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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images: 

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

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

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

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

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

1000 Words favourites

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• 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

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• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

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

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

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

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

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.

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The post Why AI street photography fails appeared first on 1000 Words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please,” responds Cwynar.

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

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

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

Images

1-Peach Peony, 2026

2-Fake Rolex Oyster Perpetual Milgauss, China, 2026

3-Pink Panther Mother, 2025

4-Pregnant, 2026 

5-Lihem with Mercedes Benz 300 SLR, 2026

6-The Disturbed Slumber, 1760, 2026

7-Doll Index, 1791-1950, 2026

8-Baby Blue Benzo, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All images courtesy Loose Joints © Aria Shahrokhshahi 2026. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie Mae Weems – Goodman Gallery
17 April – 23 May

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Moon – Michael Hoppen Gallery
16 May – 17 July

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

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

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

–1000 Words

Images: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The post Photo London 2026: Essential Exhibitions Beyond Olympia appeared first on 1000 Words.

Mark Durden | Exhibition review | 6 May 2026
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In France, news of Martin Parr’s death made the front page of Le Monde. A new exhibition at Jeu de Paume in Paris, punningly titled Global Warning, draws from his 50-year career to offer a fresh look at a photographer whose work, certainly in Britain, has in many senses not quite found its place. Parr’s emergence and subsequent populist success, through his embrace of kitsch and the tacky, his commercial savviness, led to him not being taken seriously, especially by those writers and practitioners who emerged through the photo theoretical schools of photography within the UK.  

The show’s description of Parr’s work in terms of corrosive irony is very apt. It is his acerbic representation of the excesses of late capitalism that the exhibition focuses upon. Parr concentrated on times of leisure, of holiday making and shopping, not work. No sites of production but instead the global pleasure fields of consumption. Though with the mass hordes shown sightseeing and crowded on beaches, or scrapping for products, it does not always seem to be about pleasure. Parr’s vision of greed and over consumption also showed us its fall-out, both images of conspicuous display and heaps of waste. 

This dialectic was hinted at in works from his first controversial colour series, The Last Resort, with its focus on working class holidaymakers in the northern Merseyside resort of New Brighton in the hot summers of the mid 1980s. The title puns on the idea of desperation, a final course of action. The context was the political neglect of the north under Thatcherism, which for Parr was evident in the overflowing bins and waste visible in a number of the images. But the litter also brought with it the more demeaning associations of slovenliness, with the people shown seemingly oblivious to the trash around them. 

Thematically grouped, some 180 of his photographs are presented in colourful themed rooms. It is very much a poppy and lite presentation. We start with the beach, with a room entitled Leisure and Waste Lands and a commissioned picture of the face of a tanned older woman sunbathing in fancy Gucci sunglasses in Cannes. The vulgarity of luxurious excess is a reprisal of an earlier unstaged close-up of a woman adorned with blue eye protectors, taken in Benidorm, a holiday resort notorious for its association with working class Brits. The latter image is taken from his abrasive series and 1999 book Common Sense. In the following room, the thematic focus is on shopping, Last Chance to Buy. There is a gridded glut of images taken from Common Sense: a visceral and somewhat abject depiction through close-up details of base humanity and greed, of people shown stuffing their faces. A hundred dollar note hangs out of one woman’s mouth in a succinct underscoring of money as the driver of this gluttonous binge. There are some Carry-On comedy style innuendos and collisions, with images of cleavages and sausages, and among the views of dripping ice creams, smiley faces on sugary and colourful cakes, a display of wrapped plastic cock vibrators, the close-up of a sex doll’s open-mouthed face, as well as the detail of a Priest’s collar and religious trinkets and knick-knacks – nothing is sacrosanct. It’s a break from the rhythm of the overall show, a sudden flash of Parr’s associative mode of picture making, his scabrous stream of consciousness. 

Taste is predominantly a point of humour, ironically enjoyed and consumed as wrong or bad. With their colour saturation, Parr’s photographs are loud. Just like that art consumer’s gaudy shirt, which matches the abstract painting they are viewing at a Gulf Art Fair in Dubai. Art itself is never Parr’s interest. Art is here a cue to a joke. His aesthetic is keyed into a more low-grade pop vernacular or kitsch – garish colour and clashes of colours and patterns recur in his photographs, they establish their own brash taste, which can take some adjusting to. In the Louvre, he focuses on the mediated images on mobile phones held aloft before the Mona Lisa. In this respect, Parr’s take is postmodern since the message seems to be that the sublimity of great art and culture can no longer be photographed. The Parthenon can only be depicted ironically, over the shoulder of another photographer depicting a party of tourists standing before the attraction. 

Tourists rather than tourist attractions always fascinated Parr. The Louvre and Parthenon photographs are among many that play out a similar note in the room given over to Parr’s travel pictures, the title taken from his book, Small World. The room ends with another postmodern joke: an American couple – USA is emblazoned on the arm of the man’s jacket – before a view of the Arc de Triomphe, which is not the real thing but Las Vegas’s replica of the Paris landmark. Here the subject turns and seems to snarl back in annoyance at the photographer.    

With Parr, though, people are overall observed mostly unawares. There is less evident friction in the images as a result. People are often distracted, oblivious to being pictured. In some, distraction even becomes the joke – the women shown gambling on fruit machines, their backs to an empty pram and a baby standing before one of the machines, as if already bewitched. 

Much as Parr’s work might be often linked with a British satirical tradition, and the connection is made again in the narrative introducing this show, the central influence is Garry Winogrand. He too was very concerned with the relationship between photography and comedy, likening the way the photograph could disturb the order of things to the way a pun worked to disturb sense in language. In homage to Winogrand, Parr produced a small book entitled Animals last year, the prompt for a penultimate room in this show: the Animal Kingdom. Winogrand’s book Animals offered a dystopian and bleak vision, often drawing analogies between the creatures caged and confined in zoos and those who came to view them. Focusing on such comical and absurd combinations as a woman covered in pigeons as she takes a photograph, a gorilla absorbed in a cartoon playing on a television set up just outside its cage or a woman’s furs blending uncannily with her lapdog, Parr’s pictures are lighter and less unsettling. 

Parr enjoys picturing the comic behaviour of other, often amateur photographers. Photography is just another form of consumerism. The final room of the show with its focus on his attraction to technologies, also including cars and early mobile phones, further brings this out. There are some good photographs here: the comedy of a middle-aged couple’s behaviour at an English beauty spot, with the woman in a car reading the newspaper and ignoring her partner, who stands outside taking a photograph of the view. Among pictures about selfies and selfie sticks, one striking photograph shows a woman in a red dress standing barefoot in the flood waters of Venice to take a selfie in front of St Marks Basilica. The photograph is made by the detail of the watery wavy blue design on the back of her mobile phone.

Parr relishes the laughable absurdities of our behaviour. As an exposé of our greed and excess his images might be said to have a global warning but they are not didactic. Messages and signs are in abundance, but those messages and signs alert us to the comic aspects within what we do and how we are, we that is who come to consume and queue to see this work. We are not separate from the world that we see here, as mad, weird and funny as it appears to be.    

Parr’s is a kind of world reportage, not of sites of tragedies, but scenes and places of consumerism, often of opulence and wealth, and frequently gross. There are fracture lines in this depiction, especially in representations of some of the tourists: the plump white guy on a beach in Bali being manicured and pedicured, for example. 

Adornment, décor and signage are in abundance in Parr’s photography. One gets the sense looking at these works that everything signifies, but often not as intended, and that is the comedy. Comedy entails a disruption, it takes us out of the day to day and it is often about something being out of place. So an eye for comedy in life, hones in on small or big collisions and contrasts. The woman who is shown sunbathing, right in front of the large caterpillar track of a stationary digger, in Parr’s well-known New Brighton photograph. In a photograph from one of Trump’s first presidential rallies, it is the contrast between a woman seemingly lost in smiling admiration for the speaker and the ridiculous thing on her lap: a boxed toy Trump doll that according to the label even talks.    

In Parr’s photographs people tend to be ciphers, caricatural cues to comedy. There is little sense of people’s mystery in these photographs. His image of two young, uniformed women working at the Millionaire Fair in Moscow, promoting luxury air jets, is unusual in showing us the faces of two employees. At last, here are the workers. And here too is a momentary sympathetic interaction. One woman is standing and looks straight back, the other, seated, is less poised and appears more bored and distracted. Both are shown momentarily distinct from the decadence and luxury of the event they are working for. Their look also disrupts the show’s emphasis on spectacles of binge and invites reflection upon other approaches to photography than the quick-fire hit.

All images courtesy Jeu de Paume. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos.

Martin Parr: Global Warning runs at Je de Paume, Paris, until 24 May 2026.

Images:

1-Martin Parr, Benidorm, Spain, 1997

2-Martin Parr, Benidorm, Spain, 1997

3-Martin Parr, Seagaia Ocean Dome, Miyazaki, Japan, 1996

4-Martin Parr, Dorset, England, 2022

5-Martin Parr, Salford, England, 2022

6-Martin Parr, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2007

7-Martin Parr, Tokyo, Japan, 1998

8-Martin Parr, Zürich, Switzerland, 1997

9-Martin Parr, Glasgow, Scotland, 1999

10-Martin Parr, Zürich, Switzerland, 1997

11-Martin Parr, Cozumel, Mexico, 2002

12-Martin Parr, Kleine Scheidegg, Switzerland, 1994

13-Martin Parr, Grotte bleue, Capri, Italy, 2014

14-Martin Parr, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, 2000

15-Martin Parr, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France, 2012

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1000 Words | Resource | 22 April 2026
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Seydou Keïta, A Tactile Lens – Brooklyn Museum
10 October 2025 – 17 May

Billed as the most expansive North American presentation of the artist to date, A Tactile Lens boasts over 280 works by Seydou Keïta that deliberately widens the usual photo-only frame to include textiles, garments, jewellery, alongside Keïta’s personal items – objects that echo (and sometimes literally appear in) the portraits. In doing so, the family-sourced objects and previously unseen works sharpen a sense of Keïta not simply as a great portraitist, but as a choreographer of self-fashioning, attentive to how modern identity was being tried on, staged and shared in front of the camera. Beneath the patterned backdrops, polished shoes, watches, scooters, and carefully staged poses, the exhibition foregrounds the collaboration between photographer and sitter, forged in late-1940s-to-early-1960s Bamako, an independence-era pressure-cooker in which aspirations for independent statehood, novelty and local style all converged in front of the lens.

Eugène Atget, The Making of a Reputation – ICP
29 January – 4 May 

Rather than presenting Atget as the already canonised poet of old Paris, ICP promises ‘a new approach to the story of Atget’s career,’ centering Berenice Abbott as the key agent in the photographer’s posthumous rise. For some, this will be a familiar story, for others, less so. The Making of a Reputation, true to its name, focuses on the period between Atget’s uncredited appearance in the Surrealist journal La Révolution surréaliste (1926) and the first book of his work, ATGET: Photographe de Paris (1930), overseen by Abbott. Structurally, it presents three ‘expressions’ of the work – magazines, prints (primarily from ICP’s holdings) and the book section. Reception has been mixed, with some critics arguing that, despite its compelling premise, the exhibition proceeds under a kind of false pretence, omitting key material such as Atget’s domestic interiors, downplaying the failures that shaped his life, and leaning too heavily on ICP’s own holdings. Yet Atget’s photographs are still full of their usual quiet strangeness from empty streets, shop windows, façades, staircases, and fragments of a city in transition, while also becoming part of a story about circulation, mediation and cultural afterlife.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination – MoMA
14 December 2025 – 25 July

MoMA brings together photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Jean Depara, and Sanlé Sory to consider more broadly how Pan-African solidarity and political imagination circulated through portraiture, style and everyday self-presentation in the mid-20th century, and how that charge persists in contemporary practice. The installation reportedly avoids rigid sections and keeps textual framing light; wall labels also refrain from foregrounding photographers’ nationalities, encouraging viewers to read poses, gestures and affinities across, rather than within, fixed borders. A dedicated reading room extends that argument into print culture and, as curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo has explained, emerged from engagement with the artist collective Air Afrique and their reanimation of the Pan-African airline’s magazine culture. The show’s title nods to V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa (1994), while its plural form suggests a more multiple and mobile set of Africas, shaped across diasporic circuits and media.

Sheida Soleimani, Forest of Stars – Yancey Richardson
16 April – 22 May

Forest of Stars turns political history into a family-sized, studio-built cosmos, expanding Sheida Soleimani’s ongoing Ghostwriter series, which draws on her parents’ experiences of political exile following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The exhibition, Soleimani’s first with Yancey Richardson, includes a new site-specific wall drawing by the artist’s mother, bringing a literal second hand into the space and making ‘family’ a medium as well as a subject. Archival photographs and ‘symbolic objects’ are assembled into intricate studio constructions that blur documentation and invention, with Soleimani effectively ‘ghostwriting’ family history through staged scenes rather than direct testimony. A newer strand of the work, tied to Flyways, folds in imagery shaped by her work as federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator – migratory birds appearing not as decorative metaphors but as living bodies that carry the risks of border-crossing in their feathers and talons.

Arlene Gottfried, Young & Old – CLAMP
6 March – 2 May

CLAMP’s premise for their latest show begins in a Westbeth studio where portfolio boxes held decades of work, including one simply marked ‘Young & Old’; inside were portraits of children and elders (sometimes together), images that treat age as something performative, elastic and occasionally mischievous. Scenes in these images play out across neighbourhoods and various situations on boardwalks, parades, domestic scenes, a broader arc of a practice increasingly recognised as central to the visual history of late 20th-Century New York. The gallery’s also stresses the quality of encounter in Gottfried’s practice. These are photographs made through proximity and trust. As the exhibition text notes, Gottfried described her photographs as ‘souvenirs,’ moments and remembrances gathered through sustained attention to people meeting the camera head-on. 

–1000 Words

Images: 

1-Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1949–63 / 1997. Courtesy The Jean Pigozzi Collection of African Art and Danziger Gallery, NY © SKPEAC

2-Eugène Atget, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, 1898. Courtesy International Centre of Photography, Gift of Caryl and Israel Englander, 2010.

3-Silvia Rosi, Disintegrata di profilo (Disintegrated in Profile), 2024. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Carl Jacobs Fund. © Silivia Rosi

4-Sheida Soleimani, Truce, 2024. Courtesy the artist © Sheida Soleimani

5-Arlene Gottfried, Little Rabbi, Purim, c. 1970s. Courtesy CLAMP

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Rica Cerbarano | Book review | 15 April 2026
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I wish every photographer I admire would publish a book like Water Over Thunder. This new publication by MACK brings together previously unpublished written work by Larry Sultan: journal entries, shooting notes, short stories, dreams, and teaching assignments. Page after page, numerous reflections on the meaning of artistic and photographic practice unfold, accompanied by unseen visual ephemera, like contact sheets, notebooks, handmade maquettes, and unpublished photographs.

Designed in a small-to-medium format, the book feels as if you are holding someone’s life in your hands – especially the life of someone you have long appreciated. It is precious, delicate, fragile. A secret diary that is no longer secret or an intrusion into private thoughts that become public. A bit like what happened to the photographs Sultan made of his parents over a decade, later gathered in the celebrated project Pictures from Home.

But when I say I wish every photographer I love would publish a book like this, it is not mere flattery. The truth is that the pages of this volume contain important thoughts on how photography can be understood, inevitably intertwined with the author’s personal life. Through them, one gains a deeper understanding of an artistic practice, beyond the image of success that an art career often projects.

Like a personal notebook, Water Over Thunder unveils the life of the writer/photographer, revealing the evolution of his artistic thinking – his attempts, experiments, uncertainties, and positions. A subtle sense of melancholy emerges from the writings: the awareness of being just one among many, yet still feeling a strong urgency to communicate his message.

Known primarily for projects such as Evidence and the aforementioned Pictures from Home, Sultan was in fact much more than that. He helped redefine the concept of photography, shifting attention toward how meaning is created through context, and toward the image as a cultural product. As his typewritten texts reveal, this sensitivity developed from a very young age, in opposition to an elitist and formalist school system. Growing up in Los Angeles, he recalls how streets filled with billboards constituted his first artistic experience, revealing an early interest in advertising in public space – an interest he would later explore in collaboration with Mike Mandel, even before Evidence.

The two began working together in 1973 while they were graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Both had moved to the Bay Area from the contrasting environment of the San Fernando Valley – a landscape defined by car culture, sprawling development and franchise architecture. United by an oppositional stance toward the ‘established bohemian tradition that seemed to permeate graduate school,’ they began to collaborate. As Sultan later recalled, they both collected postcards and photographed billboard sites. And it was precisely billboards that became the first medium with which they experimented.

This early experience eventually led to Evidence, which, as anyone working with photography today knows, became a cult book for its use of documentary photographs removed from their original context – ‘a very simple Duchampian strategy,’ as Sultan describes it in his writings.

But at a certain point something shifted. Sultan became interested in making pictures that were ‘excessively physical, sensual and painterly,’ driven almost by an irrational obsession with the element of water and leading to the project Swimmers, a touchstone in the progress towards a more documentary-conventional way of photographing. The motif of the eater would recur throughout his life, particularly in relation to his family and, above all, to his father, whom he always describes with remarkable clarity and deep tenderness. For example, there is a moment when he recalls something his father once said while they were swimming: ‘You know, some days I just want to reach down, dive down to the bottom, lie there on the bottom and watch all the fish.’ This attention to water also surfaces in the title itself, which derives from an early draft of Pictures from Home, in which Sultan writes about the process of beginning a new artistic project – an emotional turbulence that finds clarity only through writing.

Reading through the pages, it is clear that photography has always been a way for Sultan to bring out the ‘play between the ordinary and the surreal or the extraordinary’: but after Swimmers, he felt the need to create images that feel physically and bodily present, close to himself, yet at the same time universal in their use of visual codes so deeply internalised that they appear almost harmless, naïve – and precisely for that reason, problematic and challenging. Or simply put, interesting.

The book explores the conceptual background of Sultan’s major series, highlighting the key moments in his creative journey – the steps that shaped the direction of his later work. From the first tensions in his relationship with Mandel, which eventually led to the end of their collaboration, to the discovery of family home movies that proved crucial for the genesis of Pictures from Home. It then moves to his work The Valley, a visual documentation of porn film sets, that instead proved to be an investigation of suburbia iconography and the standardisation of middle-class domestic environments. Finally, the book presents the reflections behind Homeland, a body of work with remarkable aesthetic power, yet also deeply political in its simplicity, where Sultan once again forcefully stages the photographic frame.

This exploration unfolds relentlessly through Sultan’s simple, direct – at times fragmented – writing: a form of self-questioning about one’s identity and artistic practice, a constant doubting of the paths taken or yet to be taken, and a desire to share what has been learned along the way.

Water Over Thunder confirms Larry Sultan’s passion for writing that had already surfaced earlier – first in 1992 with Pictures from Home, and later in 2004 with The Valley. These texts, together with a handful of other essays, inspired Liv Constable-Maxwell, editor at MACK, to approach the Estate of Larry Sultan with the idea of publishing a collection of his writings. After an initial visit to Sultan’s archive, Constable-Maxwell quickly realised that the sheer volume and diversity of unpublished material offered a rare opportunity to gain an intimate, behind-the-scenes view of Sultan’s creative process, both as an acclaimed artist and as an influential art professor. It is this lesser-known side of Sultan that emerges toward the end of the book: his career as a teacher, which began in 1978 at the San Francisco Art Institute and continued until 2009 at the California College of the Arts. Within the archive, pages upon pages of lecture transcripts were uncovered, revealing how candidly he shared his doubts and uncertainties about his own work with students, with a disarming openness.

One might dismiss the book by saying that, in a few words, it simply reveals the artist’s vulnerability. I believe, instead, that it shows something more fundamental: his humanity. The fragmented, discontinuous side of a person searching for answers – someone who found in photography a way to mediate with the world. First with others, with society; then with his family, with his father; and finally with himself. Indeed, reading his own words, all of his work after Pictures from Home seems to be an unceasing journey backward toward childhood, an attempt to reconnect with what once was. A search for himself in the furrows of his parents’ ageing skin, in the water sliding over synthetic swimsuits, in the backdrop of porn actors’ naked bodies, and finally in those nameless places on the edges of the city – empty fields behind shopping malls and rough stretches along the river. After all, isn’t that the fate of all of us: to look back into childhood in search of ourselves, trying to understand who we are and why we are such a way?

All images courtesy MACK. © The Estate of Larry Sultan.

Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings (2026) by Larry Sultan is published by MACK.

–
Rica Cerbarano is a curator, writer, editor, and project coordinator specialising in photography. She writes regularly for Vogue Italia and Il Giornale dell’Arte, where she is the Co-Editor of the Photography section. She has also contributed to Camera Austria, Over Journal, Hapax Magazine, and Sali & Tabacchi, amongst others. In 2017, Cerbarano co-founded Kublaiklan, a collective that has curated exhibitions at Images Vevey (Switzerland), Gibellina PhotoRoad (Sicily, Italy), Cortona On The Move (Italy), and Photoszene Festival (Cologne, Germany), amongst others. In 2022, she was a member of the Artistic Direction Committee at Photolux Festival (Lucca, Italy), where she curated Seiichi Furuya: Face to Face, 1978 – 1985 and Robin Schwartz: Amelia & the Animals.

Images: 

1-Larry Sultan, Pictures from Home, 1983-92, proof print

2-Larry Sultan, Journal entry, mid-1990s

3-Larry Sultan, Dad on Bed, 1984, Pictures from Home

4-Larry Sultan, Untitled #1, 1978–82

5-Larry Sultan, Pictures from Home, maquette, early 1980s

6-Larry Sultan, Topanga Skyline Drive #1, 1999, The Valley

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