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1000 Words Contemporary Photography Magazine Online Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 1000 Words photography-in-parallel/ Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:11:21 +0000 ?p=17412 Click here to order your copy of Photography in Parallel: Japanese and Western Critical Perspectives since the 1960s £17.99 How has photography come to occupy its place within contemporary art? The answer depends on where one begins. Many influential Euro-American histories have traced photography’s emergence through Conceptual art and institutional critique, while parallel developments in […] The post 1000 Words appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> Click here to order your copy of Photography in Parallel: Japanese and Western Critical Perspectives since the 1960s £17.99 How has photography come to occupy its place within contemporary art? The answer depends on where one begins. Many influential Euro-American histories have traced photography’s emergence through Conceptual art and institutional critique, while parallel developments in Japan followed a markedly different trajectory. Photography in Parallel: Japanese and Western Critical Perspectives since the 1960s brings together two newly commissioned essays by critics Takanao Seki and Megumu Takashima alongside five historically significant texts selected by Miyuki Endo and Gen Umezu. Originally published from the 1960s onwards, and newly translated into English, writings by critics including Toshiaki Minemura and Yusuke Nakahara examine how photography has been discussed in Japan in relation to painting, sculpture, printmaking, and other art forms. Rather than presenting these historical writings as fixed records of past debates, this volume reconsiders them in relation to contemporary practice. Three essays by Nancy Foote, Andrei Monastyrski and Terry Smith, selected by Duncan Wooldridge, widen the frame, carrying these Japanese debates into broader transnational dialogue. Through this exchange between Japanese and English-language discourse, the book develops a layered reading of photographic expression from the postwar period to today, inviting renewed attention to the multifaceted nature of photography and its capacity to generate new critical possibilities. Published as part of the T3 NEW TALENT programme – an initiative by T3 to foster emerging talent and support the development of photographic culture in Asia – this book introduces Japanese photographic criticism into wider circulation. Featuring Nancy Foote, Yukio Kondo, Toshiaki Minemura, Andrei Monastyrski, Yusuke Nakahara, Terry Smith, Takanao Seki, Megumu Takashima, Kyoji Takizawa Director Yumiko Chiba (Director, T3 NEW TALENT Art Critic Programme)Producer Ihiro Hayami (T3 Founder/Executive Director)Editorial Manager Tim ClarkEditorial Assistant Thomas KingArt Direction & Design Sarah BorisJapanese Text Editor Fuyuki OnoProject Managers Akane Miki, Kana Ikezawa (T3 NEW TALENT Art Critic Programme)Translator Pamela Miki T3 NEW TALENT Authors Takanao Seki, Megumu TakashimaSelectors Gen Umezu, Miyuki Endo, Duncan Wooldridge Publication date September 2026Format Soft cover, sewn-boundDimensions 14.2 x 21.2cmPages 128Publisher 1000 Words (1000 Words Photography Ltd)ISBN 978-1-0369-9058-9Supported by the Japan Creator Support Fund Distribution UK, Europe, Worldwide Public Knowledge Books90 Hoe Street, LondonE17 4QS, United Kingdomwww.publicknowledgebooks.combryony@publicknowledgebooks.com Japan twelvebooks3-26-4 NishikameariKatsushika-ku Tokyo1250002 Japanwww.twelve-books.comcontact@twelve-books.com Australia and New Zealand Perimeter Distribution734 High Street Thornbury3071 Melbourne Victoria, Australiawww.perimeterdistribution.comhello@perimeterdistribution.com The post 1000 Words appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> 10 Must-See Exhibitions: Autumn 2026 10-must-see-exhibitions-autumn-2026/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:57:03 +0000 ?p=17571 A new season of art is underway, and our quarterly guide returns with a selection of the photography exhibitions and events to look out for this autumn. From Carrie Mae Weems and Sanlé Sory to Taryn Simon, Rhiannon Adam and Mikhael Subotzky, this roundup leaps between intimate archives and planetary histories, abandoned houses and imagined […] The post 10 Must-See Exhibitions: Autumn 2026 appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> A new season of art is underway, and our quarterly guide returns with a selection of the photography exhibitions and events to look out for this autumn. From Carrie Mae Weems and Sanlé Sory to Taryn Simon, Rhiannon Adam and Mikhael Subotzky, this roundup leaps between intimate archives and planetary histories, abandoned houses and imagined moons, family memory, and the fractured landscapes of cities. 1000 Words | Resource | 24 September 2026Join us on Patreon Mikhael Subotzky, A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick) – Johannesburg, Goodman Gallery27 August – 31 October Twenty years after his first exhibition with Goodman Gallery, Mikhael Subotzky returns with A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick), a layered portrait of the city assembled from photographs, paintings and his distinctive Sticky-tape Transfers. Living and working in Johannesburg since 2008, Subotzky draws on archival maps, mining histories, infrastructure, vegetation, and images from his own photographic archive, bringing different eras and perspectives into the same fractured compositions. At the centre of the exhibition is the ten-panel A Johannesburg Landscape, where fragments of Ponte City, mining imagery and the city’s flora collide in a complex passage through Johannesburg’s past and present. His interest in mapping, movement and exchange continues in An Idea of Africa (2023–26), which inverts the conventional orientation of the continent to trace routes of migration across its surface. The exhibition’s title has a more personal origin: Subotzky’s German-Jewish great-grandfather, unable to remove his assets from Nazi Germany, converted what remained of his wealth into a thirteen-ton steamroller. Shipped to Cape Town and sold there, it helped finance the family’s eventual move to Johannesburg – a remarkable journey of displacement and reinvention that echoes the exhibition’s wider preoccupation with how people, objects and histories move through landscapes. Taryn Simon, Father Country I Do Love You – Guggenheim, New York 18 September – 14 March Occupying the entire rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, Father Country I Do Love You is Taryn Simon’s most expansive project to date, nearly a decade in the making and the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist to take over the museum’s iconic spiral. At its centre is the life of an unnamed federal agent whose career placed him in proximity to defining political and violent events in recent American history, acting as a middleman who witnessed, gathered and transmitted information without ever possessing the complete picture. Simon reconstructs the reverberations of his work across 42 chapters, combining photography, text, video, and sculpture in a deliberately expansive narrative. The project is equally shaped by the intimate absence of Simon’s own father, who worked for the US government abroad before later running an arcade business, and whose life became increasingly inaccessible following his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. Presented during the 250th anniversary year of the United States, the exhibition moves between the mechanisms of state power and the fragility of personal memory, asking what can be known about a country – or a parent – when the archive is inevitably partial. Carrie Mae Weems, The Heart of the Matter – C/O Berlin12 September – 3 February Across four decades, Carrie Mae Weems has returned to the domestic interior, the family archive, the plantation, the museum, and the monument as sites where power is rehearsed and memory is authorised. Her great achievement has been to recognise that the politics of representation are inseparable from the intimate conditions through which a life is experienced, remembered and given meaning. In The Heart of the Matter, opened during Berlin Art Week, this sustained interrogation of photography’s complicity in the production of power is given retrospective form. Yet rather than tracing a linear progression through Weems’ career, C/O Berlin organises the exhibition around the idea of the artist as a “creative form”, bringing recurring preoccupations and strategies into dialogue across different periods of her practice. Works including Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), Kitchen Table Series (1990) and the recent Preach (2024), an immersive meditation on Black worship and spirituality, are brought into conversation, revealing both the continuities and the formal range of Weems’ work. Sanlé Sory, Colour Years – The Photographers’ Gallery, London14 October – 21 February Sanlé Sory’s Colour Years turns its attention to the chromatic dimension of a photographic practice more often encountered through its celebrated black-and-white portraits. Born in 1943, Sory began his photographic career in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1960, the year Upper Volta gained independence, establishing the Volta Photo studio in a city that became an important centre of the country’s emerging urban and popular culture. His black-and-white photographs of the following decades documented the musicians, dancers, workers, and young people who inhabited Bobo’s post-independence scene. The colour photographs extend this record into the 1970s and 1980s, capturing the fashions, leisure and everyday life through which a younger generation articulated new forms of identity and modernity. Meticulously restored from negatives in Sory’s archive, the images are presented alongside Volta Jazz record covers featuring the musicians and bands who shaped the city’s popular culture. First Times / First Photos – Pavillon Populaire, Montpellier1 July – 1 November The newly renovated Pavillon Populaire, in the heart of Montpellier, inaugurates its latest exhibition with a series of photographic firsts. Rather than treating its subject as an encyclopaedia of origins, the exhibition proposes a playful passage through two centuries of photographic innovation. These beginnings, often provisional and exploratory, complicate the mythology of the photographic genius by returning us to the uncertainty of the first gesture. The accompanying publication gives this language of invention a distinctly 19th-century precision: new photographic apparatuses, early French patents for “improvements in the instantaneous photography of moving objects” and accounts of the first and only colour photograph of a nuclear explosion. Yet Édouard Boubat’s deceptively simple observation — “There is no first photo. There are only ‘new’ photos. The light is ‘new’ today” — strips the photographic “first” of its finality. What appears to be an origin becomes instead a recurring condition: an encounter between light, apparatus and the present. “The cult of the new,” artistic director Luce Lebart calls it. Rhiannon Adam, Rhi-Entry – International Centre for the Image, Dublin11 September – 23 December At Dublin’s International Centre for the Image, Rhi-Entry marks the Irish premiere of Rhiannon Adam’s account of a journey that never took place. In 2021, Adam was selected for dearMoon, the proposed civilian lunar mission funded by Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, and was set to become the first openly queer woman to travel beyond the Kármán line. When the project was abruptly cancelled in 2024, it left behind a life reorganised around an anticipated future that had ceased to exist. Adam’s resulting work moves between photographs, archival material and ephemera, unsettling the boundary between documentary evidence and imagined experience. The title’s play on “re-entry” — the return through Earth’s atmosphere — becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of returning to mundane life after investing oneself in an extraordinary future. Presented alongside Lewis Bush’s examination of the historical and ethical foundations of modern rocketry, the exhibition places Adam’s experience within a wider history of who is invited to imagine the future, and who gets to participate in its construction. Robert Zhao Renhui, Trying to Remember a Tree – Fotografiska, Shanghai24 July – 6 November At Fotografiska Shanghai, Trying to Remember a Tree extends Robert Zhao Renhui’s examination of the relationship between human systems and the natural world, taking as its point of departure something easily overlooked within the efficiency of the modern city: a dead tree. The exhibition follows a fallen rain tree beyond the moment at which it would ordinarily cease to be of interest. Across five groups of works, Zhao records 28,017 leaves, sections of the truncated trunk and 24-hour surveillance footage of its gradual decomposition, bringing together photography, moving image and installation in an extended study of disappearance. The project continues the Singaporean artist’s interest in the ways nature is classified, managed and made legible, a concern also embedded in his fictive Institute of Critical Zoologists, through which he adopts the languages of scientific research and archival practice while quietly unsettling their authority. Yet, as Zhao notes, “before we engage with broader discussions of ecosystems or environmental futures, we must first return to a grounded, micro-level act of looking.” Richard Billingham, Ray’s a Laugh – 30 Years – The Apartment, Images Vevey5 September – 14 February On the second floor of Vevey’s railway station, in former apartments once occupied by railway workers, L’Appartement – Espace Images Vevey marks three decades since the publication of Richard Billingham’s landmark 1996 photobook Ray’s a Laugh. Made in the early 1990s in the council flats of suburban Birmingham, Billingham’s photographs centre on his father Ray, mother Liz and brother Jason, recording a household shaped by Ray’s alcoholism but also by humour, affection and the ordinary rhythms of family life. For the first time, the exhibition reconstructs the domestic world across the two separate homes in which the photographs were made, shifting attention from individual images towards the environment and relationships that bind them. Thirty years on, Ray’s a Laugh remains difficult to situate neatly as either family album or social document. Billingham’s proximity to his subjects makes the photographs deeply personal, while the circumstances they record have come to be read as part of a particular moment in British working-class life. The reconstruction of the two homes returns the work to that intimate tension, asking us to look again at the family before the history it has come to represent. Tereza Zelenková, Haus – Fiducia Photographic Gallery, Ostrava10 September – 16 October At Fiducia Photographic Gallery in Ostrava, the city where Tereza Zelenková was born, Haus brings a work about absence and slow change back to her native landscape. The series follows the transformation of a single abandoned house in northern Bohemia, photographed over three years from the cottage Zelenková had bought opposite it. Empty since the mid-1990s, the house sits within a former Sudetenland landscape shaped by the disappearance of buildings, communities and memories. Yet Zelenková resists treating it as either historical document or nostalgic ruin. Instead, her medium-format photographs register the minute changes revealed by repeated visits: shifting light, vegetation, weather and decay. Shown alongside objects and found material from the house and its surroundings, the photographs become a quiet meditation on time, solitude and loss, with the building itself serving as a measure of what remains – and what disappears. Nadav Kander, The Edge of Things – FOAM, Amsterdam18 September – 31 January Eclectic in subject and scale, Nadav Kander’s photography ranges from portraits of David Lynch and Barack Obama to the industrial banks of China’s Yangtze River and the shifting shores of the Thames. Yet beneath this variety runs a persistent interest in what places and people conceal as much as what they reveal. Kander is drawn to subjects already laden with political, industrial or personal history, but his photographs rarely make that history immediately legible. Instead, they create a tension between the visible image and everything that lies behind it, asking us to look for what a photograph cannot quite disclose. It is this ambiguity that comes to the fore in his latest exhibition at FOAM, curated by David Campany, with whom Kander has explored these questions in conversation. -1000 Words Images: 1-Mikhael Subotzky, Wendy House 8, Mikhael Subotzky, 2009. Courtesy Goodman Gallery. 2-Taryn Simon, One little room on fire, 2026. © Taryn Simon 3-Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man Reading Newspaper), 1990 from the Kitchen Table Series © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. 4-Sanlé Sory, Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso © Sanlé Sory 2026. Courtesy Tezeta 5-From Holding the Camera (2015–19) © Alberto Vieceli 6-Rhiannon Adam, Baikonur Rocket Soyuz Pre-Flight, from the Rhi-Entry series, 2025. © Rhiannon Adam.  7-Robert Zhao Renhui, The Centre of All Things © Robert Zhao Renhui. Courtesy the artist and Fotografiska Shanghai 8-Richard Billingham, Ray’s a Laugh – 30 years © Richard Billingham. Courtesy of the artist and Anthony Wilkinson Gallery 9-Tereza Zelenkova, © Tereza Zelenkova. Courtesy the artist. 10-Nadav Kander, Diver, Salt Lake, Utah, USA, 1997 (from the series God’s Country) © Nadav Kander. Courtesy Howard Greenberg and Flowers Gallery. 1000 Words favourites • Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism • Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age • Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect • Discover London’s top five photography galleries • Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto • Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani • Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För • Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community • Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member  • Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse   The post 10 Must-See Exhibitions: Autumn 2026 appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> Against nostalgia: Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz at Baltic, Gateshead against-nostalgia-tish-murtha-and-kuba-ryniewicz-at-baltic-gateshead/ Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:09:28 +0000 ?p=17368 Close to Home, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition, pairs Tish Murtha’s tender, furious social documentary with Kuba Ryniewicz’s queer, exuberant visions of joy, intimacy and resistance. Bringing two generations of marginalised lives into unexpected dialogue, the exhibition asks what it means to photograph a community – and who gets to shape its […] The post Against nostalgia: Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz at Baltic, Gateshead appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> Close to Home, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition, pairs Tish Murtha’s tender, furious social documentary with Kuba Ryniewicz’s queer, exuberant visions of joy, intimacy and resistance. Bringing two generations of marginalised lives into unexpected dialogue, the exhibition asks what it means to photograph a community – and who gets to shape its history – while offering a chance to rethink Northern working-class imagery beyond familiar narratives of deprivation, towards a history that is more plural, unruly and still being made, Lillian Wilkie writes. Lillian Wilkie | Exhibition review | 17 September 2026 Join us on Patreon In January of this year, Newcastle’s storied Side Gallery, the UK’s only photography gallery dedicated to stories of working-class life, which had been shuttered since 2023, announced a collaborative curatorial partnership with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Despite a fraught and controversial few years, Side and its original owner, the Amber Film & Photography Collective, have had an unquestionable influence on late-20th-century British social documentary photography. The work they championed has shaped the public consciousness around industrial communities in the North East, and contributed to a popular cultural image of what an industrial community might look like. Amber was formed in 1968 in London by a group of humanist documentary filmmakers, who relocated the following year to Newcastle with a view to preserving the stories of working-class and marginalised communities during Britain’s great deindustrialisation. Founding member Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen introduced still photography to the collective’s activities, and in 1977 Side Gallery was opened. Killip had moved to Newcastle in 1975 on a two-year Northern Arts photography fellowship and remained there for 15 years. As Side’s director from 1977-79, he brought the work of luminaries such as Imogen Cunningham, August Sander, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Martine Franck to Newcastle. In 1979, Killip staged an exhibition by a then little-known local photographer called Tish Murtha, whose Juvenile Jazz Bands project had been developed as part of a government-funded community photography scheme. Born in nearby South Shields, Murtha had recently returned to Newcastle from her studies at the School of Documentary Photography in Newport. Course leader, Magnum member David Hurn, famously recalled her application interview: “I asked her what she wanted to photograph and she said: ‘I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children,’ and I said, ‘You’re in’”. Murtha was acutely conscious of the everyday violence meted out by the state on working-class communities. One of ten children, she had seen her siblings and close relatives profoundly affected by the loss of long-standing manufacturing industries on Tyneside, and the subsequent joblessness, disenfranchisement and extreme poverty. Nevertheless, the work she has become known for eschews gratuitous depictions of the misery brought about by the post-war economic downturn, globalisation, Thatcherite policy, and their negative multiplier effects. Tragically, her work was under-recognised in her lifetime, and she died in 2013, aged just 56. Side’s curatorial tenancy will see its team co-curate a series of exhibitions at Baltic that focus on contemporary working-class photography, beginning in 2027. Baltic has shown a renewed commitment to photography in recent years, including major exhibitions by Chris Killip and Frankie Raffles. This June, they opened Close to Home, which brings Murtha’s work into dialogue with that of the Polish photographer Kuba Ryniewicz. It is, surprisingly, Murtha’s first major institutional exhibition in the North East. Upon entering, visitors encounter a huge wallpaper reproduction of young siblings Richard and Louise, from Murtha’s celebrated series Elswick Kids. The youngsters, both no older than five, gaze adoringly at each other, as other children from the neighbourhood charge around in play. The series was the first she made upon her return to Newcastle, and it explored the strong social bonds, intergenerational ties, mischief, and resourcefulness in the streets around where she lived. There is a tender, conspiratorial quality to Murtha’s photographs, and not just of children; her gaze is not one of a paternalistic outsider but a friend or neighbour, sharing in the community’s suffering and solidarity. But it belied the rage and fear she felt at how so many lives had been considered expendable. Writing about a second project, Youth Unemployment, which she produced under the same government scheme with Side, Murtha’s words are, gallingly, just as prescient today: “There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered, and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.” Two other projects are on display in full for the first time. Save Scotswood Works documents the local workforce’s struggle to save Elswick’s major industrial employer. The works had manufactured locomotives, ships, aircraft, and armaments since 1847 but, by 1979, they were slated for closure. The photographs were commissioned by Tyneside Housing Aid Centre and originally published across a series of pamphlets, which are also on display. They detail the impact of the loss of industry, and the new Conservative government’s inaction in providing alternative employment, on the lives and health of children. Murtha produced the fourth series, Elswick Revisited, 10 years later, and here we encounter a diversity sorely missing from much of the social documentary photography which has come to define working-class communities in the North East. Exploring the community’s changing demographics and cultural influences, Murtha’s warning from a decade earlier about reactionary forces in society rings painfully true, as Black and south Asian communities faced the overlapping indignities of poverty and racist violence. Adjacent to another wallpapered image from the Scotswood marches, a freestanding monitor shows a series of silent film portraits of individuals at a queer nightclub, shot on nostalgic High8 cassette. It’s a new commission by the Polish photographer Kuba Ryniewicz, who has been based in Newcastle since 2004, and whose work Close to Home brings into dialogue with Murtha’s. Those looking for highly legible narrative threads between Murtha and Ryniewicz’s prolific practices may leave the gallery confused; to me, the lack of overarching thematic relationship between the two barely seems to matter. Both photograph people, yes; both engage with marginalised groups and enshrine their stories, in Ryniewicz’s case working-class queer communities in Newcastle and beyond. Both accentuate the human capacity for joy and silliness against all odds. But it’s more enlightening to draw formal or conceptual links between individual works, made decades apart: viewing Ryniewicz’s slowly dancing, smoking, or chatting subjects, so many of them content in their own manifestations of gender, set against historically familiar black and white imagery of labour struggle, reminds us that nightlife, too, is a form of protest, a demand for liberation and visibility. Whilst Murtha’s work is generally arranged in unframed clusters, as if tacked to the wall by Murtha herself, Ryniewicz’s flows through the gallery, seeping into corners and emergency exits, even the toilets. It feels fitting for an artist whose work, which incorporates fashion campaigns and contributions to magazines such as Butt and Fantastic Man, alongside personal and often graphically intimate depictions of friends and lovers, is not often afforded a place within major institutions. There are reasonable comparisons with artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans (now an institutional mainstay), especially in the installation of prints of various sizes and formats that collapse distinctions between personal and commercial. But whilst Tillmans fills major museums with lyrical dispatches from the artist studios and afterparties of the 1990s, Ryniewicz’s images are of the here and now, a living history of queer joy, creative collaboration and marginalised sexuality. Whilst wall texts introduce the three major bodies of work on display – Cornered Study, Daily Weeding and Good Eggs – the installation disaggregates these series so that they intermingle, contract and swell, as if constantly in motion. Ryniewicz’s richly toned darkroom prints tell stories of love, adventure, trust, and longing; like in Murtha’s work, certain characters reappear across different sequences, reiterating the importance of close social networks to Ryniewicz’s practice. Whilst there is playfulness and sexiness in abundance, careful looking reveals the hostility and discrimination that gnaws at the edges of queer life. On one wall, a sensational ensemble portrait of a group of beautiful, half naked queers embrace each other beside a bonfire on the estate of the socialist poet and gay activist Edward Carpenter. On the opposite wall, a photograph of a mobile phone, held out in the dark. The screen shows Google Translate, and the text translated from Arabic reads: “I am very sad because in our country there is no sexual relations between two men”. Chris Killip once described his work as like “a people’s history – the people who history happened to.” The fastidiousness and commitment with which Amber and Side promoted socially engaged photographic practices across the North East, and the sheer popularity of photobooks such as In Flagrante and films like Paul Sng’s Tish, have consequentially manufactured a popular aesthetic of working-class life in the area. That is, deprivation, dilapidation, sooty-faced children, and hollow-eyed adults, all overwhelmingly white, and shot in gritty monochrome. The success of Side’s curatorial tenancy at Baltic remains to be seen, but in order to be truly meaningful its role now must be to diversify and pluralise that legacy. Whilst Baltic has demonstrated a new and welcome commitment to large-scale shows of photography, the institution’s declared remit is of “new work from living artists”; it must be mindful that of the five photographic artists it has shown in the last two years, three are dead. Having the imagination to bring Murtha and Ryniewicz’s work together in such a broad and ambitious show has paid dividends. But it is artists like Ryniewicz who remind us that history, like revolution, is not a one-time event. It keeps happening to people. All images courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the artists. Close to Home runs at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, until 4 April 2027. —Lillian Wilkie is a writer, editor and publisher. She is Co-Director of Bound Art Book Fair. Editorial clarifications and corrections | 22 September 2026 Side Gallery library / Chris Killip’s In Flagrante This article has been amended to remove a brief item that suggested that a copy of Chris Killip’s In Flagrante had been left discarded in the bins during Side Gallery’s recent relocation from its Quayside premises. We accept that this rumour was unfounded and that no material from the historic Amberside Collection was discarded or left behind. Side Gallery continues to assume responsibility as custodians of artists represented in the collection, and independently manage and safeguard its vital photographic archive from its new curatorial office at the Baltic. Side Gallery’s update on relocation was publicised and made available on Side Gallery’s website on 15 July 2026, regrettably after the writer had researched and written the exhibition review. Side Gallery funding A further amend has been made to another brief item that stated that ‘Side confirmed it would not re-open the gallery despite securing over £700,000 of additional funding, including £67,278 of public donations.’ We understand that this £700,000 sum comprises six separate, competitively won grants from five different funders across more than three years, each tied to its own restricted purpose and independently reported and audited – not a discretionary sum that was available to reopen the gallery, and in one case expressly barred from that use. We apologise to the gallery management for this aggregation. Images:  1-Tish Murtha, Youth Unemployment © Ella Murtha 2-Kuba Ryniewicz, The Daily Weeding (2020-2021) 3-Kuba Ryniewicz, Neck, Good Eggs (2024-ongoing) 4-Tish Murtha, Elswick Kids © Ella Murtha 5-Tish Murtha, Elswick Kids © Ella Murtha 6-Kuba Ryniewicz, Cornered Study (2022-ongoing) 7-Kuba Ryniewicz, Cornered Study (2022-ongoing) 8-Tish Murtha, Youth Unemployment © Ella Murtha 9-Kuba Ryniewicz, Cornered Study (2022-ongoing) 10-Tish Murtha, Elswick Revisited © Ella Murtha 11-Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz: Close to Home installation view. Photo: Tom Carter © 2026 Tom Carter & Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art 1000 Words favourites • Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism • Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age • Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect • Discover London’s top five photography galleries • Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto • Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani • Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För • Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community • Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member  • Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse   The post Against nostalgia: Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz at Baltic, Gateshead appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> The limits of juxtaposition: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada, Venice arthur-jafa-richard-prince-and-the-limits-of-juxtaposition/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:18:22 +0000 ?p=17072 During the 61st Venice Biennale, Nancy Spector’s Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina functioned as the unofficial US pavilion. The exhibition is ultimately ‘about’ America, writes Peter Watkins – its images, violences, fantasies, and distortions – but that ambition is also where its problems sharpen, as the pairing […] The post The limits of juxtaposition: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada, Venice appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> During the 61st Venice Biennale, Nancy Spector’s Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina functioned as the unofficial US pavilion. The exhibition is ultimately ‘about’ America, writes Peter Watkins – its images, violences, fantasies, and distortions – but that ambition is also where its problems sharpen, as the pairing of Jafa and Prince threatens to compress two complex practices into an overly neat art-world conversation. Peter Watkins | Exhibition review | 10 September 2026Join us on Patreon What do you get when you place America’s two most notorious image-scavengers in a Venetian palazzo together, and ask them to talk with one another? There is an unmistakable tension, one we might expect to complicate, or peel open our prefigured readings of these two art world heavyweights. Or rather, are we instead presented with a diametrically opposed view of the moon; connected, yet never visible to one another? Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, Nancy Spector’s exhibition at the Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina, stakes its ambition on the belief that juxtaposition can generate this kind of peculiar dialogue – that two artists never before placed in formal conversation might, side by side, reveal something neither could alone is perhaps too lofty an ambition, but why else put these artists together? The conceptual scaffolding of this show is built on appropriation, of course. Jafa (b. 1960) and Prince (b. 1949), a decade apart in age, are positioned by Spector as shared inheritors of Duchamp’s readymade – his shift from making to taking recast here as a kind of artistic piracy, an image scavenging without permission. Prince has spent four decades working over the mechanisms of American desire and white masculinity, from his rephotographed Marlboro cowboys to the Instagram grabs that eventually landed him in well documented legal trouble. Jafa, meanwhile, has spent a considerable time wrangling the accumulated visual archive of Black American life into something considerably heavier: the emotionally devastating charge of Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death alone would be reason enough to take this show seriously. What holds the exhibition together, finally, is its subject: America itself, in all its grit and grift, its death and its despair, its subcultures and its self-mythology. And here is where the exhibition’s real difficulty surfaces, one it gestures toward rather too obliquely for comfort. In the absence of any serious American Pavilion this year (stripped funding, political neutrality under Trump’s American juggernaut of cultural destruction), the whispers around the lagoon pitched this exhibition as the unofficial American pavilion, and that is what it felt like. Whilst dividing the two artists’ contributions along racial lines might feel on the surface almost too obvious to need pointing out – it is precisely that obviousness that could be considered part of the problem here. To stage a dialogue between a Black artist excavating the trauma and transcendence of Black American life and a white artist circling the iconography of white American masculinity is to accept a kind of asymmetry that can’t really be made neutral by curatorial goodwill alone. The works do not occupy the same political ground, and to its credit, the exhibition doesn’t pretend they do. But juxtaposition flattens as easily as it illuminates. Placing Jafa’s grief beside Prince’s irony risks aestheticising the former while lending the latter a gravitas that sometimes feels inseparable from the prestige he has accumulated within the art world itself. This tension crystallised more sharply than not in the room projecting Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) – for my money the most important artist’s film of the last decade, and perhaps the true fulcrum the rest of the exhibition quietly springs out from. Built from found footage, dashcam recordings, viral clips and scored to Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam, the piece refuses the viewer any settled emotional register. Joy and catastrophe are cut so close together that we smile, cry and shake our heads in rage at the injustice fundamentally embedded in the machinary of the richest nation on the planet. Black death and Black joy pinned to each other by the gaze of the watching world, especially as it circulates online. Christina Knight has pushed back against reading the film only in the spectacle of Black suffering. For Black viewers, she suggests, it’s the collapse of joy and violence that registers as a mode of recognition within contemporary America. The film’s force lies in refusing to resolve that ambiguity. It seeks discomfort; to pull and wrench at our capacity to access an empathic register. Placed rooms away from Prince’s cooler, more ironic material, Jafa’s film would simply suck everything into its orbit, if it weren’t isolated as we find it here. The exhibition’s title, “Helter Skelter”, carries a troubled history: a McCartney penned Beatles song from The White Album, the phrase Charles Manson seized on to prophesy an apocalyptic race war and the title of a 1992 MOCA exhibition, criticised for excluding Black artists. To reclaim the phrase now, for an exhibition co-headlined by a Black artist, is a pointed corrective. Spector calls it an unruly readymade. It’s certainly apt: taking a contaminated cultural object and converting it, through selection alone, into a frame for critique. The exhibition’s most intimate offering is a collaboratively conceived zine, assembled from images the two artists exchanged while the show was being built. It feels like a record of two sensibilities testing out common ground in real time, rather than being paired retrospectively by curatorial fiat. It’s a small thing, but it does more to demonstrate genuine exchange than anything in the surrounding rooms. I recently chanced upon a video interview with Jafa, who with his greying cornrows, suggests that “when I grow up, I want to be like Richard Prince.” The affection and debt he sees in the groundwork Prince laid out is palpable in his smiling, straightforward and somewhat cheeky demeanor. During Biennale week, Venice now belongs as much to Prada, Pinault’s twin outposts at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana and a widening cast of private foundations as it does to the Biennale’s own, always slightly uneasy system of national pavilions. This parallel, better-funded circuit increasingly sets the terms for what gets discussed, photographed and remembered from any given edition. Just as Jafa and Prince take images without asking permission, these foundations have taken hold of the city’s civic and historic fabric, converting Venice itself into something closer to a readymade backdrop for brand-building than a neutral host – can there ever be one? Whether that’s cause for cynicism or simply the current condition of how large-scale contemporary art gets seen at all, is a harder question than this show, or this city, seems able to answer at this moment. Certainly, the strongest offerings this year came from such spaces. Helter Skelter seems to reward a good measure of skepticism. The Ca’ Corner della Regina, with its faded grandeur, makes an apt stage – a European palazzo hosting an exposé of American myth, the old world reflecting the new world’s chaos back at itself. The asymmetries between Jafa and Prince, of race, of register, of stakes, are real, and the show is most honest when it leaves them unresolved. What it offers is not a neat little thesis on appropriation but two radically different pairs of eyes that happen to share a method. Whether the affinity is truly elective, or simply convenient, the encounter generates real heat, and left me questioning whether all these issues actually need to be ironed out ahead of time, or if it’s our job as viewers to take command of that unresolved tension, and roll with it. All images courtesy of Fondazione Prada Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice.  Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince runs 9 May–23 November 2026 at Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice. —Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently teaching at FAMU, Prague. Images:  1-Arthur Jafa, Big Wheel II, 2018 © Arthur Jafa 2-Richard Prince, Folk Songs, 2006 © Richard Prince 3- Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, 2026 © Arthur Jafa 4-Richard Prince, Untitled (Sunsets), 1981-82 © Richard Prince 5-Arthur Jafa, Man Monster – Duffy, 2018 © Arthur Jafa 6-Richard Prince, Untitled (de Kooning), 2006 © Richard Prince  7-Arthur Jafa, The White Album, 2018 © Arthur Jafa 8-Arthur Jafa, SloPEX, 2023 © Arthur Jafa 9-Arthur Jafa, SloPEX, 2023 © Arthur Jafa 10-Richard Prince, Untitled (Girlfriend), 1993 © Richard Prince 11-Richard Prince, Untitled, 2018-20 © Richard Prince 12-Richard Prince, Lilo, 1983 © Richard Prince 13-Richard Prince, Untitled (Protest Painting), 1994 © Richard Prince 1000 Words favourites • Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism • Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age • Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect • Discover London’s top five photography galleries • Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto • Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani • Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För • Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community • Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member  • Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse   The post The limits of juxtaposition: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada, Venice appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> Between pose and presence: on Farren van Wyk’s Mixedness is My Mythology between-pose-and-presence-on-farren-van-wyks-mixedness-is-my-mythology/ Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:20:42 +0000 ?p=16440 Farren van Wyk’s first solo museum exhibition, at Fotomuseum Den Haag, turns the camera towards her own family while drawing on the visual histories of anthropological photography, portraiture and colonial representation. Born to a South African mother and Dutch father, Van Wyk was classified as ‘coloured’ before moving to the Netherlands at the age of […] The post Between pose and presence: on Farren van Wyk’s Mixedness is My Mythology appeared first on 1000 Words. ]]> Farren van Wyk’s first solo museum exhibition, at Fotomuseum Den Haag, turns the camera towards her own family while drawing on the visual histories of anthropological photography, portraiture and colonial representation. Born to a South African mother and Dutch father, Van Wyk was classified as ‘coloured’ before moving to the Netherlands at the age of six. In Mixedness is My Mythology, made with her parents and brothers on the family farm in Putten, her carefully staged analogue photographs explore how identity is shaped through pose, performance and the act of representation itself. Bas Blaasse writes about a body of work that examines how photography negotiates the terms of visibility, revealing how family, history and belonging are not only recorded but constructed through images. Bas Blaasse | Exhibition review | 30 July 2026Join us on Patreon In her first solo museum exhibition at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, photographer Farren van Wyk turns to the intimate terrain of her own family while tracing the broader histories that shape it. Mixedness is My Mythology, presented in the museum’s lower gallery, brings together a series of staged black-and-white photographs made in collaboration with her parents and her brothers – Alexander, Marck-Anthony and Benjamin – on the family’s farm in Putten. Rooted in a biography that moves between South Africa and the Netherlands, the series engages with questions of migration, racial classification, identity, and representation, in a documentary register that remains carefully orchestrated. The exhibition is installed in a single, restrained space. The large photographs, evenly spaced, are hung at eye level. At first glance, they appear almost disarmingly direct, depicting a family in a rural environment, in a set of scenes that feel recognisable. For a moment, the work seems to lean toward the idea of a family archive. We see siblings together in shared moments, recurring settings and a sense of familiarity. But that impression doesn’t quite hold. No one is caught off guard. Their poses are thoughtfully composed or reserved, their gazes neutral, attentive, solemn. These are not spontaneous images, and they do not pretend to be. Instead, they propose a persistent tension between appearing natural and being carefully arranged, between intimacy and its construction. The photographs make clear that those depicted are involved in shaping how they are seen, even as the limits of that control remain open. This approach builds on Van Wyk’s broader practice, which engages with identities shaped by apartheid, migration and mixed heritage by reworking historical modes of representation. Here, Van Wyk brings that photographic questioning into the space of her own family. In the series, titles play a crucial role. Some anchor the images in kinship, naming siblings or relationships. Yet just as many introduce a more loaded register, drawing on cultural, theoretical, historical, or mythological references. The photographs themselves often adopt familiar visual formats such as portraits, group portraits and frontal compositions, but never quite land comfortably in them. Instead, they hover somewhere in between. They’re recognisable, but slightly off. The tension between what is shown and what is named opens up a space in which different frameworks – scientific, political, mythic – briefly overlap without fully aligning. In Our Anthropological Golden Era (2021), for instance, the family is arranged in a way that recalls ethnographic photography: frontal, ordered, almost typological. Yet the contemporary clothing and relaxed posture subtly undo that framing. The image is legible as ‘anthropological,’ but only just. What it exposes is the construction behind that legibility. Something similar happens in The Whole P