How would you describe what you do?

I'd like to say I just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Officially? I'm mostly a photographer, as well as a lighting director, visual merchandiser and occasional chef.

Why do you do it?

I fell into photography by accident. I started out in lighting and became really nerdy about it. I didn't properly pick up a camera until I was 20 because I was terrified I wouldn't be good enough or that I didn't understand it technically. That fear probably shaped the way I work more than anything. Instead of waiting until I felt ready, I just kept doing it anyway. I still approach shoots with that same mindset; commit to the idea and figure it out as you go. Photography can be a very solitary thing, but more often, it takes a whole village. I'm incredibly grateful that people continue to trust me to make work alongside them.

Who or what inspires you?

A lot of my inspiration comes from the people I've met along the way who have taught me what I know now. Jet, the photo studio technician at Central Saint Martins, who encouraged my geekiness about studio lighting. Raph and Lulu at Fashion East, who gave me my first photography job. I genuinely think about them every time I take a photo. Aidan Zamiri is my absolute king, legend and mentor. I don't think he realises how much I've learned just by being alongside him. He has such a clear vision, but he's also endlessly excited to experiment. And I always find myself coming back to the imagery of Hiromix, Christopher Doyle, Luis Sanchis, David Sims and Takashi Homma.

What creative work got you excited when you were a teenager, and how does it align with what you're into now?

My dad was a vinyl hoarder. He'd buy anything as long as it was a bargain. I was always rummaging through the stacks to see what he'd found, and I loved the covers. As a kid, I'd pick one record every day and display it on a shelf in my room. It could be anything, from a Russian orchestra to Dolly Parton.

How would you describe your experience of working with Palace Skateboards?

Surreal and an absolute hoot! It never feels like work. Just hanging out with friends who are hilarious and have great taste in music.

What were your thoughts on Palace prior to working with them?

They don't take themselves too seriously while also showing so much care and passion for what they do. Lots of love and respect.

What are you currently working on?

Trying to do more personal stuff.

Favourite restaurant?

This is the worst question to ask me. I love food. Lao Siam and Buck in Paris, Uoriki in Tokyo, Rita's in Soho, El Xampanyet and Nardi in Barcelona, Imone in New Malden, Books for Cooks in Notting Hill, Yokoya in Camden, My Old Place in Liverpool Street.

Anything you'd recommend?

Kokuho by Sang-il Lee. Tart by Slutty Chef. J Dilla's The Shining and Lafayette Afro Rock Band's Afro Funk Explosion. Victoria Peak, Hong Kong, at night.

Tens of thousands of real human Wallpaper* print edition readers are out there: what is your message to them?

Laugh a lot, hang out with your friends, watch films, eat good food, stay out super late, walk where you can, look after your body, be nice to others.

• Meet the entire Palace Creative Universe

How would you describe what you do?

I am a documentarian of street fashion. I'm also a photographer and publisher.

Why do you do it?

In 1985, when I was 30 years old, I decided that documenting street fashion and creating media would be my life's work. It felt like a very clear calling, and that's why I've been able to continue doing it ever since.

Who or what inspires you?

Ferdinand de Saussure, Georges Bataille, contemporary physics, contemporary art.

What creative work got you excited when you were a teenager, and how does it align with what you're into now?

Surrealism, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein and Man Ray. Andy Warhol felt so far ahead of his time that I couldn't really understand him.

How would you describe your experience of working with Palace Skateboards?

When I went to London, I expected to shoot digitally, but they asked if I could shoot on film instead. For Fruits, I had used a rather unusual medium-format camera, the Fujifilm GA645Wi, so I said I would be happy to shoot on film if they could provide that camera. Amazingly, they rented one for me the very next day. Because I was using ISO 100 slide film, it wasn't suitable for low light or evening conditions, so I shot with both film and digital. We photographed exactly where Lev wanted us to, but the shoot continued after sunset. Under those conditions, the digital images would technically have been much better. In the end, though, they chose to use only the film photographs. That creative decision reflects something I couldn't have achieved on my own – whether it's the British creative spirit or simply Lev's instinct. Combined with Vivienne Westwood's involvement, the styling was exceptional. The models and locations were also perfect. I think it became a wonderful piece of work, and people often compliment me on it.

What were your thoughts on Palace prior to working with them?

I had been aware of Palace because I often saw people carrying Palace shopping bags in Harajuku. However, their store was a little outside the area where I usually spend my time, so I had never visited it. In 2022, I was invited to London by The Face magazine to photograph Beabadoobee. While walking through Soho, I saw the Palace store and the long queue outside. I immediately felt the brand's energy and strong sense of style, and I remember thinking that it would be great to work with Palace one day. Two years later, I received an email from Palace offering me a collaboration. I was genuinely surprised.

What are you currently working on?

I'm 70 years old now, so my main focus is how to preserve what I've created over the years. For the past few years, one of my biggest projects has been making the complete digital archives of Street, Fruits and Tune available through libraries around the world. It looks like that will finally become a reality by the end of this year. My next challenge is finding ways to transform my archive into artworks and books that can endure for the future. I'd like to explore whether Fruits could become a fashion brand, and whether it's possible to create a new generation of Fruits magazine. There's also a possibility of developing a Fruits fragrance.

Favourite restaurant?

These days, I usually travel abroad alone, so I don't often go to restaurants. Instead, I love buying charcuterie, cheese, salad, fruit and wine from supermarkets or speciality shops and enjoying them in my hotel room. Earlier this year, while walking through Soho in London, I discovered a long queue outside Thai restaurant Kiln. I invited a friend and we had an unforgettable meal. In 2023 in Paris, I found an incredible charcuterie shop in the Marais called À La Ville de Rodez. I later heard it may have closed, and if that's true, I'd be very sad. Japan has many outstanding restaurants, but these days I don't eat out very often because it's difficult to maintain a balanced diet that way. As an experience, Sukiyabashi Jiro is absolutely worth visiting. I have only been once, but I still vividly remember how extraordinary it was. I was amazed that something as simple as fish on top of rice could taste that incredible. I've been to many famous sushi restaurants, but Jiro stands in a class of its own. Kyoto's long-established kaiseki restaurants are works of art in themselves. And this year, I happened to discover an eel restaurant in Gion, Kyoto, called Yondaime Kikukawa, and it was truly remarkable.

Anything you'd recommend?

Juma Densetsu (The Legend of Juma) by Waka Mizuki. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya – just don't give up after the first episode. Aki Yashiro, Bach's Mass in B Minor, Terry Riley, Illit, and Billie Eilish.

Some of the exhibitions that have impressed me most in recent years were the Man Ray retrospective, the Paul Klee exhibition, and New York's MoMA. I also loved the Hajime Sorayama exhibition at Nanzuka in Shanghai. My greatest museum experience ever was the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, although that was back in the 1980s and the atmosphere was probably very different then.

One experience I'm especially proud of is seeing Jeff Koons' installation in ‘NY Art Now' at the Saatchi Gallery in 1987 – it has stayed with me ever since. I admire Kohei Nawa, and I'm also following Wade Guyton with great interest. I love Harajuku. It has changed a lot since the 1990s, but I still think it's the most stylish neighbourhood in the world. Molecular biology fascinates me. When I listen to Bach's Masses, I feel the presence of god. Quantum mechanics also allows me to imagine something like a divine principle. But I have a feeling that if we keep exploring the inside of cells, we may one day discover signs of god there. That said, the Japanese way of thinking about gods is quite unique.

Tens of thousands of real human Wallpaper* print edition readers are out there: what is your message to them?

I think it's important to fill your mind with good visual culture. I believe that's one way to make the world a better place.

• Meet the entire Palace Creative Universe

When pondering the more than 50-year career of filmmaker and artist David Lynch (1946-2025), lightness is not the first thing that comes to mind. Who can forget the haunting suburban scene of Dennis Hopper breathing psychotically into a clear plastic gas mask before groping Isabella Rossellini in the ground-breaking 1980s neo-noir mystery film Blue Velvet? The human cruelty bestowed upon The Elephant Man or the bleak industrial trappings of Eraserhead – which put Lynch on the map in the late 1970s, and left an indelible mark on the industry. But the light – and creative possibility – that he discovered in Los Angeles, where he lived for over five decades, with the picturesque sprawling city and its underbelly as his muse and inspiration, undoubtedly informed his work. For Lynch, the city was ‘a feeling as much as it is a place’, according to Pace, which opens a show of his photographs at its Los Angeles gallery on 19 September.

Titled ‘David Lynch: LA’, the exhibition bridges the emotional and physical landscape between the myths and mysteries of the city and its archetypes – the ingenue, the shapeshifter, the beauty, and darkness. The artist’s blurred reality and surrealist slant in films and television projects, referred to as ‘Lynchian’, are also evident in this collection of photographs that spotlight his distinctive artistic sensibility in a medium that bridges his significant contributions to painting and film.

Lynch is credited for bringing experimentalism to mainstream media in the late 20th century, and was bestowed with a slew of prizes, including an Honorary Academy Award, a BAFTA, the Cannes Film Festival Best Director Award for Mulholland Drive (2001), and the Palm d’Or for Wild at Heart (1990), along with a Golden Globe for his 1990s television series Twin Peaks.

Lynch, born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, moved to Los Angeles in 1972 as a fellow at The American Film Institute, where he set up a studio in the stables at the Greystone Mansion campus in Beverly Hills for four years. Over the years, Lynch also worked as an animator, an author, a furniture designer, and a musician. His talents spanned directing music videos for Moby and Nine Inch Nails, and commercials for Dior, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. His acting roles include playing film director John Ford in Steven Spielberg's drama film The Fabelmans, in 2022.

Because of all his moving-image accolades, many film fans don’t realise that Lynch actually wanted to be a painter. Before his move to LA, he was influenced by Francis Bacon while an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, when he began creating short films out of a desire to effect movement in his paintings.

‘David Lynch had an incredibly rich and sustained art practice that began in childhood, continued through art school in the 1960s, and remained an essential part of his life for nearly 60 years,’ says Genevieve Day, senior director at Pace in Los Angeles.

With past exhibitions from the artist spanning other globally recognised galleries in Tokyo, London, Paris, Milan and Moscow, Lynch joined Pace in 2022, marking his debut with the solo exhibition ‘Big Bongo Night’ in New York, featuring mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper.

Now, it felt important for Pace to honour the commitment Lynch devoted to this practice, and to have this new show take place in his chosen home since 1972. ‘This exhibition, focusing specifically on Lynch’s photo-based work, is a prelude to a much broader retrospective that LACMA is in the early stages of preparing,’ says Day.

This continues the thread of Los Angeles, which became a defining presence in Lynch’s imagination. ‘It traces the atmospheric feeling of the city through his early 1979 black and white “portraits” of the distinctive architecture of Los Angeles, to his continued study of the nude, in which the female body becomes abstracted and visually topographical,’ says Day. ‘Later, he digitally manipulated his photographs, creating a contemporary odalisque – the reclining figure of art-historical tradition. The five large-scale colour photographs of women and smoke expand on this idea of the surreal, vivid in our imagination. Each work has a distinctive quality, but together reveal Lynch’s broader vision.’

As seen in the provocative red lips with a wafting cloud of smoke, Lynch captures these images as a moment of ecstasy. In stark contrast, smoke is also seen as a plume rising from a drab 1950s-style sofa with chintz floral drapery in the background. Ironically, Lynch was a lifelong chain smoker, and, already suffering from emphysema, he died in 2025 following evacuation during the devastating Southern California wildfires that swept through the city that same year.

In the many years that Pace has been involved with Lynch and his artwork – most recently with two 2026 group exhibitions in Berlin – there are still surprises to uncover. ‘Like the best artists, there is a mystery in his work that becomes both illuminating and more confounding the more closely you look,’ says Day. ‘He was a storyteller – some images are overt, while others are much more enigmatic, leaving space for the viewer to create their own narrative.

‘I hope people come away with a deeper understanding of David Lynch as a visual artist,’ adds Day. ‘His photography was only one aspect of his immense creative practice as an artist whose vision found expression across many different mediums.’

‘David Lynch: LA ’at Pace Los Angeles, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, 19 September – 24 October 2026

pacegallery.com

Melissa Auf der Maur is at home, enjoying a rare moment of peace in the midst of a hectic schedule. Just two days before she reunited with the Smashing Pumpkins on stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago, joining her former band for a performance of 'The Everlasting Gaze' from their 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God. Auf der Maur’s guest spot (the Pumpkins were also joined by Olivia Rodrigo and Yungblud) won’t be the only prominent role the photographer, musician and gallerist is taking this year.

This Autumn, a new exhibition opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario featuring over 200 over the Montreal-born artist’s photographs, My ’90s Rock Photographs (DelMonico Books) taken almost obsessively during an era of constant touring and recording, a time when a roll of 35mm film was on her rider and hotels, tour buses, gigs and festivals provided an ever-changing subject matter.

The show and monograph follow on from last year’s publication of Auf der Maur’s acclaimed memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ‘90s Rock Memoir (Da Capo Press), which chronicled her time playing bass in Hole between 1994 and 1999, Smashing Pumpkins in 1999 to 2000 and the solo work the followed. They’ll be followed by a new album, Bass Womb Room, featuring 4-track demos and field recordings from the era.

Now based in Hudson, NY, where she is the cofounder of the multidisciplinary art centre Basilica Hudson, Auf der Maur spoke to Wallpaper* about this current flurry of creative work, her evolving, holistic approach to photography, music and art and what comes next.

Wallpaper*: Where are you now?

Melissa Auf der Maur: I am in upstate New York, on the eve of fulfilling my dream as a fine art photographer in a museum with a book. That’s all I ever wanted, but I got derailed a hundred times. And in my mid-fifties, I get to establish myself in that land, and I am so grateful to the creative gods and goddesses that brought me here. Especially to the AGO, who know my archive better than I do now.

So I am here, starting my new life as a true multimedia artist, which is what I always thought I was. But I got very defined as a bass player and as a musician, obviously, and I’m so grateful that was my destiny. But I had so many longings outside of that were never fulfilled.

W*: Did the music feel like a side quest at the time?

MadM: When Courtney [Love] called me to ask me to join the band, and I said no, thank you. I’m a photographer, and I’m going to go do my masters, and that has always been the anchor of the crossroads, and very clear to me. But the question for me always has been, how long do I derail? When do I return?

This is the question that has seemed to run through my entire life, personally and creatively and professionally, especially as someone who went into motherhood after she quit music. How long do you serve these other callings that are absolutely fulfilling and meaningful and powerful?

W*: Do you not think that you can take on all those various things?

MadM: I don’t look at the world through lenses of right and wrong and gender and man and female. I look through more of a kaleidoscopic psychedelic lens, of energy in the cosmos and stardust. Back in 1994, I somehow managed to get a photo exhibit of my college work at this legendary dive bar in the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Max Fish. It featured a piece that’s also going to be in the AGO, ‘The Sky Is My Ocean’, a compilation of blown-up images of my SX70 Polaroids, self-portraits, and close-ups of Renaissance paintings. For me, it was when I found my voice.

I have always been obsessed with the Renaissance moment - as a young person, I started seeing myself in Botticelli paintings. I found myself in Botticelli’s muse as much as I did in Robert Smith of The Cure. When I started photographing those samples, it’s almost like sampling in music, creating what now looks like an Instagram grid, only back in the 90s.

W*: How else do you think your approach back then is mirrored by today’s media?

MadM: The creative packages I’d send to friends back then were as much a part of my soul expression as me being on stage at Lollapalooza. They were all the same and equal to me. In some way, feel like I was looking at the Renaissance because there was this explosion of spiritual media meets religion back then. I hope I was not just out of time, but I was ahead of time - I was waiting for the next Renaissance, or I was romanticizing the last Renaissance.

W*: You’re saying you’ve never been as inspired and driven as you are now. What was the instigating even to go through your archives and did your archives inspire you, or were you inspired to go through them?

MadM: The instigation was becoming a mother. I’m over a decade into motherhood and have a deep desire to integrate and unpack, integrate my past, my present, my future, and be healed, unpacked light for my daughter. My memoir is dedicated to my daughter, and all the girls of the world. I consider it all to be one big multimedia archive project - the memoir, the photo book, the exhibit, the demos, entirely spawned by the eve of turning 50.

I’ve always worked in decades - every decade seems to be really particular for me as well as thematic. Obviously, my memoir is dedicated to the decade that defined me and my generation, ’91 to 2001. After that I had this weird decade, and then I had my daughter in 2011. That will be my second memoir, about becoming a mother and what that does to a human, but also to a creative. To someone who has lived a life serving their inner voice, and then you switch in the most beautiful, physical, spiritual DNA way to serve another’s voice and to nurture the creation of another being.

W*: So that marked a major change in your process?

MadM: That was the decade of transformation and complete metamorphosis. If you want total metamorphosis, transformation, unlike anything else, have a child. If you don’t, you’ll have a fine life. You’ll have a great life as a creative. You can continue to evolve, but if you want an actual, down on your knees, fucking complete changeover, then have a baby.

I didn’t want to be on tour, so of course I quit music to become a mother because I wanted to be home. I transformed how I live my life and how I move the energy through my body and how I serve my creative inspirations. I had founded a non-profit art centre, Basilica Hudson, in 2010, a physical space for other people’s work and for music and art and dedicated a whole decade to give back to others. I had the luckiest creative life, although dark and difficult – getting to be in two giant rock bands and then make solo records and travel the world so many times over.

W*: How did the memoir come about?

MadM: I had completely gone from a global musician to a local art centre den mother. I had to find my way back, and the best way for me to do it was to start writing about it. Both my parents were literary people, and I’ve been keeping a journal since I was 12 years old.

We live in a very creative area. The Hudson Valley area has a great liberal arts college, Bard, with an amazing photo, film, and multimedia department. I started hiring students scan my negatives and had little army of photo people just scanning and going through my negatives over the course of many years.

W*: Why do you think you turned your back on the 90s for so long?

MadM: I’ve written my memoir now to explain how. It was adventurous and amazing, but how painful and dark! I joined Hole in the wake of death, so as if it wasn’t enough to join a band with the ghosts of Kurt and Kristen, but also the loss of innocence of our entire generation. I embarked on a very melancholic, hard journey with both bands - when I joined the Pumpkins, D'arcy [Wretzky] had gone missing in action.

The amount of casualties of that time… I also dive in very deeply on the death of my father [the journalist and politician Nick Auf der Maur] at the peak of my time in Hole. His death is the defining dark night of my soul that I’ve been healing from ever since. Writing this book was the essential healing. The wound and facing the grief of my father, not to mention my collective unconscious grief of my generation, was central to writing this book.

W*: Let’s talk about your photography. The images are so redolent of that era, the flash, the saturated colour, the drama of the compositions. It’s a sort of bridge between formal photography and today, where everyone captures everything on their phones.

MadM: I truly was the only person who had a camera on me every day, everywhere I went. I had obviously studied photography and loved my Nikon FE SLR, but when I became a bass player in a rock band it was too bulky so I moved into a point and shoot. I had a slightly wide-angle lens, so that specifically I could capture more of the room, and those self-portraits where I’d reach my arm out around and photograph these other people.

What’s strange is that I saw that I was sort of butchering photography - I didn't havea light meter and I had never used a flash in my life. I was used to existing light and really working on exposure and then printing in the darkroom. So what I was doing was sacrilegious in many ways.

[For a long time] my archive felt like garbage to me. When I left the Pumpkins in 2000 I had made a pledge to myself to quit music and finally go back to photography. I spent a long time the following year looking through the archive and trying to imagine what I could do with it. I realised I needed a decade or two for the answer to come to me.

That’s been what’s so inspiring and exciting, both for the stories in the memoir, but more specifically for the photo archive, is a quarter of a century is exactly enough time [for it to become] be a cultural offering for people to glean something about humanity and about pop culture and about history, not just about like some girl in a rock band.

W*: Will this creative rebirth you’re undergoing continue with new work?

MadM: I will continue to write. There’s no question. I loved writing that memoir. It came like flowing out of me so quickly. The photography archive has potential for collaborations with other artists and other mediums. For example, there’s a soundtrack for the installation in the exhibition, a mixed media installation that has sound, projections, photos and structure., a giant mirror pyramid with stacks of television monitors from the videos from my archive.

I was inspired by the three-dimensional sound dream I had at the age of 19, which is in my book. I received messages that pretty much changed the way I live, changed the way I see the world, and changed my path in music. There’s a soundtrack that I recorded for it, a hybrid of field recordings, my four-track demos, and 21st-century intervention connected by a heartbeat. I’ll also be bringing the Bass Womb Room to life – it’s in a beautiful Frank Gehry-designed pavilion.

W*: You were on stage with the Pumpkins just a few nights ago.

MadM: It was the coolest thing ever. Everything is coming back. Everything is returning. I don’t understand how it’s possible, but it is. I had invited Billy Corgan to my event in LA in the Spring and we had this very meaningful conversation around my memoir. It just so happened that day he’d confirmed that the Pumpkins were going to headline Lollapalooza in their hometown. We’ve only seen each other a handful of times in twenty years, and he just said, well, maybe you should join us for a song. I said sure, maybe.

When the gig was announced, my teenage daughter was like, ‘Holy shit! Look at this lineup!’ Because she likes Charlie XCX and Tate McRae so of course she said, ‘we have to go. You have to say yes.’ So I called Billy up and said I’d do it. And then what happens? Olivia Rodrigo was the other guest and she invited me and my daughter to Daisy Chain Fields.

It’s merging my past life with my current life. It’s just the best. The highlight of it all, the most important thing to tell you, is that I miss my fucking bass so fucking much. This entire thing, this archive scanning, this museum exhibit, this writing of this book is all one big trick to get me back into my bass.

I’m also singing on Courtney’s new record. Courtney is in great shape, and she’s going to have a big resurrection in 2027. She’s got a solo record coming out, a memoir, and a really good documentary film. I suspect there’ll be a lot of activity around all of these people and bands.

The most beautiful thing is that my grunge parents, Billy and Courtney, who found me and took me under their wings, are forever my gateway into this big world. We’re all closer than we’ve ever been. It is a happy ending, considering how hard that moment was for all of us.

Melissa Auf der Maur: My ‘90s Rock Photographs is on at the Art Gallery of Ontario, AGO.ca, @AGOToronto

The accompanying monograph, Melissa Auf der Maur: My ‘90s Rock Photographs, is available from Shop.AGO.ca and Artbook.com, $65 CA / $49.95 US

Melissa Auf der Maur, xmadx.com, @xmadx, xmadx.bandcamp.com

Bruce of Los Angeles was one of the most prolific photographers of the male nude, and his influence was far-reaching. Artists including Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber were inspired by his physique photography, which blended studio professionalism with an old world Hollywood glamour.

Critic Vince Aletti – who published his own collection of physique photography last year – has long been a fan, curating a selection of Bruce’s works for an upcoming exhibition at Acne Paper Palais Royal, Paris. The 77 images in the collection, drawn from his personal collection, are from the photographer’s Rodeo series, created during his travels across the American West.

They mark a change in Bruce’s previously established style, seeing him move away from working with professional models in a studio environment, instead photographing cowboys and rodeo riders in their own environments across Arizona, California, Oregon and Canada. He resisted embellishing or imposing narratives on his subjects, letting them be as they naturally were, rather than performing for the camera.

Born Bruce Bellas, the photographer began his career as a chemistry teacher in his home state of Nebraska, losing his job after photographing a male nude. He moved to California, opening his studio in 1948, establishing a distinctive style which celebrated the male body for a mostly hidden gay audience. His Rodeo series was widely recognised as some of his most personal work, and something he pursued for the rest of his life, cut short in 1974 after Bruce suffered a fatal heart attack while photographing a rodeo in Alberta.

'Bruce of Los Angeles: Rodeo' at Acne Paper Palais Royal, Paris from 3 September – 7 October 2026

Late summer in London, August Bank Holiday Weekend, can mean only one thing: Notting Hill Carnival. And 2026 is more special than ever for Europe’s largest street carnival, with the event marking its 60th anniversary.

Also marking a significant anniversary: Ian Watts. The Londoner has been photographing the carnival for 50 years. In 1976 he was 'a young teenager, just out of school', living in a youth hostel in Harlesden. Armed with a second-hand East German Praktica, a basic SLR camera, and a bursting curiosity, he made his debut on the streets around Ladbroke Grove.

'The group of guys I was hanging out with said, “Let's go down to Carnival.” In the end, they decided not to go. But I went anyway,' he remembers. 'I shot [mostly] black and white, and also some colour film. And my feeling was: wow, this is a great experience! I was primarily drawn because I'm very interested in sound-system culture and reggae music. But I went on a voyage of discovery.'

Teenage Ian was hooked, and thereafter returned annually. He’s documented every Notting Hill Carnival since – apart from 2012 when, his youthful passion having morphed into an adult professional occupation, his career as a BAFTA- and Grierson-winning director of photography in TV and documentary took him to Siberia.

Now, from an impossibly rich archive of photographs numbering in the tens of thousands, Watts has curated a fraction of his still images – between 100 and 150 – for a free exhibition that’s showing on the towering screens of Outernet at the other, eastern end of central London. ‘Carnival 60: Ian Watts at Outernet’ is a unique record of over half a century of partying, freedom, creativity and social change, the pictures arranged in chronological sections to create an unparalleled, insightful visual narrative. As Scott Neal, creative director of culture and lifestyle at Outernet, puts it: 'The pictures Ian has taken from being a young boy to today, across six decades, are a vibrant record of what Carnival is about and how important it is to the fabric of London.'

It’s a peerlessly vivid, and still evolving, record, one that speaks to a lifelong mission that Watts lays out on his website: in his commitment to documenting the Black diaspora, his work 'explores themes of identity, diaspora, cultural expression and community, capturing both historic moments and everyday life'.

Not that that teenager had such grand ideas in mind. Watts says that he never 'consciously' decided that photographing the carnival would be part of his life’s work.

'Once I had caught the Carnival bug, I thought, well, I’ll go back in 1977 and continue the journey.' But over time, 'it became essential, and nothing else mattered other than going to Carnival every August. Nothing else would be on my agenda. I set my work [and life] schedule to make sure that I was around.'

As it happened, Watts’ first Notting Hill Carnival was the year of a heatwave (1976), and of rioting on the streets around Acklam Road 'under the flyover'. As he recalls, 'there was a lot of tension in the air because of the heat… That might have had some effect as to what happened at Carnival, because there were lots of people getting uptight with the way the police were treating people.'

But when I ask him to highlight his best and worst experiences, he cites two moments in the 1990s.

'I had progressed onto Nikon cameras with Nikon lenses. I tended to shoot the black and white stock on Ilford film, the colour on Kodak stock. But this year I decided I was going to use Fujichrome stock. This is a stock where you shoot transparencies, you take the photograph, and then you have to send it off to Fuji for them to process it, then they post it back to you. And unfortunately, what I think are some of my best photographs of Carnival, I haven't seen – they got nicked or lost in the post.'

As for his best one: 'It's difficult to pinpoint a year but it would also be some point in the 1990s. I started enjoying Carnival in a big way. One of the things I love is going there and you don't know who you're going to bump into. I meet old friends who I haven't seen for years. I always seem to bump into my brother. [There are] people you haven't seen for the whole year and then you miraculously meet them at Carnival.'

And, in his own seventh decade, Ian Watts’ commitment to Carnival is undiminished.

'As long as I can pick up a camera, I'll be taking photographs of Carnival. As soon as I arrive on [the streets], I'm energised and straight into the zone because I just love it. One of the best things for me about the Outernet exhibition,' he adds, 'is seeing that the photographs I took at my first Carnival, shot on that very basic Praktika, have held up. They're not as good as the digital photographs I've taken more recently. But it's nice that you have this record of very old photographs. It just shows my Carnival journey from 1976 right through to 2025.'

Finally: does this Carnival whisperer and sound system expert have any music recommendations for anyone heading to Notting Hill’s teeming, beaming streets this weekend?

'Depending on your taste, there's Brazilian bands, soca bands, reggae bands… But for me there are a couple of sound systems that are really important. I would go for Rapattack. They provide a nice selection of music. And then it's a choice between Channel One and Aba-Shant-I. Two very important sound systems. They play similar forms of music, but they are Carnival stops that I have to make.'

‘Carnival 60: Ian Watts at Outernet’ is free and runs 27 August – September 2026, outernet.com

America in the early 1900s was in a state of flux. A slow transition away from the country’s agricultural foundations and a movement towards an industrial, modern world were triggering seismic changes.

Thanks to parallel developments in photography, it is a cultural shift heavily documented, and one that's at the heart of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s new exhibition, ‘Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography’ (until 4 October 2026). Beginning in the early 20th century, when – thanks to the camera becoming a more affordable purchase for families – photography was becoming more democratic, the exhibition unites 38 of the era’s leading photographers, who capture the USA’s tumultuous volatility.

Tracing a chronological path through the century, the exhibition begins with Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, an image that captured the sharp inequalities of class through the divide on an ocean liner. The reverberations from the Wall Street Crash in 1929 can be felt in important works by Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke‑White, who documented the devastating effects of mass unemployment and the debilitating poverty of the Great Depression that followed.

The physical space of the city takes shape in a multitude of ways, with photographers including Berenice Abbott, Arthur Leipzig and Ed Ruscha considering the architecture of the city itself, from the skyline to how the forms of the buildings and open spaces adapted to accommodate new demands in work and leisure. On the streets, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander turn their lens to people creating new ways to live, while Peter Hujar documents the communities ravaged by AIDS.

‘American photography offers one of the most vivid and influential records of the modern city,’ says Alexander Moore, exhibition curator and creative producer at Dulwich Picture Gallery. ‘By bringing this remarkable collection to London, we invite audiences to reflect on how the rhythms, challenges and possibilities of urban life continue to echo through our own – a century of human stories told with extraordinary immediacy and invention.’

‘Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography’ is at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 4 October 2026. Presented in partnership with Savings Bank Foundation DNB and created in collaboration with Lillehammer Art Museum

It will not have escaped your notice that ‘proper’ cameras are back, whether they’re decade-old point-and-shoot devices enjoying fresh popularity (and boosted prices), simple, screen-less digital snappers designed to focus the mind on the moment, or high-end semi-pro models designed to lure people away from their smartphone and back to more considered ways of image making.

Then there’s this, which sits somewhere in between. Sony’s RX10 range originally debuted back in 2013 as the Cyber-shot DSC-RX10, when the name ‘cyber-shot’ was still considered an essential and intriguing gateway into the world of digital photography (the name dates back to the 1996 DSC-F1). This is the fifth iteration of a camera that only reached its fourth generation in 2017. Sony has clearly been sitting on the model whilst watching the cultural shift in camera ownership and wondering when to step in and improve it.

The RX10’s secret weapon has always been its Zeiss zoom lens. Since the RX10 III, the camera has come equipped with a 24-600mm equivalent stabilized zoom, a massive piece of kit that lunges out of the camera body and brings the far distance into your viewfinder. The V is no different, with improved autofocus and burst modes.

Nine years of processor evolution has also upped the V’s speed and ability to handle large files, recognise and track subjects in line with Sony’s flagship Alpha cameras, as well as a high-res digital viewfinder and a snappier touch screen rear interface. Everything is better, in fact, from the longer battery life to the ability to shoot 4K/120 video and much, much more.

The Sony RX10 V is by no means a pocketable travel camera, although its sheer flexibility could conceivably cut down on packing if you’re normally taking two or three separate lenses. All in all, it offers a credible alternative to a digital SLR, capable of everything from serious portraiture, pro sports and wildlife work, to multi-purpose vlogging and simple point-and-shoot functionality.

Sony RX10 V, £2,199, Sony.co.uk, @Sony.UnitedKingdom

A few weeks before their 69th birthday on 26 July – a date shared with Carl Jung, James Lovelock and Sandra Bullock – Del LaGrace Volcano gives me a video tour of their Swedish apartment. The white walls are filled with photographs, primarily their own, but also by friends, while a stack of magazines includes issues that feature their 1995 work, Portrait With Blue Beard, on the cover.

‘I surround myself with my people,’ explains Volcano, who resides in an area they characterise as distinctly un-queer, just outside Örebro city centre. The adorned walls, essentially a gallery of their communities, are a necessary tonic.

An early instigator of LGBTQI+ visual culture, Volcano started taking photographs in the 1970s, and spent the subsequent two decades developing a reputation for their powerful, oftentimes intimate, bodies of work examining sex and identity, made in and around the queer spaces they inhabited at the time. ‘I'm a bit of a sociologist, and just constantly curious,’ they say.

In 2019, their portraits of drag kings – published as a book with Jack Halberstam 20 years earlier – appeared in the group show ‘Kiss My Genders’ at the Hayward Gallery, while in 2023 the Tate exhibition ‘Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990’ brought new eyes to their Queer Dyke Cruising pictures: chief amongst them was Isabella Burley of Climax Books, who published the series in full last year.

The Tate show, via curator Linsey Young, additionally introduced the artist to Dr. Maggie Matić, director of London gallery Auto Italia, where their major new solo exhibition has just opened. ‘Sensual / Mutual’ runs through 25 October with a sister show, ‘Love Bites Back’, following at Edinburgh Art Festival from 14-30 August. While the former focuses on America and the dyke scene Volcano was part of in the 1970s and '80s – the lesbian biker bar Scott’s P.I.T. and the artist-run Goodman Building in San Francisco both feature, as well as ARF, or Asylum for Rowdy Females and Dogs, in Santa Fe – the Scottish show draws from their Queer Archive of Resistance, highlighting work made in England and Scotland between 1982 and 1995.

‘Everything I make work about is something my heart is attached to – it’s not possible to separate,’ says Volcano (their very first photographs were of their sister, while past lovers appear frequently in their pictures). ‘I have no imagination, really, only the life I lead. This thing of looking at gender, it's not just because it's interesting, it affects me personally.’

Until their teens Volcano, who is intersex and employs the term 'hermaphrodyke,' was socialised as a girl; the 1995 blue beard portrait, made when they were in their late 30s, was the first time they had grown out their facial hair.

‘I love landscape [photography], but if a person, especially a queer body, doesn't disrupt a kind of normative space, what is it?’ they continue. ‘My life and the people I draw into my orbit are all part of my work. There’s lots of mirrors in it, people reflecting back at each other and literal mirrors, which I now understand is a way of looking at myself, making avatars for people.’

Leather biker jackets are one such device in this vein, and feature in one of the more, otherwise traditional, portraits in ‘Love Bites Back’. Volcano’s then-girlfriend, Sylvia McFarlane, sits on a patterned sofa in Edinburgh in 1989; her arm is around her grandparents, who sport warm, knowing smiles and the younger couple’s chunky black jackets, lapels full of badges.

It’s not lost on Volcano that the new shows concentrate on their early work, despite their career straddling five decades. ‘It does seem like there's been a renaissance. The time I was most active doing this work – the '80s, '90s, early 2000s – is really resonating with people now,’ they note, negotiating the cycle of generational nostalgia aloud.

It’s worth mentioning also, how the politics of those core decades correlates with the contemporary landscape, from the homophobia encouraged by Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, to today’s growing confidence in anti-trans and far right ideology. Volcano’s work, with its depictions of queer sex and attention to lesbians and gender-non conforming people specifically, has largely failed to break into the mainstream.

‘I was good friends with Derek Jarman the last two years of his life. We would have lunch and he would drag me to his gallery,’ says Volcano, relaying their relationship with this version of the art world. ‘He tried so hard to share his access, but people were absolutely not interested in anything to do with lesbians’.

This conversation around visibility extends also to funding, and for their part Volcano says this has transformed really in the last five years. With financial support from the Swedish Arts Council for example, they were able to have a residency in Berlin, where they had the space to truly study their archive (this no doubt contributed to the way ‘Sensual / Mutual’ and ‘Love Bites Back’ came together).

In Edinburgh these ideas will be further expanded, as Volcano’s material presence is amplified when their work spills out of the gallery space across billboards that are planned for the city centre. Typically concerned with foregrounding ‘communities that are not especially seeking recognition, but are considered either illegal, illegible, invalid’, as their practice has long been, this kind of engagement with urban architecture feels properly exciting.

'Sensual / Mutual' at Auto Italia is in London until 25 October. 'Love Bites Back' is on view in Scotland as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival from 14-30^tAugust.

Never Alone: 1997–2004 Raving in Europe brings together analogue photographs documenting the nomadic techno-punks that free-partied their way across Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic and beyond. It presents an insider’s perspective from Italian photographers Cheyenne Clementi and Valentina Morandi, who started capturing the ‘teknival’ scene where they embedded themselves during rave culture’s European golden age while they were still teenagers. 'It was our daily life,' Morandi says, 'from organising everything and scouting for venues to setting up the sound systems.'

Morandi and Clementi were young when they met. Growing up, they went to the same liceo artistico, a type of arts-focused Italian secondary school. But they officially met at a rave, back when the scene was smaller and everyone got to know each other. It was a diverse community, united under a shared vision for the future – one of creative expression and freedom. ‘It was an escape from imposed values, that’s how I’d sum it up,’ Clementi says.

Being such a cohesive project, it’s surprising that the curation of these photos, taken nearly three decades ago across eight years, wasn’t initially planned. 'It was simply our way of observing the world and preserving memories of the life we ​​were living.' Clementi explains. Her father was a photographer, too, so 'documenting those years felt natural'. It was only more recently that she and Morandi decided that their tranche of photos was 'historically significant', and that the time was right to share them.

The images are off the cuff. Snapshots of anarchic warehouse partying are paired with quotidian scenes of communal on-the-road living, so that towering rigs and crowds of police intermingle with vistas of camper vans and trucks parked up in forests and fields, and portraits of children playing with their pets. It becomes clear that these diametrically opposing sides of this lifestyle – the ecstatic and the domestic – are in fact one and the same. One image captures the striking, shadowy figure of a dog backdropped by a sky-high soundsystem. In another, amid an eccentrically dressed crowd gathered for an al-fresco wedding ceremony, a toddler is seen sitting on a pair of shoulders.

It was in 1994 that the free-party movement began to spread from the UK to mainland Europe; when raves were essentially criminalised. Increasing police crackdowns encouraged British soundsystem collectives – notably Spiral Tribe and Desert Storm – to spearhead a move to European countries where, in those early days at least, there were few-to-no restrictions. While equipment was at times seized, interactions between ravers and police generally remained peaceful. As Clementi and Morandi recall, it was only following the millennium that relations began to sour. (One photo from summer 2004 captures police disbanding ravers from CzechTek, an annual teknival which, by then, had been deemed illegal.)

Morandi recounts a 'surreal' memory that has since become legend, when in the summer of 1999 police helped to escort a convoy of ravers’ vehicles to the site where their days-long party was due to take place by Lake Bolsena in the Tuscan countryside. 'It’s almost impossible for something like that to happen today without clashes or other issues,' she says, describing the period as a 'magical time'. It’s true that many candid moments documented in Never Alone frames this bohemian way of life as akin to a sort of utopia. 'There was a real buzz, a tremendous energy, and a sense that living life differently was actually possible,' says Morandi.

She adds: 'Nearly 30 years later, we looked at each other and realised we can't keep this just to ourselves. [The photographs] are a piece of history from a movement that has proven incredibly enduring – all from an era before social media and phones, before the obsessive documentation we see today.' Not only representing a formative experience for the two friends and photographers, the images are a doorway to a bygone era – when counter-cultural communities had the freedom to prosper on the fringes and young people felt empowered to stay present in their lives. Never Alone captures the radical beauty of what has been lost, and what collective resistance has the power to reignite.

neveralonebook.it

Earlier this year, in a studio in London, creative director Ben McLaughlin found himself in a room full of Ukrainians. There were boxers from a local gym, a grandmother with her family, a Ukrainian make-up artist and a group pulled together from the city's Ukrainian community by casting director Julia Gilmour. Behind them hung enormous prints of landscapes shot 1,500 miles away, along the Dnipro river.

Dnipro Fotostudiia, a 38-page portfolio made over a single weekend, sits at the centre of Dnipro, The Plunging Shore, the first edition of Unofficial, a new publishing series McLaughlin launches this month through Officialzine. Each edition will be made with an artist or image-maker creating work about the place they grew up, with a deliberate focus on places that don't register as cultural centres. 'I find the more unexpected the place, the better,' McLaughlin says.

Up first is Eugenia Skvarska. The Ukrainian stylist and art director grew up in Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnipro, and after Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, she felt an urgency to document the river. 'It's impossible to separate it from the history of Ukraine,' she says.

She travelled it between the sites of her childhood with photographer Kalpesh Lathigra in a tiny Smart car donated by a concrete company: guiding, driving, translating, telling the stories of the places they passed through.

The landscapes they came back with, shot on large-format film, are full of summer light. 'A lot of work I see from this region can feel a little cold,' McLaughlin says. 'I hope this project turns that perception on its head.'

Skvarska is more direct. 'We knew this project shouldn't be about documenting destruction. Kalpesh has photographed wars before, but this time we wanted to photograph the soul of the country. The war is still present, but only through subtle details: anti-tank hedgehogs, traces of grief, or a quiet sense of uncertainty in the background.'

She describes her boyfriend's mother spending a night in a bomb shelter, then the next afternoon at the river among families and friends. 'People are constantly trying to hold on to moments of normalcy,' she says.

Rather than presenting the road-trip material as straight documentary, McLaughlin printed Lathigra's landscapes as vast studio backdrops and staged the London portrait shoot against them, with Skvarska styling the cast in garments by young Ukrainian designers, alongside vintage clothing sent from Kyiv by her assistant. 'I wasn't interested in creating costumes, or a romantic image of Ukrainian identity,' she says. 'I wanted the styling to feel honest and contemporary, while still carrying traces of memory and home.'

The portraits sit at the heart of the book, bookended by the landscapes and combining the two collaborators' hands into a single visual language.

The format is difficult to place, which is the point. 'It's not a magazine, but it's not an artist book. It sits in this kind of funny space between,' says McLaughlin, who spent his early career making artist books, then commissioning for magazines.

Unofficial is, in part, a response to what he sees as a glut of both: too many photography books, too many image-led independent magazines with no tone of voice. His answer is to extract the single story and give it everything, an edition at a time. Each is printed in a run of 450 by Grafiche Veneziane and the production shifts to fit the project - an insert, a poster, or a piece of tipped-in ephemera. 'It's not neat,' he says, approvingly.

What began as a set of scans took two years to edit, in printed-out sessions with Adam Murray, a curator and course leader of the MA Fashion Image programme at Central Saint Martins (where Skvarska first began the project as his student) and a close collaborator throughout. Across the book, the river resurfaces in unexpected places - in a painting hanging in a photographed interior, in wedding-venue curtains that gather like waves. 'There's a strength in taking a bit of time,' McLaughlin says. 'I don't think the project would have got to this point without it.'

Two editions a year are planned, and the next two are already in motion. Though McLaughlin is keeping them under wraps, he hints that one draws on a small-town photographic archive spanning half a century. Future editions may loosen the format further still: he's interested in hometowns curated by contributors who aren't image-makers at all. The series grew partly out of conversations about authenticity, and about how often the image of a place has been made by people who aren't from it. It’s what he hopes every edition will share: work made from the inside, in places the world rarely looks.

'Unofficial Dnipro: The Plunging Shore' is now available through Officialzine's website.

Widely acknowledged as the most-respected photography prize out there, the Prix Pictet has focused on photography’s ability to incite conversations around sustainability since its inception in 2008.

Every other year, the prize announces a new theme, revealed at Les Rencontres d'Arles, which engages with these social and environmental considerations, triggering a cycle which ends with the winning work undertaking a global tour. Themes typically centre around one word – previous iterations have included Fire, Storm and Disorder – and now director of the Prix Pictet Michael Benson has revealed that the theme will be Jungle.

‘The world’s jungles are the great green lungs of the planet,’ says Benson. ‘These huge carbon sinks play a crucial role in regulating and helping to stabilise the planet’s climate. Yet across the globe jungles are in crisis, forests are threatened by deforestation, fires, and degradation; surface water has been lost and rivers are increasingly disconnected and polluted. The implications of any loss or degradation of these densely interconnected ecosystems extend well beyond changes in land use.’

The jury – led by chair Dutch-born British businessman Sir Tim Smit – will review portfolios of work from all around the world which respond to the theme, before deciding on a shortlist of twelve photographers, set to be announced next summer. Elsewhere, Prix Pictet will also host an exhibition at Paris Photo, to mark the Pictet Group’s new role as the official partner.

It is a collaborative relationship which speaks to this year’s theme, exploring the links between humanity and society. ‘Nothing in a jungle exists alone,’ Benson adds. ‘They are complex interconnected systems that we only vaguely understand. The jungle is a place of mystery and secrets. It is a place of legendary lost cities and civilisations of economic adventures and many broken dreams. In this way, the jungle mirrors contemporary human environments more than we might expect. Cities, digital networks and social ecosystems have their own undergrowth: layers of complexity that obscure as much as they reveal.’

prix.pictet.com

The first thing you see as you enter Vibeke Tandberg’s new show is her face, twice. A monitor shows Merge (1998), a 16mm film in which the photographer has double-exposed herself onto herself. It’s a simple effect, but this low-res doubling is a synecdoche of Tandberg’s body of work: there is no one single self.

Questions of identity and performativity run throughout ‘They Live’, a new exhibition at Bergen’s Kode in Tandberg’s native Norway. The show tracks Tandberg’s career, from her early photo projects in the 1990s to more recent plaster works and videos shown for the first time. A key figure from the Nordic wave of young artists in the 1990s, Tandberg was an early advocate for digital photography and photo manipulation. For Living Together (1996), Tandberg used then-new photo editing tools to create a photo series in which she appears as her own twin. In Faces (1998), she merged her face with other people’s, creating androgynous, fictional portraits. The results are unsettling, not because they enter uncanny-valley territory, but rather because they seem hyperrealistic. There’s a clear through-line between these 30-year-old works and today’s debate around authenticity and truth in imagery.

Tandberg herself appears many times throughout ‘They Live’, but she insists that these are not self-portraits. 'That’s a loaded term,' she told me. 'It feels like a self-portrait is done because you want to tell people something about your inner self. It's confiding in the viewer something more psychological than I have ever been interested in. For me, it’s always been more conceptual.'

Tandberg, who started life in the theatre before training to be a photographer, has always enjoyed dress-up. She came to national attention with the Bride series (1993), in which she appears as an idealised newlywed alongside 11 different men. The photographs were published as wedding announcements in local newspapers on the same day, 24 July. The project established Tandberg’s main interests: performativity, playfulness, but also a desire to provoke and critique patriarchal norms.

In 2003, Tandberg bought her most important accessory. She purchased a latex mask and the character of ‘old man’ was born. He appears in much of Tandberg’s subsequent work. Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003) shows Tandberg, pregnant with twins at the time, performing the role of the aged man, heaving himself up and down a flight of stairs. 'It was such a relief to get rid of my own face,' Tandberg says. 'I was grateful to work within a mask, hiding myself.'

Soon, however, she let other people perform the role. 'It could be anyone in that mask,' she says. 'I didn't really need it to be myself anymore.' The mask is worn by the ballet dancer Maria Kochetkova in Old Man Dancing (2021) and by an assistant in Post Americana (2026), a new film for the exhibition where the old man is a dying cowboy.

The most interesting moments of ‘They Live’, however, star Tandberg’s face – and these are not confined to photography. Echo’s Bones (2021), named after a Beckett short story and realised during the Covid pandemic, contains 87 plaster busts of Tandberg: they lie on the floor, distorted and brutalised – like a graveyard of mutilated selves. As with Bride, Echo’s Bones sees Tandberg using herself to play with conceptual, if unsettling, ideas. Echo’s Bones looks like a society that’s died, but it’s also the same death mask over and over.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue contains several essays that situate Tandberg in an intellectual framework; her work is interpreted through Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze, among others. The exhibition itself, however, only has introductory wall text. We are left to interpret the works ourselves – but not before feeling something first. Tandberg’s oeuvre is well suited to theoretical discussion, but audiences shouldn’t let ideas stand in the way of emotional engagement. After all, Tandberg’s entire career, from the camp to the macabre, is rooted in play.

‘They Live’ is at Kode Bergen Art Museum until 12 September 2026

kodebergen.no

Wimbledon is, of course, defined by the tennis – or is it? What fascinated me most was everything that surrounds it. Over generations, the championships have developed a visual language of their own, built through colour, ritual, uniforms, architecture and an extraordinary attention to detail.

Discover the vibrant design codes of Wimbledon

Working almost exclusively with tight frames, I focused on colour, geometry and repetition. This year's brilliant sunshine became an important part of the story, casting hard shadows across the grounds and reducing many scenes to graphic compositions of green, white and purple. The tennis itself often became secondary to the systems that support it.

Every element feels intentional. One particular standout was the London Fire Brigade, who act as stewards and security throughout the fortnight. Professional, impeccably presented and genuinely welcoming, they quietly contribute to the uniquely British character of Wimbledon, where traditions and systems have been refined over generations.

Then there are the strawberries. They are one of those enduring Wimbledon rituals that have become almost mythological, with queues for them sometimes longer than those for the courts themselves. Alongside the uniforms, scoreboards, pristine grass courts, straw hats, Pimm's and the iconic all-white dress code, they form part of a visual language that is unmistakably Wimbledon.

It’s a scorching day at Lacock Abbey, in the village of Lacock in Wiltshire, and, beneath the screeching of low-flying swifts, Martin Parr’s widow is in the National Trust property’s Manger Barn, discussing her husband’s final work. And his legacy.

‘This project, it really did resonate with him,’ Susie Parr says of ‘Lacock’, a series of portraits of English community and tradition, a year in the taking and curating, which the great photographer-documentarian completed shortly before his death at 73 on 6 December 2025. ‘He was also aware that he was not well. He kept saying, “I'm in the departure lounge." And this was a manageable, doable piece of work.

‘Very different from his fashion work,' Susie adds with a smile of these typical Parr portraits – vivid but unadorned – of shopkeepers and schoolchildren and scarecrows; of VE Day 80th anniversary parties and the Garden and Allotment Association Annual Flower Show; of prize-winning potatoes and best-in-class raspberries and a stout vicar bedecked in Union flags. ‘Martin was the most unlikely fashion photographer – he really hated fashion, actually! He really wasn't at all interested! But it did bring in money for the [charitable Martin Parr] Foundation.’

Across 2025, Parr travelled from the couple’s home in nearby Bristol to shoot in and around the abbey and the adjoining picture-perfect village. Susie and Dr Andy Cochrane – curator of ‘Lacock’ and of the abbey’s Fox Talbot Museum that’s hosting the year-long exhibition – think he must have visited around 30 times.

Parr was a photographer with an anthropologist’s eye, and Cochrane says that all his career-long themes ‘permeate through the work at Lacock: material culture; the daily life of people; and the conviviality, how people engage and get on with each other. That's all embedded in this photography.’

In multiple ways, the series is a carefully considered bookend to an extraordinary career. Parr had shot (briefly) in Lacock in 1988. As the one-time residence of scientist and photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77), Lacock Abbey is widely viewed as the home of photography, hence the National Trust’s on-site Fox Talbot Museum. And the new project became a perfect distillation of Parr’s perennial interest in what his wife calls 'the middle ground. He was drawn to the ordinary, day-to-day life of people, rather than the extremes of how people are behaving'.

Susie Parr and Dr Andy Cochrane tell Wallpaper* more.

W*: Susie, that 1988 visit to Lacock – how did that come about?

Susie Parr: We had been living in Wallasey in the early 1980s, and Martin did his [1983-85] work in [Merseyside seaside resort] New Brighton, The Last Resort, which was the work that shot him to fame. But he also got a lot of criticism for being a middle-class photographer photographing working-class communities.

So, he was thinking: ‘I need to photograph my own tribe.’ And we were thinking: ‘Where can we live to enable you to do this?’ I was the breadwinner at the time, and I got a job in Bristol. So we moved down here and he started that work. It was supper parties, cricket matches, private schools. Very different from the New Brighton work.

Visiting Lacock was part of that. He loved a summer fête and he came and photographed plant stalls, things like that, for a [1989, Thatcher-era] project about the middle classes called The Cost of Living. Those photos, some of which are in this exhibition, were for that project.

W*: So it was a kind of visual anthropology.

SP: Absolutely. He wasn't articulate about it. He just thought in images. He wouldn't be able to analyse his work in an intellectual way. He just had an anthropological approach to ordinary life.

Andy Cochrane: In one of the first meetings that we had at the foundation, Martin brought out an anthropological book that was written in the 1940s, with colour-saturated photography by John Hinde. It was about understanding a National Trust village, Luccombe in Somerset, as part of a Mass Observation project.

I think Martin always wanted to go there and photograph it, and then went instead to Chew Stoke [in Somerset for 1992 project A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village]. So there had [long been] a sense of trying to document a National Trust village.

W*: Did the villagers require much persuasion to let him into their homes?

AC: At first, a lot of people, if they're not into art or photography, were unaware of who Martin Parr is… But with Simon [Dunn], the vicar, we did a free screening of [2025 biographical documentary] I Am Martin Parr in St Cyriac's church and invited the village.

And, of course, as people were getting themselves photographed, and the foundation was printing them immediately and handing them back out to the village, it created a critical mass [of interest].

He was also keen to engage with community groups, the clubs, the church, the school. So he was going to all these events in the evening. He was in the yoga club and the photography club and the art club. And the pace that he worked was really impressive to see. He was moving at a pace that was a young man's game!

SP: He was so disciplined and hardworking.

W* And, apparently, disarming. As one of his clearly smitten subjects, Azar Watling of local business John Watling Bespoke Jewellery, says in the accompanying video showing in the museum, ‘he was a little bit cheeky’.

SP: His natural communication style was a bit to the point, blunt, no messing about, no small talk. But when he wanted to engage with people, he could be very funny and charming, with a little bit of banter. He could do that, but it wasn't his natural style.

W*: The village’s VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations in May 2025 must have been catnip for Martin, given everything it represents and the associated, flag-waving iconography.

SP: He did like a Union Flag, but he wasn't very happy about the way they'd been used recently, and all the St George's flags everywhere. He was always wary of the Brexit-y, Reform-y-type thing. But he was never politically critical of any group.

But flags were definitely an important iconography for him – there are so many photos of fetes with Union Jacks and bunting and everything like that. At his funeral, we recreated a country fête for the reception. We had lots of the kind of [food] from his photographs: sad cupcakes, rainbow-coloured cakes, lots of sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm.

W*: Did he like a cake to eat as well?

SP: He loved a cake! Favourite cake? Lemon drizzle, I’d say. Mine? I’m not a cake person, but... a nice fruitcake sometimes. He loved his cup of tea and a cake at 3.30pm. And the final picture in the [‘Lacock’ exhibition] book is his cup of tea and his plate with cake crumbs on it. For me, it’s a poignant full stop to the project.

W*: From a Lacock Abbey point of view – being the home of the beginning of photography – showcasing the final major commission from one of our greatest ever documentarians must feel particularly providential for the property and the National Trust.

AC: It's pretty neat and it’s pretty helpful. The [Fox Talbot] museum was set up in 1975. The National Trust didn't have the money for a museum then – doesn't now! – but they were helped by another internationally famous British photographer, Cecil Beaton. So last year was the 50th anniversary, and Martin was here at that time doing this project. And now with Martin, who’s bigger than Cecil, he’s set it up for the next 50 years.

It is so generous, for the village, the National Trust, and it's a gift to everyone to be able to see this work.

W*: How good a summation is this exhibition, in this place, of Martin’s interests, his eye, his instinct, his emotional feelings for Britain and its people?

SP: I was surprised when I saw it. It's actually very kind. And very different from [his other work]. Because he could have come in and done a number on the hordes of tourists who come to the Fox Talbot Museum. But he didn't. It’s a return to the much earlier, more elegiac way of working. More connection, more gentleness. So I think it's the perfect way to end for him.

W*: Do you mind if I ask, Susie, how emotional is it for you seeing this work displayed here? We're not that many months on from your husband's passing.

SP: I must say, I did get a bit choked when I was looking at the images to write my little introduction [in the book]. But I think I'm OK now. I'm sort of used to it.

I'm finding it really interesting to think about it, that he actually went beneath the façade of the model village to look at real people and real communities. So again, it's another thing to be very proud of about Martin, that he finished off in this way… This, for me, is a perfect rounding of the circle.

‘Lacock’ by Martin Parr, 27 June 2026 – 27 June 2027, Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire

nationaltrust.org.uk/lacock

A new monograph published today makes the case for Miyako Ishiuchi as one of the most important photographers of the modern era. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces, edited by Lena Fritsch and Yasufumi Nakamori, spans five decades of the artist’s career while placing unusual emphasis on Ishiuchi’s own voice. Alongside extensive reproductions of her work, the volume includes extracts from her earlier writings, an in-depth interview conducted by Fritsch and a newly commissioned essay by the photographer herself.

Born in 1947 and raised in Yokosuka, a Japanese port city shaped by the presence of an American naval base, Ishiuchi emerged within a photography world that was overwhelmingly male-dominated. She became one of the few women of her generation to achieve international recognition, developing a practice that challenged conventional approaches to documentary photography.

At the heart of Ishiuchi’s work lies the premise that history reveals itself through surfaces. Rather than documenting events, she photographs the traces they leave behind – scars on skin, worn clothing, crumbling apartments, lipstick tubes, dentures. In her images, objects and body parts become repositories of memory, carrying the imprint of lives that might otherwise go unrecorded.

Her breakthrough came with ‘Yokosuka Story’ (1976-77), a series made upon returning to the city of her childhood. Rather than producing a straightforward documentary account, Ishiuchi photographed streets, buildings and neighbourhoods marked by the proximity of the US naval base. She followed it with ‘Apartment’, a study of ageing interiors and decaying architecture that earned her the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award in 1979.

In the 1990s, Ishiuchi turned her attention to women’s bodies, producing close-up photographs of surgical scars and other physical marks – records of experience inscribed on flesh. This was followed by ‘Mother’s’, made after her mother’s death, in which shoes, dresses, cosmetics and dentures become vehicles for exploring grief.

Two later series extended this logic from the personal to the historical. For ‘Hiroshima’, Ishiuchi photographed the clothing and personal belongings of atomic bomb victims. Her focus was not the disaster itself but its intimate residue.

A similar sensitivity informed a project commissioned by the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. Ishiuchi photographed the Mexican artist’s most personal possessions – the corsets that supported her damaged spine, the dresses that became part of her public image, the medicines that sustained her and the cosmetics used to construct her iconic appearance. Kahlo’s belongings had been sealed away by Diego Rivera following her death in 1954 and remained hidden from public view for half a century; it was fitting that Ishiuchi – an artist preoccupied with what objects carry across time – was the one to photograph them.

Traces is the book that Ishiuchi’s career has always deserved.

Two young men, lads, possibly teenagers, stand in the Adriatic, stacked one atop the other. The blonder of the pair wears a chain and wraps his legs over the shoulders and around the torso of his companion, who is bare chested with a tan and striped swimming shorts. ‘I asked them to start playing where the water was low, but they decided that one would sit on the other’s shoulders. It was not my idea!’ photographer Walter Pfeiffer shares of the double portrait, shot in Rimini in the 1980s. ‘I love when the people I photograph participate in the process. I like being in good company.’

At Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, where a major new retrospective, ‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’, has just opened, the image is blown up to movie-poster size and framed with a white border. Positioned so it’s the first standalone image visitors see upon entering the show, it makes a bold impression and, moreover, is a fitting introduction to Pfeiffer’s six-decade career (in 1984, it covered the October issue of French publication Gai Pied, once described as ‘the queen of Europe’s gay magazines’). The show’s moniker, similarly, is a strong proxy for Pfeiffer’s character. The Swiss photographer’s reputation as an enthusiastic collaborator becomes tangible at the show’s opening in Italy, where friends and admirers swarm him to say congratulations and wish him a happy birthday (he’s just turned 80).

Before you enter the show proper, a vast wall covered with pages pulled and printed from Pfeiffer’s scrapbooks provides additional context for the work that follows. It’s a practice he established in the 1960s while working at Globus department store in Zurich, where he had been hired as a window decorator following his studies at the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. ‘I was bored and had no ideas, then I started to crop images out of magazines and glue them into these notebooks,’ he recalls. ‘I don't like to look through my work, that's why I love this wall – I forgot everything, so it was again interesting for me. When we printed it as a book [2012’s Scrapbooks 1969-1985], we took only the interesting things, but here there is more to discover.’

Occupying six rooms with more than 100 images from the 1970s through to the 2020s, ‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’ highlights the broad scope of Pfeiffer’s career. In one of the smaller spaces is the series Das Auge, die Gedanken, unentwegt wandernd from 1986, featuring black and white headshots printed in strict record cover-sized squares, the portraits are situated in pairs, high up towards the ceiling. Elsewhere, colour is largely king, used to underscore the subversive vitality prevalent in the collection of still lifes, fashion images and erotic scenes. ‘Walter's very open about letting other people interpret the work,’ offers Nicola Trezzi, who, with co-curator Simon Castets, was primarily responsible for the show’s rhythm. ‘He has done so many books and exhibitions, he’s always creating a company of people that will inspire him and trigger his curiosity.’

One particular group of photographs stands out for its delicate sensibility: the portraits in Untitled (Carlo Joh), shot over several months in 1973, portray a young trans person reconfiguring their appearance through make-up and drag. Embracing Pfeiffer’s ongoing pursuit of beauty but with a faint ephemeral shadow (the teenager passed away not long after their final session), the close-ups appear visibly different from their neighbours, a condition emphasised by the large moat of white space and silver frames in which they’re presented.

‘It’s the heart of the exhibition,’ the photographer and Trezzi agree. ‘I knew I had to do this show [1974’s “Transformer: Aspects of Travesty” at Kunstmuseum Luzern], and I’d seen him before in the library of the art school,’ shares Pfeiffer of spotting his subject, later relaying the decision to leave Untitled (Carlo Joh) out of the book that accompanies the Turin exhibition: ‘The atmosphere of the series is completely different. It would have suffered if it was inserted in this energetic rollercoaster of images.’

Books – self-published since near the start of his career and, later, released with the Zurich publisher Edition Patrick Frey – have long been a vital component of the photographer’s work, and the new monograph, from Mousse Publishing, is a unique example that places text, including an essay by Trezzi, at its centre. ‘It’s the first book where I didn’t have to do anything. I always think about when I'm not here anymore, and it was like I wasn’t here. That's why I'm glad I'm in a state now, where if the company is really good, I don't have to worry,’ notes Pfeiffer, adding further weight to the show’s collaborative label. ‘In the 1970s, nobody wanted to show my work; people were not ready. That’s probably why it still looks so fresh, even after six decades, but I wanted people to see it!’

‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’ is at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, until 13 September 2026

pinacoteca-agnelli.it

There is no-one making work quite like photographer Annie Collinge. Soaked in colour and with a healthy dash of surrealism, Collinge’s work plays with our expectations of the mundane in a manner which veers between the cute and the sinister. In combining strong colours with esoteric objects and an uncanny gaze, she plays with size, dimensions, the real and the fake, presenting the familiar anew.

She has worked with brands including Valentino, in 2023 winning a Grammy for the cover art for Dry Cleaning’s Stumpwork alongside her long-time collaborators the art director duo, Rottingdean Bazaar. In her new book Ask Alexa when we are all gonna die tomorrow :-) she has made a series with her son.

'I just started taking pictures of experimenting with him as a model, and decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to make a book,' Collinge says.

She is very collaborative in her work, a natural start for the photo series created with her 12-year-old son, who turns 13 this month. Collinge’s sister Miranda is a writer and has contributed a poem to the book, making it a family affair; for Collinge this process of working with people who are in your daily life makes spontaneous creative work easier.

Collinge has created series with Julie Verhoeven, Peter Jensen and Tim Key, but her longest partnership is with Rottingdean Bazaar, with whom she has worked with numerous brands including BIMBA Y LOLA, Bottega Venetta and the Thames & Hudson Catwalk Series.

'I really don’t like working on my own,' she explains. 'It is a difficult thing for an artist, it's sad but it's like also being a twin and it's helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off. The ultimate thing is to find people that you can be so brutally honest with that it doesn't matter.'

The book’s title comes from a note Collinge's son left for her one evening, and the photographs in this series address, in part, the one-dimensional way parenthood and family life are often portrayed online.

'I think it isolates people that aren't parents, and I think it isolates people that perhaps haven't found parenthood is exactly how they imagined it to be,' the photographer says. 'So, I find those images quite jarring and I was very conscious of not making them myself.'

While there are images of Collinge's son in the book, there are also many images of interiors and object. The process of looking for objects online and in real life; acquiring them; capturing them on film; and, eventually, letting them go is intrinsic to what Collinge (who has also published a book titled Things I Looked at on eBay) does.

Collinge's love of objects comes in part from being raised in London by a British father and an American mother, and objects from America having huge resonance in the home in a pre-Google world. After having to clear her grandmother’s house as a child in California, she developed an aversion to hoarding, so her process of acquiring and shedding items she finds in charity shops and online is offset by being able to somehow own these objects in an image.

'I'm kind of an antiques dealer on the side,' she confesses, adding that she is currently collecting Lucite paperweights, and is also renovating a 1960s Severalls doll’s house. Made as part of patients’ rehabilitation at a hospital in Essex, they are now collectibles and once the project is completed and the photographs have been taken, the items will be sold.

For all the process that goes into making her photographs, Collinge’s images stay with you. They persist both for their subversiveness and for how pleasurable she makes those subversions feel to look at. In Ask Alexa she takes us on an intimate journey through the place where her art meets her life.

Over the last decade, Andre D. Wagner's photographs have documented the rhythms of daily life, both on the streets of his native Brooklyn and further afield. His work seems to capture the essence of what it is to be human, although he sees things a little differently.

'I think photography can sometimes inherit a very extractive language,' he explains. 'We speak about "taking" pictures or "capturing" places, but I’m not sure that’s what I’m doing. I’m usually trying to empty myself enough to receive what’s already there.'

Whether through his work photographing Black youth and communities in New York or portraits of some of the world's most famous faces, Wagner's intuition allows us to see behind the eyes of his subjects, feeling the emotional weight of a lived moment.

For this new project, he's turned his lens – in this instance, a Google Pixel phone – to nature, photographing the wilds of Mallorca, Spain for a body of work that, for once, leaves the human condition far behind.

Wallpaper*: Why Mallorca?

Andre D. Wagner: Mallorca was simply where life had placed me at that moment. I arrived open, and over time, the place began to reveal itself.

W*: What's the secret to capturing the essence of a place when you are merely passing through?

ADW: Even if I’m only passing through a place, I try not to arrive with rigid expectations or predetermined narratives. In Mallorca, the longer I walked and stayed open, the more porous I became to the rhythm of the place. Eventually, it felt less like I was moving through Mallorca and more like Mallorca was moving through me.

So if there’s a secret, it’s probably openness. Letting the place speak before you try to define it.

W*: You've spent over a decade photographing people. What do you get from turning your camera to the land?

ADW: Photographing landscapes gives me a temporary release from the density of human drama, though I don’t mean that negatively. People carry immense psychological and emotional complexity, especially in cities. The landscape opens a different register for me, something more elemental.

In Mallorca, that meant the sea, the mountains, shifting air, altitude, cold mornings, warm afternoons. Those elements began shaping my attention in a different way.

But I don’t necessarily see landscape as less dramatic than photographing people. In many ways, the elemental world is even more dynamic. Humans are still part of nature. We’re expressions of the same forces.

So while the subject matter changes, my approach doesn’t change very much. I’m still responding intuitively to light, composition, texture, rhythm and whatever feels alive or reverberant in the moment. The photograph becomes a way of holding some trace of that experience.

W*: What's your favourite part of Mallorca? Where should we stay?

ADW: I stayed in the mountains of Sóller. If you enjoy solitude and a slower rhythm, you really can’t go wrong there. The mountains and the air have a way of slowing you down in the best possible way.

W*: Can you recommend something to inspire creativity on the island?

ADW: I was in Mallorca through an artist residency called MEKKA whose whole ethos was centred around rest, simplicity, presence and giving artists space to just be. So I wasn’t there trying to force inspiration.

What I found instead was that when you slow down enough, nothing kind of becomes everything. Inspiration starts appearing in very small and quiet ways.

That said, one practical thing I highly recommend is renting a Vespa. Moving through the island that way felt incredibly freeing and immersive, especially in the mountains and smaller towns.

W*: What's something not to miss?

ADW: I happened to be there during the off-season, and honestly, that felt like the thing not to miss. The quietness of the island was incredibly beautiful to me.

I think we sometimes overlook our own instincts because there’s this idea that there’s a ‘right’ or popular way to travel. But for me, Mallorca revealed itself most deeply through slowness, space, and simplicity.

W*: What projects do you have coming up?

ADW: I have a photo book titled New City, Old Blues coming out this year through the Gordon Parks Foundation and Steidl, which feels significant because it represents work made over a decade in New York.

At the same time, I’ve been moving quite a bit recently. I spent a month in Japan in January and have been in India since February. By the time I return to New York, it’ll likely be sometime in June. All of that movement has opened up a completely new body of work that I’m still processing, but it feels deeply energising and expansive.

Since 2019, Creator Labs has served as Google Pixel’s incubator for visual storytelling. Born from a mission to safeguard artistic autonomy, the program provides world-class photographers with the capital and technology to execute ambitious, non-commercial bodies of work. For Season 10, Andre Wagner joins an elite cohort of six global artists tasked with "Asking More" of their medium.

Photo London is back for another year, except not as you’ve seen it before. This year marks the photo fair’s debut at its new Olympia location, in Kensington. After celebrating its tenth anniversary last year, the fair has transitioned away from its usual Somerset House set-up, and now nestles into the historic National Hall venue, which is currently undergoing a £1.3 billion redevelopment led by Heatherwick Studio.

What's new at Photo London?

The new location means more space. This year, viewers can expect even more galleries and photographers to present their work. There is also a new ‘Source’ section which is dedicated to solo presentations by culturally significant artists including UP Gallery exhibiting work exploring Taiwanese identity by Wu Chia-Yun; Galerie Julian Sander presenting the late American photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon’s project Portraits; and ROLF Art bringing Santiago Porter’s deeply personal Piezas series.

There is also a new film screening room dedicated to artists' films and their role within photography including Sarah Moon’s film There is something about Lillian. The fair has also expanded its discovery section for emerging galleries featuring strong South Asian representation, along expansion of the publishers section.

Coupled with the new additions are returning favourites, including Master of Photography. The fair will also present a second edition of Positions which features unrepresented photographers.

As always, there is a lot to see, and slotting it all into a few compact days is difficult. However, if time permits, it would be recommended to see the work of fashion photographer Steven Meisel. Here the presentation includes his photography in London, and in particular his iconic ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitude’ series, which can be viewed at the Master of Photography exhibition.

In Source, enjoy the work of Peter Sillem who presents a series of prints by married-couple Ute and Werner Mahler, including a selection of their fashion photographs from behind the Berlin Wall in the days of the GDR. Making his Photo London debut, Julian Sander will present a personal tribute to his lifelong friend Rosalind Fox Solomon, who passed away last year. She was celebrated for her portraits of suffering and survival.

Also at Source, JEDNOSTKA presents works by Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka. Here, Gęsicka’s uses photography to question truth and reality using stock photography archives, AI image generation and digital manipulation.

In Discovery, transport to Ibiza through Agony and Ecstasy's debut. The gallery presents work by Catalan-Spanish photographer Oriol Maspons and German photographer Walter Rudolph. The presentation is rooted in deep visual nostalgia of Ibiza, taken between 1976 and 1985.

Mumbai-based art gallery Fulcrum presents Vasudhaa Narayanan’s imagery which captures gender, domesticity, and the body. Her work dives deep into the patriarchy, caste, and cultural conditioning, and looks at how women’s bodies become contested sites.

At Photo London’s the Positions section is used to platform photographic artists without gallery representation. Morocco-based Hicham Gardaf’s work looks at careful framing and the colour of the city, whereby his work becomes almost abstract. Motivated by social issues, Iranian photographer and documentary maker Tahmineh Monzari focuses on Iranian women and their roles in urban and rural cultures; while in Barcelona, Luis Casadevall captures fleeting encounters within the urban landscape using black and white photography.

The Main Section of the fair features galleries such as London’s The Photographers Gallery. Here they present work by Sayuri Ichida who looks at self-identity, memories and life experiences. PHOTOINK in New Delhi showcases Ketaki Sheth’s series ‘Twinspotting’. The story behind this series came about when Sheth married Aurobind Patel and moved to London. Once there she realised there were 30,000 registered Patels in the UK directory, Sheth began to take portraits of Patel twins in the UK, pairing them with Patel twins back in India.

Photo London founders Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, said: ‘We are incredibly proud of the team who have brought together an impressive group of galleries for the launch of this new era at Olympia, including newcomers from as far afield as India and Africa proving London is still a great draw for international galleries…it is clear that Photo London’s second decade has begun in formidable style.’

Photo London runs from 14-17 May 2026 at National Hall, Olympia Hammersmith Road London W14 8UX photolondon.org

What’s in a kiss? Quite a lot, actually. Intimacy, attraction, reassurance, love – kissing is a raw and primal way of searching for that elusive human connection.

Post-pandemic, the act of kissing became more vital than ever; laced with caution, it epitomised a shared trust in an unstable environment. It is a shift that fascinates Sweden-born, Los Angeles-based musical artist Tove Lo and photographer Kenny Laubbacher, who captured more than 600 candid moments of people kissing during Tove Lo’s 2023 ‘Dirt Femme’ tour.

The Kiss Book, shot across 15 countries and 18 cities, documents the results of crowds of tour attendees being asked to kiss. ‘All pictures were taken soon after the world fully reopened following the pandemic, when kissing and dancing in sweaty crowds still felt surreal and a little forbidden,’ the duo say. ‘This added a level of ecstasy to these moments and you can feel that energy in the photos.’

The photographs are a mash-up of hands, faces and embraces. There’s couples, throuples, crowds of friends and, occasionally, a disgruntled onlooker. Throughout, affection takes shape in the playful and the passionate. In their unflinching zooming in on a moment that is usually private, the photographs are always moving.

The tome's designers, creative director Charlie Twaddle with Samuel Burgess Johnson, intertwine these enduring elements through the book’s seductive red design. They say: ‘The choice of red as a colour serves as a symbol for flesh, while the red page edges reflect on the biblical concept of original sin in a “post distancing” society.’

The Kiss Book, £50, from Baron Books

Without already having context, it can be difficult to tell what the buildings that Dean Sameshima has photographed in the Wonderland series actually are. The names of the photos hint at erotic interiors, but at a glance, the buildings themselves are a world away from this promise. This seems to be the point: that these buildings, when devoid of the things that we might associate with them, end up blending into the background and becoming anonymous.

All of them are framed the same way: shot from across the road at a medium distance, presented with stark objectivity. They’re exteriors of sex clubs and bath houses around Silver Lake in Los Angeles and, presented by Soft Opening in London, around 30 years after Sameshima first captured the series (from 1995-97), the work takes on a new, more all-encompassing kind of emptiness. As queer spaces become increasingly precarious, and the policing of queer identity and desire becomes more violent, Sameshima’s images seem to have become haunted.

The entrances to these buildings are often hidden away in Sameshima’s photographs. In Untitled (Closed 1995), mesh screens conceal a door, turning the building – with the address ‘1800 Hyperion’ emblazoned on it in black letters – into an almost abstract space, its purpose unknown. In another, the door is cast under a shadow by the building’s awning.

The spaces, even from the outside, take on a kind of otherworldly quality; there’s a sense of something hidden behind these entrances that might elude a viewer on first glance, a world that can only be revealed by one who knows where to go to find it. The space of the gallery itself seems to highlight these ideas of impenetrability; rather than being vast and open, as it has been for previous exhibitions, here, Soft Opening is defined by a series of walls that divide up the gallery. Like the barriers and closed doors that Sameshima’s images highlight, it raises the question of exactly what lies beyond the threshold.

But the one threshold that seems to most concern the Wonderland series isn’t just about physical space; the way that the inner life of a building and its occupants can be hidden by an anonymous exterior. Instead, Sameshima’s work has, willingly or not, found itself on the precipice of time: an elegy or monument to what used to be. The absence of people in these images is impossible to ignore; with Sameshima having first taken the pictures in the mid-1990s, a decade after the worst of the AIDS crisis, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that even these spaces of queer desire are so often defined by the absence of bodies in and around them.

The world itself seems frozen in these images; in Untitled (Older Men, 1995), a blue building stands as a sentinel, its neon lettering switched off; the building to one side of it boarded up and covered with posters for gigs that have since been and gone. Sameshima has captured this world in a state of flux; one reeling from the AIDS crisis, and bracing itself for whatever is next to come.

Sameshima’s fragments of desire don’t just exist in urban spaces. Alongside his frozen bathhouses and sex clubs, the artist presents a series of exterior images; popular cruising spots in Griffith Park Los Angeles, and Harbour City Recreational Park in Lomita. As opposed to the stark, fragmented nature of the building photographs, Sameshima’s exteriors carry with them a kind of fragmented narrative; these are images that can read as a journey towards a thwarted or lost desire.

A series like Untitled (Griffith Park) seems to trace generations-old footsteps, propelled by a powerful, voyeuristic force, searching for the people that may have once been here. There’s a temptation when looking at these images to crane your neck, to try and get a sense of what might just be lurking beyond the corner, if, just out of view, there’s another body.

If there’s a central question that ties together the buildings and public spaces that make up Wonderland, its what, if anything, can be done with this emptiness. Through a spare, objective lens, Sameshima refuses to offer meaningful answers about either the cause of the absence in his photos, or a sense of what – if anything – can be done in the face of emptiness and loss.

These innocent-looking building façades, and fragments of parks seem to refute the idea of any kind of narrative – whether it's a narrative through time, or the arc of desire to a satisfying conclusion. Yes, this might be frustrating, but that frustration seems to be the point. Even the curation of the show itself speaks to this; the walls between photographs, and the fact that, at the end of it all is another image of another shuttered building. There are no answers here, and nor, the show seems to be hinting, could there ever be.

While Sameshima’s photographs carry with them evidence of the wider world – next to one of these buildings is a sign for a Dolly Maddison Bakery, a sign warning ‘beware of dog’ – it’s a world that remains spare, cold, lacking in humanity. While there is no wonderland at the bottom of Sameshima’s rabbit hole, there is still a place well worth spending time; even as it (deliberately) frustrates, and feels heavy with loss.

Dean Sameshima at Soft Opening until 23 May 2026

softopening.london

When asked about the last time he made a photograph that surprised him, Christopher Anderson goes quiet. 'You're going to make me cry,' he says, and he sounds like he means it. It hasn't happened in a while. For someone who has spent the better part of three decades with a camera in his hand, that admission is not a small one. But what follows matters more than the admission itself. Making new book Index, he says, has pulled him back somewhere. 'I feel ready to start making real pictures again. I don't know exactly what it's going to be, but I feel ready to be open to that now.'

What connects Anderson's work across time is not subject matter but perspective. His presence in the image is the constant, whether he's in a conflict zone, the Oval Office or his own kitchen. Born in Canada and raised in west Texas, he first gained international recognition in 1999 when he boarded a small wooden boat with 44 Haitian immigrants attempting to sail to America. The boat sank in the Caribbean, and the photographs earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2000.

What followed was years of conflict work and magazine commissions, including a tenure shooting for New York Magazine. Becoming a father in 2008 led to an intensely personal body of work about his family, published across three books: Son, Pia and Marion. He now lives in Paris, where he has been based since 2019. Last December, his portraits of the Trump administration for Vanity Fair brought his work to an audience far beyond the photography world. Index, published by Stanley/Barker, is where much of this work now sits together for the first time.

The idea was not a retrospective, with all the tidiness that such curation implies, but something closer to the experience of opening boxes in a studio and finding things you'd forgotten you'd made. Eleven volumes, placed in deliberate proximity: photojournalism, portraiture, family, street photography, selfies. The ghost of William Eggleston's The Democratic Forest (his own ten-volume exercise in photographing without hierarchy, made across the 1980s) is somewhere in the background. Anderson didn't set out to invoke it, he says, but acknowledges the kinship. 'There is a little bit of that idea. A lot of these photographs are the constant act of seeing.'

Not every volume announces itself. The cars – interiors shot in passing, with no particular reason attached – are closer to a reflex than a project. 'There's not really a reason to photograph them. It's sort of a compulsive action,' he says. He talks about the search for patterns, about marking his place in time, a kind of geotagging. Emotional coordinates rather than aesthetic statements. In that sense, they are perhaps not so different from the rest of his personal work; the same impulse, finding different surfaces.

The White House volume is a different story. He had gone in with a journalist's brief, to photograph honestly, without flattery or the smoothing instincts of celebrity portraiture. The internet read it as a provocation. Images became memes, political ammunition, evidence of intent he hadn't had. He wasn't rattled so much as fascinated. 'I never could imagine that the pictures would jump the guardrails the way they did,' he says. He's long been accustomed to images taking on lives of their own once published, but nothing had prepared him for that particular velocity. The approach itself was nothing new; he'd been making political portraits this way since his 2014 book Stump – close, unretouched, unsparing. What the reaction revealed, he suggests, is less about the photographs than about how completely we have stopped expecting to see politicians as they actually are.

Going back through his archive for Index, Anderson kept finding absences. Moments he'd been present for and never photographed, because at the time his eye was too selective, too ruled by ideas about light or composition or what constituted a worthy image. 'I just wish I had a picture of that thing, regardless of how nice the light was.' The conclusion he draws is not complicated: photograph everything. Not because everything is equally beautiful, but because you don't yet know what will matter, or when. 'It's all important in the end.'

The book also includes an imagined conversation with Werner Herzog, which Anderson refers to in passing as 'the fake interview'. It articulates something he returns to in conversation too: that an archive is not a fixed thing. Meanings shift. Images that seemed unremarkable at the time begin to hold something that wasn't legible yet. He compares photographs to wine, for the way they keep transforming in the bottle.

'I long for being in love with photography the way I used to be,' he says. The past tense is there, but so is something else. Not nostalgia exactly, more like hunger. He doesn't know what comes next; perhaps only that he's ready to be surprised again.

Long before UK hip-hop and electronic music were globally recognised, Eddie Otchere and Normski were capturing culture in motion, documenting dancefloors and scenes as they unfolded in real time. From the birth of British drum ’n’ bass, breakdancing and raves to the early intersections of rap, sound system culture, jungle and garage, their images amplified Black British identity and celebrated youth expression at a pivotal moment in music history.

As analogue architects, they documented homegrown movements while tracing the crossover of artists from New York, LA, and Detroit through a British lens. Their photos captured the energy, chaos, imperfection, and intimacy of both superstar subjects and underground subcultures on film in a way that could neither be manipulated nor replicated. From Wu-Tang Clan goofing around in east London to De La Soul in a grimy Brixton alley, and Estelle in the Bronx with an image that propelled her from London to the Grammys with ‘American Boy’.

Eddie Otchere is a cultural chronicler, educator, and author who treats his cameras as an extension of his heart. Born in Brixton with Ghanaian roots, he cut his teeth in the communities he would later document. As jungle breakbeats were beamed from pirate radio to London’s estates, he positioned himself not as an outsider but as an archivist of lived experience. Hand-picked as the official photographer for Goldie’s Metalheadz club night in the mid-1990s, he also captured Aaliyah on the verge of fame on a sunny hotel balcony in Swiss Cottage and shot headshots of every member of Wu-Tang Clan, producing some of their most enduring images. Today, he continues to document a new generation, from UK junglist Sherelle to Jamaican reggae titan Chronixx.

Normski is a natural-born hustler and sharp shooter. Born Norman Anderson and raised in a Jamaican household in north London, he built his first darkroom at 12 and taught himself to develop film before most kids picked up a camera. His magnetic prowess led him to document the birth of Detroit techno, East LA girl gangs, voice a generation as the electrifying host of the BBC’s Dance Energy and become an in-demand DJ. His archive includes some of the earliest, seminal shots of Public Enemy, Salt-N-Pepa, N.W.A., Ice-T, and the Juice Crew on London soil. Incalculably tenacious, he shot on the fly, sometimes cold-calling magazines from payphones with his last 25p to sell images before they were even developed. Today, he remains a pivotal ambassador of UK hip-hop.

In 2026, both their passions are still fuelled by storytelling and future chapters. Their work has appeared in i-D, The Face, Melody Maker, NME, Hip Hop Connection, and far beyond. They’ve both published hit biographies, including Normski: The Man With the Golden Shutter, Otchere’s Who Say Reload: The Stories Behind the Classic Drum 'n' Bass Records of the ’90s, and Spirit Behind the Lens: The Making of a Hip Hop Photographer. Their photos have hung in galleries worldwide, and now at V&A East as part of ‘The Music is Black’, a landmark exhibition marking 125 years of Black British music shaping culture.

For the first time, both photographers have come together in this interview to celebrate the impact of their images.

Ultramagnetic MCs

Normski: I’ve heard people compare my photos to an adrenaline shot; Ultramagnetic MCs, 1989 at Dingwalls, is exactly that. I love this photo. I titled it ‘Yo! Bum Rush the Show!’ after Public Enemy’s debut album, and because it was the wildest rushing of backstage doors I’ve ever witnessed.

At that time, Ultramagnetic MCs were one of the most dynamic, brilliant rap groups ever. Everyone who was into ‘real’ hip-hop was at that gig. It was a big deal, and the photo means a lot to me, not least because Dingwalls was my local.

A lot of US acts didn’t realise they had a fanbase here; people just like them, living the music. Hip-hop closed those gaps and brought people together.

The gig was totally oversold, and Dingwalls was teeny. Promoters thought hip-hop was a fad, like skateboarding in the 1970s. But the crowd rushed in so fast that I had to jump on stage to avoid getting crushed. I had no idea how bright my flash was, but it was powerful enough to capture faces, even outside.

In the end, they did the show with the back door open so folks could listen from the street.

So Solid Crew

Eddie: When garage came along, I wanted to contribute to that iconography by working with So Solid Crew and lock into those guys. Especially because they were local to me, Battersea people, who shared the same hood.

I set up a lot of their early photos, and had already shot Lisa Mafia, Romeo and Mega Man when I was commissioned to do the press shot for their defining track, ‘21 Seconds’.

I brought in Karen Binns (a superstar stylist) to style the shoot and the video, which was an executive move. That was an executive move. Garage kids weren’t afraid to be seen; jungle kids didn’t want to be seen. So when I told them, ‘I’m getting the best stylist in the world,’ they ran with it, ‘Whatever she costs, we’re in.’

On set, I was teasing them: ‘If you’re a crew, where’s the crew? We need that shot.’

That Saturday afternoon in Battersea, their whole crew pulled up. Kids were just walking out from the estates into the local park. I knew the spot because of the gas towers, proper south London. They’d just landed a big deal, and even though I told them not to spend the money on cars, Romeo and Mega Man both rolled up with Audis. To me, that image summarises the garage era. It's the photo I wasn’t paid for, but knew we needed.

It ended up in the VHS insert for the high-budget ‘21 Seconds’ video, which had its own Leicester Square red carpet premiere. The track went to number one, won a MOBO, was performed on the Top of the Pops Christmas special and is now hanging in V&A East.

Goldie

Normski: Eddie and I were probably the only two people who ever took pictures in Metalheadz. There was only one light above the DJ. It was dark as hell in there! It wasn’t about being seen; it was about being beaten up by the bassline and the riddim. Men used to be in the corner burning greenery, everyone was flying off of their heads. The place was crazy! A proper jump up!

That’s why this photo has a lot of meaning to me because that was my introduction to this sound and culture that was like ‘This is fucking me man! I love this shit!’ I went in there with a little snapping camera in my pocket. I didn’t push it too hard because it was not comfortable when a flash went off in that place! People hated that! That was ungracious behaviour.

Goldie used to walk around that club high-pitch whistling, so loud when the track dropped and making sure everyone was happy (I won’t try to do it cuz I’ll probably blow some teeth out.) But in this photograph, if you look at it closely, you can see my fist at the bottom of it. I called him over

Kemistry and Storm

Eddie: This photograph is a diptych taken in 1995 of drum ’n’ bass trailblazers Kemistry (1963-1999) and Storm. After linking with Goldie, they co-founded the Metalheadz label and launched the Sunday sessions at the Blue Note that became foundational to the UK drum’n’bass scene and cemented the club’s place in a wider musical revolution. I was deep in and documenting.

Goldie controlled the visual narrative; no one took a picture without his say. He handpicked me to capture the warmth, intensity, and essence. For me, this is the golden image.

Kemistry and Storm were the queens. They were the heads of the label, heads of the DJ line-ups, they ran all the business and made sure that all the boys, many with massive egos, turned up on time. They set the tone and tempo of what happened in the room, while Goldie and everyone else worked under them. I don’t think it’s said enough about how many women cultured and cultivated drum ’n’ bass to be what it is. This diptych encapsulates that. Storm's looking out to the crowd while Kemi's looking down at herself, keeping her eye on the decks.

De La Soul

Normski: Here’s De La in one of my 'five-minute sessions.' It was their first big gig at Brixton Academy. I had a girlfriend, Bliss, who DJ’d on a pirate station, and she said, ‘De La Soul are here! We’ve got to go. I’ve got an idea: get some daisies for the D.A.I.S.Y. Age,’ because that was De La Soul’s acronym for ‘Da Inner Sound, Y’all.’ They were rappers who weren’t about hypermasculinity or luxury, but instead about peace, culture, and harmony.

So I went to Camden Market, spent £1.50 on these dry daisies, caught the train to Brixton and blagged my way in. I caught De La right as they were about to go on stage, but promised I’d be quick.

We ended up in this tiny gap behind the venue, in the back street. It’s nighttime, and I’ve got my little softbox flash out, trying to light three faces with one bulb. I take a few shots, then say, 'Guys, would you mind holding these?' and pull out the beat-up bunch. They’re like, 'Not really! Why the fuck would we be holding those?!' I explain the concept. They go, 'Alright, cool,' but you can tell from the photo they’re not fully 'cool'.

The photo came out great. No one had thought to shoot them that way before. That’s what I love about connecting with a subject’s message and translating it visually.

Method Man

Eddie: Picture editors always asked me to shoot acts that essentially terrified them, and Wu-Tang most certainly fit that brief. They had a reputation for lifting the air with blunts, being loud like an army sharpening swords, and carrying the spirit of gladiators. I’ve been lucky enough to photograph every member and have plenty of yarns from that time.

Ol’ Dirty Bastard once asked me to destroy the negatives. That moment has never left me. I watched the entire Wu-Tang Clan getting passport photos taken in a booth at Earl’s Court station. Popa Wu invited me onto their bus, where we listened to Stax records from Putney to Kentish Town. It was my first encounter with them, and their first time outside the US.

The Method Man photograph feels definitive of that era of Black British music culture. I shot it on Ilford HP5+ British film in a scrubby space behind the Forum, while Masta Killa and Ghostface were scaling walls like Spider-Man. These NYC kids were like comic book characters showing off their superpowers. Method Man came over and said, 'Let me show you a trick.' He pulled his cap strap over his eye, snapped his eyelid back and made the face, the rest is history.

The vibe reminds me of cult vigilante films Death Wish 1,2 and 3 which were filmed in the brillantly gritty east London which was meant to be the Bronx.

She Rockers

American hip hop was about shiny clothes and afros, fur coats, crocodile skin shoes. The golden era was colours, flare and noise. Rappers wore varsity jackets and old-school shit I loved, like FILA tracksuits and big Porsche glasses.

Our look in the UK was based on the reggae/raggamuffin scene. It was Clarks, corduroys, pin rolls, argon socks, yeah! Just a completely different take on it, and an independent identity.

I took this promo shot of the She Rockers, a pioneering British all-female hip-hop group in Shepherds Bush. They were wearing high-top Adidas Erwing trainers, layering the chunky gold jewellery of Black Atlantic hip-hop scene with their own identity. They’re projecting that sexuality isn’t about showing skin, it's about looking cool and being accessorised with plenty of attitude. This picture has been reposted and repurposed more times than I can count, and was acquired by the V&A museum for its cultural significance in depicting the Black experience in the UK.

Normski on Eddie: Estelle

One photographer, I've admired from the day I met him, was Eddie. If someone asks me ‘Who’s the best other UK photographer?’ I’d say Eddie Otchere, straight away. You know why? Because Eddie's always loved photography, he loves taking pictures, he loves the cameras and playing with all different types of film. He'd rock up carrying a Rollieflex camera or some secondhand old piece of shit and take a beautiful shot. He’s not somebody who takes pictures, he’s a master artist of the photography world.

He came up about ten years after me, at that point, magazines only wanted to feature me as a TV star, a celeb. I was the one who started it, yeah, but I also stepped back when I got on TV, just as everything I loved was beginning to happen, when Eddie kicked up and I thought, ‘Damn. He’s shooting everything I wanted to shoot.’ He was working for all the magazines, getting the time to really capture people and transform British artists into stars across the globe without the 'grab-the-shot mentality' I’d had.

Eddie on Normski: Public Enemy

Junglist Lads

Eddie: You asked me to select a photo I’ve taken that feels definitive of Black British music culture and this is it; Junglist lads outside an old Jungle record shop (with its own folklore) called De Underground in Forest Gate.

Silver Bullet Posse

Normski: I love this photo. It’s a perfect example of 1990s street style and commanding your environment. Different races, different haircuts, different fashion, taken on the steps of a Lloyds Bank.

Looking back now, I realise I was one of the only people photographing a burgeoning 1980s/90s era. A load of my work is just portraits of young, mostly Black, inner-city kids. It was a moment in culture and society where, had I not taken these photographs, there would be far fewer records of that scene.

‘The Music is Black: A British Story’ is at V&A East until 3 January 2027

Faces and Phases, the groundbreaking portrait series to address the discrimination and systematic violence facing Black LGBTQIA+ individuals in South Africa, is marking its 20^th anniversary this year. The photographic and narrative project was created by South African photographer Zanele Muholi to address the (under)representation of members of the communities in mainstream visual culture and to help change negative narratives about queer people on the continent. The body of work features hundreds of powerful black-and-white portraits.

'I want people to know that we are here, we were here before and we will always be here without fear of exclusion or being excluded, without fear of being side lined, without fear of being undermined because any person who says I am and comes forth means that they are doing that on behalf of many others who are silenced by immediate spaces from their churches to schools to workplaces,' says Muholi to Wallpaper* about the beginnings of producing what is now 'the most important Black visual archive' focusing on Black lesbian, trans and queer communities, having seen how they are depicted in mainstream media.

The individuals featured in Faces and Phases are 'participants who are partaking in the most important study of our lifetime,' as the self-described visual activist puts it. They are all 18 or older and are openly themselves. It is a deliberate decision by the artist to ensure that 'I present my people in the most positive, healthiest, and dignified manner to educate many others within the continent and the African continent to say that hear us, respect us, and recognise us because our existence saves lives.'

That’s the kind of practice that Muholi is renowned for both locally and internationally: bringing visibility to Black lesbian, trans, and queers communities, and addressing prejudice, discrimination, stereotypes and violence aimed at members of these communities. The artist has been teaching photography for over 20 years, extending that to include uplifting initiatives that provide photography lessons to young people and Black women in townships and rural areas in South Africa, as a way 'for them to write their own stories.'

The Muholi Art Institute partners with visual art teachers in South Africa and sponsors students on trips to art fairs, museums, and galleries to experience what they are taught in class and to interact with practising artists and other professionals in the field. The institute also hosts an independent artists’ residency. For about a decade and a half, Muholi has funded close to 200 people to study photography at the Market Photo Workshop, a renowned Johannesburg photography school which counts the artist as an alumnus. 'In that way, I’m not alone and people get to share their visibility as well and at the same time get some qualifications to produce work in their communities and surrounding areas,' shares the artist, adding the idea is 'not to enjoy your own resources but to share with different communities in the most kind manner.'

In early March, Muholi was named the 2026 laureate of the prestigious Hasselblad Award, the world’s largest photography prize which acknowledges the artist’s 'powerful and sustained contribution to contemporary art,' and pointing out 'activism and community work is an integral part of their practice, which combines political urgency and formal mastery, making Muholi a central figure in global queer visual culture.' Previous winners of the Hasselblad award include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, David Goldblatt, Malick Sidibé and Carrie Mae Weems. 'It means a whole lot. It’s for all of us,' says Muholi, referring to Black Lesbian, queer and trans communities. 'It’s not for me. And it means that the world is listening.'

Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in the early 2000s, and later earned an MFA in Documentary Media at Toronto’s Ryerson University in 2009. In 2013, the artist was named an Honorary Professor of video and photography at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, Germany (2013), and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège in Belgium in 2023.

For over twenty years, Muholi has been at the forefront of celebrating and documenting the lives of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex communities through photography, helping to shift narratives and expand conversations about activism, representation, race, identity, and human rights. These themes are reflected in a growing number of projects, including Only half the Picture (2003-4) on lesbian lives and hate crime survivors, Brave Beauties (2014-ongoing), which celebrates transwomen and Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) (2014-ongoing, a self-portrait series which challenges stereotypes and representation of Black people in visual culture.

'Before I am a photographer, I am a visual activist living in the art world trying to make a difference to ensure that there is visibility of Black bodies in mainstream photography,' explains Muholi. 'And it basically means that for the next generations, they have a sense of who we are as individuals, as communities, as gender non-conforming people and also human beings who are making a difference in this lifetime,' adds Muholi.

Some of these works by the photographer are held in collections including the Pinault Collection (France), Tate Modern (United Kingdom), Museum of Modern Art (United States), Foundation Louis Vuitton (France), and Wits Art Museum (South Africa) The work has also been show in solo and group shows around the world including at Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Fotografiska Stockholm, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.

On 10 October through 24 April 2027, Muholi’s work will be on view in a major solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, as part of their Hasselblad Award prize, which includes SEK 2,000,000 (about £163,000), a gold medal and a Hasselblad camera. The solo show’s opening will be preceded by a week of public events and the award ceremony on 9 October.

'I am here because of the community that helped me,' says Muholi, adding, 'we owe it to ourselves to make sure that there is a visual archive that speaks to the moment, and speaks to the future as well.'

The twin fascinations of fallen Empire and urban exploration collide in photographer Eric Lusito’s new book, Soviet Scientific Institutes. A visual essay chronicling the catastrophic decline in funding and research in the post-Soviet era, Lusito’s camera takes us on a fascinating tour of the faded relics of communism’s utopian and authoritarian grip on the country’s scientific endeavours.

An introduction by history professor Paul Josephson frames these images in context, chronicling how the focus on science became one of the driving philosophical and economic forces behind the Soviet Union’s national identity. This was coupled with the distinctive aesthetic qualities of the era’s analogue technology, bombastic scale and a commonplace incorporation of vivid elements of art and design.

There’s an obvious retro-tinged delight in these images, along with poignant schadenfreude at the combination of misplaced optimism and downright mystery that underpins the relationship between these places with Cold War militarism. Whole communities were dedicated to such ‘Big Science’ projects, often closed off from the rest of society.

Lusito’s journey took him around the sites that still exist in the USSR’s former republics and satellites (access in Russia being somewhat difficult). Despite the obvious decay and apparent obsolescence, some of these facilities are still very much in operation.

Facilities visited include a cosmic ray research centre located deep in the Armenian mountains and a vast radar array in Ukraine, apparently ‘believed to be a climate-altering weapon’ by local residents.

Soviet Scientific Institutes, Eric Lusito, £26.95, Fuel Publishing, Fuel-Design.com, @FuelPublishing

Hans Hansen is not necessarily well known to anyone but the most studious of photographic historians. Throughout a long career, the self-taught German photographer has quietly carved a niche as a master of still life and commercial image-making. His work explores colour and composition, as well as drawing lessons from modern artistic movements, resulting in some of the most striking and memorable product images of the 1970s, 1980s and beyond.

Curated by Dr Esther Ruelfs and Claire Müller, ‘Photo: Hans Hansen’ is a large-scale retrospective of Hansen’s work, a collection of 220 photographs that cover every aspect of a six-decade career. Hansen’s clients have included brands such as Volkswagen, Kodak, Erco, Nikon and Lufthansa.

In unskilled hands, his stark compositions and use of light and shadow would create stark, lifeless imagery, but somehow, Hansen ekes out the playful and the unexpected, creating images that have formed the heart of influential campaigns in the process.

Born in Bielefeld in 1940, Hans Hansen studied lithography and Applied Graphics at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, although he never graduated. Working with a medium-format Rolleiflex camera, Hansen began his career with a collaboration capturing the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala’s glass collaborations with Iittala.

Hansen used the camera as a compositional and creative tool, part informed by the era’s rediscovery and rehabilitation of the Bauhaus and other modern movements. This is photographic minimalism, to be sure, but it’s also technically precise.

Among the images on display are his seminal vision of the 1988 Volkswagen Golf, dismantled into 6,843 constituent parts. This advertising photograph was actually an update of an earlier campaign for the VW Beetle, part of the ‘Think Small’ series commissioned by the pioneering New York ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach.

Working with the deep-pocketed auto industry – he also worked for Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Fiat – also helped Hansen acquire studio space and technology, including custom flash units. He was able to deploy the unexpected use of colour to highlight form and brand, taking car photography away from its serious, quasi-scientific roots.

His work for Lufthansa was paired with the typography of Otl Aicher, showcasing the very best in German creativity. Other specialities included the use of abstracted series, especially for the work done for lighting manufacturer Erco, as well as food photography and his own personal projects, including the most recent, Analog.

The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg manages Hans Hansen’s 10,000-strong slide archive, as well as his personal collection of art glass, documentation and correspondence. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to revisit the work of this pioneering photographer.

‘Photo: Hans Hansen’ is at MKG Hamburg from 17 April to 1 November 2026.

For more information, visit MKG-Hamburg.de, @MKGhamburg, Hansen.Works

You might remember Prince as many things: one of music’s most thrillingly talented and innovative stars; a polymath who created his own artistic HQ Paisley Park to realise the extent of his ambitions; a symbol both figuratively and, for a short name-change period, literally, who still defines the colour purple. But for Steve Parke, Prince was both a boss and a friend – a man who offered him the chance to expand his own artistic remit and was notably generous with the opportunities he gifted to those around him.

Parke first began working with Prince aged 25 during the rollout of his 1988 album ‘Lovesexy’. Having shown some of his artwork to a member of Prince’s touring band, he was offered the chance to design part of the stage set for the video of single ‘Glam Slam’ and was then taken into the fold, designing T-shirts, helping with creative odd jobs and, later, painting what would become the sleeve for 1990’s ‘Graffiti Bridge’ LP.

'We learned on the job, for sure,' Parke recalls. '[Prince] would say, ‘If you can do this, I wonder if you can do this?’ And he would ask if you'd want to try it. That was pretty amazing because, when I look back on it, I don't know too many other musicians at his level at that time who would have done that.'

One such opportunity came in 1996 when, intrigued by the slowly proliferating availability of the still-burgeoning digital camera, Prince asked Parke – who already had experience in analogue live music photography – to test out the new technology with him. Already ensconced in the inner circle of Paisley Park, the shoots would be spontaneous and on the fly; a pair of artists experimenting with the immediacy of working digitally in real time. 'We worked by the seat of our pants, we didn’t really employ traditional techniques,' he explains. 'He was very enamoured with the idea that we could just shoot and he could see it right away, so the casualness [of the photos] came from the fact that we could just do it. It's like having a cell phone now – you take a ridiculous number of photos; way more than you would if you were using film. That's what was different about having this immediate feedback. It gave him a lot of freedom to just try things.'

Aside from a handful of images that were selected as promo shots, most of these pictures have remained unseen until now. But in his new two-volume book Prince: Collected Photographs, Parke throws open his extensive archive to let the world into the inner workings of the legend’s visual process. There are photos of Prince at his Paisley Park home and with his first wife Mayte Garcia and dog Mia; others show him messing about at a children’s playground, or in different outfits that he’d cycle through in the same shoot, trying to find the vision that clicked.

Importantly, all the images are ones that Prince – who passed away in 2016 – had OK-ed at the time. 'I feel confident in sharing them because these are all things he approved,' Parke notes. It means that, a decade after Prince’s death, and having spent significant time debating how best to share the work (the first volume is presented in black and white as a work-around for the colouring issues that they faced by shooting in such an off the cuff manner), fans are now able to get a glimpse of the notoriously meticulously and aesthetically-minded artist in a more casual setting. 'It was just the two of us and there was no outside pressure on any of it,” says Parke. “A lot of the shots didn't have a deadline or a specific purpose, so I definitely see the work reflecting more of the person I would see on a daily basis rather than the rock star – even though there are those pictures too.'

Parke’s favourite shots in the collection are from a day spent with the artist at a local arboretum. The pictures are casual and intimate - a snapshot of a moment that the photographer recalls fondly. 'I think that’s the only time I can think of when it was just the two of us with no-one to pull him away. Anytime we were in the studio, his brain would be in all the other things he had going on. But when we were out in the arboretum, there were no cell phones and nobody was going to bother him. It was a beautiful day that sticks in my mind just because it was so unusual on so many fronts,' Parke remembers.

And while the hundreds of images shown in Prince: Collected Works speak to the hefty expectations at Paisley Park ('You were put through the ringer a little bit with the number of hours you were awake and the amount of stuff you were expected to produce,' Parke laughs), the photographer’s main takeaway, having spent the last years trawling his archives and remembering his storied time under Prince’s employment, is of how much the artist cared about putting the time in. When most people were sleeping on the advent of new technology, Prince was the one testing the waters, and working out how to use it to his advantage.

'He didn't take his skill set for granted. He worked at it. He pushed it,' says Parke. 'He is one of the hardest-working people I've ever met and I’ve worked with some pretty hardworking people. The difference with Prince was that he put the work in and a lot of people don't.'

Prince: Collected Photographs is published April 14th via ACC Art Books.

In 2015, the photographer Joel Meyerowitz found himself in the preserved studio of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). Casa Morandi at 36 Via Fondazza in Bologna – a museum that was formed from the artist’s studio and residence after his death – retains the physical legacy of a lifetime of close looking, and is filled with the objects that were the subject matter of Morandi’s celebrated still-life works.

The result of Meyerowitz’s visit was a celebrated and now sought-after book, Morandi’s Objects, first published in 2016 by Damiani. Now, the photographer has revisited his imagery from that trip, creating a new, expanded edition of the book that delves deeper into his relationship with the artist and his lasting influence.

Meyerowitz is not the only visual artist to find solace in Morandi’s totemic imagery – Bridget Niedermair published Horizon in 2016, and countless architects cite the solemn stillness of his compositions as inspiration. Morandi's paintings can be seen in the background of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

In 2023, Amanda Renshaw curated an exhibition of Morandi’s Objects at Venice’s Palazzo Franchetti. On the occasion of the new publication, Wallpaper* discussed the updated book and the work of the Italian artist with Meyerowitz.

Wallpaper*: Before you started this project, did you consider Morandi an influence on your work?

Joel Meyerowitz: No, Morandi was not a direct influence on my work because I wasn't really a still-life photographer; I was a street photographer. I loved Morandi for his work and for the mystery and spatial joys of looking at this work. I really felt like I had learned a lot from seeing the way he used simple things to make really profound statements, but he wasn’t a direct influence on the work I had done before going to his studio.

W*: What drew you to this project? For art historians, these mostly pragmatic objects are almost sacred – how did it reflect your choice of framing and backdrop?

JM: I had a commission to do a book on Provence. While in Provence, I went to visit Cézanne’s studio in Aix-En-Provence. While in Cézanne’s studio, I noticed he had painted the walls of his studio a dark grey, and on a table against the grey wall, he had painted his still lifes, which were mostly fruit. You’ve seen his apples and oranges; sometimes there were skulls, and sometimes there were some sculptural objects, and occasionally there were bottles in his still lifes.

I was interested in why he used grey. In our contemporary artistic culture, artist studios are generally white boxes. So I began to think about the grey background, and how it made things stand out for themselves, without the contrast of the white wall with the given object.

So when I went back to the place I was living, in Bonnieux, Provence, I set up, as a test for myself, a grey background, and I started putting objects on it to see if I could come up with a really good answer as to why Cezanne did that. I became so interested in moving objects around on a grey background that I felt like I was opening myself – for the first time – to still lifes.

Then, at some point, I returned to Tuscany, where I was living, and I thought, ‘I’m going to go to Bologna and visit Morandi’s studio’; I heard you could go in and see where he worked. So, I went to Bologna, looked at Morandi’s work surface, and saw it was totally different from Cézanne’s, and Cézanne was an influence on Morandi.

My point is, I became interested in objects on backgrounds, because I had never done still lifes. Suddenly, I found myself asking a question. What is a still life, to me? That led me to make more of my own still lifes, and at some point, I thought I would go to Morandi’s house, to that studio, and ask the curators if I could photograph all of his objects and do it on his work table, so that I could show the world what it was Morandi was working with, and how he transformed them.

It was a really simple way of honouring Morandi’s huge effort, over all those years. I promised myself not to assemble objects to create ‘faux Morandis’; I just wanted to show the interested public what those objects looked like, so they could see for themselves how he played with them.

W*: The presentation and framing of the objects is – inevitably – very painterly. Your work has covered a huge variety of subjects, events and places, often capturing dynamic moments. How does photographing static objects compare to this diversity, especially in terms of lighting and framing?

JM: In this case, to honour a single object meant that when I put it on Morandi’s table, the game I played was turning each object slowly and carefully, so as to not remove any of the dust on the object. I carefully turned the object around, so I could see all of its faces, to see if there was one face that spoke to me more than any other position as I turned it.

And it was true! There were objects that, as I turned them, suddenly had character, as if they stood up strong and tall. It might have been from a dent in it, scratches on it, or some angle of it that gave it a presence.

I was looking for presence. Did these objects have their own character, and the question that I asked after that was, did Morandi do that himself, when he was playing with these figures that he was putting on his work surface? Did he turn them around the same way, to see if they offered him a new presence, new energy, a new point of view?

I think I was simply trying to honour each individual object. I never moved the camera; the camera stayed in the same position for the 300 objects I photographed there. That way, they would always be the same size, as Morandi saw them, and the same size for the public to look at them.

What I learned from Morandi’s assembling of objects was that for many years, when I was working on the street, and still true to today, when I raise my camera, its usually because there’s a cluster of people on the street, presenting some kind of field of force, some kind of energy, and some interaction between a group of three or four people who are walking together, and perhaps a couple, off to the right or left of this cluster.

I feel an energy in the space of the street, the light of the street. I tried to translate that into the still lifes that I was making for myself. I was using street energy, or ‘street assembly’, as my thematic undertone to give my arrangement of forms some kind of new feeling, or something that I recognised from the unpredictable outside world I worked in. So, in that regard, I can understand the joys that Morandi gained by playing with his objects over and over again for all his years.

Morandi's Objects. The Complete Archive of Casa Morandi, Joel Meyerowitz, texts by Joel Meyerowitz, Maggie Barrett and Amanda Renshaw, Damiani, €55, DamianiBooks.com, JoelMeyerowitz.com, MuseiBologna.it

To the uninitiated, 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan is just another New York address. To those in the know, it’s the location of the unforgettable Chelsea Hotel, once the byword for rock’n’roll excess and general 70s seediness. The 12-storey Queen Anne revival structure is still there and hosting guests, albeit in a far more upmarket capacity than the legends tell.

The Hotel Chelsea (Chelsea Hotel is how it came to be known in its heyday) is the subject of a new photobook from Albert Scopin, born Albert Schöpflin in 1943 and now an acclaimed artist working on large scale pieces using asphalt as a primary material. Scopin ‘moved to New York in 1969, the day after the moon landing’ and ended up in the Chelsea Hotel for his first two and a half years in the city.

Whilst making a name for himself as a photographic assistant, Scopin also turned his camera on his fellow Chelsea Hotel dwellers. This eclectic bunch of artists, filmmakers, musicians and hangers-on made for a rich environment for portraiture, even if at the time many of the people he photographed were largely unknown.

It’s remarkable to look through these pages and see the nascent New York scene emerge, with portraits of, among others, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, then a couple, as well as filmmakers like Wim Wenders and Milos Forman. Avant-garde director Jonas Mekas also lived in the Hotel, as did the late queer activist Rosa von Praunheim.

It was a target rich environment for a photographer (Scopin was working as an assistant to fashion photographer Bill King at the time), yet remarkably Scopin set this portfolio of images aside, believed them to be lost, and wasn't reunited with them for over four decades. In addition to an exhibition at Berlin’s FWR Gallery, this new monograph assembles these rediscovered images and places them in their historic context.

As well as the assembled emerging art crowd, Scopin captured those that worked at the Chelsea, as well as the incipient squalor that was to grant the establishment such notoriety towards the end of this stage of its life (it was the infamous location of Nancy Spungen’s murder at the hands of Sid Vicious in 1978. A few decades before Dylan Thomas had also died at the hotel).

Using a simple Kodak Instamatic, Scopin’s candid imagery captures the bohemian underworld in all its unvarnished glory, with Warhol’s Factory acolytes serving at bit part players amidst a cast of genuine eccentrics and innovators. A valuable piece of artistic, social and LGBTQ+ history.

Scopin: Chelsea Hotel, € 38.00, texts by Albert Scopin Schöpflin, Michael Stoeber, Kerber, KerberVerlag.com, Amazon.co.uk, feldbuschwiesnerrudolph.com

When Gordon Parks picked up a camera in 1937, aged 25, Black Americans around him were processing the repercussions of the Civil War. In 1865, four million enslaved people were emancipated; while they attempted to build their lives over the ensuing decades, they were subjected to humiliating racial segregation laws, mob violence and lynching, and denied a vote.

Parks, born into poverty and segregation, was a witness to it all. After buying a Voigtländer Brillant camera from a Seattle pawn shop for less than $12, he taught himself to take photographs. In 1948, Parks was hired by Life magazine, the first Black staff member, writing articles to accompany his photo essays, which emphasised the dignity and resilience of his subjects.

Many of Parks’ vital works, including his Segregation in the South series and portrait of Dr Martin Luther King Jr as he delivered his landmark ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, have now been united in London in a curation at Alison Jacques gallery, overseen by social justice activist Bryan Stevenson.

Stevenson, who received the Martin Luther King Jr Nonviolent Peace Prize in 2018, and was named by Time as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2015, brings a sharp eye to his curation, which spans a 25-year period, from 1942 to 1967. The exhibition, titled ‘We Shall Not be Moved’, is named after the protest anthem that stemmed from the African American spiritual song ‘I Shall Not Be Moved’, indicating steely resolve.

For Stevenson, Parks’ role as a humanitarian becomes the central focus. ‘In some ways, Gordon Parks was a role model,’ he says. ‘He's helped me see the importance of narrative in advancing justice and the power of art to create spaces where you can impact both the mind and the heart. I love that he elevated the lived experience of so many people like me and he allowed us to see our struggles in a larger context. It was a joy to curate an exhibit that animates the power, dignity, strength and resolve of people who are oppressed but determined to be free.’

The scale of the works on show here renders them all the more powerful. Outside Looking In, taken of Black children looking through steel mesh at white children in a playground in Alabama in 1956, is emotive and striking. Department Store and Mr and Mrs Albert Thornton feel almost too intimate to view.

‘There is an inherent tension in wanting to educate people about the harm, degradation and brutality of bigotry and discrimination without completely presenting or defining people in terms of their victimisation,’ says Stevenson, pointing out that Parks was thoughtful in treading the line between exploitation and education. ‘Gordon Parks seemed to be aware of this challenge and his images were unusually effective because they depicted the brutality and anguish of exclusion and racism while still emphasising the dignity and beauty of the people excluded. Parks documented the harm of segregation but also the hope of those who were marginalised. You respect and admire the subjects in many of his photos because he's made you aware of the burdens they bear, but also their determination to persevere.’

Seen together, Parks’ photographs are an emotional tribute to this perseverance in the face of a seemingly casual everyday injustice. It runs through everything, from a child’s ice-cream cone to a student peering through a microscope. Adds Stevenson: ‘Through the lens of Gordon Parks, Black people could be beautiful, complex, joyous, grief-stricken, regal, triumphant, burdened and overwhelmed. He made the Black community fully human, which was atypical of the images most frequently presented, and especially uncommon in mainstream publications with white readers.’

For Parks, photography was the medium through which he could achieve the greatest impact. In 1970, when speaking to Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Power organisation, The Black Panther Party, he commented: ‘You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours.’

'We Shall Not Be Moved' at Alison Jacques London from 5 March – 11 April 2026, alisonjacques.com

When Tops first appeared as a short film in 2024, it was brief and restrained, shaped by touch, breath and proximity. As a book, the project stretches out, unfolding as a series of still moments that reward slower attention. For artist Lindsay Perryman, who was keen to portray transmasculine vulnerability after their own experience with top surgery, the move from film to book was never about translation, but continuation. 'After the short film, I thought it was necessary to continue it,' they say. 'The complexity comes through when you include different people’s perspectives.'

Where the film’s intimacy lies in closeness, the book introduces reflection. Still images allow motifs to recur and meaning to surface gradually, often only in hindsight. Scars, which Perryman has described as taking on new significance during the editing process, register here less as evidence of surgery than as signs of care, of having been held, attended to and supported. That care also extends beyond what is visible. It appears in the practical knowledge exchanged between people, from advice and reassurance to recommendations passed from one person to another. Healing is not framed as an individual experience, but as something shaped collectively.

One of the most compelling aspects of Tops is how it understands community. Care does not sit alongside the work as sentiment; it gives the work its structure. 'I would hope that people see that community is very important,' Perryman says, 'in all aspects of queer life. I also hope the work invites those outside that community to witness without spectacle.'

That refusal of spectacle runs throughout the book. The images are calm and unforced, resisting the neutrality of the studio in favour of bedrooms and lived-in spaces. Healing, Perryman insists, happens at home. Subjects appear at ease and unguarded, and the camera stays close without intrusion. At moments, the act of photographing appears in a mirror or reflection, not as self-assertion but as an acknowledgement of presence. Authorship here is relational, with the photographer positioned inside the conditions of trust that make the work possible.

More recently, Perryman’s practice has begun to move beyond photography. 'I used to identify strictly as a photographer,' they say. 'But this work pushed me to explore other mediums.' Cyanotypes and sculptural forms are emerging as part of a growing archive. The impulse remains consistent: to create records that take up space, that can be physically encountered, and that resist erasure through their material presence. 'I didn’t see much of this kind of work when I was growing up,' Perryman says. “Making something that could exist in history felt important. For my younger self, and for others.'

Ultimately, Tops brings into view forms of support that often go undocumented. It doesn’t offer resolution, but recognition: of shared knowledge, and the quiet ways people look after one another. In doing so, it frames archiving not simply as preservation, but as an ongoing responsibility.

TOPS is published by Palm* Studios

palmstudios.co.uk

Photographer Marc Wilson’s latest monograph looks at the spaces and landscape of post-industrial Britain. In The Edge of Ruin, Wilson gleans an uncanny beauty from land that has been churned up by centuries of process, extraction and exploitation, exploiting the atmospheric haze of typical British weather to give these places an otherworldly, alien feel.

To the unfamiliar, these images don’t betray their industrial heritage; it’s only when one delves into the captions and accompanying essays that you realise that these contours and skylines represent the remnants of various industries, from abandoned tracks and spoil heaps, to quarries, mines, and clay works, to irrigation and water supply projects.

For Wilson, the challenge was to document these ‘seemingly benign places’ without romanticism, demonisation or nostalgia. Noting that many of these environments continue to pollute their surroundings, despite their bucolic appearance, Wilson says the images present a ‘version of our own future: a landscape tainted by ruthless exploitation of the world we inhabit.’

‘I walked 1,000km to reach desolate locations that had been underestimated and uninhabited until their riches were exposed,’ he continues, ‘[these are] landscapes that were formed by nature and remoulded in the pursuit of power and wealth. In making this book, I discovered the shadows and impressions of the past.’

Wilson’s other books include The Last Stand (currently in its fourth reprint), a visual documentation of a journey along the coastlines reshaped by the Second World War. Wilson travelled 23,000 miles to 143 different locations in the UK and Northern Europe, chronicling the decay and remnants of the crumbling fortifications that still stud the dunes, sands and shallow waters of what was once a substantial military bulwark.

‘Photography, Video Game, Landscape’ by Pascal Greco

A very different take on the post-industrial aesthetic comes from photographer Pascal Greco. On the surface, Photography, Video Game, Landscape appears to be a travelogue through a mix of moody, spectacular and quotidian landscapes.

But this quiet realism is an illusion, for these are all ‘in-game spaces’, captured as part of an increasingly popular trend for chronicling the digital picturesque as part of one’s journey through a game space.

‘I travelled to more than ten regions in four years, including Northern California (Cyberpunk 2077), Japan (Assassin's Creed Shadows), Mexico, and Australia (Death Stranding 2),’ Greco says.

The book, which is also accompanied by an ‘in-game film’, Place(s) Space(s), is the artist and avid gamer’s second foray into in-game photography, following 2022’s (sold-out) Place(s), a paean to the world of Hideo Kojima’s cult PlayStation title Death Stranding.

Greco spent hours during the pandemic exploring Kojima’s reimagining of a futuristic Iceland. The new book brings together vistas from over a dozen games, fabricated realities that are – to many people – more familiar and evocative than real landscapes.

Just as Wilson shows us a world inexorably changed by technology, Greco’s eye captures realms that only technology could have created.

For the last few years, Kalpesh Lathigra's work has moved around ideas of home and belonging, mostly to test where it breaks down. Mémoire Temporelle began as a way of walking Mumbai with his family history in mind: tracing his grandfather's route from Gujarat to Bombay, then on to Nairobi and London, while trying (and not quite managing) to answer the question of 'home.' It's a project that carries the pull of memory, but it also pushes back against easy nostalgia by admitting fiction and the fact that his gaze has been shaped by a Euro-American photographic education.

His first solo exhibition in India, ‘The Lives We Dream in Passing’, gathers the full trilogy: Mémoire Temporelle; The Indian Photo Studio (a box of found studio portraits, faces staring out from unknown lives); and Junagadh, his father's hometown, where streets and hotel rooms become charged spaces of looking. The exhibition pulls together photographs that already existed separately, but something has shifted. He's more certain about his position now, and he's stopped trying to smooth it out.

Seen together, the work feels settled not because it offers answers, but because Lathigra is clearer about where he stands inside it. 'What feels settled is an understanding of me,' he says. 'The chaotic energy in my head, the photographs as a kind of symphony.' Over time, his attention moved away from negotiating identity and towards trusting his own responses as an artist. That clarity came into focus in the hotel rooms of Junagadh. He's long been drawn to hotels as spaces where he can be alone and anonymous. Neither India nor the UK, the room sits outside fixed categories. While there, reading Letters to a Young Poet, he was drawn to Rilke's idea of solitude as strength and the need to 'embrace the difficult.' He looked around the room and, as he puts it, 'the realisation of who I am at heart and what position I hold as an individual hit me.'

From inside, often at height and using a basic point-and-shoot camera, Lathigra began photographing the street below. The limitations of the camera and the distance of the view mattered. 'It allowed me to be a voyeur,' he says. Looking through windows, he became aware not only of gestures unfolding outside, but of his own act of looking. Only later did he find language for it. When he came across the idea of positionality, it felt less like a theory and more like a name for what he'd already been doing. 'The window, the height, that distance represented a kind of divorce,' he says. 'Once I realised that, I leaned into it.'

Importantly, that distance is not treated as something to overcome. Moving away from photojournalism's fixation on access and immersion, Lathigra resists the idea that proximity equals authenticity. The separation in these images is deliberate; the work doesn't try to disguise the fact that it's made by someone who grew up in Forest Gate, London, and carries that history with him.

Back on the street, the work changes register. It's no longer about the elevated view from above, but about being on the ground with a gaze that remains, unavoidably, shaped elsewhere. The work originally carried the working title A Point of Departure, inspired by thoughts of his father leaving India and the lives that followed. Being there again wasn't about reclaiming a place. 'It's an arrival,' he says, 'but validated in myself.' The photographs acknowledge the Euro-American influences that shape how he sees, without apology. 'The water you drink is you,' he says, pointing to the ways education, reference and experience quietly assert themselves. He cites Joachim Brohm's Ohio as a work that resonated deeply – not as a template, but as confirmation that a way of seeing is always formed by where you've been.

Across the exhibition, many images remain partially obscured or hard to pin down. In one, a car interior breaks apart in reflection, inside and outside collapsing together. In another, palms dissolve into haze. For Lathigra, that uncertainty is central. 'Opacity is everything,' he says. To explain too much would close the work down. Meaning is left open, unfixed.

The Lives We Dream in Passing does not aim for closure. Junagadh, Lathigra suggests, remains unfinished – he's thinking about going back with his father, who turns 80 this year. A road trip, maybe, to close something out. For now, what's offered is a photographer's way of seeing: shaped by contradictions, comfortable with distance, resistant to resolution. Lathigra's not trying to arrive anywhere. He's showing what it looks like to accept where you're standing.

'The Lives We Dream in Passing' is at NCPA (National Centre for Performing Arts) Photography Gallery, Mumbai until 3 March 2026

ncpamumbai.com

'Find me 20 boys. Athletic. Abs. Good thighs.' Out of context, this line reads almost camp in its authority. In context, it is edged with anger and fervid inquiry. In her debut monograph, The Boyfriend Casting (2025), published by Libraryman, photographer Rosie Harriet Ellis charts a contemporary coming-of-age. Shot over five years, the project unfolds in distinct acts, moving from a tender domestic closeness to a cool, clinical study of the male form. The work is a personal undoing, a reckoning with intimacy, with the camera, with men.

'I needed a new boyfriend,' Ellis writes. 'Not one to love, one to photograph.'

The first chapter serves as the book’s catalyst. It opens with a reclining male figure, echoing Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus before suffragette Mary Richardson’s blade slashed its surface in 1914. These early photographs, made while Ellis was working on her master’s, focus on her then-boyfriend Nick. He is held in a tender, near-obsessive gaze. The hues are warm and the light soft, but her focus remains exacting.

His body becomes a measured terrain: contours surveyed, muscles charted, limbs laid out like coordinates. 'He performed, and I adored,' Ellis writes in her accompanying text. What began as a mapping of desire soon became a source of tension. Two years into the project, just months before her degree show, Nick withdrew consent. Ripping up the model release, erasing the work. In an act not unlike that of Slasher Mary.

Prompted by this rupture, Ellis cast a substitute. A pretend boyfriend. 'I also wanted to make him jealous,' she reveals on a call. 'There are many photographic layers and personal agendas at play.'

For the book’s second act, she and Nick devised a pose guide that could be replicated by understudies. A studio was booked, 20 pairs of his white briefs purchased, with their old duvet marking the stage. Act three, as it were, sees a series of men standing in identical poses, their bodies disciplined into sameness. Tattoos and hair patterns rebel as subtle signs of difference. The resulting images are chillingly anatomical. Even the light is homogenising and impersonal. Ellis explains that at the time she was shooting luxury handbags for commercial clients and lit these men in the same way, as desirable, interchangeable objects. The models appear dissociated from their own bodies. Standing there, standing in.

After the sterile studio portraits, Ellis joined a martial arts gym (as in any good break-up) to understand why she felt so strongly about Nick. 'A big part of it was how obsessed with his body he was,' she confirms. These images depict wrestlers, not lovers or pretend boyfriends. Cropped, monochrome frames abstract these bodies into a pas de deux of power and struggle, classical in its brawl for dominance.

'I’m fascinated by masculinity, male ego, and have always been hugely jealous of it.' Ellis explains that a lot of her work is occupied with masculine fragility 'that sits so close to the surface', which 'could all fall apart' at any moment. This recalls Raewyn W Connell’s concept of Hegemonic Masculinity, which theorises the instability beneath masculinity’s claim to dominance.

Throughout her book, Ellis inhabits the authority of the male photographer. 'I really wanted to approach it like a man,' she confesses. In questioning masculinity, she adopts the male gaze, though its authority is as fragile and precarious as the very object of scrutiny.

In the final two chapters, closeness and distance coexist. The images shift again, warmer and slightly hazy, as Ellis falls for photographer Gareth. Though initially wary of bringing the camera back into the bedroom, she is nonetheless compelled, and the chapter records this reprise of falling in love. Slow shutter speeds depict sex, cum, and the impressions of pressed bodies. This time, however, her own body enters the frame. One photograph shows Gareth cross-legged, head bowed. His body is abstracted, neither icon nor stand-in, held and framed by Ellis’s legs. This conclusive photograph, perhaps, could encapsulate the book in a single frame. As Charlotte Jensen writes in the foreword, ‘in trying to author the male image, she found she wanted, needed, to author her own image, too’.

The Boyfriend Casting does not seek resolution; rather it sits in the tension Ellis set out to hold, between intimacy, pain, anger and desire. The images have the ease of Wolfgang Tillmans, the tactility of Nan Goldin, and the forensic obsession of Vince Aletti. It is not a feminist manifesto, no Mary slashing Venus, nor a tidy adoption of the male gaze. Like any good coming-of-age story, it is messy, sexy, and at times uneasy. It is precisely this tension, this relentless photographic inquiry, that gives the book its force. The abs and thighs, well, they are an added bonus.

Rosie Harriet Ellis, 'The Boyfriend Casting,' is published by Libraryman and priced €60, libraryman.se

Picking up Roe Ethridge’s Rude in the Good Way, you’re instantly caught in the middle of a Southern shootout, Ethridge wielding his camera, while the subject, Lindsay, points a BB gun directly at you. The cover, conceptually, is a stroke of perfection, effectively eye-catching, surrounded by an air of danger. Yet, it's the visual imperfections of the photograph that stand out to Ethridge, who, video calling from his couch amidst the record-breaking New York City snowstorm, critiques, ‘it’s not lit right, it’s all kind of messed up. It feels like you’ve stumbled into something like, uh-oh.’

It’s that same intentional imperfection that has defined Ethridge’s nearly three-decade-long career and embodies the book’s title, a phrase that continued to come up throughout our conversation about the book’s contents: the B-movie CGI-inspired collages of Lindsay Lohan, thrown together as quickly as possible, were ‘rude in the good way.’ The confrontingly sexual paintings of John Currin, photographed during a 2008 studio visit on assignment for Artreview, were indeed ‘rude in the good way.’ The photographs, taken on his iPhone of the back of his camera, from a shoot where the original images had been lost, yet again, were ‘rude in the good way.’

As a child of the Reagan era, who spent his adolescence wanting ‘nothing more than to be a wholesome American good boy from the South,’ Ethridge’s interest in the imperfection of American life naturally arose once he left suburban Atlanta for college and began to critique that 'perfect' identity. His first three books, Orange Grove, Spare Bedroom and County Line – which have been compiled into a three-volume reissue titled In the Beginning to accompany the release of Rude in the Good Way – showcase his early explorations of American imperfection, from desolate strip malls to unloved orange orchards.

‘I recognise all the themes, the sense of colour and composition, they are still part of who I am now,’ he says of the books he originally self-published in the mid-2000s. Within the pages of Rude in the Good Way, you can see a direct through-line to that early work; the photographs of mouldy peaches are reminiscent of the mouldy oranges in Orange Grove, and an image of an open refrigerator feels like a contemporary sequel to his 1999 photograph, Refrigerator.

Coming four years after American Polychronic, a 400-page career retrospective, I was curious if it was difficult to begin another book after releasing what seemed to be the wrapping up of a lifelong body of work. ‘There's no finishing the book, but I do think that it did affect me. Having mid-career retrospective-type shows and books, there’s a kind of weird death feeling, where you’re stuck asking yourself questions like, ‘Am I Dead?’ ‘Is this over?’ But, it never is. You have to keep going and find what keeps you interested. That’s what this book is.’

Roe Ethridge, ‘Rude in the Good Way’ is published by Loose Joints, £43.00, loosejoints.biz

At 90, Don McCullin is still looking. He has just returned from Indonesia, where he has been photographing on assignment, and is preparing for an invitation from the Vatican to photograph its museum collections. Travel, he admits, has become harder. Airports make him feel sick. The physical demands of the life he once led no longer appeal.

Nevertheless, he is starting 2026 with not one, but two exhibitions unfolding close to home. ‘Broken Beauty’, showing at the Holburne Museum in Bath, brings together images from across his career, placing some of his most recent unseen photographs of Roman sculptures – captured in museums around the world – alongside earlier work from conflict zones, landscapes, portraiture and still life. In February, Hauser & Wirth Somerset will present ‘Don McCullin. 90’, which marks his ninth decade by tracing the quieter threads woven throughout his career.

His early years were spent learning how to disappear. He photographed markets, neighbourhoods and people going about their lives in Finsbury Park, north London. 'I was learning how to disguise my presence,' he says, 'how to snatch pictures.' He is careful not to romanticise this. Even then, he was aware of the moral weight of looking. That awareness has never left him. 'I know I’m stealing from people’s lives by taking their images,' he says. In war, that knowledge sharpened into something constant and uncomfortable. Even now, he places himself 'on trial' when he photographs.

On the surface, the Roman sculptures at the heart of ‘Broken Beauty’ offer silence. They cannot protest or suffer in front of him, but McCullin does not see them as neutral objects. Even stillness, for him, is burdened with history. 'Before the man and the chisel got to that stone, people died in their thousands to get it out of the quarry,' he says. 'There was always someone suffering while I was photographing. Even a Roman sculpture.'

Landscape is where that questioning loosens its grip. Since settling in Somerset, McCullin has increasingly turned his attention to the land around him, which he only photographs in winter (watch McCullin speak of this in Hauser & Wirth’s short film, which we featured on the occasion of his 2020 exhibition at its Somerset gallery). It’s the season’s nakedness that draws him in. 'The landscape is in pain. It’s under rain and frost, the whole historical judgement of the elements.' He can sit on a hill for hours, waiting for the light to be right. He speaks about gazing at dark winter skies, conjuring mythical thoughts inspired by Arthurian legends and the long histories embedded in the land. He references John Steinbeck’s time in nearby Bruton and the pleasure of creative thought, of letting the mind wander. After decades of witnessing violence, the quietness of this kind of looking feels earned.

That freedom makes the distance from war more apparent. Conflict, he says, has changed. Drones have replaced ground-level confrontation, silently bringing death from above. The kind of war photography he once made is no longer possible in the same way, and he is sceptical about its impact now.

'My images were to try and persuade you to be anti-war. And since I've given it up I've seen things ten times worse than what I photographed,' he says. 'I don’t think the work I did made much difference to the world.' There is no bitterness in this, just clarity. McCullin speaks often about stepping back. He talks about growing tomatoes, about dahlias filling his house in September, about the satisfaction of tending something living. He laughs when recalling the young man who ran across battlefields, putting two fingers up to snipers, but he is serious about what this shift represents.

Asked about legacy, he shrugs off comparisons to art-historical giants. 'Legacy is short,' he says. 'Even Cartier-Bresson is being forgotten. I’m just a little old photographer living in Somerset.' What matters to him now is the ability to work without danger and to be among objects he loves. The chance to return, briefly, to something like the peace he started with. He recalls a trip to Crowthers reclamation yard, Isleworth at the age of 26. Having photographed a group of statues, he turned on the self-timer and jumped in beside them. It’s the only self-portrait he has made, and the first time it will be shown in the UK.

'When I finished, I found one last piece of stone. It was a man kneeling down, kissing a woman's legs. Nothing could be less war than this. It's a picture of peace and love.' He pauses. 'How strange, that I did this peaceful picture and in between all that I did all that dreadful stuff, and now I'm back to photographing Roman statues again.'

Outside, the countryside is bright. When the call ends, he plans to walk the hedgerows near his home. The Vatican assignment, he tells me, will be the last serious project of his photographic life. But for now, the looking continues.

Broken Beauty runs at the Holburne Museum from 30 January to 4 May 2026, alongside Don McCullin. 90 at Hauser & Wirth Somerset (14 February - 12 April 2026)

holburne.org
hauserwirth.com

Martin Parr (1952-2025) was a keen supporter of The Photographer’s Gallery in London, a relationship that began with his first solo show at the venue in 1977, ‘Hebden Bridge and Beauty Spots’.

During the last year of his life, Parr and the gallery worked together to plan an exhibition focusing on the works he made in rural Ireland in the early 1980s, a collection the photographer felt had not been shown widely.

The series, A Fair Day, was Parr’s last major project in black and white, before he moved into the distinctive bold colours and hyper-realistic style debuted in 1986’s The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton. It depicted the lives of working Britons under Margaret Thatcher, and established his own unique form of social documentary.

The humour and playfulness glimpsed in this lesser-known series embodies Parr’s typically sharp eye. His capturing of ‘fair days’ – the times communities gathered for trade or entertaining, or to mark religious events – shows a society in flux, caught between traditional rituals and a burgeoning modernisation.

In the photographs, dance halls and cattle trading are historical foils for modern new buildings and plastic cups. Timeless, bleak landscapes are spiked with TV aerials; elsewhere, village halls are dominated by 1980s fashion. As always, Parr finds the humanity in everyday moments.

‘Martin Parr: A Fair Day’ from 9 February to 19 April 2026 at The Photographers' Gallery, thephotographersgallery.org.uk

‘Luigi Ghirri: Felicità’ at Thomas Dane Gallery proposes happiness not as a condition to be attained, but as a way of inhabiting the world through images. This is not joy as spectacle or affirmation, but something quieter and more exacting: the felicity of naming, noticing and holding things in view without exhausting them. Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, and unfolding across both of Thomas Dane’s Duke Street spaces, the exhibition makes a persuasive case for Ghirri as one of the most lucid thinkers of photography’s perceptual limits – and one of its most generous practitioners.

The exhibition’s physical split is not incidental. Moving between the two galleries feels like moving between registers of looking: from surface to space, from image as object to image as environment. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s curatorial touch is deliberately light, allowing Ghirri’s internal logic to emerge through juxtaposition rather than didactic framing. What results is not a survey, but a carefully calibrated rhythm – one that mirrors Ghirri’s own conception of photography as an open, elastic system rather than a sequence of definitive statements.

The photographs that anchor the first space are small, restrained, almost stubbornly unassuming. Works such as Sassuolo, 1970 and the cluster of Modena images made between 1970 and 1973 appear to offer very little at first glance: fragments of walls, signage, partial horizons, colours softened into chalky blues and muted reds. But this reduction is precisely the point. Ghirri understood that modern landscapes – particularly the Italian countryside – had become visually exhausted, over-coded by clichés and nostalgia. Rather than attempting to restore a lost pastoral ideal, he chose to work from within this representational void.

These early images operate like a pared-down vocabulary of place. In Modena, 1971, a sign gestures beyond the frame, pointing nowhere in particular. In another Modena photograph, from 1972, a strip of sky presses against a flat plane of colour, collapsing depth into surface. The photographs refuse narrative resolution; instead, they ask the viewer to stay with the act of looking itself. Happiness, here, is not revelation but attention.

This emphasis on surfaces, maps and signs establishes a logic that carries into the second Duke Street space, where interiors and landscapes extend the same conceptual enquiry. Wallpapers photographed in the mid-1970s flatten rooms into graphic fields, turning domestic space into another kind of atlas. Walls behave like pages; photographs become images of images. The boundary between inner and outer worlds – so central to Ghirri’s thinking – begins to dissolve.

The later works bring this sensibility into the open air. In Capri, 1981 and Croce Bianca, Piacenza, 1984, colour becomes more luminous, but never expressive in a sentimental sense. The compositions are precise, almost architectural, holding the viewer at a measured distance. Landscapes from the late 1980s: Campagna Emiliana, 1985-89, Marina di Ravenna, 1986, are neither celebratory nor elegiac. They refuse the familiar drama of old versus new, rural versus industrial. Instead, they present a world shaped by coexistence, where distinctions have lost their visual productivity.

This curatorial decision to skirt Ghirri’s most iconic images in favour of quieter, less resolved works sharpens the exhibition’s thesis. ‘Felicità’ is not about reclaiming landscape or reasserting photography’s authority. It is about recalibrating the gaze. Ghirri believed photography should organise attention rather than overwhelm it – offering a pause within a world increasingly governed by speed, repetition and visual noise. His images do not seek to transform reality; they allow it to appear, lightly and with measure.

Seen today, Ghirri’s work feels less prophetic than necessary. In an image economy driven by excess and instant legibility, ‘Felicità’ argues for another mode of seeing: photography as a way of staying with things, of accepting their partiality, of recognising that meaning often resides in what remains unresolved. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s exhibition doesn’t present happiness as an outcome, but as a condition of looking – one grounded in silence, precision and the radical modesty of paying attention.

Luigi Ghirri: Felicità is at Thomas Dane Gallery from 23 January to 9 May 2026, thomasdanegallery.com

How do you create an image that feels both familiar and unsettling? This is the realm of American visual artist and photographer Brooke DiDonato, whose new photo book, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer, will be released on 29 January 2026. The monograph brings together DiDonato’s surreal work in a collection that blends nostalgia, humour and unease.

This is DiDonato’s most comprehensive collection to date, featuring her best-known series – including A House Is Not a Home – alongside new work appearing in print for the first time. The book also includes an introduction by writer Eleanor Sutherland and a conversation between Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and writer Eve Van Dyke and DiDonato’s father, Bob DiDonato.

The images are rooted in domestic life – depicting white-picket-fenced homes and other suburban environments in Ohio and beyond – but are distorted into the fantastical. Human bodies appear in everyday contexts – on sidewalks, in cornfields and deserts – but in unexpected, even impossible, ways. They’re contorted into uncanny positions – limbs bent across sofas, climbing into attics and emerging from unlikely places.

A pair of legs hang from a window, flowers bloom from armchairs and toilet bowls, and foliage crawls from beds and telephone receivers. A head squeezes into a dollhouse and bodies fold into a fireplace, perch on a ceiling fan blade, and slot between the crockery in a kitchen cabinet.

The images evoke dreamlike disorientation: we recognise the world, but it feels off-kilter. DiDonato’s imagery recalls Freud’s concept of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes eerie through distortion. The photographs capture feelings that are difficult to articulate – like forgetting a face, or a once-familiar place becoming strange over time.

A defining element of DiDonato’s work is the playful, provocative titles she assigns to her photographs. Names such as Growing Upward Has Its Downside, What to Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing, and Went to Therapy but I’m Still in My Patterns hint at modern-day anxieties; her work is infused with dark comedy and self-awareness, adding an element of emotional truth. Each image becomes a private joke shared with the viewer.

What about the title of the monograph itself? While Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer recalls the playground taunt, it also echoes the tradition of vanitas painting – still-life works popular in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries depicting skulls, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, hourglasses and decaying fruit as reminders of life’s transience. DiDonato’s work similarly balances life and death, humour and tragedy, intimacy and alienation.

A man stares at us wide-eyed as he crouches on a rock, cradling his hands close, a desolate wilderness rising behind him. It could be an eerie photograph from a 1960s horror film, but its presence in a new book, The Ramble, NYC 1969, places it amid the early work of photographer Arthur Tress. In 1969, he captured gay men, like himself, cruising around The Ramble, a forested area in New York’s Central Park, the winter before the Stonewall riots and the shift in gay rights movements that would follow.

'A [term] for gay people at the time was twilight people,’ says Tress, dialling in from his studio on a mid-winter Friday morning. ‘You couldn’t tell your family, you couldn’t tell your employer – especially if you worked for the government or in education.' He recalls his parents sending him to a psychiatrist when he was in high school. 'Of course, he told me being gay was bad, against the law, unnatural and that I should get a girlfriend,' he laughs. 'Which didn’t really work out.'

The Ramble was ten minutes away from where Tress lived on 72nd Riverside, and the moment he stepped into its world of hidden gestures, hankies and leather, he felt a fellowship with the other gay men, whom he imagined also shared his low self-esteem, stemming from the shame of doing something illegal. There were many who didn’t want to be photographed, recalls Tress, as they could lose their jobs. 'There was a crippling anxiety,' he says. 'Somehow, as a photographer, I could bring that out of them – almost like I was a director of a film.'

While Tress’ photographs might seem like merely documentation, the photographer was also showing a greater truth of the men, who revealed their emotional turmoil. 'In the late 1960s there was a strong move towards documentary,' he says. 'But we went against that with staging.' He had encountered the abstract expressionist works of George Tooker and Paul Cadmus at The Whitney when he was in high school, and from them he extracted an essence of isolation amid stark architectures of modernity, which percolated into this series.

Physique magazines were circulating at the time, but Tress wasn’t particularly inspired by them, cheekily mentioning that they might have inspired Robert Mapplethorpe, but he wanted to find a deeper recess within the psyche. Drawing on the magic realism of the artists he admired, Tress created a surreal world where men pop up from underground like phantoms, or lie spent on a tree trunk, like a modern-day vanquished warrior. 'That’s very dreamlike,' he smiles. 'I think as a child I lived in an escape world of fantasy, and I tried to embed these photos with that quality.'

Cruising was like photography for Tress, with prolonged waiting to catch the eye of other men. 'I was a Ramble wallflower,' he laughs. 'There was a lot of rejection – but after Stonewall, you could meet men at a gay community centre or a student dance and hold hands in public.'

Arthur Tress, 'The Ramble, NYC 1969' is published by Stanley / Barker, £60, stanleybarker.co.uk

Photographer Jan Staller’s new monograph, Manhattan Project, is a sideways examination of the city’s relentless pace of change. Staller’s focus is not on the physical structures that give the New York skyline its ever-shifting dynamism, but on the materials that are being hoisted, poured, and extracted in the pursuit of new architecture.

Staller has been photographing the city for nearly half a century, focusing specially on the idiosyncrasies of Manhattan’s West Side, as infrastructure comes and goes and parts of the city fall by the wayside or remain forever unseen. The subject matter of Manhattan Project is there for all to see, yet most of us look right through it.

By turning his camera on the construction process and abstracting the results through canny framing, Staller has turned New York into an open-air art gallery, alive with ephemeral sculptural objects en route to decades or centuries of entombment within contemporary architecture. Rebar, cables, steel, glass and pipes are rendered as if they were bold pieces of contemporary art.

With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and an essay by Brett Littman, Manhattan Project is a worthy addition to the canon of New York chronologies. This is the Staller’s third monograph. Examples of his work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, while his editorial work has been seen in Fortune, Conde Nast Traveler, The New York Times and many others.

Manhattan Project, Jan Staller, $54, Simon & Schuster, SimonandSchuster.com, Amazon.co.uk, JanStaller.net, @JanStaller

Cast your mind back to the early days of Instagram and what a revelation the site seemed to be. Other than a few specialised sites like Flickr, 500px and DeviantArt, photographers didn’t really have an online space to showcase their work to a wider audience. Debuting in 2010, the app’s fascination lay in its square, Polaroid-esque format and array of aggressive filters. It wasn’t long before the creative community embraced the way Insta likes, shares and follows helped build followings and even make careers.

For photographer Alan Schaller, those early years of Instagram had a certain purity to them. Late to photography, after first training and working as a commercial songwriter and musician, Schaller picked up a camera at the age of 25 and found an aptitude, especially for street photography. ‘Photography is the opposite of music,’ he says. ‘It’s instant and non-collaborative.’ His work got noticed online and commissions flooded in. As well as his own substantial one million-plus following, Schaller set up Street Photo International, which has over 1.7 million followers.

And yet year on year, Insta delivered less and less. The advent of reels in 2020 saw the now Meta-owned site pivot hard to video content. Before this, SPI was getting around 40k submissions a day. With the advent of video, Schaller, like many other photographers, maintained his social presence but felt that the app’s appeal to pure photographers was waning.

Some pivoted to video, but Schaller – who made his name with crisply observed and beautifully framed black and white imagery – felt this was ‘madness – this isn’t how creativity should work. Why should we expect tech companies to care about the photography world?’

Instead, Schaller set out to create his own platform, assembling a team of photo industry players and taking on the role of CEO. The seeds of Irys were sown, just in time to tap into the current resurgence of all things photographic – not just phone photography, but dedicated cameras and even analogue film.

According to Schaller, Irys is a platform designed to actively celebrate the art of photography, not video, reels, memes or, heaven help us, AI. With a design partly inspired by the traditional photographic monograph, Irys will be familiar to anyone who’s tapped into a social media app over the last decade, only with a few key differences.

For a start, it’s curated by humans, not algorithms. Pictures aren’t compressed or cropped and you, the photographer, decide how best to display them in your portfolio. There are also no collections of filters or editing functions.

Irys offers the chance to browse and discover other people’s work, not have it pushed towards you algorithmically, with ‘collections’ set up to collate like-minded subjects, approaches, styles or whatever takes your fancy. Whereas one unthinkingly signs away all sorts of things when agreeing to a tech giant’s Ts and Cs, Schaller is adamant that everyone on Irys retains their image rights.

The team at Irys has already made solid partnerships with key camera brands, including Leica, Sigma and FujiFilm, reckoning that an eco-system that supports creators, promotes hardware and is committed to the industry is good for everyone. A basic account is free but naturally there are paid tiers. ‘We decided not to sell ad space,’ says Schaller, pointing out that Instagram has around 2.4 billion monthly users and that if just a tiny fraction of that number – less than 0.01 per cent – subscribed to Irys then the platform would be self-sustaining.

Naturally, you can like and follow photographers and images you admire, adding ratings across a number of different categories including composition, use of colour, etc. Your follower numbers aren’t made public, to avoid the inevitable popularity arms race that characterises other platforms.

‘It’s a more thoughtful space,’ says Schaller. ‘It’s not about attaching numbers to art. We want people to go on Irys and see great photography.' The Irys slogan, ‘This is what community looks like’, will also be extended to a new monograph publishing venture, Irys Publishing, and hopefully even a magazine.

It's a bold play to stand up to the dopamine dealers and create a platform that actively discourages doomscrolling in favour of more considered, focused browsing. But based on Schaller’s personal and professional experience, large swathes of the photographic community are not about chasing clout, obsessing over gear and going viral.

Irys recaptures something of Instagram’s early enthusiasm, spliced with the archival capabilities of Flickr, an isolated patch of quality amidst a raging sea of ever-changing imagery. For photographers and photography lovers, it’s a fine place to start exploring.

Irys is available for iOS and Android. Visit Irysphotos.com to download the app at the Play Store and App Store. @IrysPhotos, @Alan_Schaller, @StreetPhotoInternational

For more than 40 years, LA-based set decorator Lauri Gaffin has quietly shaped the worlds we see on the silver screen – from the frozen expanses of Fargo to the sun-soaked beaches of Thor. But Gaffin is also a photographer who's turned her lens toward the backgrounds of popular culture.

Now, that photography has been collected in a new book, which launched during Paris Photo, Moving Still: A Cinematic Life Frame-by-Frame. Gaffin captures the fleeting, unguarded moments that often go unseen, transporting readers from Edmonton’s icy plains to Louisiana’s swamps and the Martian landscape of the Mojave Desert. Beyond extraordinary sets, Gaffin documents the intricate interplay between directors, actors, designers and crew on projects ranging from The Pursuit of Happyness to Iron Man – the moments of laughter and stillness amid the chaos of production.

The book chronicles the reptilian alien from 2001 sci-fi film Evolution, discarded on the floor between takes, and the submerged plane that strands Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in the survival odyssey Six Days, Seven Nights (1998), swarmed with crew trying to navigate the challenging set. Gaffin also captures the stylised, high-gloss milieu of Charlie’s Angels (2000), the bizarre alternate world of Land of the Lost (2009) and the shiny, futuristic universe of Captain Marvel (2019).

The book functions as a behind-the-scenes retrospective, pairing Gaffin’s photographs with personal reflections from the moments they were taken, as well as candid insights into her own life – navigating her parents’ declining health, complex relationships and the emotional demands of filmmaking. Moving Still also includes texts by writer and fellow set decorator Florence Fellman, with a foreword by LACMA curator Britt Salvesen.

Gaffin’s photography balances spectacle and intimacy, becoming both a record of her craft and a medium of personal expression. The book celebrates the magic of cinema, honours those who bring it to life, and offers a deeply human story told through the lens of one of Hollywood’s keenest eyes.

All artists leave traces of themselves in their work: an emotion, a thought, a memory. There’s a kind of courage, even generosity, in offering up a fragment of yourself in the name of art. British photographer, filmmaker and artist Nadia Lee Cohen has captured countless faces and personas, yet in her character-driven imagery, it’s hard not to glimpse the many versions of herself.

Her first book, Women, published in 2020 by Idea, took six years to realise. Featuring 100 previously unseen portraits of contemporary womanhood, it feels at once vulnerable and brutal, rethinking the pop iconography associated with ‘strong femininity.’ In Julie Bullard, her more recent book in collaboration with Martin Parr, she becomes a fictionalised version of her childhood babysitter, conjuring a honey-toned vision of 1990s Britain. Whether subject or observer, Cohen’s hyper-stylised gaze doesn’t conceal reality so much as amplify it.

Nadia Lee Cohen presents ‘Holy Ohio’

Though her work has always felt deeply personal, her latest project may be the most intimate yet. Created with WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, and distributed by Idea, it begins at the threshold of memory. In Holy Ohio, Cohen returns to America’s rural heartland to reconnect with a branch of her family, a place she had not returned to since she was a child, more than two decades ago.

Designed to physically echo a Bible, the 150-page volume documents a journey back to a place at once distant and familiar. ‘I last visited my family in Ohio in 1999. Ohio was my first introduction to anything overtly American outside of the television,’ she explains. ‘My mum’s brother moved to Ohio in the early 1990s with his wife and son to join his daughter, her American husband and their children. Eventually, his grandchildren had kids, then the kids had kids, and now the kids’ kids have kids; and now four generations of one family live in two houses right next door to each other on a tree-lined cul-de-sac.’

She recalls the scent of bacon, coffee and pizza – domestic noise as comforting as it was chaotic – yet she avoids the temptation of a rose-tinted family portrait. Instead, she turns towards the dysfunctional, tracing the frictions and eccentricities of Midwestern domestic life. ‘The house was very much alive – there was a cosiness to the chaos, and I was at the age where I found any kind of dispute or dysfunctionality exciting,’ Cohen adds.

Two decades of sporadic contact unfold across images of weathered skin, worn neighbourhoods, patriotic symbols, all-American slogans and a family home seemingly untouched by time. Eclectic possessions reveal the rhythms of a family shaped by an unfamiliar culture for the photographer. Cohen captures these clashing cultural nuances with candour and cinematic tension, her frames washed in a steel-grey melancholy.

‘Holy Ohio’ by Nadia Lee Cohen releases on 12 December, exclusively at Idea Books London, Dover Street Market London, and the Idea Books online store.

On a quiet street in Paris near the Comédie-Française, there sat a seemingly unassuming Chinese restaurant. But despite its nondescript façade, Davé, which opened its doors in 1982, was the pinnacle of glamorous Parisian nightlife for three decades.

A roll call of celebrities from across art, music, fashion and culture were regulars – including Helmut Newton, Grace Coddington, Allen Ginsberg, Yves Saint Laurent, Francis Ford Coppola, Iggy Pop, Rei Kawakubo, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Alexander McQueen and Kate Moss. They ignored the ‘Complet’ (full) sign that hung on the door to party in absolute privacy.

There every night was owner Tai ‘Davé’ Cheung, who captured it all with his Polaroid camera. How did his guests feel when he pulled it out? ‘They were delighted. With the Polaroid, they saw the result immediately – no surprises. You can’t take a bad picture of someone without them knowing,’ he says now.

Word of mouth drew in his guests, he says. ‘I liked the creatives, the designers, artists, musicians and writers, especially because they taught me things: they shared. The first ones through the door – Brion Gysin, Jean-Marie Rouart, Eduardo Arroyo, Francis Ford Coppola, Aurore Clément, Suzi Wis, Anne-Marie Deschodt, Helmut and June Newton – especially.’

Now – launching during Paris Photo 2025 – Davé’s Polaroids are the subject of a new book , A Night at Davé, conceived by Charles Morin and Boris Bergmann with Davé, which reveals what happened behind its doors. Sofia Coppola, who was a regular in the 1980s with her parents and their friends, was such a fan, she has written the book’s introduction. ‘Davé was the place to be,’ she says.

‘It wasn’t a bourgeois place,’ reflects Davé. ‘It was a place where people could be who they wanted to be.’

There's much to see – and to covet – at Paris Photo 2025 (13-16 November), the 28th edition of the event, which is back at the Grand Palais for the second year in a row. It's hosting 179 galleries from 33 countries and a rich programme that encompasses photography in all its forms, from silver gelatin to blockchain. Artistic director Anna Planas says, ‘We want to embrace the entire history of photography, from the 19th century to the most contemporary works, and to show the diversity of the medium.’

The world's most important international photography fair, Paris Photo brings together big-name galleries and smaller ones, iconic photographers and emerging artists. If you're looking for gems by Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, Seydou Keïta, William Klein, Weegee, Sally Mann, Sebastião Salgado or Hiroshi Sugimoto, you've come to the right place.

But you'll also find lesser-known surprises, such as Marine Lanier, one of the artists in the ‘Emergence’ sector of the fair and winner of the Prix Maison Ruinart for an enchanting series called Alchimia, shot in the fields and skies of the Champagne region.

In addition to art for sale, the fair offers conversations, performances and book signings from the likes of Todd Hido and Wolfgang Tillmans. And ‘The Last Photo’ is an exhibition of works from the collection of Estrellita B Brodsky, one of the most important private collections of Latin American photography.

All of this edition's curators are women, though Planas says this was not intentional. What was deliberate is an ongoing increase in the number of female artists on display, from 20 per cent in 2018 to nearly double that percentage this year.

Upon entering, visitors come face to face with the Poggi gallery's powerful installation by Sophie Ristelhueber, the French photographer who won the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2025. A wall nearly 40m long displays works from throughout her career, revealing the scars that war and other disasters have left on landscapes, cities and human bodies.

Steps away, at Klemm's Berlin, Truth Table, by Adrian Sauer, is a project about digital manipulation, consisting of different images (a smiley face, a palm tree, an Eiffel Tower) made up of millions of coloured pixels in various combinations.

Thierry Bigaignon has an actual darkroom on his stand, complete with a photographer: Renato D'Agostin. When a collector acquires one of his silver gelatin prints, they can meet D'Agostin, who will reprint it on the spot, to show how the development process works. Setting up his chemicals before the fair opened, the Italian photographer laughed, ‘It's going to be strange, I feel like an animal in a cage.’

Vermelho from São Paulo presents Brazil's Claudia Andujar, who has reworked her 1975 archives, attaching a yellow acrylic panel to a photo of the Volkswagen that she drove to the Venezuelan border for her work covering the Yanomami people. Rosegallery, from Santa Monica, has come back to Paris Photo after an absence of a few years with a solo show by Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein (who is also currently part of MoMA's New Photography exhibition).

Magnum Gallery is featuring vintage prints by several of its stars, including Philippe Halsman's 1948 portrait of a floating Salvador Dalí and three cats. Galerie Nathalie has Un feu by Luc Delahaye (formerly of Magnum), a photo of migrants standing around a fire, also part of Delahaye's solo show now running at the Jeu de Paume museum. Fraenkel presents a new work by artist/sound composer Christian Marclay, a grid of vinyl record sleeves and covers. Martin Parr's French-fry-eating seagull from 1996 graces the stand of Clémentine de la Feronnière. And at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve's stand, Juergen Teller is drinking a beer while standing naked on his father's grave.

But not everything is profane. Galerie Binome is presenting dark, ghostly images from Laurence Aëgerter's series on French cathedrals and churches. Aëgerter screen-printed them with thermo-chronic ink, which undergoes a chemical reaction when sunlight hits it, revealing the image underneath. Gallery director Valérie Cazin says, ‘When this happens, the revelation is so magnificent and surprising that the spectator can only observe. It's the same magic as when an image is revealed in a darkroom. In a society where we are all hyperactive, it provokes a moment of meditation.’

The ‘Voices’ sector of the fair features two guest curators. One, Devika Singh, says she approached the theme of landscapes in different ways, ‘from documentary perspectives to more speculative and personal takes’. Works include French painter/photographer Bernard Guillot's atmospheric photos of Cairo's City of the Dead, as well as Indian photographer Gauri Gill's The Village on the Highway, a quietly political statement set against a backdrop of plastic tarpaulins.

This is the third year that the fair has a dedicated ‘Digital’ sector, curated by Nina Roehrs. It includes an installation by conceptual artist Cole Sternberg for Giga – a partnership between Unicef and the International Telecommunication Union to address digital inequalities among the world's children. Called A Garden, the project is a large cube upon which a million images of generative artwork are projected, representing a network of interconnected schools.

In a rather different vein, the digital platform TAEX is showing the Irish artist Kevin Abosch, who trains AI systems with his own images, then ‘sculpts’ them into a kind of synthetic photography. The results can be creepy, such as a white cockatoo emerging from a high-tech apparatus. Two centuries after the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce turned a camera image into the first permanent photograph, Paris Photo is still exploring what defines the art form.

Paris Photo 2025 runs 13-16 November

In 1903, the architect Adolf Loos was tasked with reworking a country house on the shores of Lake Geneva. Formerly a leprosarium, the residence was later the site of a controversy when the owner, physiology professor Théodore Beer, was accused of immoral conduct and left, in disgrace, for America. Now a private residence, the home’s rich history of unresolved tension and psychological trauma makes it an arresting example of twentieth-century architecture. For Portuguese photographer Jaime Welsh, it proved irresistible.

Welsh’s previous work has considered the role that ideological systems and political structures play in shaping us, in poignant images which emphasise the innocence and isolation of the individual. When he came across Villa Karma, its dual role as sanctuary and site of trauma felt like a natural jumping-off point from which to explore themes of perception, surveillance and identity.

‘I was drawn to Villa Karma for its secrecy,’ Welsh says. ‘The building is like a fortress, with rooms nested within rooms, doorways and vantage points built for observation. It feels ceremonial in its order and deeply oppressive, yet somehow oneiric. The history of the place also drew me in. It was shaped by illness, first a leprosarium and later the residence of a troubled neurologist.’

In Welsh’s photographs, Villa Karma becomes a living thing, its structure not only sheltering its inhabitants but also shaping them. ‘I was drawn to the passageways, whose lines of sight were designed for surveillance,’ he adds. ‘In the end, the camera assumes that role, replacing the architecture as the ultimate instrument of control.’

It is unclear, in the works, if the villa is healing or harming its inhabitants; to find out would be beside the point. ‘Safety and trauma often exist within the same space. What protects can also wound. Architecture absorbs contradiction, shaping anxiety and fear into form. I wanted that ambiguity to surface, where control and vulnerability coexist in the same frame.’

Jaime Welsh 'Convalescent' is at Ginny on Frederick, London, from 8 Nov – 17 Dec 2025

A dazzling duo

Ellie Stathaki, architecture and environment director

I recently came across jewellery entrepreneur The Diamond Lab, and this week, I had the opportunity to meet its founders, sisters Ruby and Jamie Patel, at their Selfridges pop-up with Maddox Gallery. Beyond their mission to bring ethical, lab-grown diamonds to the forefront of the luxury industry, the pair also plans to establish their own laboratory in Kenya, where the sisters hail from. Working within the country’s Special Economic Zones – which aim to boost local manufacturing and exports and to create jobs – they are hard at work, picking their architect and crafting their business's spatial representation. More to come.

A London institution

Charlotte Gunn, director of digital content

On Monday, it was off to The Connaught to celebrate editor-in-chief Bill Prince's new book about the hotel, with martinis served by the master Agostino Perrone. In attendance: the cute little white pooch from the cover.

A photographic pilgrimage

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches and jewellery editor

I was lucky enough this week to have a walk around the exquisite new Diane Arbus exhibition at London’s David Zwirner gallery with curator Jeffrey Fraenkel. The intimate exhibition of 45 rare photographs focuses on the works Arbus created in private spaces between 1961 and 1971. Raw, honest, and respectful – they speak to Arbus’ massive talent.

A visual voyage

Jamilah Rose-Roberts, social media editor

I previously went down to Sadie Coles HQ for the opening of Arthur Jafa’s GLAS NEGUS SUPREME. Having missed his presentation in Croydon earlier this year, I was determined not to miss this one. There was an undeniable pull to this exhibition: the scale, the sound, the weight of it all. The highlight of the evening was meeting Jafa himself. Our brief, easy chat left me with a sense of privilege and a deeper connection to his work. His exacting yet generous nature made me want to return – to sit longer with the work, to let the sound and imagery seep deeper.

For his first exhibition at Sadie Coles, Jafa fills the Kingly Street space with a charged edit of new and recent works: two moving-image pieces, several paintings, silkscreens, and cutouts, all orbiting the same gravitational force – the depth and complexity of Black life. His films unfold with a cosmic and intimate allure, a surge of imagery and music that catches you off guard and carries you into a world of profound intrigue and captivation.

There’s a rhythm to Jafa’s world, a ‘Black visual intonation’, as he calls it, that folds sound and image into one another until they feel inseparable. Clips, faces, fragments, and beats move as if guided by pulse rather than sequence; everything vibrates. Musical figures appear as apparitions, passing through history’s veil with ghostly defiance. And yet, even in that spectral space, the work feels vividly alive.

The new paintings and silkscreens extend this dialogue: Kurt Cobain’s body hovers in a void; Foxy Brown glows, commanding her crowd. Fame, pain, transcendence – all held in tension, all rendered through Jafa’s unmistakable visual cadence. To witness his work is to feel language reshaped; it’s to understand how sound, image and memory can coalesce into something beyond narrative: a collective vibration.

GLAS NEGUS SUPREME continues that conversation with force and tenderness, expanding Jafa’s lexicon of Black being and becoming. On view at Sadie Coles HQ until 22 November 2025.

A Middle Eastern medley

Tianna Williams, staff writer

On Wednesday evening, I headed over to Lamb’s Conduit Street to enjoy a Middle Eastern feast at Honey & Co. The evening, which coincided nicely with Bonfire Night, was a display of festive dining that made me consider swapping the Christmas turkey for spiced lamb and stuffing shawarma. Honey & Co founders Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (who also run sister outposts Honey & Smoke and Honey & Co Daily) served a vibrant mezze, complete with dips and salads. Mains followed, ranging from smoked duck with pickled cherries to slow-roasted lamb shoulder with plums and roses. The evening was rounded off with desserts, from feta and honey cheesecake (divine) to spiced apple mince pies, paired perfectly with Persian tea. The great news is that this delectable menu is available throughout the festive period if you fancy a fragrant feast for yourself.

A theatrical tempest

Gabriel Annouka, senior designer

If an apocalypse had a dress code, it would take the form of BULLYACHE: WHO HURT YOU? at Southbank Centre this week. Part of the Kunsty festival, and staged in the ample setting of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the performance – directed by Bullyache, the artist duo Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel – unravelled as a drag requiem: an end-of-days cabaret that played with glitter as much as it did with grief. East London drag star Barbs, sequins blazing, ruled the stage as a diva in disarray, balancing Deyn’s singing and the dancers with a lawless, intoxicating narrative. Music and lights begged for mercy, and surrender never looked so good. I may have cried, probably laughed, and most definitely both. Absolute mayhem, pure perfection.

A scent-sational history

Anna Fixsen, US editor

‘There are three things no respectable woman should do: smoke, dance the tango and wear Shalimar,’ a famed 1920s-era adage went. Unfortunately for those upright citizens, the appeal of Shalimar – a hypnotic amber fragrance dreamed up by French perfumer Jacques Guerlain in 1925 – has remained a favourite of bad girls everywhere (Frida Kahlo, Brigitte Bardot, Rita Hayworth… need we go on?) for exactly a century. To celebrate the milestone, Guerlain has concocted a 21st-century version of the flapper-era fragrance, Shalimar L’Essence, which emphasises the perfume’s mouth-watering, vanilla notes for a scent that’s suited to today’s rebel. I popped by an exhibition at the Waldorf-Astoria (now home to the world’s largest Guerlain spa) to experience both new and old formulations and geek out over the fascinating history of this storied art deco aroma. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but Shalimar might be the next-best thing.

In 1978, Zofia Rydet embarked on a colossal task: photographing the inside of every household in Poland. The 67 year-old had already produced a major body of work with Little Man – a study on children, published as a book in 1965 – while her series of photomontages, The World of Feeling and Imagination, had been in development since 1975. What became Sociological Record would ultimately take Rydet into the 1990s, culminating in more than 20,000 images, only a fraction of which were ever printed (by the series’ end her efforts were solely focused on making sure there was a record, as opposed to sharing it).

‘Not everyone could have had access to these people,’ says Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, where a substantial new exhibition of the work has just opened (through 22 February 2026). ‘They were often in rural areas with a very local life. For her to gain their trust and access their inner most domestic environments, is a real testament to her personality.’ Rydet travelled by bus or relied on friends for lifts, turning up and knocking on doors unannounced. ‘The actual photographing was quite quick,’ Grafik adds on a video call, ‘it was the conversations she would subsequently have with the homeowners, that profoundly affected the way she thought about life and work.’

A month earlier I had been invited to the Zofia Rydet Foundation, inside the home of its founders, Zofia AugustyNska-Martyniak and her mother Maria Sokol-AugustyNska (Rydet was AugustyNska-Martyniak’s great grandfather’s sister, though she usually refers to the photographer as her great grandmother). Sat in the family’s living room with Grafik and her co-curator, lecturer and cultural manager Karol Hordziej, the visit mirrored some version of Rydet’s own circumstances, with talk filling much of our allotted time. At one point AugustyNska-Martyniak recalls casually how, when Rydet died, in Gliwice in 1997, most of the family were interested in inheriting her cameras; she and her mother instead became custodians of the archive, and it moved with them from a residence in Rabka, to the Kraków house where we’re introduced. The Foundation was established in 2011.

Hordziej , a school friend of AugustyNska-Martyniak’s (he remembers, unconscious of their gravity at the time, first seeing Rydet’s pictures on the walls of her home), has been working with the Foundation for a number of years, originally helping to digitalise the archive as a way to preserve, celebrate and extend its function. In London however, the focus is on around 100 physical prints Rydet made in her home darkroom, as well as books and personal letters. A documentary, ‘Endlessly Distant Roads’ is also on show; made by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Różycki in 1989, in it, a young AugustyNska-Martyniak can be seen walking beside Rydet, carrying the photographer’s camera bag.

‘The Photographers’ Gallery is interested in what happens to archives, how you deal with archives online, and how they then get translated into physical exhibitions,’ continues Grafik. ‘This project became quite important in terms of thinking about that, because obviously the digitalisation of much of the Sociological Record was the way that that work suddenly became disseminated beyond the boundaries of this sort of niche field, but we’re looking at just a tiny part of it. Ultimately the prints tell you something different about what her intention was for the work, versus scans from negatives.’

‘The project was such an ambitious undertaking, particularly for a photographer in the autumn of her career, to suddenly decide that's what she wanted to do,’ she notes. ‘It brings up all sorts of interesting issues to do with photography, archives, identity; there's many layers to it.’ Rydet predominantly worked in black and white, shooting with a wide angle lens and flash, and the exhibition is largely comprised of the busy domestic spaces of the project’s ‘People in Interiors’ sub-series; lace curtains, religious ephemera, floral tablecloths and posters of pop stars all feature. Elsewhere are works from ‘Women on Doorsteps’, ‘Windows’ and ‘Presence’, the latter highlighting the many images of Pope John Paul II Rydet observed on her travels, (notably elected the same year the Sociological Record commenced, the former Archbishop of Kraków had been the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years).

‘She was very free,’ offers Hordziej, who has worked on previous Zofia Rydet exhibitions across Poland and also in Paris. ‘She never married, never had her own family. Maria from the Foundation told me that her male colleagues [as well as joining photo clubs, she became a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers in 1965] joked that they were kind of jealous, that she could save all her money for traveling and focus on photography. But she also wanted to talk with her photographs, to ordinary people. She really focused on the message – it’s not how it's done but what is it about.’ Attuned to the project’s future significance, during her lifetime Rydet made a point of entering competitions and gifting her work, oftentimes sending it out internationally; some of these respective labels and similar ephemera still exist in a folder at the Foundation.

Five decades on, against a backdrop of camera phones and social media, reality TV and a contemporary interest in what other people’s homes look like (those before us and currently around us), the exhibition brings Rydet’s work into a new context that speaks to her own curiosity, and her desire to share widely what she saw. ‘She was really photographing people – who wouldn't have been photographed much in their lives, maybe never inside their houses – in their kind of essence, in these interiors that had been put together very organically and often practically,’ shares Grafik. ‘Versus today, where things are photographed all the time. They are so rich as images, each one is a little universe.’

Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, produced with The Photographers’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Zofia Rydet Foundation. It is on view at The Photographers’ Gallery until 22 February 2026