, picked up a camera for the first time at 60 years old, goes about her work. You might see Adorno’s approach as elaborate or luxurious, but I see it as her way of expressing a unique and abstract view of life through the lens.

This year, Adorno will exhibit her latest project, Fragments of Light. For this body of work, Adorno chose to print her images using metallic silver ink on navy blue paper to “transform quiet scenes of daily life into mystical works of art”. A very intentional decision, perhaps the reflective nature of the color silver represents the fragments of life and energy we see in the scenes.

Adorno’s previous book, Ten Years (2024) – a celebration of a decade in photography – employed an equally unique approach, albeit with different metallic choices. For this book, Adorno printed her images in gold ink on matte black paper, capturing the warmth, nostalgia and melancholic memories of life in Rio de Janeiro as only someone who’s lived there could.

Sandra Cattaneo Adorno: Fragments of Light, will be on view May 9 – November 22, 2026, at Palazzo Bembo during the 8th Edition of Personal Structures: Confluences, Venice. You can find her previous books Ten Years (2024), Scarti di Tempo (2022) and Águas de Ouro (2020) at Radius Books.

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There are exhibitions where you walk around admiring individual photographs, and there are exhibitions that change how you think about photography itself. Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, opening at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London on 28 July, very much fits into the second box.

With more than 100 works by 38 photographers, it traces American urban life from the early 1900s to the close of the 20th century. What makes it genuinely valuable isn't just the quality of the individual images, though that's considerable. It's the sweep: the chance to watch photography figure out what it's for, in real time, across a century of history.

From ambition to urgency

The show opens in the early 1900s, when American cities were exploding with immigration and industrial change, and photographers were working out, more or less from scratch, how to document it. Lewis Hine's workers cling to the steel skeleton of the Empire State Building in his 1930 image Riding the Ball High up on Empire State, a photograph that manages to be both record and argument. At the same time, Alfred Stieglitz was redefining what the medium could be; his 1907 image The Steerage reveals the realities of labour and class with a directness that still lands hard.

Then the Depression hit, and photography's purpose sharpened dramatically. Dorothea Lange's White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 and Margaret Bourke-White's Augusta, Georgia, 1936 show what happens when photographers point cameras at poverty without flinching. The result isn't comfortable, but it's honest, and that shift from ambition to urgency is one of the exhibition's key arguments.

For street photographers, the middle section is likely to be the highlight. The New York Photo League, active from the 1930s through to the early 1950s, produced some of the sharpest social documentary work in the history of the medium, and several of its key figures are well represented here: Weegee, Ruth Orkin, Aaron Siskind and Rebecca Lepkoff among them. So too are Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter, whose studies of New York street life set a standard that photographers are still reaching for, and Roy DeCarava, whose tender images of life in Harlem belong in any honest account of what photography can do.

Berenice Abbott's mid-century records of New York's changing skyline provide a different kind of counterpoint, setting new architectural forms against the city's historic fabric in a way that feels quietly radical. Arthur Leipzig's Divers, East River, 1948 is another highlight: kids launching themselves off a pier, peripheral urban space briefly transformed into something joyful.

By the 1960s and 1970s, something shifts again. Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander bring a new restlessness to street photography, less interested in solidarity than in strangeness, in the odd and unsettling textures of modern life. Ed Ruscha and Robert Adams turn their attention to the built environment itself, the highways, car parks and strip malls of the American west.

The show doesn't shy away from the harder material of this period. Mary Ellen Mark's The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, 1987 confronts homelessness directly and without sentimentality. Peter Hujar's Richie, 1985 offers an intimate portrait of communities ravaged by the AIDS crisis.

These aren't easy photographs, but they're necessary ones, and their inclusion here is part of what gives the exhibition its moral weight.

The closing argument

Portrait of a City concludes with Bruce Davidson's celebrated Subway series (1980–1985), whose vivid, unflinching photographs of New York underground riders feel like a fitting end: raw, immediate, formally assured, made by a photographer who'd spent decades learning exactly how close to get.

Taken together, the show makes the case that photography's great subject isn't any particular city. It's people, how they live, how they're shaped by the places around them, and what survives when the moment has passed. The collection is drawn entirely from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation in Norway, making this a rare UK chance to see it. 

Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from July 28 – October.4, 2026

There's a specific kind of photographer who doesn't wait to be told something is important. Case in point: British photographer Janette Beckman was in a dressing room in Milan in 1981 when punk frontman Joe Strummer struck a pose that managed to be both absurd and iconic. Another day, in 1987, she was in a New York studio with a hip-hop group that was about to change how America talked about race, power and music (Public Enemy). The lesson isn't complicated, but it is hard: you have to show up before the world catches on.

Now, her impressive body of work – spanning four decades and more than 700 photographs – is the subject of Rebels + Icons: The Photography of Janette Beckman, opening at the Museum of Pop Culture (MOPOP) in Seattle on 15 May. The most comprehensive exhibition of Beckman's photographs assembled to date, it runs through to 8 September 2027 and includes rare archival prints, contemporary collaborations and newly unearthed images.

Right place, right time

Beckman worked in London at exactly the right time, building her reputation shooting the mod revival and early punk scenes, before relocating to New York, where she embedded herself in the emerging hip-hop world.

The two genres were a generation apart in sound but similar in spirit: working class, confrontational, fashion conscious, and deeply suspicious of the mainstream. Beckman's eye recognised the continuity, even when nobody else was drawing the line.

The timing of the new exhibition is pointed. 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of punk in the UK, and MOPOP is positioning Rebels + Icons as a meditation on how subcultures are born, how they evolve and, occasionally, how they conquer. For anyone who photographs music, youth culture or street life, her career reads like a masterclass in access, empathy and patience.

Beckman's own description of her working method is free of mysticism. "I've always been attracted to rebel cultures," she has said. "My journey has taught me there are no roadmaps. Being an artist is about following your passion no matter what happens. Photography is a practice and I am still practicing."

What 700 photographs actually means

From a technical standpoint, the scale of this exhibition raises an interesting question: what does it take to sustain a coherent visual identity across four decades, multiple continents, several film formats and the eventual, grudging arrival of digital?

Looking at Beckman's work chronologically, the answer seems to be less about equipment than about proximity. She consistently managed to get close, not just physically but relationally, shooting subjects who appear relaxed, unguarded and occasionally oblivious to the camera.

The exhibition goes beyond static prints, incorporating film, interactive elements and live programming. Visitors will be taken behind the lens, gaining insight into Beckman's process alongside the finished images. Michele Y. Smith, CEO of MOPOP, describes it as "a living archive of cultural movements".

The deeper argument that Rebels + Icons makes, I think, is that documentary photography at its best is an act of faith. You commit to a subject, a scene or a community before you can prove it matters. You spend the time, you take the pictures, you come back.

Today, Beckman's archive of punk, hip-hop and street fashion is regarded as culturally essential. In the moments the shutter fired, it was just a Tuesday.

Peter Hujar was born in 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey, and raised in poverty before making his way to New York City as a young man. He went on to become one of the most important photographers of the 20th century: revered by anyone who cared seriously about the medium, but largely unknown outside it.

His black-and-white portraits have a quality that is almost impossible to fake: a stillness and intimacy suggesting the subject has genuinely allowed themselves to be seen. Susan Sontag wrote the introduction to his 1976 book Portraits in Life and Death. His influence on photographers including Nan Goldin has been immense. He died of AIDS in 1987, aged 53.

This spring, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York opens Hujar: Contact (May 22 to October 25 2026), drawing on its archive of more than 5,700 of Hujar's contact sheets. And for photographers specifically, that's the bit that makes it most interesting.

Why contact sheets mattered

If you've only ever shot digitally, a contact sheet might need explaining. In the film era, before you committed the time and expense of a full darkroom print, you'd lay your negatives directly onto photographic paper and expose them all at once, producing a grid of thumbnail images in the order you shot them. It was your Lightroom library, your first honest reckoning with what you'd actually got.

Typically photographers would examine them with a loupe (a small magnifying glass designed for inspecting film), marking selects with a chinagraph pencil (a waxy marker that writes cleanly on glossy surfaces and wipes away if you change your mind).

In short, contact sheets are the part of photography most photographers keep to themselves. They show everything: the misfires, the near-misses, the frame before the decisive one and the frame after it.

New York time capsule

Hujar began filing contact sheets and assigning them job numbers at age 21, and continued until his death, logging more than a thousand shoots in meticulous job books. Many sheets bear his editing marks in varying colours of oil pencil, a personal notation system for decisions about cropping, sequencing and printing. Those marks make the sheets read less like an archive and more like a lesson.

It's one thing to stand before a Hujar portrait and admire its stillness. It's another to see the contact sheet it came from, to understand the alternatives he considered and dismissed, the moment he chose and the ones he didn't. Photography is often described as an art of instinct. Hujar's contact sheets suggest it was, for him, equally an art of deliberate and sustained looking.

The exhibition brings together more than 110 sheets and 20 enlargements. The subjects range across downtown New York life: Susan Sontag, Candy Darling, Iggy Pop, Marsha P. Johnson, David Wojnarowicz, John Waters. Hujar wasn't photographing these people from the outside, he was embedded among them. And the sheets collectively chart, as the show's curator Joel Smith puts it, the sea changes of gay life from Stonewall to the AIDS crisis.

There's an argument that the contact sheet is a casualty of digital photography. Scrolling a Lightroom catalogue doesn't accumulate in the same physical way. You can't annotate it in oil pencil and hand it to a researcher 50 years later. Hujar's archive is a reminder of what careful record-keeping makes possible, both for the photographer and for everyone who comes after.

Hujar: Contact is at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York from May 22 to October 25. The accompanying 364-page catalogue is being published by MACK, costin $70 / £55.

There's a particular irony in using a camera to document humanity's relationship with nature. Zed Nelson, the Sony World Photography Awards' Photographer of the Year 2025, has spent six years doing exactly that, and the results, now on show in London, are as beautiful as they are unsettling.

The exhibition is The Anthropocene Illusion, opening at Somerset House on April 17 as part of the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards exhibition, running until 4 May. It's the most expansive UK showing of the project to date, with previously unseen works alongside those that won Nelson the Photographer of the Year title last year.

What the pictures actually show

Look at the two images released ahead of the exhibition and the project's thesis becomes immediately apparent. The first (above) is a fish tank, its plastic coral rendered in colors too vivid to believe; its composition painterly and precise.

The second (below) shows rows of red deckchairs arranged before a painted tropical backdrop at an indoor swimming complex, a few oblivious figures wandering through the frame. Both images work because they resist editorialising. The lighting is measured, the framing cool. Nelson lets the strangeness speak for itself.

To my mind, that restraint is the work's greatest technical achievement. It would be easy to photograph these environments with satirical intent baked in, to make the fakery look ugly or comic. But Nelson does the harder, braver thing. He treats artificial landscapes with the same care he might bring to any serious documentary work, and trusts the viewer to feel the dissonance.

The broader series extends this approach to a wider range of subjects: holidaymakers on synthetic beaches, indoor rainforests, zoo dioramas and artificially lit aquariums. Nelson also turns his lens on what passes for real nature in the age of mass tourism: a traffic jam of SUVs inching through Yosemite National Park, a champagne breakfast on safari in the Maasai Mara, ski slopes kept alive by snow guns on a mountain that's quietly melting.

Building a visual case

The Anthropocene, the term the project takes its name from, refers to the proposed geological epoch defined by humanity's impact on the planet. The argument it makes is quite profound: that in a tiny sliver of Earth's history, one species has permanently altered the conditions of life for all the others.

Nelson has been building his visual case for six years across four continents. The cumulative effect is less a polemic, more of a lost lament, a record of the gap between what's disappeared and the simulations we have built to paper over it. Since the industrial revolution and the mass shift to cities, he argues, "ancient bonds with nature" have been broken, but the craving for connection remains, and commerce has been happy to supply a version of it.

The prize and what it means

The exhibition only exists, by the way, because of how the Sony World Photography Awards structures its top prize. Each year, the Photographer of the Year is given a solo platform at the following year's exhibition. Nelson's show is the direct result of that opportunity, and that's worth noting.

The Photographer of the Year 2026 will be announced at a gala on 16 April, chosen from the 10 professional category winners. The winner receives a $25,000 cash prize, Sony Digital Imaging equipment and the same platform Nelson now occupies: a solo show at the 2027 exhibition.

The Anthropocene Illusion is at Somerset House, London, April 17 to May 4 2026. The accompanying book is available from guesteditions.com. For more information visit worldphoto.org.

The National Portrait Gallery is set to celebrate what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday (born June 1, 1926) by hosting an exhibition that will explore her life, career and legacy. Marilyn was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century, but Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait is set to wow audiences by displaying previously unseen portraits from Allan Grant’s famous Life magazine photoshoot, which took place at Monroe’s Brentwood residence just weeks before her untimely death in August 1962.

Although 432 images were captured during Grant’s exclusive and intimate portrait session with Marilyn, only eight were originally published alongside Life associate editor Richard Meryman’s interview on August 3 1962. Marilyn passed away the following evening. According to the National Portrait Gallery, Grant captured the actor reading a transcript of the interview and performing various emotions.

But Marilyn was far from a passive subject. The exhibition will also highlight her role as a creative collaborator, directing sessions and curating images by rejecting those she didn’t like. All this is alongside a wide range of images from throughout her career, from the young model, still predominantly known as Norma Jeane, to the illustrious actor and cultural icon, Marilyn Monroe.

As well as an incredible selection of artists, including Andy Warhol and Pauline Boty, the exhibit will include the works of over 20 era-defining photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Philippe Halsman, Bernard of Hollywood, André de Dienes, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Milton Greene, Sam Shaw, Richard Avedon, and George Barris.

The exhibition will run from June 4 to September 6 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and is accompanied by the book Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait. Tickets are priced at £25 to £27, but free for National Portrait Gallery members.

According to Rosie Broadley, the joint-head of curatorial & senior curator of 20th century collections at the National Portrait Gallery: “It has been a privilege to spend time curating an exhibition about a woman who both defined and challenged the era in which she lived. In addition to her iconic beauty, Marilyn Monroe had inimitable attitude, intelligence, strength and humanity and it is no surprise that she held such fascination for artists working during her lifetime and in the decades since.”

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Leica will celebrate another milestone in its long and distinguished history this year, as 2026 marks 50 years since the opening of the first Leica gallery.

In recognition of 50 years of “preserving, promoting and progressing photography”, Leica will host a “major exhibition" displaying 50 images from select artists at the company’s inaugural gallery in Wetzlar, Germany.

According to the company, the included images will feature the full spectrum of Leica photography, capturing “intimate moments, fascinating stories and creative perspectives”.

The first Leica gallery opened its doors in 1976 at the company's Wetzlar headquarters. Since then the network has grown to 26 locations worldwide, with the aim of presenting the artistic, historical and social value of photography.

Karin Rehn-Kaufmann, art director of Leica Galleries International, said: “For me, photography is the most exciting artistic medium because a large proportion of the population encounters it on a daily basis.”

Throughout five decades, Leica has opened galleries in cities including Boston, Kyoto and London, and this year it's set to open more in Chicago and Shanghai.

These galleries have put on “iconic” exhibitions displaying photos by renowned photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastiãn Salgado and Steve McCurry, as well as those from other famous names such as Bryan Adams and Lenny Kravitz.

Rehn-Kaufmann said that works by professionals are an “indispensable part of Leica’s world”, playing a key role in the galleries’ mission of sharing the company’s enthusiasm for photography globally.

Last year was also a major one for Leica as it celebrated a half century of Leica Historica, a photo-historical society documenting Leica and its camera systems, and 100 years since the release of the Leica 1, the first mass-produced 35mm Leica model.

This year’s celebrations will take place at the Wetzlar headquarters in June, with the exact date(s) to be announced. The 50 images on show will be chosen by current Leica gallery directors.

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There's a photograph of two children on a seesaw. Nothing unusual, except they're sitting six metres underwater off Fiji, perfectly still, hair floating upward, performing an everyday gesture where human life cannot be sustained. For photographers, the immediate question isn't what it means (that's clear), but how Nick Brandt made it happen.

The answer reveals everything about Brandt's approach. In stark contrast to the way photojournalists work (capturing events as they unfold), the Oxford-born photographer stages elaborate scenes requiring months to plan and weeks to execute. As a result, 67 large-format images from his four-chapter series The Day May Break are being shown together for the first time at Gallerie d'Italia in Turin from 18 March to 6 September 2026.

The technical challenge

Despite what some may assume, that underwater seesaw – part of SINK / RISE, Chapter Three (2023) – isn't a digital composite. Brandt physically transported playground equipment to the Fiji seafloor, weighted it and worked with local families to create images that are simultaneously beautiful and devastating.

The technical demands must have been unbelievable. Managing natural light filtering through water. Dealing with visibility issues. Maintaining compositional control when everything wants to float away, ensuring subject safety.

But Brandt isn't doing this to show off. He's doing this because the people portrayed underwater, performing ordinary domestic gestures in an impossible environment, represent Pacific Island communities facing permanent displacement. It's a glimpse of futures already being written.

Months, not moments

From a photography point of view, we're a long way from the fashionable emphasis on spontaneity and decisive moments. Each chapter in Brandt's series involves months of preparation with local crews who understand terrain and communities. Scenes are carefully staged. Lght and atmosphere emerge through patience and responsiveness to nature's unpredictabilty. Weeks of printing and selection follow.

Chapter One (2021), shot in Kenya and Zimbabwe, sees rescued animals alongside people displaced by climate disasters (cyclones, droughts) placed within the same frame. These aren't candid shots but carefully composed tableaux. Chapter Two (2022) continues in Bolivia, where a monkey appears in sharp focus while human figures recede into fog. The staging is theatrical, yet subjects' dignity remains uncompromised.

For photographers accustomed to working alone, Brandt's collaborative model is instructive. He works with local teams who know the communities, understand cultural sensitivities, and can facilitate the complex logistics of positioning people and animals in extraordinary circumstances. A behind-the-scenes section of the exhibition reveals this methodical approach in detail. It's a useful counterpoint to photography culture's romanticisation of the lone artist.

Refugees and resilience

The Echo of Our Voices, Chapter Four (2024), commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo, makes its debut here. Shot in Jordan, it portrays Syrian refugee families in desert landscapes where water scarcity worsens with climate change. A young girl stands atop a concrete pedestal against jagged mountains, her wind-blown dress and direct gaze suggesting both vulnerability and resilience.

Climate photography at this scale requires institutional support. Brandt's large-format prints and months-long production demand resources editorial assignments rarely provide. And overall, this exhibition's grand scale – 67 large-format images across four continents – offers photographers a case study in sustained project development.

Developing this show has involved years of commitment, complex production and ethical collaboration with communities under extraordinary stress. But it's been time well spent: the results are technically accomplished, morally engaged and uncomfortably timely.

Nick Brandt. The Day May Break. The light at the end of the day runs from 18 Mar-6 Sep at Gallerie d'Italia, Piazza San Carlo 156, Turin, Italy.

When Don McCullin stepped into Crowthers Reclamation Yard in Isleworth in 1963, surrounded by broken Roman busts and weathered statuary, he was already establishing his reputation as a photographer documenting conflict and urban decay. What he captured that day – his only self-portrait – has never been exhibited in the UK. Until now.

The image seems oddly prophetic. This was McCullin at the height of his war photography years. Yet here he is, immersed in the classical antiquities that would become a significant preoccupation decades later.

The self-portrait will be unveiled as part of an exhibition titled Don McCullin. 90, at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK. For photography enthusiasts, this offers a rare opportunity to trace the entire arc of McCullin's seven-decade career.

What makes the 1963 self-portrait particularly compelling is its prescience. McCullin was then best known for visceral images of gang culture, poverty, and war zones. Yet this photograph, taken at a salvage yard filled with Roman sculpture, hints at an aesthetic sensibility that wouldn't fully emerge until decades later.

Fast forward to his Southern Frontiers series, a 25-year survey of Roman Empire remains, and the connection becomes clear. The 90-year-old photographer has spent recent years documenting broken classical sculptures in museums worldwide, work that forms the centrepiece of a concurrent exhibition, Broken Beauty, at The Holburne Museum, Bath. Those ancient, fragmented faces echo the statuary crowd that witnessed his 1963 self-portrait.

McCullin himself has articulated why these sculptures matter to him: "These are the best antidote to the grim realities of the front line," he said. "I hold in awe the mouldering stone, the fragments of dreams and the mysteries of the vanquished past." Looking at that 1963 self-portrait, it's as if he instinctively understood this therapeutic relationship with antiquities, decades before he could name it.

Conflict to contemplation

The twin exhibitions showcase McCullin's remarkable range. The Holburne Museum show presents his most recent Roman sculpture studies (not previously shown in the UK), made using ink-jet printing that gives the images extraordinary physical presence. This technical choice is significant: bridging contemporary digital output with ancient subjects.

"Over the years going to various wars, this corner of Somerset has saved and restored my sanity," McCullin has said. His black-and-white Somerset landscapes reveal a photographer who understands place's redemptive power. His still lifes, composed in his garden shed, draw inspiration from Flemish and Dutch masters; a different philosophy of photography entirely.

The Roman sculptures at The Holburne Museum, broken survivors from the ancient world, offer their own commentary. These fragmented statues possess a dignity that perhaps only someone who has witnessed human suffering could truly recognise and honour.

And ultimately that 1963 self-portrait, finally getting its UK debut, serves as the connecting thread. McCullin surrounded by ancient faces, at once present and timeless, documenting and documented. It's an image that photographers of any genre might study; not just for its formal qualities, but for what it reveals about creative evolution. 

Sometimes, it seems, a photograph knows more about the photographer's future than the photographer does themselves.

Don McCullin. 90 runs February 14 -April 12 at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton.
Don McCullin: Broken Beauty runs until May 4 at The Holburne Museum, Bath.

Tate Britain is currently running the UK’s largest-ever retrospective of famed photographer and photojournalist, Lee Miller. But for the full experience, you’ll also want to visit Lyndsey Ingram’s Lee Miller: Performance of a Lifetime.

This more intimate exhibition, in the heart of London, was curated by Clara Zevi and organized in collaboration with the Lee Miller Archives.

The exhibition will showcase 34 photographs by the prominent New Yorker, whose incredible life was recently brought to the big screen in Kate Winslet-led biopic Lee.

A portion of the proceeds from the exhibition will directly support the conservation of Lee Miller’s photographs, as well as the founding of a charity to preserve Farleys – Miller and Roland Penrose’s East Sussex home.

The exhibition covers the photographer’s return to Paris in 1929 to the end of the Second World War, and is said to explore the role that theater, staging and performance played in her work.

In 1925, an 18-year-old Lee left New York to study at a technical theater school in Paris, L’Ecole Medgyes pour la Technique du Théâtre, run by French-Hungarian artist Ladislas Medgyes. She returned to New York the following year to attend Vassar College. Despite still being a student, she was asked to lecture on contemporary European theater.

In 1929 she would return to the French capital and thus would ensue a remarkable 15-year period of her life, where she was heavily involved in the surrealist movement, formed a lifelong bond and indeed collaborated with Man Ray, and photographed the Second World War as a correspondent for Vogue.

It’s this incredible period of Lee’s life that Performance of a Lifetime delves into.

Lyndsey Ingram is currently showing Lee Miller: Performance of a Lifetime at 20 Bourdon Street, London, England. The exhibition runs until February 25 2026.

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If there's one style dominating photography right now, it's the stripped-back look: clean shots, natural light, real moments. David LaChapelle is the complete opposite. And his biggest US museum show, opening at the Orlando Museum of Art this week, might be exactly what we need to see right now.

While everyone else chases candid moments, LaChapelle builds entire worlds. His photos aren't captured spontaneously; they're constructed over days with massive physical sets, teams of people and a weird technique he invented as a teenager: literally painting on his negatives before developing the film.

This method came from his background as a painting student at North Carolina School of the Arts. When he couldn't get the intense colors he wanted in the darkroom, he just grabbed a brush and painted straight onto the negatives. It's like building a skyscraper when everyone else is putting up tents.

Making things matters

At 17, after his first gallery show in New York, Andy Warhol hired LaChapelle to shoot for Interview Magazine. By 1997, The New York Times was saying that he'd influence the next generation of photographers the way Richard Avedon had.

But LaChapelle's real impact goes beyond his look. At a time when photography increasingly means pointing your phone and letting software do the rest, his work is all about actually making things.

Titled As the World Turns, the Orlando show includes behind-the-scenes footage showing what goes into each shot: sketches, models built from junk food containers, days building sets that only exist for one shot. It's photography as Hollywood production.

The show features over 100 works from four decades, from early celebrity shots of Tupac Shakur and David Bowie to religious scenes that remake Renaissance paintings with modern pop culture. There's even a brand new large-scale piece inspired by old fresco techniques; because apparently regular photography wasn't ambitious enough.

Where most photography tries to look natural – the "I just woke up like this" vibe – LaChapelle celebrates the artificiality. His images are obviously staged, obviously painted, obviously unreal. And somehow, by going to that extreme, they reveal truths about celebrity worship, consumerism, religion and environmental disaster that more "authentic" approaches miss.

Take his celebrity portraits. Most portrait photographers try to uncover the "real" person behind the fame. In contrast, LaChapelle photographs the fame itself; turning his subjects into modern-day saints or consumer products. It's both celebrating and mocking celebrity culture at the same time, using advertising's own tricks against it.

This approach, as you might expect, requires massive teams. Unlike the lone photographer wandering streets with a camera, LaChapelle works with set builders, lighting crews and digital artists.

His photos are closer to movie productions than traditional photography; which makes sense since he's also directed music videos for Britney Spears, Elton John and others, along with the documentary Rize, about LA street dance.

More is more

For those used to Instagram's minimal aesthetic, this more-is-more approach is a useful reminder: there's not just one way to make good photos. Sometimes going big actually works better than going small.

With AI threatening to turn photography into something that algorithms generate, LaChapelle's insistence on physically building everything feels almost rebellious. These are images that required someone to actually construct something, paint something, light something and photograph something that really existed.

Whether this hands-on approach is photography's future or its past is anyone's guess. But for anyone sick of the tyranny of minimal aesthetics and "real-life" moments, As The World Turns shows that you're allowed to build big, exaggerate wildly, go completely over the top… and still make photos that matter.

David LaChapelle: As the World Turns is open now at Orlando Museum of Art, 2416 N Mills Ave, Orlando, FL 32803 and runs until May 03.

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Martin Parr, who died last December aged 73, was best known for his highly saturated color work. But before The Last Resort brought him to fame in 1986, he'd spent years mastering black-and-white photography with the same forensic eye and wry humour.

Now a new exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London, England, reveals exactly what that looked like.

The show centers around his final major black-and-white project, shot in rural Ireland in the early 1980s. A Fair Day, running from February 06 to April 19 2026, shows work that Parr himself felt had been overshadowed by his later projects.

Poignantly, he'd been planning this exhibition with the gallery throughout 2025 – believing that these images spoke to contemporary debates around community and social change. Now, posthumously, they offer us a chance to study the craft foundations that underpinned his career.

Technical shift

Here, working in rural communities during 'fair days' (gatherings for trade, entertainment and religious observance), Parr deployed patience and a keen eye, rather than the confrontational intimacy of his later macro work.

These are silver gelatin prints, now extremely rare, showing traditional darkroom craft. The tonal range, composition and timing reveal a photographer who'd thoroughly mastered classical documentary technique before later choosing to abandon it for something more provocative.

The photographs document Ireland in transition: cattle trading and horse fairs alongside abandoned Morris Minors and partygoers in 1980s fashion. At first glance, these scenes appear timeless. But look closer and you spot plastic cups at holy wells, TV aerials creeping into pastoral scenes.

This was exactly the kind of detail-oriented observation that would later define Parr's color work, yet rendered with the subtlety that monochrome affords. The conclusion is striking: Parr's eye for the telling detail, the gap between tradition and modernity, the absurdity hiding in plain sight; all this existed before the color and flash made it unmissable.

Avoiding clichés

Even in monochrome, Parr's images avoid the romantic clichés into which documentary photography about rural Ireland easily falls. The exhibition text notes his "characteristic wit ensured the images avoided cliché."

That wit – the slight distance, the eye for contradiction, the refusal to sentimentalize – would become more obvious in the color work, but it's fully present here in more subtle form.

For photographers working in black-and-white today, these images offer a template for how to be affectionate without being reverential, observant without being voyeuristic, documentary without being didactic.

With the complete arc of his career now visible, these shots reveal how much his approach was consistent across technical changes. The same eye that saw plastic cups at holy wells in 1982 would see Union Jack deckchairs on littered beaches in 1984. The medium changed. The seeing didn't.

Coinciding with Global Warming, a retrospective with a broader sweep running right now in France, A Fair Day offers an enticing chance to see a master's apprentice work, made when he still had something to prove.

These photographs remind us that before Martin Parr changed documentary photography, he had to learn how to do it the traditional way first. He just did it better than most.

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Circulation(s), Europe's premier festival dedicated to showcasing new photographic talent, is returning for 2026. And whether you're a young photographer seeking international exposure and professional development opportunities, or an older hand seeking inspiration and new perspectives from the next generation, it promises to be a must-see.

Since its founding in 2011, Circulation(s) has established itself as a crucial platform for photographers in the early stages of their careers. The festival's distinctive approach comes from its management by the Fetart collective, a group of seven independent curators specializing in emerging photography who bring diverse sensibilities to the selection process.

Running from March 21 to May 17 at Centquatre-Paris – a large multipurpose art space in the city's 19th arrondissement – the festival will present work from 26 artists representing 15 different nationalities.

For 2026, the artistic direction welcomes three new members – Caroline Benichou, Ioana Mello and Lucille Vivier-Calicat – joining established curators Carine Dolek, Laetitia Guillemin, Marie Guillemin and Emmanuelle Halkin.

Diverse inspirations

The selected works demonstrate the breadth of contemporary photographic practice. Czech artist Alžběta Drcmánková combines digital photography with seed bead embroidery, in a meditation on memory and fragmentation.

Belgian photographer Marcel Top tackles surveillance technology through his series Poison Data, Kill Algorithms, deliberately corrupting facial recognition datasets as an act of resistance against mass surveillance.

Documentary approaches feature prominently, with Italian photographer Davide Degano exploring the suppression of Slovenian heritage in his grandmother's home region, and French artist Manon Tagand investigating her family's colonial past in Cameroon through salvaged photographs and film reels.

Polish photographer Joanna Szproch, meanwhile, has spent over a decade building a complex visual universe that challenges Catholic norms through photographic performances with her daughter.

Experimental techniques push boundaries throughout the exhibition. Slovak artist Nina Pacherová uses in-videogame photography and digital weaving to examine social conditioning, while Brazilian photographer Ricardo Tokugawa creates meticulously constructed images questioning tradition and identity.

Ukrainian artist Olia Koval's installation Eruption features 40,000 handcrafted red-winged bugs invading a living room, metaphorically representing Russian occupation.

Four Irish photographers will present work exploring themes of identity, community and transformation. Belfast-based Ellen Blair's Homemade Undercuts celebrates hair as a canvas for queer kinship and self-expression. Clodagh O'Leary documents children and youth in republican areas of County Derry, examining how historical conflict continues to affect new generations.

Elsewhere, Donal Talbot's Becoming explores queer identity through nature, while Ruby Wallis's Bloodroot & Foxglove uses cameraless processes including anthotypes and lumen-prints created during walks with people seeking asylum in Ireland's oldest cultivated gardens.

Professional opportunities

Beyond the exhibitions, Circulation(s) offers practical support for career development. The festival's professional weekend brings together photographers and industry experts for portfolio reviews, with individualized sessions providing direct feedback on work.

Meanwhile a number of masterclasses cover essential topics including publishing, scenography and photographic printing, while festival partners offer technical and legal advice.

Visitors can vote for the Public Prize, awarded to their favorite photographer from the exhibition; a recognition that can significantly boost an emerging artist's profile.

The festival also features photo studios where professionals offer portrait sessions to the public, providing both income opportunities for artists and demystifying professional photography practices.

In short, for anyone watching contemporary trends or seeking inspiration from peers working at the cutting edge of the medium, Circulation(s) offers a concentrated view of where European photography is heading in 2026.

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Martin Parr, one of Britain's most acclaimed documentary photographers, died on December 06 aged 73 – just weeks before a major retrospective was due to open at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, France. The exhibition, Global Warning, running from January 30 to May 24, 2026, was planned in collaboration with Parr himself.

Its premise is both simple and devastating: for five decades, while documenting tourists and consumers with his characteristic saturated flash, Parr was actually capturing the causes of climate breakdown – even though nobody was explicitly framing it that way.

This isn't, then, a photographer pivoting to environmental activism in his final years. It's a recontextualisation of work that was always there, hiding in plain sight behind the humor and garish colors.

Accidental environmentalist

Running at the same time as The Last Resort exhibition in Bristol, England, the new Paris show brings together around 180 works spanning from the late 1970s to recent years.

It's organized into five sections: beaches transformed by mass leisure, consumerism as religion, global tourism's contradictions, humans' relationship with animals, and technological addiction.

Recurring motifs emerge (waste, cars, fossil fuel consumption, overconsumption) that viewers might have noticed, but never considered as a coherent environmental record.

Working with Parr before his death, the thesis of curator Quentin Bajac was that every time the former photographed a littered beach, a traffic jam of tourists or someone photographing their food, he was actually documenting the climate catastrophe in progress.

In other words, he wasn't just documenting quirky tourist behaviour. He was creating a visual database of how mass mobility, enabled by cheap flights and fossil fuels, was reshaping both destinations and visitors. The work doubles as both social satire and carbon footprint visualization.

Importantly, none of this was ever lecturing or self-important. Parr never positioned himself as intellectually or environmentally superior to his subjects. In 2022, he acknowledged: "We're heading for catastrophe, but we're all heading there together."

He freely admitted his own substantial carbon footprint and never adopted the preachy tone that makes so much environmental photography difficult to digest.

Changing times, changing meaning

This idea of reinterpreting photography decades on might seem strange or controversial, but it certainly does make you stop and think. A 1997 Parr image of a globe-shaped beach ball on sand in Benidorm was, at the time, a witty observation about packaged leisure. In 2026, we see our planet itself being treated as a disposable toy.

The photograph hasn't changed; we have.

For photographers thinking about long-term projects, it's all very instructive. Parr shot what interested him (the gap between aspiration and reality, the absurdities of modern life) and the work has proved durable enough to support multiple interpretations as society's concerns evolved.

That close-up of sticky fingers holding ice cream isn't just about food; it's about immediate gratification and disposability. Tourists photographing the Mona Lisa on phones isn't just about technology it's about experience mediated and commodified. The packed indoor beach in Japan isn't just surreal; it's about artificial environments replacing natural ones.

What photographers can take from this

The exhibition arrives when photography is expected to be "addressing" climate change. But that needn't necessarily mean defaulting to melting glaciers and polar bears. Parr's approach suggests that shooting people with shopping trolleys might ultimately prove more effective documentation of the problem.

His 2021 statement applies perfectly to this exhibition's thesis: "I create entertainment that contains a serious message if you want to read it, but I'm not trying to convince anyone – I simply show what people already think they know."

Global Warning proves he was showing us what we didn't know we knew: that we were documenting our own environmental collapse, one holiday snap at a time. And he did it with a flash, a macro lens and a willingness to look closely at what everyone else preferred to ignore.

Martin Parr: Global Warning runs at Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, from January 30 to May 24. Entry €14 ($16 / £12 / AU$24) or €7.50 ($8.75 / £6.50 / AU$13) for under-25s during the week.

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When Nan Goldin shot the photographs that would be published in 1970s as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, she didn't really know what she was doing with light. As she told the Guardian years later, "That series is stark. It's all flash-lit. I honestly didn't know about natural light then and how it affected the color of the skin because I never went out in daylight."

For some, that would be a career-limiting admission. For Goldin, it was precisely the point. Now, from January 13 onwards, all 126 images from the seminal photobook will be shown at Gagosian in London. It's the first time the complete body of work has been exhibited in the UK.

The timing feels significant for anyone interested in how photography moved from the margins into the centre of contemporary art discourse. Because what Goldin achieved with her on-camera flash and Cibachrome prints was nothing short of a technical and aesthetic revolution.

Slideshow that ate the art world

The genesis of Ballad began in New York, where Goldin moved after graduation and began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Before the series became a book, it was a constantly evolving slideshow screened in New York nightclubs, accompanying everything from Frank Zappa's birthday party at the Mudd Club to live performances by the Del Byzanteens, a live band featuring Jim Jarmusch. The audience's immediate reactions shaped its form night after night.

This was photography as performance art, as living document. Crucially, it was photography made by someone who was part of the world she documented, not observing it from outside. "I don't select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life," Goldin says today. "These pictures come out of relationships, not observation. They are an invitation to my world."

That insider status, combined with her flash-lit snapshot aesthetic, upended everything the art establishment thought photography should be. Here was work that was technically "wrong" by conventional standards, deeply personal to the point of exhibitionism, and yet somehow spoke to universal experiences of intimacy, power, gender, and loss.

Camera as memory machine

Shot between 1973 and 1986 in the bars, bedrooms and bathrooms of New York, these photographs document what Goldin called her tribe with unflinching honesty. The flash creates harsh shadows and saturated colors. The compositions are often awkward. But the emotional truth shines through, and that's what makes these pictures special.

By the time Whitney Biennial screened the slideshow in 1985 and Aperture published the book in 1986, Goldin had created what many consider the most influential photobook ever produced. It's now in its 23rd printing, a remarkable achievement for work that began as something shown to friends in nightclubs.

Tthe photographs in Ballad document a world that no longer exists. Most of Goldin's subjects have since died; friends are preserved only in these flash-lit frames. The work has become both a celebration of life lived intensely and a memorial for a lost generation.

Lessons for today

"I'm still impressed that generation after generation finds their own stories in Ballad, keeping it alive," Goldin reflects today. And surely, that's the ultimate validation for any creative practitioner: creating work so rooted in personal experience that it becomes universal.

For photographers working in 2026, when everyone has a camera in their pocket and social media has made the snapshot aesthetic ubiquitous, Ballad offers some important lessons. That technical perfection can be overrated. That intimacy and honesty matter more than formal beauty. And that sometimes, not knowing the "rules" frees you to make work that changes the rules entirely.

Forty years on, in an age when we're drowning in images, Goldin's flash-lit intimacy still cuts through. That's the mark of work that matters.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is at Gagosian, 17-19 Davies Street, London, from January 13 to March 21, 2026.

It's been almost a month since documentary photographer Martin Parr left us. He spent over 50 years capturing everyday British life with saturated colors and a satirical eye, and leaves behind an enormous body of work. But Parr knew which photographs mattered most.

When asked about his legacy, he said that when he reached the Pearly Gates, The Last Resort – his breakthrough series from 1986, capturing working-class holidaymakers at a rundown seaside resort – would be the first he'd pull out. Now, following his death, his eponymous Foundation is doing exactly that; putting those pictures front and center in a new exhibition.

Color heretic

This show isn't just a memorial, though. Opening at the Martin Parr Foundation in February. It's a reminder of how radically one man changed what documentary photography could be... and how long it took for the establishment to catch up.

His technical choices alone were revolutionary. Parr used a Plaubel Makina W67 medium-format film camera to shoot The Last Resort, and chose to work in color when "serious" documentary photographers still worked in black and white. In the context of the time, this wasn't just an aesthetic decision; it was practically heretical.

The new exhibition will display that very camera alongside contact sheets and ephemera, offering visitors a rare glimpse into the working methods behind images that have influenced thousands. But the real controversy wasn't about color film. It was about class, who deserved to be photographed, and how.

In 1983, having recently moved to the Merseyside town of Wallasey with his wife Susie, Parr started cycling the couple of miles to New Brighton, a Victorian seaside resort that had fallen on hard times. Where others might have documented decline with "sympathetic" monochrome, Parr deployed ring flash and saturated color to capture working-class holidaymakers eating chips, sunbathing on concrete, and making the best of things in Thatcher's Britain.

The series featured highly saturated shots of beachgoers lit by lurid flash. The aesthetic borrowed from commercial photography and garish postcards; exactly the sort of visual language that "serious" photographers dismissed as vulgar.

And when The Last Resort opened at London's Serpentine Gallery, critics were vicious. He was accused of being cruel, voyeuristic, patronising; a view that some people still hold to this very day. Yet Parr's response was characteristically blunt: "Why shoot the messenger?"

What critics missed

Susie Parr's recollection is telling: "When the show opened at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool in the winter of 1985, guests dressed appropriately, with rain hats, swimming costumes, lilos and Pac-a-Macs," she says. "No one batted an eyelid at the images: that was what New Brighton was like." In other words, while middle-class critics saw condescension, the working-class people of Liverpool simply saw themselves. Were the former, one wonders, in fact projecting their own class prejudice onto the pictures?

For photographers, there's a lesson here about seeing versus judging. Parr's macro lens put his subjects under the microscope, but my view is that he wasn't dissecting them; he was getting close enough to see them clearly. The resulting images may feel uncomfortable to some, precisely because they're honest; capturing people in unguarded moments without the flattering distance that "respectful" photography often maintains.

Today, when every documentary photographer works in color and intimate, flash-lit observations of everyday life have become commonplace, it's easy to forget how radical this approach once was. The exhibition's archival materials, including some of the postcards by Tony Ray-Jones and John Hinde's that influenced Parr, will help today's photographers understand the visual grammar he was building from.

Fitting tribute

The Last Resort wasn't about poverty tourism or class condescension. It was about British resilience, about finding joy in imperfect circumstances, about the gap between the mythology of a traditional seaside holiday and the reality of concrete and litter. Parr found that gap fascinating, not contemptible.

And for Susie Parr today, the new exhibition is all a fitting tribute. "I do hope that as many people as possible will come to see the show," she says. "It's the best possible way we could open up again; truly a celebration of the extraordinary, the one-off Martin Parr."

The Last Resort opens at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, UK, from February 20 – May 24, 2026. Entry is free.

Within 48 hours of photography's public announcement in Paris on 19 August 1839, George Shaw had created Birmingham's first daguerreotype. This wasn't luck. While most people were still trying to understand what Daguerre's mysterious process meant, Shaw was already coating silver plates with light-sensitive chemicals in his Queens College laboratory.

His advantage? He knew that great photography begins with great materials.

That insight matters now more than ever. Today's photographers obsess over sensor size, ISO performance, and processing speed. Shaw and his collaborator John Percy were doing exactly the same thing in the 1840s, only their battleground was silver plate quality rather than silicon wafer purity. The principle, though, remains the same.

Overdue recognition

Shaw's story is now being told through a free exhibition at Birmingham's West Midlands Metro Town Hall stop. It reveals a man who understood that technical innovation drives creative possibility. In this light, he wasn't just Birmingham's first photographer, but also its first photography technologist.

Shaw and Percy's 1844 experiments at Queens College focused on one goal: faster exposures. They discovered that electroplated silver, manufactured using Birmingham's revolutionary new galvanic process, produced plates with superior light-sensitive properties compared to traditional clad silver.

For context, early daguerreotypes required three to 15 minutes of stillness. Shaw's work with improved silver plates helped push the boundaries of what could be photographed. His surviving daguerreotypes include street scenes of Birmingham's New Street, capturing horses, carts and shop fronts, as well as portraits of Victorian families.

Any modern photographer who's pushed their camera beyond ISO 6400 to freeze a moment in failing light understands what Shaw was aiming for here. While the technology may change, the fundamental challenge – capturing life as it happens – remains constant.

Manufacturing meets art

Birmingham's metal trades gave Shaw a unique advantage. The city's innovation in electroplating, led by the Elkington company, wasn't intended for photography. But Shaw recognised that better manufacturing processes created better photographic materials. Luckily, as a patent agent, Shaw had direct access to Birmingham's manufacturers. He knew which factories were pushing boundaries in silver plating. He understood the chemical properties of different metal preparations. He could source experimental materials before they reached commercial production.

The new exhibition, researched by artist Jo Gane and curated by the late Pete James, showcases reproductions of Shaw's daguerreotypes. These aren't just historical curiosities. They're proof that technical excellence and artistic vision have always been inseparable.

Above: watch this video to find out more about George Shaw

Shaw taught chemistry, helped establish Birmingham's first free public library, advised the Great Exhibition of 1851, and lectured at the Royal Society. Some of his calotype photographs currently reside in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Yet in his home city, he remains virtually unknown outside specialist circles.

That's something this free exhibition, which is funded by Colmore BID, will hopefully set right. It runs until January 2026 at the West Midlands Metro Town Hall stop in Victoria Square. For modern photographers, it offers a chance to see where our obsession began; when capturing a sharp image required genuine chemical expertise and manufacturing innovation.

Riccardo Ghilardi recently photographed 42 of cinema's biggest names – including Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Sharon Stone, Willem Dafoe and Zoe Saldana – inside Italy's National Museum of Cinema in Turin. And the resulting exhibition, opening this week at Gallerie d'Italia, demonstrates just what happens when you treat your subject as a creative partner, not a passive model.

The brief was straightforward: transform the Mole Antonelliana, the museum's iconic tower building, into a film set. But rather than dictating poses and concepts, Ghilardi gave each actor and director freedom to interpret the space however they wanted. 

Some subjects chose quiet intimacy, drinking tea in dressing gowns as if the museum were home. Others went theatrical; dancing on the exterior dome, exploring areas normally closed to visitors. Each image reflects genuine creative input from both photographer and subject, not just a single vision.

Taking a step back

The results speak for themselves. When subjects contribute ideas rather than simply following directions, you capture personality instead of just likeness. Ghilardi created a clear framework – the museum setting, the cinematic theme – then stepped back and let people surprise him.

Ghilardi's collaborative instincts lie deep in his career as a photographer. Born in Rome in 1971, an early project in 2007 saw him documenting his own fire brigade unit. The following year, he photographed Italian actresses in abandoned film institute buildings, and during the Covid lockdown, he captured Italian film figures in their home surroundings. During each project, he followed the same approach: strong concepts that give subjects space to be themselves.

For those who are interested in his creative process, the exhibition features QR codes linking to behind-the-scenes footage and artist commentary. This gives us the chance to see how Ghilardi negotiates with subjects, when he offers direction, when he holds back. These moments of visible collaboration show how collaboration is not about surrendering control, but sharing it strategically.

Classic films, unmade movies

Sixteen of the images in the show reference classic films, including Mary Poppins, A Clockwork Orange and The Red Shoes. Others look like stills from unmade movies. All are Ghilardi's compositions, but also each subject's interpretation of cinema and architecture.

Captions identify museum materials used in each photograph, connecting Ghilardi's work to the institution's collections. The accompanying book by publisher Allemandi positions the project within the museum's 25-year history. In short, every element of the show acknowledges multiple contributors rather than asserting a singular artistic vision.

For working photographers, this is all a great demonstration of how collaboration doesn't mean losing your vision or damaging your ego: Ghilardi's visual style remains consistent throughout. But what it does mean is recognizing that subjects bring valuable creative input that can strengthen, rather than dilute, your work.

Ultimately, the photographs in this exhibition are not standard publicity shots or conventional museum portraits. They're something stranger and more interesting: 42 different creative conversations captured as photographs. And each of them shows what becomes possible when you trust your subjects to be more than just faces in front of your lens.

Riccardo Ghilardi. Piano sequenza la Mole runs from 12 November 2025 to 1 March 2026 at Gallerie d'Italia in Turin. The exhibition is curated by Domenico De Gaetano and marks the 25th anniversary of the National Museum of Cinema. Visitors presenting tickets from either institution receive reciprocal discounts. The accompanying book The temple of cinema is published by Allemandi and curated by Carlo Chatrian, director of the National Museum of Cinema.

Just five months after his death in Paris, Sebastião Salgado's extraordinary vision is returning to Germany. Opening on October 25 at Galerie Bene Taschen in Cologne, Sebastião Salgado. A Retrospective offers a rare opportunity to experience the full scope of a career that redefined documentary photography.

The exhibition brings together works from the Brazilian photographer's monumental series Genesis, Workers, Gold, Exodus and Other Americas. As such, they span decades of dedication to documenting both humanity's impact on the planet and the enduring beauty of the natural world.

Running until 21 February 2026, it coincides with a complementary solo show at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne titled Amazônia, Photographs by Sebastião Salgado.

Why this matters

Salgado's work divides opinion, and that's precisely what makes this retrospective essential viewing. Critics have accused him of aestheticising suffering, of making poverty and hardship too beautiful. His defenders counter that his exquisite compositions dignify his subjects rather than exploit them. The truth probably sits somewhere between.

His 1986 photographs from the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil, showing 50,000 workers carved into terraced mud like figures from a Renaissance vision of hell, are undeniably beautiful. They're also profoundly disturbing. That tension is where Salgado's power resides.

His Workers series, which he described as a "visual archaeology" of vanishing labour, documents traditional craftsmanship and physical toil across continents. There's an elegiac quality to these images, a mourning for ways of life being erased by globalisation. Whether you see this as romantic nostalgia or urgent historical documentation probably depends on your own politics.

Environmental activism

What's indisputable is Salgado's commitment beyond the frame. With wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, he founded Instituto Terra in 1998, transforming 17,000 acres of degraded Brazilian land back into Atlantic Forest. Over three million trees have been planted. This wasn't a photographer dabbling in environmentalism; it was environmental restoration practised with the same intensity he brought to his lens.

Genesis, his meditation on pristine landscapes and indigenous communities, emerged from this worldview. As he put it in 2021: "For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt like nowhere else on earth."

Salgado died on 23 May this year, aged 81, his health compromised by malaria contracted years earlier in Indonesian New Guinea. His passing removes one of the few remaining photographers whose work commanded genuine cultural authority beyond the photography world.

Time for reflection

This retrospective arrives at a moment when documentary photography feels increasingly fragmented and uncertain of its purpose. Salgado represented something unfashionable: the belief that sustained, serious photographic work could matter, could change minds, could bear witness in ways that mattered.

His son Juliano's documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-directed with Wim Wenders, captured something essential about his father: photography as a form of devotion rather than profession. Whether you emerge from this exhibition inspired or critical, you won't be unmoved.

This retrospective won't be the last word on Salgado's legacy, of course. But it does represent an essential chapter in understanding what documentary photography was capable of achieving, in the hands of someone who refused to settle for less than everything.

This winter, the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) is presenting Still Glasgow, an ambitious photographic survey drawn from Glasgow Life Museums’ collection.

Opening November 29 and running until April, it features more than 80 works spanning from the 1940s to today. And together, they make a persuasive case that Glasgow’s appetite for change shapes not just what’s photographed, but how.

“Glasgow is a city that has energy, creativity and a history of invention and change,” says curator Katie Bruce. Plenty of industrial cities could claim the same, but this exhibition suggests something more distinctive. Glasgow doesn’t just allow experimentation; it demands it. This is a city that refuses to be photographed the same way twice.

The idea came when Bruce and Malcolm Dickson from Street Level Photoworks visited the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. What they found wasn’t a single aesthetic tradition, but a jumble of competing visions; all trying, and often failing, to pin down a city in constant motion.

The range of work is striking. Oscar Marzaroli’s 1960s street photography set one template for seeing Glasgow: lyrical, humanist, full of dignity in tenements and shipyards. Decades later, Roderick Buchanan’s 1999 film Gobstopper turns the everyday experience of holding your breath through the Clyde Tunnel into conceptual art. Both claim to show the “real” Glasgow. Both are right.

Constant reinvention

Some cities seem to have fixed photographic identities. Edinburgh? Castles and Georgian symmetry. Liverpool: docks and Beatles nostalgia. But Glasgow keeps shedding skins. The Red Road Flats once symbolised municipal ambition, then social failure, then nostalgia. Iseult Timmerman’s 2015 photos, taken before their demolition, capture a city already looking ahead.

Yes, Glasgow trades heavily on its past, but its best photographers pull back against nostalgia. Eric Watt’s 1960s photo of a girl at a chalk-marked wall could easily slip into sentimentality, but doesn’t; because Watt saw children not as picturesque subjects, but as participants in the city’s self-creation. Meanwhile, contemporary contributions from Glendale Women’s Café and Romano Lav highlight how reinvention continues in communities long ignored by the photographic establishment.

Bruce’s curatorial statement says the exhibition “looks beyond nostalgia and asks how the city can imagine its future.” And this isn't just rhetoric. Glasgow’s visual history is full of attempts to freeze it in time: crumbling tenements, fading industries, lost working-class authenticity. But the strongest work here resists that impulse, and instead shows what genuine creative engagement looks like.

It’s not about pointing a camera at interesting subjects; it’s about finding new ways to express what the city feels like. Jane Evelyn Atwood’s 1994 portrait at the Great Eastern Hotel captures transience and vulnerability. David Eustace’s 1993 Buskers Portfolio documents street performers embodying the city’s resilience. Elsewhere, Alan Dimmick’s portrait of Franz Ferdinand reflect how Glasgow’s music scene generates its own visual culture. 

In short, Glasgow’s “history of invention and change” plays out in its photography as restlessness. The city refuses to settle into one identity. Post-industrial, yes, but also a university town, music hub, architectural showcase, immigrant destination and cultural capital; each producing its own version of Glasgow.

For photographers, that’s both challenge and opportunity. Glasgow rewards experimentation but defies definitive statements. Its energy isn’t something to capture; it’s the force pushing photographers to keep finding new ways to see.

Still Glasgow runs from November 29 2025 – April 2026 at the Gallery of Modern Art, Royal Exchange Square. Admission is free.

This autumn, Tate Britain is presenting the UK’s largest-ever retrospective of Lee Miller, a photographer whose life and work continue to fascinate and inspire photographers.

Running until February 15, 2026, it brings together around 230 prints, unseen archive materials, and various ephemera, tracing Miller’s extraordinary evolution from surrealist muse to war correspondent and visionary artist in her own right.

If you’ve read my previous pieces on the film Lee or the recent books that explore her life, you’ll already know I consider her one of the most vital figures in 20th-century photography. This exhibition feels like the moment she takes up the space she deserves, not just as Man Ray’s muse or as a Vogue model, but as one of the great modern photographers.

Born in New York in 1907, Miller’s life reads like fiction: model, surrealist, photojournalist, war correspondent. After being photographed by the likes of Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton, she switched sides of the camera and moved to Paris, working with Man Ray, where together they explored solarisation, a technique that gave ordinary portraits a spectral, dreamlike quality.

Tate will be showing the newly discovered Sirène (Nimet Eloui Bey), which perfectly captures that alchemy of chance and control that defined early surrealist photography.

But what’s most exciting about this exhibition is how it reframes Miller’s work beyond surrealism. Her photographs of Parisian streets, Egyptian deserts, and Cairo interiors reveal a curiosity and a mind constantly searching for form and meaning in the world around her. Her 1937 image, Portrait of Space, taken in the Siwa Oasis, remains one of the defining images of modern photography, a literal and metaphorical window into her way of seeing.

When the war broke out, she reinvented herself yet again. Moving to London, Miller began working for British Vogue, documenting life during the Blitz with a sense of irony and realism. Photographs like Fire Masks (1941) show her ability to find beauty and absurdity in chaos.

Later, as one of the few accredited female war correspondents, she documented the liberation of Europe, producing images that still haunt and define the visual memory of that era.

Her most famous photograph, the portrait of herself bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, taken in Munich in 1945, remains one of the most powerful and complex self-portraits of the 20th century. It’s a piece of performance and journalism all in one frame.

But what I find most inspiring about Lee Miller is not just her work, but her adaptability. She reinvented herself constantly, without apology. She could move between fashion, art, and war without losing her voice, something I think all photographers can learn from in an age that demands we fit into neat categories.

If you’re in London before 15 February 2026, Lee Miller at the Tate Britain is a must-see. It’s a chance to experience the full breadth of Miller’s vision. I highly recommend booking in advance so you can pick the best timeslot for your visit.

Whatever your position on climate change, there is no escaping the debate – especially when 16 artists and photographers bring the climate crisis conversation to where you work, live and travel, in one of the world's largest public art exhibitions.

Part of the UK Brazil Season of Culture 2025-26 (celebrating 200 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries), It's Not Easy Being Green is an exhibition by British arts producer Artichoke that takes over nationwide advertising billboards – creating the most inclusive public exhibition possible.

Sixteen international artists responded to the theme with works consisting of photography, performance, sculpture, land art and data visualization to give their unique perspectives on the climate crisis.

"We're working with artists to take on the climate crisis, one of the most urgent issues of our time, and they've responded with imagination, urgency and nuance," explains curator Bakul Patki.

"Whether it's rage, resilience, irony or sorrow, each work offers a distinct perspective that brings us closer to understanding this complex, global challenge. I'm excited and energized to see these vital works out in the world, in the public realm where they belong, sparking conversation and provoking thought in everyday spaces."

It's Not Easy Being Green is part of Artichoke's project, The Gallery – "a new kind of cultural institution bringing art that addresses the important questions of our times to the places where people live, work and travel across outdoor advertising space nationally and internationally."

According to creative director and provocative public artists, Martin Firrell, "Billboards enable The Gallery to bring socially important art to everyone, everywhere. Billboards include everyone in the conversation."

It's Not Easy Being Green is being exhibited on advertising billboards and screens across the UK until November 04, before moving to Brazil where the exhibition will run from October 14 to November 12. It will also join The Gallery's permanent collection hosted on its website. Here are some more images from the exhibition:

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Gallerie d’Italia in Vicenza, Italy, is now hosting Cristina Mittermeier. A Greater Wisdom, running until 15 February 2026. Curated by Lauren Johnston in collaboration with National Geographic, the exhibition brings together around 80 of Mittermeier’s most powerful photographs, including three previously unseen works.

Following successful runs in Turin (2024) and Palermo, the show presents a comprehensive overview of Mittermeier’s career, one defined by a profound respect for the planet and the people who live in harmony with it.

A marine biologist, activist, and globally renowned nature and conservation photographer, Mittermeier has spent decades documenting the delicate balance between humanity and the natural world.

The exhibition is structured around three central themes: the underwater world, the terrestrial world, and tribal peoples, each conveying Mittermeier’s philosophy of "enoughness" – a reflection on how much is truly enough for us, and how we might live more sustainably within the Earth’s limits.

Her portraits of indigenous communities, fragile ecosystems, and oceanic life serve as both visual poetry and urgent reminders of our shared responsibility to protect the planet.

Michele Coppola, Executive Director for Art, Culture and Historical Heritage at Intesa Sanpaolo, said, "Through her photographs, Cristina Mittermeier offers us images of rare intensity, stirring emotions and prompting deep reflection on our relationship with the environment."

Having seen Mittermeier’s work in person at Photo London earlier this year, I can attest to the impact of her large-scale prints. Her ocean portraits and tribal studies, rendered with intimate composition, add a new dimension to her storytelling; every image feels alive, carrying both beauty and urgency.

Beyond the exhibition, A Greater Wisdom features educational workshops, family labs, and themed tours, offering visitors ways to engage more deeply with the photographer’s conservation message. As co-founder and president of SeaLegacy, Mittermeier continues to lead a global effort to protect the oceans, demonstrating through her imagery that humanity is inseparable from the natural world.

Check out more details about the exhibition on the official Gallerie d'Italia website.

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Leitz Photographica Auction's upcoming event will be one to remember, as the centerpiece of the 'Motion' auction and exhibition is a 100-year-old print of a vintage nude study by Edward Weston – and it joins stunning works by names like Ansel Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and many others.

The event, which takes place at Leica Gallery Vienna in October, ties in perfectly with Leica's 100-year celebrations.

In case you missed it, this year marks 100 years since the launch of the original Leica I camera in 1925. The iconic brand has been commemorating the occasion with everything from teddy bears to its millionth M camera to "the most beautiful camera money can buy", the Leica D-Lux 8 100 Years of Leica edition.

The upcoming Leitz Photographica Auction, "celebrating the art of photography in 'Motion'", is yet another way for the brand to commemorate the landmark occasion.

One of the best photographers ever, and a great of large format photography, Edward Weston was renowned for his black-and-white images. And it's one of his most famous photographs, Nude Study (Anita), that's up for auction next month – taken in 1925, the same year as the Leica I was released.

"We are offering a rare vintage print of this iconic nude study – a work distinguished not only by its formal radicalism, but also by its year of creation, which both resonates with the Leica anniversary and signifies the threshold to photographic modernism," says Caroline Guschelbauer, head of photographs at Leitz Photographica Auction.

The print carries an estimate of €200,000 to €250,000 – approximately $233,270 to $291,600 / £174,800 to £218,500 / AU$357,590 to AU$447,000.

Joining Weston's piece are a cross-section of works of modern photography, including early history greats such as Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Berenice Abbott, Ruth Bernhard, August Sander, Brassaï and Horst P Horst.

Influential postwar photographers like Otto Steinert, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Ernst Haas, Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz and Helmut Newton are also represented. And complementing them are contemporary voices such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nobuyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin, Alison Jackson, Sissi Farassat and Paul Cupido.

"With this century auction, Leitz Photographica Auction highlights its commitment to curating works of museum quality, historical significance, and lasting collectability- an offering that speaks both to seasoned collectors and to newcomers with a passion for art," notes Guschelbauer.

"I am very pleased that this carefully curated selection once again reflects the diversity of photographic expression, while staying true to our mission of sharing the fascination of photography with enthusiasts, connoisseurs and collectors," adds Alexander Sedlak, managing director of Leitz Photographica Auction.

The Motion auction takes place on October 30 (pre-bidding is open now, if you're interested) at Leica Gallery Vienna. The highlights of will also be on display at the gallery in the two weeks leading to the auction, with the Motion exhibition running from October 17 to 30. Admission is free.

For more information, visit the Leica Gallery Vienna website.

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It’s not every day you get to see the work of some of the greatest photographers of all time in the flesh. Even rarer still is the chance to stand before their original slides, frozen moments that shaped visual history. That’s what makes Magnum: A World in Color such a rare treat for anyone with a passion for photography.

Presented as part of Fujifilm’s Fujikina London festival, at the Fujifilm House of Photography in Covent Garden, the exhibition marks the first public unveiling of a huge archival project that has been dormant for decades.

Hidden away in the late 19th-century Saint-Cyr fort on the outskirts of Paris, France, Magnum’s Paris color library holds over 43,000 slide sheets and more than 650,000 images, dating from the 1950s through to the early 2000s.

Until now much of this work has remained unseen, untouched for over 20 years. Thanks to Magnum’s archive team and Fujifilm’s GFX100 II medium format camera, these slides are now being digitized and brought into the light.

The result is a fascinating portrait of Britain, past and present, seen through the lens of Magnum’s legendary photographers. What struck me most was the sense of process on display: the way the slide series reveals how a photographer worked a scene, the decisions they made, the frames they discarded.

For anyone learning photography, it’s a masterclass in itself. You’re not just looking at finished images, you’re peeking into the working mind of some of the greatest names in the medium.

Adding to this conversation between past and present, the exhibition also features brand-new work from Magnum photographers Olivia Arthur and Mark Power. Both are renowned for their use of large format film, but here they were challenged to respond to the archive with Fujifilm’s digital alternatives.

Power used the GFX 100S II and, during his talk, admitted that he enjoyed it so much he was reluctant to hand it back afterwards. Arthur’s and Power’s images add a contemporary layer to the rediscovered archive, showing how today’s photographers see the UK through fresh eyes while still in dialogue with history.

What stayed with me most was Power’s reasoning for his project: in looking through the archive he felt that Brighton, his hometown, wasn’t represented in a way that matched his own experience of it. His response was to turn his lens back on familiar streets, showing that photographing the places you know, even when they don’t seem glamorous, can be the most meaningful.

It’s a reminder that important work often begins at home.

For me, that’s the real takeaway of this show. It’s thrilling to see Magnum legends in color and up close. But just as valuable is how the exhibition teaches us the importance of looking back, reflecting, and recognising how images connect across time.

Whether it’s poring over your own contact sheets or standing in front of someone else’s, the act of studying photographs deeply is what helps us grow as photographers.

The evening also carried a poignant note. The late Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, who sadly passed away last week, was honored on the night. His extraordinary archive made up a large part of the exhibition and his images remain central to our visual documentation of Britain.

Magnum: A World in Color is free to attend and open now at the Fujifilm House of Photography, with additional talks and book signings scheduled as part of Fujikina London on September 19 (with Olivia Arthur) and September 26 (with Mark Power). It’s well worth making the time to step inside, look, learn and be reminded of photography’s power to connect past and present.

Magnum: A World in Color is now open at Fujifilm’s House of Photography, London, until October 12.

As a 55-year-old Englishman, countless people have asked me over the last year or so if I'm excited about the Oasis reunion. And I'll be honest: not really.

Yes I was a youngster in the Nineties, living through the golden age of British music, but I completely missed the Oasis memo. While everyone was going mad for Wonderwall, I was losing myself in sweaty warehouse raves till 6am.

To me, Britpop felt insular, nostalgic, backward-looking; everything the techno scene wasn't. So when Liam swaggered onto the TV with that trademark sneer, I just shrugged and went back to my Prodigy records.

But now, 30 years later, with the reunion sending the UK into delirium, I found myself wondering what I'd missed. And the answer came in an unexpected place: a photography exhibition sprawled across Wembley Park featuring Kevin Cummins' intimate portraits of the Gallagher brothers from 1994, just before they became the biggest band in Britain.

What the camera caught

Brothers: Liam and Noel Through the Lens of Kevin Cummins isn't your typical rock photography exhibition. These aren't the usual posed shots of leather-clad rock gods with guitars. Instead, Cummins – the genius behind those iconic Joy Division and Smiths photographs – has captured something far more interesting: the actual human beings behind the mythology

The first thing that strikes you is how young they look. Noel's barely 27, Liam's 21 and they're both clearly having the time of their lives. I glimpse a shot of them leaping onto the back of a London bus like overgrown kids – and suddenly I get it. This isn't calculated rock-star posturing; this is pure, unfiltered joy at their own ridiculous good fortune.

That said, it's the quieter moments that really hit home. There's one photo where they're leaning into each other, and the body language tells a completely different story to the backstage bust-ups we'd hear about later.

These are brothers who clearly love each other, despite their macho posturing; who understand each other's jokes, who've got each other's backs against the world. Cummins caught them in that brief window before fame turned toxic, when being in Oasis was still the best thing that had ever happened to them.

What's remarkable about these photographs is how they capture lightning in a bottle; that precise moment when Oasis were about to explode, but hadn't yet been consumed by its own success. They're still wearing tracksuits and vintage jumpers; there's nothing polished or media-trained about them. They're just two Manchester lads who've stumbled into something extraordinary.

The exhibition includes shots from their first studio session, candid hotel room moments and that famous image of them in Manchester City shirts with "Brother" emblazoned across their chests. Looking at these now, you realize that Cummins wasn't just documenting a band – he was creating their visual mythology, helping them understand who they were becoming.

Understanding the phenomenon

Standing among these larger-than-life images scattered across Wembley Park, I finally understood what I'd dismissed so casually in the 90s. Oasis weren't really about the music; they were about possibility. They represented this idea that ordinary people from ordinary places could become extraordinary, that you didn't need connections or posh accents or art school credentials to matter.

The rave scene I loved was anonymous, collective, about losing yourself in the crowd. Oasis was the opposite: it was about individual personalities, about Liam's attitude and Noel's songs and their complicated, public relationship. It was theater, but theater performed by people who felt real.

Maybe that's why the reunion has hit so hard. We're not just getting the band back together – we're getting the brothers back together, closing a circle that's been broken for 15 years. These photographs remind us what we lost when the feuding started, what made Oasis special in the first place.

Brothers: Liam and Noel Through the Lens of Kevin Cummins runs until 30 September at Wembley Park. Entry is free. A book, Oasis The Masterplan, featuring Cummins' photos, is also on sale now.

I’m a big enough fan of The Beatles that I sat through eight hours of Peter Jackson’s meticulously restored footage of the ‘Fab Four’ working on their final studio album in Disney+ docuseries, The Beatles: Get Back. So news of a Beatles-themed photography exhibition at the Gagosian’s Davies Street location in London was always going to be of interest. But Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris isn’t your typical fly-on-the-wall showcase, because all of the images were captured by none other than Paul McCartney.

It would be foolish to think that a man who’s spent a lifetime expressing himself through various media, be it a lyric sheet, bass guitar, piano, or paint brush, could pick up a camera and do anything but capture enticing imagery. But what I love most about these photographs is that only three other people in the world could have come close to matching the spirit of Paul’s work: John, George, and Ringo. That’s because there’s an intimacy in the photography that could only have been captured by a fellow Beatle.

The collection spans December 1963 to February 1964, just after the release of the band’s second album, With the Beatles. This is a pivotal moment in the Yesterday hitmakers’ history, because it marks the first few months of ‘Beatlemania’. Rather than an outsider’s inside look into the world’s biggest band, Paul’s photography eschews the gaze of the masses, sheds the superstar skin, and captures four young lads from Liverpool, touring the UK and Paris, just prior to their debut trip to the United States. I don't think it's hyperbole to suggest that Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris documents one of the most transformative periods of The Beatles’ careers, from domestic superheroes to the genesis of global stardom.

Paul even makes an appearance as a subject himself, reflected in the mirror of his then-girlfriend, Jane Asher’s, family home. The exhibition also features playful portraits of the songwriting legend’s bandmates, imagery of the ogling press from the band’s point of view, and contact sheets that provide frame-by-frame documentation, akin to video footage. Everything was captured on Paul’s 35mm Pentax film camera. As such, not everything is perfectly in focus or exposed and I think the imagery is all the better for it. In a world where we strive constantly to improve the technical aspects of photography, Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris is a reminder that one element of photography trumps all else: being there, in the moment.

The prints are hand-signed by Paul McCartney and remastered from original negatives and contact sheets that were, rather remarkably, assumed lost for over half a century. Gagosian’s exhibition coincides with Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm, an exhibition that opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery and is currently on tour. Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris opened on August 28 and runs until October 4, 2025, in Gagosian’s Davies Street exhibition space, in central London.

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Sigma, the Japanese manufacturer renowned for its precision-engineered cameras and lenses, is opening its first-ever UK pop-up store in the heart of Bloomsbury, London.

Running from 13 to 22 September 2025, the store arrives at a perfect moment. Overlapping with London Fashion Week and London Design Festival, it aims to showcase Sigma’s blend of technical innovation and design-led craftsmanship.

Just a short walk from the British Museum, the pop-up will offer visitors the chance to get hands-on with Sigma’s full range of high-performance stills and cine lenses, as well as the award-winning Sigma BF camera.

Since its debut, the BF has been celebrated for its minimalist design, powerful full-frame sensor and intuitive handling. It has already claimed Best Camera at the Monocle Design Awards 2025 and Best Full Frame Professional Camera at the TIPA World Awards 2025, praised for its "austere beauty, technical prowess and ease of use."

Every BF camera is built entirely at Sigma’s sole factory in Aizu, Japan, with a unibody chassis milled from a single block of aluminum; a meticulous process that takes more than seven hours. Only a limited number are made each day, underscoring the brand’s obsession with quality.

To celebrate the store opening, Sigma is also hosting six free photo walks during the week led by professional photographers. Open to all skill levels, these two-hour sessions explore how to create more meaningful images in London’s bustling urban environment. Attendees are welcome to bring their own cameras or borrow Sigma equipment, including the BF and I-series lenses, subject to availability.

As someone who has followed Sigma’s evolution closely, I find this pop-up particularly exciting. In recent years Sigma has undergone a profound transformation, refining its brand into something that feels as much about storytelling and design sensibility as it is about optics.

Its product catalog now feels more like an artist’s zine than a technical brochure, pairing aesthetic minimalism with proof of real-world creative potential.

Recent releases like the Sigma Sports 300-600mm f/4 lens, the BF camera and the Aizu cine lenses have been among my personal highlights of the year – and with this pop-up, London’s creative community will have the rare chance to see, touch, and shoot with some of the most talked-about gear of recent years.

Further details can be found on the official Sigma pop-up webpage.

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After a decade at Somerset House, Photo London, arguably the UK’s premier fair for photography collectors, is turning the page on a new chapter, with its 2026 edition set to take place at Olympia, Kensington’s newly redeveloped cultural hub.

The move signals a bold shift for the fair. While Somerset House has been a stunning and atmospheric backdrop, it hasn’t always been the easiest venue to navigate. This year’s fair, though rich with exceptional exhibitions, photography books, and standout talks, often felt cramped, particularly in its tighter rooms and passageways, where large crowds made for tricky circulation.

In contrast, Olympia offers something quite different. Currently undergoing a £1.3 billion transformation, the venue promises to be a major cultural destination, with its historic National Hall providing expansive space beneath its soaring canopy. This means more room not only for galleries but also for Photo London’s increasingly popular talks and public programs.

In many ways, this shift positions Photo London to join the ranks of top-tier photography events like Paris Photo, which is famously held in the Grand Palais on the Champs-Élysées – another grand, historic venue that’s been adapted for modern use.

The parallels are hard to ignore. Both fairs now share a focus on heritage blended with innovation, situated in architectural icons tailored to accommodate large-scale exhibitions with ease and elegance.

If Olympia delivers on its promise, this could mark a transformative moment for Photo London, allowing it to expand its ambitions and cement its place further on the global photography fair circuit.

The fair’s founders, Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, framed the move as the natural next step in their "tradition for innovation and cultural leadership."

Director Sophie Parker added, "From outstanding gallery presentations to thought-provoking exhibitions and vibrant conversations, Photo London is the best place to explore the past, present and future of photography. The move to Olympia offers an expanded platform to showcase photography in a setting that embodies both tradition and modernity."

Olympia’s "cross-cultural profile" will open up new synergies with other creative industries, while offering visitors a more seamless and unified experience.

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If there’s one event that strips away the gloss of Instagram-friendly nature photography and instead dives deep into the reality of working on the frontline of environmental storytelling, it’s WildPhotos.

Back this year with a bold new line-up, the much-loved symposium returns, this year at the British Library in London, and online, on Friday 17 October – and it’s shaping up to be one of the most dynamic and thought-provoking editions yet.

Organized in partnership with Wildscreen and Wildlife Photographer of the Year, WildPhotos 2025 will feature fifteen globally recognized photographers and filmmakers, each offering a personal glimpse into the craft, ethics, and impact behind some of the world’s most striking visual narratives. It’s a day that reveals just how layered and demanding this kind of work really is, where questions and discussions of aesthetics, responsibility, and storytelling constantly collide.

I attended last year’s WildPhotos and came away feeling completely recharged, not just as a photographer, but as someone trying to understand where creativity fits within the environmental conversation. One moment that’s stayed with me since was listening to Evgenia Arbugaeva speak about her transition from photographer to filmmaker. It was raw, honest, and beautifully articulated; a talk that shows the long and winding road behind the final output.

This year’s speakers are drawn from across nine countries, with names like David Doubilet, Rena Effendi, Jasper Doest, Melissa Groo, Fernando Faciole, and Rachel Bigsby among those confirmed.

What makes WildPhotos so distinctive is the range of perspectives. There are sessions focused on working from home, where photographers document the animals and ecologies just outside their doorsteps. Others will explore how human relationships shape the stories we tell through conflict, community, and unexpected proximity to the natural world.

One of the most anticipated moments is likely to be the panel discussion on conservation photography, a topic that has grown increasingly urgent in recent years. With Roz Kidman Cox chairing and insights from Melissa Groo and Jasper Doest, it promises to go beyond familiar talking points and instead challenge how we use photography not only to witness but to advocate. As Groo put it in a previous interview, "Photographers have a responsibility to the subjects they portray, especially when those subjects can’t speak for themselves."

Then come the headliners. David Doubilet needs little introduction; his underwater photographs for National Geographic have shaped how generations understand the ocean and its fragility. With more than 26,000 hours spent beneath the surface, he’s as much an archivist of the sea as he is a photographer.

Karine Aigner, meanwhile, brings an equally powerful but very different lens. Her work centers on human-wildlife relationships, often with an emotional weight that lingers long after the image is seen. In 2022, she won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Grand Title, only the fifth woman to do so in over four decades.

The event also arrives just days after the winners of the 61st Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition are announced and the Natural History Museum’s annual exhibition opens, adding to what is already a landmark week for wildlife storytelling in the UK capital. "This year’s WildPhotos programme is a powerful reflection of our shared belief—alongside Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Focused on Nature—that storytelling can shift perspectives and spark change," said Lucie Muir, CEO of Wildscreen. "From intimate portraits of backyard wildlife to bold investigations into human–nature relationships, the 2025 line-up offers an unmissable journey guided by those pushing the boundaries of conservation photography."

WildPhotos 2025 will take place on Friday, October 17, at the British Library in London and online via stream. Tickets are now available via the official Wildscreen website.

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The Family of Man exhibition has a legendary status in the history of photography. It was first put on in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, so celebrates its 70th birthday this year.

The idea of the exhibition was the ambitious plan of celebrated photographer Edward Steichen. Steichen had made a name for himself as a top fashion photographer in the 1920s and 30s, and then ran the US government's Naval Aviation Photographic Unit during war, before becoming Director of MoMA's photographic department.

Steichen's idea for The Family of Man was to invite entries from around the world that celebrated the “the gamut of life from birth to death” - celebrating the universal aspects of the human experience through the medium of photography.

Almost two million photographs were submitted - an incredible number back in the days when you couldn't simply email a file, and physically had to send in a print (which would not be returned).

In the end, 503 images – all in black and white, by 273 photographers from 68 different countries – were selected from the amateurs and professionals who had submitted their work. 

Some of the best-known photographers of the time were in this selection. Ansel Adams, W Eugene Smith, Lee Miller, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, August Sander, Alfred Eisenstadt, Dorothea Lange... the contributor list reads like a rundown of the best photographers ever.

After its initial run in New York, the exhibition toured the world for the following eight years and was seen by more than 10 million people.

I have got to know the exhibition well through a book of all the photographs that was published by MoMA to accompany the exhibition, and which has been regularly reprinted. My copy was printed in 2006, but you can still buy a new copy today for $35/£25 (with secondhand copies often costing a lot less).

More staggering still, you can actually still see the exhibition itself as all the photos are now now on permanent display in Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg – the country where Steichen was born, before he emigrated to the USA with his family aged 10. 

To mark 100 years since the release of the Leica I, a trio of new exhibitions open this month at Leitz Park in Wetzlar, Germany, the birthplace of Leica cameras.

Together they offer a wide view of what Leica photography has meant and continues to mean to the medium across different genres, generations and ways of seeing.

The flagship show, Joel Meyerowitz: The Pleasure of Seeing, is a major retrospective hosted at the Ernst Leitz Museum. It traces the life’s work of one of the key figures in American street photography, spanning early New York street scenes to post-9/11 Manhattan, from still lifes in Cézanne’s studio to rare frames from Meyerowitz’s very first roll of Leica film in 1963.

All 100 images were selected by the photographer himself. Color is at the heart of the work, and rightly so, as Meyerowitz was one of the earliest to champion color photography as a serious artistic form in a field then dominated by black and white. His pictures are composed with care but remain open, giving the viewer space to explore and inviting attention.

I’ve followed Meyerowitz throughout my photographic journey. His early street work, in particular, taught me that color could carry emotional and narrative weight without becoming decorative.

Alongside figures like Eggleston and Leiter, Meyerowitz helped define a way of seeing that felt alert to both chaos and beauty. His use of Leica cameras and his belief in the photographer’s presence as a witness have stayed with me for years.

Speaking on his use of color in photography, Meyerowitz says, "I have always considered myself to be an advocate of color. It was always about real life for me – not gaudy moments. I want to describe everything I see. And color opens up a new dimension for us to do so."

Upstairs, at the Leica Gallery Wetzlar, two very different perspectives are brought together. In Édouard Elias: Eyewitness, the French photojournalist presents work from three of his most important series – oil fires in Iraq, migrant rescue missions in the Mediterranean and scenes from the Central African Republic during the civil war.

These aren’t quick responses or distant observations. Elias works slowly and deliberately, spending long stretches embedded with those he photographs. His images are stark but never exploitative, shaped by time, trust, and a refusal to flatten experience into spectacle.

The third exhibition, Jamie Cullum: These Are the Days, offers a quieter kind of documentary feel. Cullum, who is best known as a musician, has built up a visual diary over the years on tour, using Leica cameras to capture moments with his band, strangers met along the way and landscapes that resonate.

It’s informal work, but intentional. The pictures feel like glimpses of life between sound checks and hotel rooms, full of life without performance. Cullum’s approach to photography mirrors his approach to music; instinctive and open.

Together, the three exhibitions offer a sharp reminder of how wide the field of Leica photography is, and how much its form can shift in the hands of different storytellers. From the streets of New York to rescue boats in the Mediterranean to backstage lounges, the exhibitions mark the anniversary not by looking back alone, but by showing how Leica continues to be part of the way we see and record our lives.

The exhibitions open on June 29 and run until September 21, 2025, at Leitz Park, Wetzlar.

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The Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition (IPE) returns this summer for its 166th edition, cementing its place as the world’s longest-running photography exhibition.

For the first time, the exhibition will be hosted at the prestigious Saatchi Gallery in London, England, running from August 05 to September 18 2025 with free admission.

This year, 51 photographers have been selected from over 4,000 submissions worldwide, showcasing 113 works that span a compelling range of subjects; from identity, community, and family to environmental change and cultural heritage.

The IPE has always reflected the times, and this year’s selection is especially rich in personal storytelling and visual urgency.

British photographic artist Lydia Goldblatt received the IPE Award for her quietly powerful series Fugue, which explores the complexity of motherhood; love and grief, presence and absence, tenderness and distance. The images, made over four years within her domestic space, are hauntingly intimate and honest without being sentimental.

I saw Goldblatt speak about Fugue at BOP (Books on Photography) in Bristol, UK, last year, and it remains one of the most affecting presentations I’ve attended. Her insight into the emotional terrain of motherhood offers a perspective we need to see more of: deeply felt, unflinching, and grounded in lived experience.

The Under 30s Award was presented to Keerthana Kunnath for her bold and timely series, Not What You Saw, which documents South Indian female bodybuilders. In challenging mainstream narratives around femininity and strength, Kunnath’s work reclaims space for bodies and stories that are too often marginalized or misunderstood.

In addition to the award winners, plenty more exceptional photographers will be on display. One of them is Murray Ballard, featuring images from his exceptional body of work Ghosts in the Field, documenting the devastation of the local Olive Trees in Salento, Italy, and its impact on the surrounding region.

With its anonymous and rigorous selection process, the IPE continues to spotlight a diverse range of voices from emerging artists to established names. This year’s move to the Saatchi Gallery will help bring the work to a wider audience, and the broad themes represented feel especially resonant in today’s climate.

Whether you're drawn to visual poetry, social critique, or raw storytelling, the 166th IPE offers a snapshot of the very best photography today.

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