Peter Watkins | Exhibition review | 10 September 2026
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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

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Bas Blaasse | Exhibition review | 30 July 2026
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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 Picture (2021), where the siblings are gathered in a quasi-heroic formation, holding tools that evoke labour and land. The title promises completeness, but the scene feels too composed to deliver on that promise. The ‘whole picture’ materialises, but only as something staged.

Other works push this tension further. In The Black Panthers meet Nelson Mandela (2024), Van Wyk is seated centrally, flanked symmetrically by her brothers. The composition borders on being ceremonial. The title invokes political histories and imagined affiliations, while symbolic elements in the scene, such as animal imagery, posture and setting, echo visual traditions of display and authority. Elsewhere, rifles, animal skins and assertive stances recall the language of hunting photography. These references evidently carry weight: associations with power, ownership and historically charged relationships to land and animals deeply embedded in European and colonial traditions. The images seem to move within these traditions while also testing them, without fully determining where they stand.

One of the most remarkable, if not revealing, photos is Home (2021). The four siblings gather around a mirror, in which Van Wyk herself appears in the centre, holding the camera. The act of photographing is folded, as it were, into the image. It’s a simple gesture, but it slightly contrasts with the otherwise measured tone of the series. For a moment, the composition loosens. Benjamin’s broad smile introduces something more open, almost casual. At first glance, the title seems to frame ‘home’ as a constructed scene, aligned more with family ties than with place. Yet the mirror complicates that reading somewhat. It also hints at identity as something mediated, as formed in relation to others, appearing before a gaze that frames and potentially judges. The photograph embodies how the entire series holds together both the pose and the possibility of slipping out of it.

Seen from this angle, the exhibition is less about presenting a fixed identity than about following how identity takes shape in images. And repetition plays a central role in doing so: similar poses, recurring gestures, repeated encounters with the camera. Identity, if it emerges at all, does so gradually, through these iterations, rather than as something stable or given. The use of black and white reinforces the ambiguity. In a body of work concerned with ‘mixedness’, the absence of colour does not neutralise difference, but shifts attention to form, contrast and the cultural weight of the image itself.

This also raises a more basic question: what does it mean to produce an image of a family together, rather than to document one? The collaborative setup suggests a shared investment in how the family appears, while the precision of the staging also introduces a certain – critical – distance. These are intimate scenes, but they are also clearly arranged, held in place for a viewer. They don’t so much define a life between South Africa and the Netherlands as explore how such a life can be made visible at all.

The unremarkable setting in Putten helps sharpen the project’s tensions. The landscape of fields, barn and stretches of grass carries the familiar tone of a Dutch rural calm. But that calm feels provisional. The landscape is less a backdrop than a surface against which the family positions itself, bringing together, if only temporarily, different histories, references and ways of seeing.

All images courtesy Fotomuseum Den Haag and the artist. 

Mixedness is my Mythology runs at Fotomuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, until 23 August 2026.

—
Bas Blaasse is a Brussels-based writer, editor and researcher focusing on photography, contemporary art and visual culture. His work examines how images and artistic practices engage with questions of nature, landscape, and collective experience. Trained in philosophy and in photography, he received the 2023 C/O Berlin Talent Award in Theory.

Images: 

1-Farren van Wyk, Craniometry Study, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.

2-Farren van Wyk, Home, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.

3-Farren van Wyk, Benjamin, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021. 

4-Farren van Wyk, The Rebirth of Venus, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021. 

5-Farren van Wyk, Alexander’s Braids, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.

6-Farren van Wyk, Our Anthropological Golden Era, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.

7-Farren van Wyk, Marck-Anthony & Benjamin, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2022. 

8-Farren van Wyk, Alexander, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021. 

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Peter Watkins | Exhibition Review | 23 July 2026
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En route to Vienna’s Secession, I thought I understood the terms and conditions Katherine Hubbard was working in. My own project, The Unforgetting, grew from losing my mother as a child and watching my grandmother’s slow slide into dementia during the years the project was reaching its apex, until those two losses became, for me, almost indistinguishable. I assumed this thematic and familial overlap would make Hubbard’s photographs familiar territory. I was mistaken. I spoke with Hubbard for over an hour before her public talk, working through ideas I recognised as my own without either of us quite naming that recognition. But our conversation changed how I saw the show. It wasn’t that I was necessarily wrong about her approach or the subject; rather, I had assumed the project reached a certain clarity that the exhibition, to its credit, deftly refused.

The Great Room documents five years Hubbard spent photographing her mother, Antonette Berger, in Berger’s Philadelphia home – a project that began in 2020 and continued through Berger’s diagnosis with LATE, a relatively recently characterised brain disease whose symptoms can resemble those of Alzheimer’s. Two kinds of images make up the exhibition. The first are large-format, black-and-white photographs taken in the house itself: mother and daughter staged in doorways, the mother’s bed, surrounded by an accumulation that can only be described as “things”, boxes and clutter, in various states of order/disorder. As we move through the exhibition, the apartment seemingly begins to shed the weight of its contents, and the photographs increasingly lean on the use of mirrors as props. These photographs work to dissect the space, tear it apart, and transform our visual register.

Some of the more straightforward photographs show the ordinary tasks of care, and mother-daughter exchange, moving between what felt like genuine moments of recognition between the two women, to something more staged, theatrical and ethereal. The power of the portrait of Berger in the bath – her concentrated, intelligent gaze directed at the camera – has stayed with me ever since. The second are darkroom body prints, made without a camera at all: Hubbard’s mother, covered in Vaseline, pressed directly onto photographic paper, a cameraless contact print. Where the other photographs are sustained by an umbilical tether that links the body to the gaze, these prints collapse that distance entirely; the cord becomes literal, skin against paper.

At Secession, the domestic architecture of Antonette Berger’s house is structurally imported, at least in gesture. A dividing wall that once harshly split her mother’s “great room” between the bedroom and living room is reconstituted in the gallery, its bare studwork exposed and doing double duty as an armature for the photographs themselves. The room that once served a grander, representative function is represented as a place of abundant accumulation, improvised storage, objects in transition from purpose to obsolescence, waiting for their inevitable removal from the home. The skeletal structure, in the context of the exhibition, becomes a kind of Frankenstein version of the curious addition to the Victorian room that Hubbard herself confessed to hating: unfinished and practical rather than sensitive to its architectural surroundings.

The photographs register a circling, almost ritualistic movement through the interior. Hubbard and Berger loop repeatedly through the apartment with two 4×5 cameras, tripods, mirrors and props, staging images alongside the mundane routines of bathing, dressing, sorting possessions. Hubbard has called the camera, in this context, a “structuring presence”: it inserts pauses into the grind of care work, carving out time outside the realm of medical necessity. As the circuits through the house tighten – drawing, in Hubbard’s words, “smaller and smaller concentric circles” around the false wall – the work tracks the gradual constriction of Berger’s cognitive world without ever settling into a documentary account of decline.

Mirrors recur throughout, notably capturing Hubbard herself, tripod and all, in the act of looking – a refusal of the invisible, omniscient viewpoint that photography usually assumes. In a diptych of photographs, the roles invert outright, and Hubbard photographs her mother while her mother photographs her back. It would be tempting to call this collaboration, but Hubbard resists the word. Hubbard has said she wanted to give her mother “all the power” assumed by the person behind the camera – which means the inversion is something she designed, a fiction built for her mother to inhabit, not a symmetry that simply existed between them. This somehow makes the work more precise, more real, and more reflective of what this period of their relationship perhaps looked like.

Hubbard has also spoken of not wanting the viewer to mistake themselves for standing where she once stood with her camera; by keeping herself visible in the frame, she resists the fantasy that her mother is a passive object of scrutiny. The fiction of “Antonette the photographer” runs through the whole project as a playful counter-current, insisting on respect for a woman whose social image could otherwise easily flatten into that of patient, elderly, demented.

I had expected, before Vienna, that the ethics of this project would rest on consent – on whether a mother with declining cognition could meaningfully agree to being photographed nude, at her most exposed. That question doesn’t disappear. But meeting Hubbard reframed it. Her method, she says, is “homeopathic”: rather than smoothing over what is uncomfortable in her mother’s house, she uses the image to amplify it. When she felt her mother was no longer cognitively able to maintain the photographic rituals they had instilled in their relationship, they immediately stopped the work.

Hubbard has said she has come to loathe the framework in which she is “mothering her own mother,” and wonders instead whether something closer to a theory of queer mothering is at stake: a relation that doesn’t run one direction, that keeps swapping who holds the camera and who is held by it. At the end of her talk before the exhibition opening, when the conversation circled back, inevitably, to the word “collaboration,” her interviewer offered something more apt: perhaps the role Antonette took on was simply that of mother – the unbounded, non-judgmental love that overlooks everything for the sake of a daughter. They left it there, and it felt right to leave it there too.

Carol Mavor, writing through her own mother’s Alzheimer’s in Black and Blue, opens with a sentence I have carried with me since long before I met Hubbard: “My mother has lost herself. My mother has forgotten herself.” I recognise the flatness of that sentence, its bruising straightforwardness. It is close to how I once described my grandmother, in her last years, to people who asked about her wellbeing. Elsewhere, writing on Barthes and the photographic image, Mavor calls the maternal “a cord (unsevered)” – and that, I think, is the truer description of what Hubbard’s photographs insist on.

During the opening, as crowds gathered below, a handful of us – Hubbard, her partner, the artist A.K. Burns, a few of her friends, the curator Bettina Spörr, and I – were let up onto the Secession’s roof to visit the cupola. The setting sun reflected off Olbrich’s 3000 gilded wrought-iron laurel leaves, long ago nicknamed the golden cabbage. Hubbard stood apart, and for a moment the composure she had held all evening seemed to loosen. A friend embraced her. Brief as it was, I recognised in that moment the sincerity and difficulty of undertaking such a project, the toll exacted in its making, and the personal cost of rendering this kind of grief so public. 

All images courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery, New York. 

Katherine Hubbard: The Great Room runs at Secession, Vienna until 30 August 2026.

—
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-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one, 2021.

2-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (hand to face), 2021.

3-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (after all), 2025. 

4-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (s), 2025.

5-Katherine Hubbard, body print, hawk, mother, 2023. 

6-Katherine Hubbard, body print, rear pressure point, 2023. 

7-Katherine Hubbard, body print, my chin on your shoulder from behind, 2023.

8-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (pendulum left), 2025.

9-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (untitled), 2025. 

10-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (Antonette), 2022.

11-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (snap), 2025. 

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Tim Clark | Exhibition Review | 16 July 2026
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There is a moment, midway through Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other, when the scale and sheer force of Mark Sealy’s ambition become fully apparent. Moving between photographic bodies of work by Dawoud Bey, Sandra Brewster, Mónica de Miranda, and Tyler Mitchell, one is vividly aware that this is not simply a powerful group exhibition. Nor is it merely another attempt to redress historical exclusions within the medium. Rather, Sealy asks a more difficult question: what if photography could serve as a site for ethical encounter? What if, in a moment characterised by disquiet, violence and ideological hardening, photographs might help us imagine relationships founded on mutual recognition rather than domination?

As the headline exhibition of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Alliance, Infinity, Love, carries the weight of the festival’s intellectual programme. Drawing upon the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the writings of bell hooks and the enduring refrain of Nat King Cole’s 1948 recording of Nature Boy – ‘the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return’ – Sealy constructs a curatorial framework that is by turns poetic, political and perhaps even unfashionable. When irony is so often the condom of culture and social and environmental justice remain familiar features on the international art circuit, Sealy avoids loading up on critique by placing love at the centre of his thesis.

It’s a risky move. Walking around the exhibition together, Sealy, as the festival’s artistic director, is aware of this danger. I, for one, cannot help but think that ‘love’ has become one of the most overused and underexamined terms in contemporary curatorial discourse. Too often love in art and exhibition-making appear as a form of rhetorical softening, a means of smoothing over structural inequalities without adequately confronting them. Here, Sealy underscores love not as sentiment or consolation but as an ethical demand – a commitment to recognising the humanity of others despite the historical and contemporary systems designed to deny it. After all, bell hooks’ insists: ‘love is an action, not a feeling.’

This distinction matters because Sealy’s exhibition emerges from a decades-long, career engagement with photography’s complicity in the production of racialised, colonial and exclusionary forms of knowledge. As director of Autograph in London, and author of several books including: Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time and A Lens on Liberation: Photography as Resistance, he has spent years interrogating the medium’s role in shaping perceptions of race, identity and power. Although those concerns remain present of course, they have evolved, much to the exhibition’s benefit. The emphasis is no longer solely on exposing photography’s failures; instead, Sealy pursues what possibilities might emerge once those failures have been acknowledged.

The exhibition brings together approximately 30 artists whose practices span generations, continents and photographic traditions. Importantly, the selection resists any straightforward geographical and demographic categorisation. Within Sealy’s constellation of works, it’s the emphasis on imagination that gives the exhibition much of its emotional force. Particularly striking is the extent to which joy, intimacy and tenderness are permitted to occupy space alongside grief and historical trauma. This may sound like a modest achievement, but within contemporary exhibition-making it remains surprisingly rare. So embedded in visual culture are representations of marginalised communities within narratives of suffering that it can become a trap for curators, artists, cultural workers, and publics alike. By contrast, beauty functions gloriously here not as escape but as a form of resistance, the possibility of pleasure itself becoming politically significant.

This strategy proves effective. In Alliance, Infinity, Love, unfolding an argument takes second place to generating a series of conversations. Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s explorations of Black queer spirituality resonate across the galleries with Hélène Amouzou’s meditations on migration, displacement and visibility. Mário Cravo Neto’s refined portraiture finds unexpected echoes in the work of younger artists such as Tyler Mitchell, whose images continue to expand the visual vocabulary of Black representation. Elsewhere, Inuuteq Storch’s photographs challenge inherited colonial narratives surrounding Greenlandic identity, while Mónica de Miranda’s work navigates the complex terrain between memory, geography and postcolonial belonging.

Decidedly body-centric, the exhibition’s most haunting works are those marked by absence, none more so than Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black. Reimagining sites along the Underground Railroad – a covert network of secret routes, safe houses and abolitionists that enabled more than 100,000 enslaved people to escape the American South for free states and Canada during the mid-19th century – the black-and-white photographs depict landscapes in northeast Ohio. Evoking the perspective of an African American fugitive, Bey’s images of marshes, woodlands and white picket fences at night are suffused with the enveloping atmosphere of twilight. Far from documenting history, they conjure a psychological landscape that invites viewers to reflect on the uncertainty, fear and resolve of enslaved people navigating unfamiliar terrain in search of safety. Printed in velvety blacks that teeter on the threshold of visibility, the photographs are presented at a monumental scale and hung unusually low against grey walls, drawing the viewer into their darkness. Arranged as a sequence, the gallery culminates in a view across Lake Erie, its waters stretching towards an indistinct horizon. To where, we do not know.

Elegantly installed at the Deichtorhallen, the exhibition is carefully paced, allowing individual works the room they require while maintaining a coherent rhythm across the galleries. Moments of visual intensity are balanced by quieter intervals of contemplation. What emerges is an exhibition structured around relation as opposed to resolution, because Sealy does not impose a singular interpretative framework upon the works. Conversely, viewers are encouraged to inhabit a space of uncertainty, where the “other” of the title is not presented as a fixed subject to be known but as a continual challenge to the viewer’s assumptions.

For all the current enthusiasm surrounding participatory and socially engaged practices, contemporary photography exhibitions often remain surprisingly didactic. Images are expected to communicate clear political messages, while audiences are positioned primarily as recipients of information. Thankfully Alliance, Infinity, Love operates differently. It slows the viewer down and insists upon attention. It asks us ‘to look at and look into things.’

Yet the exhibition is not without its tensions. The philosophical framework derived from Levinas provides a compelling ethical foundation, but it occasionally risks abstraction. Levinas’ notion of infinite responsibility to the other has inspired generations of thinkers; however, it has also been criticised for its limited engagement with political structures and material conditions. A similar challenge occasionally surfaces here. While individual works grapple directly with histories of colonialism, migration, racial violence, and social exclusion, the exhibition’s overarching rhetoric sometimes appears more comfortable addressing interpersonal ethics than systemic power.

This is not a fatal flaw, but it does create moments of friction. One occasionally wonders whether the language of alliance and love can adequately account for the entrenched economic and political forces that continue to shape contemporary inequalities. The exhibition asks how we might relate differently to one another; it is somewhat less clear about how those relationships intersect with institutions, states and systems.

And yet perhaps that criticism risks missing the point. What distinguishes Sealy’s project is precisely its refusal to reduce photography to a tool of diagnosis. Much contemporary photographic discourse remains oriented towards revelation: exposing injustice, uncovering hidden histories, documenting harm. These remain essential tasks. But Sealy suggests they are not sufficient. If photography is capable of revealing what is wrong with the world, it must also help us imagine what could be otherwise. ‘The photographic works’, he writes, ‘are not passive reflections. They are calls that invite us to embrace a cosmology of difference, and seek to function as sutures against attempts at division.’

Ultimately, Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other succeeds because it embraces risk and boldly articulates an expansive moral vision. Sealy has produced an exhibition of generosity and intellectual coherence; one that is also emotionally profound and galvanising. Where it trumps other similar projects is in the questions it prompts about what photography can help us become, less what photography can show us. In doing so, Sealy offers one of the most thoughtful and ambitious photographic exhibitions of recent years – an exhibition that understands the encounter with the “other” as the beginning of a shared future, as long as we are willing to look for it. 

The 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg runs until 22 September 2026. 

–
Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words. Also working as an independent curator, he was Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Arianna Catania, Walter Guadagnini and Luce Lebart between 2020-26. He teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Images: 

1-Mario Cravo Neto, Odé, 1989 © Mario Cravo Neto

2-Inuuteq Storch, Keepers of the Ocean, 2016-2022 © Courtesy the artist and Wilson Saplana Gallery

3-Tyler Mitchell, Self Decoration (#1), 2022 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery 

4-Dawoud Bey, Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky), from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) Rennie Collection, Vancouver. © Dawoud Bey

5-Sandra Brewster, Take a Little Trip (Frantz Fanon), 2021. © Courtesy the artist 

6-Hélène Amouzou, Self portrait Molenbeek, 2009 © Hélène Amouzou

7-Mónica de Miranda, Earthworks, 2024. © Mónica de Miranda 

8-Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Nothing to Lose XII (Bodies of Experience), 1989. © Courtesy Autograph, London

9-Tyler Mitchell, Ghost Image, 2024 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery

10-Lee Shulman und Omar Victor Diop, The Anonymous Project presents Being There, 2023. © Courtesy the artists

11-Works by Mário Cravo Neto, Installation view of Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other June 5 – September 22, 2026 © Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Photo: Henning Rogge

1000 Words favourites

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• 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

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The post Mark Sealy’s vision of photography beyond critique appeared first on 1000 Words.

Anneka French | Book review | 2 July 2026
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A woman sits on a bed, legs folded beneath her, a soft purple fabric wrapped around her waist. The woman’s dark eyes, defined brows and glossy hair are accentuated because the rest of her body is cut away. Rendered as a map of the night sky, her body is filled with tiny bursts of starlight shining against a black expanse. This is Brooklyn-born Lorna Simpson’s Everrrything (2021), one of a ten-part work Sky Pin Ups (2021–present), a series of photo collages that reclaim the Black female body by partially removing the original context of a sexualised image and reworking it within the expansive and radical possibilities of the cosmos. The word ‘VISIBLE’ appears, and the central subject, framed by a deep indigo surround that mimics the sky, emphasising the infinite scale of the series’ ambition.

Everrrything is one of the images in Cut Out, Fiona Rogers’ 240-page book that examines photo collage, photomontage and assemblage through a feminist lens. While it is not the first work that appears, Simpson’s piece is indicative of Rogers’ intentions. Indeed, Alona Pardo’s text on Simpson, part of the chapter ‘Feminisms,’ argues that the women in these collages ‘give form to speculative realms…’ and ‘are the creators of their own universe,’ sentiments that feel apt throughout Rogers’ book.

The Oval Court (1986) by British artist Helen Chadwick is another expansive example. A vast installation composed of life-sized Prussian blue photocopies, collaged on to a low plinth, it shows Chadwick’s naked body amid a collection of dead mammals, birds and insects, accompanied by plant life and other assorted objects. In the section of The Oval Court illustrated, a small axe appears, wound with rope and laid up Chadwick’s stomach and crotch, a gesture that references the violence, precision and creative potential of a sharp blade.

Rogers, the V&A Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography, here presents artists and photographers on a global scale, each one making a significant contribution to subject or process, with insight provided via thematic introductions and by texts from a range of critical contributors. The vast majority of these works are owned by the V&A, a collection that holds almost a million photographs. The first chapter ‘Early Pioneers’ features Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron and Edith Mary Paget, experimenters with cyanotype, photogram, multiple and cut negatives, watercolour, and mixed media collage. Later chapters centralise more bodily feminist concerns. Joy Gregory’s cyanotypes explore the Western world’s obsession with the female blonde; Joanne Leonard’s prints from Journal of a Miscarriage (1973) portray the personal, visceral sweep of emotions experienced through the loss of a pregnancy; Linder’s photomontages recontextualise pornographic and consumerist depictions of the female body; Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is represented through a photogravure in which eyes are ‘tattooed’ across her back, collaging both voyeurism and ritual within one provocation.

‘Experimental Forms’ includes some of the most well-known but nonetheless extraordinary photographers selected for this anthology, many of whom have been the subject of major solo exhibitions in recent years. Claude Cahun’s practice, for instance, is illustrated through eight symbolically loaded pieces, reprinted from half-plate negatives: Surrealist compositions of faces, eyes, hands, cacti, scissors, and a game of chess. Dora Maar is here shown through silver gelatin Surrealist photomontages from the 1930s including Untitled (Hand Shell) (1934) and The Pretender (or The Simulator) (1935). Meticulously rephotographing different motifs, cropping, reorienting, and retouching these, Maar’s work taps into the emotionally atmospheric and enigmatic possibilities of the technique to reinvent. Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue, meanwhile, via Fantasy (1953) and Modern History (1956), uses photocollage via platinum prints, imaginative experimentations developed by building upon the technique of chigiri-e, where softly textured collages are formed from torn paper components.

The power of photography in combination with interdisciplinary gestures such as printing, stitching, projecting, and piercing, are most evident in the ‘Reclaiming Histories’ chapter. Reclamation, reparation, collaboration, and appropriation offer approaches to examine the archival, canonical, traditional, traumatic, and inherited. Works by Swiss-Haitian, Helsinki-based, Sasha Huber, employ a supremely-impactful layer of staples that disrupt the photographic surface to give a kind of armoured exterior to Black female subjects; Joana Choumali’s embroidered prints are means to personally and psychologically connect to a landscape devastated by terrorism in Côte d’Ivoire; cyanotype self-portraits by Tarrah Krajnak address a dislocation from her birth city of Lima via projections of political violence on to her Indigenous body. The recovery of female subjectivity and autonomy is apparent across the whole book but in works such as Mickalene Thomas’ Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires (2010), this gesture is made in direct reference to art historical representation, to Édouard Manet’s 1863 oil on canvas. Other of Thomas’ photographic prints and collages are overlaid with rhinestones, tape and fibreglass mesh, all part of the ‘incandescent magic’ of her practice, as curator Renée Mussai’s longer text describes it.

‘Speculative Futures’ presents work that engages with the digital, the climate crisis and interrelations between these subjects. Echoing Pardo’s words on Simpson’s practice, ‘I have a world to build… and I’m not waiting around for this world to end before I begin to build the next – we, travas, have already begun that’, says Ventura Profana. Profana, a Brazilian artist who uses photomontage as a tool for divination, queering and climate justice is here included by way of the hyperreal digital montage Balm of Gilead (2020). This chapter also includes Barbados-born, Glasgow-based Alberta Whittle, French artist Noémie Goudal and an extended text by curator Pelumi Odubanjo on the abstract mixed-media collages of Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu. In Uruguayan artist Liliana Farber’s large-scale series, Isolarii (2022), also within this section, historical cartography is layered with contemporary digital mapping processes to create ‘data collages’ shaped by politically controlled borders, colonialised territories and technologised perspectives.

The final text within the book is an artist’s, that of Justine Kurland, the American who, following Valerie Solanas, developed SCUMB (The Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books), a body of work in which photobooks by canonical white, male photographers have been cut up and reconfigured into something new, something shape-shifting, bold and radical. In an extract from her manifesto, Kurland writes, ‘I thrive in the stagnant waste of your boring photography… I’m coming for you with a blade.’

Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage by Fiona Rogers is co-published by Thames & Hudson and V&A.

—
Anneka French is a writer, editor and curator based in Birmingham. She is Project Editor at publishing house Anomie and contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor among other titles.

Images: 

1-Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), Kate Dore with Photogram Frame of Ferns, photograph by Oscar Gustav Rejlander in collaboration with Julia Margaret Cameron. © The Victoria and Albert Museum

2-Mabel Annie Burnip (1893–1984), from photographic album with albumen prints and hand illustrations, c. 1870s. © The Victoria and Albert Museum

3-Claude Cahun (1894–1954), Aveux non Avenus [Disavowed Confessions], 1930. © The Victoria and Albert Museum

4-Muza Vladimirovna Luppian (1912–42) Military collage album, c. 1935. © The Victoria and Albert Museum

5-Elemérné Marsovszky (1895–1944), Untitled (women holding ball with skull emblem), c. 1930. © The Victoria and Albert Museum

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 feminist possibilities of the cut image appeared first on 1000 Words.

1000 Words | Resource | 25 June 2026
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Laia Abril, Endometriosis – Museum of Romanticism, Madrid
2 June – 13 September

Housed in the Museum of Romanticism, an ornate Madrid institution better known for its Spanish Romantic paintings, a new photographic and research-led installation by Laia Abril figures people living with endometriosis in moments associated with pain, exhaustion, physical self-protection and attempts to obtain relief. Presented in the Official Section of the 29th PHotoESPAÑA, the images echo the suffering and reclining women of 19th century art and follows directly from Abril’s On Mass Hysteria and extends the concerns of her long-term project, A History of Misogyny. It’s timeline begins in 1860, when the condition was first described medically, but its focus is firmly contemporary. Namely, the lasting consequences of a healthcare system that has treated the male body as the universal standard. That bias, Abril tells us, has fuelled inadequate research, delayed diagnoses and the routine dismissal of symptoms as normal, exaggerated or psychological – a form of violence that has shaped the project’s focus on invisibility, disbelief and the gulf between the makeshift strategies patients use to survive and the scientific answers they are still denied.

Joanna Piotrowska, A Moment of Darkness at Noon – The Common Guild, Glasgow
23 May – 18 July 

Joanna Piotrowska’s A Moment of Darkness at Noon turns The Common Guild in Glasgow into a charged, dreamlike chamber of bodies, fragments and uneasy intimacies. Working across large-scale black-and-white photography, collage, sculpture, textiles, and specially made frames, this highly anticipated exhibition extends the artist’s interest in Jungian psychoanalysis; particularly intuitive, associative and pre-verbal forms of expression. Within it Piotrowska splices together faces, limbs, animals, landscapes, and family images into strange new constellations that feel theatrical and faintly threatening. Long preoccupied with the push and pull between care and control, safety and confinement, she brings those tensions into sharper, more surreal focus here. Installed in the former school building’s upper galleries, it is Piotrowska’s first exhibition in Scotland. Devoted entirely to collage, A Moment of Darkness at Noon marks an exciting shift in a practice already celebrated for making the familiar feel deeply, deliciously strange.

Daido Moriyama, Love Letters to Photography – Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation, Paris
20 May – 4 October 

Sidestepping the dutiful career retrospective, a new exhibition on the legendary Daido Moriyama goes straight for the live wire running through more than six decades of his work and takes up his restless, ecstatic and often combative obsession with the photographic image. 60 prints mingle with books, magazines, texts, and archival documents, creating a portrait not only of Moriyama but of photography looking back at itself. Moriyama has always treated the magazine page and photobook as active photographic spaces rather than secondary containers for his images, and a new 256-page publication accompanying the exhibition honours that while bringing 22 of his essays and fragments into the French language for the first time.

In Common, 20 Years of the Sputnik Photos Collective – Museum of Photography, Kraków
11 April – 13 September

Sputnik Photos was founded in 2006 by photographers from Central and Eastern Europe whose formative experience was the political and economic transformation following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Its early membership stretched across Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Belarus, Latvia, and Georgia. In Common is an anniversary show with the brakes off. Curated by Marta Szymańska, it skips the polished victory lap and asks a livelier question, that is, what happens when documentary photography becomes a group verb? Installed at MuFo Rakowicka, itself housed in a converted 19th century military building, In Common makes a persuasive case for documentary photography as something active and gloriously untidy – a meeting place, an argument, a classroom, an archive and, when necessary, a tool for pushing back. The real subject of the show, then, is not simply the region the collective has photographed, but the changing ethics of documentary practice itself, who tells a story, who appears inside it, who signs it, and what an image might do once it leaves the photographer’s hands.

Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography – Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
28 July – 4 October 

Dulwich Picture Gallery goes for metropolitan voltage in Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, a restless, street-level survey of urban America from the early 1900s to the 21st century. Placing canonical modernist images alongside humanist documentary, the exhibition traces the rise of urban photography as a defining mode of 20th century image-making, moving fluidly between social documentary, street photography, architectural study, and portraiture through the work of multiple generations of photographers. Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Margaret Bourke-White and others bring a particularly sharp focus to people living beyond the polished metropolitan image, their photographs combining formal invention with empathy, confrontation and social witness. Installed within the measured elegance of Dulwich’s historic galleries, the show promises a lively clash of settings, a century of American speed, grit and reinvention unfolding inside one of London’s most refined museum spaces.

Abdulhamid Kircher, Rotting from Within – PHOXXI, Deichtorhallen Hamburg
5 June – 1 November

Rotting from Within takes its title from Abdulhamid Kircher’s fear that, despite years of separation, something of his father might still live inside him. In this deeply autobiographical exhibition, the German-Turkish artist uses analogue photography to trace the emotional inheritance passed between generations of men in his family. Presented as part of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, the show brings together images made between Berlin and Turkey with family snapshots, archival documents, personal objects, and diary-like texts. The result feels less like a conventional documentary sequence than a volatile, living family album by way of an elaborate, site-specific installation. While earlier versions centred on Kircher’s father, the Hamburg presentation draws his late paternal grandfather into the frame, bringing three generations into view. Migration from rural Turkey to Germany, cultural displacement, emotional repression and patriarchal authority emerge as forces shaping recurring cycles of violence, absence and abandonment.

Katia Kameli, The Algerian Novel (A New Chapter) – Les Rencontres Arles 2026
6 July – 4 October

Begun in 2016 and now opening a new chapter at Les Rencontres d’Arles – inside the Église Saint-Blaise, the former conventual church of the Abbey of Saint-Césaire – Kameli’s project is a layered, polyphonic film essay. Postcards, press photographs, artworks, popular objects, and remembered voices jostle together, complicating how Algeria’s national history is pictured and passed on. A French-Algerian artist who has long described her role as that of a translator, Kameli moves between images, languages and inherited narratives, allowing past and present to continually revise one another. Here she turns to Assia Djebar’s 1978 film-poem La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, a landmark work that approaches Algerian history through the voices of women from different generations. The chapter extends a wider practice spanning Algeria’s visual history, raï music, the Eastern origins of La Fontaine’s fables, and medieval Persian poetry – following stories as they travel between cultures, acquire new meanings and return in altered forms.

Wendy McMurdo, The Digital Mirror – National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, Edinburgh
30 May – 25 October

The Digital Mirror is Wendy McMurdo’s largest exhibition to date, bringing together more than 50 works made chiefly between 1995 and 2018. Photographs, working contact sheets, unseen images, and rarely shown digital animations spill across the Portrait’s Library and Upper Balcony, mapping three decades of fascination with childhood, technology and the idea of the unstable image. For example, early 20th century dolls from Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood sit beside works that helped shape McMurdo’s visual world, including sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi and Henry Raeburn’s The Skating Minister. McMurdo’s practice emerged from the friction of the early digital moment, drawing on the photographic double, Surrealism, and the cyborg, while staying rooted in classrooms, museums, workshops, and the everyday theatre of childhood. Three decades on, her questions feel sharper than ever: what does a screen teach a child to see? What kinds of selves do games and algorithms produce? And where does imaginative freedom end and technological violence begin?

Diana Markosian, Replaced – Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
10 April – 6 September

The third EXPOSED Torino Photo Festival takes the theme Laid Bare, inviting artists to look beneath appearances and examine the relationship between identity and representation, body and image, and the visible and invisible. Markosian’s exposure of her own romantic history fits that framework almost painfully well. Replaced combines a newly produced photographic series with an immersive film adapted for the museum’s projection room. The film moves between individual images and split-screen compositions, giving the photographs duration and allowing different versions of the same memories to overlap. The work grew from the end of a relationship that lasted more than a decade. Markosian became fixated not only on losing the person she loved, but on the thought that their apparently private gestures, locations and rituals could be repeated with somebody else. She hired an actor to embody her former partner and retraced their relationship through staged reconstructions, returning to various cities, staying in the same hotels and repeating experiences once shared with him.

GHANA! Dreaming independence, 1957-1976 – Les Rencontres Arles 2026
6 July – 4 October 

GHANA! Dreaming Independence, 1957–1976 bursts into view as a vivid, multi-voiced portrait of a country learning to picture itself anew. Developed by curator and photography historian Damarice Amao through Les Rencontres d’Arles’ 2020 Curatorial Research Grant, the exhibition begins with Ghana’s independence on 6 March 1957, when the former British colony of the Gold Coast, led by Kwame Nkrumah, became a trailblazer for political emancipation and Pan-African possibility across sub-Saharan Africa. Photography becomes one of the young nation’s liveliest building tools, bouncing from studio portraits and street scenes, all helping to circulate a fresh image of Ghana at home and abroad. Landmark publications such as Willis E. Bell and Efua T. Sutherland’s The Roadmakers (1961) and Paul Strand’s Ghana: An African Portrait (1976) pushed against the stiff visual grammar of colonial representation, opening room for Ghanaian people to appear not as ethnographic “subjects” but as cultural makers and participants in a shared national future. Visual sovereignty and postcolonial self-representation is the order of the day.

-1000 Words

Images:

1-Laia Abril, Endometriosis, 2026. © Laia Abril

2-Helen Levitt, New York, 1972. © 2026 Film Documents LLC

3-Abdulhamid Kircher, Untitled, 2017 Courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid © Abdulhamid Kircher

4-Katia Kameli, Still from The Algerian Novel (Chapter 1, 2016, video). Courtesy of the artist and ADAGP, Paris

5-Wendy McMurdo, Girl with Bears, Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. © Wendy McMurdo

6-Diana Markosian, from the series Replaced, 2026

7-Paul Strand, Samuel J.K. Essoun, Shama, Ghana, 1964. Courtesy Paul Strand Archive and Aperture. 

8-Rafał Milach, Solidarity with Belarusian women and men, screaming outside the EP, Warszawa, 2021. © Rafał Milach

9-Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Phillida Reid

10-Daido Moriyama, Komoro, Nagano, Japon, 1977 © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

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

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The post 10 Must-See Exhibitions: Summer 2026 appeared first on 1000 Words.

Mark Durden | Exhibition Review | 18 June 2026
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Phillip Toledano’s latest exhibition consists of 20 black and white photographs, matted and framed. They are accompanied by a text stating that the images were printed from a caché of negatives he recently discovered – all made by his late father, who was a painter and sculptor and worked as an actor under the stage name Edward Trevor. The pictures, so we are informed, were taken in New York and all dated in the 1930s and 40s. Here is another Vivian Maier-like discovery, of newly found images, and another artist to add to the roster of great street photographers. Only these pictures are not that interesting and they all rest upon a deceit. His father was not a photographer. The story is made up and the pictures were all generated by AI.

The reveal is given in a statement made by the artist on a video screen at the other end of this show. It also includes comments from people who had given feedback to the work, critical and astute, like this one: ‘By using AI you create an image that is based on images that were stolen from artists all over the world – since algorithms only replicate what they have been trained on.’

‘Frictionless’, ‘hollow’, ‘high resolution AI slop’ – these are not my words but were some of the words given to me by ChatGPT, when I asked it to write a critical review of this show. Since Toledano is making a name for himself by popularising and championing AI photography it seemed very apt to try and use ChatGPT to write a response. But of course I prompted the criticism, even introducing the word ‘slop’. I could quote more, because I also discovered AI had very likely scraped my texts and seemed to know about the kind of things I would say about photography in reviews like this. It also pointed out that because photo criticism has its reproducible patterns, even a review solely written without AI, could be deemed to be as it put it ‘AI adjacent.’

For Toledano the point of generating these images was to show how what is artificial and inhuman can still carry ‘beauty and emotion’. But what does such a show really say about AI and our supposed ‘age of synthetic imagery’ (the description is from the blurb for a recent Toledano talk)?  

A key issue for AI and many of the anxieties and issues arising from its use return to romantic conceptions of creativity and authorship, premises that had been disavowed by much system-based, appropriative art practices from the 20th century to the present. Interestingly Toledano calls himself a conceptual artist. But his approach and use of AI allows him to return to a romantic conception of authorship and creativity. Unlike traditional photography, AI allows greater authorial control, more creative opportunities and possibilities than the more chancy process of trying to snatch pictures from the flux of life.  

In what still remains one of the best essays written on the subject, James Agee refers to ‘the unimagined world’ that street photography can reveal. It was written for a book of Helen Levitt’s ‘lyrical’ photography from Harlem dating from the late 1930s to the 1940s, for a book that did not get published until 1965, after his death. For Agee, the photographic artist’s task was not ‘to alter the world as the eye sees it, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the world.’   

Agee’s idea of ‘the unimagined world’ speaks to the way Levitt’s work was receptive to pictorial possibilities from moments observed on the street: comedic, odd, beautiful, inexplicable, and surprising. The problem with much AI generated photography is that it presents not so much the wonders of the unimagined world, but the poverty of what has been imagined about that world.  

Street photography lies often with subtle details, of unexpected rhymes and correspondences, or comedic, slapstick moments, as in Levitt’s portrayal of a woman watering, pictured just at the moment she looks one way while the hosepipe she is holding spays water in the other direction. Toledano’s street photography is too hyperbolic, over insistent on oddballs and oddities, with everything signalling its strangeness to us. AI photography can tend to produce generic images because when data is summarised, classified, the most common is preserved and the exceptional ignored. Toledano might then be deliberating trying to counter this tendency in his over insistence on quirks and quirkiness. But then again, he tends to overwork things, pictorially that is. Take, for example, his picture of an elderly woman, a tough street-wise lady with a cigarette in her mouth. The swirling cigarette smoke encircling her head, illuminated from behind, is over spun. 

One of Toledano’s images shows a riderless black horse running at night on the road, ahead of the traffic. I wonder if this is how he sees AI, the liberation and creative freedom it entails – a freedom despite its obvious costs. In these ‘frictionless’ fictions we are not given any new or critical knowledge about AI. Nothing about the problems with the use of such technologies: the environmental costs, the obscene wealth accrued by tech oligarchs, the exploitation of labour in the tagging of data etc., as well as the ethics of image appropriation. 

Toledano likens using AI to generate images to being a writer, creating new fictional worlds. But consider how Agee, who certainly was a great writer, responds to one of Levitt’s photographs. It depicts a young child on a street, barefoot, wet and fearful, at the moment she moves towards a smiling woman, beckoning her to come near. Children behind the girl have let off a fire hydrant and water is spraying everywhere. For Agee what is revealed in this photograph cannot be matched in the other arts: ‘No one could write, paint, act, dance or embody in music, the woman’s sheltering and magnanimous arm or tilt and voice of smiling head, or bearing or whole demeanour.’ 

AI may well signal a greater valorisation of the document itself, a greater appreciation of traditional photography. Toledano’s joke is that he pretends to return those documentary qualities to us as precious, as a newly discovered family treasure. But in his simulated photography everything is over determined. Street photography is fundamentally perceptual – cut this out and we see the limits of an imagined world, a street photography by numbers, with caricatural figures.

Images: Phillip Toledano, Untitled, c. 1930-1940, New York City, USA, from Edward Trevor: Never Seen the Light, 2026 © Phillip Toledano

Edward Trevor: Never Seen the Light by Phillip Toledano ran at Fotografiska Berlin from 28 March – 31 May 2026.

—
Mark Durden is an academic, writer and artist. He is Professor of Photography and the Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales. He works collaboratively as part of the artist group Common Culture and, since 2017, with João Leal, has been photographing modernist architecture in Europe.

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 Why AI street photography fails appeared first on 1000 Words.

Gem Fletcher | Exhibition Review | 4 June 2026
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I’m lost. It’s been a minute since I’ve been to The Approach, and I’d totally forgotten it’s above a pub, requiring visitors to cosplay East End punter to access the space via the downstairs bar. As I meander through the bustling lunchtime crowd, my headphones are full of the work of writer and psychotherapist MJ Corey reflecting on the progression in performance dynamics between Instagram and TIKTOK – vacant selfies and flat vocal affect in the former mutating to vibrant, excessive caricature personality in the latter – all while referencing Erving Goffman’s theories of dramaturgy. When I finally reach the doorway into Sara Cywnar’s latest exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, I attempt to quietly slip into the blacked-out viewing room to watch her film of the same name. I failed. My presence triggers a dog that is now barking and lunging at me, to the embarrassment of its owners. 

“Everything is moving forward as planned,” states the laconic, authoritative male narrator.

Looking back, everything about this series of events offered the perfect disorientating precursor to Cwynar’s show. For the last decade, the New York-based artist’s mission has been to physically and conceptually disassemble images to reveal the power they exert over our personal and collective imagination. Baby Blue Benzo is her most potent attempt yet. At its core, the 21-minute opus unravels the arbitrariness of value and the way in which photography helps create the desire on which capitalism thrives. The film – and a small series of images on display in the gallery’s annex – traffic in allegory, taking cultural touchpoints, including but not limited to a Mercedes-Benz, Pamela Anderson, an 18th century doll costume and Benzodiazepines (benzos), to unravel the perpetual harm that binds capitalism, desire, misogyny, and information overload in the digital age.

The film’s central protagonist is the Mercedes-Benz 300SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé. The world’s most expensive car, which sold at auction for 135 million euros in 2022. Cwynar uses the Benz as a recurring motif. An object of desire that drives the conceptual narrative, while quietly nodding to the vehicle’s dark history in the 1955 Le Mans Disaster, in which a number of vehicles collided into the spectator arena killing 82 people. The disaster became the deadliest in motorsports history, and Mercedes-Benz cancelled its racing programme immediately after. And yet, the car acquired its prestige and subsequent worth from its failure to fulfil its purpose. This grand waste of manufacturing is something Cwynar critiques throughout the film, using the Benz as a fulcrum to the perverse ways objects (and images) accumulate fiscal and social value. 

Next comes Benzodiazepines: a class of highly effective, but highly addictive sedatives commonly prescribed for anxiety and insomnia, conditions which the artist has experienced herself. Developed in 1955 (just like the Benz), the little blue pill is used to parallel an insomniac’s drifting illogic and speak to the experience of living in an era of accelerated image capitalism. It’s here Cwynar parses the simultaneous desire for progress and rest – a world where we constantly yearn for both satisfaction and relief – while encountering a daily mashup of images and information unlike anything we could have imagined until a few decades ago. Ironically, sleep is now our last remaining autonomous space, rendering the cruelty of insomnia as something more savage. Not just because it offers relief from a tirade of content, but because it prevents us from accessing a world of imagination where alternative ideas and values that rebel against the status quo can thrive. 

In truth, Baby Blue Benzo is a film with endless subplots. Nothing is neutral, and every gesture is steeped in theory and provocation. Under her lead inquiry, Cwynar references Allan Sekula’s The Traffic in Photographs, provoking questions about images and power. How does photography turn people into products? What’s the difference between consuming a product and an image? Is a picture enough? Ideas from Lauren Berlant, Charles Baudelaire, Saidiya Hartman and Maurice Merleau-Ponty circulate throughout the narration, alongside personal reflections from Cwynar and a reading from the Mercedes-Benz sales literature.

The multifaceted script is delivered by Cwynar and her long-term collaborator, actor Paul Cooper, whose rich ASMR tone reflects our collective ambivalence towards images while gradually building a sense of unease and existential dread. In addition, Cwynar uses the sonic experience to heighten her quick cuts, both playing and mocking our dwindling attention spans. Every few minutes, the film’s dramaturgy pivots, driven by the throb of the beats, which range from Porche by Charli XCX to Metz’s Demolition Row. Occasionally, the action pauses, enabling the pub downstairs to casually announce itself by a clattering of pans in the kitchen. 

Making poetry out of collisions has long been Cwynar’s artistic purview, and throughout Baby Blue Benzo, she unsettles the space between nostalgia and the contemporary, between what’s authentic and constructed, between the replica and the original, creating her own typology of dissonance. This tension is particularly felt in the ‘collage’ scenes, where hundreds of images pulled from the internet, print and Cwynar’s ever-expanding personal archive are removed from their contexts and positioned on multiple panes of glass layered on top of each other. These scenes invoke Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–29) and his attempt to understand recurring visual themes and patterns across time and cultures by obsessively organising collections of images on flat planes. In Cwynar’s interrogation, the images shift constantly, utilising a mid-century animation technique that feels eerily reminiscent of doomscrolling. Although, instead of the vertical scroll of social media, the film moves horizontally, mimicking the assembly line or the treadmill, evoking the exhaustive reality of endless production, endless images and the endless pursuit of upward mobility. 

Now, with five films under her belt, Cwynar seems to feel at home in the theatre of ideas she has created. Every decision in Baby Blue Benzo is carefully tuned to create maximum impact. What’s more, she asserts herself through more on-camera appearances than ever before, playing roles as varied as motor show model, film-maker, figure skater, influencer, and film director. Her performance, which ricochets between earnest and sardonic, brings a sense of levity, making the hard and dark truths the project mirrors back to us more palatable.

Cwynar’s work, just like the raging Alsatian I first encountered in the gallery, is an alarm. A canary in the mine. A rallying call to address our relationship to photography and its role in manufacturing illusion and advancing capitalism. Her delivery is a masterclass in subliminal education – a visual world that welds advertising aesthetics and attention-economy storytelling strategies to deliver consumer critique through a blend of irony and sincerity. 

“Seduce me?” asks Cooper desperately as one chapter comes to an end.

“Please,” responds Cwynar.

All images courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London.

Baby Blue Benzo runs at The Approach, London, until 7 June 2026.

—
Gem Fletcher is a writer, consultant and podcaster. Her work has been published in Foam, Aperture, Dazed, Creative Review and The British Journal of Photography. She also hosts The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today.

Images

1-Peach Peony, 2026

2-Fake Rolex Oyster Perpetual Milgauss, China, 2026

3-Pink Panther Mother, 2025

4-Pregnant, 2026 

5-Lihem with Mercedes Benz 300 SLR, 2026

6-The Disturbed Slumber, 1760, 2026

7-Doll Index, 1791-1950, 2026

8-Baby Blue Benzo, 2024

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The post Capitalism’s dream sequence: Sara Cwynar at The Approach appeared first on 1000 Words.

Aria Shahrokhshahi | Interview | 28 May 2026
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Nathan Leigh Taylor: Wet Ground has been described as being made ‘from inside the war rather than in response to it.’ How did living and volunteering in Ukraine shape the way you photographed?

Aria Shahrokhshahi: I think one thing that’s important to mention is that the work started in 2019, before the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation, and many of the project’s central ideas were already there from the beginning. I was interested in questions of identity, reclamation, shifting culture, masculinity, and what happens when a nation’s sovereignty is under attack.

During the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014 and the partial occupation of Ukraine by Russia, a lot of these questions around Ukrainian identity became increasingly pertinent, and the full-scale invasion only amplified the things I was already trying to explore.

I would say that being witness to the unbelievable kindness, especially from NGO BASE UA, amidst the horror of war has been one of the greatest honours of my life. In war, you see the best and the worst of people, and I think that inevitably became part of the way I understood and approached the work.

NLT: Although Wet Ground emerges from within an active conflict, you have positioned yourself outside the category of ‘war photographer.’ How did that position develop, and do you think the work could complicate or challenge how war photography is typically understood?

AS: While there has been a concerted effort to position both the work and myself outside of the ‘war photographer’ space, I understand that for some people it will still be seen as work about war. But for me, that’s not really what the work is about.

It’s about the beauty of normality within chaos, the shifting identity of a nation and, ultimately, it’s a way for me to make sense of the world around me and communicate a feeling to others. A lot of the work is actually quite introspective.

To be frank, I have no real interest in war. I never intended to make work in a place at war, and I don’t intend to do so again. Ukraine is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever had the chance to spend time in, filled with extraordinary people, and for me the work is far more an observation of a country and its people than a focus on war.

That said, it’s not something I would ever try to ignore. Ukrainians face constant violence and war crimes against the civilian population, and in the opinion of many global human rights organisations and charities, there is an ongoing attempt to ethnically cleanse a nation by authoritarian aggression.

I also have two other long-form bodies of work in progress – one in Iran where my family live, and another in the UK – so rejecting the label of ‘war photographer’ comes from feeling that it’s dishonest and doesn’t represent my work or the way I think about making work.

NLT: How did you approach sequencing the images in the book? Were there particular themes, rhythms or narratives you wanted the viewer to experience? Were there images that changed significance when placed in dialogue with others?

AS: I thought carefully about who I wanted to publish the book with, and I’ve always found the way Loose Joints sequence and create sentences within an edit absolutely beautiful, so I really felt like they were the right match.

Sarah Chaplin Espenon and I spent three days in Marseille laying all the images out on the floor and making sentences and rhythms with the photographs. That’s where a lot of the feeling came from. There were images that I had essentially written off that Sarah shone a light on, allowing me to look at them from a different perspective.

One image that really revealed itself during the edit was of Baby Theo, photographed just minutes after he was born. I had almost discarded the image because I felt I hadn’t made the photograph I originally hoped to. But once we saw it in sequence, it suddenly made complete sense. It became an image of hope and new life.

It’s less about two images working together and more about the sentences you create in sequence to develop momentum. What comes before and after. It’s about the breaths and pauses you need to complete or emphasise a point within an edit.

NLT: Wet Ground walks the line between conceptual reflection and historical document. How do you view Wet Ground in this regard? Do you see the book as primarily a record, a meditation or something else entirely?

AS: Quite simply, the goal of the work is to try and make a poem with pictures. I’m always trying to communicate a feeling that I have. I’m not interested in fact or historical documentation in the surface-level sense.

I think the work has multiple practicalities and uses, but for me it was important to provide a different way of looking at something that has already been so well documented. A meditation, or conceptual reflection, would be a good way to describe it.

What always interests me is finding another way to look at a place, situation or idea that exists outside of the usual language surrounding it. That’s what Wet Ground is an attempt to do for me.

NLT: The title Wet Ground refers to a moment during a civilian evacuation when wet ground prevented a missile from detonating. Could you reflect on why that experience stayed with you, and how the idea of ‘wet ground’ operates as a metaphor throughout the book?

AS: During the seven years making the work, I spent a lot of time working as a humanitarian volunteer. It never felt right to simply be there making photographs.

I was lucky enough to already have an amazing group of friends in Ukraine prior to the full-scale Russian invasion, and they let me join them volunteering with NGO BASE UA, evacuating civilians from frontline areas. On 10 February 2024, during an evacuation in the east of the country, a GRAD missile landed around fifteen metres away from us. Instead of detonating, it was absorbed into the earth because it had been raining and the ground was wet.

That’s a very literal origin of the title, but over time I became more interested in the wider metaphorical interpretation. Wet ground is always shifting.

I also became interested in Chernozem, the black soil that not only saved our lives, but is also a cornerstone of Ukrainian identity. Before the war, Ukraine produced around a third of the world’s grain, and agriculture remains deeply tied to both the country’s economy and national identity.

But what always feels most important to me in conversations around land is that land is never just material space. It’s places where someone learnt to ride their bike, had their first kiss, built memories. That relationship between land and memory became very important to me, and having the title closely connected to that felt right.

NLT: The book opens with a poem by Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, setting a tone for the images that follow. How did you come to select this text, and what significance does it hold for the work?

AS: I first came across Charlotte’s work through her book Food For The Dead, and specifically a poem called ‘Happy Violence’. One thing that’s really important to me in my work, and something that really interests me, is the mystery of photography. The images that make you think, make you wonder.

I think the quickest way to bore someone is to tell them everything, so I like to make work that leaves space for people to question what they’re seeing and try to understand the context themselves. I think something interesting happens once context is removed, because people fill in the gaps with their own experiences and their relationship to the work changes because of that.

‘Happy Violence’ spoke to me very deeply for that reason. The way Charlotte assembled sentences took my mind somewhere else. It wasn’t on the nose, it made me question and wonder, and it engaged something in me emotionally. I felt she was the perfect fit for the book.

Myself and Loose Joints were always aligned in not wanting a descriptive foreword. A poem felt more appropriate. It was a real collaboration, and I feel so lucky to have her text in the book. I think one of the things it does really well is engage that sense of mystery I’m always looking for within work.

NLT: What would you hope an international reader comes to understand differently after spending time with the book?

AS: It’s a difficult question, because I understand that every reader will interpret the work differently depending on their own experiences and the context they bring to it. But I hope what comes across is not only the beauty of Ukraine and its people, but also the duality of existence and the complexity of identity during this incredibly strange and difficult time.

I hope Wet Ground allows people to see Ukraine in a way they maybe haven’t seen before. I hope the work makes them stop and think, question and wonder, feel and laugh, and that engaging with it might encourage them to spend time learning more through other, more didactic sources about what Ukrainians are facing.

I hope the work maintains a non-didactic approach – that people are able to look at the pictures with a sense of mystery and wonder and, almost like reading a novel, create a world they can step into, even momentarily.

I think many depictions of war are so unrelatable for most people. Whether it’s an adolescent kiss in a nightclub or cuddling with a loved one, those smaller human moments close the distance and reconnect people to the reality of what others are experiencing.

All images courtesy Loose Joints © Aria Shahrokhshahi 2026. 

Wet Ground (2026) by Aria Shahrokhshahi is published by Loose Joints.

—
Aria Shahrokhshahi (b. 1996) is a British-Iranian multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice has been shaped by a deep fascination with the intricate dynamics of diverse communities and the complexities of the human condition. With a focus on social structures and the human experience, Shahrokhshahi’s work serves as a critical exploration of the relationships and power dynamics that inform everyday life.

Nathan Leigh Taylor (b. 1990) is a UK-based photographer and writer.

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The post Beyond the frontline: Aria Shahrokhshahi’s journey through Ukraine appeared first on 1000 Words.

1000 Words | Resource | 11 May 2026
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John Gossage, From the Garden to the Darkness – Large Glass Gallery
14 March – 30 May

John Gossage’s first UK exhibition arrives at Large Glass, one of London’s most discerning photography-dedicated spaces. The show comprises two bodies of work that operate as elegant bookends. The first is Gardens, a 1978 portfolio of 24 photographs made in Washington, D.C. between 1973 and 1977, with text excerpts selected by Walter Hopps and published by The Hollow Press and Castelli Graphics. The second is a group of Berlin photographs from 1982–86 — images that, as the gallery puts it, ‘photograph the darkness’ — which feed into Gossage’s books Stadt des Schwarz and Berlin in the Time of the Wall. Between these poles, Large Glass presents what Gossage calls his ‘photographs with distractions,’ which are small, single photographs mounted on board and edged with collage-like elements and handmade marks. ‘I think of them as assemblages. They are not collages because none of the elements intrude upon the photographic reality,’ says Gossage.

Carrie Mae Weems – Goodman Gallery
17 April – 23 May

Carrie Mae Weems’ solo presentation at Goodman Gallery London marks her first with the gallery in the capital. A defining and soaring voice in contemporary photography, Weems presents bodies of work — Seaside, The Law of Diminishing Returns and Ocean Line — that attend to places of beauty, passage and irreparable loss, where the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and contemporary economic displacement press against the limits of representation. The show also includes works from Painting the Town, in which boarded-up storefronts from the period of the Black Lives Matter protests become ‘accidental abstractions,’ their ‘found’ painterly surfaces actually formed through acts of erasure, concealment and censorship. Weems remains singular in her ability to make history appear at once monumental and intimate.

Jermaine Francis, Linn Phyllis Seeger, CHIRAL DEFLECTIONS – Meadow Conservatory 
11 May – 19 May

Chiral Deflections takes place at Mason & Fifth’s Meadow Conservatory Exhibition Space in Westbourne Park, a canal-side cultural setting within the brand’s largest London building. Here, Jermaine Francis and Linn Phyllis Seeger extend an ongoing dialogue, following Seeger’s recent curatorial presentation of films, including work by Francis, during her residency at Shipton Gallery. For this presentation, Francis stages CYMKISS_BLACK_0: REGISTER FUGITIVITY, a work that turns the photographic landscape into a site of fracture and refusal. Its fragmented images resist the demand that Black presence be made immediately legible, available or possessed. Instead, the body is displaced into opacity, registration, trace. Seeger’s true idle approaches fugitivity through the screen, using video sculpture to examine the dead drift of contemporary navigation, where scrolling produces movement without progress and digital time loses its sequence.

Nhu Xuan Hua, Of Walking on Fire – Autograph
16 April – 19 September

Curated by Bindi Vora, Nhu Xuan Hua’s first UK solo exhibition, Of Walking on Fire fills both galleries at Autograph with a body of work that draws on Hua’s Vietnamese family history, her parents’ migration to Europe after the Vietnam War and the linguistic gaps that shaped her childhood — including a household in which, as Autograph notes, ‘there was no common language spoken.’ Reworking photographs from Vietnam and the family’s early years in Europe, Hua digitally bends, doubles and dissolves figures. In the second gallery, the tone shifts toward restoration and feminine force, with new works invoking Đạo Mẫu, the Vietnamese spiritual tradition honouring mother goddesses. For example, Promise of Spring (the English translation of Nhu Xuan Hua’s Vietnamese name) is a self-portrait in which Hua reclaims a name long subject to mispronunciation and places herself within a lineage of maternal protection and cultural transmission.

Sarah Pickering, Vanishing Act – Hapax Living Room
20 April – 18 May

At the HAPAX Living Room, a first-floor Victorian Flat conversion in West Brompton, Sarah Pickering’s residency begins with Vanishing Act, an exhibition staging the home as a theatre of disappearance and belief. The show brings together extracts from two new bodies of work, The Reveal and Apport, through photography, sound and video. Pickering has long been interested in staged evidence and controlled unreality, and here that inquiry moves into a more intimate register. The Enfield Poltergeist, the magician Fay Presto, analogue darkroom processes, X-rays, and Kirlian aura imaging all feed into a project in which the domestic object becomes part proof, part prop, part apparition. HAPAX describe Pickering as a ‘re-emerging artist’ returning to practice after a difficult period of parenting, while the title also points to the social disappearance of middle age, especially for women.

Sarah Moon – Michael Hoppen Gallery
16 May – 17 July

Sarah Moon was a model before she moved behind the camera, so her long association with Yohji Yamamoto, and her recent three-volume meditation on Dior might therefore seem inevitable. Yet her photographs are never merely beholden to the conventions of fashion or commerce. Across decades, Moon has produced images of rare poise, both elusive and quietly seductive. Her latest exhibition at Michael Hoppen Gallery, her fifth solo with the gallery, brings together a selection of recent colour and black-and-white photographs made between 2003 and the present. These works offer a particularly refined encounter with Moon’s printed image, colour and monochrome works whose dreamlike atmosphere and muted palette invite slow, wondering attention, and which, in the gallery’s words, affirm her position as ‘one of the most distinctive and influential voices in photographic history.’

Peckham 24 Festival of Contemporary Photography, The Eras Edition –  Copeland Gallery 
15 May – 17 May

Peckham 24 returns to the Copeland Gallery and the Bussey Building for its 10th-anniversary edition, billed as The Eras Edition. What began in 2016 as a 24-hour pop-up on the fringes of Photo London Week has become one of the UK photography calendar’s liveliest independent fixtures. This year, the organisers are leaning into the anniversary, framing the programme around photography’s relationship to time — memory, decay, ecological duration, nostalgia, political urgency, and the persistence of the past inside the present. Exhibiting artists include Vinca Petersen, Max Ferguson, Maen Hammad, Kristia Yenza, and others. A Bigger Book Fair also returns to Unit 8 with 90+ independent publishers across photobooks, zines and magazines, and the talks programme sees the return of The Messy Truth Live, hosted by Gem Fletcher with a new series of ever exciting guests.

–1000 Words

Images: 

1-John Gossage, Beobachtungsstand, Cuvrystr, 1984. © John Gossage

2-Carrie Mae Weems, From The Law of Diminishing Returns, 2026. Courtesy Goodman Gallery

3-Linn Phyllis Seeger, true idle, 2026. © Linn Phyllis Seeger

4-Nhu Xuan Hua, Promise of Spring. Courtesy the artist. © Nhu Xuan Hua

5-Sarah Pickering, The Reveal (Duster Jacket) Pocket #1, 2026. © Sarah Pickering

6-Sarah Moon, Maria Grazia pour Dior II, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

7-Vinca Petersen, From the series HULALA. © Vinca Petersen

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