Lillian Bassman — New York

Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond provides an expansive view of a woman who challenged the status quo in fashion photography between the 1940s and the 1960s. Bassman was an American fashion photographer acclaimed for her illustrious tenure at Harper’s Bazaar, where she promoted the careers of Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Paul Himmel. This show traces Bassman’s trajectory from design apprentice to art director turned photographer, featuring her hallmark high-contrast black-and-white images of society women, actresses, and models. Rare vintage prints, layout designs, and darkroom experiments highlight Bassman’s signature abstract aesthetic through gestures and silhouettes that complemented the ultrafeminine style of midcentury glamour. Bassman’s contribution to the genre, she once said, “has been to photograph fashion with a woman’s eye for a woman’s intimate feelings.”

Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through July 26, 2026

Nhu Xuan Hua — London

Nhu Xuan Hua has presented solo shows of startlingly imaginative, at times surreal portraiture at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam and Les Rencontres d’Arles, the photo festival in Southern France. She has also worked in the fashion industry, for brands such as Dior and Margiela. Hua’s latest project, Of Walking on Fire, takes place at Autograph in London, where she probes the limits of communication and memory. Hua’s parents immigrated to France following the war in Vietnam, and the photographer often seeks to reconcile gaps in family history with the rhythms of her own life in Paris by restaging scenes drawn from archival images. Faces and identities are sometimes obscured by garments, flashes of light, or digital manipulation. The body, Hua’s work implies, seems always to exist between eras and places, and through that mélange, a new personality might arise.

Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire at Autograph, London, April 16–September 19, 2026 

Catherine Opie — London

Catherine Opie rose to eminence in the 1990s as the court portraitist to Los Angeles’s leather-dyke scene during the height of the culture wars. Since then, she has continued to photograph her queer circle of friends and intimates while documenting other subcultures: surfers, protestors, football players, ice fishermen, Boy Scouts. Opie’s first retrospective in the United Kingdom explores this expansive, conceptually charged body of portraiture and how it makes visible the countenance of American democracy itself.

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through May 31, 2026

Martin Parr — Paris

“I respect what you’re doing, but I think you’re from a different planet,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once told Martin Parr. With his lurid flash and ultrasaturated palette, the late British photographer might seem like an emissary from outer space, sent to give earthlings a surreal reality check. A current exhibition in Paris frames his work against the backdrop of climate change—a ripe theme for Parr, whose tragicomic pictures, far from shallow satire, have always spoken deeply to how we want to see the world.

Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, through May 24, 2026

Deborah Turbeville — Sweden

Alongside Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, Deborah Turbeville brought an edgy theatricality to fashion photography beginning in the 1970s. She rejected the glossy sex appeal that motivated commercial photoshoots by xeroxing, cutting, blurring, scratching, and pinning prints together to conjure otherworldly narratives. This exhibition concentrates on Turbeville’s personal experiments with photo collage, a means through which she heightened the distinct air of unreality that distinguishes her work, in which the forces of fashion and fiction coalesce.

Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage at Moderna Museet, Malmö, May 2–September 27, 2026

Lin Zhipeng (No.223) — Shanghai

The photographer Lin Zhipeng, known as No.223, traces the hidden dialogues between desire, physicality, and the everyday. At Fotografiska in Shanghai, a new exhibition, drawn from over one hundred photographs spanning twenty years, portrays No.223’s artistic practice of documenting intimate moments between friends and lovers, sensual still lives of fruits and flowers, or city corners and natural landscapes. No.223’s images pulse with a poetic, almost electric energy: flowers seemingly bloom from the curve of a figure’s back; a knife pierces through a sliced lemon and pomegranate stacked on one another. In photographing these clandestine moments, No.223 questions how desire can become a subversive element of daily life. 

Under the Sunlight, There is No True Intimacy at Fotografiska, Shanghai, through June 14, 2026

Kyotographie 2026 — Kyoto

“I don’t know if individual photographs contain ideas, worlds, history, humanity, beauty, ugliness or nothing at all,” the Provoke-era legend Daido Moriyama observed in 1973. A large survey of his work at the Kyocera Museum of Art, covering almost sixty years of output, will test this observation while anchoring this year’s edition of Kyotographie, the photography festival in Kyoto. Kyotographie, however, maintains a decidedly international point of view. A spotlight on South Africa will feature three generations of image makers—Ernest Cole, Pieter Hugo, and Lebohang Kganye—revealing the ongoing work of writing a history of place. Exhibitions by resident-artist Thandiwe Muriu, from Kenya, and Fatma Hassona, a Palestinian photographer-activist killed in Gaza in April 2025, echo Moriyama’s notion of photography’s openness and contradictions, simultaneously containing beauty and ugliness. 

Kyotographie 2026 at various locations in Kyoto, Japan, April 18–May 17, 2026

Women Photographers of the Bauhaus — Berlin

The Bauhaus was well schooled in contradiction—it was a place torn between craftsmanship and industry, emotion and function, the collective and the individual. Much recent scholarship has focused on the patriarchal structures of this supposedly utopian haven, which allowed women to study art but often confined them to categories such as weaving and costume. Yet, as this exhibition proposes, photography became an accessible and profound medium for the Bauhaus’s female students, among them Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Grit Kallin-Fischer, and Lucia Moholy. These artists were central to shaping the Bauhaus’s New Vision, a movement that sought to reflect Weimar reality with experimental methods.

New Woman, New Vision: Women Photographers of the Bauhaus at Bauhaus Archiv, April 17–October 4, 2026

Johny Pitts — Paris

For the last twenty years, the writer, filmmaker, and photographer Johny Pitts has embarked on a large-scale body of work centered on the African diaspora in Europe and beyond. Photographing across London, Lisbon, Brussels, and Berlin, he has documented moments of daily life with the idea, as he says, that “being black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant.” (Musically-inclined viewers may recognize his work as having recently graced the cover of the Blood Orange album Essex Honey.) His exhibition Black Bricolage assembles photographic archives, ephemera, and personal testimony to create a layered, constellatory experience: a nuanced representation of what Pitts calls Afropean identity, “whole and unhyphenated.”

Johny Pitts: Black Bricolage at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, through May 24, 2026

Peter Hujar — New York

Whether photographing the fixtures of Manhattan’s queer counterculture or the catacombs of Palermo, Peter Hujar approached his subjects with genuine curiosity and preternatural clarity. Nearly forty years after his death, in 1987, from AIDS-related pneumonia, Hujar is the subject of a biography by frieze editor Andrew Durbin, an Ira Sachs film starring Ben Whishaw, and exhibitions in Venice and London. This season, the Morgan Library in New York presents Hujar:Contact—a follow-up to the museum’s celebrated 2018 Hujar show Speed of Life—which considers the artist’s process through his contact sheets and editing notes. Gifted with an ability to make his subjects pose at ease, Hujar also displayed virtuosic control in the darkroom—burning, dodging, bleaching, and spotting to refine the presence and meaning of an image. Hujar:Contact offers the rare occasion to observe a singular photographic mind at work.

Hujar:Contact at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, May 22–October 25, 2026

Inez and Vinoodh — The Hague

In the world of fashion photography, few names are as inescapable—and inseparable—as Inez and Vinoodh. Since emerging in the 1990s with slick, digital images that offered an audacious alternative to the era’s heroin chic, the Dutch-born husband-and-wife team have continued to explore what makes us human, often pairing nuanced gestures with extremes of editing. Celebrating their forty years of collaboration, this survey traces the theme of love across eighteen galleries, offering a sustained look at the intimate dynamics of power coupledom.

Can Love Be a Photograph at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, through September 6, 2026

In his latest monograph, Life Still, his first collaboration with Aperture, Friedlander playfully reimagines the presentation of his oeuvre at age ninety-one, bringing together rarely seen and unpublished images from the past sixty years alongside new work to stage a visual dialogue between past and present. Here, six photographers reflect on how Friedlander’s photographs continue to resonate and endure.

Daniel Arnold

Obviously, a distillation of eerie harmonic order from chaos is the persistent Lee Friedlander knockout. The calling card. It’s only worth mentioning here to accentuate how rare it is to look at his work and relate to anything beyond the compulsion of looking. He’s just too good at it. In that regard, there’s not much evidence in the hit parade of his vulnerability—even in the self-portraits. At his most unflatteringly double-chinned, his photos are still so inventively executed that the subject feels divorced from, even mocked by, the photographer. 

Life Still is the end of all that, and what a pleasure it is to meet Lee there. A book of invitations! Many of them are eloquent and intentional (see an image of a dumpster with fuck spray-painted on its surface next to a tongue-in-cheek auto-store slogan that reads “Time to retire”), but where I find Lee to be so vulnerably present that I could cry is in this simple shot of an Obama sticker on a minivan window. A photo that would be right at home in my mom’s phone gallery. Talk about a self-portrait! To see him in his nineties, still snapping instinctively at shapes and shadows, even with an unparalleled body of work trailing endlessly behind him—it’s beyond moving. It’s relatable. The photographer’s dream.

Awol Erizku

My first and only memory of meeting Lee Friedlander was during a class visit with Tod Papageorge to Yale University Press in 2013. We watched Friedlander hover over a set of proofs for Family in the Picture, 1958–2013 the way a pianist listens for the softest note. He studied the tonal range with austere precision. I remember him asking for alternative pulls because one set needed just a touch more contrast, reminding us how much feeling a great black-and-white reproduction can carry.

That same vigilance runs through his whole oeuvre: the cluttered American stage, the ever-present mirror that turns the camera back on its maker. I’ve long dubbed Friedlander the original “selfie king,” not out of vanity but for his unorthodox investigation of self-portraiture (see In the Picture: Self-Portraits, 1958–2011). In his practice, he becomes shadow, reflection, interruption, a figure folded into the world’s signage and glare. He makes the ordinary strange, then honest. He reminds us that the overlooked structure is often the story.

But my favorite turn in the work comes after knee replacements and forced stillness, when he turns to the flowers from his wife’s garden, stripped of their petals, and studies what holds them up. Stems (2003) is my favorite conceptual detour: portraits of endurance, born from necessity, with no patience for sentimentality. And that refusal of sentimentality is the throughline from then to Life Still.

Sara Cwynar

In this picture from 1963, a fully furnished bedroom set (bed, side table, two lamps, multiple chests of drawers, and an ornate floral bedspread) sits behind a store window at street level, available to view and purchase. The weight of the photo comes from the reflection of the street seen on the store window and how the sky mashes itself into this view of a bedroom set—these features lend it language more in common with that of a dream sequence from a movie, or a modern nightmare, than a display window. It is an example of Friedlander’s ability to find collages in the real world made out of furniture, asphalt, unloved objects, sky, and light. This picture, taken twelve years before Michel Foucault famously wrote about the panoptic nature of modern life, feels like a harbinger of something to come, foreshadowing the way that sleep is now the only place where technology, surveillance, and commerce can’t get you, the way that all our private thoughts and feelings and spaces are churned out for public view through social media. This bedroom is no longer private, sacred, or safe, displayed as it is to Friedlander, the stranger reflected on the glass overlaid with a row of fluorescent lights shooting straight down Main Street.

Lee Friedlander, Spain, 1964

Lee Friedlander, Paris, 1984

Gillian Laub

Lee Friedlander’s photographs are always brilliantly layered, composed with multiple worlds coexisting inside a single frame. I love how he finds intimate moments inside the public spaces and does it with humor, wit, and a generosity toward his subjects. I was particularly drawn to this pairing: two images, made twenty years apart in Spain and Paris, that feel timeless and universal. The first photograph carries a quiet melancholy, expressed through a solitary figure dwarfed by the towering fantasy of the world around her. The second depicts ordinary life colliding with spectacle in a way that makes you want to laugh and look closer at the same time. Each plays with aspiration and reality, with the gap between the world we are sold and the one we actually inhabit. They form a conversation about fantasy and everyday life and show how effortlessly—almost comically—the two collide. What I admire most about Friedlander is the quality that runs through all his work: an insatiable curiosity without judgment. These two images are a perfect distillation of everything that makes his vision so enduring.

Anastasia Samoylova

In Waddy, Kentucky (1969), Lee Friedlander composes a world that seems to look back at itself. A solitary cowboy flickers on the television, his chiseled profile and sidelong glance set against a smiling young man in a formal portrait above the lamp. Beyond the window, another figure—a rugged mechanic, perhaps an echo of that same man from the portrait—bends over a piece of farm equipment, absorbed in a task we cannot fully see. There is both mystery and quiet humor in this trio of archetypes, as if the image were gently staging its own internal dialogue. These presences do not connect so much as resonate, like variations on a theme, each contained, each distant.

The wallpaper hums across the surface, its dense pattern recalling Friedlander’s chain-link fences—that familiar screen through which the world is both revealed and withheld. Frilly curtains soften the view. A subtle misalignment between expression and setting, image and world, carries a sense of endearment.

Nothing fully resolves. Inside and outside fold into one another. Meaning gathers gently through proximity and repetition.

A small, complete world. A short film, stilled.

Stephen Shore

Lee Friedlander’s path and mine crossed at Monet’s House and Garden in Giverny, France, in the early 1980s. Over lunch at the nearby Auberge St. Eustache, Lee told me that he’d been photographing arrangements on tabletops and windowsills. He said that he was so impressed with these arrangements, that he could never have conceived them. I was stunned. Here was the photographer with, perhaps, the most intense formal imagination telling me how impressed he was with the imagination behind these tabletops. Then it occurred to me that there are two kinds of imagination. Some of us can see an empty tabletop, or a blank canvas, and know what to fill it with. Then there are those of us who can stand on a street corner or in a living room or in a forest and know where to stand and where to place the frame and when to take a picture. Those of us who have an instinct for making sense of things—more than envisioning things out of thin air—we’re the ones who are drawn to photography.

See more in Lee Friedlander: Life Still (Aperture, 2026).

Michella Bredahl — Amsterdam

Having begun a modeling career at fourteen years old, Michella Bredahl felt the intrusions of a camera’s gaze early on. By contrast, her own portraits of young women, many with unstable upbringings that mirror her own, are grounded in trust and collaboration. In the Danish photographer and filmmaker’s first museum exhibition, portraits of pole dancers, new mothers, artistic peers, and chosen family derive their strength from displays of unguarded tenderness. “She had a specific vulnerability,” Bredahl has said of Sybilla, a friend and recurring subject. “It’s as if there was always a tear in her eye.”

Michella Bredahl: Rooms We Made Safe at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, through February 8, 2026

Boris Mikhailov — London

A towering figure in Ukrainian art, Boris Mikhailov fully embraced photography after being fired from an engineering job in 1969, when the KGB realized he was developing nude portraits of his wife in the factory’s darkroom. It’s a fitting origin story for this inveterate rule breaker, whose photographs of everyday life in Kharkiv—both behind the Iron Curtain and after its collapse—skewer ideology with a bracing intimacy and a sly amateurism. Planned before the Russian invasion, Mikhailov’s largest exhibition to date explores the complexities of Ukrainian identity at a time when the nation is fighting for its future.

Boris Mikhailov: Ukraine Diary at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, through February 22, 2026

Alejandro Cartagena — San Francisco

Between 2011 and 2012, Alejandro Cartagena waited every morning on an overpass in Monterrey, Mexico, leaning over to photograph day laborers sprawled across various pickup beds, where they read newspapers, scrolled their phones, or napped during their commute into the city center. Carpoolers exemplifies Cartagena’s cumulative, serial approach to visual storytelling, as well as his mix of political critique and deadpan humor. The artist’s first museum retrospective—coinciding with a monograph published by Aperture—reveals the absurdity surrounding border culture, disastrous development schemes, and contemporary image-making itself, lending new credence to André Breton’s claim that Mexico is “the Surrealist place par excellence.”

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through April 19, 2026

Ralph Eugene Meatyard — Atlanta

In 1950, a twenty-five-year-old optician named Ralph Eugene Meatyard bought his first camera, and what started as a way to document his new family led to a tremendous addition to the history of old, weird America. Part of a close-knit creative community in Lexington, Kentucky, Meatyard often photographed his wife and children, who gamely portrayed the figments of his Southern Gothic imagination using masks, dolls, and other props. The prints on view in the High Museum’s The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard are drawn from a monograph that the photographer assembled at the end of his life—tragically cut short in 1972—and intended as the culmination of his peculiar vision.

The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, through May 10, 2026

Photography and the Black Arts Movement — Los Angeles

Flourishing in the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Arts movement formed a revolutionary cultural front against the marginalization of Black life and art in the United States. This substantial show, curated by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, is the first to historicize the role of photography in what is often called the Second Renaissance, whose image makers—among them Barkley L. Hendricks with his pioneering portraiture that venerated everyday Black people—advanced a new visual language of self-representation and community building.

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, February 24–June 14, 2026

William Eggleston — New York 

For a relief from doomscrolling, try The Last Dyes, an exhibition of William Eggleston’s incandescent color photographs from the 1970s. The cars, meals, bedrooms, and gas stations that would otherwise be unremarkable are, in this elegant exhibition at David Zwirner, elevated to icons of Americana, and burned into memory through an extraordinary range of colors. Eggleston ushered color photography into artistic consciousness exactly fifty years ago with his controversial 1976 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York—color being associated, at the time, with the lurid commercialism of print advertising. The toxic and arduous dye-transfer process which Eggleston made famous, and which an explainer on the Zwirner website helpfully illustrates, renders banal scenes both shocking and glorious—a red sweater, a blue ceiling, a sunset like cotton candy. But Kodak stopped making the chemicals in the 1990s, and the works on display are the last of the dyes ever to be made with the remaining supply. The newest iPhone camera has nothing on the experience of encountering these prints in person, each one a vivid dream that’s all too real. 

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes at David Zwirner, New York, through March 7, 2026

Jeff Wall — Toronto

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Jeff Wall’s breakthrough pictures: staged narrative photographs mounted in light boxes that, when they debuted in Vancouver in the late 1970s, confounded and thrilled viewers. They still thrill. Exploring memory, war, and everyday life, his post-truth tableaux demand a level of sustained attention vanishingly rare today, each one resulting from meticulous location scouting, rehearsals, multiple shoots, and post-production magic. If visiting this show in Toronto—his first major Canadian survey in twenty-five years—feels a little like going to the cinema, that’s not by mistake. As the artist famously put it, “I guess you could say I’m like a director, but my movies have only one frame.”

Jeff Wall Photographs 1984–2023 at Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, through March 22, 2026

Nan Goldin — London and Paris

Throughout her career, Nan Goldin has photographed her friends, lovers, and family she made for herself. Her candid, visceral photographs captured a world teeming with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. First published by Aperture in 1986, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has had a profound influence on photography and visual culture around the world. Marking the fortieth anniversary of Ballad, two new exhibitions explore its undimmed intensity and towering influence. In London, Gagosian Gallery presents Ballad in full for the first time in the United Kingdom, and later this spring, a retrospective devoted to her videos and slideshows will fill the Grand Palais in Paris.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at Gagosian Gallery, London, through March 21, 2026, and Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well, at the Grand Palais, Paris, March 18–June 21, 2026

Dana Lixenberg — Paris

Portraiture has been central to Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg’s documentary practice for more than three decades, and it likewise anchors her latest solo exhibition, American Images. Bringing together work she has made in the United States since the early 1990s, the exhibition spans two floors of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and ranges from portraits of pop culture icons such as Tupac Shakur to Polaroid test shots and images from her incisive examinations of race and class, including The Last Days of Shishmaref (2007) and Jeffersonville, Indiana (1997–2004). The museum’s top floor is dedicated to Imperial Courts (1993–ongoing), a body of work begun in the 1990s about the residents of a Los Angeles housing project, to which Lixenberg continues to return today.

Dana Lixenberg: American Images at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, February 11–May 24, 2026

Janna Ireland — Chicago

Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles explores the last residential project designed by visionary American architect Bruce Goff. Ireland’s photographs delve into the origin story of the Al Struckus House, commissioned in 1979 for the engineer, woodworker, and art collector Al Struckus. Located in Woodland Hills, in northwestern Los Angeles, the four-story cylindrical structure features organic elements, from radical floor joists to rotating circular closets, that create an open yet dizzying atmosphere, reflecting the architect’s eccentric flair as well as the personality of its owner. As Ireland notes, the house is “organic and singular in form, it is a shining example of Bruce Goff’s design philosophy, moving forward through time unimpeded, always somehow in the ‘continuous present.’” The exhibition complements the retrospective Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, also on view this spring at the Art Institute.

Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 18, 2026

Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré — New York

In Latitudes, two distinctive yet complementary photographers present meditations on memory and place in Côte d’Ivoire. François-Xavier Gbré, who was born in France and has worked across West Africa, is known for his precise examination of how architecture forms a living archive of a country’s aspirations. His newest series, Radio Ballast (2025), follows a rail line that connects Abidjan to Niger. He spent a year photographing its aging infrastructure: train cars, stations, and rusted track, against the backdrop of the verdant Ivorian landscape. Nuits Balnéaires is a Grand-Bassam–based visual artist who began his career in the fashion industry. His work explores the multicultural nature of Côte d’Ivoire’s southeastern shores and its deep connection the environment. Inspired by the Nzima and Agni-Bona people’s belief in a return to a single human origin at the end of life, his series Eboro (2025) takes viewers on a metaphorical journey to find his ancestors—and himself. The rich, cinematic palette of colors in Eboro evoke nostalgia and quiet longing. Together, these works offer a remarkable look at how Côte d’Ivoire’s past—spiritual, cosmological, and ecological—seeps into its present.

Latitudes: Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré at the International Center of Photography, New York, through May 4, 2026

Jump Ahead:
The Year in Interviews
The Year in Portfolios
The Year in Essays

The Year in Interviews

Heinkuhn Oh’s People of the Twenty-First Century
A conversation with Hyunjung Son, from Aperture No. 261, “The Seoul Issue”

In mural-scale portraits of high schoolers, soldiers, and other social types, Heinkuhn Oh subtly dramatizes tensions between collective and personal identity in Korean society. “I don’t try to create complex gazes—I find people who naturally possess them,” says Oh. “My role then becomes creating the trust needed for them to reveal their authentic selves to the camera.”

The Darkroom Master Keeping Diane Arbus’s Spirit Alive
A conversation with Lesley A. Martin

Neil Selkirk, photographer and darkroom wizard, is best known as the only person who has printed Diane Arbus’s work since her death in 1971. Here, Selkirk shares rare insight into the photographer’s extraordinary breakthroughs: “People recognized pictures they could believe in. Nobody believes in an Ansel Adams picture. Everybody believes in a Diane Arbus picture, for reasons that had been built into the work.” 

Is Photography Yorgos Lanthimos’s True Calling?
A conversation with Zack Hatfield, from Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” in The PhotoBook Review

Yorgos Lanthimos, the filmmaker behind Poor Things (2023), Kinds of Kindness (2024), and most recently, Bugonia (2025), is known for his stylized, pitch-black comedies rife with disfigurement, deadpan dialogue, and transgressive gamesmanship. His experimental spirit undiminished by mainstream success, Lanthimos has recently branched out to a new venture: the photobook. Here, the director discusses his fledgling career as a maker of dreamy, category-defying photobooks. “The beautiful thing about photobooks is that they often allow for a story that’s not tied to the conventions of narrative,” he says.

Zen and the Art of Photography
A conversation with Michael Famighetti, from Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue”

Mark Steinmetz and Irina Rozovsky discuss the mysteries of the darkroom and the gifts of close looking. “Picture making is like a strange maze, and there’s a frustration and euphoria to it,” says Steinmetz. “Frustration in not quite knowing if and when a photograph is going to announce itself and then the pure joy when it shouts, ‘Over here!’”

Melina Matsoukas Creates Space for Black Stories in Hollywood and Beyond
A conversation with Solange Knowles, from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

Solange Knowles recently sat down with Melina Matsoukas for the “Barbara Walters treatment,” interviewing her friend and collaborator about her visionary career spanning fashion, photography, music, and film. “I always felt like I had this purpose to do these things and honor my family and the people that empowered me,” says Matsoukas. “I just didn’t know what the tool or medium would be to do that.”

The Lives of Coreen Simpson
A conversation with Deborah Willis, from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph (Aperture, 2025)

For five decades, Coreen Simpson has chronicled hip-hop, fashion, and New York’s cultural scene with unparalleled style. Here, in an interview from Simpson’s new monograph, the artist speaks with the art historian Deborah Willis. “The camera gave me license to see the world,” Simpson says. “When I have my camera with me, I’m not afraid of anybody. I always feel like I can just do anything if I have my camera with me.”

Daniel Arnold’s New Pleasure? Missing the Shot. 
A conversation with Freddy Martinez

On the occasion of a new monograph, the street photographer Daniel Arnold speaks about New York City folklore, stepping away from Instagram, and his shifting priorities as an artist. “I made an edit of probably three thousand photos to show the scope of what’s there from my current point of view: Here’s my trajectory from those very crude photographs when I couldn’t use a camera to now trying to work without my brain noticing,” Arnold says.

David Alekhuogie Sees Blackness at the Core of Modern Art
A conversation with Zoë Hopkins, from A Reprise (Aperture, 2025)

In his project A Reprise, David Alekhuogie remixes Walker Evans’s images of African sculptures—and poses bold questions about what we consider fake or original, art or archive. “I wanted to make work from the perspective of an outsider, because I think that to grapple with broken, inherited cultural capital is to always be an outsider,” says Alekhuogie.

Vija Celmins Isn’t Interested in Photography
A conversation with Richard Learoyd, from Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting”

For more than half a century, Vija Celmins has produced absorbing paintings and drawings that are often inspired by—and mistaken for—photographs. Here, she speaks with Richard Learoyd about images, surfaces, and illusion. “My tools are like hours, and it becomes a real part of the work,” Celmins says. “Whereas in photography, it’s instantaneous, and then you pick which image. It’s hard to do either one, it seems to me.”

“Superfine” Unpacks Self-Expression, Resistance, and Status Through Black Style
A conversation with Monique Long

Earlier this year, the exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York explored Black style across three hundred years through the lens of dandyism. Here, Superfine catalog contributors Elizabeth Way, Kimberly Jenkins, and Ekow Eshun consider what it means to be a Black dandy—and how the figure functions in diasporic culture and history.

The Year in Portfolios

Silvia Rosi Reimagines the Family Album
by Vanessa Peterson, from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In her performative self-portraits, Silvia Rosi speaks to experiences of the African diaspora across Europe. “Rather than reaching toward historical personages, Rosi emulates those who aren’t written about, the lives of immigrants trying to establish themselves in a new country in the face of economic precarity and cultural dislocation,” writes Vanessa Peterson. “Her images beautifully highlight tender, painful feelings of misrecognition and alienation, and the difficulties of starting anew.”

A Bittersweet Ode to the Teenagers of 2000s Seoul
by Hiji Nam, from Aperture No. 261, “The Seoul Issue”

In search of lost youth, the New York–raised Sung Jin Park spent his thirties photographing high schoolers in his native Korea. “The series is photographed like an editorial, with the subjects often looking straight at you; we meet their gaze as teenagers ourselves and are transported back to the thrilling desperation of youthful indiscretions and the hope that they’d puncture the seemingly endless expanse of adolescent boredom,” writes Hiji Nam.

David Lynch’s Outsized Influence on Photography

The director David Lynch (1946–2025) blended a dark surrealism with banal Americana to create hypnotic, dreamlike atmospheres. His plots were cryptic; his characters eccentric and unforgettable; his love of coffee, cherry pie, and Transcendental Meditation, legendary. Lynch was an artist of total originality who invented his own cinema of the unconscious, influencing generations of image-makers. Here, a group of photographers—Gregory Crewdson, Roe Ethridge, Todd Hido, Tania Franco Klein, Jarod Lew, Alec Soth, and Yelena Yemchuk—pay homage to the beloved filmmaker. 

Sakir Khader’s Portraits of Palestinian Perseverance
by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting,” under the column Viewfinder

Sakir Khader’s photographs of people in conflict zones across the Middle East document violence and grief alongside moments of tenderness and reprieve. “Khader doesn’t parachute into war zones. He doesn’t join official military embeds,” writes Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. “Without narrative or polemic, his images create a withering critique of US foreign policy from the so-called War on Terror until today.” 

A Photographer’s Scavenged Still Lifes
by Jesse Dorris, from Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting”

Leaving leftovers in her backyard, Lia Darjes creates a stage for a series of improvised tableaux. Snails, squirrels, ladybugs, and other fauna pay visits to the backyards of Berlin and parts unknown; scavenging the leftovers of human congregation, they trigger Darjes’s camera. “I was sitting in the garden one day,” she says, “just thinking, What’s next? And I saw a squirrel jumping on our garden table. I thought, I wonder if I can recreate that.” 

How Sarker Protick Built a Career Through Listening
by Varun Nayar

In Bangladesh, Sarker Protick combines the impulses of the photojournalist with the intuition of a musician, unpacking questions about photography’s relationship to time and memory. “Musical composition is such an editorial process; you build a logic through it,” Protick says. “That selectiveness is vital, and it came to me naturally as a photographer.” 

A Portrait of Creative Community in Ivory Coast
by Tiana Reid, from from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In his crisp, ecstatic photographs, Nuits Balnéaires draws from iconic West African portraiture to depict his circle of friends and family. A relentless respect for fashion, tailoring, jewelry, craft, and aesthetics are, to Nuits Balnéaires, “a way to really reclaim that identity which is strongly African, but also with a lightness that equals an openness to the world, to this contemporary world, to this global world in which we exist today.” 

Photographing the Night That Shook Seoul
by Jungmin Cho, from Aperture No. 261, “The Seoul Issue”

Last December, South Korea found itself under martial law for the first time since the Gwangju Uprising. Yezoi Hwang took to the streets with her camera. The uniforms of the police blocking the National Assembly and confronting the protesters failed to absorb light, reflecting it instead, turning them into ghosts. In contrast, hopeful handwritten notes, ribbons, and tiny, solidaristic snowmen became fixtures of the cityscape. As Hwang states: “Photography becomes a tool that allows one individual to confront the multitude.”

David Gilbert’s Queer Wish for Other Worlds
by Evan Moffitt

David Gilbert’s colorful studio photographs feel intensely private, like a scrapbook for a tightly knit circle of friends. “The simple stuff that Gilbert photographs isn’t meant to last: drawings and collages on paper that are usually destroyed by the time their image circulates,” writes Evan Moffitt. “Instead, they’re preserved in the paper stock of his photographic prints. In Gilbert’s studio, the lens always comes last, even though it’s the first thing we see.”

Alana Perino Crafts a Haunting Story of Family and Memory
by Eli Cohen, from from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In the Florida island town of Longboat Key, Alana Perino—and winner of the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize—portrays a home upended by loss. As Eli Cohen writes: “Pictures of Birds does not shy away from the idea that spirits dwell in this home, and in many ways, the photographs take comfort in their presence.”

The Year in Essays

How An-My Lê Makes Meaning from History’s Psychic Debris
by Ocean Vuong, from Small Wars (Aperture, 2025)

Ocean Vuong reflects on An-My Lê’s photographs of Vietnam and the US, considering how the artist masterfully uses blurred motion and stillness to reclaim the semiotics of war. As Vuong writes: “The stillness Lê captures is not one of lifelessness—but of life lived so fully—the arrested movement of these figures, as in another shot of a crowd of people observing a solar eclipse, is a reclamation from the semiotics of war and tragedy.”

Richard Misrach on the Eerie Grandeur of Global Trade
by Rebecca Solnit, from Cargo (Aperture, 2025)

Rebecca Solnit considers the photographer’s recent work tracing histories of shipping routes and their impact on the natural environment. “These ships carry specific burdens, but they also transport the burden of the industrial age’s consumption and production and its impacts,” writes Solnit. “They carry a burden, a cargo, of meanings.”

Sally Mann’s Photographs of Girls on the Cusp of Adulthood
by Rebecca Bengal

On the occasion of Aperture’s reissue of the long sought-after volume, the writer Rebecca Bengal looks at At Twelve through a dozen reflections. “The true subject of At Twelve is time itself,” Bengal writes, “perceptions of time and youth, about being a girl, versus a woman, about the chasm between those two phases, and what it means to cross them, and what selves are lost and what selves are inhabited in that process.”

Stephen Shore on the Color Red
From Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” under the column Notebook

The color can evoke love, anger, and—especially for photographers—danger. What makes red so tricky? “A painter can choose the shade of red they want. They can choose not to use the color at all. They can place it where they want on the canvas and in relation to the other colors they have chosen. If a painter were to see a red door and want it to turn black, they would have that option,” Stephen Shore writes. “A photographer wouldn’t. We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us.”

Seydou Keïta’s Revelatory Portraits of Malian Life
by Kobby Ankomah Graham, from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In midcentury Bamako, sitting for a portrait in Seydou Keïta’s studio was a defining assertion of identity. “Keïta’s images offer windows into a world where individuals claim space within a rapidly shifting society,” writes Kobby Ankomah Graham. “They are living archives, constantly being reinterpreted through contemporary perspectives. They show the enduring power of photography to capture more than mere aesthetic.”

Nikki S. Lee Stays in the Picture
by Hyunji Nam, from Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue” 

Nikki S. Lee was a rising star in New York’s late-’90s art world—then she walked away. Can the artist reinvent herself in Seoul? “I’ve never once dreamed of being a photographer,” Lee stated. “To me, photography was just one medium I happened to use. I never saw it as the end goal.” 

Kunié Sugiura’s Genre-Blending Vision
by Erin O’Toole, from Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting”

Since the late 1960s, Kunié Sugiura has defied the expectations of the art world with hybrid, dreamlike forms that test the limits of photographic expression. Sugiura’s practice, which melds photography and painting, emerged, in part, from the heritage of artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. But while her work bears hallmarks of Moholy-Nagy’s legacy, Sugiura’s approach to photography also reflects her fierce independence of mind and the influence of Japanese aesthetics. “Even before she took up a brush, Kunie Sugiura was gesturing toward painting,” writes Erin O’Toole.

Bruce Weber’s All-American Obsessions
by Natasha Stagg

Bruce Weber’s ad campaigns for Abercrombie & Fitch and Calvin Klein made him one of the most prestigious names in photography—until he was accused by male models of unwanted advances. Will a recent exhibition reshape his legacy? “To see these images now is to recognize them from an earlier, non-art context,” writes Natasha Stagg, “and to recall their impact: a stirring of sexuality, a seed of aspiration.” 

How Baghdad Is Rebuilding Its Arts Community
by Dalia Al-Dujaili, Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads,” under the column Dispatches

After decades of conflict, photographers gather to reimagine Iraq’s global image. As Dalia Al-Dujaili writes: “The wide accessibility of photography, which requires little more than a smartphone, has accelerated its growth in Baghdad. With more photographers emerging, the need for a communal space to share images has become crucial.” 

Essex Hemphill’s Love Knew No Bounds
by Michael Londres

A crucial voice for Black queer desire and liberation, the late poet—finally back in print—has ignited a fire in American artists across generations. This year, a group exhibition in Washington, DC, commemorated the bygone era in which the poet thrived, and celebrated the dream that he kept alive for the next generation. “In a town of memorials set in stone, the show pulsates with optimism and collective life,” writes Michael Londres. 

Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.

Pioneering Voices

David Alekhuogie: A Reprise

In A Reprise, David Alekhuogie remixes Walker Evans’s photographs of African art, provoking timely questions about authorship and authenticity. In 1935, Walker Evans photographed hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alekhuogie investigates Evans’s photographs, provocatively remixing them into vibrant collages, and confronting the legacy of authorship behind Western perceptions of African art. Drawing upon the musical concept of the reprise—a performance of repetition—Alekhuogie stakes a claim to restorative ideas around Black antiquity by questioning our relationship to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours

In her searing, diaristic portrait of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together over a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020. Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay. “They know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”

Collect a limited edition of Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours featuring a signed print by the artist and a copy of the volume.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules

Ground Rules in the first bilingual survey by one of Mexico’s most innovative and fearless photographic artists. Celebrated for his photobooks Carpoolers (2014) and A Small Guide to Homeownership (2020), Cartagena is known for his formally engaging and socially incisive images that span the politics of the US-Mexico border, suburban sprawl, and the increasing wealth disparities in North America. Ground Rules emphasizes Cartagena’s serial-based approach and innovative production of artists’ books, and deploys an array of photographic formats, from documentary and collage to the appropriation of vernacular photographs and AI-generated imagery—all unified by a commitment to addressing life in Mexico today with humor and pathos.

Collect a limited edition of Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules featuring two prints by the artist and a signed copy of the volume.

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real

Wish This Was Real is the definitive early-career survey by one of the most acclaimed photographic artists working today. Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of art and fashion—including his iconic covers of Vogue magazine and his photography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition catalog—Mitchell has created images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century. Offering new perspectives by leading writers on his long-standing themes of self-determination and the extraordinary radiance of the everyday, Wish This Was Real shows how photography can be rooted in a collective past while evoking imagined futures.

Collect a limited edition of Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real featuring three metallic cover volumes presented with two posters in custom deluxe folder.

Coreen Simpson: A Monograph

Coreen Simpson—photographer, writer, jeweler—has done it all. Coreen Simpson: A Monograph is a comprehensive survey of a singular, creative force who interweaves photography, design, and explorations of identity. Working for publications such as Essence, Unique New York, and The Village Voice, from the late 1970s onward, Simpson covered New York’s art and fashion scenes, producing portraits of a wide range of Black artists, literary figures, and celebrities. Her iconic jewelry, the Black Cameo, has been worn by everyone from the model Iman to civil-rights leader Rosa Parks. This long-awaited volume, Simpson’s first, features her celebrated B-Boys series—portraits of young people coming of age during the early years of hip-hop—as well as her experiments with collage and other formal interventions. 

Collect a limited-edition print from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter brings critical insights into the mind and eye of Carrie Mae Weems, a touchstone artist renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. The volume traces a spiritual and personal journey through Weems’s career, gathering together her landmark bodies of work from Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) to Preach (2024), her most recent series on the Black church, alongside a series of essays and contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars. Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, the volume puts Weems at the center of the discourse, underscoring the singular value of her vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

Words & Pictures

Aperture Magazine Subscription

The source for photography since 1952, Aperture features immersive portfolios, in-depth writing, and must-read interviews with today’s leading artists. Numerous luminaries have guest edited issues—including this year’s “Liberated Threads” issue guest edited by Tanisha C. Ford—among them Wolfgang Tillmans, Tilda Swinton, Alec Soth, Deana Lawson, Sarah Lewis, and Wendy Red Star, making the magazine essential reading for anyone interested in photography and contemporary culture.

The Photography Workshop Book Series

In our Photography Workshop Series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography, offering the workshop experience in a book. Whether showcasing Vik Muniz on seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways; Graciela Iturbide on how to employ a deeply personal vision while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds; or Dawoud Bey on photographing people and communities, these books offer inspiration to photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

Josef Koudelka: Next

Josef Koudelka: Next is an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists. Drawing from extensive interviews conducted over nearly a decade with the artist and his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators from around the globe, author Melissa Harris offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and world of this notoriously private photographer. Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, this visual biography includes personal and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, alongside iconic images from his extensive body of work spanning the 1950s to the present.

Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images

Race Stories brings together a collection of award-winning short essays by the late cultural historian Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories features seventy-one essays paired with 189 photographs, examining the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. This volume is the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis—which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira

Throughout his decades-long career, Takuma Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). At the Limits of the Gaze collects Nakahira’s writings in English for the first time, bringing together boundary-pushing essays that challenge the expressive limits of photography. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.” 

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

What is a “photo no-no”? Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, or sometimes even arbitrary. Edited by Jason Fulford, this volume brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility—offering a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

Children’s & Activity Books

Inspire young readers with three special books that explore the magic of photography. Eyes Open, compiled by Susan Meiselas, is a sourcebook of photography ideas and prompts for children to engage with the world through the camera. Seeing Things serves as a wonderful introduction to photography, with narration by Joel Meyerowitz on how photographers can transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography.

On the Road

Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs—A Chronological Album

Well known for his luminous photographs of landscapes and suburban housing, Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all his work. A decade after the book’s first publication, this revised and expanded edition of Intimate Distance charts Hido’s career with ten years of new photographs. From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this collection reveals how Hido’s unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

Justine Kurland: Highway Kind (2021 Edition)

Justine Kurland’s Highway Kind contrasts the fantasy of the American dream with the nation’s reality. In the early 2000s, Kurland and her young son, Casper, traveled in their customized van through the United States. Balancing her life as an artist and mother, Kurland reveals in her photographs her fascinations with the road, the western frontier, escapism, and ways of living outside mainstream values. Casper’s interests—particularly in trains and later cars—and the people he befriends along the way weave throughout Kurland’s images. From images of open vistas and epic landscapes to depictions of out-of-the-way communities and subcultures, Kurland’s work is equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian.

Danny Lyon: The Bikeriders

Danny Lyon’s riveting book about a Chicago motorcycle club is one of the definitive accounts of American counterculture. First published in 1968, The Bikeriders offers an immersive look into the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, bringing together photographs and transcribed interviews by Lyon from 1963 to 1967. The volume was also the inspiration for the 2024 film of the same name starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Tom Hardy. 

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast

In Atlantic Coast, Anastasia Samoylova puts her distinctive mark on the American road trip, adding a new chapter to a storied lineage of photographers. In 1954, American photographer Berenice Abbott set out to document the historic US Route 1, already predicting seismic changes to small towns and major cities along the route brought by the rapidly expanding Interstate Highway System. Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations on life along Route 1, Samoylova retraces Abbott’s trip seventy years later, in reverse—beginning in her home state of Florida and ending in Maine. In color and black and white, Samoylova’s photographs explore the enduring impact of Route 1 as a corridor of commerce, migration, and myth, revealing how the American landscape continues to be shaped by infrastructure, ideology, and illusion.

Collect a limited-edition print from Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast.

Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places, The Complete Works

Stephen Shore’s photographs of the American vernacular landscape have influenced not only generations of photographers but the medium at large. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered his unarticulated vision of America via the highway and camera. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, inaugurating what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years. In 1982, Aperture published Shore’s first monograph, the now-legendary Uncommon Places. Since then, this formative work has continued to be expanded on and reissued, including in The Complete Works (2015) and Selected Works, 1973–1981 (2017), which features previously unseen images from the series.

Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed 

In Wires Crossed, Ed Templeton offers an insider’s look at the skateboarding community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond. Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused community of skateboarding, the book reflects on a subculture in the making and the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world he helped create. “This book is a culmination of literally my first idea as a photographer,” Templeton notes, “which was to document this culture that I’m part of.”

Collect a limited edition of Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed featuring a hand-painted print by the artist and slipcase edition of the volume.

Contemporary Classics

Tina Barney: Family Ties

In Family Ties, Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with a sense of spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common. In the late 1970s, Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class, of which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Released upon the occasion of Barney’s first retrospective in Europe, Family Ties brings together sixty large-format portraits from three decades that have defined Barney’s career.

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz-Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been underrecognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax

From hip-hop to Nefertiti, Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to span the artist’s career. Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reinterprets Western art, often by casting Black subjects in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination,” Erizku states. “When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.” Blending Erizku’s studio practice with his work as an editorial photographer, the volume is accompanied by essays from acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Félix, alongside conversations with Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent.

Richard Misrach: Cargo

Eerie, sparse, and undeniably beautiful, Richard Misrach’s images offer a timely meditation on the profound impact of global trade on the environment. In 2021, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its height, seemed to nearly halt the networks of international trade, Misrach began taking thousands of photographs of cargo ships as they moved to and from the Port of Oakland, California. Cargo presents the acclaimed photographer’s sublime meditation on the often-unseen patterns of global trade and commerce.

Collect a limited-edition print from Richard Misrach: Cargo.

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II

In their evocative self-portraits, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon notions of Blackness and the myriad possibilities of the self. Drawing on different materials or found objects referencing their environment, a specific event, or lived experience, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.

Wendy Red Star: Delegation

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow), centering Native American life and material culture through the artist’s imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Delegation is a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, gleaning from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring.

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences of women in Japanese society. The volume showcases the work of twenty-five artists whose voices and practices have shaped the medium’s landscape across seven decades, alongside a range of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians.

Aperture Legends

Robert Frank: The Americans

In the nearly seven decades since its publication in the 1950s, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption, injustice, and the stark reality of the American dream. In 2024, to mark the centennial of Frank’s birth, Aperture reissued The Americans, alongside a special centennial edition with a slipcase and featuring a booklet showcasing Frank’s early films.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. First published by Aperture in 1986, The Ballad continues to exert a major influence on photography and other aesthetic realms, its status as a contemporary classic firmly established.

An-My Lê: Small Wars

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. First published by Aperture in 2005, this twentieth anniversary reissue brings together three of Lê’s interconnected series—Viêt Nam, Small Wars, and 29 Palms—alongside a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later. Taken together, this trilogy presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war.

Sally Mann: At Twelve

First published by Aperture in 1988, Sally Mann’s At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is an intimate exploration of the complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann made portraits that capture the excitement and social possibilities of a tender age—while not shying away from alluding to experiences of abuse, poverty, or young pregnancy—and the girls in her photographs return the camera’s gaze with equanimity. “The true subject of At Twelve is time itself,” writes Rebecca Bengal, “perceptions of time and youth, about being a girl, versus a woman, about the chasm between those two phases, and what it means to cross them, and what selves are lost and what selves are inhabited in that process.” This reissue of At Twelve features new scans and separations from Mann’s 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a quality true to the original edition. 

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In Nicaragua, Meiselas forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from films by the artist in which she interviews and collaborates with the people she photographed and local communities. By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”

Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition

Sixty years after its publication, Edward Weston’s The Flame of Recognition continues to offer unmatched insight into the mind, life, and work of a twentieth-century icon. Originally issued as a hardcover volume in 1965, The Flame of Recognition holds the distinction of being the very first title in Aperture’s publishing history. The volume was reissued in 2015 on its fiftieth anniversary, and ten years later in this new paperback edition. The volume brings together a selection of Weston’s iconic images—from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still lifes—alongside excerpts of his writing from his now-famed Daybooks and letters, channeling the photographer’s creativity and, in his own words, “present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty . . . without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique.” Additional contributions to the book include two of Weston’s sons, Brett and Cole, and other Aperture cofounders, Dody Weston Thompson and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist.

Exclusive Editions

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, Limited Edition

One of the most compelling photographers working today, Deana Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful through her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. Lawson’s Aperture Monograph is the first photobook by the visionary artist, and this limited edition features a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print on the cover. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in her essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Diana Markosian: Father, Limited Edition Book and Print Set

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together a mix of documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera, Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger: her long-lost father. The volume is a follow-up to Markosian’s first book, Santa Barbara, in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement.

David Benjamin Sherry: Pink Genesis

With his mesmerizing analog photograms, David Benjamin Sherry melds queer history, abstraction, and darkroom magic. Born out of what Sherry has called the “transformative potential of the darkroom,” each of his large-scale, cameraless color photograms is laboriously made by hand. Using cardboard masks to create geometric forms and incorporating his own body into the images, Sherry actively references histories of photography—while also thinking through the intersections of identity, form, and the hypnotic power of extreme color. Pink Genesis collects twenty-nine one-of-a-kind works that delight in the pleasures of form and color.

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Mnemosyne Atlas

One of my all-time favorite artworks. Conceived by Aby Warburg in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death five years later, the Mnemosyne Atlas is a giant compendium of photographs of artworks as well as other images from across Western visual culture categorized and mounted on sixty-three panels, through which Warburg attempted to map the “afterlife of antiquity.” His project strikes me as something like an early internet search produced by one idiosyncratic mind. Warburg tries to be objective and comprehensive (the Atlas contains nearly a thousand images), and yet his work includes an enormous amount of personal decision making and subjective, enduring beauty.

Encyclopedia Britannica

The most kitsch object of all! The idea that you could distill all human knowledge into a single set of books, from A to Z, is just preposterous, filled with hubris and Enlightenment-era optimism. I like looking back at these physical objects (the Encyclopaedia Britannica went online only after the 2010 edition) to see what they communicated about the world. If kitsch is a way of distilling the messiness of life into an easily digestible set of images and ideas, then an encyclopedia is its quintessential text.

Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant’s 2011 book Cruel Optimism—a meditation on the condition in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”—is one I return to over and over again. I first encountered it while making a video work about the rose gold iPhone, thinking about how we get attached to objects we already ostensibly own.

Algorithms of Oppression

Safiya Noble’s 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a kind of modern companion to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. I often think about the difficulties in making an objective archive or representation of “cultural memory,” as Warburg was trying to do, and how these ideas have been accelerated within the giant archive that is the internet. Noble’s book explores the politics of search engines such as Google, and the seemingly neutral technologies that are always inflected with human bias.

Figure Skating

I became obsessed with figure skating in 1994 when an assailant, hired by Tonya Harding’s husband and her bodyguard, bashed Nancy Kerrigan in the knee. That year, more people watched the Olympic women’s skating final than the Super Bowl. I was a competitive figure skater from the age of nine to seventeen. Skating is the perfect mix of physical rigor, showmanship, and kitsch. And the rink was the first place I began to process some of the abiding themes in my work—how people are made (and make themselves) into images, how women’s bodies become commodities, how people are used up in our culture for entertainment and profit.

F for Fake

Worth watching if only for the baby monkey! A late work by Orson Welles, the 1973 film F for Fake documents a famous forger of Picasso and Matisse paintings before moving on to examine other types of fraud and illusion. Ever relevant in our time of online grifters and algorithmic legerdemain, it is also beautifully shot, funny, and very entertaining.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” under the column Curriculum.

Youth is about a moment, a memory—a state of becoming. It’s the spark of firsts: the first glance, the first protest, the first kiss, the first fall, the first revelation. This collection gathers over one hundred images chosen by the photographers or their estates, exploring the many faces of youth across generations and geographies. This selection reminds us of our own beginnings, encapsulating how youth is not only an era in our lives but a state of mind.

Through October 26, collect signed or estate-stamped, museum-quality 6-by-6-inch prints, starting at $110. When you purchase through this link, you directly benefit the artists and support the full range of Aperture’s nonprofit publishing and educational programming in New York and worldwide. Below are highlights from Youth.

Abbas

“As a boy I had a heroic image of the journalist: you traveled, you went to war, you covered historical events. I started out both writing and taking photographs, but I soon found it was more fun taking pictures.” —From Magnum Stories (Phaidon, 2004)

Arielle Bobb-Willis

“This image was taken on a cloudy New Orleans afternoon in 2017. The Lower Garden District near Tchoupitoulas Street . . . lots of textured buildings and quiet streets . . . good for creating. Being inspired by painters like Kandinsky, Jacob Lawrence, and Sister Gertrude Morgan, I really see my subjects as colors on a canvas . . . a little green there, some orange. . . . I find it interesting to bring the ideals of creating compositions with paint into the photographic world . . . it expands our ideas on what a portrait can be and it allows for true abstractions to live within our reality.”

Kwame Brathwaite

“This image captures a young child in front of an A-frame advertisement for a James Brown concert at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem. The sign towers over the curious child as he takes in the moment. The contrast between the toddler’s wide-eyed gaze and the confident pose of Brown captures both the innocence of the child and the aspiration of Brown.

In the face of the grandeur of the Apollo and all that it represents, the child is in awe of the moment, ripe with possibility, inspiration and hope.” —The Kwame Brathwaite Archive

Danny Clinch

“This was my very first portrait session with Bruce Springsteen. He was rehearsing with the E Street Band at Fort Monmouth and had recently gotten the band back together after over a decade of music without the E Street Band. He invited me out to photograph for the upcoming tour after I sent him a copy of Discovery Inn, my first and recent book of photographs at the time. Having grown up in NJ listening to Springsteen, I do recall having tears in my eyes as I was driving out to the shoot that day listening to Greetings from Asbury Park.”

Ernest Cole

“The fellow pictured appears to be channeling local heroes like Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, but the song that comes to my mind is John Lee Hooker’s ‘I’m Bad Like Jesse James.’ It’s typical that Cole should discover a youthful ‘street’ version of the mythical Stagger Lee. More than 70 years after ‘Stack’ killed Billy. Nearly 50 years after the song was first recorded. Twelve years after Lloyd Price’s hit single, as William Faulkner noted: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’” —James Sanders, the Ernest Cole Family Trust

Baldwin Lee

“A contrast is suggested by the comparison of the young man’s new baseball glove and the ripped bag of trash. The pants hanging from the delicate clothesline offer the possibility of other boys who live in the household.”

Danny Lyon

“All the pictures in Uptown were made on a single block, Clifton Street. Lyon would ride there on his Triumph. Many years had passed when an Uptown teen, Rita Knight, sent Danny an email: ‘I have displayed your picture in my home and I get lots of comments and love to tell the story of the hippie that came over on his scooter, that gave us a dollar to pose for pictures. Take care, I love those pictures. It was a sad time in America, but some of us made it out . . . I am still married to the same boy I was with when you were there. I plan to be cremated and then some friends will sneak over and put some of my ashes on Wilson and Magnolia, and then some out at the lake where we spent so many happy days.’”

Diana Markosian

“As a former dancer, stepping back into ballet through photography has allowed me to reconnect with my own childhood, not just in memory, but by immersing myself in a world that once felt so familiar—from the quiet rituals of helping one another prepare to the music and movement on stage.”

Joel Meyerowitz

“As a father I watched my daughter Ariel from the moment she was born at the most intimate distance, and every small change marked a turning point; from newborn to infant to toddler, and continued on up through today when she’s now in her fifties. And though the journey has been wondrous at every stage, it was at puberty that the move into adolescence was most remarkable. For a man to watch his daughter slip—seemingly overnight—from childhood into becoming a young woman is as close to miraculous as any of life’s changes can be.”

Adam Pape

“The streets of New York are defined by the energy of its citizens, constantly testing the boundaries of expression and freedom. Moving through the city there is always a sense that one is on display, for eyes or lenses on the street. In 2017, I became captivated by roses surrounding a police station in my neighborhood. As I photographed the roses next to the officers, I may have seemed like a flower enthusiast to an onlooker. However, in the frame, the blooms became a soft red veil over the city. I then noticed other roses planted in the urban surroundings and imagined them as links between disparate locations and neighborhoods. These flowers have continued to be my guide through the city, acting as an alternative map to its diverse landscape.”

Shikeith

“My photograph Oche (With Candle) delves into the spiritual and emotional interiority of Black men, examining how the body holds memory, grief, and the possibility of spiritual elevation, all rendered through a deliberate blue tonality. As part of my series Notes Towards Becoming a Spill, this work reflects on the fluidity of identity, where Blackness, masculinity, and yearning are not fixed states but porous, ever-shifting forms. The candle functions both as a vessel and an emblem, conjuring ritual, remembrance, and illumination, while also embodying the delicate interplay between vulnerability and strength. By placing Oche in a soft, dimly lit, almost uterine environment, I aim to craft a sanctuary in which Black men are not confined to rigid definitions but allowed to remain malleable, free to soften, to feel, to yield. This image, like the series it belongs to, gestures toward the shedding of armor and an embrace of the sacred emotional fullness of becoming.”

Anastasia Samoylova

“I photographed this flag as it seemed to both announce itself and conceal the life behind it—a reminder of how symbols shape our sense of home and belonging. The photograph is part of my Atlantic Coast project, published by Aperture, in which I retraced Berenice Abbott’s path along Route 1, reflecting on how the American landscape continues to carry its myths and contradictions. In its layered view, House Flag also echoes the tensions explored by Robert Frank in The Americans, while reimagining them in today’s landscape.”

Carmen Winant

 “‘Have you cut off your hands yet?,’ writes Marge Piercy in her 1982 poem ‘The Friend.’ Across the three sparse stanzas, Piercy renders a destructive, perhaps violent, romantic relationship in which the woman is pushed to negate herself. I thought about this poem while making this work by hand: cutting each individual image (from a single book on healing touch), mixing batches of dye, and bathing each picture. My hands are a surrogate for myself. They are the tool by which I make things in the world: in the studio, and in myself.”

Zanele Muholi

“This photograph is of me as a six-year-old at home in Umlazi township, Durban. In this photograph, I am standing in front of a banana tree at the back of my home. I vividly remember my mother coming home from her work as a domestic worker. Often, she would bring back apples from her employer, and I can still see her cutting them into four slices for us to share, such a simple joy that meant so much. My childhood was marked by these moments: the fresh taste of apples and bananas, and the roasted stuffed chicken my mother’s white employers discarded, but she lovingly brought home.”

The Magnum Square Sale in Partnership with Aperture, Youth, is available through October 26, 2025.

Don McCullin – New York

A Desecrated Serenity charts seven decades of Don McCullin’s photojournalistic work across conflicts in Greece, Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, and Beirut. The exhibition, his first New York show at Hauser and Wirth, presents his harrowing portraits and reportage from the front lines alongside cherished objects—like the Nikon F camera that once caught a stray bullet during battle. The exhibition moves from the stark landscapes of crime and poverty in postwar Britain; through unflinching records of global conflict; to images of vibrant cultural rituals in India, Indonesia, and the Sudan; to painterly meditations on the countrysides of France, Scotland, and Somerset, where McCullin sought solace late in his career.

Don McCullin: A Desecrated Serenity at Hauser & Wirth, through November 8, 2025.

Tyler Mitchell – Paris

Growing up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Tyler Mitchell made skateboarding videos inspired by Spike Jonze and Ryan McGinley. After enrolling at New York University with plans to become a filmmaker, he began to make portraits full of energy, brash color, and sartorial panache, honing a signature look that landed him commissions for i-D and Vogue. This fall, Mitchell’s exhibition Wish This Was Real arrives in Paris after stops in Berlin, Helsinki, and Lausanne, Switzerland. Covering roughly a decade of image making, the show offers new perspectives on his abiding themes of masculinity, joy, and beauty. As the critic Salamishah Tillet writes in an accompanying monograph published by Aperture, “Mitchell’s work brilliantly reconceptualizes familiar spaces and teaches us that Black utopia has always been a place, constantly moving, unfolding, and being remade—like freedom.”

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, October 15, 2025–January 25, 2026

Katy Grannan – San Francisco

California’s Humboldt County is considered a place where people go to disappear. Katy Grannan first came to this bucolic backcountry in 2023 and began making portraits of people she found through Craigslist ads, flyers, and eventually word of mouth. Known for building long-term relationships with her subjects, Grannan conspired with those she photographed to create a kind of collaborative fiction, working both in the studio and in nature to thread together connections between site and self. Mad River unites these portraits for the first time, offering an intimate glimpse of the independent spirit of Humboldt County’s inhabitants.

Katy Grannan: Mad River at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, through October 25, 2025.

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging – New York

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography program of annual exhibitions that have, over the decades, brought then-emerging artists, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Lieko Shiga, to wider renown. MoMA’s latest edition considers themes of belonging as explored by a baker’s dozen of artists and collectives—hailing from Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City—who weave personal stories with broader colonial histories. Gabrielle Goliath and Prasiit Sthapit are among the photographers, along with Sandra Blow—whose whose tender portraits of friends in Mexico City’s queer underground attest to photography’s community-making potential.

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 14, 2025–January 17, 2026

Samuel Fosso – New York

“I wanted to show how good I look,” Samuel Fosso once said of 70s Lifestyle (1975–78), a series he began as a teenager. Autoportrait, Fosso’s first solo exhibition in New York in two decades, certainly succeeds in this goal. The show celebrates the Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer’s self-portraiture, which calls upon and reinvents traditions of studio photography from West Africa and the African diaspora. In addition to 70s Lifestyle, which fuses the visual language of highlife culture with the bold attitude of young Black Americans as seen in magazines of the era, African Spirits (2008) features Fosso adopting the personae of such revolutionaries as Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait at Yossi Milo, New York, through November 8, 2025.

Man Ray – New York

“I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself,” declared a young American in Paris upon his invention of what he named, after himself, the “rayograph.” In 1921, Man Ray had discovered that, by placing everyday objects—such as scissors, keys, a wishbone, and a mousetrap—on photosensitive paper and exposing it to light, a new kind of photography was possible, one that dispensed with the camera entirely in its spectral, chance mash-ups, which quickly became the toast of Dadaist Paris. When Objects Dream includes some sixty rayographs, illuminating how the artist’s “crimes against chemistry and photography” (as he winkingly described them) informed the rest of his rebellious experimentation, which spans painting, cinema, drawing, and photography.

Man Ray: When Objects Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 14 through February 1, 2026.

Black Photojournalism – Pittsburgh

At its height in the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Courier was read by hundreds of thousands of readers across the United States, one among many Black newspapers to report on the burgeoning civil rights movement and the struggles for equality and social justice. Newspapers such as the Courier, Atlanta Daily World, and The Chicago Defender take center stage in Black Photojournalism, an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art focused on Black photographers who, from the post–World War II era through the 1980s, helped create the first draft of history. One searing image by Ming Smith, made in 1976, the year of the US bicentennial, points up the aspirations of the American Dream and its limitations: A man gazes outward in reflective sunglasses while the stripes of three flags appear like prison bars.

Black Photojournalism at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, September 13, 2025–January 19, 2026

Cecil Beaton – London

Renowned photographer, illustrator, costume designer, diarist, arriviste, and court photographer to the British royal family, Cecil Beaton is synonymous with glamour. Cecil Beaton: Fashionable World explores his groundbreaking society portraits, tracing an illustrious career from the Jazz Age of “Bright Young Things” to the glitterati of My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958). The show’s trove of photographs, costumes, and ephemera places the viewer into the mind’s eye of the acclaimed “King of Vogue,” whose stylized, highly theatrical portraits of a bygone beau monde once offered starry escapism during the interwar and early postwar era.  As Beaton once said, “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

Cecil Beaton: Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery, London, October 9 through January 11, 2026.

Ben Shahn – New York

The painter Ben Shahn spent his career chronicling and confronting the social issues of his era—from censorship and authoritarianism to the labor movement and civil rights. Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity marks the first US retrospective of the artist’s work in nearly half a century, showcasing the enduring relevance of Shahn’s vision. A highlight includes a selection of photographs—both those taken by Shahn himself and by peers, such as those who worked for the Farm Security Administration—that served as his muse. “One of the main goals of this exhibition is to illuminate the under-appreciated complexity of his aesthetic, the multifaceted layered quality of his work, which is largely indebted to photography, both his own photographs and those of others,” notes curator and art historian Laura Katzman. “Photography was central to Shahn’s vision and his working process.”

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity at The Jewish Museum, New York, through October 26, 2025.

Seydou Keïta – New York

Seydou Keïta captured the dignity and the dreams of the people who posed in his studio in midcentury Bamako, during Mali’s turn to independence. With his ingenious use of props and backdrops, the photographer struck an elegant balance between formality and intimacy, timelessness and urgency. As Kobby Ankomah Graham writes in Aperture’s Summer 2025 cover story, “Keïta’s subjects gaze directly into the camera and claim their place in history on their own terms.” A retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum celebrates Keïta’s own rightful place in history—as an all-time great whose name should be as well-known as that of August Sander, Irving Penn, or Richard Avedon.

Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 10 through March 8, 2026.

Germaine Krull – Germany

Germaine Krull, the legendary modernist photographer, had many nicknames. One anarchist friend dubbed her the “Iron Valkyrie” for her interest in industrial forms, as seen in Métal (1928), a slight but epochal photobook whose tightly cropped, strange-making photographs of the Eiffel Tower and other steel structures launched her career in interwar Paris. She called herself chien fou—crazy dog—and this is the title of an exhibition opening at Museum Folkwang, the home of her estate since 1995. The show examines how Krull balanced her experimental vision with her role as a working photojournalist, drawing overdue attention to an oeuvre that spans reportage, writing, portraiture, and avant-garde photomontage across four continents.

Germaine Krull: Chien Fou at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, November 28, 2025–March 15, 2026

By slowing down to focus on the details, Edeani creates an image dense with meaning. “The woman braiding her hair has tribal marks, which I know from Nigeria,” Edeani says. “Here are these two Black women with completely different complexions and backgrounds. You’ve got the tribal marks, you’ve got the tattoo, the chain, the hoodie. For me, widening the frame made the image much stronger, much more of a story.” 

Born in Nigeria before moving to the United States at the age of sixteen, Edeani is a self-taught photographer who initially trained as an architect. Even so, he always knew he wanted to be an artist. At a young age, he dabbled in drawing and still life painting, and realized how easy it was for him to reproduce things he saw in the world. “I would draw and paint all the time,” he shares. “But in Nigeria, the only kind of career options that are visible to you, at least as a kid, are doctor, engineer, or lawyer. I wasn’t interested in science and I knew I wasn’t going to be a doctor.” 

Architecture was a happy medium between creative expression and the safety of a stable career. After practicing in the field for a few years, he soon realized that he didn’t want to build anything, but he was interested in design. 

Watch Now: Ike Edeani on Style as a Form of Liberation

The photographer reflects on photographing in the city, what drives his work, and documenting everyday Black style.

What better place to see design than through Black style on the streets of New York? As proof of life in the city, the street has excited the brushstrokes and lenses of a wide range of artists and photographers, from the gritty paintings of John Sloan in the early twentieth century to photographers like Roy DeCarava, Jamel Shabazz, and Bill Cunningham. Edeani extends this legacy by turning his cinematic flair toward the brilliance of the everyday. Black vernacular style—the kind of vibrant personal style that takes place far outside an extractive fashion system driven by labels, trends, and fashion seasons—has a mind of its own.  

Church Sunday. Harlem. Little girls dressed in stockings and barrettes. Mothers, grandmothers, and aunties in hats, head wraps, and pencil skirts. “I don’t think I could have done this project justice without including Sunday style,” Edeani says. “Sundays were when we got dressed up. Sunday was the day you show out because that’s when you go to church, which means you’re seeing everybody. That’s the Met Gala.”

At the heart of Edeani’s work is an insistence on glimpses, gestures, and fleeting encounters, rather than posed portraits. Call it the intimacy of the moment. When we pose, we pose the way we always pose. We become hyper aware of the camera, of the photographer, and of our own awkward selves. The juice of Black personal style, for Edeani, lies in the zhuzh—a moment of expression that comes when we add our own twist, our own five-six-seven-eight set to the look, particularly for folks who work jobs that require them to wear a uniform every day. “Black folks do that better than anybody,” Edeani says, “Because we’re denied access, so you make your own shit. And I think that’s so beautiful.” 

For Black folks, who exist within the frame of what the poet Dionne Brand calls “virtuosity or despair,” style is never about vanity. It’s always about creativity, personal expression, and small—even if the smallest—gestures of refusal. The way Edeani sees it, whether we’re going to church or just going about our day, “Black folks want to look good in front of other Black folks. What I really love about Black style is the idea that this is what people choose to put on before they leave the house—this is their best foot forward. And that, to me, is amazing.”

Ike Edeani’s photographs were created using FUJIFILM GFX100RF.

All photographs by Ike Edeani, New York, May–June, 2025

American Photography — Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum may have come late to acquiring photography, but in three decades it has amassed a collection of more than two hundred thousand photographs, a fraction of which is on view as part of American Photography, the first comprehensive survey of its kind in Europe. Spanning three centuries, the show corrals marquee names (Sally Mann, Irving Penn, James Van Der Zee) alongside amateur and commercial obscurities in a sprawling visualization, and vivisection, of the American dream. As we know from the Swiss-born Robert Frank, whose epochal The Americans is included in the exhibition, sometimes it takes an outsider to see the place clearly.

American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, through June 9, 2025

Lucia Moholy — Winterthur, Switzerland

The Bauhaus existed only from 1919 to 1933, but its ideas transformed modern society—in no small part due to Lucia Moholy, whose legacy was long eclipsed by that of her male peers. As the Bauhaus’s house photographer, Moholy helped define the visual identity of the design school, immortalizing its architecture, objects, and circle in photographs that distill their subjects’ quintessence. She also played a key role in perfecting the photogram technique often solely credited to her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, and, in 1939, published one of the first histories of photography in English. As this current retrospective makes clear, any history of the medium today would be utterly incomplete without her.

Exposures: Lucia Moholy at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, through July 13, 2025

Annegret Soltau — Frankfurt am Main

For more than six decades, the German artist Annegret Soltau has sought to exceed the strictures of the self through the visceral manipulation of images. Her hallmark is the use of black thread; she stitches representations of her own body and that of other women into photo collages that delve into themes of mother- hood, pregnancy, and aging. Soltau, a product of the feminist movement, is now having her first retrospective—an opportunity for audiences to encounter remarkable multimedia work by an artist decidedly unbound by aesthetic and social conventions.

Uncensored: Annegret Soltau–A Retrospective at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, through August 17, 2025

Wolfgang Tillmans — Paris

The name Wolfgang Tillmans more readily evokes nightclubs and daylong raves of the sort he chronicled in the 1990s than the hushed environs of a library. But this summer, the German photographer is taking over the bibliothèque of the Centre Pompidou, which will go dark in September for a five-year renovation. Given carte blanche, the artist will bring together photographs, videos, music, text, and archival material to transform the mostly empty, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot Public Information Library into a node of epistemological inquiry and Tillmansesque togetherness.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait (Nothing prepared us for it – Everything prepared us for it) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 13–September 22, 2025

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Kunié Sugiura — San Francisco

Since the 1960s, Kunié Sugiura’s genre-blending practice has defied the boundaries of photographic expression. Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art spans the arc of Sugiura’s career across six decades, and marks the first major survey of the artist’s work in the US. Employing a range of experimental techniques—prints made on canvas, photograms, compositions from X-ray negatives, and so on—Sugiura melds these mediums together to create artworks that, as she has said, “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.”

Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through September 14, 2025

Carrie Mae Weems — Turin

In Turin, the Gallerie d’Italia, Intesa Sanpaolo, presents Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Meister, Aperture’s executive director, and featuring Weems’s landmark bodies of work, such as Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Museums (2006–ongoing). In her newest work, Preach (2024), a series commissioned specifically for the exhibition, Weems considers religion and spirituality among Black Americans across generations. The exhibition orients Weems’s oeuvre around explorations of her own subjectivity as a way of discovering herself as “a muse and a guide into the unknown,” using her own photographic selfhood to show the intertwined historical, personal, spiritual, and institutional dimensions of otherness that her work unsparingly represents.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at the Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, through September 7, 2025

Stan Douglas — New York

Stan Douglas produces painstakingly composed “speculative histories” that trouble the boundaries between history, fiction, and myth, using the supposed objectivity of the camera as a starting point. Ghostlight, his first United States retrospective in over twenty years, will draw out themes of collective memory and rupture in works that include a new multichannel video installation reimagining D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation. As Douglas once said, “Maybe by breaking the rules of realism in photography—the rules of this automatic, perspectival image—we can get back to a trace of the humanity of looking.”

Stan Douglas: Ghostlight at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, June 21–November 20, 2025

Marta Astfalck-Vietz — Berlin

Marta Astfalck-Vietz’s contributions to photography’s story may not be as familiar as that of her peers working in Germany in the vital, if imperiled, cultural scene of the 1920s. One reason is that Astfalck-Vietz’s archive was partially destroyed during the bombing of Berlin in World War II. What survived—and have recently been restored—are dreamy, surreal pictures, often embracing formal experimentation, ranging from portraits, to nudes, to performative self-portraits that foreshadow modes of art-making that would become dominant in the 1970s.

Marta Astfalck-Vietz: Staging the Self at the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, July 11–November 30, 2025