£17.99

How has photography come to occupy its place within contemporary art? The answer depends on where one begins. Many influential Euro-American histories have traced photography’s emergence through Conceptual art and institutional critique, while parallel developments in Japan followed a markedly different trajectory.

Photography in Parallel: Japanese and Western Critical Perspectives since the 1960s brings together two newly commissioned essays by critics Takanao Seki and Megumu Takashima alongside five historically significant texts selected by Miyuki Endo and Gen Umezu. Originally published from the 1960s onwards, and newly translated into English, writings by critics including Toshiaki Minemura and Yusuke Nakahara examine how photography has been discussed in Japan in relation to painting, sculpture, printmaking, and other art forms. Rather than presenting these historical writings as fixed records of past debates, this volume reconsiders them in relation to contemporary practice.

Three essays by Nancy Foote, Andrei Monastyrski and Terry Smith, selected by Duncan Wooldridge, widen the frame, carrying these Japanese debates into broader transnational dialogue. Through this exchange between Japanese and English-language discourse, the book develops a layered reading of photographic expression from the postwar period to today, inviting renewed attention to the multifaceted nature of photography and its capacity to generate new critical possibilities.

Published as part of the T3 NEW TALENT programme – an initiative by T3 to foster emerging talent and support the development of photographic culture in Asia – this book introduces Japanese photographic criticism into wider circulation.

Featuring Nancy Foote, Yukio Kondo, Toshiaki Minemura, Andrei Monastyrski, Yusuke Nakahara, Terry Smith, Takanao Seki, Megumu Takashima, Kyoji Takizawa

Director Yumiko Chiba (Director, T3 NEW TALENT Art Critic Programme)
Producer Ihiro Hayami (T3 Founder/Executive Director)
Editorial Manager Tim Clark
Editorial Assistant Thomas King
Art Direction & Design Sarah Boris
Japanese Text Editor Fuyuki Ono
Project Managers Akane Miki, Kana Ikezawa (T3 NEW TALENT Art Critic Programme)
Translator Pamela Miki

T3 NEW TALENT Authors Takanao Seki, Megumu Takashima
Selectors Gen Umezu, Miyuki Endo, Duncan Wooldridge

Publication date September 2026
Format Soft cover, sewn-bound
Dimensions 14.2 x 21.2cm
Pages 128
Publisher 1000 Words (1000 Words Photography Ltd)
ISBN 978-1-0369-9058-9
Supported by the Japan Creator Support Fund

Distribution

UK, Europe, Worldwide

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bryony@publicknowledgebooks.com

Japan

twelvebooks
3-26-4 Nishikameari
Katsushika-ku Tokyo
1250002 Japan
www.twelve-books.com
contact@twelve-books.com

Australia and New Zealand

Perimeter Distribution
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3071 Melbourne Victoria, Australia
www.perimeterdistribution.com
hello@perimeterdistribution.com

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1000 Words | Resource | 24 September 2026
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Mikhael Subotzky, A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick) – Johannesburg, Goodman Gallery
27 August – 31 October

Twenty years after his first exhibition with Goodman Gallery, Mikhael Subotzky returns with A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick), a layered portrait of the city assembled from photographs, paintings and his distinctive Sticky-tape Transfers. Living and working in Johannesburg since 2008, Subotzky draws on archival maps, mining histories, infrastructure, vegetation, and images from his own photographic archive, bringing different eras and perspectives into the same fractured compositions. At the centre of the exhibition is the ten-panel A Johannesburg Landscape, where fragments of Ponte City, mining imagery and the city’s flora collide in a complex passage through Johannesburg’s past and present. His interest in mapping, movement and exchange continues in An Idea of Africa (2023–26), which inverts the conventional orientation of the continent to trace routes of migration across its surface. The exhibition’s title has a more personal origin: Subotzky’s German-Jewish great-grandfather, unable to remove his assets from Nazi Germany, converted what remained of his wealth into a thirteen-ton steamroller. Shipped to Cape Town and sold there, it helped finance the family’s eventual move to Johannesburg – a remarkable journey of displacement and reinvention that echoes the exhibition’s wider preoccupation with how people, objects and histories move through landscapes.

Taryn Simon, Father Country I Do Love You – Guggenheim, New York
18 September – 14 March

Occupying the entire rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, Father Country I Do Love You is Taryn Simon’s most expansive project to date, nearly a decade in the making and the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist to take over the museum’s iconic spiral. At its centre is the life of an unnamed federal agent whose career placed him in proximity to defining political and violent events in recent American history, acting as a middleman who witnessed, gathered and transmitted information without ever possessing the complete picture. Simon reconstructs the reverberations of his work across 42 chapters, combining photography, text, video, and sculpture in a deliberately expansive narrative. The project is equally shaped by the intimate absence of Simon’s own father, who worked for the US government abroad before later running an arcade business, and whose life became increasingly inaccessible following his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. Presented during the 250th anniversary year of the United States, the exhibition moves between the mechanisms of state power and the fragility of personal memory, asking what can be known about a country – or a parent – when the archive is inevitably partial.

Carrie Mae Weems, The Heart of the Matter – C/O Berlin
12 September – 3 February

Across four decades, Carrie Mae Weems has returned to the domestic interior, the family archive, the plantation, the museum, and the monument as sites where power is rehearsed and memory is authorised. Her great achievement has been to recognise that the politics of representation are inseparable from the intimate conditions through which a life is experienced, remembered and given meaning. In The Heart of the Matter, opened during Berlin Art Week, this sustained interrogation of photography’s complicity in the production of power is given retrospective form. Yet rather than tracing a linear progression through Weems’ career, C/O Berlin organises the exhibition around the idea of the artist as a “creative form”, bringing recurring preoccupations and strategies into dialogue across different periods of her practice. Works including Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), Kitchen Table Series (1990) and the recent Preach (2024), an immersive meditation on Black worship and spirituality, are brought into conversation, revealing both the continuities and the formal range of Weems’ work.

Sanlé Sory, Colour Years – The Photographers’ Gallery, London
14 October – 21 February

Sanlé Sory’s Colour Years turns its attention to the chromatic dimension of a photographic practice more often encountered through its celebrated black-and-white portraits. Born in 1943, Sory began his photographic career in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1960, the year Upper Volta gained independence, establishing the Volta Photo studio in a city that became an important centre of the country’s emerging urban and popular culture. His black-and-white photographs of the following decades documented the musicians, dancers, workers, and young people who inhabited Bobo’s post-independence scene. The colour photographs extend this record into the 1970s and 1980s, capturing the fashions, leisure and everyday life through which a younger generation articulated new forms of identity and modernity. Meticulously restored from negatives in Sory’s archive, the images are presented alongside Volta Jazz record covers featuring the musicians and bands who shaped the city’s popular culture.

First Times / First Photos – Pavillon Populaire, Montpellier
1 July – 1 November

The newly renovated Pavillon Populaire, in the heart of Montpellier, inaugurates its latest exhibition with a series of photographic firsts. Rather than treating its subject as an encyclopaedia of origins, the exhibition proposes a playful passage through two centuries of photographic innovation. These beginnings, often provisional and exploratory, complicate the mythology of the photographic genius by returning us to the uncertainty of the first gesture. The accompanying publication gives this language of invention a distinctly 19th-century precision: new photographic apparatuses, early French patents for “improvements in the instantaneous photography of moving objects” and accounts of the first and only colour photograph of a nuclear explosion. Yet Édouard Boubat’s deceptively simple observation — “There is no first photo. There are only ‘new’ photos. The light is ‘new’ today” — strips the photographic “first” of its finality. What appears to be an origin becomes instead a recurring condition: an encounter between light, apparatus and the present. “The cult of the new,” artistic director Luce Lebart calls it.

Rhiannon Adam, Rhi-Entry – International Centre for the Image, Dublin
11 September – 23 December

At Dublin’s International Centre for the Image, Rhi-Entry marks the Irish premiere of Rhiannon Adam’s account of a journey that never took place. In 2021, Adam was selected for dearMoon, the proposed civilian lunar mission funded by Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, and was set to become the first openly queer woman to travel beyond the Kármán line. When the project was abruptly cancelled in 2024, it left behind a life reorganised around an anticipated future that had ceased to exist. Adam’s resulting work moves between photographs, archival material and ephemera, unsettling the boundary between documentary evidence and imagined experience. The title’s play on “re-entry” — the return through Earth’s atmosphere — becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of returning to mundane life after investing oneself in an extraordinary future. Presented alongside Lewis Bush’s examination of the historical and ethical foundations of modern rocketry, the exhibition places Adam’s experience within a wider history of who is invited to imagine the future, and who gets to participate in its construction.

Robert Zhao Renhui, Trying to Remember a Tree – Fotografiska, Shanghai
24 July – 6 November

At Fotografiska Shanghai, Trying to Remember a Tree extends Robert Zhao Renhui’s examination of the relationship between human systems and the natural world, taking as its point of departure something easily overlooked within the efficiency of the modern city: a dead tree. The exhibition follows a fallen rain tree beyond the moment at which it would ordinarily cease to be of interest. Across five groups of works, Zhao records 28,017 leaves, sections of the truncated trunk and 24-hour surveillance footage of its gradual decomposition, bringing together photography, moving image and installation in an extended study of disappearance. The project continues the Singaporean artist’s interest in the ways nature is classified, managed and made legible, a concern also embedded in his fictive Institute of Critical Zoologists, through which he adopts the languages of scientific research and archival practice while quietly unsettling their authority. Yet, as Zhao notes, “before we engage with broader discussions of ecosystems or environmental futures, we must first return to a grounded, micro-level act of looking.”

Richard Billingham, Ray’s a Laugh – 30 Years – The Apartment, Images Vevey
5 September – 14 February

On the second floor of Vevey’s railway station, in former apartments once occupied by railway workers, L’Appartement – Espace Images Vevey marks three decades since the publication of Richard Billingham’s landmark 1996 photobook Ray’s a Laugh. Made in the early 1990s in the council flats of suburban Birmingham, Billingham’s photographs centre on his father Ray, mother Liz and brother Jason, recording a household shaped by Ray’s alcoholism but also by humour, affection and the ordinary rhythms of family life. For the first time, the exhibition reconstructs the domestic world across the two separate homes in which the photographs were made, shifting attention from individual images towards the environment and relationships that bind them. Thirty years on, Ray’s a Laugh remains difficult to situate neatly as either family album or social document. Billingham’s proximity to his subjects makes the photographs deeply personal, while the circumstances they record have come to be read as part of a particular moment in British working-class life. The reconstruction of the two homes returns the work to that intimate tension, asking us to look again at the family before the history it has come to represent.

Tereza Zelenková, Haus – Fiducia Photographic Gallery, Ostrava
10 September – 16 October

At Fiducia Photographic Gallery in Ostrava, the city where Tereza Zelenková was born, Haus brings a work about absence and slow change back to her native landscape. The series follows the transformation of a single abandoned house in northern Bohemia, photographed over three years from the cottage Zelenková had bought opposite it. Empty since the mid-1990s, the house sits within a former Sudetenland landscape shaped by the disappearance of buildings, communities and memories. Yet Zelenková resists treating it as either historical document or nostalgic ruin. Instead, her medium-format photographs register the minute changes revealed by repeated visits: shifting light, vegetation, weather and decay. Shown alongside objects and found material from the house and its surroundings, the photographs become a quiet meditation on time, solitude and loss, with the building itself serving as a measure of what remains – and what disappears.

Nadav Kander, The Edge of Things – FOAM, Amsterdam
18 September – 31 January

Eclectic in subject and scale, Nadav Kander’s photography ranges from portraits of David Lynch and Barack Obama to the industrial banks of China’s Yangtze River and the shifting shores of the Thames. Yet beneath this variety runs a persistent interest in what places and people conceal as much as what they reveal. Kander is drawn to subjects already laden with political, industrial or personal history, but his photographs rarely make that history immediately legible. Instead, they create a tension between the visible image and everything that lies behind it, asking us to look for what a photograph cannot quite disclose. It is this ambiguity that comes to the fore in his latest exhibition at FOAM, curated by David Campany, with whom Kander has explored these questions in conversation.

-1000 Words

Images:

1-Mikhael Subotzky, Wendy House 8, Mikhael Subotzky, 2009. Courtesy Goodman Gallery.

2-Taryn Simon, One little room on fire, 2026. © Taryn Simon

3-Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man Reading Newspaper), 1990 from the Kitchen Table Series © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

4-Sanlé Sory, Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso © Sanlé Sory 2026. Courtesy Tezeta

5-From Holding the Camera (2015–19) © Alberto Vieceli

6-Rhiannon Adam, Baikonur Rocket Soyuz Pre-Flight, from the Rhi-Entry series, 2025. © Rhiannon Adam. 

7-Robert Zhao Renhui, The Centre of All Things © Robert Zhao Renhui. Courtesy the artist and Fotografiska Shanghai

8-Richard Billingham, Ray’s a Laugh – 30 years © Richard Billingham. Courtesy of the artist and Anthony Wilkinson Gallery

9-Tereza Zelenkova, © Tereza Zelenkova. Courtesy the artist.

10-Nadav Kander, Diver, Salt Lake, Utah, USA, 1997 (from the series God’s Country) © Nadav Kander. Courtesy Howard Greenberg and Flowers Gallery.

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

Lillian Wilkie | Exhibition review | 17 September 2026 
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In January of this year, Newcastle’s storied Side Gallery, the UK’s only photography gallery dedicated to stories of working-class life, which had been shuttered since 2023, announced a collaborative curatorial partnership with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Despite a fraught and controversial few years, Side and its original owner, the Amber Film & Photography Collective, have had an unquestionable influence on late-20th-century British social documentary photography. The work they championed has shaped the public consciousness around industrial communities in the North East, and contributed to a popular cultural image of what an industrial community might look like.

Amber was formed in 1968 in London by a group of humanist documentary filmmakers, who relocated the following year to Newcastle with a view to preserving the stories of working-class and marginalised communities during Britain’s great deindustrialisation. Founding member Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen introduced still photography to the collective’s activities, and in 1977 Side Gallery was opened. Killip had moved to Newcastle in 1975 on a two-year Northern Arts photography fellowship and remained there for 15 years. As Side’s director from 1977-79, he brought the work of luminaries such as Imogen Cunningham, August Sander, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Martine Franck to Newcastle. In 1979, Killip staged an exhibition by a then little-known local photographer called Tish Murtha, whose Juvenile Jazz Bands project had been developed as part of a government-funded community photography scheme.

Born in nearby South Shields, Murtha had recently returned to Newcastle from her studies at the School of Documentary Photography in Newport. Course leader, Magnum member David Hurn, famously recalled her application interview: “I asked her what she wanted to photograph and she said: ‘I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children,’ and I said, ‘You’re in’”. Murtha was acutely conscious of the everyday violence meted out by the state on working-class communities. One of ten children, she had seen her siblings and close relatives profoundly affected by the loss of long-standing manufacturing industries on Tyneside, and the subsequent joblessness, disenfranchisement and extreme poverty. Nevertheless, the work she has become known for eschews gratuitous depictions of the misery brought about by the post-war economic downturn, globalisation, Thatcherite policy, and their negative multiplier effects. Tragically, her work was under-recognised in her lifetime, and she died in 2013, aged just 56.

Side’s curatorial tenancy will see its team co-curate a series of exhibitions at Baltic that focus on contemporary working-class photography, beginning in 2027. Baltic has shown a renewed commitment to photography in recent years, including major exhibitions by Chris Killip and Frankie Raffles. This June, they opened Close to Home, which brings Murtha’s work into dialogue with that of the Polish photographer Kuba Ryniewicz. It is, surprisingly, Murtha’s first major institutional exhibition in the North East.

Upon entering, visitors encounter a huge wallpaper reproduction of young siblings Richard and Louise, from Murtha’s celebrated series Elswick Kids. The youngsters, both no older than five, gaze adoringly at each other, as other children from the neighbourhood charge around in play. The series was the first she made upon her return to Newcastle, and it explored the strong social bonds, intergenerational ties, mischief, and resourcefulness in the streets around where she lived. There is a tender, conspiratorial quality to Murtha’s photographs, and not just of children; her gaze is not one of a paternalistic outsider but a friend or neighbour, sharing in the community’s suffering and solidarity. But it belied the rage and fear she felt at how so many lives had been considered expendable. Writing about a second project, Youth Unemployment, which she produced under the same government scheme with Side, Murtha’s words are, gallingly, just as prescient today: “There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered, and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.”

Two other projects are on display in full for the first time. Save Scotswood Works documents the local workforce’s struggle to save Elswick’s major industrial employer. The works had manufactured locomotives, ships, aircraft, and armaments since 1847 but, by 1979, they were slated for closure. The photographs were commissioned by Tyneside Housing Aid Centre and originally published across a series of pamphlets, which are also on display. They detail the impact of the loss of industry, and the new Conservative government’s inaction in providing alternative employment, on the lives and health of children. Murtha produced the fourth series, Elswick Revisited, 10 years later, and here we encounter a diversity sorely missing from much of the social documentary photography which has come to define working-class communities in the North East. Exploring the community’s changing demographics and cultural influences, Murtha’s warning from a decade earlier about reactionary forces in society rings painfully true, as Black and south Asian communities faced the overlapping indignities of poverty and racist violence.

Adjacent to another wallpapered image from the Scotswood marches, a freestanding monitor shows a series of silent film portraits of individuals at a queer nightclub, shot on nostalgic High8 cassette. It’s a new commission by the Polish photographer Kuba Ryniewicz, who has been based in Newcastle since 2004, and whose work Close to Home brings into dialogue with Murtha’s. Those looking for highly legible narrative threads between Murtha and Ryniewicz’s prolific practices may leave the gallery confused; to me, the lack of overarching thematic relationship between the two barely seems to matter. Both photograph people, yes; both engage with marginalised groups and enshrine their stories, in Ryniewicz’s case working-class queer communities in Newcastle and beyond. Both accentuate the human capacity for joy and silliness against all odds. But it’s more enlightening to draw formal or conceptual links between individual works, made decades apart: viewing Ryniewicz’s slowly dancing, smoking, or chatting subjects, so many of them content in their own manifestations of gender, set against historically familiar black and white imagery of labour struggle, reminds us that nightlife, too, is a form of protest, a demand for liberation and visibility.

Whilst Murtha’s work is generally arranged in unframed clusters, as if tacked to the wall by Murtha herself, Ryniewicz’s flows through the gallery, seeping into corners and emergency exits, even the toilets. It feels fitting for an artist whose work, which incorporates fashion campaigns and contributions to magazines such as Butt and Fantastic Man, alongside personal and often graphically intimate depictions of friends and lovers, is not often afforded a place within major institutions. There are reasonable comparisons with artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans (now an institutional mainstay), especially in the installation of prints of various sizes and formats that collapse distinctions between personal and commercial. But whilst Tillmans fills major museums with lyrical dispatches from the artist studios and afterparties of the 1990s, Ryniewicz’s images are of the here and now, a living history of queer joy, creative collaboration and marginalised sexuality.

Whilst wall texts introduce the three major bodies of work on display – Cornered Study, Daily Weeding and Good Eggs – the installation disaggregates these series so that they intermingle, contract and swell, as if constantly in motion. Ryniewicz’s richly toned darkroom prints tell stories of love, adventure, trust, and longing; like in Murtha’s work, certain characters reappear across different sequences, reiterating the importance of close social networks to Ryniewicz’s practice. Whilst there is playfulness and sexiness in abundance, careful looking reveals the hostility and discrimination that gnaws at the edges of queer life. On one wall, a sensational ensemble portrait of a group of beautiful, half naked queers embrace each other beside a bonfire on the estate of the socialist poet and gay activist Edward Carpenter. On the opposite wall, a photograph of a mobile phone, held out in the dark. The screen shows Google Translate, and the text translated from Arabic reads: “I am very sad because in our country there is no sexual relations between two men”.

Chris Killip once described his work as like “a people’s history – the people who history happened to.” The fastidiousness and commitment with which Amber and Side promoted socially engaged photographic practices across the North East, and the sheer popularity of photobooks such as In Flagrante and films like Paul Sng’s Tish, have consequentially manufactured a popular aesthetic of working-class life in the area. That is, deprivation, dilapidation, sooty-faced children, and hollow-eyed adults, all overwhelmingly white, and shot in gritty monochrome. The success of Side’s curatorial tenancy at Baltic remains to be seen, but in order to be truly meaningful its role now must be to diversify and pluralise that legacy. Whilst Baltic has demonstrated a new and welcome commitment to large-scale shows of photography, the institution’s declared remit is of “new work from living artists”; it must be mindful that of the five photographic artists it has shown in the last two years, three are dead. Having the imagination to bring Murtha and Ryniewicz’s work together in such a broad and ambitious show has paid dividends. But it is artists like Ryniewicz who remind us that history, like revolution, is not a one-time event. It keeps happening to people.

All images courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the artists.

Close to Home runs at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, until 4 April 2027.

—
Lillian Wilkie is a writer, editor and publisher. She is Co-Director of Bound Art Book Fair.

Editorial clarifications and corrections | 22 September 2026

1. Side Gallery library / Chris Killip’s In Flagrante

This article has been amended to remove a brief item that suggested that a copy of Chris Killip’s In Flagrante had been left discarded in the bins during Side Gallery’s recent relocation from its Quayside premises. We accept that this rumour was unfounded and that no material from the historic Amberside Collection was discarded or left behind. Side Gallery continues to assume responsibility as custodians of artists represented in the collection, and independently manage and safeguard its vital photographic archive from its new curatorial office at the Baltic. Side Gallery’s update on relocation was publicised and made available on Side Gallery’s website on 15 July 2026, regrettably after the writer had researched and written the exhibition review.

2. Side Gallery funding

A further amend has been made to another brief item that stated that ‘Side confirmed it would not re-open the gallery despite securing over £700,000 of additional funding, including £67,278 of public donations.’ We understand that this £700,000 sum comprises six separate, competitively won grants from five different funders across more than three years, each tied to its own restricted purpose and independently reported and audited – not a discretionary sum that was available to reopen the gallery, and in one case expressly barred from that use. We apologise to the gallery management for this aggregation.

Images: 

1-Tish Murtha, Youth Unemployment © Ella Murtha

2-Kuba Ryniewicz, The Daily Weeding (2020-2021)

3-Kuba Ryniewicz, Neck, Good Eggs (2024-ongoing)

4-Tish Murtha, Elswick Kids © Ella Murtha

5-Tish Murtha, Elswick Kids © Ella Murtha

6-Kuba Ryniewicz, Cornered Study (2022-ongoing)

7-Kuba Ryniewicz, Cornered Study (2022-ongoing)

8-Tish Murtha, Youth Unemployment © Ella Murtha

9-Kuba Ryniewicz, Cornered Study (2022-ongoing)

10-Tish Murtha, Elswick Revisited © Ella Murtha

11-Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz: Close to Home installation view. Photo: Tom Carter © 2026 Tom Carter & Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

1000 Words favourites

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• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

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• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse

The post Against nostalgia: Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz at Baltic, Gateshead appeared first on 1000 Words.

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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The post The limits of juxtaposition: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada, Venice appeared first on 1000 Words.

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. 

1000 Words favourites

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• 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 Between pose and presence: on Farren van Wyk’s Mixedness is My Mythology appeared first on 1000 Words.

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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The post The ethics of looking at a mother appeared first on 1000 Words.

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

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• 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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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

Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse

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.