The aftermath of 9/11 brought an estimated 400,000 first responders – the largest number of mobilized rescue workers in American history. But one New York-based artist photographed 9/11’s heroes, families, and survivors with a camera so large, the photographs feel almost like meeting them in person.

Joe McNally’s life-sized Polaroid series, The Faces of Ground Zero, went on to capture 272 faces of 9/11 with the world’s largest Polaroid, a camera about the size of a single-car garage that created massive life-sized 9x7-foot prints. Taken in the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the series went on to become a permanent part of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Nearly 25 years later, the photographer is speaking on how The Faces of Ground Zero unfolded in a special event on September 10 at 5 PM ET. Presented by Adorama, McNally will speak live in person at 42 West 18th Street, New York, NY, while the event will also be live-streamed on YouTube.

Many photographers and photojournalists have told the story of 9/11, but McNally, a portrait and assignment photographer, wanted to photograph the people of 9/11 in a way that was both distinctive and respectful.

At the time, the world’s largest Polaroid camera, built by Dr. Edwin Land, happened to be in a studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “It was the size of a one-car garage, with two technicians inside of it working the machinery of this unique picture instrument,” McNally said of the unusual camera.

But, McNally, after first using the camera in 2000, knew what the mix of modern and vintage camera tech could do – freeze a moment, life-sized.

“For the viewer, standing in front of one of these life-sized Polaroids is akin to meeting the person in the picture,” McNally once wrote. “It’s an emotional encounter. They gaze back at you. And, given the fact that these portraits were all shot within a month of 9/11, those faces spoke a powerful, emotional truth. You cannot look away from the hurt, the stress, the exhaustion, the bravery, and the pride.”

But Faces of Ground Zero didn’t just record life-sized portraits. The series not only went on to become a permanent part of the 9/11 Museum, but the subsequent book ended up raising nearly two million dollars for the post-9/11 relief fund.

Each frame taken by the giant Polaroid camera, at the time, cost $300.

“The subject must stand very still for their portrait, while the camera is prepped and focused," McNally said. "The studio lights need to be doused. The cap is pulled off the massive lens that serves as the portal to the interior chamber. With a single pop of a powerful flash system, the subject is recorded, life-size.”

McNally, as a New York-based photographer, had photographed the World Trade Center many times in his career before 9/11, including climbing to the top of the Twin Towers in 1977 to photograph maintenance workers.

The Adorama event will feature not only a special appearance by McNally but will also display a selection of some of the Polaroids from the series. The Faces of Ground Zero: 25 Years Later event is free to attend, with reservations now open. The event will also be livestreamed on Adorama’s YouTube channel.

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For more of the inspiring stories behind the photographers of 9/11, read about the Projections NYC six-day series interviewing more than 30 photographers.

The first-ever photograph is returning back to where it was taken in France for the first time in 200 years. Shot by Nicéphore Niépce in either 1826 or 1827 – no one knows the precise date - the image entitled View from the Window at Le Gras will go on show in Chalon-sur-Saône, in the Burgundy region, as part of France's 200th anniversary of photography celebrations.

The image of a courtyard was shot from a room in Niépce's home in the village Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, just outside Chalon-sur-Saône. It was recorded onto a sheet of pewter plate, which was coated with bitumen of Judea – a naturally occurring light-sensitive resin. He used a camera obscura to create the 8-hour exposure.

Niépce travelled to the UK shortly after the image was taken, to look his older brother in Kew – and to promote his photographic process, which he called heliography (the Greek for sun drawing). He had hoped to demonstrate his image-making process to the Royal Society and King George IV. But the presentation to the Royal Society never happened as Niépce refused to disclose the exact technical details of his chemical process, which went against the society's rules for investigating new discoveries. He returned to France later that year, leaving some of his plates with a botanical illustrator and friend Francis Bauer.

His first-ever image is now part of the Gernsheim Collection, which was purchased by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin in 1963. "The Gernsheim collection is one of the seminal collections in the United States of the history of photography and contains an unparalleled range of more than 35,000 images," explains Michael Pritchard.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce have jointly announced thatView from the Window at Le Gras will be shown in both museums in 2027.

The heliograph will be included in an exhibition Radical Forms: Photographic Experimentation from the Harry Ransom Center's Collections which opens on February 27 2027. It will then head to France to be displayed in the exhibition Helios 1826-1827 at the Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, close to Niépce's home and where the plate was made, from April 26 to June 20 2027.

A new exhibition coming to London, England, will delve into the history of children as photographers and how photography transformed from a pastime reserved for the elite to a DIY hobby for all youngsters.

Curated by Annebella Pollen, a professor of visual and material culture at the University of Brighton, Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers will explore how youngsters saw the world through a viewfinder and built communities with cameras in hand.

The exhibition will feature previously unseen images taken by children across a range of settings, from family life to playing in the great outdoors, to archive materials such as influential photography magazines that helped photography become more than just a niche pursuit.

Different types of cameras are explored, too, including homemade devices such as the “Wellieflex” – a pinhole camera which, believe it or not, employed a Wellington boot for the body.

The Wellieflex, along with a handful of other homemade camera models made using everyday items, was the invention of activist and photographer Terry Dennett.

According to Dennett, who published about his DIY cameras and children’s photography workshops in a 1976 edition of the magazine Camerawork, the devices, essentially a light-tight container, a lens and a film holder, “worked”.

Competitive photography increased uptake of the craft, too, which is also detailed in the exhibition. Between 1958 and 1972, the Junior Photographer of the Year was a major national competition organized by the Photographic Information Council (PIC), helping to establish over 1,000 school darkrooms.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers runs from October 14 2026 to February 21 2027, at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. On-the-door admission costs £14 (approximately $18 / AU$26), and online bookings are cheaper at £12 ($16 / AU$22).

Visit the gallery website for opening times and concession prices.

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Here's a fact that should shock you: there are, at the time of writing, only two northern white rhinos left alive anywhere on the planet. That's right, just two.

Fatu and Najin, mother and daughter, live under permanent protection at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya – and neither can ever be returned to the wild. Both were born into captivity and their species is basically extinct, outside a fenced enclosure watched round the clock by armed rangers.

It's the kind of emotive subject that countless photographers would relish. But it's also a topic that could easily tip into cliché: all sorrow, symbolism and empty hand-wringing.

Thankfully, photographer Mital Patel has taken a refreshingly different route – as his online exhibition The Caretakers, running on All About Photo this month, demonstrates. Rather than making Fatu and Najin the entire story, Patel points his Nikon Z9 camera just as often at the humans who spend their lives beside them.

A ranger laughing with his arm braced against a rhino's flank. A four-man foot patrol – one carrying a rifle, another a leash and a tracking dog – walking out across dry grassland toward two grazing shapes on the horizon.

A man standing beside a stone memorial reading "Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, 1973 to 2018," his hand resting on it the way you'd touch a friend's headstone.

This is not just an extinction story. It's a story about the unglamorous labor of keeping something incredibly special alive, day in, day out.

Technical approach

From a technical point of view, what's striking is how Patel gets you close enough to share that experience.

Some of the strongest images use a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 extreme wide-angle lens pushed right up against a rhino's face; close enough that the horn distorts and looms into the foreground while the animal's herd carries on grazing, unbothered, in the background.

It's a technique that only works with animals used to human presence. And it does something that a longer lens never could: it collapses the safe distance a telephoto gives you and puts the viewer intimately inside the frame.

This contrasts nicely with the more conventional side-on portraits – rhino and ranger sharing the same patch of golden light, shot on what looks like a standard portrait length.

Switching registers between reportage and something closer to formal portraiture gives the series as a whole a sense of verve and dynamism.

Meanwhile the image above, used on the show's poster, sums up the story in a single frame. Two rhinos graze at the edges of the picture, a ranger standing in the empty middle distance, dwarfed by the animals on either side.

It's a picture that could be titled either 'Guardianship' or 'Futility', depending on how you feel about the odds.

Conservation photography typically asks you to mourn for a species. This one asks you to also think about the people who show up for it.

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The ColorChecker – a small card featuring 24 color patches – has turned 50. And, to mark its half century, Calibrite, the manufacturer, has launched a virtual museum exploring the history of the iconic design.

Calibrite has said that the virtual museum forms part of a year-long celebration of its color-accuracy tool. These will also include a challenge teaching what each of the 24 color patches does and a “perfectionist” quiz matching creators to the right Calibrite products.

The original ColorChecker, later known as the “Macbeth chart,” was created by scientists at the Macbeth company, who designed it for the TV and movie industry.

To determine the correct paint colors, they used a spectrophotometer to measure the actual spectral reflectance curves – how much light is reflected at every individual nanometer wavelength of the visible spectrum – of real-world materials like human skin and leaves.

Over the next 50 years, the ColorChecker brand changed corporate hands several times, from the newly merged GretagMacbeth company in the late 1990s, to X-Rite in the mid-2000s, and finally to the current owner, Calibrite, in 2021.

As the owners of the ColorChecker changed, so did the technology behind it. These days, ultra-precise laser scanners measure the light of each color patch, translating them into universal digital coordinates that computers and software can understand.

This enables the digital ColorChecker products to determine correct screen colors beyond the original handheld card. In fact, here at Digital Camera World, we use a ColorChecker Video when editing our Bokeh Face podcastt to ensure we don’t get any quirky hues before publishing an episode.

Calibrite’s 50th anniversary of the ColorChecker went live today, September 1, and you can check out the virtual museum and other celebratory online activities at the official hub.

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In a bare, wind-scoured field in the 1930s, a man leans against the running board of an old car, a sleeping infant cradled against his chest. Behind him stands the family's home: a shack, cobbled together from scrap wood, cardboard and torn sacking, a single stovepipe jutting from the roof. A young girl watches from the doorway.

No caption is needed to explain what kind of life this is. It's the same visual world that Dorothea Lange and her Farm Security Administration colleagues were documenting up and down California at the time.

Except the families in these particular frames were Mexican, and many of them would soon be forced out of the country entirely – regardless of whether they held US citizenship.

Elsewhere in the same era, a young cotton picker looks straight into the lens, a canvas sack half her own height slung over one shoulder, already bulging with the day's work.

A boy stands alone in a freshly worked beet field, hoisting a battered metal water can above his head to carry to the other workers. A group of seven men poses together at the end of a shift, laughing, one holding up a fistful of harvested beets for the camera.

Two women in overalls and caps walk between the wheels of a steam locomotive, lanterns swinging from their hands, doing railroad maintenance work that had opened up to Mexican and Mexican-American women during the labor shortages of the Second World War.

These are recruitment-era pictures, made to document a workforce the country needed and, in some cases, had gone looking for.

Other pictures change the register entirely.

One frame shows a crowd of men, hats on, pressing toward the open door of a train carriage in open desert country, hands reaching down to pull each other up and in. The label attached to the photograph states plainly what it is: men boarding a train to Mexico.

Another shows a long line of men filing through an arched colonnade, one after another rolling up a sleeve so that a young woman can swab his arm before a vaccination. A third shows dozens of men stripped to the waist inside a wooden building, holding numbered slips of paper, waiting their turn in a queue that stretches out of frame.

Whether some of these images were made for entry processing or for deportation processing isn't obvious from the pictures alone.

Others, however, are unambiguously so: 1954 photographs of a chain-link and barbed-wire compound at El Centro, California, crowded with men held behind the fence, and a street scene of men lined up with their suitcases beside a waiting bus, police officers standing watch on the pavement.

Together, these images span roughly twenty years and two different purposes: one set made to record a labor force that the United States actively recruited, the other to record its mass removal.

The appropriately titled exhibition Help Wanted / Leave Now: ‘Operation Wetback’ & the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation at the California Museum places them uncomfortably together, in the same rooms.

The show is centered on the coerced removals of the 1930s and the Eisenhower-era 1954 campaign, but the museum's advisory council, which includes the labor leader Dolores Huerta and several historians of Mexican-American labor, frames the story as older and longer-running still.

A pattern of recruitment in times of need, expulsion in times of political convenience. Repeated across a century and, they argue, still recognizable in immigration enforcement today.

Did you ever hear the one about the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards' 10th anniversary? Well, you’ve come to the right place, because an immersive exhibition is being held at Frameless, the largest permanent immersive art experience in London, England.

The laugh-out-loud event opens to visitors on September 12, where a curated collection of the competition’s funniest images will be blown up to full scale and immersed within their natural habitat, ensuring that you’re left cackling like a hyena that’s having its tummy tickled.

The exhibition will feature 91 award-winning photos, presented in what Nikon is calling a “spectacular” 15-minute immersive experience.

Far from a cheap laugh, visitors will get to walk through seven different immersive habitats where they’ll be exposed to the sights and sounds of locations such as shorelines and forests.

And of course, they’ll get to meet a variety of hilarious characters including a grinning bear, a ridiculously smarmy fish and a fox stuck headfirst in a patch of snow.

"Being able to show some of the very best entries from our fantastic collection of images at Frameless is an absolute honor for all involved with this competition," said Tom Sullam, co-founder of the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards.

"The strength of our message is only as strong as the people that see the images, and this upbeat, positive and enhancing exhibition will be an incredible experience for all visitors. We are genuinely thrilled by this exhibition and can’t wait to see the positivity that comes from it!"

The exhibition will run from September 12 2026 through January 2027, with adult entry from £29.50 and £20 for children. Visit the Frameless website for more information.

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One of the tricks a great photographer can pull off is to make their job look easy. Taken between 2010 and 2012, Peter Marlow's large-format cathedral photographs fit firmly in that category. To the untrained eye, these hushed, glowing interiors, empty of people, might look like they were easy to set up and shoot. They were anything but.

An exhibition running at Southwark Cathedral titled The English Cathedral – drawn from Marlow's book of the same name, first published in 2012 – includes his planning notes alongside the finished prints, and they tell a very different story. One of admin, phone numbers scrawled in red biro, and vergers who needed persuading to switch off the lights.

Marlow's archive puts the lie to the idea that "natural light" photography is ever the simple, unmediated option. Getting a cathedral lit purely by the sky, with every electric light and spotlight killed, meant negotiating access, coordinating with staff who controlled the switches, and repeat visits when the weather or the angle of the sun didn't cooperate.

His to-do lists, reproduced as part of the show, read less like an artist's notebook and more like a project manager's spreadsheet: diocese phone numbers, admin contacts, notes on when scaffolding needed clearing before a shoot.

Another interesting detail is Marlow's use of instant film, specifically Fujifilm FP-100, to test each composition and exposure before committing to a single frame of large format. His exposure notes for Rochester and Chichester show him logging shutter speeds and f-stops shot by shot, refining his read of the light before the "real" exposure went down.

It's a reminder that even photographers working at the very top of the trade, with decades of experience and a Magnum membership behind them, don't trust their light meter alone when the stakes and the film costs are high.

Marlow himself put it plainly: his cathedral days involved hours of driving and thinking, with his reference Polaroids drying in the sun on the dashboard while England passed by outside the windscreen.

Camera kit

Marlow was shooting on a Sinar F1 monorail camera, fitted with a Sinaron-W 115mm lens, loaded with sheets of Fuji 160 Pro colour negative film (rated at ISO100 ASA rather than the box speed of ISO160). He mounted it on the largest tripod Manfrotto makes and stood on a six-foot stepladder to keep his shooting height consistent across all 42 buildings.

He used the rising front of the Sinar to keep verticals parallel, shot at small apertures between f/22 and f/32 for maximum depth of field, which pushed exposures out to between one and five minutes in the low dawn light.

Ultimately, though, what makes the 42 images cohere as a single body of work lies less in Marlow's kit and more in his insistence on repeating the same discipline at every cathedral. The same eastward orientation towards nave and altar, the same reliance on dawn light, the same refusal to compromise by leaving a single spotlight on.

Because his method never wavered, buildings as different as Manchester's dark hammerbeam roof and Southwark's pale gothic vaulting ended up reading as part of one continuous project. And for anyone attempting their own long-term project, I think that's the real takeaway from this show.

Marlow didn't chase 42 different ideas. He found one rigorous, bureaucratically-challenging method, and applied it 42 times; cathedral vergers and drying Polaroids included.

Peter Marlow: The English Cathedral runs at Southwark Cathedral, London Bridge, Montague Close, London, SE1 9DA, until August 31. The exhibition is free to view during general opening hours.

Earlier this year, Icelandair launched a competition for a “really bad photographer.” The airline wanted someone truly terrible with the shutter at their fingertips to show the spectacular Icelandic scenery in its worst light, all as part of a tourism marketing stunt.

And after over 120,000 awful photographers answered the call, one stood out as being far worse than all the rest: French woman Blanche Mortemard.

She’s now back from her 10-day trip gallivanting around Iceland with an iPhone 17 Pro smartphone camera in hand – but no technique in mind – with the airline sharing her less-than-stellar camera roll for us all to see.

While the obvious flaw in this first image is the finger blocking out the top portion of the frame, there’s an equally glaring beginner error at play here. Mortemard has completely failed to isolate a clear subject, instead cramming everything she possibly could into the frame.

While she may have thought that she was capturing a beautiful landscape scene, to a more trained eye, the end result is a mashup of colors, objects and shapes with no real narrative anchored in a clear focal point.

This is arguably the number one error all beginner photographers make. But it’s one all beginners have to make many times in order to develop a stronger editorial eye capable of picking out a clear, story-infused scene.

It seems like Mortemard’s compositional skills improved slightly by the time she took this next shot, but not enough. While in this scene she’s done a better job at outlining a subject – the waterfall – she’s captured it from completely the wrong angle.

Looking at the photo, I’m not quite sure what the best angle would’ve been, as it’s hard to tell if the waterfall is within an inaccessible gully, or if it could be better seen from lower down.

If this waterfall is visible from lower down, then I imagine that there would have been many people there, which would've added another challenge to the shot. However, with a tripod, she could've handled this creatively by keeping the waterfall in focus and capturing the other tourists with lots of motion blur.

Since the inception of social media, waterfalls in Iceland are probably one of the most photographed natural landmarks you, well, at least I, see nowadays too. So this approach could've also produced something a little different – which is always nice to see.

Either way, scouting the area would have potentially helped her find a better composition. And if this really was the best angle, then I’d argue the shot was better not taken at all.

This final image was definitely worth taking, and I actually don’t have much to critique here. Overall, I think this is a nice shot, although I put it down to luck more than skill. No offense, Blanche…

What’s good about this scene is the way she used the curvature of the land to split the frame. There’s a nice amount of space dedicated to the cliff and the ocean, and the contrasting textures of the grass and waves look great to me.

If I had to be super picky, I’d say she could’ve waited for the bird to look directly at her, or gotten down lower, which wouldn’t have made it a more interesting portrait.

Something tells me that Blanche’s camera roll doesn’t contain too many shots like this following her trip, but I’m sure to her untrained eye it’s an absolute masterclass.

Not that she’ll care, though; along with the all-inclusive experience, Icelandair also paid their terrible photographer $50,000 (approximately £37,000 / AU$70,000) for her skills, or lack thereof.

Blanche’s candid images will now go on display at White Rabbit Studios, London, from September 11–12, where she’ll also give a live “artist” talk, on the second day. Tickets for the event will be available (for free) from 01 September at the exhibition webpage.

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When you see an iconic photograph hanging on a gallery wall, it's tempting to assume this was the creation of a lone visionary. If so, a new exhibition at The Getty Center, in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, will set you straight.

Instante / revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography gathers work from thirteen practitioners across nine decades.

It makes the case that Mexico's rich photographic tradition was built not by isolated geniuses, but by a vibrant network of friends, teachers, students and even couples who kept shooting the same streets, the same faces and sometimes the same bathtub.

I'm not being flippant with that last bit, by the way. One of the show's threads follows Graciela Iturbide's series shot inside artist Frida Kahlo's bathroom at Casa Azul, decades after the latter's death, where crutches, orthopaedic braces and a Stalin poster sit oddly together in the tub.

Strange, but true.

Masterclass in framing

Another thing I like is that rather than presenting all this work chronologically, curator Julieta Pestarino has organized it into 5 themes, each named after a line from Octavio Paz's poem Cara al tiempo, written to accompany Manuel Álvarez Bravo's images in the 1982 book that gives the show its title.

One of these sections, La sensación y la percepción ("Sensation and perception"), provides a masterclass in framing.

Back in the late 1920s, Álvarez Bravo figured out that if you crop tight enough or shoot from an interesting enough angle, an ordinary scene stops looking ordinary. You can see the same trick in later work by Iturbide, Pedro Meyer and Cecilia Salcedo Méndez.

The latter shoots a cluster of seed pods against black until they look more like sculpture than plant matter. Meyer does it with a nautilus shell, shooting so close that scale disappears and all that's left is light and curve. "Ahead of their time" doesn't really cut it.

An uneasy truce

Another section, El ojo piensa, el pensamiento ve ("The Eye Thinks, Thought Sees") section, examines the relationships between photographers and Mexican artists including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo.

This means we get, for example, a dramatic Rodrigo Moya portrait of Rivera and Siqueiros standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a mural: two rival titans of the art world sharing an uneasy truce for the camera.

The final section, El tiempo no cesa de fluir ("Time never stops flowing") grounds all this experimentation in history.

This spans everything from the economic boom of the mid-20th century, aka the "Mexican Miracle", through to a haunting image by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio – a wind-bent cactus with graffiti scrawled beneath it, demanding the return of the 43 students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa in 2014.

Instante / revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography runs at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, from September 01 2026 until January 03 2027. Admission is free, but timed entry tickets need to be booked.

The job of a gallery curator is not just to bring together the best images, but to arrange them in a way that gives us new perspectives on them.

If Getty's new exhibition has a theme, I'd say it's that the history of Chicano/a photography in Los Angeles is not all grainy documentary shots of marches and protest signs. It's far more varied, intimate and unexpected than that.

For non-US readers unfamiliar with the term, Chicano (masculine) and Chicana (feminine) generally describe people living in the United States who are of Mexican descent.

This does not necessarily mean they or their family are immigrants. Parts of what are now California and Texas, among other states, were once part of Mexico, hence the oft-used phrase: "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us."

Getty's new exhibition, Every Minute Is History: Five Views of Los Angeles, brings together Laura Aguilar, Reynaldo Rivera, George Rodriguez, Patssi Valdez and Ricardo Valverde.

These five photographers refused to settle on one way of working and, between them, built a more varied and expansive record of the City of Angels than any single one could have achieved.

Each to their own

George Rodriguez shot police lines and picket signs. Patssi Valdez staged elaborate, theatrical scenes in her own apartment.

Reynaldo Rivera photographed drag performers backstage at LA nightclubs. Laura Aguilar's subject was her own body. Ricardo Valverde hand-colored his prints and painted directly onto them.

None of them were trying to do the same thing at all: this wasn't a movement with a house style. Instead, this was a scene where very different instincts all found their subject in the same communities.

Rodriguez's photographs sit at one end of the spectrum: straight reportage, shot on the ground at events such as the 1966 Sunset Strip riots and at United Farm Workers actions in Delano, where men lean against a car holding hand-painted placards that pay tribute to Cesar Chavez – one of the most biggest labor and civil rights leaders in US history, and a central figure in the Chicano Movement.

Valdez is at the other end entirely. Her images from backstage at a theater showcase performers mid-transformation, buried in paper costumes and half-applied makeup; the scene so cluttered it takes a moment to find the face in it. These aren't documents of an event so much as constructions of a mood.

Aguilar's Clothed / Unclothed series does something different again: it turns the camera on the artist's family and her own body, presenting the same figures, dressed and undressed, side by side. Her Latina Lesbians portraits go further still, pairing a straightforward headshot with a handwritten statement from the sitter, so the photograph doesn't have to speak alone.

Valverde and Rivera occupy their own strange middle ground. Valverde's Dances with Muertos and his hand-painted Integrated School collage treat the photograph as raw material to be altered after the fact.

While Rivera's nightclub portraits, of performers including Gaby at La Plaza, capture LA's queer Latino nightlife with an intimacy that only comes from being inside the room.

Seen together, it's all a reminder that a community's history is not a monoculture – and that those who capture it best are often those who seek out the interesting stuff, in the corners and cracks.

Every Minute Is History: Five Views of Los Angeles runs at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, from September 01 2026 to January 03 2027. The exhibition is presented in English and Spanish. Admission is free, but timed entry tickets need to be booked in advance.

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Alan Lodge isn’t just a photojournalist with a particular focus on British subcultures. He’s lived them.

Leaving a stable career at the London Ambulance Service to join the traveling community, he roamed the country with family and friends in old caravans and buses, experiencing the heyday of the free festival “circuit.”

Since then, he’s played an active role in many of the prominent counterculture and socio-environmental movements – from land rights and anti-war protests to LGBTQ+ Pride – all with a camera in hand.

Now, Nottingham Trent University – where Lodge studied photography – will exhibit his photos.

Alan Lodge: Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation Since 1976 will tell the story of how movements beyond mainstream society have helped shape the UK’s cultural and social landscape today.

Featuring around 80 photographs alongside 35mm slide projections, moving images and personal archives, the exhibition sheds a rare, insider’s light on these events.

On display will be frames that Lodge took at what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

In the summer of 1985, the photojournalist joined the Peace Convoy on its annual journey to Stonehenge, seeing first-hand the now-infamous clashes between the police and travelers.

The “battle” resulted in one of the most violent mass arrests in British history, with prominent eyewitness accounts describing “extreme” police brutality.

Lodge began his studies in Nottingham in 1990, becoming involved with the city’s influential house music collective known as the DIY Sound System.

Two years later, he went on to shoot what are now considered his most influential images of ravers at Castlemorton Common in Wiltshire. The 1992 event is widely regarded as the largest illegal rave in British history and prompted the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994.

Alan Lodge: Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation Since 1976 runs from September 25 to December 12 at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University. The exhibition will launch the evening before, on Thursday September 24, from 18:00-20:00. Entry is free for all.

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Canon has launched a photo exhibition for visually impaired students, saying the bespoke art display will enable young people with impaired sight to experience photography in a “completely new way”.

The private exhibition – which, unfortunately, isn't open to the public – is a collaboration with the Royal Society for Blind Children (RSBC), taking place at RSBC Dorton College in England.

On display are portraits created by seven of the college’s students during a Canon creative workshop, held at the college last year, which the camera manufacturer has now printed using raised, tactile ink.

Neale Conroy, marketing director at Canon UK & Ireland, said that the elevated-print technology will help visually impaired youngsters to “connect with creativity.”

He added: “It’s wonderful to see how this project has helped students experience photography in a completely new way.”

Canon developed the relief prints using its proprietary Prisma Elevate XL – a software application that uses height maps and multiple layers of UV-curable ink to build raised textures up to 4 mm high, giving images a physical dimension that can be explored by hand.

Prisma Elevate XL only works with compatible flatbed printers, with Canon using one of its own Arizona series models for this series. These printers have built-in UV lights to which the ink is exposed upon printing so that it hardens.

“Seeing students engage with their own work in such a tactile and meaningful way has been incredibly rewarding,” said Sarah Mallion, vice principal at RSBC College Dorton.

“The project has shown how technology can open up new ways for young people to connect with creativity.”

According to the RSBC, there are some 37,000 blind and partially sighted children and young people in England and Wales, and 4 more children are diagnosed with sight loss daily.

Mallion hopes that the Dorton College display, which will remain permanently, “marks the beginning” of more accessible exhibitions and learning experiences for visually impaired people.

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One of the most powerful ways that photography can convey what's happening to our world is by offering the kind of perspective you can only get from on high. Indeed, many credit the Earthrise photo captured by astronaut William Anders during the 1968 Apollo 8 mission for sparking the modern ecological movement in the first place.

That same approach of seeing our world from above runs through much of the photography on show in Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet, a new exhibition opening at the Eden Project in Cornwall, England, this September.

The show brings together photography, film and sculpture within four themed zones: Extinction, Climate, Community and Renewal. The organisers describe this as "a journey from deep time into a more hopeful future".

Along that journey through time, photography's main contribution is in the present: how the world is now, not how it was or how we'd like it to be. And many of the photographs on show share an interesting approach: to see things as they really are, you first have to gain some altitude.

View from on high

Take Daniel Beltrá's shot of Iceland's Hvíta River, shown at the top of this page. Shot from above, its blues and golds – formed by a mixture of glacial meltwater and sediment – marble together in a way that resembles an abstract painting.

Also on show is Sebastião Salgado's aerial image of Alaska's Brooks Range (below), which brings this entire mountain range and its river system into a single composition that's awe-inspiring in its breadth and detail.

Paul Nicklen's drone shot of a polar bear crossing sea ice, meanwhile, strips out everything you'd have seen from ground-level: eye contact, a sense of human-animal scale, a sentimental feeling towards the subject.

What's left is a clean, almost geometrical composition, with the bear just a single white shape next to a crack in the ice. Somehow that makes it even more poignant, emphasizing its vulnerability against forces far larger than itself.

Richard Mosse pushes that sense of detachment even further with his shot of log barges from above. His use of infrared, rendering the vegetation red and water black, is an inspired decision, swapping objectivity for a clear editorial line in the visual itself.

Key takeaways

While many of these pictures are beautiful, this is not really about aesthetics, nor using drones just because they're fashionable. It's about pulling countless small details into a broader picture that reveals larger patterns and deeper truths.

And that fits well into the spirit of the show, which is less about doom, gloom and wringing our hands in despair, and more about providing solutions and a positive vision of the future.

The lesson for photographers here is clear. Whether you're shooting wildlife, landscapes or other natural phenomena, there's often an argument for stepping back, up and outwards from the detail, and seeing things from a wider perspective that can tell an altogether different story.

Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet runs at the Eden Project, Bodelva, St Austell, Cornwall, PL24 2SG. September 17-27, 10:00-17:00; September 28-October 16, 10:00-16:00, October 17-November 01, 10:00-17:00; November 02-January 03: opening times may vary.

Most photography students know the Lewis Hine story: the sociologist-turned-photographer whose images of child labor in American factories helped change the law.

Fewer, however, seem to know that a British missionary from a small Somerset town had already done something similar, and arguably more consequential, several years earlier, using a camera she carried into the Congo Free State on her honeymoon.

Alice Seeley Harris was 27 when she sailed for Africa in 1898 with her new husband, John, as missionaries with the Congo-Balolo Mission. She wasn't trained as a photographer, and hadn't gone there to become one.

What she encountered at the mission stations of Ikau and Baringa, though, was industrial-scale brutality.

Within territory that was privately owned by Belgium's King Leopold II, villages were required to meet impossible rubber-plant quotas. If they failed, the hands of men, women and children were taken by soldiers as proof that bullets had not been wasted. Harris began photographing the survivors and the evidence.

The pictures she brought back are difficult to look at even now, but it is worth understanding exactly how they worked, because the mechanics of that campaign still shape how photography gets used to demand accountability today.

Gathering evidence

One of her photographs shows a man named Nsala sitting on the veranda of her mission station, looking down at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, killed by sentries after her village failed to meet its rubber quota.

Harris persuaded him to pose for the picture. It is not an image she stumbled upon; it is one she constructed, deliberately, as testimony.

Her aim was to assemble a legal-style case in pictures. She understood, early on in the lifespan of the technology, that a photograph of an atrocity, properly composed and properly distributed, was more powerful than a written account – because it could not easily be denied.

She was proven right. Her images were printed in pamphlets, reproduced by Mark Twain in his satirical attack on Leopold, and eventually projected as lantern slides to audiences of hundreds across Britain and the United States.

By 1908, under mounting international pressure that her photographs had done more than anything else to generate, King Leopold II was forced to give up his personal ownership of the Congo Free State and hand control over to the Belgian state.

Written out of history

What happened to Harris afterwards is a tale that seems depressingly familiar in the history of brave women.

Twain used her photograph without naming her. Arthur Conan Doyle, writing an entire book on the subject, mentioned her once, as "Mrs Harris". The public campaigning credit went overwhelmingly to her husband, John, who became a knighted anti-slavery grandee, while her own name faded from the record she had created.

It's taken more than a century, and a series of exhibitions – including at Autograph ABP in London and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool – to give Alice Harris the recognition she is due.

This summer her hometown of Frome, Somerset, is running its own exhibition, Let's Talk About Alice, at the town museum where she is buried nearby with her family.

For anyone working in documentary, editorial or campaigning photography, this story is a useful corrective to two common assumptions: that photographic advocacy is something invented by Americans in the 20th century, and that the person who takes the picture is always the person who gets remembered for it.

Harris proved photography could move governments, a decade before Hine did. She was, for most of the century that followed, denied the credit. Finally, in her hometown, she's getting what she's long been due.

Let's Talk About Alice runs until August 22 2026 at Frome Museum in Frome, Somerset. Entry is free. For more information, visit the Discover Frome website.

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This year, the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) – a charity promoting contemporary art and architecture in Scotland – celebrates its bicentennial anniversary. And in honor of the moment, it will host an exhibition covering 200 years of its home country’s photographic history.

PhotoDalkeith RSA 200 will be hosted at the iconic Dalkeith Castle, just outside Edinburgh, and will display the photography of some 120 artists, exploring the medium’s development across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

“We are delighted to present this exhibition at Dalkeith Palace, which traces the evolution of photography from its pioneering beginnings to the present day,” said Calum Colvin, one of the exhibition curators at the RSA.

On display are prominent photos from the Buccleuch Collection, one of the world's largest private art and decorative collections, owned by the Buccleuch Family, for whom Dalkeith Castle was built in 1711.

Among the exhibited collection items will be a portrait of Lady Constance (1877-1970), daughter of the 6th Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, thought to have been taken in 1885, when she was 8 years old.

Other notable works to be featured include Wendy McMurdo’s The Games Hall. Originally trained as a painter, McMurdo became a photographer in the 1980s and was an early pioneer in experimenting with digital manipulation.

There’s also more recent imagery from Leena Nammariy (2021-22), whose multidisciplinary practice combines photography and printmaking to explore themes of identity, community and social engagement.

Entry to PhotoDalkeith RSA 200 costs £3 (approximately $4 / AU$5.75) and the exhibition will open Friday to Sunday, 10:0-16:00, from August 22 to September 27 2026. The exhibition extends beyond the Palace walls with large-scale outdoor photographic installations and interactive photo frames throughout Dalkeith Country Park.

The RSA is hosting celebrations throughout its bicentennial anniversary, which you can learn more about, along with finding further details of the photography exhibition, at its official website.

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Last year, Nikon celebrated the centenary of the launch of its JOICO microscope, the very first product in what would become the-then Nippon Kogaku’s microscope division, still a vital part of the Nikon Healthcare Business Unit today. Successes such as this are what ultimately paved the way for Nikon’s play into the camera market in 1948 with the Nikon I and beyond.

This year marks the 101st anniversary of the JOICO microscope and Nikon is once again celebrating its precision-optics lineage via a special exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum called Nikon Small World / Nikon JOICO Award Exhibition: “The Microscopic World – Illuminating the Future of Life”.

The exhibition, which runs until August 23, invites visitors to journey through Nikon’s microscope history, all while being treated to some jaw-dropping imagery courtesy of Nikon Small World (see last year's incredible stills winner above).

This global microscopic image contest celebrates the art of photomicrography, whereby a camera is attached to a microscope and used to capture incredible microscopic images. Nikon Small World includes both stills and video competitions, and features a panel of experienced judges. The 2026 competition is now closed for entries but the winners haven't yet been announced.

The Nikon Small World / Nikon JOICO Award Exhibition runs from July 25 to August 23, 2026. Standard opening hours are from 10:00 to 18:00. General admission costs 700 JPY (approx $4.50/£3.30/AU$6.30), students and 65+ rates are 500 JPY (approx $3.20/£2.40/AU$4.50), along with free admission for high-school students and younger.

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Every photographer who lands in Havana knows the standard shooting checklist. A 1957 Chevy Bel Air against peeling pastel paint. A cigar-smoking abuela on a wrought-iron balcony. The Malecón promenade at golden hour. And the thing is, you're probably going to get a nice picture. It'll be, though, a picture that's been taken roughly nine million times already.

David Saxe went looking for something else: the unposed, unpolished moments most visitors walk straight past. His resulting series Cuba es Vida, built from three separate journeys to the island, has just been named All About Photo's solo exhibition for August 2026 .

It's a monochtome project that leans hard into darkness, blur and atmosphere, favouring feeling over documentation. Rather than tourist landmarks, he went looking for domino games under a portico, a trumpeter perfecting his lines on a seawall at dusk, two sisters doing each other's hair on a crumbling patio. What makes it worthy of attention, though, is not just the subject matter. It's the stubbornness of the visual language.

Grain as a feature

Plenty of travel photographers treat imperfection as something to be corrected in post: sharpen the grain away, lift the shadows, clean up the blur. Saxe does the opposite. His images resist the polished perfection that's become the default setting for travel photography. The press release puts it plainly: shadows soften the edges of memory, movement suggests the pulse of daily life, and imperfect moments become expressions of authenticity rather than mistakes to fix.

That's worth thinking about, next time you're tempted to bin a slightly soft frame because it didn't look "clean" enough. Here, a boy mid-tumble in a Havana street, caught in a blur that a sharpness-obsessed editor might reject, does more to convey the energy of the moment than a tack-sharp version ever could.

Why this matters

Cuba has been photographed relentlessly over the years, and there's a real risk of the island becoming photographic shorthand: a set of visual clichés rather than a place with its own present tense.

Saxe's approach – three trips deep and built around access rather than spectacle – gets past that. He's not interested in the big symbols of history and culture for their own sake. He wants to capture what those symbols sit alongside, which is ordinary Cuban life carrying on regardless.

A long apprenticeship

Saxe, born in Montreal in 1943, cites Robert Frank, Roy DeCarava and Henri Cartier-Bresson as his early influences, and spent four years studying under the Canadian photographer John Max before building a career that's now taken him through decades of exhibitions across Canada and the US.

It's a reminder that this kind of loose, atmospheric documentary style isn't a shortcut or an aesthetic trend; it's the product of a long apprenticeship in looking properly.

For anyone planning a documentary project where the obvious shot is tempting, Cuba es Vida is worth studying closely. The lesson isn't complicated: put the postcard down, wait for the gesture, and let the grain do some of the talking.

Cuba es Vida runs throughout August on All About Photo's Solo Exhibition platform.

There's a photograph of Vivienne Westwood above that I absolutely love. Shot by Jillian Edelstein, it shows the late fashion designer in close-up: flame-orange hair wild against a warm brown background, two small silver horns tucked into her curls, her expression somewhere between mischief and defiance.

It's funny, strange and tells you more about her in a single frame than most interviews managed in an hour. It's also, technically speaking, a celebrity portrait, but it has little in common with what that phrase usually implies.

Most celebrity photography exists to serve a purpose: the album campaign, the magazine cover, the press junket. The subject is presented as the public wants to see them, and the photographer's job is largely to execute that vision as efficiently as possible. Edelstein's work operates on a different plane entirely.

Her portraits of Amy Winehouse, Yoko Ono, Kate Moss, Helena Bonham Carter and Sandra Oh, all included in the forthcoming Stardust exhibition at Hundred Heroines in Gloucestershire, are studies in what happens when a photographer pursues the person behind the persona, rather than the image in front of it.

Surprising results

The results are consistently surprising. Winehouse, in a white crop top and towering beehive, arms folded and gaze averted, looks simultaneously iconic and guarded.

Bonham Carter, shot outdoors in black and white and visibly pregnant, is dressed in a feathered hat, fishnet tights and heels, perched on a garden chair. She appears theatrical and defiant, but shot with the quality of light and intimacy that feels nothing like a standard commission.

Yoko Ono faces the camera with arms crossed and one hand raised, as if conducting something inaudible. Kate Moss, caught in a crowd with a cigarette raised and hair mid-movement, looks as if nobody told her a photograph was being taken.

How Edelstein works

Born in Cape Town, Edelstein began her career as a press photographer before moving to London in the 1980s to study photojournalism. That background is relevant: press photography trains you to read situations quickly, to find the moment within the chaos rather than manufacturing one from scratch. Her portraits carry that quality, a sense of observation rather than construction, even when they're clearly set up.

Her most significant project to date, the book Truth and Lies (2002), documented the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission between 1996 and 2002, and won the John Kobal Book Award.

It's a long way from celebrity portraiture in subject matter, but the underlying approach is the same: find the human truth in the situation, however difficult or complex, and let the image carry it.

"My portraits included here reflect the humanity behind the mask of celebrity, the person behind the persona," she says. "We see them as more than the fame, more than the hype of modern-day fame. They become real and infinitely more moving as a result."

The exhibition

Stardust: 100 years of stage, screen and celebrity runs from September 11 to November 20 at the Hundred Heroines Photo Museum in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, with Edelstein's portraits displayed in the outdoor Art Garden at Mortimer Gardens nearby.

The exhibition also features archive material from Elisabeth Buchmeyer-Lewis, whose images of the music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including a previously unseen contact sheet and performance photographs of Ian Dury, bring a rawer, more immediate energy alongside Edelstein's formal precision.

Hundred Heroines is the UK's only museum and charity dedicated to women in photography, and Stardust is the inaugural show in its new, larger, single-level gallery space. Entry is free; open Thursday to Saturday, 11am to 4pm.

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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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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