In 1936, Dorothea Lange approached Florence Owens Thompson – a 32-year-old sheltering with her children at a California pea-pickers' camp – and took one of the most recognizable photographs in history.

Migrant Mother portrays her with two children pressed against her shoulders, staring into the middle distance with an expression that seems to contain the entire weight of the Great Depression.

It's the kind of image that stops conversations and changes minds. Lange made dozens of them.

Now a major retrospective of her work, titled simply Dorothea Lange, is opening in Italy. And it's a great opportunity to see one of photography's most important bodies of work, at the scale it deserves.

An artist by instinct

Lange's career is extraordinary, both for its quality and its scope. She began as a portrait photographer in San Francisco before the Depression drew her out into the streets and fields of California.

Commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, she documented the lives of migrant workers, Dust Bowl refugees and rural poor with an unflinching but deeply empathetic eye.

In his curator statement for her 1966 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski described her as "by choice a social observer and by instinct an artist"; neatly capturing the tension that makes her work so compelling.

It's simultaneously rigorous documentary and deeply felt portraiture, and the images here span the full range of that work.

Shown at the top of this page, Migratory cotton picker (1940) is a close-up portrait of a man resting his weathered hands across his face against a flat sky. Shot in Coolidge, Arizona, it's as formally precise as anything from a studio photographer.

Toward Los Angeles (1937) shows two men walking along a California highway, their backs to camera, a Southern Pacific railroad billboard reading "Next time try the train" visible in the distance behind them.

It's a composition of cruel irony, built from nothing more than available light, a well-chosen moment and a strong instinct for what the frame contains.

Lange's Japanese-American internment work is less well known, but no less powerful. This was another dark chapter in 20th century American history.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing more than 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps for the duration of the war. Lange documented the process with characteristic moral clarity.

Nisei girl with baggage (1942) shows a young girl, identification tag pinned to her coat, standing exhausted among piled luggage, her eyes downcast.

I am an American (1942) is a street photograph of an Oakland grocery store whose owner, a University of California graduate, placed the sign in his window on December 08 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. By March 1942, when Lange photographed it, the store had been shuttered.

Why Lange matters

What makes Lange's work essential study is the precision of her decisions under difficult conditions. She wasn't working in a studio or with controlled light: she was in the field, often approaching strangers in states of distress, working quickly and with a clear sense of what she was trying to say.

Her images are never gratuitous and never sentimental. They work because she understood composition, light, timing and human psychology simultaneously, and because she knew that a photograph's power comes both from what it includes and what it leaves out.

Dorothea Lange runs from July 30 to November 01 at the Centro Internazionale di Fotografia Scavi Scaligeri, Cortile Mercato Vecchio 8, Verona, Italy. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 19:00. Entry is €10 full price (approximately $11 / £9 / AU$16) or €7 concessions ($8 / £7 / 11)). Tickets are available online at vivaticket.it.

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There's a photograph in an upcoming exhibition of two farmers in old overcoats, both gripping the same length of rope, hauling a sick ram across a muddy field in a battered tin bath. A small flock watches from the hedge bank behind, utterly unbothered.

It's James Ravilious at his best: no drama, no staging, just a moment of rural ingenuity caught because he happened to be standing in the right field with a Leica camera and the patience to wait for it.

To me, that patience is really what A Photographic Friendship: James Ravilious and Chris Chapman is about.

The show – opening at The Burton in Bideford, England, on August 01 – pairs work by the two photographers across 15 curated dialogs. And it's pleasing to know that decades of quiet, unglamorous documentary work can still count for anything in an industry obsessed with the next shot.

Because that's really the story here. Two men, working the same corner of south-west England for the best part of 50 years between them, never once treating each other as competition.

Why the work has lasted

Ravilious moved to Devon in 1972 to shoot for Beaford Arts' archive project, eventually amassing more than 80,000 negatives of a rural way of life he could see disappearing.

Chapman settled a few miles away in Throwleigh, in 1976, and turned his camera on Dartmoor instead: farms, chapels, foot and mouth, village halls.

Both men were documenting the same broad subject, in the same region, at the same time. Yet rather than treat that as a threat, they seem to have treated it as company.

For pro photographers now trained to think in terms of niches, personal brands and first-mover advantage, that might seem quaintly odd. But it's also, arguably, why both archives have lasted.

Neither man was chasing an angle nobody else had. They were, in fact, chasing depth on an angle everybody could see – which takes far longer and is much harder to fake.

The importance of trust

Ravilious shot on a Leica rangefinder camera, often with older, uncoated lenses, and used a compensating development process that gave his negatives their distinctive silvery quality. It's a nice technical footnote, but it's not really why the pictures work.

They work because a subject like Mary Wedlake – laughing mid-toast at her own wedding party with a pint in hand – clearly isn't performing for the camera. That's not a lens choice; that's years of a small photographer being a familiar, unthreatening presence at village halls and farm gates.

Chapman's picture of a woman cradling a bandaged terrier at a Moretonhampstead vet's surgery has a similar quality. To put it bluntly, nobody in either archive looks like they've been asked to hold still.

Why this matters

It's tempting to label this show 'nostalgia': black-and-white Devon, thatched roundhouses, a bygone rural England. But I think there's a deeper lesson here for anyone shooting documentary or portrait work today.

Neither photographer was parachuting in for a story. They lived among their subjects, returned to the same farms and families for years, and allowed the pictures to accumulate rather than forcing a set in an afternoon.

That's a harder sell to an editor or publisher than a single striking image (believe me, I know). But it's also the only way that anyone ends up with an archive people are still putting up on walls, 50 years later.

A Photographic Friendship: James Ravilious and Chris Chapman runs at The Burton at Bideford, Devon, England from August 01 to October 04. Entry is free.

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You don't need a haunted house to make a photograph feel haunted. That's the lesson buried inside Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic, a new exhibition opening at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, England, on September 17 and running until December 20.

Curator Isaac Blease has pulled together more than 80 years of British documentary work, much of it drawn from the Foundation's own archive of over 5,000 prints.

It includes images by Kjell-Åke Andersson, Bill Brandt, Anna Fox, Robert Frank, Don McCullin, Lee Miller, John Myers, Akihiko Okamura, Sue Packer, Charlie Philips, Sarah Pickering, Alice Poyzer, Jo Spence, Janine Wiedel and Donovan Wylie among others.

All this material makes the case, quite brilliantly, that unease has been baked into the genre from the start. And for anyone who shoots documentary or street photography, that's something worth thinking about.

No body, no blood

Here's just one example. John Myers' The Bed (1976) is, on paper, a photograph of an unmade bed with a dark, wave-patterned throw. There's no body, no blood, no drama. Yet it reads like a crime scene waiting to happen, purely through composition, tonal weight and the photographer's refusal to explain himself.

That restraint is the whole trick, and it's one worth studying rather than admiring from a distance. It's a topic that, quite frankly, couldn't be more timely.

"Interest in the Gothic resurfaces during times of uncertainty," Blease points out. "And documentary photography itself is in a dark moment, with its purpose and role in question, public distrust of 'photographers', and the existential threat posed by AI."

Split into four chapters (The Castle, Domestic Bliss, Double Take and Night Creatures), the show leans hard on the idea that horror lives closest to home.

For instance, Janine Wiedel and Kjell-Åke Andersson's images of British heavy industry, molten iron pouring in the dark in Shelter from the Heat / Molten Iron, Shelton Bar, don't need staging to feel gothic; the subject matter does the work.

Anna Fox's Pete's Food and Flowers, meanwhile, turns a plate of grilled tomatoes into something closer to a wound, using nothing more than color and a floral border plate to suggest the domestic aftermath of trauma.

What's striking is how little of this depends on technical trickery. It's about editing choices: cropping tight, holding back context, letting a caption (or its absence) do heavy lifting.

For example, Sarah Pickering's Boots – an eerily-lit, empty former shop interior shot for her series Incident – works because it withholds narrative rather than supplying one.

This all teaches us something, too, about genre snobbery. Documentary photography likes to think of itself as sober and evidentiary, while gothic imagery gets filed under fiction and excess.

But as this exhibition shows, they're more alike than you might think. Peter Mitchell's abandoned Leeds villa, Don McCullin's industrial landscapes, Donovan Wylie's clinical prison cells at the Maze… none of this is supernatural. Yet all of it unsettles.

For anyone wondering how to make your subjects feel charged with meaning, without resorting to gimmicks, this is close to a syllabus. Look at what you're leaving out of frame. Trust low light and stillness over spectacle. And above all remember: the most disquieting image in the room might simply be a wardrobe, a kettle or a bed.

Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic runs at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, from September 17 to December 20, 2026. Entry is free.

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A polar bear is caught mid-leap between ice floes, its legs still tucked beneath it, doubled perfectly in the still water below. The whole frame reads as a single graphic shape before it registers as an animal at all. It's in color, and it needs to be, because the cold blue of that water is doing half the work.

That choice points to something interesting about the press shots from Midnight Sun, the debut book from Sue Flood OBE and Ian Dawson.

Look through the images on this page and you'll find Adélie penguins, Scott's hut at Cape Evans and a pair of emperor penguins dwarfed by an ice shelf, all rendered in black-and-white. Meanwhile, the bear, the crabeater seals and the portraits of the photographers themselves arrive in full color.

That's not an accident or a printing quirk: it's a deliberate editorial decision. And it's the sort of decision every photographer should pay attention to.

Color is a decision, not a default

In these images, color earns its place in each case because it's doing something, whether that's the pale blue of Antarctic ice against dark water or the warmth of a human moment. Strip color away from that seal image, for instance, and the pale blue ice would flatten into just another grey shape.

Compare that with the images below of an Adélie penguin walking alone across the ice, and a blizzard scouring Captain Scott's hut. Those images are about form, contrast and weather – not hue – and color would only clutter them.

It's a reminder that monochrome conversion isn't a fallback for a disappointing sky; it's a creative tool that suits texture-heavy, high-contrast scenes far better than a flat color palette ever could.

The importance of access

The exhibition also makes a point about access. A hunter with a rifle slung across a denim jacket in Kinngait, three crabeater seals hauled out on a single ice floe, a bear guard doing his actual job rather than posing for one.

These aren't images grabbed on a passing cruise. They're the product of years of return visits, local relationships and enough patience to wait for a moment rather than manufacture one.

For anyone planning their own trip north or south with a camera bag, the takeaway is clear. Good glass helps, but it's the third or fourth expedition, not the first, that tends to produce the picture worth printing at gallery scale.

Midnight Sun goes on show at the Royal Geographical Society gallery in London, England, from October 06-30 – 10:00-17:00 on weekdays, free to view with no booking required. They're drawn from the 132 images in the book itself.

The launch night on October 06, hosted by Sir Michael Palin in the Ondaatje Theatre, gives Flood and Dawson a proper stage to explain their thinking. Tickets for the launch talk start at £15 (about $20 / $AU29), rising to £295 ($393 / AU$563) for a collector's edition of the book with signed prints included.

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Bob Carlos Clarke spent a career being filed under a single word: provocative. That's accurate in one sense, but it's also the kind of shorthand that lets people skip past the actual work. As a new retrospective opens in London, it's a good opportunity to look past the hype and take a closer look at his actual process, because for photographers there's more craft here than the headlines suggest.

The Last Dolls, opening at Atlas Gallery on 5 September and curated by Brandei Estes, marks 20 years since the Irish photographer died in 2006 and is the first Carlos Clarke show in London for a decade. It brings together signed edition prints, rare unique prints, one-of-a-kind collages and pieces from his celebrated Love Dolls Never Die series.

Ben Burdett, founder of Atlas Gallery, has described Carlos Clarke as "the William Burroughs of photography": transgressive, dark and permanently close to taboo. Fair enough. But it's important to understand that the images that made his name weren't snatched moments. They were built.

Highly constructed

Often labelled Britain's answer to Helmut Newton, Carlos Clarke worked across celebrity portraiture, photojournalism and advertising. But it was his highly constructed, carefully composed studio images, women and rubber chief among his recurring subjects, that sealed his reputation.

Estes, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery and former head of photographs at Sotheby's, believes the comparison to Newton only goes so far. In his view, Carlos Clarke's work carries a sharper psychological edge; more cerebral in how it handles desire and control.

According to his long-time agent Ghislain Pascal, Clarke chose his models carefully, often outside the usual agency system, and built collaborations that sometimes ran for years.

These weren't commissioned jobs shot in an afternoon. They were meticulously planned projects, with models active participants, rather than props in front of a lens.

That distinction matters. A photograph built on true collaboration reads differently to one that isn't, whatever the content. And it's a large part of why these images hold their tension: composed and glamorous on the surface, but with a sense that the subject retains full command of the frame.

As Estes puts it, they're less invitations to look, more declarations that looking is as far as it goes.

British photography expert Philippe Garner's often-quoted line about Carlos Clarke – that he was photographing either what he desired or what he feared, and probably both – gets at why the pictures still unsettle. But the unsettling part was engineered: the lighting, the styling, the studio control, all deliberate.

Nothing in these prints happened by accident, which is precisely what separates constructed provocation from the merely shocking.

Carlos Clarke's six books, from The Illustrated Delta of Venus in 1979 to Love Dolls Never Die in 2004, chart a career that never settled for the easy version of an image. A new limited edition book, The Last Dolls, was published on March 26, the exact anniversary of his death, and is available through Atlas Gallery, The Little Black Gallery and The Photographers' Gallery.

The Last Dolls exhibition, meanwhile, will run at Atlas Gallery, 49 Dorset Street, London W1U 7NF, from September 5-26. For photographers inclined to dismiss Clarke's work as shock value, it's worth a look. The shock, it turns out, was the easy part.

Some portfolios document a moment. Box of Pin-Ups, you might say, built one. When the British photographer David Bailey released a boxed set of 36 portraits in 1965, he wasn't just shooting the people who mattered in London (Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Michael Caine, the Kray twins). He was making the argument, novel at the time, that musicians, models, fashion designers and even criminals belonged in the same visual category as the era's screen idols.

Sixty years on, that argument still holds, which is why art publisher and gallery HENI's new release deserves attention.

The Pin-Ups Contact Sheets, running at HENI Gallery in Soho until July 31, is the first time Bailey's original contact sheets from the project have ever been offered for sale. For a portfolio this heavily reproduced, that's a significant gap being filled: the chance to see the Kodak Tri-X frames either side of the ones that made the cut, the crossing-outs, the grease-pencil circles, the handwritten notes to a printer deciding which face would represent an era.

The release sits across several formats. Alongside the 36 original silver gelatin contact sheets, HENI is offering a first edition of the original Box of Pin-Ups clamshell, a run of Bailey's photographic prints from 1990 to 2009, and two new limited-edition series produced with HENI Editions: four XL archival prints with screenprint detailing, and three smaller screenprints priced at $1,250 each. Everything is by application only, closing at 17:00 BST on July 31.

What they show

For photographers specifically, the value here is less in the finished portraits, more in the process laid bare. A contact sheet, you understand, doesn't lie about how a photographer thinks.

You can see Bailey and his medium-format camera circling back to the same expression on Jagger across a dozen near-identical frames, testing how little a fur hood needs to move before a picture stops being a snapshot and becomes an icon. The Michael Caine sheet, glasses pushed up, cigarette mid-frame, shows the same discipline: shoot the gesture until it's inevitable, then stop.

That's a masterclass in editing as much as shooting, and it's rarely available to study this directly from a photographer of Bailey's stature.

Box of Pin-Ups is also worth revisiting for what it left out. Of the 36 sitters, only four were women, a decision the original text defended bluntly. In the age of Mick Jagger, it argued, it was the boys who'd become the pin-ups.

Whatever you make of that framing six decades on, it's a useful reminder that Bailey wasn't shooting celebrity as a neutral fact. He was shooting a specific, contestable idea of who counted as glamorous in 1965, and doing it with enough conviction that the portfolio became a document of the argument itself, not just its subjects.

Bailey, now 88, discovered photography while serving in the RAF in Singapore, inspired by a single Cartier-Bresson print. That the same eye went on to define an entire decade's visual identity, and that its working notes are only now becoming public, makes this one of the more excitingly rare opportunities on this year's collecting calendar.

David Bailey: The Pin-Ups Contact Sheets runs at HENI Gallery, 6–10 Lexington Street, London, until 31 July. Admission is free; works are available by application.

It’s not often that a photojournalist rubs shoulders with major crime bosses and comes away unscathed. But that’s exactly what British photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg did for four years, documenting some of the UK’s seediest characters during the late 1990s, culminating in his celebrated 2001 book, The Firm.

During this time, Bain Hogg somehow gained the trust of London’s most notorious criminals, including Freddie "Brown Bread" Foreman, a well-known enforcer connected to the Kray twins, and Joe Pyle, a central figure in the feared Pyle gang, who ran the city’s unlicensed boxing industry.

Now, over 20 years after its publication, The Firm returns to the limelight, but not as we know it. Until September 03, Leica Gallery London will display previously unseen images from the series, revealing more about the turn-of-the-century UK underworld.

“The reason the pictures resonate is because I never ever lied to them [the criminals]," Bain Hogg told Photography News.

“From the start I made it clear I didn’t want to photograph their own presentation – no posed pictures and no complicity. I soon realized that they actually enjoy being presented in this hard, real way”.

According to Photography News, the exhibition prints have been pulled straight from Bain Hogg’s “yellow and black Kodak boxes,” after decades collecting dust.

And with the cobwebs blown away, we see these gangsters in all aspects: from dysfunctional family life to how they carried out business and mourned the loss of criminal associates.

“Do not judge your subjects but be interested by them. Allow them to ‘speak’ through the pictures, never ever put yourself or your bias first,” said Bain Hogg.

Jocelyn Bain Hogg – The Firm is open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 18:00, running until September 02. For more information, visit the Leica Gallery London listing page.

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Every photographer has, at some point, blamed their gear. The lens wasn't sharp enough, the sensor too noisy, the light too flat. It's comforting, but it falls apart entirely when you look at the work of John D Rattar (1876-1957) – the Shetland joiner-turned-photographer whose 150th anniversary is being marked this month with a major exhibition.

Rattar, whose earliest known photographs date back to 1890-92, was entirely self-taught. He worked with equipment that would look laughably basic by today's standards, in an era when a single exposure demanded patience most of us have long since outsourced to burst mode.

And yet A Time to Keep, which opened this weekend at Shetland Museum and Archives in Scotland, shows a body of work so alert to composition, light and moment that it still stops visitors in their tracks.

The exhibition, curated by exhibitions officer Karen Clubb and senior curator of collections Carol Christiansen, moves away from a chronological retelling of Rattar's career and instead groups the work thematically: land, sea, work, play, textiles and historic events.

For anyone who photographs for a living or a hobby, it's not just a history lesson but also a masterclass in resourcefulness.

Whatever the picture needed

Here's the detail worth dwelling on: Rattar routinely carried a small boat in his car so he could reach remote lochs and shoot landscapes from angles nobody else could get to. No drone, no telephoto zoom to fake the distance, just a man prepared to physically relocate himself to wherever the picture demanded.

He climbed to precarious cliff edges at Noss for nesting seabirds, rowed into the caves of Papa Stour and travelled to Mousa to document the wreck of the Sunniva. The picture always came before the comfort.

It's a useful lesson for anyone who's ever talked themselves out of a shoot because the weather looked uncertain or the walk-in was too far.

Rattar's landscapes and wildlife studies, including a strikingly composed eider duck nest and a hand cradling a catch of tiny fish, share a quality that's hard to manufacture: he was clearly right there, on the ground, waiting.

A sense of restraint

What comes through most strongly in the selected images is Rattar's restraint. His portraits, whether of fishermen, croft workers or a model maker bent over the hull of a half-built boat, feel observed rather than arranged.

Christiansen points out that some of the subjects remain unidentified, which only adds to the sense that Rattar was documenting rather than staging. He photographed life as it happened to be, not as it might look better rearranged.

That instinct extended to his subject matter, too. Rattar moved without apparent hesitation between a hatching bird and a bomb crater, between herring drifters under sail and the quiet domestic ritual of a woman tending sheep's puddings on a stove.

Nothing was beneath his attention and nothing seems to have been forced into a frame it didn't belong in.

For photographers used to chasing gear upgrades as a substitute for graft, A Time to Keep is a gentle rebuke.

Rattar's tools were modest; his patience and curiosity were not. It didn't stop him building a proper business, either, selling mounted prints, postcards, calendars and souvenir packs that carried his work into homes across Shetland and, through reproductions and publications, well beyond it.

A Time to Keep runs at Shetland Museum and Archives in Lerwick, Shetland, Scotland until Sunday, October 11.

Staged in the Gadderie's newly darkened space, with a reconstructed bird hide complete with recorded birdsong, it's as much about atmosphere as artefact, making it well worth a visit. And while you're there, you'll get a useful reminder that the best accessory in your bag has never been the one you can buy.

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You Never Did Anything Wrong opens at the Hayward Gallery on November 24 this year, running until March 7 2027. It's Goldin's first UK institutional show since 2002, and as we previously reported, sees her turning her lens on classical art and sculpture. That in itself is an expected pivot for an artist best known for her human studies. But as we've just learned, that's only the half of it.

At the center of the show will be two films, both titled You Never Did Anything Wrong. Part I, shot on 16mm and centred on a solar eclipse, draws on an ancient myth of animals stealing the sun. Part II, made with filmmaker David Sherman, is built from found footage and damaged soundtracks lifted from nature documentaries of the 1960s and 70s, the decades of Goldin's own youth.

The title comes from a photograph Goldin took of a pet's gravestone in Lisbon in 1998, inscribed with the words "you never did anything wrong". It's long served as a kind of manifesto for her documentary work; here, reused as the title for two films almost entirely without people in them, it reads differently again.

Above all it's striking how consistent Goldin's method remains, even as her subject changes dramatically. In short, she's still working the way she always has: close attention, structural critique built from personal material, a refusal to look away from difficulty.

What's in the show?

Part I carries a dedication to Sulala Animal Rescue, the oldest animal rescue organisation in the Gaza Strip, which Goldin has worked with closely. This isn't the first time animals have entered Goldin's frame; photographs like My horse Roma, outside Luxor, Egypt (2003) and Electric Gaja, Paris (2010) show the same warmth and attention she brings to people, extended to other creatures. What's new is building an entire body of moving-image work around that gaze, rather than letting it surface occasionally within a wider body of human subjects.

Part II pushes the idea further. By reworking old nature documentary footage rather than shooting new material, Goldin explores how her generation was taught to see other species in the first place. The film moves from that critique into what's described as a lyrical ode to the land and the animals within it; one shadowed throughout by a sense of impending extinction. Both films feature scores by Mica Levi, with Part I also carrying music by Valerij Fedorenko.

Rachel Thomas, the Hayward's Roden chief curator, frames the shift as being more about continuity rather than rupture. "Shifting her focus from human relationships to animal consciousness and the natural world, Goldin brilliantly re-evaluates how we perceive other living beings," she says. The compassion is the same; only the frame has widened.

What photographers can learn here

For anyone building a practice around a single, well-honed subject, be that portraiture, street work or documentary reportage, Goldin's move offers a useful lesson. She's not swapping technique for a new one. She's asking whether the empathy and formal control she's spent decades developing on people can hold up when there's no human face to anchor it. (Spoiler: it can.)

The exhibition will also bring the UK premiere of Stendhal Syndrome (2024), pairing photographs of Goldin's friends and lovers with classical artworks, and a UK showing of Memory Lost (2019-2021) , her slide work on addiction, dedicated to the activist group P.A.I.N., which she founded. Upstairs, a new body of photographic prints connected to the You Never Did Anything Wrong films will be shown alongside a wider selection of Goldin's photography.

Tickets are on sale to Southbank Centre members now, and are available to the general public from Friday 17 July. Full-price tickets cost £19, with a £7.50 offer running for the exhibition's opening fortnight, and Under-30s subscribers eligible for half-price entry.

Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong is at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, from 24 November to 7 March 2027.

Look through Oliver Klink's Where the Earth Remembers, on view throughout July on All About Photo's Solo Exhibition platform, and you'll soon see a pattern emerge.

The two children steadying a donkey loaded with firewood are looking straight at the camera. So are the couple standing in their stone doorway beside an old television set. So are the elderly women pressed up against an iron church gate strung with tinsel, and the pair walking arm in arm down a snow-covered village road.

None of the subjects in these photos, it's clear, were caught unaware.

Klink documented these communities across Poland, Romania and Turkey on a Leica Q3 Monochrom and a Fujifilm GFX100; two cameras that don't, on the face of it, have much in common.

In fact, a fixed-lens compact camera and a medium-format camera body are about as different from each other as two digital cameras can be. And to me, that's a reflection of how a successful series is rarely based on one particular camera, lens or even technical approach. For documentary photography, it's more about relationships than the gear.

Moment of acknowledgment

It's a common assumption that the best documentary work is invisible. The photographer unnoticed, the subject caught mid-life rather than mid-pose. I'd argue, though, that the brilliance of Klink's series demonstrates the opposite.

A subject who looks straight into the lens has, by definition, stopped what they were doing and acknowledged the person holding the camera. That moment of acknowledgement is much harder to earn than a candid frame, because it requires the subject to trust that being seen won't cost them anything.

To put it another way, grabbing a candid shot from a distance takes a long lens and no relationship at all. Getting someone to meet your eyes, mid-task, in their own home, takes the opposite.

What of the images that break the pattern? In a way, they make the point clearest. Take the shot below of a woman knitting in a Turkish barn doorway, chickens crowding the threshold behind her. She is entirely absorbed in her own hands; she isn't performing for Klink at all.

Set against the other photos on this page, that unguarded frame reads less like an inconsistency and more like proof of range. Klink got some subjects to look at him and others to simply forget he was there. But both outcomes depend on the same groundwork of trust rather than on luck or a longer lens.

The broader lesson for photographers

Klink himself grew up on a Swiss farm before building a career photographing culture and landscape internationally. And his own account of this project leans hard on patience and time spent inside these communities before the camera ever came out.

In that light, the eye contact in the finished images is the visible evidence of invisible work.

All this makes his series a useful corrective for anyone shooting portraits of strangers. Put simply, a subject looking directly at you isn't a failure of candour. It can actually be a clear sign that you were allowed to be there in the first place.

Presented by All About Photo, Where the Earth Remembers by Oliver Klink is on view throughout July here.

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There's a particular kind of exhibition that makes you want to put your camera down for a minute and think about what you're actually trying to do with it. Playing the Piano Upstairs, which has just opened at the Print Sales Gallery, inside The Photographers' Gallery in London, is one of those shows.

On the surface, it's about a photographer's relationship with her sister, built and rebuilt in the years after their mother died. But for anyone who spends their weekends fussing over exposure and grain, what's most interesting is what Ichida did after she put her camera away.

Ichida, who was born in Niigata, Japan in 1985 and is now based in the UK, spent this series photographing her sister against the snow-heavy landscapes of their hometown; often alongside sticks, reeds, antlers and other found forms that seem to echo the human body back at itself. The images are quiet almost to the point of vanishing, with silhouettes and reflections doing lots of emotional work.

What really grabbed my interest, though, is how these pictures were made. Ichida has hand-printed every image using photopolymer photogravure onto Japanese washi paper, layering in archival pigments as she goes. This is a slow, physically demanding process that has more in common with etching than with anything most working photographers would commit to today.

The case for slow photography

Photogravure has been around since the 1870s, and it fell out of everyday use precisely because it's so awkward. A photosensitive gelatin plate has to be exposed, etched and inked by hand, and every print carries the tiny variations that come with that. For most of the 20th century, that made it a niche practice for printmakers rather than photographers.

I find it fascinating that Ichida has resurrected this antiquated technique in the 2020s. She's working in this arduous way at a moment when the profession is facing the consequences of instant smartphone photography and the ability of AI to make an instant photorealistic image, with no lens even being involved.

To be clear, Ichida isn't discussing any of that; the press release makes clear that this series is about grief and sisterhood, not technology. But at the same time, there's something quite profound about a photographer choosing, in 2026, to route her most personal work through a 19th-century printmaking process.

Ichida has said her snowscapes function as "visual metaphors for memory itself; mutable, obscured, yet softly glowing just below the surface". And I don't think it's stretching things to say that description applies just as well to the photogravure process as it does to the pictures themselves.

Memory doesn't render at full resolution. Neither does a hand-inked plate.

What photographers can learn

Ichida's compositions lean hard on negative space, on letting a figure occupy a small fraction of a vast, pale frame, and on using reflections in still water to double a subject without ever showing their face. None of that, importantly, requires specialist kit. Instead it requires patience, a willingness to wait for flat, windless conditions, and the confidence to leave most of the frame empty.

There's a deeper lesson here, I think, about process. Ichida's choice of technique isn't incidental decoration around the pictures – it's doing as much narrative work as the compositions themselves. That's worth thinking about in a world where photographers are often chasing the fastest possible workflow; from card to cloud to client. While that's often commercial reality, it's sometimes worth asking the question: would a slower method be feasible, and might that end up pleasing the client or customer more?

Playing the Piano Upstairs runs until September 13 at The Photographers' Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW.

Prices for prints start at £675 plus VAT, with profits going towards the gallery's public programme, and buyers can pay in instalments through the Own Art scheme. The show runs alongside Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now, also on at The Photographers' Gallery until September 27. Entry is free.

Once a year, deep in the rural countryside of the French department of Cantal, some 40,000 people amass in the small village of Allanche.

Normally, the town is home to just 800 people, but every May, the streets swell with crowds, and the air fills with the sound of cowbells, as a centuries-old tradition gets underway: the transhumance of Salers cattle to the high mountain pastures.

At the invitation of a longtime friend, photographer and art director Thomas Savary left the urban expanses of Paris for the countryside town to document the event. Now he's exhibiting the photo series in collaboration with Sigma at this year's Les Rencontres d'Arles festival.

"I travelled to the Cantal to bring my own perspective to the event,” said Thomas. “Immersed in the heart of this landmark event, I set out to document the transmission of a living heritage.”

While many farmers now transport their livestock via lorry, several areas across France continue to do the droves on foot as part of transhumance festivals (Fête de l’Estive), keeping tradition alive. In Allanche, the highlight is the procession of hundreds of Salers cattle through the main streets, led by local farmers.

“I enjoyed weaving my way through the crowds, talking with farmers and visitors alike, who generously shared both their expertise and their enthusiasm for this extraordinary occasion,” said Thomas.

Opting for freedom of movement, the photographer used the ultra-compact Sigma fp, enabling him to become immersed in the action and develop a “sense of closeness” with his subjects.

He revealed details like the weathered hands resting on a shepherd's staff, a child carefully brushing their animal, and the look of pride on a farmer’s face as he led his herd, combining photojournalism with his fine art directing background.

“Through these images, I sought to reveal the quiet beauty of the bond that unites people, animals, and the land they share,” said Thomas.

L’estive – the name of Thomas' exhibition – is open until July 12, Rue du Pont, Arles, France, bringing rural tradition to the heart of the festival's opening week, inviting viewers to pause and reflect on national heritage.

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Every keen photographer eventually collects something, whether it's cameras, prints, or just a hard drive full of "keepers" nobody else will ever see.

Judy Glickman Lauder collected the real thing: around 100 photographs by around 50 of the medium's biggest names. And it's now heading out on a four-venue US tour as Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder. The exhibition is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Portland Museum of Art, Maine, and curated by Anjuli Lebowitz, PhD, Judy Glickman Lauder Curator of Photography at Portland Museum of Art.

What grabs my attention isn't just the roll call, though it's a serious one (Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Gordon Parks' American Gothic, Nan Goldin's Self-Portrait in Kimono with Brian, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Imogen Cunningham...). It's that the collection was assembled by someone whose own relationship with the camera began on the other side of the lens.

Her father was Irving Bennett Ellis (1902-1977): an early California pictorialist photographer, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and the recipient of many photographic awards.

He photographed his daughter from infancy into adulthood, and the project eventually fed into Kodak's iconic "Turn Around" TV commercial in the 1960s. That made her a familiar face to millions, before she'd ever composed a frame of her own.

Only in the 1970s did she buy her first professional camera and start pointing it the other way. She eventually built a body of work which today sits in the Met, the Getty and the Whitney, exploring topics like the Holocaust and civil rights.

As a result of this myriad of experience, her own photography collection has an unusually personal editing eye behind it. This isn't an acquisitions committee assembling a survey. It's a working photographer choosing pictures that made her feel something.

A masterclass in curation

For anyone building their own portfolio or trying to sequence a personal project, the way Presence is put together is worth studying.

Crucially, the curators haven't arranged the roughly 100 prints in date order, walking visitors through photographic history decade by decade. Instead, they've grouped them into eight themed sections, based on the idea of "presence": the theorist Roland Barthes' notion that a photo is proof that a moment, a person or place existed.

That means a Lange sits near a Goldin, and an Arbus near a Parks, because of what the images share emotionally. It's a good approach to borrow when you're editing your own contact sheets: ask what a picture does to the person looking at it, not just when or where you took it.

This particular mix is also a reminder of how wide "documentary" photography actually stretches. James Karales' sweeping Selma to Montgomery March and Steve Schapiro's close-in portrait of Martin Luther King sit alongside Merry Alpern's grainy, voyeuristic Dirty Window Series and Jerry Uelsmann's darkroom surrealism in Small Woods Where I Met Myself.

Eslewhere, Todd Webb's eight-print panorama of a single block of Sixth Avenue in 1948 shows what patient, methodical street photography looks like when it's given room to breathe across multiple frames, rather than compressed into one decisive moment.

Glickman Lauder built this collection over decades – buying work she responded to rather than chasing a checklist of famous names – and the show is stronger for the gaps and idiosyncrasies that approach leaves behind.

To my mind, this is a useful lesson for anyone assembling a portfolio purely to look impressive. Namely, that pictures with presence tend to come from conviction, rather than completism.

Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder runs at the Southampton Arts Center, New York, from July 25 to September 27, 2026, before touring to Sarasota Art Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston and the Lowe Art Museum in Miami through February 2028.

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Back in April, we wrote about Lacock by Martin Parr, the late British photographer's last major commission, ahead of its opening at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, UK. The exhibition has now opened to the public, and the National Trust and CEWE have now released a set of behind-the-scenes photographs that change the story slightly, in the best possible way.

Because what these new images show isn't really the village of Lacock. It's Martin Parr himself, working. And for anyone who's ever picked up a camera, that turns out to be the more interesting picture entirely.

The man behind the lens

In several of the shots, taken by National Trust photographer Andy Cochrane, Parr is seen exactly as you'd expect: ring flash mounted on his camera, braces holding up his trousers, sleeves rolled, crouched low over a trestle table of prize vegetables at a village hall show or crouched even lower to photograph a scarecrow on a roadside chair. It's the same posture he'd held for 50 years, in front of everyone from holidaymakers in New Brighton to tourists at the Louvre.

What's different, and what makes these images poignant, is the walking frame. It's there beside him in shot after shot: at a cricket pavilion, in a flag-strewn cricket field, at a photography talk where he's pictured photographing his own audience. Parr was seriously ill throughout this project. He kept working anyway, on foot, with mobility aid in tow, getting exactly the shots he wanted.

There's a craft lesson buried in this, separate from the obvious human one. None of these images show Parr fighting his equipment or his circumstances. He's not awkwardly shooting from a chair or compromising his eye-level. He's still getting low, still getting close, still working the angle properly. The walking frame might have meant slower movement between shots, but it never meant lazier composition once he arrived.

Other images show the exhibition coming together: two technicians in purple gloves hanging large framed prints, including that prize potato and the Union Jack lollipop seller we covered last time, and a wider shot of a contact-sheet wall, rows and rows of small prints pinned up for editing.

Unglamorous insights

That wall is worth dwelling on. It's the unglamorous part of any photographic project: hundreds of frames, most of them ordinary, a handful of them extraordinary, and someone has to sit down and work out which is which.

Among the small prints visible on that wall: scarecrows, village processions, a woman holding a vegetable marrow, a man in a horse costume, an unmade bed. All of the photos Martin captured at Lacock Abbey as part of this final commission feature in the exhibition.

Held at the Fox Talbot Museum within Lacock Abbey, the exhibition runs until 27 June 2027 and is accompanied by a book with a foreword by Susie Parr and a short film about the project. Curator Dr Andy Cochrane calls it Parr's "gift to us all," and on the evidence of these new images, that's not an exaggeration. He gave the project everything he had, right up until he couldn't give any more.

The takeaway is the same one Parr always offered, just sharper now. The work isn't about the equipment, the location or even your health. It's about showing up and looking properly, for as long as you possibly can.

Lacock by Martin Parr is open now at the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, and runs until 27 June 2027. Visit nationaltrust.org.uk/lacock for further information.

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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This tiger video went viral for all the wrong reasons and I’m shocked by the trend of taking photos with big cats in captivity.

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.