In pictures: the W* photography desk’s 2016 digest of visual inspiration

Meat feast
23 December 

Early this year, pioneering online gallery One Shot launched by selling one-of-a-kind, museum quality prints from photographer Brian Finke to blind buyers, aiming to reclaim the mystery and fragility of analogue photography. Negatives are then destroyed to ensure that each piece is totally unique. Now, the artist has returned with a new project for the gallery, which focuses on a subject that has fascinated him for his entire career: meat. Raw meat. Meat in a burger. Meat cooking on a stove. The all-American’s iconic shots artfully combine documentary with a tinge of humour. This second edition is going on sale in early 2017.

Pictured: Shot Nº 06, by Brian Finke. © One Shot Editions 2016 

Writer: Phoebe Jayes

Wild west
21 December

On view in Phillips' Park Avenue galleries in New York from 3 January is a collection of 82 pictures by one of the most significant contemporary photographers of the great American West. ‘That Day’ spans over three decades’ worth of photographs taken by Laura Wilson during her extensive explorations around America. The exhibition includes photographs of the Hutterites, a group of hermetic people established in 1870s America and Canada, whose beliefs are strongly against photography. Wilson made many trips to their colonies over the years and was finally granted permission to take photographs of them in black-and-white. Her rarely exhibited work captures the diverse spirit of the American West, including its vast landscapes and characterful locals. In February, it moves to the Whitney Western Art Museum, Wyoming.

Pictured: Cowboys Walking, J.R. Green Cattle Company, Shackelford County, Texas, May 13, 1997, by Laura Wilson. © the artist

Writer: Phoebe Jayes

Seeing is believing
20 December

'The timeliness of this exhibition could not be greater,' says Timothy Potts, director of the J Paul Getty museum, where a collection of media-curious works are on show until 30 April 2017. 'Breaking news: turning the lens on mass media' highlights the extent to which the media has infiltrated people's lives and shaped their perceptions of current events. It explores how artists have responded to the media's coverage of a range of topics. In doing so, it also points to the similarities between art and journalism; both need to represent and give meaning to their subjects. The pictured photograph shows four missiles during the time of Iran's weapon tests; the photograph appeared to contain one more missile than was alleged, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used.

Pictured: War Primer 2, Plate 31, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, 2011. © Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Writer: Phoebe Jayes

Photo diaries
19 December

On Tuesday, Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II opens its doors to Osservatorio, a new exhibition space dedicated to photography and visual languages. Therein, Fondazione Prada – which is in charge of the space – presents ‘Give Me Yesterday’, a collection of personal documentation from 14 Italian and international artists (Ryan McGinley, Izumi Miyazaki, Joanna Piotrowska and Maurice van Es among them). Shown together, the photographs explore themes of daily routine and liminal moments of intimacy.

Given the proliferation of photo-capturing technology and the unassailable circulation of digital imagery, ‘Give Me Yesterday’ explores the use of the photograph as a way of documenting daily life and personal ritual for a generation of young practitioners. It observes the power of the gaze, playing with the distinction of capturing truthful portraits of those unaware of the camera and those who subconsciously alter themselves when conspicuously made a ‘subject’.

‘Give Me Yesterday’ is on view from 21 December – 12 March 2017.

Sugimoto’s ‘Black Box’
16 December

Opening today, Amsterdam’s Foam hosts a conspectus collection by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto.

‘Black Box’ is a study of Sugimoto’s practice over the past 40 years, showcasing a five-part series comprised of 34 large-format prints. The artist’s most notable photographs have a marked visual delicacy and philosophical subjects. Sugimoto’s perspective and choice of genre has been identified as a classic tradition of photography, and the images are constructed to emphasise a rejection of modern technology.

Also working with sculpture, architecture and installation, Sugimoto’s craftsmanship has made him an influential creative figure. He continues to work, with examples of ongoing series included in the exhibition.

‘Black Box’ will be on view until 8 March 2017.

Pictured: Hyena-Jackal-Vulture, 1976. © Hiroshi Sugimoto

Writer: Liberty Dye

'The Situation Room'
15 December
 
Grotesque figures converse with one another in 'The Situation Room' at Ruth van Beek’s upcoming exhibition in The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam. The figures react to the room as if they were a Greek chorus, exuberant in their carnivalesque distortion. Van Beek’s images come mainly from old photo books, skilfully rearranged and manipulated through cutting, folding and adding. In doing so, the original images are taken out of context, but the familiar imagery remains recognisable, speaking to our collective memory and maintaining a jarring hint of the natural amid such unnaturalness. In her work, Van Beek offers a counterbalance to the modern world's limitless information availability, by finding restriction in closed, physical archives. On view until 4 February 2017.

Pictured: Untitled (From the forest), 2016

Writer: Phoebe Jayes

New Yorker
14 December

An exhibition at the Wien Museum in Vienna, ‘Framing Two Worlds’ presents an archive of never publicly seen before work by the late Austrian-American artist Robert Haas. Beginning his photography career in the 1930s, Haas captured everyday life by observing architectural details and portraits of residents on the streets. After the Nazi’s took action across Europe in 1938, Haas' move to New York City gave him a new landscape to seek inspiration from. Bolstered by his background in graphic design and typography, Haas rebuilt his artistic eye through the influence of American visual culture. Until 22 January 2017.

Pictured: New York City, 1940s. Courtesy the artist.
 © Wien Museum/Sammlung Robert Haas

Writer: Liberty Dye

Life under glass
13 December

Street photographer Nick Turpin is recognised for his urban documentation. On the Night Bus is his second publication of images captured on London’s public transport.

The book is comprised of portraits taken outside of bus windows during winter; Turpin uses the glass as a divider, an identity-protecting device between himself and his subjects. Using the condensation to hint at interior warmth and presence, these portraits provide a sense of intimacy in the enclosed bus, the soft glow and smudges that mark the passengers' faces comparable to those in classical paintings.

On the Night Bus, £16.95, published by Hoxton Mini Press.

Writer: Liberty Dye

Photographic memories
12 December

Currently on show at New York’s Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, ‘The Farther I Remember’ is a group exhibition featuring work by Carolle Bénitah, Eeva Hannula, Susanne Wellm and Robin Cracknell.

The collective show is a study relating to the photographers’ nostalgic dreams and memories; reworking new material from original archived prints and negatives, physically and digitally embellishing the source material. Therein, the once familiar becomes new, the artists’ interventions affording fresh new perspectives.

‘The Farther I Remember’ is on view until 4 February 2017.

Pictured: à la plage (at the beach), by Carolle Bénitah, 2009

Writer: Liberty Dye

‘In Asmara’
9 December

Opening this Saturday, 2016's Aperture Portfolio Prize winner Eli Durst will exhibit his collection ‘In Asmara’ at Aperture Gallery in New York. The inspiration for the series came during time Durst spent volunteering in an immigrant detention center in his hometown of Austin, Texas. While meeting people who had emigrated from Eritrea (of which Asmara is the capital), Durst was compelled to travel to the city to see for himself what went on within its modernist framework, and where he spent 15 days documenting details that capture the movements and moods of the city.

'In Asmara' is on view until 2 February 2017.

Photography: Portrait with Beetle, by Eli Durst, 2016

Writer: Liberty Dye

Powerful blow
8 December

In his new photo book Bomba, Thomas Prior captures the intense masculinity surrounding the sledgehammer festival in the small Mexican town of San Juan de la Vega. Every February, hundreds of local men gather on a desolate football ground to strap explosives to sledgehammers as a customary ode to an ancient battle, and Prior documents the destruction from the amateur ammunition. Noxious clouds of smoke pose as curtains to isolate the chaos from the public, and shrapnel travels as if wandering in the wind; these photographs provide a sense of romantic fascination behind the rather absurd act.

Available to pre-order at Dashwood Book's website, $65.

Writer: Liberty Dye

Early inspirations
7 December

For his new book Hometowns, British born photographer John MacLean traveled to 25 towns to document the childhood neighbourhoods of some of today’s most established photographers, including Takashi Homma and Gabriel Orozco. The photobook’s title is an extract of a directive the artist scribbled in his notebook five years ago: ‘Photograph the hometowns of your heroes’. The resulting series of sixty-five photographs do exactly this. MacLean has adapted his own style in each image, drawing influence from the individuals who once called the towns' home. Available through MacLean’s website, £40.

Pictured: Hometown Of Ed Ruscha Oklahoma City Oklahoma, by John MacLean. © The artist. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Writer: Liberty Dye

'I Welcome'
6 December

2016 has been an unequivocal cavalcade of disasters – so much so that it's easy to forget the continuing plight of refugees around the world, whose day-to-day problems are far more critical than ours.

Partly touching on this – but digging far further back through history – is a new exhibition on London's Southbank, organised by Magnum Photos in collaboration with Amnesty International. The show surveys the horrors of displacement since the Second World War in an attempt to humanise statistics and the numbing wash of news. Starting with Magnum co-founder David 'Chim' Seymour's shots of child refugees in Greece in 1946, the survey works through a variety of global crises, from Vietnam to Chechnya, to the current hell of war-torn Syria.

'I Welcome: An Amnesty International and Magnum Photos exhibition of photographs of refugee crises past and present' is on view until 18 December.

Pictured: Chechen refugees living in neighbouring Ingushetia. Russia. Ingushetia, 11/12 1999, by Thomas Dworzak, 1999. © Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos

Writer: Tom Howells

Ebb and flow
5 December

Opening this Saturday in the heart of Bangalore, India, Tasveer Arts presents an exclusive two part series by photographer Karan Kapoor, titled ‘Time and Tide’. The exhibition showcases the unique identities of Anglo-Indians in Bombay and Calcutta between the 1980s and 90s. Kapoor also closely documents time spent in Goa on Baga Beach with his family and friends.

These two subjects both connect with Kapoor’s vision and interpretation of capturing places and people no longer perceived in the same way. ‘Time & Tide’ comprise an archive that reveals the artist’s attempt to cling onto a traditional culture despite a continuous evolution of his community through modern influences.

‘Time and Tide’ is on view from 10 December – 20 January 2017 at Tasveer Arts. A new photography book, published by Tasveer, with original texts by William Dalrymple and Felicity Kendal, accompanies the exhibition.

Pictured: Brothers at the local feast in Loutolim, Goa, by Karan Kapoor, 1994. © Karan Kapoor. Courtesy Tasveer

Writer: Liberty Dye

Horizon line
2 December

Opening tomorrow at London's Michael Hoppen Gallery, ‘Measuring Infinity’ – on view until 23 December – is a solo exhibition from photographer Chloe Sells, who spent the last two years documenting the heart of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, the Makgadikgadi Salt Pan. Sells plays with alchemic processing in the darkroom, helping her large-format photographs bring new life to the arid landscape. The artist’s experimentation with hand drawing and paint renders a new perspective on landscape photography; though the horizon line, seen in each work, creates an understanding between the fixed and altered layers.

Pictured: Kiss The Sky, by Chloe Sells, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Hoppen Gallery

Writer: Liberty Dye

Gavel talk
1 December

Webber Represents is a creative agency that supports a variety of artists, from photographers and designers to casting directors and stylists. To celebrate the agency’s 15th anniversary – in conjunction with Webber Gallery in London – they will be hosting a charity photography auction. All proceeds will go to Refugee Support Europe, who help to raise awareness and give ongoing aid to refugees the continent over. The auction features a selection of photographs donated by a host of Webbers’ previous photographers, including pieces from Thomas Albdorf (whose work is pictured), Gregory Halpern, Steve Harries, Venetia Dearden and Jo Metson Scott. All of the lots will be on display at a special exhibition located at Webber Gallery, from 14–16 December, and bidding is encouraged through the Webber Represents website. 

Writer: Phoebe Hinton-Kench

Tales of the Emerald Isle
30 November

Comprising photographs based upon the Gaelic word teannalach (a West-Irish term meaning heightened awareness in a quiet surrounding) Irish photographer Enda Bowe’s new book At Mirrored River documents the people and places of small-town industrial Ireland. Each image aims to reveael the beauty of the mundane, and shines a new light on habitual scenes. The book is a collection of work that identifies ‘ordinary’ suburbia as a place for artistic possibility. Available through Claire de Rouen Books, £36.

Writer: Liberty Dye

Focal lore
29 November

Opening tonight at Beetles+Huxley in London, ‘Masters of Photography’ is a concise exhibition that brings together 29 renowned 20th century photographs. The collection is a monument to the era’s most groundbreaking images, each chosen for its significant role in the history of the medium. Featuring vintage and rare prints, highlights include Alfred Stieglitz’s seminal The Steerage (1907), and an oversized early print of Yousuf Karsh’s photograph of Winston Churchill – one of the most recognisable portraits ever taken. Until 23 December.

Pictured: Cabbage Leaf, by Edward Weston, 1931. © The artist. Courtesy of Beetles+Huxley

Writer: Liberty Dye

Body of evidence
28 November

Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes is a new collection of work by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins. Throughout the publication, he examines an archive of forensic evidence photographs stored at the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Lisbon. Martins' collection consists of over 3,000 negatives scanned over the space of three years. The book focuses on a refined selection of images, documenting weapons and items recorded as evidence at crime scenes and suicide locations. The series analyses death and the dead body, and objects such as suicide notes and death masks represent the contrast between past and present.

Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes, published by The Moth House, £48

Writer: Liberty Dye

Vision of disorder
25 November

On view at Dublin’s Gallery of Photography until 22 January, Prix Pictet presents the shortlist for the sixth edition of the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability. Twelve photographers are in the running for the 2016 Prix Pictet Prize, which focuses on the theme of ‘disorder’ and aimed at raising public awareness on the fragility of the environment. Following the exhibition each year, a book is published on the chosen theme, featuring the finalists. This year, the global selection includes the likes of Yang Yongliang (China), Maxim Dondyuk (Ukraine) and Pieter Hugo (South Africa).

Pictured: Abdulai Yahaya, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, by Pieter Hugo, 2010, from the series 'Permanent Error'

Writer: Liberty Dye

Pine arts
24 November

A new exhibition on William Eggleston – entitled ‘The Democratic Forest’ – has opened at David Zwirner gallery in New York. The show is accompanied by a slim volume published by Steidl, and includes a selection of images from the exhibition, which is itself whittled down from Eggleston's epic, ten-volume tome of over 1,000 images, released in full last year. Forming a biographical narrative, both the book and the show chart Eggleston's vast travels around America since the 1980s. The selection provides a manageable insight for Eggleston newcomers, while honing in on highlights for die-hard fans. It's a captivating view into the photographer's practice and a valuable expression into a well-trodden subject. The exhibition continues until 17 December.

Pictured, a photograph from William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest, Volume 8: The Surface, 2015. Courtesy of the artist

Writer: Phoebe Hinton-Kench

Dream world
23 November

Surrealist photography established a foothold in the art world in the early 20th century, aided by artists like Man Ray who developed signature techniques including double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarisation. On view at London’s Atlas Gallery from tomorrow, ‘The Psychic Lens: Surrealism and the Camera' traces five decades of this photographic era, featuring compositions from the likes of Man Ray himself, Andre Kertesz and Florence Henri, alongside more unusual figures like Vaclav Zykmund, Franz Roh and Raoul Hausmann. The exhibition tells the story of photography, once assumed to be an inherently realistic medium, as a fantasy world; a revolution against the constraints of the rational mind. Until 28 January 2017.

Pictured: Sunglasses Lake Lucerne Switzerland, by Herbert List, 1936. © The artist and Magnum Photos

Writer: Phoebe Hinton-Kench

Fashion, photography
22 November

Today in Milan, Vogue Italia launches the first edition of the Photo Vogue Festival. The four-day fair celebrates the publication’s longstanding and hugely influential association with fashion and photography. Taking place throughout Milan, it presents a unique opportunity to delve into Vogue’s auspicious involvement in these disciplines, via lectures, conferences and exhibitions. Co-curators Alessia Glaviano and Chiara Bardelli Nonino have gathered 47 artists in a group exhibition, entitled ‘The Female Gaze’. The show explores the social utility of the gaze in photography; the photographers capturing the sensual, vulnerable truth that reveals the imperfection and idealised perspective of the female gaze. Photo Vogue Festival is on view until 26 November.

Pictured: Figure 10, by Isabelle Wenzel, 2010. © The artist

Writer: Liberty Dye

Public, private, secret
21 November

Since June, The International Center of Photography Museum in New York has presented ‘Public, Private, Secret’ - a rotating installation of photographers’ work on the theme of privacy (or lack thereof) in visual culture.

Tomorrow, British photographer Natasha Caruana’s ‘Married Man’ series goes on display. Over the course of a year, Caruana went on 80 dates with married men, in order to document the experience with a disposable camera and a voice recorder disguised in her red purse. The accessory has become an iconic emblem of the collection, making it immediately recognisable. Until 4 December.

Pictured: Nero, from the 'Married Man' series, by Natasha Caruana, 2008–09. © the artist

Writer: Liberty Dye

World on fire
18 November

Kuwait: A Desert on Fire – newly published by Taschen – is Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado’s exploration of the 1991 oil well incinerations by Iraqi military forces in Kuwait. The attacks were a manifestation of revenge by Saddam Hussein’s troops after being forced out of Kuwait by American forces during the Gulf War.

Salgado’s work surveys one of the world’s worst environmental disasters; over 700 oil wells were ignited. He subsequently captured the scorched landscapes, scattered with cluster bombs and animal remains. These photographs of soaring flames and smoke plumes not only evoke the unbearable temperatures therein – the heat caused the photographer’s smallest lens to warp – but also intimate the permanent damage caused.

Kuwait: A Desert on Fire, $59.99, published by Taschen.

Writer: Liberty Dye

Teller on Mapplethorpe
17 November

Alison Jacques Gallery steps back into the controversial and sensual side of the 1960s with its newest exhibition, ‘Teller on Mapplethorpe’. Opening in London tomorrow, the exhibition sees a curatorial collaboration between German-born photographer Juergen Teller and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. To celebrate what would have been Mapplethorpe’s 70th birthday, Teller selected 58 images as a representation of the artist’s life and career. Featuring rarely exhibited prints, Teller shows the photographer’s work in a new light, creating a new angle of compassion in Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit images. However, Teller’s curation is not wholly concerned with Mapplethorpe’s silver gelatin prints, arguably his most iconic works. Here he also showcases unique Polaroids from the 1970s and a selection of images taking animals as their subject matter. Until 7 January 2017.

Pictured: Frogs, 1984. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Writer: Liberty Dye

Hot off the press
16 November

In German photographer Thomas Ruff's ‘press++’ series, archival American news cuttings are scanned and layered together. First show in New York earlier this year, the works have now travelled to David Zwirner’s London gallery for a show opening on 18 November. Interested in the deconstruction of the image, Ruff scans the front and back of documents collected over several years – smudges, rips and scribbles included. The resulting photomontages tell the tale of time, while cleverly putting the newspaper stories in context of how they were received. Until 23 December.

Pictured: Press++01.38, by Thomas Ruff, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York / London

Writer: Liberty Dye

Street smart
15 November

The Eyes of the City – a new photobook by Richard Sandler – presents a collection of images captured in Boston and New York City between 1977 and 2001. Having grown up on the streets of New York, Sandler used his intimate knowledge of the city to inform the project. Taking a nostalgic turn, these snapshots freeze and preserve the fast-paced environment, and with the help of Sandler’s precise eye, we see familiar streets in a new light.

Pictured: from The Eyes of the City, by Richard Sandler. Published by Powerhouse Books, $49.95

Writer: Liberty Dye

Island life
14 November

For his latest book, Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment, Magnum photographer Mark Power documents the shifting socio-politcal atmosphere of England, alongside poet Daniel Cockrill. During a series of road trips between 2006 and 2010, the collaborators witnessed pivotal changes in government and England's fall into deep recession. Through photography, Power captured the action that society took against its civic misfortunes. Cockrill’s poetry does the same through words. This self-published book demonstrates the changing moods and realities of an ever-adapting cultural climate. Tomorrow, Magnum Photo presents an evening with Mark Power and David Cockrill at The Nightingale Rooms, Brighton.

Pictured: UK. Lincolnshire. Ingoldmells. November 2006. From Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment. © Mark Power / Magnum Photos

Writer: Liberty Dye

Topsy turvy
11 November

Wandering Bears, founded in 2010, is a collective that showcases up-coming artists and photographers through talks, exhibitions and workshops. Its latest exhibition ‘Inside Out Upside Down’ explores how we engage with photography, challenging audiences to interact with the work. Part of London's The Photographers Gallery ‘open door’ residency series, the exhibition features 15 international artists (including Jason Evans, his work pictured). Visitors are invited to participate with and reinterpret their creations using mobile phones or cameras provided. The resulting images will be collated into their very own take-away sticker book. This inventive approach to photography helps the audience embrace their sense of adventure and indulge their creative streak. Until 13 November.

Writer: Phoebe Hinton-Kench

Visual noise
10 November

Opening tonight at Protein Studios in London, ‘Visual Noise’ is a new exhibition curated by StudioSmall and photographic agency East, exploring the complex relationship between humans, photography and sound. Featuring six artists - Jess Bonham, Anna Lomax, Leandro Farina, Linda Brownlee, Owen Silverwood and Ryan Lowry - ‘Visual Noise’ is an innovative take on a vast subject, drawing inspiration from ‘abstraction and rhythm, chaos and commotion, cyborgs and celestial bodies.’ Each of the artists share their thoughts on the matter through unique photographic styles. Expect loud, graphic works and electric colours - a resounding success. Until 13 November.

Pictured: Hard, by Jess Bonham and Anna Lornax, 2016

Writer: Liberty Dye

The shape of things
9 November

A new exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York - ‘The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B Menschel’ – continues until 7 May 2017. The exhibition materials are gathered entirely from Menschel's generous donations to the MoMA archive over the last 40 years, including images on display for the first time. The final selection, whittled down from a vast collection of 504, are chosen for the way they chart the changing perceptions of photography. As Menschel believed, each generation re-invents photography – it is a medium in constant, exciting flux.

Pictured: The Gay Deceiver, by Weegee (Arthur Fellig), circa 1939. Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Writer: Liberty Dye

Jungle book
8 November

Between 17 and 28 October this year, British photographer Harley Weir witnessed the clearing of the refugee camp in Calais. These photographs make up Homes, a new book that displays the makeshift houses inside the camp. The images show that a space of humanity and relative security had been constructed in the so called ‘Jungle’, despite the overwhelming sense of displacement, loss and grief permeating it. Weir provides a unique and powerful insight into the plight facing the refugees, which takes on new, poignant meaning now the camp has been completely dismantled. All earnings from the publication will be donated to La Cimade, a French charity committed to protecting and defending the human rights of refugees and migrants.

Homes, £15, published by Loose Joints

Writer: Liberty Dye

'Erratic' art
7 November

MAC International 2016, Belfast is currently displaying Darren Harvey-Regan’s ‘The Erratics’ – an exhibition exploring the photographic and physical acts of repositioning elements from their own environment. ‘The forms exposed in their natural surroundings remain curiously abstract, while forcefully sculpted objects are balanced on the edge of the organic and abstract,’ explain the festival organisers. Harvey-Regan combines natural formations that amplify erosion by wind and sand. Split into three chapters, two of them photographic, The Erratics (Exposures) explores the monolithic chalk forms of Egypt’s Western Desert; while the artist captured The Erratics (Wrest) using singular studio sculptures. Using a large-format field camera, The Erratics (Wrest) features smooth planes and rough rocks of sculptural chalk, collected from England’s south coast. Focusing on the space between the chalk and their plinths, the sculptures’ alignment creates a two-dimensional surface in print. Until 19 February 2017.

Writer: Liberty Dye

Lagos Photo
4 November

Until 21 November, the Nigerian city of Lagos hosts the country’s international photography festival, Lagos Photo. Presently in its seventh edition, the month long programme aims to establish cross-cultural collaborations with artists, promoting the development of contemporary photography across Africa.

One of 39 participants, Italian photographer Lorenzo Vitturi is showcasing his series The Balogun Particle, depicting the urban transformation of the heart of Balogun Market in Lagos Island. Vendors set their stands around one of the skyscrapers, The Financial Trust House, located in the market’s centre. Vitturi captures the lifelessness of the building in contrast to the locals' vibrant goods and wares, in a kind of 'reverse gentrification' - where the local market is overtaking, symbolically and literally, the financial tower.

Pictured: from The Balogun Particle, by Lorenzo Vitturi, 2015 - date

Writer: Liberty Dye

Life in Qing Dynasty Shanghai: The Photographs of William Saunders
3 October

An exhibition at the China Exchange in London, 'Life in Qing Dynasty Shanghai: The Photographs of William Saunders' is a consummation of antiquarian Stephan Loewentheil’s 35-year quest to build a collection of historic photography from China.

The photographer who allowed Loewenthiel to do so, British-born William Saunders, is distinguished by his thorough documentation of Shanghai, a journey which began in 1860. However, despite this feat, this is the first exhibition of his work.

The exhibition provides a rare insight into the Chinese ‘golden age’, revealing the lost world of late Qing Dynasty Shanghai, by one of the masters of 19th century photography.

‘Life in Qing Dynasty Shanghai: The Photographs of William Saunders’ is on display at the China Exchange from 4–10 November

Pictured: Rain! by William Saunders. Courtesy of the Stephan Loewentheil Historic Photographs of China Collection

Writer: Inez Bartram Vilar

Production line
2 November

At seventeen, a young Stephen Shore made the decision to dedicate his remaining teenage years to photographing Andy Warhol’s New York Factory. The material, collected between 1965 and 1967, comprises a new photobook - Factory: Andy Warhol - released tomorrow.

Shore captured everyday life in Warhol’s Manhattan studio, developing as a photographer with every snap. The book unveils previously unpublished images of the iconic location, including portraits of Edie Sedgwick and Lou Reed. It also reveals the influence that Warhol and Shore had on each others' work. The two began collaborating artistically after Warhol invited Shore to document a film shoot in 1965 at the restaurant L’Avventura. These photographs - along with all 175 seen in the extensive book - provide insight into the collective creativity within the famous Factory walls.

Factory: Andy Warhol by Stephen Shore. Published by Phaidon, £39.95

Pictured: Rene Ricard, Susan Bottomly, Eric Emerson, unidentified woman; middle row: Mary (Might) Woronov, Andy Warhol, Ronnie Cutrone; background: Paul Morrissey, Edie Sedgwick. Paraphernalia’s opening and show (1966); clothes designer Betsey Johnson, store owner Paul Young, by Stephen Shore, 1965-7

Writer: Liberty Dye

'Becoming South Sudan'
1 November

'Becoming South Sudan', a three-part exhibition from Alinka Echeverria, captures ceremonial preparations for Independence Day in the South Sudanese capital of Juba, in June 2011. Through a series of portraits, the Mexican-born visual artist powerfully documents how the South Sudanese people use clothing, uniform and costume as an expression of identity - 'a mode of becoming'.

Echeverria's subjects are seen in military suits, police uniforms, religious garb, and even teenagers in school ties. The portraits, which vary from staged photographs to stolen family moments, convey an intimate insight into South Sudanese communities, while expressing a tense outlook on the future of the young, fragile country.

‘Becoming South Sudan’ is on view until 3 December at The Ravestijin Gallery in Amsterdam.

Pictured: Becoming South Sudan Chapter I: Portraits / Scar, by Alinka Echeverria, 2011

Writer: Liberty Dye

One Sun, One Shadow
31 October

Photographer Shane Lavalette’s first monograph – One Sun, One Shadow – explores the musical tradition of the American South.

One Sun, One Shadow was inspired by Lavalette’s 2012 series for the exhibition ‘Picturing the South’, commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The region’s rich musical history became an inspiration for the extension of this body of work: though he hails from the northeast, the photographer claims it was music – the sounds of old time, blues, and gospel – that consolidated his relationship with the American South.

The hardcover ‘desires to explore the relationship between traditional music and the contemporary landscape’, as Lavalette delves into analysing the power of music, and its ability to carry stories across time and space. One Sun, One Shadow also includes an essay by artist/poet Tim Davis, who describes Lavalette’s series as: ‘Quiet pictures that build to a boisterous whole. They speak from the endlessly renewed place of the photographic expeditioner who loves the world and knows it’s a well that never runs dry.'

One Sun, One Shadow, $65, will be available from 4 November. For more infomation, visit Shane Lavalette's website.

There will be a launch and signing on 4 November from 6–8PM, at Printed Matter Inc, 231 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10001.

Writer: Inez Bartram Vilar

Search and destroy
27 October

The birth of American punk is a tale of highs and lows, and the story of proto-punk icon Iggy Pop is best distilled in his own words. Born James Newell Osterberg, Jr, The Stooges frontman resonated with a generation whose social, political and moral reality was on the brink of a KO.

Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges / As told by Iggy Pop will be released by Third Man Books on 15 November. The tome, which includes rare and unseen photographs of Iggy and company, is the result of interviews Jeff Gold and Johan Kugelberg conducted with the artist. Other contributors to the tome include Jon Savage, Dave Grohl, Jack White, and Joan Jett, who calls Iggy and The Stooges 'one of the greatest American rock bands that has ever been'.

From hiatus and back, the story of The Stooges is that of a six-stringed phoenix. And the only rightful narrator is Iggy.

Image courtesy of Jeff Gold and Johan Kugelberg

Writer: Daisy Alioto

Like a charm
26 October

Girl plays with snake - the new book by photographer Clare Strand - is a collection of images sourced from the darkest recesses of the artist’s extensive archive. Though not fond of snakes herself, Strand depicts women and girls holding, playing with and gazing at snakes. Accompanied by a medley of carefully orchestrated texts, the project is a continuation of the scrapbooks, magazines and monographs the artist has been drawing together since her mid-teens.

Strand modestly describes her working method as being like 'rolling in the grass and seeing what you pick up on your jumper'. Girl plays with snake adds to a long, eclectic list of work: from machines that encourage entropy, to web programmes, looped films and intricate photographic constructions. Despite this range of techniques, each one succeeds in focusing on, subverting, reimagining and manipulating the medium.

Girl plays with snake, published by MACK Books, €35

Pictured: Untitled, by Clare Strand. Courtesy the artist and MACK, 2016

Writer: Inez Bartram-Vilar

Divine portraits
25 October

For his new book, Face and Faith: Mount Kailash - Tibet, Hamburg-based photographer Samuel Zuder observed and documented Tibetan pilgrims, aiming to capture encounters between the human and the divine.

The book documents the circling of Mount Kailash. According to doctrine, Monks must circle the mountain 108 times in his or her lifetime, considering the origin of the universe with every turn. According to the legend, completing the mountain path in one day will bring you good fortune, but most pilgrims need two or three days to do it – the holiest of them take weeks.

In respect of this, armed with a large, analogue format camera and a tripod, Zuder employed a version of ‘slow photography’, asking individual monks for permission before taking their portrait. Because of this, a contemplative atmosphere pervades the photobook, without sacrificing the character and individuality of each worshiper. The result is a collection of highly unusual portraits. We challenge you to come away without a renewed mindfulness of your own.

Face and Faith: Mount Kailash - Tibet, published by Hatje Cantz, €58.00

Pictured: Mountain Kailash, by Samuel Zuder. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

All eyes on Vienna
24 October

Opening tomorrow, the seventh annual Eyes On–Month of Photography Vienna sees a broad events programme and over 150 exhibitions take hold of the Austrian capital.

The sprawling show is delineated into five thematic groups, which collectively seek to ‘network audiences and artists’, says co-director Michaela Obermair. These are: ‘Thin Lines and Borders’, ‘Processing Photography’, ‘Flash! Boom! Bang!’, ‘This Beast Called Beauty’ and ‘Beyond Time’, each exploring different idiosyncratic aspects of fine art and documentary photography. The exhibitions will be on display until the end of November in museums, galleries and independent spaces.

The overall banner of the European Month of Photography also incorporates festivals in Athens, Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Luxembourg and Paris, looking to strength European photography ties by creating cross-country creative networks.

Pictured: A Man Feeding Swans in the Snow, from the series Simple World, by Marcin Ryczek, at the Polish Institute, Vienna. Copyright Marcin Ryczek, im Polnischen Institut Wien

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Tools of investigation
21 October

‘The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble.’ So said Danny Lyon, the work of whom will be on view at London’s Beetles + Huxley Gallery from the 26 October. The American documentary photographer utilises an approach known as 'New Journalism', in which he took an active part in his subjects’ lives.

The exhibition will be divided into a variety of sections, opening with a selection of photographs taken during the Civil Rights Movement. Lyon was heavily involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and donated funds from the sale of his pictures to the cause.

Lyon also explored biker culture in the America Midwest, working in particular with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle club in the period 1963–1967; and developed a series on Texas prisoners in 1967–68. Speaking about the latter project, Lyon said, ‘I tried with whatever power I had to make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I know it to be in reality.’

‘Danny Lyon’ runs from 25 October until 26 November.

Pictured: Two Years, Burglary, 1968. Copyright Danny Lyon, courtesy of Beetles + Huxley

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

California’s golden decade
19 October

The Golden Decade: Photography at the California School of Fine Arts 1945–1955 is a new documentary photobook by William Heick, Ira H Latour and C Cameron Macauley, and edited by Ken Ball and his wife Victoria Whyte Ball.

The book’s titular ‘Golden Decade’ corresponds with the post-war period during which Ansel Adams was hired by San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts to create one of the first fine art photography schools in the country (Heick, Latour and Macauley subsequently studied under Adams and Minor White). The school was resolutely avant-garde and unmatched in the quality of its faculty – luminaries such as Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham were also present.

The Golden Decade: Photography at the California School of Fine Arts 1945-1955, €58, is published by Steidl.

Pictured: Dancing at a Joint in the Bayview District, San Francisco, CA, by David Johnson, 1957

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Modern folk tales
18 October

Laura Pannack’s  ‘Youth Without Age, Life Without Death: Chapter 1’ is a project about Romania,  ‘a photographic exploration of the fragility of life’ and a delve into the country’s idiosyncratic rural folklore. This exhibition – opening Saturday at the Francesca Maffeo Gallery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, until 23 December – is the first chapter of a larger body of work exploring the Balkan region.

‘I needed to escape, to begin an adventure in my search for meaningful answers,’ explains the London-based photographer of its genesis. She chose Romania because its 'hazy purple evening light and untouched land allowed me to gather my thoughts. I began to think about how I could visually explore the idea of life and death, that is when I stumbled across the folk tale “Youth Without Age and Life Without Death”.’ The works subsequently explore themes of time, journeys and life cycles.

Pannack’s images include landscapes, still life and portraits shot on expired film, colliding reality and fantasy with a particularly poetic nuance.

Photography copyright Laura Pannack, courtesy Francesca Maffeo Gallery

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Life on the road
17 October

Opening this Wednesday (19 October) at Chelsea's Proud Galleries, 'Around the World in 80 Years: Photographs by Bill Wyman' is an immersive behind-the-scenes show of works by the erstwhile Rolling Stones bassist (and a celebration of the man's 80th birthday).

Wyman's love of photography was solidified at a young age, after being given a camera by his uncle. Joining the Rolling Stones in 1962, he documented life on the road and in the studio, creating a survey of the band that remains unsurpassed in its candid intimacy. For this show – a defacto return to the Stones' ground-zero of King's Road – Wyman has hand-picked a number of his favourite images, including a shot of Mick Jagger reading the Bible before a concert for the blind and photographs featuring luminaries and peers such as the late David Bowie.

'Around the World in 80 Years: Photographs by Bill Wyman' is on view until 27 November.

Photography © 2016 Bill Wyman Archive (Bill Wyman/Ripple Productions Ltd)

Writer: Tom Howells

‘Flesh & Blood’ in Foligno
14 October

Until 6 November, the Italian city of Foligno will play host to seven photographic exhibtions linked by the theme ‘Flesh & Blood – Affari di famiglia’ (‘Flesh & Blood – Family Business'). Therein, the artists on view explore ideas of family and how this concept can rapidly change with time.

With his work ‘La Famille’, Alain Laboile shows the life of his family in the French countryside. As a flipside to that bucolic existence, ‘Shane and Maggie’ is a project about domestic abuse by American photographer Sara Lewkowicz, who is also showing ‘Emily and Kate, Eddie and Reid’, a project about pregnancy and unconventional family life. Paolo Pellegrin’s ‘Sevla’, meanwhile, describes the relationship between the gypsy community and the city of Rome.

Other projects on view include ‘Inheritance’ by Andrea Stern, Nicoletta Cotechini’s ‘Up-rooted’ and ‘Gombe Family Album’ by Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers.

Pictured: Sevla by Paolo Pellegrin. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Sicily’s shadows
13 October

Opening tonight at The Print Space in Shoreditch, ‘Terra Nostra’ is a solo exhibition by Mimi Mollica about Sicily and the persistent presence of the Cosa Nostra Mafia on the island. Though a London resident for 20 years, Mollica still identifies strongly with his homeland despite the entrenched realities of injustice and inequality. 

‘Mimi Mollica has returned time and time again to his native Sicily to observe its landscape of shadows and light, its everyday rituals and its sense of cultural and political stasis,’ says journalist Sean O’Hagan of the Italian photographer’s work. ‘His photographs are often formally austere and his approach oblique rather than direct. This is a Sicily shadowed by its own reputation, a place at once familiar and unknowable, traced in metaphor and suggestion by Mollica's patient, attentive and often clandestine eye.’

'Terra Nostra' is on view until 18 October.

Photography courtesy the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Man of the people
12 October

Born in 1921, Seydou Keïta was a Malian photographer, who began his career taking pictures of his relatives, and strangers he met in the street. He opened his first studio in 1948: ‘All the elite in Bamako came to be photographed by me: government workers, shop owners, politicians. Everyone passed through my studio at one time or another,’ the artist once said. He kept a private practice until 1962, when he was invited to become the newly independent country’s official government photographer. Though he retired in 1977, he later became one of the best-known African photographers in Europe after the curator and dealer Andre Magnin 'discovered him' in 1991. Keïta died in 2001 in Paris.

His work is currently featured in ‘African Portraits’, a group show also including works by Aida Muluneh, Omar Victor Diop, Malick Sidibé and JD Okhai Ojeikere. The exhibition runs until 4 November at HackelBury Fine Art Gallery, London.

Pictured: Untitled – Lovely Daughter, 1949–1951. Copyright the artist. Courtesy HackelBury Fine Art, London

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Uncontaminated in Oslo
11 October

Opening tomorrow is the second edition of Uncontaminated: Oslo Fashion Art Festival.

The three-day festival will see more then 20 exhibitions, talks, pop-up events and concerts take place around the city, including a photography exhibition, ‘The Collective’, featuring the work of Arielle Chiara, Amanda Charchian, Lea Colombo, Charlie Engman, Isabel Martinez, Synchrodogs and Petra Collins.

The ascendant Canadian-Hungarian artist Petra Collins has been heralded by numerous art and culture magazines as one to watch; as the founder of The Ardorous art collective she seeks to empower young female artists in collaborative work and help disseminate their work. Her own images, colourful and full of soft light, are immediately recognisable – ‘raw and realistic, yet sensual and toned down’, explain the festival organisers.

Running until 14 October, the festival is curated by Hilde Pettersen Reljin and Rita Mostrøm Larsen of creative agency NOIONE, in collaboration with Riccardo Ruini of the REM Ruini e Mariotti advertising agency.

Photography courtesy Petra Collins

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Platinum prints
10 October

London’s Atlas gallery is currently playing host to ‘Platinum’ – an exhibition surveying platinum print work, demonstrating the beauty and versatility of the photographic production technique.

The show features images by a host of international photographers from across the 20th century, including fashion photography by Irving Penn, landscapes by George Tice and still life work by Imogen Cunningham, among many others.

Cunningham (whose Magnolia Blossom is pictured above) learned the platinum technique while working in the Seattle portrait studio of Edward S Curtis. The American photographer wrote her thesis 'About Self-Production of Platinum Papers for Brown Tones' in order to demonstrate the artistic benefits of the process.

‘Platinum’ is on view until 19 November.

Pictured: Magnolia Blossom, by Imogen Cunningham, 1925. Copyright the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Photaumnales: Love Stories
7 October

This weekend marks the opening of the 13th edition of Photaumnales. This year's offering, entitled 'Love Stories', promises to ‘nourish and enliven’, exploring the realm of love without borders.

With a roster including acclaimed photographers Robert Montgomery, Lauren Fleishman, Malick Sidibé, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Janet Biggs, whose displayed work fully embraces the theme with uncalculating openness.

In a tense and turbulent world, the exhibition attempts to focus on open-mindedness, highlighting how artistic expression can contribute to the construction of tolerance. As curators Paul Ardenne and Barbara Polla state, ‘What matters here is instinct, drive, feeling – not what draws the drive, not the object of the feeling. Love is a sensation first, becoming a concept only afterwards.’

The 'Photaumnales: Love Stories' will be on view from 8 October – 1 December at Le Quadrilatère, 22 rue Saint-Pierre à Beauvais.

Pictured: The Lovers, Lauren Fleishman, 2014

Writer: Inez Bartram Vilar

'Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s'
6 October

Opening tomorrow at the Photographers’ Gallery, 'Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s' is an expansive exhibition comprising 48 female artists and over 200 works from the Sammlung Verbund collection in Vienna.

The exhibition is an ode to the groundbreaking practices that shaped the feminist art movement. In addition to works by internationally-acclaimed photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Valie Export and Francesca Woodman, the show provides a rare opportunity to explore the practices of artists such as Katalin Ladik, Nil Yalter and Birgit Jürgenssen.

The exhibition comprises photographs, collage work, performances, films and videos produced throughout the 1970s. It reflects the wider public discourse of the time, when gender equality and civil rights movements were on the rise. Artistic expression meant female artists were ‘galvanised to use their work as a further means of engagement’, fundamentally addressing and reshaping the social conventions surrounding women in the art industries. 

The exhibition is organised into four themes: 'Domestic Agenda', 'The Seductive Body: Sexuality and Objectification', 'In My Skin: Normative Beauty and the Limits of the Body' and 'Alter Ego: Masquerade, Parody and Self-Representation'.

‘Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund Collection’ will be on view from 7 October – 15 January 2017.

Pictured: Self-deceit #1, by Francesca Woodman, 1978/1979. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman, New York/The Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna

Writer: Inez Vilar

Mid-century Mali
5 October

Opening tomorrow as part of Somerset House’s ‘1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair’, Malick Sidibé’s ‘The Eye of Modern Mali’ is the late photographer’s first UK solo showing. The exhibition features 45 black and white original prints shot in Bamako – the Malian capital – from the 1960s and 1970s.

The exposition, curated by André Magnin and Philippe Boutté, revolves around three themes: ‘Au Fleuve Niger / Beside the Niger River’, ‘Tiep à Bamako / Nightlife in Bamako’ and ‘Le Studio / The Studio’. Across these, Sidibé has documented the life and times of his city in a period of fast-paced cultural and social change.

Sibidé, who died in April this year, was the first African artist – and, broadly, photographer – to be awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. He also received The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2003 and the Arts and Entertainment category at the World Press Photo competition in 2010.

‘Malick Sidibé: The Eye of Modern Mali’ will be on view from 6 October – 15 January 2017.

Pictured: Les Retrouvailles au bord du fleuve Niger, by Malick Sidibé, 1974. Courtesy the artist and Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

The camera on camera
4 October

‘The Camera Exposed’ is a photographic exhibition about photography – exploring the camera itself as subject. Further significance is afforded by its being held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the first institution to collect and exhibit photography as an art form.

Nowadays, the proliferation of smartphones has made photography an egalitarian act, with the traditional analog camera used less and less. ‘The Camera Exposed’ shows more than 57 works by known artists. These include portraits of famous photographers with their cameras – Bill Brandt, Paul Strand and Weegee among them – as well as self-portraits by Eve Arnold, Lee Friedlander and André Kertész, images of cameras without their owners and a host of new acquisitions.

‘The Camera Exposed’ is on view until 5 March 2017.

Pictured: Bill Brandt with his Kodak Wide-Angle Camera, by Laelia Goehr . Courtesy Alexander Goehr

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

‘At Land, At Bloom’
3 October

Comprising a temporary exhibition and store opening this Wednesday in Melbourne, ‘At Land, at Bloom’ is a collaboration between Lauren Cassar – artist, textile designer and founder of Australian clothing brand Mirador – and Victoria Zschommler, a still life, beauty and fashion photographer. Together, the launch is ‘a joint celebration of the essence of nature and our cherished interactions within it’, says the duo.

‘At Land’ is the launch of Cassar’s third collection, the designer’s exploration of the sarong as a ‘wearable artwork’; while ‘At Bloom’ is a series of still life photographs by Zschommler. All the photos of Simone Gooch floral arrangements were taken in London at the beginning of 2016; therein, the photographer references the Japanese art of Ikebana. Each image is available in an edition of ten.

The exhibition-cum-store will be on view in Melbourne from 5–10 October, before moving to Sydney from 1–4 December.

For more information, visit Mirador or Victoria Zschommler.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Fringe cut
30 September

The Brighton Photo Fringe (BPF) opens tomorrow. The seventh edition of the biennial presents over 200 artists, whose works will be exposed in over 40 venues across the city. The festival will be also joined by Fotopub in Slovenia, Cork Photo located in Ireland and the French festival Diep-Haven.

The BPF is one of the largest and well-known festivals in UK because of its inclusivity - its aim is to support and connect early-career artists to international audiences. What’s more, all the photographers and lens based artists have self-curated their collections. This year, Dana Ariel’s work won the OPEN16 SOLO, selected via LensCulture.

The BFP also includes a rich program of events including panel discussions, workshops, talks, guided tours and the 22 and the 23 October will take place the Photo Publishers’ Market.

The BPF is supported by Metro Imaging and the Brighton Photo Biennal, and it runs until 30 October.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Joanna Piotrowska's personal space
28 September

This Friday sees the opening of 'Frantic', the first solo exhibition by the Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska at Lisbon's Madragoa gallery, which runs until 5 November.

Piotrowska's project focuses on the practice of building shelters, and all that encompasses – transcending the childhood experience of creating small personal spaces ('localised utopias', as Foucault put it), to incorporate the persistent desire of adolescents and adults for a defined home, as well as the topical notion of immigrants and the homeless 'searching for a lair in the rips of the urban fabric', says the gallery.

For 'Frantic' the photographer asked her subjects to erect personal shelters inside their own apartments or gardens, using furniture as architectural ballast. Within these, they were to include a selection of objects they couldn't live without. The result is a survey of bizarre constructions, simultaneously reflective of the personalities of those that built them and, when the creator is present, occasionally disturbing in their photographed forms – the particular use of the flash flattens the images, human bodies becoming inanimate objects trapped in too-small spaces. 

For more information, visit the Madragoa gallery's website.

Pictured: Frantic, by Joanna Piotrowska. Courtesy the artist and Madragoa, Lisbon

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Gregory Halpern’s city survey
29 September

‘Beauty and its implication of promise is the metaphor that gives art its value. It helps us rediscover some of our best intuitions, the ones that encourage caring.’ So says Robert Adams of ZZYZX – a new book by American photographer Gregory Halpern, available this month from MACK.

Here, Halpern focuses his lens on the sublime, contradictory extremes of California, where 'the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light as transcendent as it is harsh’, explains the publisher.

His photographs begin in the desert east of Los Angeles, segueing through the city and on to the Pacific. It is a journey, and Halpern’s talent is in his affording of a voice to the places, people and animals that have been transfigured into his surreal survey. 

ZZYZX, £35, available from MACK.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

EMOP 2016 hits Berlin
27 September

Opening on 1 October, Berlin’s European Month of Photography (EMOP) is Germany’s largest photography festival.

For this year’s edition, the festival jury chose a total of 130 exhibition projects from 120 institutions, across myriad themes and manifestations. They will be exhibited at outdoor spaces, museums, cultural institutions, galleries, project spaces, embassies and a photography school.

The festival also offers a large range of events, including talks, workshops, lectures and screenings. Particularly interesting are 'Book Days', during which 30 international publishers will show recent works; and 'Portfolio Reviews', wherein students, photographers and artists will have the opportunity to show their work to a panel of international experts.

The festival will run until 31 October.

Pictured: CPV-Japanische Orte-Skowron Sashiogi, by Wojtek Skowron, 2015. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Photography past and present in Tokyo
26 September

This Friday sees the opening of the third edition of the Daikanyama Photo Fair, organised by the Fine-Art Photography Association (FAPA) in Tokyo. The festival, on view until the 2 October, sees myriad Japanese artists, galleries, bookstores and publishers present a range of work both historical and contemporary.

Concurrent with the 2016 edition, FAPA launches an exhibition series called 'The Photobook'. Providing a history of Japanese photobooks, the series explores the proliferation of this now ubiquitous trend. The programme includes lectures by both Japanese and international curators and critics, photobook relay talks and a children’s workshops.

The Daikanyama Photo Fair will run from 30 September – 2 October.  Exhibitors included Taka Ishii Gallery, Mörel Books, MACK, Komiyama Tokyo, Zen Foto Gallery and many more.

Pictured: Geisha, Izunagaoka, by Kikuji Kawada, 1952. Copyright Kikuji Kawada. Courtesy of PGI

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Questions and answers?
23 September

'All these images were made to illustrate a fact,' explains the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London, preceding the opening of a new show, 'The Image As Question: An Exploration of Evidential Photography'.

The exhibition explores the entrenched documentative potential of photography – as a record of crime scenes, science, art, biology, exploration and fashion – across works drawn from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Most were never intended to be viewed in a gallery context; they are merely 'proof' of things happening, created to 'prove a point, solve a mystery or simply to inform with clarity' – though the composition and aesthetic of the chosen examples is meticulous.

Melanie Einzig's September 11th, New York, NY 2001 is a case in point – both visceral and banal, it's an unprecedented scene caught absolutely in the moment and retrospectively loaded with meaning.

Pictured: September 11th, New York, NY 2001, by Melanie Einzig, 2001. Copyright the artist

Writer: Tom Howells

Joël Tettamanti presents 'Kobo' in Lesotho
22 September

To call Swiss photographer Joël Tettamanti's practice 'one-track' is doing it a great disservice. From the start, he has focused on the transformation of global landscapes by human intervention. Opening tomorrow at Alliance Française in Maseru, Lesotho, 'Kobo' is a photographic survey of the country's Basotho people (and his second on the south African enclave).

The images particularly focus on the 'covers' (or 'kobo' in Sesotho) of the community – the elaborate forms of clothing that replaced their traditional animal skins when Lesotho was colonised by Europeans in the 19th century. They perform myriad functions: as gifts during rituals (rites of passage and birth among them) and in the preparation of beer and tobacco, as well as generating heat (an emblem of transformation). They are also printed with symbolic motifs; vertical lines, for instance, indicate growth and prosperity.

Crucially, the covers are a vanishing symbol of traditional life, increasingly worn only in rural areas. The region is both under-populated and under-built, says the gallery; Tettamanti's gravitation to 'the human presence in the landscape' expresses his extant interests.

Photography courtesy the artist

Writer: Tom Howells 

Piece of mind
21 September

The Kentucky-born photographer Stacy Kranitz has, for the past six years, dedicated her practice to exploring the Appalachian regions of the United States.

As it was Give(n) to Me – the corresponding body of imagery, text, drawings and objects that she has compiled on the area – has now been used to create a publication, entitled Speak Your Piece. The book amalgamates her photographs of Appalachia with entries to a local reader-contributed newspaper column, which cover issues as diverse as drug use, the coal industry, love and loneliness, providing a singular insight into both rural mountain life and the minutae of the human experience.

'When I read the column, I think about my photographs and what I want for them,' says Kranitz. 'I hope they bear witness in a way that is both extraordinarily specific and universal. I hope that they offer a narrative as bold and heart-felt as the contributions to the column selected for this book.'

Speak Your Piece, £30, published by Here Press.

Photography copyright the artist

Writer: Tom Howells

Parafin gallery puts Soviet history on a ‘Pedestal’
20 September

Opening Thursday at London’s Parafin gallery, ‘Pedestal’ is a new exhibition of work by Indrė Šerpytytė. The Lithuanian artist’s first solo show with the gallery will feature photographs, archival imagery and sculpture – presented alongside a new audio piece – to explore themes of history and trauma.

For Šerpytytė, photography is ‘as an emotional expression rather than a documentation process’. The work that comprises ‘Pedestal’ looks at how the past affects the present, by juxtaposing in collage form archival images of statues of Lenin and Stalin located in the public spaces of her country. The photographer is fascinated by the recent past of Lithuania, in particular its conflicts – the Second World War, the Cold War, the decades of Soviet control and ‘war after war’ time.

The photographic exhibition is accompanied by the aforementioned audio project, Toppled. The artist worked with a professional narrator, who presented the idea behind the pictures without emotional inflection in order to create an unexpected and surreal atmosphere.

‘Pedestal’ is on view at the Parafin gallery from 23 September – 12 November.

Pictured: Pedestal, Girls, by Indrė Šerpytytė, 2016. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Parafin, London

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Chris Steele-Perkins' 'The Teds' at Magnum Print
19 September

For the first time in nearly 40 years, Chris Steele-Perkins' 'The Teds' will take over London's Magnum Print Room.

Alongside the iconic vintage prints – including eight previously unseen photographs from his archive – a platinum print of the cover image from his landmark book, first published in 1979 and from which the exhibition takes its name, will also be on show.

Working with writer Richard Smith, the duo documented the phenomenon of Ted culture across the UK in the 1970s; Smith through his words and Steele-Perkins with his camera. Capturing the distinctive fashion of the movement – the gravity-defying quiffs, bone-crushing brother creepers and drainpipe trousers – Steele-Perkins famously also captured the way in which the youth culture of the time interacted with its environs, be it a dance hall, the pub, the suburban home or seaside promenades.

In the wake of the arrival of Bill Haley's film Rock Around the Clock, the Teds were taking over. 'They had found their identities in the gangs,' writes Smith. 'They had moved from the back-streets to the housing estates and headlines. And they did it to the back-beat of Rock ’n’ Roll.’

‘The Teds’ will be on view from 21 September until 28 October. A revised, larger-format edition of the book has just been published by Dewi Lewis.

Pictured: GB. England. Adam and Eve pub in Hackney, 1976. Copyright Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Bruce Gilden returns to Detroit
16 September

Opening tomorrow at Leica Gallery Mayfair, 'Detroit: Against the Wind' comprises over 20 images taken by Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden over the past year. 

Gilden’s exhibition, commissioned by Leica UK, is an ode to the Midwestern city and its inhabitants, and follows the artist’s 2009 Detroit series, which documented foreclosed homes and their owners.

Originally trained as a sociologist, Gilden is inspired by the beauty in this ‘apocalyptic’ city, one that was previously considered a ‘shining example of the American Middle Class’. The monochromatic series expounds Gilden’s fascination with Detroit, and his mission to capture the spirit of the city.

'No matter how down at the heel some of this city’s people are, they remain vibrant and alive,' he explains. 'They’re tough. To survive in this city, you need to be. I instantly felt an affinity with the women and men I photographed in Detroit; a black Muslim selling newspapers, an ex-junkie, a church goer, a prostitute, a blues singer who had seen better days… The work I have been doing there is an ode to the city and its people.'

‘Detroit: Against the Wind’ is on view until 6 October.

Pictured left and right: Untitled, Detroit, USA, 2016. Copyright Bruce Gilden / Magnum Photos

Writer: Inez Bartram Vilar 

Unseen Photo Festival opens in Amsterdam
15 September

Opening tomorrow, Amsterdam’s Unseen Photo Festival will see collaborations with institutions, educational groups, photographers and artists, as well as localised initiatives across the city.

This year, the festival will be set within the historic Spaarndammerbuurt district, with its epicentre at the Museum Het Schip. In reference to the latter – which recently saw a new wing opened to explore Dutch artisanal practice – the fair will see an exhibition held on the topical trend of craftsmanship in contemporary photography, curated by Anton Corbijn.

Elsewhere, Unseen sees exhibitions by the festival’s campaign managers, Christto & Andrew (entitled ‘The Politics of Sport’), and on Japanese photography, selfie projects, artist’s recipes, the opportunity to have one’s portrait shot by master photographer Koos Breukel and a host of related lectures and shows across myriad collaborating cultural institutions.

Unseen Photo Festival is on view until 25 September.

Pictured: A Telepathic Subject, by Christto & Andrew, 2016. Copyright Christto & Andrew

Writer: Tom Howells

Edward Burtynsky at Flowers Gallery
14 September

Opening this Friday at London’s Flowers Gallery, ‘Salt Pans’ and ‘Essential Elements’ comprise a duo of solo shows by Edward Burtynsky.

In essence, Burtynsky’s abstract aerial photographs map the human transformation of the landscape, documenting the consequences of industrial processes and manufacturing. They present an unsettling contradiction – between the aesthetic appeal of the images and the profound ecological concerns they expose.

'Salt Pans' graces the Lower gallery. These images are composed topographically, exposing a network of wells, pans and vehicle tracks.

In the Upper gallery, 'Essential Elements' comprises of a selection of photographs that act as journey through Burtynsky's past projects, Oil, Water, China, Manufactured Landscapes and Quarries, drawing on the core themes that mark his entire oeuvre.

The exhibition is held in correlation with the release of a corresponding new book, which comprises an overview of his work over the past four decades. Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements is edited and curated by William A Ewing and published by Thames & Hudson.

‘Salt Pans’ and ‘Essential Elements’ are on view until 29 October.

Pictured: Edward Burtynsky, Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007, (c) Edward Burtynsky, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

Writer: Inez Bartram Vilar

Ata Kandó - I Shall Use My Time’
13 September

The Hungarian-born Dutch photographer Ata Kandó (b.1913) initially trained as a painter at Budapest’s Bortnyik School, though she quickly segued into photography after acquiring a camera. She subsequently worked as a lab technician for Magnum; produced series on young mothers during the Hungarian Uprising, Indian communities in South America and a plethora of personal projects focusing on her loved ones; and became active in photography education. Now 102, she resides in a Bergen care home, often visited by a younger generation of photographers in thrall to her skill and reputation.

Kandó’s inspirational career is now being explored with a major retrospective at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, entitled ’Ata Kandó - I Shall Use My Time’, curated by Koos Breukel and Rose Ieneke van Kalsbeek. As well as featuring a wealth of her intimate portraits, the exhibition also features her seminal series Droom in het woud (’Dream in the forest’) and Kalypso & Nausikaä.

’Ata Kandó – I Shall Use My Time’ is on view until 1 January 2017.

Pictured: Madeleine Kandó, from the series Droom in het woud, Switzerland 1955. Copyright Ata Kandó / collection Nederlands Fotomuseum. Courtesy Kahmann Gallery Amsterdam

Writer: Tom Howells

Ai Weiwei at Foam
12 September

Opening this Friday at Amsterdam’s Foam, ‘#Safe Passage’ is a new exhibition by artist and activist Ai Weiwei.

The show is divided into two parts. The first sees Weiwei survey his personal experience of life under the close surveillance of the Chinese government, exploring the way he used self-portraiture and social media as a means of defining his freedom of expression.

The second focuses on the artist’s personal affinity with migrants and refugees. After spending time in Lesbos, Weiwei travelled around the Mediterranean in an attempt to document this contemporary socio-political crisis. Through this, he presents the grim reality of the migrant risking their lives to reach Europe, only to be met with further isolation, xenophobia and arduous bureaucratic procedure when they reach the continent. Again, social media is a crucial aspect of his practice; his Instagram feed ‘has functioned as a de facto real-time newswire’ in his travels, the gallery explains.

‘#Safe Passage’ will be on view from 16 September until 7 December.

Pictured: Incoming refugee boat, Lesbos, Greece, 17 February 2016. Copyright Ai Weiwei Studio

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Shore thing
9 September

Opening tomorrow at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, ‘Shores Like You’ is the new solo exhibition by Scarlett Hooft Graafland, which presents photographs taken in remote, isolated locations.

The title of the exhibition takes inspiration from Baudelaire’s famous poem Invitation to the Voyage. Hooft Graafland works most of the time with unspoiled vistas (Vanuatu, Socotra, and in the Red Dunes of Dubai), and, as in the poem, uninterrupted shorelines feature prominently. She is influenced by these places, but also by stories found there – the Dutch photographer's work wouldn't be possible without close collaboration with local people.

The atmosphere evoked by Hooft Graafland is reminiscent of fairy tales. But there’s also an air of seriousness – the photographer is interested in contemporary global problems, like climate change and migration issues, two themes that are well covered by this exhibition.

Pictured: Burka Balloons, 2014. Copyright the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Artist on artist
8 September

Paper Journal, the online visual arts magazine launched in 2013 by Patricia Karallis, is turning three, and the Webber Space Gallery in London is hosting an exhibition to celebrate.

In line with the magazine’s collaborative approach, Karallis called upon the 350 artists featured on the site since it’s conception to help curate the exhibition. Each artist picked two of their favourite Paper Journal artists, and those with the most votes ended up being featured in the Webber Represents show.

The chosen 12 photographers include international talent like David Brandon, Heikki Kaski and Natalie Krick. If this diverse, vibrant selection is anything to go by, the next three years will be just as fruitful and engaging as the last.

The exhibition opens tomorrow, and is on view until 23 September.

Photography: The Unseen, by Tereza Zelenkova, 2015

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Out of Africa
7 September

Opening tomorrow at London’s October Gallery, ‘Daniele Tamagni and James Barnor’ is a two-man exhibition by a duo of photographers equally enamoured of Africa, colour and fashion.

Tamagni – an Italian practitioner trained in art history – has traveled worldwide to document fashion’s vivid subcultures. He won the Canon Young Photographer Award in 2007 with his project Sapeurs of Brazzaville about Congolese dandies, and in 2010 received the ICP, Infinity Award, fashion category.

Barnor – born in Accra, Ghana, in 1929 – had a swift professional ascent, working for the Daily Graphic and, after moving to the UK in 1959, photographing international models in London for Drum, the influential anti-apartheid magazine. His portraits, the gallery explains, ‘depict the self-assurance and individualistic fashion trends that dominated at the time’.  

The exhibition is on view until 30 September.

Photography: Untitled #4 (Sick-Hagemeyer shop assistant, Accra), by James Barnor, 1971. Courtesy Autograph ABP

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Festival Images Vevy, Switzerland
6 September

This Saturday sees the opening of the fifth edition of Switzerland’s Festival Images Vevey, on view until 2 October. The festival – the country’s first biennale of visual arts – is set, as always, to transform the town into an open-air museum, presenting original photographic exhibitions in unusual venues,  both indoors and out.

Festival Images Vevey will see 75 projects by artists hailing from 15 different countries, including major names such as Hans-Peter Feldmann, Alec Soth, Mat Collishaw, Graciela Iturbide, Guido Mocafico, Christian Patterson, Martin Parr and James Casebere.

The theme this year is ‘immersion’. The concept is inevitably broad, literally evoking the act of developing analog photographs (now evaporated into a digital ‘cloud’); as well as the analogous idea of a photographer immersing themselves within an approach or artistic environment, aquatic or otherwise.

Take the work of Japanese artist Asako Narahashi, for instance. Narahashi interpreted the theme via photographs of Japan’s coastline and its natural architectural symbols – images showing the connection between earth and water and the relation between seasickness and ‘the pleasure of floating freely’.

Pictured: half awake and half asleep in the water, by Asako Narahashi, 2003. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Osiris Co

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Summer snaps
5 September

The second edition of the photobook festival 'Gazebook' opens this Friday in Sicily, curated by Teresa Bellina, Simone Sapienza and Melissa Carnemolla.

As last year, the festival will be located in Punta Secca, and presents a range of different events nightly, until 11 September. Focusing on the growing medium of contemporary photography books, visitors have the chance to meet a host of national and international photographers, curators, editors and publishers.

Entirely free, the exhibitions, open air installations and talks will be located all around the picturesque Sicilian village. What's more, 'Gazebook' promises to be a feast for the eyes and the stomach, with local Sicilian delicacies on offer throughout the area.

Martin Parr, president of Magnum photo agency, will bring festivities to a close with a retrospective dedicated to his most celebrated books, including Last Resort and Common Sense.

Photography: Martin Parr

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Cold case
2 September

Jack Latham is the second recipient of the Photographers’ Gallery’s Bar Tur Photobook Award. The award sees the Welsh photographer given the opportunity to work with an independent publisher to create his first book.

Sugar Paper Theories is the result. Published in collaboration between the Gallery and Here Press, the book explores the 1974 Guðmundur and Geirfinnur Case. A still-unsolved Icelandic murder case, the crime saw six people testify to the murders of 18-year-old Guðmundur Einarsson and 32-year-old Geirfinnur Einarsson – two cases set ten months and 50km apart, with no apparent connection. A year later, Saevar Ciesielski and Erla Bolladottir were arrested for an unrelated crime, but confessed to the murders, as well as fingering three male friends and another acquaintance. The catch? All six of the self-implicated claimed no memory of the crime.

Following their sentences and convictions, details pertaining to physical and mental torture of the suspects were released and, in 2011, a government task force declared the six confessions unreliable and recommended the trial was re-set.

In his book, Latham uses a mix of archival police images and material, photographs of spectral and desolated landscapes, and pictures of suspects’ diary entries to survey one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the history of the Icelandic legal system.

Sugar Paper Theories, £35, will be formally launched at a ceremony at The Photographers’ Gallery on 6 September.

Pictured: Stockfish, by Jack Latham, 2014. Copyright Jack Latham. Courtesy the artists / INSTITUTE

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Lay of the land
1 September

Bringing Richard Saltoun Gallery’s four-show run of exhibitions devoted to British conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s to a close is a double header exploring the work of Ed Herring and Roger Palmer.

Herring, who died in 2003, was a land artist who came to prominence in the 1960s for his ‘environmental statements’, as well as the documentation he made of his practice. This manifested itself in the depleting bird seed of 1969’s Bird Grid and his measurements of oil absorbed by the ground in the same year’s Oiled Earth, among others – works rooted in both ecological and ethical socio-cultural concerns.

Palmer, on the other hand, combined text and image to turn traditional notions of landscape on its head, surveying how a reading of a photograph – silver gelatin iterations in his case – can be altered by accompanying information.

‘Some Dimensions of my Lunch: Conceptual Art in Britain. Part 4: Ed Herring & Roger Palmer’ is on view until 28 September.

Pictured: Maryport Workington Whitehaven (Industrial towns on the Solway Firth), by Roger Palmer, 1979

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Marc Riboud, 1923–2016
31 August

Following a long illness, Magnum photographer Marc Riboud passed away yesterday, Tuesday 30 August. He was 93.

Born in 1923 in Saint-Genis-Leval, Riboud discovered his passion for photography at the age of 14, when he received a Vest Pocket Kodak as a birthday present from his father.

He joined Magnum in 1953, personally invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa upon seeing his first published image in Life Magazine. He subsequently published more than 30 books, and travelled globally, initially across the Middle East, Afghanistan and India, to China and onwards to Japan (as well as working in the USSR, Europe and the United States). He produced seminal work on the Cultural Revolution in China and surveyed wars in Algeria and Vietnam.

Says Magnum Photos president Martin Parr, ‘Marc’s association with Magnum has been a long and fruitful one. He was a terrific photographer and of particular note was his pioneering work in China, which he first visited in the late 1950s, and continued to photograph over the next three decades. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to his family.’

Photography copyright Bruno Barbey /Magnum Photos

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Life in the background
30 August

Now on view at Warsaw’s Zacheta Project Room, ‘I like you, I like you a lot and others’ is the inaugural solo exhibition by Polish-born, London-based photographer Alicja Dobrucka.

In 2008, she began constructing I like you, I like you a lot, a project reflecting on her 13-year-old brother Maks, who tragically drowned on a scouting trip. Over the ensuing years, Dobrucka focused her attention on Maks’ friends, exploring their obsessions with American action films, turning a rumination on family grief into an objective survey on one of the brashest veins of Western pop culture.

The role of the landscape, too, is crucial here, Dobrucka using it to represent personal feelings and to reflect the atmosphere of provincial Poland during the post-communist transformation period.

The show’s second series, Scenery, was realised in Mumbai, and documents the wealth of backdrops used by Indian portrait photographers (a kind of ‘archaeology of the everyday’ the gallery explains).

‘I like you, I like you a lot and others’ is on view until 16 October.

Pictured: from the series I like you, I like you a lot

Writer: Sara Tagliorett

Visa pour l'image
26 August

This weekend, Perpignan welcomes the largest photojournalism festival in the world to its galleries, open-air cinemas and streets.

The annual festival, which continues until 11 September, presents a range of anthology style exhibitions of renowned photographers' work, with an emphasis on those who go where others won't, to report on war, the environment, religious issues and social phenomena.

The organisers and curators have worked hard to create a throng of profoundly important stories with astounding emotional range. We challenge you to leave without having felt moments of joy, heartache and terror, as in Dominic Nahr's Fractured State, produced for Médecins Sans frontières (pictured), which depicts the humanitarian disaster in South Sudan, in which 2.5 million people have been uprooted.

The exhibition caps off with the announcement of 2016's prestigious Visa d’or award winners, for the most powerful news, feature and daily press images.

Pictured: from Fractured State, by Dominic Nahr. © the artist

Writer: Elly Parsons

Alec Soth’s ‘Gathered Leaves’
24 August

Opening tomorrow at the Finnish Museum of Photography, ‘Gathered Leaves: Photographs by Alec Soth’ collates the four major series responsible for Soth’s critical ascendance.

The Magnum photographer is a multifaceted talent and one of the most respected practitioners of the past decade, possessed of a lyrical and vibrant documentative voice (or, perhaps, eye?).

‘Gathered Leaves’ features the series Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010) and Songbook (2014), the latter of which comprises a plethora of black and white ‘dispatches’ on modern American life, drawn from cross-country road trips Soth took with the writer Brad Zeller (and on which the duo posed as local newspaper reporters).

‘Alec Soth’s work belongs within the canon of great American photography, capturing the American society and mindscape,’ says Elina Heikka, director of the Finnish Museum of Photography. ‘Gathered Leaves’, she continues, ‘may well be the exhibition that will be remembered as an iconic assemblage of our times for years to come’.

‘Gathered Leaves’ is on view until 15 January 2017.

Pictured: from Broken Manual, 2010. Copyright the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Bischof at Bildhalle
23 August

Opening Thursday at Zürich's Bildhalle Gallery, 'Werner Bischof – Fotografiker' is a new survey on the feted Swiss photojournalist and visual essayist, focusing especially on the importance of the latter role.

Taking titular inspiration from Bischof's studio signage (a door notice of the space he opened in 1936, at the age of 20, read 'Foto-Grafik'), the show features a smattering of early studio work, before segueing to his later years and the galvanising period of 1951–53.

Travelling through Japan on assignment from Magnum, Bischof sought to eschew the restrictions of commission photography and devise a new visual language, shifting his attention to personal images in an attempt to 'get a feel for the Japanese soul'. His practice would quickly become more avant-garde. In 1953, travelling through the USA shortly before his death, Bischof would also start experimenting with nascent colour photography techniques, to beguiling effect. Images from both periods are represented here.

'Werner Bischof – Fotografiker'  is on view from 25 August – 1 October.

Pictured: Plants, Zurich, c.1941. Courtesy Bildhalle

Writer: Tom Howells

Philip Jones Griffiths Award 2016
22 August

Entries for the first edition of the Philip Jones Griffiths Award for documentary photography are now open until 10 October. The winner will be announced on 15 November.

The judging panel is a mixture of highly respected professionals and renowned photographers, including Magnum photojournalist Chien Chi Chang; former National Geographic photo editor Elizabeth Krist; former Rolling Stone and Newsweek director of photography Karen Mullarkey; Trolley Books and TJ Boulting director Hannah Watson; and Philip’s daughter and Foundation trustee Katherine Holden.

The winner will be awarded £10,000 (they will also be published on the PJG website), and the prize money must be used to complete a body of work. A ‘highly commended’ status will also be given to a small number of works.

Philip Jones Griffiths set up his eponymous Foundation in 2000, with the intention of helping fund photojournalists cover essential stories. The award has been founded to further reward this.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Identity exploration
19 August

The fourth edition of the Landskrona Foto Festival in Sweden was curated by Jenny Nordquist, gallerist and photographer, as well as Christian Caujolle, one of Europe’s most respected photo critics and curators.

Through a series of portraits, the program explores current issues of identity – how gender and the self are perceived and our relationship with nature – to uncover a new way of defining ourselves and the society in which we live.

More than 150 photographers are represented here; world-famous names appearing next to promising new artists. Much of the art has been moved from the festival’s traditional exhibition galleries out into streets, squares and parks, to invite more people to connect with the issues at hand. ‘In a world that is currently being shaken by profound crises,’ says Nordquist, ‘we have chosen not to give the festival a specific isolated theme but instead find different expressions that complement each other and give them an opportunity to meet.’ The festival runs until 28 August.

Pictured: 'Waiting'. Photography: Jason Larkin

Writer: Alix Biehler

About the Physical Object
18 August

Tomorrow, Peckham’s car-park-based Bold Tendencies space launches 'APO': a series 'About the Physical Object' in publishing. The event proposes to explore the idea of the book and the tangible object it represents.

The fair’s first event will be an expo entitled ‘Show and Tell’. Imprints including Bemojake, Loose Joints, Odd Eye Press, Nous Vous Press, MACK, Rick Pushinsky and Trolley Books will show what they do and explain the process of creating a book.

Saturday will see the presentation of ‘The Heart Grows Fonder: Bedtime Stories’ by Miniclick. The ongoing project displays commissions responding to Marshall McLuhan’s seminal publication The Medium in the Massage. Utilising photos, illustrations, paintings, drawings, diagrams and cartoons, the project seeks to explore how new media affects and creates distance between us.

'APO' concludes on Sunday with ‘The Scene Series’, a celebration of Sammy Kissin’s writing by Robin Linde Production and Libreria. Three evocative and intriguing 20 minute short plays will be presented; while Libreria’s Jess Fogarty will create illustrated prints drawing on the performances (and which will subsequently be available for purchase).

Pictured: spread from Dark Rooms, by Nigel Shafran, £35, published by MACK.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Sohei Nishino’s sprawling cityscapes
17 August

On view at Brittany’s Festival Photo La Gacilly until 30 September, Japanese photographer and artist Sohei Nishino’s Diorama Maps are giant photographic cartographic surveys comprised of thousands of images – taken over weeks-long trips around a particular city from myriad viewpoints, and then painstakingly printed and assembled into huge, intricate wholes.

Nishino’s recreations of urban landscapes meld different creative disciplines, the artist describing his work as a combination of photography, collage and cartography. Of his approach, he says: ‘I wander around these cities, camera in hand, taking a multitude of shots, so that I can later assemble them one by one, as I remember them, and thus create a geographical representation constituting the portrait of a place.’ The resulting diorama, the festival organisers explain, ‘is a subjective cartographic representation of this experience, a city expressed through memories and images’.

This year sees the 13th edition of the Festival Photo La Gacilly, a central theme of which is Japanese culture and photography.

Pictured: Hiroshima. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Clarisse d’Arcimoles' forgotten tale
16 August

Opening on Thursday at the Photographers’ Gallery – and part of the Print Sales Gallery Summer Spotlight – is ‘A Forgotten Tale’, a three-dimensional installation by Clarisse d’Arcimoles.

Using a photograph found in London’s Bishopsgate Institute archive, d’Arcimoles recreated a black and white model of a room in a Spitalfields home.

The picture shows a woman making handcrafted brushes surrounded by her six children. The photographer transports viewers back to the Victorian East End, documenting the poverty of the family pictured but also depicting a scene of quiet dignity and familial tenderness.

The Print Sales Gallery at the Photographers’ Gallery is committed to the promotion of affordable art, experimental practice and emerging artists alongside more established names. The Gallery also offers the opportunity to buy work by its roster, which currently numbers 35 photographers.

‘Clarisse d’Arcimoles: A Forgotten Tale’ is on view until 24 September.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

National identity
15 August

A House Without a Roof is a new collection of work by the Brooklyn-based photographer and filmmaker Adam Golfer. Across the publication, he analyses the histories of violence that have always connected Europe, Israel and Palestine.

Framing this within family relationships, Golfer scrutinises photography, appropriated imagery and text pertaining to his personal history in representing the continuing military occupation of the West Bank. In particular, he focuses on his relationships with his father and grandfather, who lived on a kibbutz in the early 1970s and was a survivor of Dachau, respectively.

Golfer’s family memories are intermingled with the ethnical and national identity issues that have always characterised the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (both ideologically and physically).

A House Without a Roof, $45, is available to pre-order from Adam Golfer’s website.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2016
12 August

Entries for the fifth edition of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards are now open until 9 September.

The panel, comprising C/O Berlin curator Ann-Christin Bertrand, Aperture creative director Lesley A Martin and Paris Photo artistic director Christoph Wiesner will select the shortlist, to be announced on the 30 September for the Opening Days of the European Month of Photography at C/O Berlin. The final decision will be made by a different jury at Paris Photo in November.

The 35 shortlisted titles will be divided into three categories: Photobook of the Year, First PhotoBook and Photography Catalogue of the Year. The prizes include $10,000 for the First PhotoBook Prize, though all will be exhibited for Paris Photo’s 20th anniversary showing.

Information on submissions can be found on the Aperture website.

Based in New York, Aperture is a not-for-profit organisation created in 1952 by photographers and writers as 'common ground for the advancement of photography'. Impeccably connected within the photo community, the Foundation produces, publishes and presents a rich programme of photography projects across the United States and beyond.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Man of the world
11 August

Opening Monday at The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, Austin, ‘Elliot Erwitt: Home Around the World’ is a new exhibition featuring more then 200 images from the titular documentary photographer’s collection. Organised by Jessica S McDonald, the Ransom Center’s Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography, it is the most comprehensive survey of Erwitt’s work yet.

The exhibition explores the way Erwitt has looked at and documented the world for more then 70 years. The French-born American photographer’s peripatetic upbringing and subsequent life is reflected in his choice of subjects and themes – from portraits of dogs and lone figures, to crowded beach and street scenes. All provide a touching, amusing insight into the human condition. 

‘It's been a long journey but worth all the laughs and tears,’ says Erwitt of his practice. ‘And it is all here in “Home Around the World” for anyone to examine.’

Adds Ransom Center director Stephen Enniss, ‘The Erwitt collection captures collective events of great historical importance, as well as those quotidian moments that illuminate what it means to be human.’

‘Elliot Erwitt: Home Around the World’ also features a wealth of magazines, books, advertisements and contact sheets, as well as highlights of Erwitt’s work in films. The show is accompanied by a catalogue edited by McDonald and co-published with Aperture.

‘Elliot Erwitt: Home Around the World’ is on view at The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, Austin from 15 August 2016 – 1 January 2017. The publication Elliot Erwitt: Home Around the World, $65, is available from Aperture.

Pictured: Shreveport, Louisiana, 1962. Copyright Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Changing tides
10 August

Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear is a new photojournalism monograph by Paula Bronstein, available from the University of Texas Press. The release of the publication is as historically pertinent as ever, in part because media coverage of life in the country has largely moved on to other tumultuous areas in the region. The risk for the Afghan population is that its plight under the brutal rule of the Taliban will be quickly forgotten.

‘Bronstein has put together one of the richest portraits there is of modern Afghanistan – complicated, conflicted, and contradictory, but always compelling,’ explains Kim Barker in the book’s foreword. ‘Just try to put down this book without looking at every image, without feeling each person in your gut, in your heart. It’s impossible.’

In her portraits, Bronstein gives a voice to the helpless, particularly women and children. The war in Afghanistan – which began in 2001 and it is still ongoing – is the source of trauma, from unending human rights abuses against women, to abject poverty and a proliferation of heroin addiction. But Bronstein attempts to embrace positive change in the country as well – depicting the emergence of new hope for its citizens, with democratic elections, education for women and new work opportunities.

Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear, $55, published by the University of Texas Press.

Pictured: Burqa-clad women wait to vote after a polling station runs out of ballots (Kabul, April 5, 2014). Copyright Paula Bronstein

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

A beautiful game
9 August

'What’s important, money, sex, kids, football, wife, family, work? It’s a variable order. It could be that if you are playing really well, then football would have to be first.' So writes Chris Killip, professor of photography at Harvard University.

The blunt appraisal was made in reference to The Topical Times for these Times – a new book about Liverpool's football culture, shot by Ken Grant and published by RRB PhotoBooks Publishing.

Grant was born in Liverpool 1967. He began to photograph the city's rich history of football culture in the 1980s. His images reflect the city's social environment; he takes photos of people inside and outside pubs, on the streets, on buses and at the pitches – rarely entering the stadiums – collecting pictures of the game, the land and the people who define it. The title of the book is inspired by the sports annuals and football yearbooks so popular between 1970 and 1990.

It's not the first time Grant has paid tribute to his hometown, having previously released Liverpool: The Close Season – a monograph of Liverpool photographs – via Dewi Lewis Publishing and No Pain Whatsoever via Gosta Flemming/Journal.

The book is available from RRB Publishing for £35; a £75 special edition includes a limited signed print.

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

Critiquing crises
8 August

Tomorrow at the PrintSpace on Kingsland Road, Photo-Forum will hold its free monthly talk. August's focuses on how the refugee crisis has been documented.

For the discussion, Photo-Forum will bring together Rob Pinney, Mary Turner and Clare Struthers; three photographers with different backgrounds but a complementary interest in immigration issues. It’s a particularly pertinent discussion, though heightened due to the exponential increase in refugee movement from ever fractious North African and Middle Eastern regions.

The talk will allow people to ask challenging questions around these issues – with the photographers doing their best to answer them.

The gallery has raised a number of potential challenges preceding the debate. Just how can we navigate the fine line between documentation and voyeurism? Is it appropriate to present the ‘refugee crisis’ as a single, homogenous event? How can we avoid resorting to recurrent visual tropes and stereotypes in place of sympathetic, complex reporting? And what ethical responsibility does the photographer have in these situations?

The discussion will take place tomorrow evening, from 7.30pm–10pm at the PrintSpace, 74 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8DL.

Photography: Mary Turner

Writer: Sara Taglioretti

The jazz age
5 August

Opening today at Washington's National Portrait Gallery, 'In The Groove: Jazz Portraits by Herman Leonard' displays a smoky, evocative side to the successful commercial and editorial photographer's oeuvre.

Captured over the period 1948 (the year Leonard opened his first studio in Greenwich Village) to 1960 on an unwieldy Speed Graphic camera, these 28 images span the gamut of jazz's sub-genres, from Dixieland to cool jazz, depicting vocalists and instrumentalists as esteemed as Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

'Thanks to these remarkable photographs, we have front-row seats to a golden era in American jazz,' says Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. 'They transport us to the intimate, smoke-filled nightspots where Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich performed groundbreaking music.'

'In The Groove: Jazz Portraits by Herman Leonard' is on view at the National Portrait Gallery – part of the Smithsonian's Donald W Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington – until 20 February 2017.

Pictured: Duke Ellington, 1958. Copyright Herman Leonard Photography, LLC

Writer: Tom Howells

Ghana's gold
4 August

Tripod City's 'Gold Dust' is a new photographic exhibition and book, on view at London's Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes and published by Village Books.

The project comprises a series of images of everyday life in the African country of Ghana, devised to confront the socio-cultural stereotypes so often brushed across the entire continent. Tripod City is the collective of Charlie Kwai, Chris Lee and Paul Storrie. The set features Kwai's intimate, occasional surreal snapshots; Lee's candid street scenes; and Storrie's tightly composed portraits.

It's a warm, frequently amusing survey of a country – and continent – so often underrepresented in this way.

'Gold Dust' is on view at Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes until 28 August. The publication is available from Village Books.

Writer: Tom Howells

'Cortona On The Move' 2016
3 August

On view until 2 October, the sixth edition of the 'Cortona On The Move' international photography festival presents work by a host of national and international proponents, as well as prizes, an OFF Circuit select display of young photographers' work and a number of workshops.

Held in the eponymous Tuscan town, the festival's motto is 'Fotografia in Viaggio' or 'Photography in Travel'.  'Each year,' the organisers explain, 'the festival takes you on a voyage of discovery into unexplored worlds and unimagined situations.'

Of the myriad single exhibitions, Lucas Foglia's 'FRONTCOUNTRY' particularly draws the eye. Between 2006 and 2013, the photographer journeyed across the United States' least populated regions – from the Midwest of Idaho and Wyoming, through to New Mexico and Texas – documenting the local people living in the emergence of a transformative mining and energy industry.

Also showing are exhibitions by Darcy Padilla, Simona Ghizzoni, Daesung Lee and the first European retrospective on Larry Towell, among others.

Pictured: from the FRONTCOUNTRY series, by Lucas Foglia. Courtesy the artist and MiCamera

Writer: Tom Howells

A passage of time
2 August

Hai Bo's photographs are marked by silence and solitude. The former is almost palpable; the latter simultaneously serene and haunting. In a world of chaos, Bo's vistas and portraits find solace in rural China, though his is a countryside both stark and anachronistic rather than bucolic.

This is particularly evinced in the seven works from Bo's The Northern Series on show as part of a new exhibition at Pace Hong Kong. Bo's uncle is a defacto protagonist in these images – a previously wild figure now quiet and elderly, and a real-time witness to China's transition from an agrarian to a modern civilisation. 'More than individual catharsis and nostalgia,' the gallery explains, 'Hai Bo's creations are a form of resistance against change.'

As well as images from the Northern Series, the show will also feature the work Fable, from the Photographic Diary collection.

'Hai Bo' is on view until 14 September.

Pictured: The Northern No. 14 – Dense Fog, 2004. Copyright Hai Bo. Courtesy Pace Hong Kong

Writer: Tom Howells

Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2016
1 August

Entries for UK-based artists and photographers are now open for the second Jerwood/Photoworks Awards.

Three Awards of £5,000 will be given to assist in the making of new work (there will also be a mentoring programme). Up to £5,000 of additional production funding will be available, and the recipients' works will be shown in a group exhibition at the Jerwood Space from January 2018.

The selection panel for the prize will include Celia Davies, director of Photoworks; Sarah Williams, head of programme at Jerwood Visual Arts; photographers Anna Fox and Ori Gersht; and writer and artist Mark Durden.

Says Davies: 'The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards are unique in that they’re a rounded opportunity, developed within a supportive framework. It’s not just a fund, but a process of opportunity and development for practitioners.'

Information on submissions can be found at the Photoworks website. The closing date is 2 November, and the winners will be announced in January 2017.

Pictured: Untitled, by Joanna Piotrowska, originally commissioned through Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015. Last year's works are currently on view at Belfast Exposed, at The Exchange Place, Belfast

Writer: Tom Howells

Varied landscapes
29 July

Opening today at London's Richard Saltoun Gallery is the third part of the exhibition 'Some Dimensions of my Lunch: Conceptual Art in Britain'.

The show focuses on the work of John Blake and the late Tony Morgan.

Blake was enraptured of landscape, and movement within it as a means of exploring 'site' (as evidenced in his Untitled (M Panorama) pair of photographs depicting Oxfordshire's White Horse of Uffington, taken in 1968/69). More personal is Skin II, 1969/70, in which the landscape of Blake's own body is manipulated and twisted.

The Fluxus-inspired Morgan was equally indebted to landscape as an expressive canvas – an approach inaugurated with a month-long walk to Rome at the age of 22. His most famous thesis on this practice will be shown for the first time in its entirety; The Book of Exercises, 1971, amalgamates text and photography, attempting a 'taxonomy of activities according to their usefulness to the community', the gallery explains.

'Some Dimensions of my Lunch: Conceptual Art in Britain. Part 3: Tony Morgan & John Blake' is on view until 26 August. Part four – focusing on Ed Herring and Roger Palmer, will open 1 September.

Pictured: Skin II, 1969/70. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

Writer: Tom Howells

The War of Terror
28 July

Opening at the Imperial War Museum today, 'Edmund Clark: War of Terror' is a multifaceted exhibition surveying the global war on terror's imposition of state control.

The show – Clark's first major presentation in the UK – explores the ways political states, particularly the UK, look to safeguard their citizens, as well as the personal experiences of residents and terror suspects.

This is conveyed across five series of Clark's work, including: the visualisations of 'extraordinary rendition' to the US seen in 'Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition', his most recent work; the photography of 'Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out'; and 'Control Order House', in which Clark lived in and documented a suburban English house that had previously been occupied by a terror suspect under a Home Office enforced control order.

This latter series is also explored in a new book, Control Order House, published by Here Press to coincide with the exhibition.

Says Kathleen Palmer, head of art at the IWM, ‘Edmund Clark’s innovative work finds new ways to make visible aspects of the "War on Terror" which have remained out of sight. This is the latest of IWM’s exhibitions to explore in depth the work of an outstanding contemporary artist with a sustained interest in conflict.’

'Edmund Clark: War of Terror' is on view until 28 August.

Pictured: Bedroom, from the series 'Control Order House'. Copyright Edmund Clark. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York

Writer: Tom Howells

Wolman at Woodstock
27 July

Opening tomorrow at Proud Camden, 'Woodstock by Baron Wolman' is a survey of the titular festival by the esteemed and hugely influential Rolling Stone photographer.

Taking place from 15–18 August 1969 – advertised as 'Three Days of Peace and Music', in the midst of the Vietnam War – Woodstock would become a touchstone event for the counter-culture generation; espousing values of positivity and community through the elemental force of rock'n'roll.

Baron Wolman, an important figure in the formative early years of Rolling Stone, captured the raw, unfettered energy of the festival in an unobtrusive, humanistic manner; spending, he explains, most of his time in the wild throng of the crowd and on the site's outskirts, rather than focusing purely on the music. The result, on display here, is an encompassing social statement and a snapshot of a cultural movement at its most energised.

'Woodstock by Baron Wolman' is on view until 11 September.

Pictured: A couple play the guitar sitting on their car on the way to the Woodstock Festival, August 1969. Courtesy Iconic Images/Baron Wolman

Writer: Tom Howells

Britain on film
26 July

'An Ideal for Living: Photographing Class, Culture and Identity in Modern Britain' – a new exhibition at London's Beetles + Huxley gallery – draws on the work of 29 practitioners to ascertain how the medium has shaped our national consciousness and identity.

Beginning with the interwar period via works by Bill Brandt, Emil Otto Hoppé and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the show flits through post-Second World War austerity to the more lurid social releases of the 1960s and 70s. Here, the rise of divisive youth culture is juxtaposed with the stark realities of northern mining communities, the Troubles and the integration of black communities across the country.

Almost every aspect of Britain's subsequent socio-cultural identity is explored: from the racially-motivated riots of the 1970s and 80s, to life on gypsy encampments, the quirks of homegrown tourism and ruminations on the deep-seated ties between national identity, immigration and religion.

Featuring work by artists as diverse as John Bulmer, Chris Killip, Martin Parr, Anna Fox and Mahtab Hussein, 'An Ideal for Living' opens tomorrow and is on view until 17 September.

Pictured: Notting Hill Couple, by Charlie Phillips, 1967. Courtesy the artist and Beetles + Huxley

Writer: Tom Howells

Olympic legacy
25 July

While the imminent Rio 2016 Olympics may be preemptively marred by doping scandals, the Zika virus and ropey athletic accommodation, there's much to acknowledge in the controversial transformation of a major city set deep with social, environmental and corruption issues.

Documenting this is Morar Olimpíadas, a new book by the celebrated landscape and portrait photographer Giles Price (and foreworded by Jules Bokyoff, the author of three books on the Olympics).

Price's abstract images, captured from the air in the period 2014–16, reveal a city in flux; in the throes of systemic regeneration, but juxtaposed with the prevailing negative social and environmental impact. They are landscapes, says Price, of 'transition and partition'.

Boykoff continues: 'From an altitude of 1,500 feet, Price offers us geographical landscapes laced with geopolitical import. He deftly accentuates the inequalities that all too often Olympic development either exacerbates or breathes into being. […] We owe Price gratitude for gifting us with fresh perspective, for affording us a glimpse of the privatised enclaves of the future, for stoking a vital discussion about privilege, priorities and power.'

Morar Olimpíadas, by Giles Price, £30, published by SeeStudio. Available to order from Giles Price's website.

Pictured: Residents fight eviction as their homes start to be demolished in Vila Autodromo, Barra da Tijuca, 2014

Writer: Tom Howells

Ghirri in words
22 July

The Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri may be known for his rich, layered and extensive body of visual work, but he was also a prolific essayist – for magazines and newspapers, as well as his own publications and private ruminations.

Now available in English for the first time via MACK, The Complete Essays 1973–1991 features 86 of Ghirri's short texts. Published by MACK, the book highlights the way Ghirri's writing worked in parallel to his photographic practice, exploring similar themes of time, identity, vision and place. In doing so, the photographer drew on myriad wider cultural references, weaving personal reflections on sci-fi cinema, pop music, painting and architecture into his texts. The result, explains the publisher, is 'a sort of dialectic chamber of curiosities'.

The Complete Essays 1973–1991, by Luigi Ghirri, £15, published by MACK.

Photography copyright Luigi Ghirri, 2016, courtesy MACK

Writer: Tom Howells

William Eggleston at the National Portrait Gallery
21 July

Opening today and on view until 23 October, 'William Eggleston: Portraits' is a landmark retrospective on the influential and groundbreaking American photographer, showing at London's National Portrait Gallery.

Highly lauded for his pioneering work in colour photography, Eggleston's 1976 solo MoMA show is now seen as a catalytic moment in the elevation of colour imagery's status as an art form.

Featuring 100 works, 'Portraits' is the most thorough survey of Eggleston's work to date.

Pictured: Untitled, c.1970 (Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi), by William Eggleston, c.1970. Copyright Eggleston Artistic Trust

Writer: Tom Howells

Punk's not dead
20 July

Given the genre's 40th anniversary this year, one can barely move without passing a punk retrospective – a sea of monochromatic sneers, bad hair (and worse piercings) and Johnny Rotten staring into the middle distance.

Next up: 'Punk' at London's Michael Hoppen Gallery is an exhibition of vintage press prints, held in conjunction with Rex Shutterstock, that document the rise of the divisive subculture in the 1970s, before its inaugural British wave became a commodified self parody.

Michael Hoppen Gallery was founded 24 years ago on the King's Road – the epicentre of the punk movement, and home to the defacto ground zero of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's SEX store.

'Punk: Celebrating 40 Years of Punk' will be on view until 26 August.

Pictured: Steve Havoc, Siouxsie Sioux, 'Debbie', 1970s, by Ray Stevenson. Copyright Ray Stevenson. Courtesy Rex Shutterstock

Writer: Tom Howells

Haas at the Hall of Fame
19 July

Opening tomorrow at the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St Louis, 'Ernst Haas: Color Brought to Life' is a career retrospective on the influential Magnum member.

A pioneering colourist, the Vienna-born Haas eschewed a career in medicine to embrace photography, staging his first solo show at the age of 26 (in 1947) and joining Magnum two years later (turning down a role at LIFE magazine in the process).

Haas moved to the US in 1950 and started experimenting with colour photography soon after. Within a decade, he had been voted one of the world's greatest photographers, by Popular Photography. His practice was galvanised in the 1953 photo essay 'Images of a Magic City' – printed in LIFE – and the 1986 book The Creation, though his work was given a first thorough survey in a 1962 MoMA show.

'Color Brought to Life' features 43 colour prints, spanning Haas' four-decade career, further emphasising his enduring legacy and indelible contribution to photographic history.

Pictured: Traffic, New York, 1963

Writer: Tom Howells

'Made You Look – Dandyism and Black Masculinity'
15 July

Opening today at The Photographers' Gallery, the exhibition ‘Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity’ consists of a selection of photographs from a range of time periods and locations. Shown together, the images work to explore the theme of black masculinity, particularly through the adoption and appropriation of the persona of the dandy.

Traditionally referring to a man unduly devoted to appearing stylish and refined, in the context of this exhibition the persona takes on a more political significance, made all the more poignant by the current political climate.

Today, black men are some of the most influential forces in style across the world, though they also make up one of the most vulnerable demographics, evidenced most recently by the disproportionate rates of arrest for black men in both the UK and USA.

In these photographs, the flamboyance of the subjects’ dress challenges the traditional perception of the black male as a persecuted and objectified individual. With their exuberant and flamboyant apparel, these men’s appropriation of the dandy character signifies a refusal to conform to the stereotype of the persecuted individual history has dealt them.

‘Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity’ is on view until 25 September.

Pictured: Wayne Swart, by Kristin-Lee Moolman

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

A trip into Ruscha country
18 July

‘Ed Ruscha and the Great American West’, which opened over the weekend at the de Young museum in San Francisco, focuses on the artist’s life-long fascination with this part of America.

In 1956, Ruscha left home aged just 18 and drove from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, where he hoped to pursue his dream of attending art school. Travelling Route 66, Ruscha journeyed through swathes of the American southwest, where he encountered the landscapes that would come to dominate his practice for years to come. The 99 works on display include photographs of landscapes and sights emblematic of the region. Auto repair shops, billboard and long stretches of roadway punctuated by telephone poles feature repeatedly, along with the iconic image of the gasoline station that has become synonymous with Ruscha’s work. The exhibition also includes his famous 'Technicolour’ images of the Hollywood sign, along with other works that comment on LA and its film industry.

Now 78, Ruscha continues to explore the theme of the quintessential American landscape, making regular road trips and producing work out of his studio located in the Californian desert. His newest pieces, some made as recently as 2015, also feature in the exhibition, offering visitors a survey of this seminal artist’s continued commitment to exploring the American West.

‘Ed Ruscha and the Great American West’ is on view until 9 October.

Pictured: Pool #7, from Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

Seeing is believing
13 July

The theme of this year’s Aperture Summer Open – opening tomorrow at the eponymous New York gallery – is ‘Photography is Magic’. Selected annually by a prominent writer or curator, the exhibition is intended as a platform for investigating an aspect of photography at the forefront of debate and discussion.

This year, contributors were invited to submit work exploring the notion of photography as a magical form, in opposition to the traditional perception of it as a primarily documentative medium. The images selected for the exhibition range from complexly staged scenes and digital experiments to snapshots of everyday life: from a pineapple soaring through a blue sky to a man blowing a plume of smoke into a holographic void.

All, however, are concurrent in their focus on photography as a medium capable of manipulating reality into something chimerical or uncanny. In a world increasingly saturated with images, the photographs on display make us stop and question just what it is we are seeing. They encourage us to appreciate the possibilities of the medium outside of its ability to simply record. 

'Photography is Magic' is on view until 11 August.

Pictured: Digital Clouds, by Marco Scozzaro, 2015. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

‘Diane Arbus: In the beginning’
12 July

From today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new space dedicated to modern and contemporary work, the Met Breuer, is showcasing over 100 previously unseen photographs by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus.

Although she had photographed intermittently from the age of 18, it was only in her early thirties that Arbus began to move away from a career as a commercial fashion photographer to pursue her unique artistic vision. Renowned for her poignant images of society’s outsiders, the exhibition explores the development of her distinct style via photographs taken during the first seven years of this period, beginning in 1956 and ending in 1962.

Working mainly in and around New York, Arbus dedicated herself to the documentation of the city’s strangest inhabitants. In contrast to her contemporaries – from Walker Evans and Helen Levitt to Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who believed that a detachment from their subjects was essential to their practices – Arbus actively sought out personal encounters as a basis for her work.

Nearly half of the photographs made by Arbus during her short, prolific career were produced during these years. However, stowed away in an inaccessible corner of her basement darkroom in Greenwich Village, the prints remained undiscovered until several years after her death. ‘In the beginning’ marks a long overdue exploration of the origins of Arbus' artistic journey.

‘Diane Arbus: In the beginning’ is on view until 27 November.

Pictured: The Backwards Man in his hotel room, NYC 1961, by Diane Arbus, 1961. Copyright The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

'City of Dust'
11 July

Opening today at the Westminster Reference Library, ‘City of Dust’ is a new exhibition marking the completion of the writer and photographer Lewis Bush’s most recent photographic project and accompanying publication. The photo-book is conceived as a newsprint publication, with a self-contained exhibition that can be taken away by visitors.

The series explores the tensions between past and present in the physical landscape of London, a city simultaneously shaped by its rich history and relentless redevelopment to certify its status as a modern metropolis. Bush has employed his camera to capture details from the city’s urban landscape, which are charged with memories of the past. In doing so, he presents London as a city steeped in vestiges of history, waiting for discovery if only one took the time to reminisce and reflect.

In a continuation of narratives explored in his previous book Metropole, the series also explores the obliteration of this history through the rapid redevelopment and gentrification of the city. A photograph of a mural, depicting a historical vista of the River Thames, mounted with security cameras, epitomises this relationship between past and present. The series points to the reality of a city that risks being transformed into a metropolis completely devoid of memory.

‘City of Dust’ is on view until 23 July.

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

A peek inside 'The Palace'
8 July

Opening today at the ICA in London, ‘Alasdair McLellan & Lev Tanju: The Palace’ will showcase a selection of previously unseen and archival images of the Palace Skateboards team by the acclaimed photographer Alasdair McLellan. A video installation by Lev Tanju, the founder of Palace, will be exhibited alongside the photographs, together providing an intriguing insight into the activities of the group and its extended family, London skate gang The Palace Wayward Boys Choir (PWBC).

Shot over the seven years since Palace’s inception in 2009, McLellan’s series documents the group’s evolution from a small skate label into a global sportswear brand. With his unfailing talent for sensitive portraits, McLellen has produced a series in which the subjects’ devotion to the London skateboarding scene is palpable in each frame.

The term skateboarding typically brings to mind images of the notorious skate gangs of California and New York. McLellan’s portraits, however, communicate the innate Englishness of Palace, from their dress to the brutalist backdrop of the Southbank skate park. Given Palace’s commitment to producing merchandise by and for the skateboarding community, it is fitting that the exhibition forms part of the Young ICA programme this summer, which will provide a platform for young creatives to collaborate on, create and showcase their work. A full survey of McLellan’s work with Palace and the PWBC will be published by IDEA this summer.

Pictured: Blondey McCoy, by Alasdair McLellan. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

Growing pains
7 July

Opening this Saturday at the Joseph Bellows Gallery in San Diego, ‘The Teen Years’ is a group exhibition exploring the theme of adolescence through an array of vintage and contemporary prints. Showcasing the work of over 16 photographers, many of whom have previously had solo shows at the gallery, the exhibition promises to survey the experience of adolescence from a diverse range of perspectives.

From Andrea Modica’s recent series of portraits of ‘Best Friends’ to Sage Sohier’s photographs of teens in 1980s Boston, the show represents the universal experience of being a teenager regardless of time or place.

Collectively, the works communicate the complexity of adolescence as a period of tumultuous physical and emotional change. Throughout the photographs we see variations in fashion and hair, set across a backdrop of significant historical periods – from Nacio Jan Brown’s photograph of three girls with their bomber jackets and John Lennon-esque sunglasses, to the buttoned-down shirts and matching quiffs of Edward Sturr’s image of teen boys. The diversity of the photos on show are united in their shared communication in a sense of the innocence, angst and youthful energy that define one’s formative years.

Pictured: South Boston, by Sage Sohier, 1982. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

TOILETPAPER at Galeries Lafayette
6 July

As of today, the experimental, image-only art magazine TOILETPAPER, presided over by artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, will be taking over the Galeries Lafayette in Paris. The duo’s creative showcase will include an exhibition at the Galerie des Galeries until 10 September, along with a window sequence in the storefront until 27 July and an installation beneath the iconic dome at the centre of the space until 27 August.

TOILETPAPER is characterised by a bright aesthetic, featuring photographs and assemblages both playful and provocative. By combining images from magazines and the internet, these provide a startling and surreal alternative to the conventional codes of contemporary visual culture.

Their window sequence for the department store of the Galeries Lafayette encapsulates this creative vision in its playful interpretation of the themes of 'Romance' and 'Parisian Summers', including one scene with the Eiffel Tower taking a holiday on a desert island. For their exhibition at the Galerie des Galeries, Cattelan and Ferrari have worked to create an experience that is at odds with the traditional gallery show, in being both visual and tactile. Working with design companies Gufram and Seletti – their long-time collaborators – they have produced three-dimensional renderings of the images on display, in the form of household objects, which visitors can buy and take home with them.

Photography courtesy TOILETPAPER

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

Rautert in full
5 July

Running until 25 September at the Dresden Royal Palace, ‘Bildanalytische Photographie’ will showcase the German photographer Timm Rautert’s series of ‘image-analytical’ photography in its entirety for the first time. A seminal collection in 1960s and 70s German art photography, ‘Bildanalytische Photographie’ consists of 56 works, almost all of which are composed of several images, intended to address the medium from new and critical perspectives.

Working on the series between 1968 and 1974, Rautert was influenced by the contemporary emergence of the conceptual art movement. He travelled regularly to the United States, where he met with conceptual artists such as James Turrell and Walter de Maria, as well as frequenting Warhol’s factory. The increasingly avant-garde and theoretical approach of these artists’ practices can be felt strongly in the ‘Bildanalytische Photographie’.

As was the focus of much of Rautert’s oeuvre, the series stands as an exploration of the nature of photography. Consisting of analogue photographs (in both black and white and colour), portions of text and photographic manuals, and segments of technical materials, the series encourages viewers to consider both the limits and possibilities of the medium outside of its role as a documentative tool.

Pictured Selbst mit Kamera gedreht (0º 180º) [Self with the camera turned [0º 180º], 1972. Courtesy the artist and Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden and Parrotta Contemporary Art Gallery, Stuttgart. Reproduction by Herbert Boswank

Writer: Hannah Abel-Hirsch

To infinity and beyond 
4 July

In 2009, Argentinian artist and architect Tomás Saraceno attended the International Space Studies Program at NASA Ames. Seven years later, he embarked on a research expedition to the Atacama desert, filming and photographing skies. With his team, he worked in Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on Earth, which has been used to calibrate telescopes from outer space thanks to its reflective surface. The result, titled '163,000 Light Years' (referencing the distance to our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud) is being exhibited in MARCO in Monterrey, Mexico, until 4 November.

Saraceno regards his work as ‘ongoing research’ in ‘collaboration with other disciplines’ (engineering, science, and natural history), and is known for producing large-scale installations with a visionary, utopian feel. '163,000 Light Years' is no different, incorporating both underwater spiders and films of outer space.

As with the notebooks of the early 20th century astronautics pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who inspired him, Saraceno’s work is a conglomerate of science and fiction, looking beyond the technological possibilities of today. But its playfulness does not undermine its ambition. As Tsiolkovsky said, ‘First, inevitably, the idea, the fantasy, the fairy tale. Then, scientific calculation. Ultimately, fulfillment crowns the dream.’

Pictured: Re-entry, by Tomás Saraceno, 2016. Courtesy of the artist

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Bruce Conner's opportune things
1 July

Films, photographs, assemblages, drawings, collage, painting and music are ‘... Parallel. Merging into one another. Opportune things’. This was the view of Bruce Conner, one of the foremost multimedia artists working in post-war America, who asserted that ‘none of the arts are totally separate’. ‘It’s All True’, the first complete retrospective of his 50-year career, opening at MoMA on 3 July, contains over 250 objects, tracing his colossal output.
 
From photograms and experimental cinema to sculptural collations of objects found on the streets, Conner’s work has a fearless and explosive quality (at times literally). Throughout his life, he felt constricted by imposed structures, and was guided by a kind of inherent deviance. Conner worked ‘backwards’, against the grain, saying: ‘If they give you lined paper, write the other way.’ Recognising the ephemerality of his own work, he made collages which gradually withered away, and withdrew his films from distribution.
 
As well as working on his personal projects, Conner was involved in various film societies – founding the Experimental Cinema Group – and worked on concerts with Terry Riley. Although he regarded culture in the US as a ‘foreign environment’, his work remains an important, if indirect, comment on post-war society.

Pictured: BOMBHEAD, by Bruce Conner, 1989. Courtesy Conner Family Trust. Copyright 2016 Bruce Conner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

A Little Life
30 June

Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, recently shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, was ‘born of images’. When writing it, the American author used a collection of paintings and photographs accrued over 14 years, which guided the details and ideas in the book.
 
In collaboration with the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Yanagihara has curated ‘How I Learned to See: An (Ongoing) Education in Pictures’, an exhibition of the images which catalysed her growth and education as a writer. Opening with Diane Arbus’ The backwards man in his hotel room, NYC, a photograph Yanagihara felt compelled ‘to put some words to,’ the exhibition is mimetic of a book in structure; spanning six ‘chapters’ from 'loneliness' to 'discovery'.
 
Featuring work from 12 artists including Alec Soth, Peter Hujar, Lee Friedlander and Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘How I Learned to See’ promises to be a thoughtful exploration of the ties between images and text, highlighting the influence of photography on the human experience.
 
‘How I Learned to See’ runs from today until 20 August.

Pictured: New York City, by Lee Friedlander, 1962. Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Coco Capitán’s ‘Enlightened Snobbism’
29 June

London-based Spanish photographer – and imminent RCA graduate – Coco Capitán’s catchphrase is ‘I am sorry, I am busy, I am living’. She calls London her ‘universe,’ producing editorials for classic British brands such as Fred Perry and Mulberry, as well as shooting documentary work in China, alongside a series of oneiric self-portraits.

Capitán’s latest exhibition, ‘Enlightened Snobbism’, will run from tomorrow until 2 July across two venues: the RCA studios and the Hotel Café Royal on Regent Street. Oblique invitations will re-direct visitors of the RCA graduate show to the hotel, where Capitán’s work will be on display in the Tudor Suite.

The show is themed around the concept of success in art, which Capitán’s word-paintings address with their usual mordant humour. 'Lord grant me the beauty and sexiness that will lead me to a life blessed with fame, money and power without having to work too hard for it', reads one work – a grimly pertinent statement for an aspiring young artist in 2016 (though perhaps not one as ascendent as Capitán).

Entrance to ‘Enlightened Snobbism’ is by appointment only. Visitors can register via Capitán’s website.

Imagery courtesy the artist

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Death and other interludes
28 June

An image is always a point of view, regardless of its seeming objectivity. Such is the thinking of Edgar Martins, whose interest in photography is spurred by its inadequacies as a medium. His latest project – entitled 'Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes' – is about death, holding up the ‘contradictions and problems’ inherent in the way it is depicted in photographs.

Gaining access to the archive at Portugal’s Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, Martins studied a range of images, police cases and suicide paraphernalia. From these, he produced his own photographs, referencing letters, belongings and implements left by those who had died. At times, these are used directly – for instance, ligatures photographed days after being used – or indirectly, as with the stripping away of narrative from a suicide letter and recreating its creases on a blank piece of paper. The series is informed by Martins’ own experience of traumatic death, probing for a means of representing its impact.

On show from 29 June at Lisbon’s MAAT, Martins’ work underscores the details of death which are usually omitted from sensationalist media stories, but encountered by families as they deal with bereavement.

Pictured: Untitled, 2016. Photo appropriated from the photographic archive of INMLCF. Copyright Edgar Martins

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Bill Cunningham: 13 March 1929 – 25 June 2016
27 June

Paris, 2008: when asked why he was working at his own Legion of Honour awards party, the American fashion photographer Bill Cunningham replied, ‘My dear, it’s not work, it’s pleasure. You think I’m gonna miss a good picture?’

Cunningham died on Saturday aged 87. He was an astute, keenly sensitive observer of clothes – not celebrities, just clothes, and people who looked good wearing them.

Cunningham started photographing in the Second World War, with ‘a little box Brownie, nothing too expensive’. He was lauded for his street style shots, but he was also a writer, milliner and critic, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of fashion.

His individuality stemmed from a relentless disinterest in marrying fashion and status. Cunningham was averse to spectacle, but recorded the spectacular – patiently waiting for what he called ‘a stunner’ to appear, or running, crouching and cycling to capture outfit details during Fashion Weeks. ‘He was like a war photographer that way, except that what he was photographing were clothes,' says Kim Hastreiter, editor of Paper magazine and friend of Cunningham’s, in an interview with the New York Times.

Pictured: Bill Cunningham at Paris Fashion Week, S/S 2012

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Bas Jan Ader at Simon Lee
24 June
 
The Dutch conceptualist Bas Jan Ader didn’t talk about his work – hence why, 40 years since his disappearance in the Atlantic, others are still dissecting his concise, formidable oeuvre.
 
A solo exhibition of Ader’s work will run from today until 26 August at London's Simon Lee gallery, showing a collection of pieces made between 1969 and 1975. His ‘falling’ films – a series of decisions involving gravity, captured by collaborator and wife Mary Sue Ader – narrate experiences which lie somewhere beyond normal life, and are both funny and quietly devastating.

In the same vein, longer works such as Primary Time and I’m Too Sad to Tell You balance subtlety with irony. Details about the creation of these are scarce, confirming that, even to his closest friends, Ader was an enigma.
 
Saturday 25 June will also see a special event at the ICA, including a panel discussion with Ader’s friends and family.

Pictured: Primary Time, 1974. Copyright the Estate of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen, 2016 / The Artist Right’s Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles and Simon Lee Gallery, London

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

'77 rising
23 June

Running from 23–26 June, 'Punk Weekender' is a series of special events exploring the iconic countercultural movement, being held at The Photographers' Gallery in London. It will include work by Janette Beckman, Owen Harvey, Anita Corbin and Derek Ridgers, along with previously unseen images by Shirley Baker. A live gig by the acclaimed post-punk band The Raincoats punctuates the programme, alongside a screening of Derek Jarman's cinematic punk opus Jubilee. 

The season will examine the way London's political and cultural space shaped the punk insurgence, via rare colour prints and a multimedia timeline from Nick Knight's SHOWstudio. Crucially, the exhibition takes place metres from the old sites of Soho's alternative clubs, where those who wore 'art history as make-up' ran wild.

Pictured: Neville and Eldridge, High Wycombe, by Gavin Watson, 1980. Courtesy the artist and Photographic Youth Music and Culture Archive (PYMCA)

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

‘Observation and wit with reason’: Peter Marlow at Protein
22 June

Curated by Peter Marlow's colleagues and friends in the Magnum membership, a memorial exhibition at Protein Studios, which continues until next Sunday, celebrates his life and prolific body of work.

A month before his death in February, Marlow was working on a photographic record of England’s 42 Anglican cathedrals, using large format film. He took a mobile darkroom to Angola, zoomed in on myriad cigarette butts left by staff at a BT call centre in Newcastle, and shot everyone from AA Gill to David Beckham. He may have 'simply blasted away' during family holidays and Margaret Thatcher's speech in 1981 – 'hoping to get that one shot' – but he also trawled Japan, documenting Wakayama's misty roads protected with concrete against landslides and Kosagawa's morning fog. His images of Milton Keynes, taken for an Evening Standard commission titled ‘The Most Boring Towns in Britain’, are particularly stark, 'telling a story without much going on in the shot'.

Dodging the 'disheartening reality' of fame-hungry conflict photographers, Marlow joined Magnum, later becoming president of the agency. Magnum gave him the flexibility he needed to avoid becoming a workaday documentary photographer; instead, he would blend 'observation and wit with reason,' generating 'a sense of the unexpected, the hidden and the seemingly spontaneous'.

Pictured: Race Riots in Lewisham, 1977. Police making an arrest, 1977. Copyright Peter Marlow / Magnum Photos

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Breaking boundaries
21 June

Featuring everything from Sophie Calle's The Sleepers to Merry Alpern's Dirty Windows and Natalie Bookchin's Testament; Henri Cartier-Bresson to Andy Warhol and Larry Clark; and wall-size video projections, live feeds of museumgoers narrated by CCTV cameras and mirror surfaces as partitions, a new exhibition inaugurating ICP's new Bowery space is eclectically wide-ranging.

'Public, Private, Secret', on view until January 2017, is a tripartite collection of works: contemporary pieces, their 'classic' precedents and eight live streams of media, curated in real time. The show is anything but easy viewing, curated by Charlotte Cotton to encourage audiences to form their own conclusions, in the hope that the 'non-hierarchical organisation' of works will foster dialogues 'between and about the diversity of photographic and visual culture'. As the boundaries between a photograph and a piece of visual communication continue to shift, issues of privacy, surveillance and self-identity resurface.

'Public, Private, Secret' opens at the ICP Museum at 250 Bowery, New York on 23 June.

Pictured: Untitled, by Cindy Sherman, 1979. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Ren Hang at MAMA
20 June

‘I don’t have to photograph to live,’ says Ren Hang, citing ‘life’ as his inspiration and ‘fun’ as the imperative for shooting. Hang’s words, like his images, are succinct and uncompromising.

He writes poetry, takes photographs and sculpts bodies, arranging his models into polyploid organisms – Hang prefers his work to do the talking, even if it is physically absent from the exhibition space. When told by Chinese authorities that a certain photo cannot be displayed due to its ‘pornographic’ content, he exhibits an empty frame instead: providing negative space as a comment on censorship.

Showing for the first time in LA, Hang has nothing to fear – after all, ‘nudes are nudes. They are not sexy or quirky. If they have any meaning, it is because I give them meaning.’ That said, the ‘meaning’ in most of his work is too elastic to pin down, which only adds to its dark intrigue.

'What We Do Is Secret' is on view at MAMA, LA until 23 July.

Pictured: Untitled 3, by Ren Hang. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Dina Tsesarsky

Prior portraits
17 June

The National Portrait Gallery has an extensive range of early photographs, including a series of one of the medium's most elementary forms: daguerreotype. Opening today, Double Take: Daguerreian Portrait Pairs highlights this historic collection.

Daguerreotype, most commonly used between 1839-1860, was named after the inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. The complicated process involved a daguerreotypist polishing a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish, treating it with fumes that made its surface light sensitive, then exposing it in a camera, fuming the resulting latent image with mercury vapour. After treating it with a liquid chemical to remove its light sensitivity, rinsing, drying and sealing, the portrait will, finally, develop.

Due to its lengthy process, only the wealthiest were able to afford this type of portrait. The National Portrait Gallery will exhibit daguerreotypes of seven of these affluent subjects: George Bancroft, Jenny Lind, Zachary Taylor, Frederick Douglass, Jefferson Davis, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams.

Pictured: George Bancroft, by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, circa. 1847. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Dr. and Mrs. Lester Tuchman and Gallery purchase

Writer: Alex Wright

Intimate documentary
16 June

Danny Lyon, known for his work in the style of photographic New Journalism, has always taken an interest in tackling social and political issues, whether he's taking a picture, making a film or writing a piece.

Able to find beauty in the starkest reality, Lyon rejects the traditional 'stand and watch' documentary approach, in favour of a more intimate involvement with his subjects.

After moving from New York in the 70s, the photographer settled in New Mexico exploring a broad range of topics, from the people around him to the chaos of life and political turmoil in countries like Haiti, Colombia and Northern China.

The exhibition showcases approximately 175 photographs, vintage prints, unseen 16mm footage made inside Texas prisons, his personal photo albums as well as assessing his achievements as a filmmaker.

On view from tomorrow until 25 September at Whitney Museum in New York, 'Danny Lyon: Message to the Future' is organised in collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and will be moving to the De Young Museum on the West Coast in November.

Pictured: Tesca, Cartegena, Colombia, by Danny Lyon, 1966. Collection of the artist. © the artist. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

Writer: Elisa Carassai

Naming game
15 June

From tomorrow, The Supermarket Gallery presents ‘Volume Of Light’ by Thomas Brown. The show comprises an extensive series of 469 images, all of which are 'up for exclusive adoption', as the gallery phrases it, where members of the pubic can assign permanent titles to each image, via the web app.

Brown's aesthetic is beautifully simple. Balls of paper are hand scrunched and strewn across colourful backdrops, sometimes evoking angst, sometimes calmness, depending on your perspective. Brown's interest lies in precisely this: how different viewers might respond to the same image.

As well as the online, virtual space, the exhibition will take place at the gallery's newly renovated location on 393 Broadway, New York. All 469 images are for sale, to be personalised and reshaped by their unique titles, which will appear on the website as well as in the upcoming book.

Pictured: adopted image, Bride of Rain Dog, by Thomas Brown

Writer: Alex Wright

Writing with light
14 June

A new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York explores photography's more unusual byways: from x-rays to aerial views, conceptual art to documenting warfare. The aim is to emphasise the variety and flexibility of photographic practises, by displaying them side be side.

Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World, on show until 30 May next year, approaches photography as a multifaceted means of communication, which has many different dialects and languages, dependent on the image in question. With work from a stellar cast of 20th century photographers, including Eugène Atget, Brett Weston, Frederick Sommer and Aaron Siskind, the exhibition spans the width and breadth of photography's history.

As well as looking backwards, this jam-packed one-room show dedicates space to the future of image making, as revolutionised by the JPEG and the 'send' button. With contemporary photographers represented by the likes of John Baldessari and Sophie Calle, the ever quickening evolution of photographic technology is seen, literally, unfolding before our eyes.

Pictured: Illustrated Lectures are an Important Part of Instruction, by an unidentified maker (American), 1918. Courtesy George Eastman Museum, gift of Dwight R. Furness

Writer: Elly Parsons

London calling
13 June

40 years on from the birth of the Punk era, Galleria Carla Sozzani presents 'Punk In Britain', a collection of over 90 photographs documenting London's punk movement since the 1970s. The exhibition features the photographs of Simon Barker (also known as Six), Dennis Morris, Sheila Rock, Ray Stevenson, Karen Knorr, Olivier Richon, drawings, collages and graphics of Jamie Reid with a special section highlighting the videos and photos of John Tiberi.

Punk role models The Sex Pistols were emblems of anarchy, in a uniform of studs, safety pins and ripped fabric. Their fans, together with the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Jordan, Billy Idol, Soo Catwoman and Adam Ant, became known as the ‘Bromley Contingent’ (after the south east London town where some of them were brought up), representing a new wave of young, spontaneous rebellion against rigid Britain.

Often accompanying this group was a mix of photographers, who followed them between public concerts to the intimacy of their bedrooms and kitchens. This exhibition showcases stolen moments captured in these transitional times.

'Punk in Britain' will be on show at the Galleria Carla Sozzani in Milan until 28 August.

Pictured: Ray Stevenson, Viv Westwood, Parigi, September 1976, Viv Westwood, Paris, September 1976. © Ray Stevenson

Writer: Alex Wright

Bristol hits the books
10 June

This weekend, Photobook Bristol is holding its third highly acclaimed, globally participated arts festival – all in the worthy name of photobooks.

Contributors include photographers, artists, publishers, designers and collectors, each bringing a different area of expertise to the table. Many of those who've taken part over the last three years have gone on to gather accolades from the World Press Photo awards, and feature in major exhibitions worldwide.

Highlights from this year's festival include Moises by Mariela Sancari, winner of last yera's 'Best Book' award. The volume, a metaphorical, yet personal account of the death of her father, depicts men in their 70’s, the age that her father would have been were he still alive.

Other festival highlights include Ivars Gravlejs’ eccentric Latvian scrapbook Early Works, and Kent Grants' The Topical Times for These Times, a nostalgic account of Liverpudlian football since the 80s.

Pictured: Untitled, from Moises, by Mariela Sancari. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Alex Wright

Stephen Shore at Huis Marseille
9 June

Opening tomorrow, Friday 10 June, Amsterdam's Huis Marseille photography museum presents a long-awaited Stephen Shore retrospective, featuring over 200 works created between 1960–2016 and exploring the fundamental turning points of his career.

During the early 1970s, Shore spent much of his time trekking across America, photographing what many would interpret as mundane, everyday subjects; motel interiors, pancake breakfasts, car parks and traffic intersections.

He switched seamlessly between colour and black and white photography, using a wide range of cameras in every possible format. It was during an age where colour photography had, until then, only been used in advertising and where many held it in disdain; a time when the 'decisive moment' reigned supreme in photographic law. Shore changed this perception by actively seeking out artistic conventions to refute, and was one of the first practitioners to abandon black and white photography. From his first exhibition in 1970 in the Netherlands to this show, 46 years later, he has become regarded as one of the leading pioneers of contemporary colour photography, inspiring generations along the way.

Pictured: Room 125, Westbank Motel, Idaho Falls, Idaho, 18 July 1973, by Stephen Shore, 1973. From the Uncommon Places series. Copyright Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Writer: Alex Wright

Torbjørn Rødland at the Whitney
8 June

The Whitney Museum of American Art is currently showcasing the latest addition to its series of public art installations by key artists, this time unravelling Blue Portrait (Nokia N82) by renowned photographer Torbjørn Rødland. It is the fourth installment in the series, which has previously explored works by Alex Katz (2014), Michele Abeles (2015) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015–16).

Rødland often embraces images and objects with political and historical meaning; with an open interpretive nature, they resonate broader cultural meanings. Imbuing seemingly everyday scenes with rich colour, texture and quality of light enables his images to transcend their mundane subjects. He often juxtaposes disparate objects with heraldic lighting to create scenes both alluring and unsettling. Rødland is interested, the gallery continues, ‘in the way that events get turned into mythology, transcending the facts and reducing complexities to simple representations of good and evil’.

In Blue Portrait (Nokia N82), we see a portrait of Anne Frank pictured on a Nokia phone. This approach highlights Rødland's pointed use of political imagery juxtaposed with odd combinations of subjects and setting.

Pictured: Blue Portrait (Nokia N82), by Torbjørn Rødland, 2009–16. Courtesy of Eva Presenhuber, STANDARD (OSLO), David Kordansky and Greenspon. Collection of the artist

Writer: Alex Wright

In the blink of an eye
7 June

Michael Hoppen Gallery today opens its doors on ‘The Blink Of An Eye’, a new exhibition on Jacques-Henri Lartigue, as seen through the eyes of author and devoted fan William Boyd.

Lartigue entered the world of photography early, taking his first photograph at the age of six. His family belonged to the French upper bourgeoisie, affording him a privileged childhood. His photographs are filled with visions of the sun-drenched French Riviera, fast cars and a plethora of female muses, all capturing a perfect moment in time. Lartigue himself said that, ‘I have never taken a picture for any other reason than at that moment it made me happy to do so.’

In 1963, after a chance meeting with John Szarkowski, Lartigue's previously undiscovered work was exhibited at the MoMA in New York. It was an immediate success. His work subsequently gained huge recognition; numerous exhibitions and publications followed. To this day he still occupies a key role in the history of photography, and his work generates critical acclaim worldwide.

Pictured: Coco on the terrace, Neuilly, June 1938, by Jacques-Henri Lartigue. Courtesy Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL

Writer: Alex Wright

(More or less) decisive moments – the Magnum Square Print Sale
6 June

The ‘decisive moment’ was a term coined by the pioneer of street photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson, as the title of his 1952 book. Since then, the phrase has become synonymous with a certain type of photography; a critical idea in the theory and history of the medium that requires the photographer to ascertain at what precise moment the correct point to capture an image is, and to what purpose.

What goes through a photographer’s mind when capturing a shot? What are the moral or ethical implications in the quest to find the decisive moment? What part does the unconscious play? Is the realisation of a decisive moment always in the present, or can that come later? Is there even such a thing as the decisive moment?

An online Magnum Photos print sale asks these questions, aiming to spark debate among viewers around the meaning of the concept.

Magnum Photos has invited a selection of photographers to chose an image from their archive and reflect upon how the decisive moment influences them and their practice. Accompanied by personal written responses, these images and texts create a collective portrait of the critical thinking that defines the agency.

The Magnum Square Print Sale is taking place at the Magnum Photos online shop until Friday 10 June at 6PM EST. Signed or estate stamped prints for $100 from over 60 Magnum photographers will be available during this time.

Pictured: The Golden Rock at Shwe Pyi Daw (the "Golden Country"), the Buddhist holy place. Kyaiktiyo. Burma, by Hiroji Kubota, 1978. Copyright Hiroji Kubota / Magnum Photos

Writer: Alex Wright

Trevor Paglen wins the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2016
3 June

Photographer and former prison rights activist Trevor Paglen has been awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2016, presented at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, on 2 June.

The American photographer won the £30,000 award for his summer 2015 retrospective exhibition, ‘The Octopus’, at Frankfurt’s Frankfurter Kunstverein gallery.

Over the past decade, Paglen has taken thousands of pictures of restricted military and governmental areas, satellite and drone activities, and the systems of power controlling these enterprises.

His work aims at underlining current issues that deal with the disturbing impact technology is having on our daily lives, and how it will further affect us.

This is not the first award Paglen has won; in 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and was defined as ‘a groundbreaking investigative artist’.

The Deutsche Börse award's finalists also included Laura El-Tantawy, for her self-published photo-book In The Shadow of Pyramids (2015); Erik Kessels for his exhibition 'Unfinished Father', at Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia; and Tobias Zielony, for his exhibit 'The Citizen', presented at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015.

Pictured: They Watch the Moon, by Trevor Paglen, 2010

Writer: Elisa Carassai

Take six at Ravestijn Gallery
2 June

Opening 3 June, the Ravestijn Gallery’s 'Summer Show' draws together the works of six disparate artists, exploring photography through different conceptual and practical approaches.

Ruth Van Beek delves into her growing archive of collected photographic material, which she cuts, folds and arranges into odd combinations and decontextualised images.

Jean-François Lepage blends his ghostly figures with coloured, cut-out shapes to create abstract forms after scratching out lines from the negatives.

Eva Stenram's collection of vintage photographs portray details of glamorous pin-up models left in intimate interior spaces, obliterating most of the model and therefore altering the orginal erotic purpose of the photograph.

Similarly, Katrien de Blauwer also uses found photographic material from magazines and papers to create dysfunctional collages depicting cut-out body parts and faces. This prevents an emphasis on the image relating to a single individual, though simultaneously allows the viewer to recognise themselves in the story.

Finally, Michael Etzensperger draws inspiration from Carl Einstein’s text Negerplastik to create his series Masks, double exposing a variety of marks from ethnographical books, and territories including Africa and Switzerland.

Pictured: Part 6, by Eva Stenram, 2013

Writer: Alex Wright

Libyan Sugar
1 June

Today sees the worldwide release of Libyan Sugar, a war journal photo book by American photographer Michael Christopher Brown, published by Twin Palms.

Focusing on the 2011 Libyan Revolution, the book documents a journey through the warzone, via photographs and written communications to family and colleagues.

Libyan Sugar’s focal narrative is of a young man going to war for the first time; the fear, the fight and the suffering therein. Brown himself left the United States with the aim of getting as close as possible to the conflict, looking to simultaneously discover something about the nature of war and himself.

This resulted in being injured twice and losing colleagues, events that reveal the physical and emotional toll on the storyteller and their loved ones.

Brown is now working on a film and mixed media installation incorporating video, images, sound and artifacts, which will complete the project.

Pictured: LIBYA. BIN JAWAD. March 6, 2011. 16:05:59, by Michael Christopher Brown. Copyright Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos

Writer: Alex Wright

Summer at Helmut Newton
31 May

Opening tomorrow, the Helmut Newton Foundation's summer exhibition features a triumvirate of modern photographers, each with a distinct aesthetic approach.

The Berlin institution will see works by Alice Springs, Helmut Newton and Mart Engelen on view. The former – the late Newton's widow June, working under a pseudonym – will present 'The MEP Show', featuring both a plethora of portraits of fellow photographers and contemporary celebrities, and images shot on LA's Melrose Avenue in the 1980s. These photographs delve deep into the area's nascent punk and hip hop scenes (and the outré visual self-expression of their adherents).

Helmut Newton's 'Yellow Press' was first shown in 2002 at his Zurich gallery. An eclectic selection of work, the exhibition includes nudes, court photography and the 18-part series 'The Woman on Level 4', a revealing (in more ways than one) 'visual detective story'.

Finally, Mart Engelen's 'Portraits' comprises a wealth of contemporary celebrity portraiture, including shots of Willem Dafoe, John Waters, Gilbert & George and Michel Houellebecq.

The collective exhibition will be on view until 20 November.

Pictured: Helmut Newton with Lisa Lyon,Venice, California, 1981, by Alice Springs. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Tom Howells

'Provoke: Between Protest and Performance'
27 May

From tomorrow, Switzerland's Fotomuseum presents an insider view of Provoke, the highly regarded Japanese magazine, famed for its documentation of post-war photography between November 1968 and August 1969.

The exhibition reveals the far-reaching impact photography had on Japan during this tempestuous time in the country's history, which was riddled with political debate regarding Japan's Cold War alliance with the United States, and social unrest amongst workers, farmers and students at the speed of modernisation in their country. This breakdown of parliamentary politics led to the ignition of counter-journalism, including the photographic production of the ‘Protest Book’, documenting 15 years of struggle and anti-government demonstrations, created by trade unionists and student and environmental activists.

Inspired by this rebellious period, Provoke magazine was conceived by a group of photographers and art critics: Takahiko Okada, Takuma Nakahira and Kōji Taki, Takanashi and Daidō Moriyama. They were keen to envisage a new means of reporting visual documentation, and a new perception of the rapidly changing modernity. Photography was now a theoretical reflection on the relationship between art, language and society.

Pictured: Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, 1973. © Nobuyoshi Araki / The Art Institute of Chicago

Writer: Alex Wright

Simen Johan at Yossi Milo
26 May

Opening today, Yossi Milo Gallery is presenting an exhibition of Simen Johan’s new photographic works and sculptures.
 
On view until 10 August, this is Johan’s ninth exhibition at the New York gallery.
 
The photographer – who rose to fame in the early 1990s with a modern style characterised by the merging of digital manipulation and darkroom techniques – has since started ‘composing’ his images by integrating an interest in the natural world with concepts typically associated with painting and cinema.
 
Johan’s images combine elements captured in various international locations. The images portray contrasts, often creating tensions between what is revealed and concealed, attracting the viewer’s attention.
 
The photographer has since moved on to experimenting with sculpture, and his art often mirrors the themes represented in photography. Clay, fabric and feathers are molded in a similar way to his singular image-making process, allowing him to experiment until the final image appears.
 
This exhibition portrays Johan’s continuous artistic development; the evolution and maturation of his photographs and sculpture over time.

Pictured: Untitled #181, by Simen Johan, 2015
 
Writer: Elisa Carassai

A Tiny retrospective at Aperture
25 May

From tomorrow, Aperture Gallery presents Mary Ellen Mark's ‘Tiny: Streetwise Revisited’, on view until 30 June.

Mark began taking the photographs that would become her 1988 Streetwise series in 1983 (also sharing the title with a 1984 documentary film by Martin Bell, her husband). The series documents a group of wildly independent youth – an eclectic group of homeless, pimps, prostitutes, panhandlers and small-time drug dealers.

Although featuring many unforgettable narratives with troubled protagonists, a memorably poignant character from the series is Erin Blackwell, otherwise known by her street name, Tiny. After meeting, Mark continued to photograph Tiny over the course of 30 years, creating one of her most significant and long-term projects.

Through this continual, on-going relationship, a bond of trust was formed between Tiny and Mark, a result of the photographer’s commitment to documenting Tinys’ life as realistically and sympathetically as possible. We first witness Tiny as a 13-year-old, eventually seeing her become a middle-aged mother of ten, weaving through a life of poverty, addiction and homelessness.

Martin Bell's landmark film Streetwise, and his 2016 feature Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell, will also be shown as part of the exhibition.

Pictured: Tiny, by Mary Ellen Mark, 1983. Copyright the artist

Writer: Alex Wright

Magnum takes six
24 May

From tomorrow, Magnum Photos Print Room will be hosting 'New Blood', showcasing the work of the latest six photographers to be elevated to the ranks of the titular agency’s elite photographers.

The exhibition will include work by Matt Black, Sohrab Hura, Lorenzo Meloni, Max Pinckers and Newsha Tavakolian; while unique prints from Carolyn Drake’s 'Wild Pigeon' series will be showcased in a satellite presentation by Magnum Photos at Photo London. Since the agency’s inception 68 years ago, Magnum has never before admitted so many photographers in one year.

These photographers have collectively worked across the globe, from the remote provinces of China to poverty stricken towns of America, documenting narratives via photojournalism and reworked images, depicting struggles such as war, complex human relationships and poverty.

Pictured: Because a Diagonal Always Works, by Max Pinckers. From the series ‘Two Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself’, 2015. Copyright Max Pinckers/Magnum Photos

Writer: Alex Wright

‘Seizing the Light’ at Beetles + Huxley
23 May

Opening tomorrow at London's Beetles + Huxley gallery, ‘Seizing the Light: Photography in the Age of Invention’ is an exhibition of works by the godfathers of photography – 19th century pioneers who revolutionised travel photography, war reportage, early photojournalism and celebrity portraiture.

The show exhibits works by two key rivals in the early development of photography, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot; the former introducing his daguerreotype process in 1839 (the show includes examples from 1841 and later), the latter his paper negative method very shortly after.

The invention of photography was concurrent with a growing European interest in the Orient. Early examples of travel photography can be seen in this collection, with photographs of the ancient monuments of Egypt by Francis Frith, of Nile crocodiles by Henri Bechard and some of the first photographs ever taken of Burma, by Linneaus Tripe on show.

‘Seizing the Light’ will also feature a selection of creative portraits of notable 19th century figures, indicating the early usage of photography and how the rich used it as a means to circulate their images not only to family and friends, but also to the press and public.

‘Seizing the Light: Photography in the Age of Invention’ will be on view until 18 June.

Pictured: La Chasse au Crocodile, by Henri Bechard, c.1870

Writer: Alex Wright

Offprint London’s independent spirit
20 May

This weekend, and for the second year running, Tate Modern opens its doors to Offprint London, the independent publishing fair and forum focusing on art publications, photography, design, experimental music, open culture and activism.

Offprint offers a variety of events, hosting 150 independent and experimental publishers and a program of book signings, workshops and performances. It’s the largest fair of its kind in Europe.

One of these events will be Making Memories, presented by Self Publish, Be Happy. It features ten international artists relating their photographic knowledge to a live audience, exploring the ever-shifting boundaries between the existence of online photographs and their easy distribution worldwide. It’s a system, they posit, that creates short-term satisfaction that is soon forgotten.

By championing small, global independent publishers, Offprint also seeks to assist photographers in realising their projects in book form. One of the featured authors in this part of the fair is Sophie Borges, winner of MACK’s ‘First Book Award’, for her newly-published title The Swamp.

Pictured: image from The Swamp, by Sophie Borges. Copyright the artist, 2016. Courtesy MACK

Writer: Alex Wright

Caught in the rain
19 May

Opening tomorrow at London’s Webber Gallery Space (and coinciding with the second edition of Photo London) is Yoshino Mizutani's first UK solo show, ‘Rain’.

The celebrated Japanese photographer has enjoyed worldwide recognition with a succession of photographic series, of which Rain is the latest. This collection mainly focuses on pedestrian crossings on the streets of Tokyo, witnessed from above. As viewers, we are treated to voyeuristic depictions of vivid patterns, contrasting against the brightly coloured umbrellas of commuters passing by, occasional scuffs and road markings cutting through the sharp painted lines.

Also on view will be a selection of works from Mizutani's previous collections, Tokyo Parrots (2013) and Yusurika (2014).

'Rain' is on view until 21 June.

Writer: Alex Wright

‘Black Chronicles’ at the NPG
18 May

Opening today, ‘Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862–1948’ is a new exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery (held in partnership with Autograph ABP) that brings together some of the earliest photographs of Black and Asian sitters in the gallery’s collection.

An accumulation of over 40 photographs, many showcase talented individuals – including performers, dignitaries, politicians and musicians – as well as portraits of unidentified sitters, representing a diverse and multifaceted black presence in Britain before 1948, when the Empire Windrush brought the first group of Caribbean migrants to Great Britain. It aims to highlight Britains’ extensive cultural history and depict previously suppressed historical narratives.

The collection includes albumen-printed cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards from the Gallery’s permanent collection, presented alongside a series of large-scale modern prints from 19th century glass plates drawn from the Hulton Archive’s London Stereoscopic Company collection, recently unearthed by Autograph ABP for the first time in 135 years and first shown in the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Black Chronicles II’ at Rivington Place in 2014.

‘Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862–1948’ is on view until 11 December.

Pictured: Berto Pasuka, by Angus McBean, 1947. Courtesy Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University

Writer: Alex Wright

Body of evidence
17 May

Coinciding with the opening of Photo London at Somerset House, TJ Boulting presents ‘Now You See Me’, a group project from a variety of established and emerging photographers, shedding light on the human body.

‘Now You See Me’ portrays the body as a versatile instrument on which the photographers play with a multitude of photographic techniques both historical and contemporary. They project ideas of aesthetics, identity, society and politics, largely exploring this through self-portraiture and bold auto-exploitation at their most fractious and vulnerable – via death, body shaming and body manipulation.

The artists exhibiting include Juno Calypso, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Mat Collishaw, Eloise Fornieles, Rachel Howard, Rasha Kahil, Thomas Mailaender, Haley Morris-Cafiero and Jo Spence.

TJ Boulting will also be present at Photo London itself, presenting the works of Juno Calypso and Juliana Cerqueira Leite.

Pictured: The Honeymoon Suite, by Juno Calypso, 2015

Writer: Alex Wright

‘Please Return Polaroid’
16 May

Best known for disorientating, voyeuristic female portraits – often of housewives, mothers and pin-ups with vacant expressions and fragile qualities – Miles Aldridge returns to his Polaroid archive for a new show.

‘Please Return Polaroid’ spans over two decades worth of Aldridge’s career in film and photography, often bridging the gap between fashion and fine art.

Starting in the early 1990s, Aldridge frequently used Polaroids to document his shoots, enabling him to check lighting, colour and composition before filming for real. In doing so, he captured images that portray a story within themselves; removed form their original context but creating storyboards of surrealism and playfulness, while the viewer learns to appreciate the flaws and imperfections within the creative learning process.

‘After a Polaroid was exposed it was kept warm under the armpit of one of my assistants for 120 seconds (30 seconds for black and white) before being peeled apart,’ Aldridge explains. ‘The Polaroid would then be referred to for lighting, colour and composition. At the end of the shoot, a set of Polaroids with notes to my lab would be included with the shot film with the instruction “Please Return Polaroid”.’

Many of these old Polaroids have been both intentionally and accidentally damaged by trimming, adjusting, marking, cutting, pasting and outlining specific details for modification.

‘Please Return Polaroid’ is on view at London’s Lyndsey Ingram until 21 May, preceding a book of the same name, published by Steidl.

Pictured: Red Marks – study, 2003. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Alex Wright

Marton Perlaki’s Elemer
13 May

Launching today at London’s Webber Gallery Space, Marton Perlaki’s Elemer is a new publication of the Hungarian photographer’s work (originally conceived with the title Bird, Bald, Book, Bubble, Bucket, Brick, Potato).

The idea for the series came to Perlaki after he started collecting cigarette cards. Fascinated by the initially confusing juxtaposition of the sides of the cards – on one, a piece of household advice; on the other, a corresponding image, that only make sense when considered together – he applied this concept across the book’s constituent photographs.

The nonsensical imagery of random inanimate objects and the enigmatic, titular protagonist of the book bear no immediate correlation to each other. However, envisioned as a whole, we are exposed to Elemer’s unstable identity through these loosely choreographed, haunting images, in which he appears before the camera in sculpted forms both literal and gestural. We feel his presence throughout the book, granted access into a weird and wonderful world; of the ordinary turned extraordinary.

Pictured: image from Elemer, by Marton Perlaki, £25 in an edition of 500, published by Loose Joints

Writer: Alex Wright

Doyle in Dublin
12 May

Until 15 July, London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery is hosting ‘End’, the third and final set of three collections of work created by Irish photographer Eamonn Doyle, and his first solo exhibition in London.

A depiction of modern day Dublin and its residents, the photographer explores the familiarity of Parnell Street in the city's northern districts, a working class and multi-cultural area wherein Doyle focused his lens upon the repetitive banality of everyday life. His images portray the long-beaten path of Dubliners in their environment; individually monotonous journeys unfolding like a series of maps to reveal the day-to-day goings-on at Doyle's doorstep.

He shoots at close range, eliminating as much of the context and background as possible and thus giving the viewer an opportunity to apply their own stories to the images. 'The pictures show only fragments of possible narratives, but for me, every life has weight and drama, even if its meaning is ultimately elusive,' he explains.

Pictured: END. Red straw, by Eamonn Doyle, 2016. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

Writer: Alex Wright

'Painting with Light' at Tate Britain
11 May

Currently on view at Tate Britain, 'Painting with Light: art and photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age' is an expansive new exhibition spanning over 70 years and exploring the symbiotic and sympathetic early relationship between photography and art.

The show is broad in scope, variously revealing how the 'radical naturalism' of JMW Turner informed the first photographic panoramic views, and the way PH Emerson and TF Goodall channeled the hazy beauty of the Impressionists in their captured scenes of rural life on the river; as well as shedding light on Julia Margaret Cameron's relationships with George Frederic Watts and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the nascent parlour popularity of stereograph photography (among many other examples).

'"Painting with Light" offers new insights into Britain’s most popular artists and reveals just how vital painting and photography were to one another,' explains Carol Jacobi, Tate Britain's curator of British Art 1850–1915. 'Their conversations were at the heart of the artistic achievements of the Victorian and Edwardian era.'

Pictured: Setting the Bow-Net, in Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, by Thomas Frederick Goodall and Peter Henry Emerson, 1885, published 1887. Private collection

Writer: Tom Howells

Ori Gersht’s Floating World
10 May

Opening tomorrow at London's Ben Brown Fine Arts, 'Ori Gersht: Floating World' sees the Israeli photographer present a new series of work, Floating World.

A graduate of Westminster University and the Royal College of Art, Gersht’s practice has seen widespread success, and his images have been displayed in museums and galleries internationally since the early 1990s.

This success is largely credited to his ability to capture the eerie beauty of brutal scenes in human history; as evinced in images taken from Sarajevo at the end of the Balkan wars, a train between Krakow and Auschwitz and from a retracing of Walter Benjamin's fateful journey across the Pyrenees in 1940.

Floating World came to life in Japan in late 2015, inspired mainly by time spent in Kyoto’s many Buddhist Zen temples and ancient gardens. By nature, these places are areas of neutrality and meditation, oases of peace commonly immersed into busy city life. Gersht often focuses his lens on mirror images, creating a world subject to illusion. This approach can be traced back to his 2014 series, On Reflection, in which he used mirrors to create a similar effect of disillusionment by contrasting the material and virtual within single images.

‘Ori Gerst: Floating World’ opens tomorrow, 11 May, and is on view until 16 June.

Pictured: Floating World, White Lines, by Ori Gersht, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts

Writer: Alex Wright

Henry Talbot hits the NGV
9 May

Henry Talbot might not be as familiar a 20th-century fashion name as Horst P Horst or Hiro, but that's not to underestimate the influence of the late German-born / Melbourne-based photographer.

Comprising over 80 images drawn from the 35,000 negatives gifted to the National Gallery of Victoria by Talbot in the 1980s, 'Henry Talbot: 1960s Fashion Photographer' cements the artist's place in the annals of Australian fashion history, highlighting a wealth of his 1960s work for Australian Vogue, as well as contemporary tastes for then-glamourous national brands like Qantas and Holden.

In addition, the city of Melbourne is as much as subject as the elegant youth that peopled Talbot's photographs; rendered here, the gallery states, into a landscape redolent of fashion hubs like New York, Paris and London.

‘Henry Talbot’s photography captures the exuberance and changing times of a generation,' explains National Gallery of Victoria director, Tony Ellwood. 'His modern photographs depict an emerging youth culture and offer an insider’s look into a thriving cultural scene during the 1960s.'

'Henry Talbot: 1960s Fashion Photographer' is on view until 21 August.

Pictured: No title (Fashion illustration for Sportscaft, model Janice Wakely), by Henry Talbot, 1956–61. Courtesy Lynette Anne Talbot

Writer: Tom Howells

Colin Jones, then and now
6 May

London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery is paying tribute to its first ever exhibition – a survey of the work of Colin Jones, held in 1992. On show until 3 June, ‘Colin Jones: Retrospective’ appears a full 24 years after the gallery first showcased his talent.

The child of a working-class family turned world-class ballet dancer (via a scholarship with the Royal Ballet), Jones’ passion for photography first appeared in his early 20s; while touring in South Africa in 1960, he bought a Leica, and his nascent interests in the documentative power of the discipline were galvanised.

He subsequently began a professional career in photography, going on to work for The Observer and The Sunday Times, capturing the raw, honest tales behind his subjects of outlaws, dancers and celebrities, and focusing his lens on topics as disparate as post-war British mining communities, Leningrad and mod godfathers The Who.

Pictured: Sun bathing, Leningrad (St Petersberg), 1964. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

Writer: Alex Wright

Memory disturbance
5 May

Due in June and published by the ever-reliable MACK, Torbjørn Rødland's Confabulations is a beguiling collection of analogue photographs that willingly skews the hazy, dream-like memories of childhood.

'A dictionary will tell you that confabulations are memory disturbances,' the publisher explains. 'The production of fabricated, distorted memories about oneself and the world, but without a conscious intention to deceive.' So it is with Rødland's images, which a tow line between the abstract and the muted, banal and grotesque, the surreal and the sexualised – but are never less than chimerical.

Photography copyright the artist, 2016. Courtesy MACK

 Writer: Tom Howells

Weegee's Bowery
4 May

It's hard to underestimate the importance of Weegee – the Ukraine-born, mono-monikered NYC/LA documentarian – in the canon of journalistic photography, sensationalism be damned.

Thus, a new exhibition on the man born Usher Fellig's work is a welcome occurrence – and the International Center of Photography have run with the maxim 'short is sweet' for a new 39-print exhibition, currently on show at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, curated by ICP's Weegee specialist Christopher George.

'Weegee's Bowery', on view by appointment until 5 August, depicts the titular Manhattan district when it was still New York's skid row; a grimy slum in-between the East Village and Nolita that attracted no end of drifters, unfortunates and ne'er do wells.

In particular, the show includes an extensive pick of Weegee's images of Sammy's on the Bowery, a chaotic nightclub where all walks of life would mix with raucous abandon (and where Fellig himself held book launches for his Naked City and Weegee's People tomes). A short film set in the club, Cocktail Party (1950), will also be on view.

Pictured: Norma Devine is Sammy’s Mae West, by Weegee, 1944. Copyright the artist / International Center of Photography

Writer: Tom Howells

Port of call
3 May

John Radcliffe Studio’s new publication, Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–16, is the documentation of a year-long enterprise by Thomas Saxby and Daniel Castro Garcia, which saw the British photographers cast an eye on the lives of people at various stages of their migration to Europe. Launching at Photo London (held as part of Offprint London), and shortlisted for the 2016 First Book Award, the duo present a medium-format film photography book in three sections.

Opening with a lens on migration to Italy from North Africa, we travel to Greece from the Middle East through the Balkans, ending in Calais at the migrant camp known as ‘The Jungle’ –  accompanied by shared stories from the journey. In reaction to what Saxby and Garcia describe as sensationalist and alarmist media imagery, this documentary photobook adopts a less frenzied, more personal perspective, with a considered approach.

Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–16, by John Radcliffe Studio, the creative partnership of Thomas Saxby and Daniel Castro Garcia, is being funded via a Kickstarter campaign – contribute here.

Pictured: Port of Catania, Sicily, Italy, June 2015. Courtesy John Radcliffe Studio 2016

Writer: Abbie Mailer-Howat

She who tells a story
29 April

The word ‘Rawiya’ in Arabic translates as ‘she who tells a story’ – but it also represents a collective of female photographers based in the Middle East, established in 2009. Currently on show at Washington, DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, ‘She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World’ features 12 female artists – including Iraq’s Jananne Al-Ani, Lebanaon’s Rania Matar and Jordan’s Tanya Habjouqa – tackling the stereotypes of this misunderstood region with a video installation and over 80 images of mixed genres.

From documentary to staged narratives, the women aim to represent the landscape, people and cultures of the region from the point of view of those actually within it. In doing this, the artists hope to ‘stimulate and enhance cultural dialogue on a personal level as well as a national level’, exploring themes of identity as well as protest, war and occupation in a momentous exhibition.

Photojournalist Rula Halawani is a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem. With a photojournalistic background, she illustrates her experience of destruction and displacement through the series Negative Incursions (pictured above). Using enlarged negative images her photographs take on the eerie effect of scientific or military night-vision cameras.

‘She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World’ is on view until 31 July. An accompanying 176-page book, She Who Tells a Story, published by MFA, is on sale in the Museum shop and online.

Pictured: Untitled VI, from the series Negative Incursions, by Rula Halawani, 2002. Courtesy the artist and the Ayyam Gallery

Writer: Abbie Mailer-Howat

Auto-constructive art
28 April

Opening tomorrow at Amsterdam's Foam is 'Revisiting Pictures' – a first international exhibition for self-taught, 25-year-old British photographer Jack Davison.

Davison may have an autodidactic background, but his images are far from amateurish. As a ‘millennial’ – a digital native immersed in social media culture and internet communities – he has benefited from easy access to a broad range of photographic names, genres, techniques and styles to draw on within his practice. From Salvador Dali and August Sander to Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, Davison has unrestrictedly explored and developed his photographic identity, influenced by his exposure to numerous seminal names.

Pictured above, Untitled C, 2016, arguably holds elements of Mark Michaelson’s Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, along with Avedon-style lighting and compositional simplicity, all the while appearing original and contemporary. Led by a playful and investigative curiosity, Davison’s body of work merges archival roots with a characteristically ‘now’ aesthetic.

‘Revisiting Pictures’ is on view at Foam, Amsterdam until 5 June.

Pictured: Untitled C, by Jack Davison, 2016. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Abbie Mailer-Howat

Magnum Cycling at Rapha Soho
27 April

Launching today at Soho’s Rapha Cycle Club, Guy Andrews (editor, author and cycle photography expert) presents his latest project, Magnum Cycling, in which ‘the world’s best photographers capture the world’s most thrilling sport’. Drawn from Magnum’s archives, Andrews has assembled a masterful panoply of cycling history, featuring international sporting legends, iconic events, scenes and landscapes.

The collection of images includes work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, John Vink and Harry Gruyaert, among others, alongside an accompanying ‘story’ in each thematically organised chapter of iconic moments or events. The result is a colourful (albeit often monochrome) object of desire for cycling fanatics and photography enthusiasts alike.

Magnum Cycling, $50, published by Thames & Hudson, is out now.

Pictured: Cyclists been stopped by rally of farmers vs certain Common Market, by Harry Gruyaert, 1982. Photography © Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos

Writer: Abbie Mailer-Howat

Plaid pants and all
26 April

Comprised of photographs drawn from the artist’s private collection, New York’s ClampArt is currently exhibiting Henry Horenstein’s ‘Histories: Tales from the 70s’. (The show is accompanied by a 144-page monograph.)

In the late 1960s, Horenstein was instructed to ‘Shoot what you love’ by his Rhode Island School of Design professor, Harry Callahan. With such a reputable mentor, it’s understandable that this advice might be followed literally. For this solo exhibition, Horenstein has selected some of his favourite images captured across the following decade.

In the monograph foreword, Tom Rankin, director of the Centre for Documentary Studies at Duke University, writes that Horenstein ‘intentionally avoided the typical perspective of an audience member’, instead finding ‘the lasting voices and enduring lives that help sing us back home, help us to see where we once were, and what it means to us today’. Photographed from his own immediate environment during an era of progressive change, the collection documents a personal history while simultaneously resonating with anyone who truly experienced America in the 1970s – ‘big cars, plaid pants, long hair and all’.

‘Histories: Tales from the 70s’ will be on view until 21 May. The monograph of the same name is published by Honky Tonk Editions.

Pictured: Lovers, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville, TN, 1975. Courtesy the artist and ClampArt, New York City

Writer: Abbie Mailer-Howat

Cover to cover
25 April

Given the grimly steady departure of our most precious cultural and musical icons, ‘Total Records: Vinyl & Photography’ – currently on show at Winterthur’s Fotomusem – feels like an ever-more essential survey of record cover art drawn from the past half century.

The exhibition is a timely blast from the past, featuring recently lost heroes in the form of Prince (with the inclusion of Lovesexy) and David Bowie (with Fashion). The show features some 500 album covers from the 1960s through to the 2000s  – also factoring works by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Nirvana and Grace Jones, among many others – presenting a range of iconic touchstones in cover design, significant artistic movements and a welcome reunion of pop music pioneers.

With the resurgence of analogue photography (fittingly, the tag #film was attached to around 11.5 million Instagram posts last year) and vinyl sales (the format's sales are running at a 20 year high), ‘Total Records’ celebrates the nostalgia of these two mediums through a collected history of culture, photography and media in the 20th century.

Originally curated by Sam Stourdzé, Antoine de Beaupré and Serge Vincendet in 2015, 'Total Records: Vinyl & Photography' will be on view at the Fotomuseum with additional Swiss contributors until 16 May.

Pictured: Lovesexy, by Prince, 1988

Writer: Abbie Mailer-Howat

Foam Talent
22 April

Open from 22 April, 'Foam Talent' presents a selection of 21 contemporary photography talents. Exhibiting in Amsterdam and London, the photographers also feature in Foam Magazine’s annual 'Talent Issue'.

The competition – this year drawn from 1,208 applicants under the age of 35, from 67 countries – seeks to encourage, develop and stimulate across international photography fields. This year’s show displays a variety of influences in an offering of diverse originality.

From an ongoing series, Márton Perlaki's Bird Bald Book Bubble Bucket Brick Potato plays with the idea of a game of association, the artist harnessing Facebook to source his model, Elemer. Perlaki liked the idea that Elemer became an anonymous photography prop despite being a ‘happy family man and a teacher living and working in Szolnok, Hungary’.

The exhibition comprises over 100 photographs, from analogue black and white prints to lightboxes and installations. The resulting images are an explosion of experimental photography, and include Dominic Hawgood’s slick lighting design installations alongside Sara Cwynar’s flattened digital appropriations, scanned from magazines and encyclopaedias.

‘Foam Talent: Shaping the Future of Contemporary Photography’ will be on display at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and Beaconsfield in Vauxhall until 22 May.

Pictured: Bird Bald Book Bubble Bucket Brick Potato, by Márton Perlaki. Courtesy the artist, with thanks to Andrea Kozma and Elmér Szatmári

Writer: Abbie Mailer-Howat

Snappy dressing
21 April

The 31st iteration of the International Festival of Fashion and Photography is in full swing this weekend at Hyères.

The festival - directed by Jean-Pierre Blanc and presided over by Didier Grumbach - annually encourages and supports young artists in the fields of fashion and photography. This year's young artists competition merges both of these disciplines. 

In a new twist, the ten competition finalists (who were hand plucked from a longlist of over 700) were asked to take two still life photographs which feature at least one fashion accessory. The resulting images playfully stretch the definition of the word 'accessory', and, for that matter, the word 'fashion'. They include everything from sunbathers in goggles; a lady being viscerally removed from her prosthetics, to a rotund man in a bear suit.

The shortlisted images will be on display throughout the festival, and in an exhibition that runs until 22 May at the villa Noailles.

Photography: Untitled, by Anaïs Boileau, 2016

Writer: Elly Parsons

Life through a lens
20 April

A new show at London's Science Museum comprises the city's largest ever insight into the life and practice of William Henry Fox Talbot, popularly considered the 'father of photography'.

'Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph' seeks to place the inception of Western photography within the context of British industrialisation, and its development within a desire to experiment with new technologies in the 19th century (so successfully realised by Talbot in the form of the negative-positive process).

It's startling simply how old Talbot early successes were; a haunting image of a latticed window at Lacock Abbey was captured on negative in August 1935. His book The Pencil of Nature – the first commercially available tome to be illustrated with photography – was published nine years later.

The exhibition explores how Talbot managed to meld art and science in creating this most fundamental, significant mode of documentation, as well as highlighting the subsequent practices of his contemporaries, and their social and artistic legacies.

‘William Henry Fox Talbot wasn’t only one of the key figures in the invention of photography; he anticipated its uses and usefulness with intelligence and a vision for its critical role in modernity,' explains Greg Hobson, co-curator and curator of photographs at the National Media Museum. 'It is a delight to be able to examine these significant contributions through our remarkable holdings in the National Photography Collection.’

'Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph' is on view until 11 September.

Pictured: William Henry Fox Talbot and Nicolaas Henneman at the Reading establishment, by William Henry Fox Talbot, 1846. Courtesy National Media Museum, Bradford / Science & Society Picture Library

Writer: Tom Howells

River of the north
19 April

The Chinese photographer Zhang Kechun casts a singular eye on the country's post-industrial landscapes. Opening tomorrow at London's Beetles + Huxley gallery, an exhibition of large format works drawn from two of Zhang's series comprises the artist's first UK solo exhibition.

The first, The Yellow River, explores the ecological status of and effects of modernisation on the ancient waterway, Zhang's images captured on a Linhof camera while on a bicycle journey from the coast at Shandong to the Qinghai mountains.

Between the Mountains and the Water, meanwhile, is concerned directly with the relationship between the Chinese people and their surrounding environs.

'Zhang Kechun' is on view at Beetles + Huxley from 20 April – 21 May.

Pictured: A Man Standing on an Island in the Middle of the River Shaanxi, China, 2012. Photography copyright Zhang Kechun. Image courtesy Beetles + Huxley

Writer: Tom Howells

Bowie in books
18 April

Publishing on 25 April via powerHouse Books, Steve Schapiro's Bowie collects a series of photographs shot in Los Angeles, in 1974.

That original meeting – which took place shortly after one of Bowie's myriad transmogrifications, this time into Aladdin Sane – would end up providing imagery for both the Station to Station and Low record covers, though much of the shoot would end up going unseen (until now).

The shoot lasted from 4pm until early the next day, Bowie shifting through various costume changes and moods. 'From the moment Bowie arrived, we seemed to hit it off,' says Schapiro. 'Incredibly intelligent, calm, and filled with ideas... he talked a lot about Aleister Crowley, whose esoteric writings he was heavily into at the time. When David heard that I had photographed Buster Keaton, one of his greatest heroes, we instantly became friends.'

Pictured: Bowie seated drawing circles on the background paper and then the Kabbalah 'Tree of Life' diagram on the floor. Los Angeles, 1974. Photography: Steve Schapiro, from Bowie, published by powerHouse Books

Writer: Tom Howells

Cracks and scars
15 April

Masahisa Fukase (1934–2012) is best known for his 1986 book Solitude of Ravens, the fruit of his heartbreak following a break up with his second wife Yoko. The project, capturing the mythical birds, is widely considered one of contemporary photography's most important publications.

With the same obsession that Fukase photographed these birds, he had previously followed Yoko with his camera. Indeed, part of the reason his ex-wife cited leaving Fukase was his tendency to always photograph and, in this way, control her.

Fukase himself admitted that he tried to contain the world through photography. 'I work and photograph while hoping to stop everything,' he explained at one point. 'In that sense, my work may be some kind of revenge drama about living now.'

One of his last projects, Hibi, realised in 1992, is a series of images depicting details in road surfaces, cracks and markings. It exudes the same single-mindedness of the Japanese photographer's previous work; but what is unexpected about the series – collected in a new publication by MACK – is the artist's colourful, raw paint interventions on top of the black and white photographs.

Pictured: untitled, by Masahisa Fukase. Courtesy the artist and MACK

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Head in the clouds
14 April

Benedict Redgrove gained fame by photographing the fastest cars, the biggest yachts, the most impressive architecture and expensive technology. But, he says, he has always looked for a more benign calm and perfection in his work.

Perhaps as a counterbalance to his commercial projects, Redgrove shot images of clouds from above the speedy world that marked his work to date. The series forms the exhibition 'Everything & Nothing' at London's Display Gallery, on view from 15–28 April.  Critic and curator Dr Daniel Barnes commented that seeing the works as cloudscapes 'is both to offer an accurate characterisation and to make an obscene understatement'.

Indeed, with their translucent quality, and immense expansiveness, Redgrove's series transports the viewer into a place of stillness, where nothing is asked of them except merely being. Fresh yet timeless, Redgrove's clouds seem like a visual translation of zen Buddhism's explorations of nothingness.

Pictured: 20121215 21:39:04, by Benedict Redgrove. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Paula Erizanu

The uncanny and the familiar
13 April

At a first glance, American photographer Stephen Shore's Badlands National Monument, South Dakota, July 14, 1973 is all about the familiar – indeed, in the 1970s Shore expressed an aesthetic agenda of making pictures that looked 'natural'. But by only having access to the back of the isolated hut and car surrounded by mountains, and seeing the shadow but not the tree, the image could equally serve as setting for a bloody Truman Capote narrative.

The picture is part of the exhibition 'Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography', on view at the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London, until 19 June.

The exhibition is inspired by philosopher Friedrich Schelling and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's essays on the uncanny. Where Schelling defined the term as ‘everything that ought to have remained hidden and secret and has become visible’,  Freud was interested in the concept as ‘that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’.

The show also features work by Sonja Braas, David Claerbout, Elger Esser, Julie Monaco, Jörg Sasse and Joel Sternfeld.

Pictured: Badlands National Monument, South Dakota, July 14, 1973, by Stephen Shore. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York

Writer: Paula Erizanu

A walk and 10,000 photographs
12 April

Sohei Nishino first discovered strolling as a spiritual experience when he went on a graduation trip, alone, with a tent and a camera. Ever since, he's been trying to recreate the peace he felt then, by walking for miles in every city he visits, taking about 10,000 photographs per project.

'The Day Drawings' accompany the 'Diorama Maps' – a series Nishino started 13 years ago, comprising large-scale photo collages of cities of the world that look like medieval maps in how they distort perspective. The drawings show the paths Nishino took in those cities.

Nishino says, 'I gradually realised that [walks] have been composed and created by the paths humans have taken over a long period of time. I became very interested in this movement, these ancient primordial walks.

'"The Day Drawings" series depicts my passage through a city, filtering out the noise of others to focus on my own personal every day journey.'

Nishino's journey gets closer to a pilgrimage in 'The Day Drawings' than in his previous work; the delicate sparkling outlines of his walks allude to the serenity of walking as a means of contemplation. 

'The Day Drawings' are on view as an online exhibition at Michael Hoppen Gallery, and are available to purchase.

Pictured: 26 May 2015, Bilbao, by Sohei Nishino. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Good enough to eat?
11 April

The Photographer's Cookbook is an eclectic creative project mixing recipes, 1970s first-echelon photography and a lot of humour.

The range of creativity – both visual and gastronomic – is wide. In the breakfast section, Ansel Adams' eggs poached in beer meet Ed Ruscha's cactus omelette. On the main dishes pages, Richard Avenue's picture for a 'Royal Pot Roast' recipe is a fashion shoot, in which a thin, elegant hand exuberantly holds a glass of red wine. Right after Avedon, Les Krims portrays the half-naked body of a middle aged woman holding an uncooked chicken above a yellow bowl of cereals – with what must be milk pouring from the chick's head. Les Krims's recipe is dubbed 'Formalist Stew' and requires '185 ingredients and takes 31 days to prepare'.

Subsequently, Arthur Rothstein's photograph is a perfect middlepiece between the themes of Avedon and Les Krims, picturing two elegantly dressed American housewives killing a chicken behind their house in Indiana in 1938.

The book was initiated in 1977 at the George Eastman Museum (then called George Eastman House) but it was left unfinished and only came to fruition due to Lisa Hostetler's edits this year. Published by Aperture and the George Eastman Museum, The Photographer's Cookbook is set for release in June.

Pictured: Untitled, by William Eggleston, 1976, from the series 'Election Eve'.  In accompaniment to the recipe 'Cheese Grits Casserole'. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust

Writer: Paula Erizanu

MACK finds mystery in transparency
7 April

Transparency is the new mystery – freshly published by MACK – is Japanese photographer Mayumi Hosokura's exploration of the geometry of the body. In it, 21 nudes collude with diamonds, creating a world that needs to be looked at slowly. The bodies – whether coiled, or openly facing the viewer – are shown in all their vulnerability.

Hosokura's work simultaneously breathes timeless youth and potential loss. Warm light and delicate shadows hint at the protecting space Hosokura has created for the fragile young people that feature in her stills. For Hosokura, photography is about both reality and imagination; 'an excuse to venture into unknown territory'.

Giving up on the delicate hues of her previous series, the black-and-white imagery of Transparency is the new mystery means to fully bring the shape of the body to light. The same thinking explains her decision to remove any context from the pictures.

Photography: Mayumi Hosokura, 2016. Courtesy MACK

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Patrick Zachmann's Chinese lens
6 April

French Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann specialises in portrayals of identity and migration. His first visit to China in 1982 was part of a report on Chinese cinema – though getting to know China through the medium inevitably made Zachmann's collisions with the realities of the country more disconcerting.

This trip inspired him to later explore the Chinese diaspora around the world and to capture changes in Chinese society. His reportage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square events gained wide coverage in the international media and brought him the prestigious Niépce Prize.

'So Long, China 1982–2015' opens today at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and will be on show until 6 June. If Zachmann's initial 1980s photographs conjure dramatic black and white contrasts and a wealth of visual poetry, his later 2000s colour pictures depict the idiosyncrasies of Chinese daily life through an unassuming lens.

An accompanying book, published by Éditions Xavier Barral, is also available.

Pictured: Shooting film Liao Zhong Kai by Tang Xiao Dan, Shanghai, 1982. Photography: Patrick Zachmann. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

Writer: Paula Erizanu

The modernist past as a Memory of the future
5 April

Laurent Kronental, a 29-year-old photographer based in Courbevoie, a commune just outside Paris, is interested in the relationship between individuals and buildings. In the series 'Memory of the future', he focuses on 'Grands Ensembles' – large housing projects in Parisian suburbs and the elderly people inhabiting them. Kronental says he has always had a deep curiosity for seniors. In his photography, he tries to rehabilitate their public image.

Pictured above is Jacques, 82, seemingly in thrall of Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill's 1982 Les Arcades du Lac in Montigny-le-Bretonneux – an ensemble of social housing built in response to France's stringent housing crisis. The shape of the blocks echoes the structure of a French garden, the hedges reconstituted as buildings. While considered avant-garde during its construction, the project, like so much of the social housing documented by Kronental, has been largely forgotten. For the young photographer, this is a metaphor for the ageing universe and the vanishing of modernist utopias.

Kronental's work is on view as part of Circulation(s): Young European Photography Festival at the Cenquatre-Paris centre.

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Meryl Meisler's funny people
4 April

Meryl Meisler's dazzling early photographs of suburban New York in the 1970s are on view until 9 April at the city's Steven Kasher Gallery. The series is a black-and-white cross-generational portrait of outré, disco-era New York life – including outlandishly decorated houses, explosive concerts, dance and dressing up (by both children and adults).

Meisler, born in South Bronx and raised in Long Island, took pictures of herself, her family, relatives and friends in the Jewish-Italian neighbourhood nicknamed 'Matzoh Pizza'. They all look relaxed and exuberant, beginning with self-portraits in ballerina and Girl Scout outfits, and moving on to her parents' 'Mystery Club' – together with ten other couples, they frequented seances, nudist colonies and gay bathhouses. Set in this mad paradise, Meisler's collection is a coming-of-age story. 'I had to photograph it to make sense of it all,' she says.

'I see funny,' explains Meisler of why she could never do commercial photography: she simply can't take things seriously. 'People come out funny,' she says.

Pictured: Butterfly Bedroom Telephone, East Meadow, New York, June 1975, by Meryl Meisler. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Remembering the Thatcher years
1 April

May 5th 1981, North Shields, Tyneside, pictured above, was taken on the day the IRA member and hunger striker Bobby Sands died. As soon as photographer Chris Killip heard Margaret Thatcher's radio announcement about it, he went to the only place where Sands was 'memorialised' – a strongly Protestant council estate in North Shields, a small town near Newcastle. As Killip was photographing, a few children asked if they could be in the picture. In the background, one can see the flats that people were burning out in order to be rehoused.

In Flagrante Two – new from Steidl – presents Killip's collection of photographs of life in northern England between 1973 and 1985, an oversized reprint of a 1988 edition published by Secker & Warburg. The series is widely considered Killip's masterpiece.

Killip took the pictures during 15 years spent in Newcastle. (He likes to document as an insider – he says it took him eight years to get access to photograph the sea-coal workers.) His work is often concerned with the working class and the manifestation of politics in everyday life.

Pictured: May 5th 1981, North Shields, Tyneside, by Chris Killip

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Challenging narratives at Foam
31 March

'Traces of the Familiar' – on view at Amsterdam's Foam Gallery until 24 April – showcases a beguiling new camera technique. The young Dutch young artists behind it, Jaya Pelupessy and Felix van Dam, have mixed photography with silkscreen printing to produce poetic and humourous black and white still life images.

The exhibition is a postmodern trip, seguing between the contemporary and the archaic. A sharply ironic photograph of a marble classical Greek-style male bust with goggles sits, poker-faced, next to a blurry silkscreened print that transforms a photograph of a flower pot into a seemingly turn-of-the-20th-century image. The artists question how narrative is built through historical and contemporary photography techniques; the process is documented in images such as that above.

Just as 'Traces of the Familiar' questions photography, it also makes home feel like fiction. With blurred outlines, the domestic objects pictured in the exhibition – from bananas to pot plant leaves – become less recognisable. The dark edges of the silkscreened photographs are a reminder that you're not seeing the whole picture.

Pictured: ScreenprintCamera, by Jaya Pelupessy and Felix van Dam, 2014. Courtesy the artists

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Against all authority: Jörg Immendorff in Berlin
30 March

A new exhibition dedicated to the legendary and scandalous post-war German artist Jörg Immendorff (1945–2007) is now on show at the VeneKlasen/Werner gallery in Berlin until 24 April. The show focuses on Immendorff's formation as an artist in the tumultuous 1960s. As Joseph Beuys' student at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Immendorff believed that art should bring active change in society. 'Those who are engaged in the cultural sector,' he said, 'always stand on one definitive side in political struggle.'

Immendorff's focus in the 1960s was a series of divisive performances called LIDL. He was arrested for walking a small pet-like wooden block painted in the colours of the German flag on the street; expelled from the academy for Maoist activity, which included setting up a LIDL commune in the Kunstakademie in 1968; and tried to create an occupied LIDL room in the Bonn Parliament in 1969 to protest against high rents.

Although recognised as a great artist by the end of his life, Immendorff continued to defy authority. In 1998 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (rather less auspiciously, he was also busted 'entertaining' seven prostitutes with six grams of cocaine in a luxury suite of a Dusseldorf hotel in 2003).

'Jörg Immendorff' will also be on showat Michael Werner Gallery London from 12 May–2 July.

Pictured: LIDL Sport, Köln, 1969. Courtesy VeneKlassen/Werner

Writer: Paula Erizanu

Modern matter: Stephen Gill at Print Sales Gallery
29 March

On view at The Photographers' Gallery's Print Sales Gallery until 8 May, 'Stephen Gill: myeyefellout' pulls together six series of work, delving into the photographer's dual interests in nature and the borough of Hackney.

The works – begun in 2003 with the series Hackney Flowers, and ending with 2013's Best Before End – eschew the shackles of straight descriptive photography, Gill embracing outré approaches to development and treating film (from part-processing negatives in energy drinks and decomposing photos in soil), as well as layering photos with biological matter and reshooting them (in Hackney Flowers) and placing organic debris and insects directly into the body of the camera.

Hackney Kisses – an example of which is pictured above – saw Gill curate a selection of wedding images reprinted from thousands of 1950s negatives purchased on eBay. 'By focusing on this one traditional moment,' the gallery explains, 'Gill sought to re-contextualise the narrative of the images as one continuous kiss.'

Pictured: Untitled, from the series Hackney Kisses, by Stephen Gill. Courtesy the artist and Christophe Guye Galerie

Writer: Tom Howells

Method photography
24 March

When Doug DuBois approaches a project, he clears his diary - for the next twenty years. His painstaking photographic method tracks and captures unfolding nuances in human relationships with insider-knowledge, wisdom and wit.

His most recent series, 'My Last Day at Seventeen', was supposed to be a month-long residency in Ireland. It ended up being a five-year furlough, dictated by DuBois' fascination with the residents of his insular neighbourhood.

A new, mid-career survey at Aperture Gallery draws together a trio of DuBois' projects and highlights the innate irony contained in all three: that a momentary flash of a camera can successfully narrate the inexorable passing of time. 

'In Good Time' is at New York's Aperture Gallery until 19 May.

Pictured: My Mother and Father at the Bar, London, by Doug DuBois, 1990. © Doug DuBois 

Writer: Elly Parsons

Water stories
23 March

A short walk along the Thames from Wallpaper* HQ is ampitheatre The Scoop, which will display 70 large-scale photographs by Mustafah Abdulaziz until 10 April.

The American photographer has made it his life's work to highlight the global water crisis. Working alongside WaterAid, his journalistic photographs are shocking, both for their moments of aesthetic beauty and their disturbing truths. Here we see the River Benue in Nigeria, which becomes almost completely dry during the Harmattan season.

As well as these vast landscapes, the exhibition includes contrastingly urban portraits of individuals working to improve their local environment, including volunteer citizen scientists who gather data on freshwater quality in London.

Coinciding with UN World Water Day (22 March), the exhibition aims to promote awareness of the global impact of water, and all that hangs in the balance. Abdulaziz explains, 'between growing populations and energy demands, between rising seas and melting ice, and between those who have access to clean water and those who do not; water is one of the great challenges of our time.'

Photography: River Benue, Nigeria, by Mustafah Abdulaziz, 2015. © the artist and WaterAid

Writer: Elly Parsons

'Look at the Pictures'
22 March

Using the upcoming Getty and LACMA joint exhibition as a jumping off point, HBO and Dogwoof are releasing a hard-hitting documentary about the life of provocative photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe.

It's the first full-length feature on the artist, who's life was tragically cut short by AIDS in 1989. Famous for his shocking, sexually explicit images, the documentary sets out to be equally as confrontational as Mapplethorpe himself.

Thanks to a number of rediscovered, never before heard interviews, Mapplethorpe is our narrator. The audience is put in the place of his many iconic sitters, and through the lens, an enigmatic portrait emerges.

Directors Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato state, 'When we set out to make this film, we knew we were making a portrait of the artist, but a portrait of the artist as what, exactly? Angel or devil?' They conclude, that's up for the audience to decide.

'Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures' is in cinemas 22 April.

Writer: Elly Parsons

They call him Disfarmer
21 March

At fifty cents for three, portraits like this one ended up in family albums across Arkansas throughout the first half of the 20th century. They were taken by eccentric photographer Mike Disfarmer (who made up his own surname as a way of distinguishing himself from the traditional Arkansas farming lifestyle).

He made his living snapping these portraits of local working people: farmers in overalls to house-wives with their hair crimped for the occasion.

Disfarmer's quirks shine through his images. Gone are the elaborately painted cloudy backdrops that were so popular at the time. Instead, Disfarmer chose clean black scenes, often with a contemporary single stripe just off-centre. He also asked his sitters to look directly into the lens, which creates an arresting, almost sinister effect.

It wasn't until 1977, 17 years after Disfarmer's death, that the images began to attract artistic inspection. Since then, they have been on display at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography in New York, amongst others. They have gained a reputation as a landmark of American portraiture.

Last week, 182 of these vintage portraits arrived at Foam gallery, in a major retrospective, where they will be on display until 5 June this year.

Photography: Joe and Fanny Carr, Mose Harmon and Bill and Julia Harlan, by Mike Disfarmer, 1930. Courtesy the artist and The Edwynn Houk Gallery New York

Writer: Elly Parsons

Modernism in motion
18 March

Tomorrow, London's V&A will launch the first major UK retrospective of American photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, who passed away in 1976.

Along with his peers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, Strand was one of the key twentieth century modernists who helped establish photography and the moving picture as an art form. His work remains hugely influential today.

Collating around 200 objects spanning Strand’s career, from his peaceful shadow images to his bolshy street portraits, his technical close-ups of industrial machinery to the brooding landscape images he captured on his world-wide travels.

To illustrate his reaching influence on the art of photography, the V&A have contributed pieces from their own photographic archives to go on display side by side with Strand's, a most fitting tribute. 

'Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century' runs until 3 July 2016

Photography: The Family - Luzzara (The Lusettis), 1953. Courtesy the artist and Archive Aperture Foundation

Writer: Elly Parsons

'If this is true…10,000km across America on a motorbike'
17 March

In-demand Dutch portrait photographer Robin de Puy left for America on 4 May, armed with nothing but her Harley and two saddlebags. The photographs she took on her 10,000km journey are being displayed at Hague Mueum of Photography, until 26 June this year.

De Puy followed no set route, but toured the country looking for distinctive faces. The 'American Photogrpahic Road Trip' might seem like an exhausted subject, from Jack Kerouac to Alec Soth, but de Puy adds a new dimension: her aim was not to record social contrasts or the antithesis between urban and rural America. Instead, her sympathetic portraits are simply about the individuals they capture.

De Puy jotted in her journal half-way through her trip, 'I do not want to go back – no launch parties or openings anymore, [I just want to stay here and] wear the same pair of jeans every day', which seems to prove the old cliché, that all who wonder aren't lost. 

Photography: Dakota, by Robin de Puy. Courtesy the artist and The Ravestijn Gallery

Writer: Elly Parsons

Daisuke Yokota wins Foam Paul Huf Award
16 March

Today it was announced that Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota has been awarded the coveted Foam Paul Huf Award, worth €20,000.

The annual prize, given to a photography talent under 35, is in its tenth iteration. It takes its name from innovative Dutch photographer and Foam collaborator Paul Huf. It is fitting, then, that a similarly inventive talent took the 2016 award.

The judges (chaired by Simon Baker, Tate London) agreed unanimously that Yokota's pioneering work deserved the accolade, above 96 other international entries. Baker explains, 'Yokota has established a formidable reputation as a young artist who has the ability to take photography forward into ever more original directions; and always with a distinctive and unmistakable visual language'.

A delighted Yokota told W*, 'I really did not expect this, I could not sleep well last night from all the excitement. In the early days, when I started following international photography-related news, I got to know this award. It has always been one of my goals to be part of it, so I am very pleased and honoured.'

Photography: Untitled, from the series Color Photographs, by Daisuke Yokota, 2015. Courtesy the artist and G/P Gallery

Writer: Elly Parsons

Going native
15 March

Opening tomorrow, 'Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers' is a new Barbican show curated by the seminal British photographer Martin Parr. In collecting the work of 23 foreign artists, Parr has created a fascinatingly broad depiction of 20th century Britain's diversely dilapidated and idiosyncratic social landscapes, exploring a country whose regional foibles can be alienating even for natives.

The work spans extractions and decades: from Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1937 series of images taken at the coronation of King George VI; to Akihiko Okamura's documentation of the Northern Irish troubles in 1968; Raymond Depardon's delve into the bleak industrial decline of Glasgow's Govan and Maryhill districts; the whimsical London, Cambridge and Oxford streetscapes of Cas Oorthuys; and Tina Barney's candid portrayals of the British upper classes. (Luminaries as notable as Robert Frank, Candida Höfer and Garry Winograd are also featured.)

'The exhibition will reveal a very different take on British life than that produced by British photographers,' explains Parr. 'It is both familiar and strange at the same time.'

'Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers' is on view until 19 June.

Pictured: The Red Sheath, by Tina Barney, 2001, from 'Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers'. Photography courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery

Writer: Tom Howells

Take two: a co-hosted Mapplethorpe retrospective
14 March

Opening on 15 March at the Getty Center and 20 March at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 'Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium' is a dual-retrospective on one of the 20th century's most seminal artists.

Each institution will present one half of the exhibition. The Getty's offering will comprise the full gamut of Mapplethorpe's oeuvre, from portraits and self-portraits to figures and floral imagery (with a partial focus on the raunchier inclusions to his controversial 1988–90 show 'The Perfect Movement'; a technical highpoint in his career, but one which tends to overshadow his extensive career for all the wrong reasons).

Meanwhile, the LACMA exhibition will delve into the artist's symbiotic relationship with the New York underground, as well as his broader multimedia work.

Pictured: Patti Smith, by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1978. Photography copyright the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Writer: Tom Howells

Dubai Photo Exhibition's inaugural showing
11 March

Next week sees the inaugural staging of the 'Dubai Photo Exhibition'; a new showcase that, this year, will comprise myriad museum quality pieces (from 23 countries) in an offering supported by the World Photography Organisation and held in the Dubai Design District. The mini-festival will also feature public lectures, workshops and a curator-led symposium.

'We are delighted to be able to work on a project that brings together some of the most remarkable work over the last century,' says the WPO's founder and CEO Scott Gray. 'An exhibition with this global reach and of this magnitude is unique and an important statement for photography, not just in the exhibition itself, but also by bringing some of the most respected curators from around the world together under one roof.'

Dubai Photo Exhibition is on view from 16–19 March.

Pictured: Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California, by Dorothea Lange, 1936

Writer: Tom Howells

Ann Parker's 'Los Ambulantes'
10 March

Ann Parker's 'Los Ambulantes' series – shown, with this exhibition, for the first time in New York since 1981 – was developed over the course of the 1970s in Guatemala.

As well as the portraits' sitters, Parker also took a step back to capture the itinerant Guatemalan photographers with their anachronistic equipment. She was fascinated both with her own position as a 'spokesman' for these idiosyncratic artists, and the intensity of the photographic experience for indigenous Indian members of Guatemalan society.

'In our society, where it is not uncommon for people to be photographed hundreds of times, the psychological impact of facing a camera is greatly diminished,' she said. 'Many of the people […] were typically appearing before a camera for the first and perhaps only time. The casual snapshot plays no part in their existence, and the rarity of coming before [the] lens is reflected in the portraits.'

'Ann Parker / Los Ambulantes: The Itinerant Photographers of Guatemala, Vintage Photographs from the 1970s' is on view at Deborah Bell Photographs until 30 April.

Pictured: Photographer directing pose, Santa Cruz del Quiché, by Ann Parker, c. 1970s. Photography copyright the artist. Courtesy Deborah Bell Photographs & Paul M Hertzmann, Inc.

Writer: Tom Howells

'Quaking Aspen: Photographs of Gary Metz'
9 March

The late Gary Metz's 1970s series Quaking Aspen: a Lyric Complaint was significant in repositioning traditions in landscape photography within an everyday vernacular, eschewing the divine for subtler – but no less enthralling – depictions of the workaday and manmade.

Metz (a Professor Emeritus at RISD) never received the acclaim that many of his contemporaries did – this afforded partly through their inclusion in the seminal 1975 exhibition 'The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape'.

This showing of his work at the Southeast Museum of Photography at Daytona State College thus affords a timely reassessment of a set of work, 'as powerful and relevant as ever, resonating with current interest in ecology and the quotidian', explain curators Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Joseph Lawton.

'Our perceptions of the world,' Metz once said, presciently, ' will ultimately tell us more about our perception than they will tell us of the world.'

Pictured: from the series Quaking Aspen: a Lyric Complaint, by Gary Metz

Writer: Tom Howells

Devil in the details
8 March

Released in conjunction with ‘… my English breath in foreign clouds’ – on view at Marian Goodman New York – British artist Tacita Dean's Buon Fresco is a companion publication to the 2014 video work of the same name.

The project saw Dean filming details of Giotto's frescoes in the the Upper Basilica in Assisi – paintings that humanised their subjects in a way comparable to how the humble St Francis humanised sainthood. 'This moment,' the publisher explains, 'when the radical artist depicted the radical saint is an extremely important juncture in the history of art.'

By documenting these images on a micro level – and compiling them in this way – Dean is affording a previously unprecedented insight into the detail and sophistication of Giotto's hugely significant and influential practice.

Buon Fresco, by Tacita Dean, is published by MACK

Writer: Tom Howells

The returned
7 March

The '回' of 'Retrieved回: The Art of Looking Back' is a Chinese symbol pronounced 'hui', meaning to return, turn around or revolve.

In the case of this show – a dual-location curation being exhibited at both San Francisco's CCC Visual Art Center and SF Camerawork gallery – the sentiment is channeled through the work of three artists and their portraits capturing the contemporary Chinese experience. An experience, the organisers explain, in which viewers of myriad heritages are 'certain to find glimpses if not revelations of their own lives and histories'.

Of the three artists – Kurt Tong, Thomas Sauvin and Daniel Traub – only Tong is Chinese, though all provide uniquely compelling insights into the country.

Sauvin's 'Beijing Silvermine' series (an example of which is pictured above) is particularly beguiling; a sorted, digitised and catalogued selection of surreal everyday images spanning a 15 year period, drawn from piles of negatives salvaged by the artist in Beijing.

From 'Beijing Silvermine', by Thomas Sauvin

Writer: Tom Howells

'The Unforgetting'
04 March

Until 8 April, The Ravestijn Gallery in Amsterdam presents a stirring installation of photographs and sculpture from artist Peter Watkins. 

'The Unforgetting' tells the story of Watkin's mother, who committed suicide in 1993. Through the combined presentation of images and objects, a personal narrative is developed, and Watkins questions how much of a person remains in the objects they leave behind.

The exhibition takes it's name from another artist intrigued by memory – French writer and film-maker Chris Marker – who said, ‘I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting but rather its lining.'

Almost entirely monochromatic, the series of photographs is enlivened by a solitary image of a single yellow dress. 

Pictured: Self Portrait, by Peter Watkins, 2011. Courtesy The Ravestijn Gallery

Writer: Elly Parsons

Rosalind Fox Solomon has 'Got to Go'
3 February

Recent years have seen New York-based American artist Rosalind Fox Solomon explore poetry, performance, video and installation work, though she's best known as a superlative photographer (not least via her series Portraits in the Time of Aids, first displayed in 1988, and a MoMA solo show two years earlier).

Currently on show at New York's Bruce Silverstein gallery, 'Got to Go' – also the name of her latest book, published by MACK – comprises 30 photographs (and a three-channel video projection featuring 40 image and sound). According to the gallery, the collection 'evokes childhood memories, parents' frantic voices and the early imposition of deranged social codes and expectations', presenting the artist's natural predilection for 'individual efforts of survival against the barrage of circumstance, in far-flung locales or in one’s own home'.

Photography: Rosalind Solomon. Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY

Writer: Tom Howells

The collected works of Howard Greenberg
2 March

Widely credited with helping to cement the canon of 20th century photography, dealer Howard Greenberg has – over the last 30-plus years – donated in excess of 1100 prints to the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (part of the State University of New York at New Paltz).

'On the Street and in the Studio' is a two part show presenting Greenberg's donations as a standalone entity within the museum's collection. On view until 10 June, the 'street' portion of the collection features works by such pioneering practitioners as Jacob Riis, Sid Grossman, Bruce Davidson, Leon Levinstein and members of the photo-journalistic Magnum Photos cohort.

The 'studio' segment of the exhibition – focussing on portraiture – will go on view in the autumn of this year.

Pictured: Untitled (man with beard), by Leon Levinstein, c. 1965. Gift of Howard Greenberg. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Writer: Tom Howells

Inner space
1 March

On the Soft Edge of Space – published by Onomatopee and available now – is a limited edition retrospective overview of the last eight years of work by photographer Marleen Sleeuwits.

An experimental tome that itself represents a new artwork in Sleeuwits' oeuvre, the publication sees the artist proposing 'a four-tiered representation of space: starting with two-dimensional images of space, that are then placed in a scale model, to the photos taken inside this model and, finally, to their convergence in this book' (explains Onomatopee's Freek Lomme).

(More) simply put, Sleeuwits has devised a maze of her own practice: miniature versions of her works hung and shot in a model of a gallery, the various sizes and formats of the reproductions affording both mental and tactile appeal. It's a disorientating collection that demands deeper reading.

On the Soft Edge of Space, by Marleen Sleeuwits, €40, availabel from Onomatopee

Writer: Tom Howells

Colour us astonished
29 February

Best known for his celebrity portraiture and collaborations with arch surrealist Salvador Dalí and Alfred Hitchcock, Philippe Halsman is considered one of the 20th century's finest photographers.

Now the subject of a retrospective at the Kunsthal Rotterdam – appropriately titled 'Astonish Me!' and first staged at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne in 2014 – Halsman imbued his portraits with a spontaneous kineticism via the self-developed technique of 'jumpology' (capturing his subjects mid-leap).

This approach is exemplified most charmingly in the iconic Dalí Atomicus – a beguilingly odd construction of flying cats, watery arcs and silhouetted furniture (plus an astonished SD), now as redolent of Nobuhiko Obayashi's bugglegum horror masterpiece Hausu as it is Halsman's more conventional people pictures.

'Astonish Me!' is on view until 12 June.

Pictured: Dalí Atomicus, by Philippe Halsman, 1948. Courtesy Philippe Halsman Archive/Magnum Photos

Writer: Tom Howells

Davidson at de Young
26 February

One of the past half-century's most influential American photographers, Bruce Davidson – a member of Magnum Photos since 1958 – is best known for his humanist approach to exploring subjects such as the racial unrest of the civil rights movement (in his Time of Change series, 1961–65), youth culture (Brooklyn Gang, 1959), fringe communities (The Dwarf, 1958) and the streets of East Harlem (in 1970's East 100th Street and 1980's Subway), among many others.

Despite this thematic diversity, Davidson's imagery, whether in black and white or colour, is consistently striking, imbued with an engagement with his subjects drawn from influences such as Robert Frank and W Eugene Smith.

Opening tomorrow at San Francisco's de Young gallery, 'Bruce Davidson: Gifts to the Collection' presents 42 of the photographer's images, exhibited for the first time since being bequeathed in 2013.

Pictured: Untitled (Bodybuilder, Venice Beach), by Bruce Davidson, 1964. Courtesy Michael and Joyce Axelrod collection

Writer: Tom Howells

'Fashion Show' at Atlas Gallery
25 February

Now open at London's Atlas Gallery, 'Fashion Show: 60 years of Fashion Photography' is a display of over 40 images charting the medium's development.

The scope of the show is rivetingly broad: from Irving Penn's sharp 1950s portraits of his frequent subject (and future wife) Lisa Fonssagrives; through the form's progression from the 1970s onwards, exemplified in Helmut Newton's athletic nudes; to the supermodel era of the 80s (particularly in a Tony McGee shot of a recently discovered Kate Moss); the evolving practice of Horst P Horst (a defacto show centrepiece being his 1987 image Round The Clock); and on to the disparate contemporary work of Alec Soth and Miles Aldridge.

Of particular note are three large-scale technicolour chromogenic prints by Aldridge, including 2009's chimerical Dinner Party #3.

Pictured: Dinner Party #3, by Miles Aldridge 2009. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Tom Howells

Stein in exile
24 February

'Fred Stein has recorded the central years of our century with a flood of pictorial impressions, and a multitude of faces famous and anonymous, which will illuminate the period forever. In my own historical writings, I have found such photographic material of crucial value in recreating the sense of a bygone time.'

So wrote the American author Herman Wouk of the late German photographer. It's lofty stuff, appropriately repurposed here to outline Stein's appeal – a wealth of work by whom is currently on show at Daytona State College's Southeast Museum of Photography.

'In Exile: Paris and New York. The Photographs of Fred Stein', comprises images Stein took after fleeing Nazi Germany for Paris, and then occupied France for New York. His portrait photography captured everyone from the destitute to the very fashionable, famous and unknown – all shot without elaborate set-ups, with natural lighting and developed from un-manipulated negatives. 

Pictured: Little Italy, New York 1943, by Fred Stein

Writer: Tom Howells

Making sense of history
23 February

Born in Lebanon in 1967 – and subsequently growing up during the country's civil war – Walid Raad is significant multi-disciplinary talent in both the Arabic art and wider conceptual worlds.

An eponymous new show, opening tomorrow at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, represents the first full North American survey of his practice, exploring Raad's focus on investigations into distinctions between fact and fiction, especially in relation to 'the veracity of archives and photographic documents in the public realm [and] the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict'.

The exhibition is curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee chief curator at the ICA, and Katerina Stathopoulou, curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography, at MoMA, New York. It runs until 30 May.

Pictured: Civilizationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves_Plate 922, by Walid Raad, 1958–59/2003. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Writer: Tom Howells

This must be the place
22 February

'This Place', a new exhibition on view at the Brooklyn Museum until 5 June, explores Israel and the West Bank through the lenses of 12 photographers.

The featured artists – Frédéric Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington – each spent time in the area between 2009 and 2012, documenting the people and landscapes they encountered.

The result – exemplified in the show's 600-plus images – seeks to present a non-polarised and humanised view of a region relentlessly typified by conflict and cultural tumult.

Pictured: St Sabas Monastery, Judean Desert, Israel, by Stephen Shore, 20 September 2009. Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York

Writer: Tom Howells

Modern classic
18 February

‘I have so many fond memories of this project, not least meeting and working with all the supermodels of the time who were all incredibly friendly and giving, and a lot of fun.'

Thus spake Webber photographer Steve Harries of his experience documenting Vivienne Westwood's S/S 1994 Café Society Show in Paris. Harries, then a 21-year-old Central St Martins student, was afforded the rare opportunity by fellow photographer Gavin Bond, who offered him an assistant's role.

The show – inspired variously by Van Dyck, and the culture and Charles Worth-conceived fashions of 19th century France – would eventually be regarded as one of the most seminal fashion presentations of our era.

Opening tonight at Webber Gallery Space, 'Vivienne Westwood, Café Society, 1994' presents a plethora of insightful and evocative bromide images of the show, that previously lay untouched for two decades, stored in a shoebox in Harries' home.

Writer: Tom Howells

Sense of self
17 February

Featuring over 500 images drawn from a 150 year period, 'Performing for the Camera' is an expansive new exhibition on performance related photography, opening tomorrow at Tate Modern.

Spanning a broad gamut of themes and applied constructs, the show includes such as early works as shots taken in Nadar's 19th century Parisian studio, of the mime artist Charles Deburau posing as Pierrot the clown (an example of a performance played out purely for the camera); through the theatrical and conceptual work of Carolee Schneemann and Paul McCarthy; nuanced developments of self-identity in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol; and onto the hyper-contemporary world of selfies and social-media disseminated flotsam.

The exhibition is on view in the Tate's Eyal Ofer Galleries until 12 June. 

Pictured: From Window, by Masahisa Fukase, 1974. Courtesy Masahisa Fukase Archives

Writer: Tom Howells

Chartered territory
16 February

'Myth and Majesty: Photographs Picturing the American Southwest' is a new exhibition drawing on the California Museum of Photography's permanent collection, examining imagery shot across the region between 1870 and the 1930s.

Featuring work by practitioners including Adam Clark Vroman, Edward Sheriff Curtis, John Karl Hillers and William Henry Jackson, the photography presented herein explores the landscapes and native peoples of the area from an overwhelmingly Western point of view, imbuing the images with fractious underlying themes of perambulatory mythmaking and inescapable socio-political tension.

The show is split into two parts: the first focuses on the museum's sizeable holding of images by Vroman, a former railroad industry worker, photographer, and bookstore founder; the second comprises 15 photographs depicting the native Hopi people, drawn from the institution's Keystone-Mast Collection of stereoscopic prints and negatives (intriguingly, 3D viewers will be provided to fully appreciate the stereo images).

The exhibition is on view until 21 May.

Pictured: pictographs and undeciphered writing of antiquity, near Adamana, Arizona, produced by Underwood & Underwood, n.d.. Collection of the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, the Keystone-Mast Collection

Writer: Tom Howells

Fernell Franco at Fondation Cartier
15 February

Fernell Franco was one of South America's most respected photographers, though relatively unheralded outside of the continent – a fact Paris' Fondation Cartier hope to alter with 'Cali Clair-Obscur', a first European retrospective of his work.

Born in Colombia's Versalles district, Franco moved to the vibrant city of Cali with his family, aged nine. As a teenager, he worked for the city's Arte Italia photography studio, before joining the advertising agency Nicholls Publicidad in 1968, eventually becoming head of photography at Bogotá's Cromos magazine, and a photojournalist for the newspapers Occidante and El País.

Over this time, he built a formidable body of personal work, 140 photographs (from ten series) of which are brought together for the Fondation Cartier show. Together, they comprise an enlightening, nuanced exploration of Cali's late 20th century urban and cultural identity.

Pictured: Series Prostitutas, by Fernell Franco , 1970–1972. Photography: Fernell Franco. Courtesy Fundación Fernell Franco Cali / Toluca Fine Art, Paris

Writer: Tom Howells

Heart of darkness
12 February

Now on show at Amsterdam's Foam, 'Blanco' is the first major museum-based solo exhibition by Awoiska van der Molen.

The Dutch photographer's new collection takes a remote bucolic realm as its focus, exploring these densely mysterious landscapes by way of low contrast black baryta prints (a defacto thematic flipside to her urban series 'Maintained Ground', shown at Foam 3h in 2007 – though both present a world devoid of actual people).

'Far removed from a society racing ever onwards, she takes time to experience the landscape in a new manner, beyond first appearances,' explains the gallery of the current exhibition. 'She moves slowly there, returns repeatedly and by doing so makes these unknown places her own.'

Pictured: #346-18, by Awoiska van der Molen, 2013. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Tom Howells

'Dark Rooms'
11 February

Fashion turned still-life photographer Nigel Shafran is known for his deep interest in the commonplace. His pictures of bookshelves, confectionary displays and suburban garages have been exhibited widely, including at Tate Modern and the V&A.

The MACK monograph 'Dark Rooms' is Shafran's newest offering. Comprising a sequential series of captured moments, the book continues Shafran's study of domestic scenes. By lending his precise, trained eye and high production value to images of underground escalators and supermarket check-outs, Shafran makes art out of the ordinary.

'Dark Rooms' by Nigel Shafran is released this March by MACK books, £35

Photograph courtesy MACK books and the artist

Writer: Elly Parsons

Sign of the times
10 February

Louis Draper – the hugely influential, Harlem-focused proponent of the Black Aesthetic – referred to his photography as a means of ‘engaged resistance’ to the social inequalities rife across the US in the mid-20th century.

In 1963, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop collective, which strove to give agency to African-American photographic subjects and thus shake off stereotypical conceptions of contemporary social victimhood.

On view until 20 February at New York’s Steven Kasher Gallery, ‘Louis Draper’ is a major retrospective of over 75 prints, taken from the 1950s to the 1980s, featuring portraits of civil rights leaders and artists, Civil Rights-era street photography and images taken in Senegal in 1977–78.

Pictured: Malcolm X, 369th Armory, Harlem, New York City, by Louis Draper, 1964. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Writer: Tom Howells

Lost in the Wilderness
9 February

‘I wanted to make a series of photographs that would not add to the cliches about Native Americans, but would be more lyrical and metaphorical, using ideas around historical landscapes, still life and portraiture,’ says photographer Kalpesh Lathigra of the formative context of his forthcoming show – ‘Lost in the Wilderness’ – at  London’s Webber Represents Gallery Space.

Lathigra’s interest in the plight of marginalised individuals and communities was piqued as a student by reading books such as James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and, in 2006, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and On The Rez by Ian Frazier. The latter drew Lathigra to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota a year later, where he began laying foundations for the work that comprises the exhibition’s titular collection.

Documenting both the reservation’s problems – poverty, addiction, violence – and the determination of its residents to preserve their cultural traditions and social landscapes, the photographer’s work is a nuanced insight into a topic so often marked by pre-conception and stereotype.

'Lost in the Wilderness' opens on 17 March.

Writer: Tom Howells 

Perfect pair
8 February

Opening tomorrow at the Gagosian Gallery's London outpost, 'Avedon Warhol' is the first major exhibition to juxtapose works by two titans of postwar American portraiture.

Though working in distinctly different disciplines, both artists harnessed techniques in repetition and serialisation in their practices (practices that occasionally overlapped).

Rigidly comparing and contrasting works drawn from the broad period of the 1950s through to the 1990s, the show explores such shared themes as social and political power; the acceptance of cultural differences; mortality; and the tumultuous realities of celebrity.

'Avedon Warhol' is on view until 23 April.

Pictured left: Liza Minnelli, by Andy Warhol, 1979. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artsists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Louis Armstrong, musician, Newport Jazz Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, May 3, 1955, by Richard Avedon, 1955. Photography: Richard Avedon. Courtesy the Richard Avdeon Foundation

Writer: Tom Howells

Sugimoto's Sea of Buddha
5 February

The Tokyo-born Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto – a philosophical practitioner who has worked across a diverse range of subject matter in minimalist and conceptual contexts – is the focus of a new show at New York's Pace Gallery.

'Sea of Buddha' features images from the series of the same name (as well as a related video piece and five works from his Seascapes series), first conceived in 1988 but actually shot in 1995. Thirty-six of the series' 48 photographs are on show, each presenting a near identical, hypnotically repetitive staging of  the statues installed in Kyoto’s Sanjῡsangen-dō, a temple dating to 1266 AD – Sugimoto's photographs signifying, explains the gallery, 'the Buddhist practice of replicating manifestations of a deity in order to achieve spiritual merit'.

'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Sea of Buddha' is on view until 5 March.

Pictured: Sea of Buddha 004,005,006, by Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1995. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Writer: Tom Howells

Martin Parr at Wakefield Hepworth
4 February

Open from today at the Hepworth Wakefield, 'The Rhubarb Triangle & Other Stories' is a beguiling-titled retrospective on the work of esteemed British photographer Martin Parr – the largest since his 2002 Barbican exhibition, comprising almost 400 photographs from the past four decades.

Featuring series such as The Non-Conformists, 1975–80; The Last Resort, 1983–85; and Autoportrait, 1991–2012 (among others), the show draws on the theme of global industry networks and issues of consumption; a defacto centrepiece is the titular new collection of photographs focusing on various aspects of the forced-rhubarb producing industry around Wakefield, Rothwell and Morley in West Yorkshire.

Pictured: New Brighton, from The Last Resort, 1983–85. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Tom Howells

Form and function
3 February

'Isn’t art about breaking rules, about challenging existing systems; isn’t it about discovering meaning in things or situations before others see anything in them?'

So asked Peter Lindbergh in a 2012 interview with 59 Magazine. It's a sentiment that spans an eponymous new show of the photographer's work at the Gagosian Gallery's Athens outpost, on view until 23 April.

Imbued with a heightened sense of glamour, physicality and stark sensuality emboldened by the verité approach to his subject matter, the exhibition only serves to strengthen Lindbergh's monolithic status in the world of fashion portraiture (and his place as an inimitable master of the camera in general).

Pictured: Kristen McMenamy, Le Touquet, France, 2009, by Peter Lindbergh, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery

Writer: Tom Howells

Still lives
2 February

Currently showing at the Art Institute of Chicago, 'Nothing Personal' juxtaposes work by Zoe Leonard, Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson to create an exhibition about 'the passage from personhood to persona', the gallery states.

To this end, Leonard's 82-image facsimile invention of a person who never existed – collectively titled The Fae Richards Archive – is displayed alongside Sherman's major Untitled Film Stills series of staged cinematic ephemera, and Simpson's video work Corridor, itself an acted comparison of domestic life in 19th and mid-20th century America.

Writer: Tom Howells

'Varna Road'
1 February

American academic and documentary film maker Janet Mendelsohn studied at the University of Birmingham in the sixties, and now she returns as the focus of Ikon gallery's new exhibition.

Depicting the red-light district of Birmingham, Balsall Health, the 'photo-essay' on display combines Mendelsohn's talents as an academic and an artist. The collection tells the story of a sex worker called 'Kathleen' with whom Mendelsohn formed a close relationship during her time at university.

Encouraged by renowned Birmingham Professor, Stewart Hall, Mendelsohn saw her photography as a method of social field research. Yet there is nothing voyeuristic or exploitative about the way in which 'Kathleen' is captured - nor is there anything sentimental. Instead, a laissez-faire attitude surrounds the collection; the audience simply see the life of a woman - in the park, enjoying the company of her children, at home cooking dinner - in rare, and artistic detail.

Janet Mendelsohn: Varna Road remains at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham until 3 April this year. 

Pictured: Kathleen, by Janet Mendelsohn, c.1968. Courtesy Cadbury Research LIbrary, University of Birmingham

'MoCP at 40'
29 January

As it hits the big 4-0, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibits work from its 14,000-strong permanent collection.

Selected images are displayed chronologically, from nineteenth century analogue prints, to cutting edge digitial manipulations. Highlights include the authoritative eye of Walker Evans, the technical brilliance of Sally Mann, and the boundary-testing portraits of Diane Arbus.

In an adjacent gallery, archived correspondences between museum officials, friends and artists are displayed, revealing the rarely seen, humanistic side of the curatorial process.

MoCP at 40 runs from 28 January - 10 April this year at MoCP, Columbia College, Chicago.

Pictured: Two Girls in Matching Bathing Suits, Coney Island, N.Y. by Diane Arbus, 1967

Writer: Elly Parsons

'The Real Thing'
28 January

Flowers Gallery in New York presents The Real Thing - a collection of work from four female photographers, who experiment with gender roles, sexuality and constructed identity. 

The works are thematically linked, but visually variant. Juno Calypso weaves a narrative through her series of self-portraits, in which she stages herself as a solitary, seductive voyeur called 'Joyce'. On a darker note, Natasha Caruana captures exchanges (sometimes intimate, sometimes otherwise) between herself and married men that she met though online sites devoted to inter-marriage matchmaking. Pixy Liao's revealing vignettes navigate the power play of her own relationship, from the perspective of a young woman growing up in mainland China.

Finally, Melanie Willhide presents the lighter side of intimacy, in a series of forged photographs of made-up tokens passed between lovers, complete with fabricated glue marks, fingerprints and scribbled sweet nothings.

The Real Thing: Juno Calypso, Natasha Caruiana, Pixy Liao & Melanie Willhide runs from 28 January until 27 February 2016. 

Pictured: Tiger Tiger, from the series Married Men by Natasha Caruna, 2008-9. Courtesy the artist

Writer: Elly Parsons

'Cape Light'
27 January

Coinciding with the re-release of the widely successful Cape Light photobook (published in 1987), a new exhibition at Beetles+Huxley in London revisits Joel Meyerowitz’s classic works of colour.

The images portray everyday scenes — an approaching storm, a local grocery store at dusk, the view through a bedroom window. Serene and sensorial, they present a contrast to Meyerowitz’s later, more widely known photographs of chaotic streets, and later still, images of the Twin Towers.

Despite these shifts in subject matter, Meyerowitz has been continually preoccupied with colour. For the photographer, ‘colour describes more things, the sensation I get from things – their surface and colour – my memory of them in other conditions as well as their connotative qualities. Colour plays itself out along a richer band of feelings – more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation.’

'Joel Meyerowitz: Cape Light' is on view until 20 February. The corresponding photobook is published by the Aperture Foundation, £26.81.

Pictured: Provincetown, Dairy Land, by Joel Meyerowitz, 1976. Courtesy the artist and Beetles+Huxley

Writer: Elly Parsons

Pretty vacant
26 January

The spirit of '77 lives on in the photography of Pierre Benain, whose collected gonzo images of the Sex Pistols and other members of punk's first-wave form a new exhibition, 'Never Mind The Sex Pistols', open now at London's Snap Galleries.

Shot over a three-day period spent at Johnny Rotten's Gunter Grove house in April 1978 – visited on assignment for French magazine Actuel a few months after the Pistols split up –  the set is an insightful, humanising exploration of one of the 20th-century's most explosive cultural touch points.

Pictured: Light from above, by Pierre Benain, 1978. Courtesy the artist and Snap Galleries

Surveillance state
25 January

Dragging the unlikely intersections of mass-surveillance and art to sinister new heights, Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg have co-opted Russian governmental public 'security' photography to produce a new book of portraits, Spirit is a Bone, published by MACK.

Designed for facial recognition in crowded public areas – or rather, the surreptitious documenting of passive subjects – the machine's four lenses operate in tandem to create an image more relief-mask than straight portrait photograph.

Broomberg and Chanarin's book is a largely low-res catalogue of individuals 'struggling and often failing to negotiate a civil contract with state power' in an increasingly tech-savvy – and occasionally dystopian – social landscape.

Pictured: Member of a Rural Gymnastics Club

Photography: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, 2015. Courtesy MACK

Writer: Tom Howells

New York minute
22 January

The late Pittsburgh-born, New York-based Saul Leiter largely self-defined as a painter, though the instincts and aesthetic eye developed for that medium bled heavily into his visually striking and occasionally chimerical photographic work.

Specifically, the structural and colour compositions of his New York City snapshots – he eschewed set pieces and high drama, instead locating a wistful poeticism in the streets' everyday happenings – simultaneously evoke more impressionistic artistic forms, as well as the abstract work of Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.

Opening today and on view until 3 April, 'Saul Leiter: Retrospective' comprises a wealth of the artist's early black-and-white and colour work, as well as ephemera and a selection of his paintings.

Pictured: Snow, by Saul Leiter, 1960. Photography: Saul Leiter. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Writer: Tom Howells

Life in colour
21 January

The late Jacques Henri Lartigue is best known for his timeless, kinetic and energetically joyous black-and-white images of animal, people, cars and aeroplanes in motion. But a new show – 'Life in Colour' – at Amsterdam's photographic institution Foam reveals a lesser known aspect of his extensive body of work (despite the fact that almost 40 per cent of Lartigue's 100k-plus back catalogue of images was rendered in colour).

The collection on show includes photography spanning the breadth of Lartigue's eight decade career – from the first image he took, as an eight-year-old in 1902; to his final work, captured in 1986 at the age of 92 – much of which is drawn from his own personal albums.

Pictured: Les mains de Florette Brie le Neflier, by Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1961. Courtesy Ministère de la Culture – France / AAJHL

Writer: Tom Howells

The magic in the mundane: Hiro at Hamiltons
21 January

Opening this Friday at Hamiltons Gallery's Mayfair hub, 'Hiro' is a long-awaited retrospective of work by the eponymous Japanese photographer – the gallery's first in two decades.

Hiro's magisterial eye for fashion, still-life and portrait photography first came to fruition with his time spent under Alexey Brodovitch in the 1950s and 60s, as a contract photography for Harper's Bazaar (a position he held for a further decade, and a publication he still accepts assignments from). He quickly rose to prominence as one of the industry's pre-eminent practitioners, feted for his ability to transpose mundane objects or specific organic figures into vivid, chimerical realms, by way of outré lighting and colour effects, unconventional staging and inspired juxtapositions.

'Hiro’s world encompasses the separate domains of fashion, portraiture, still-life and studies of the human body,' explains the lauded photography writer and curator Mark Holborn. 'His eye scrutinises men and machines with equal focus.’

Pictured: Jerry Hall, Saint Martin, French West Indies, 1975. Photography: Hiro

Writer: Tom Howells

Sign of the times
19 January

The late Roger Mayne was a giant of post-war British photography, largely building his reputation around kinetic, insightful collections of images documenting the working class streets and residents of West London in the 1950s and 60s, in particular the shots captured around Southam Street in North Kensington (later largely demolished to make way for Erno Goldfinger's extant Trellick Tower). His photography proved so redolent of the era that by 1959 Vogue had begun using Mayne's images to illustrate articles on teenage styles.

A new show at Manhattan's Gitterman Gallery displays a wealth of Mayne's London photography, as well as similarly-themed images from Leeds, Glasgow and Dublin. 'Roger Mayne' is on view until 23 January.

Pictured: Bomb Site, Portland Road, North Kensington, London, 1958

Photography copyright the Estate of Roger Mayne. Courtesy Gitterman Gallery

Writer: Tom Howells

Francesca Woodman at FOAM
18 January

On show until 9 March at Amsterdam's FOAM museum, 'Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel' is a broad retrospective on the late photographer's work.

Tragically committing suicide in 1981 at the age of 22, Woodman left behind an extensive body of imagery, of which she was almost always the subject (in the instances where her images featured other people, they always functioned as stand-ins for the artist herself). Exploring theme such as corporality, representation, gender and sexuality – using decaying, lived-in settings as the backdrop – Woodman consistently appears either naked or conspicuously in the throes of attempting to to conceal herself. The result is a chimerical, symbolic oeuvre that has proved hugely influential.

Pictured: Untitled, by Francesca Woodman, New York, 1979. Courtesy Betty and George Woodman

Writer: Tom Howells

'Beyond Maps and Atlases'
15 January 

Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen introduces her new tome, Beyond Maps and Atlases, available this month from MACK.

The concept has moving beginnings, germinating and finally flourishing during a time of personal anguish in which van Manen lost her husband. Formerly a portrait photographer, van Manen moved to Ireland and developed a new emphasis within her photography in which she ‘dispensed with the people and reflected on the atmosphere’. She searched for meaning in the mythical history of the Emerald Isle, finding comfort in the ‘mystery and endlessness’ of the sparse terrain. She immersed herself in the words of Seamus Heaney, John McGahern and John Banville, capturing something of their poetic vision of the Irish landscape within her images. 

Van Manen began her career as a fashion photographer but in 1977 tired of the throwaway pace of this trend crazed industry. She turned for inspiration to the documentary photographers Robert Frank and Josef Koudelka to help her explore new routes into creating imagery. She began using her photographs as a means of establishing relationships between herself and her subjects, which helped her develop a unique and intimate style. 

Photography: Bertien van Manen 2016. Courtesy MACK

Writer: Rhiannon McGregor

'Guise and Dolls' – Warhol and Mapplethorpe at Wadsworth Atheneum
14 January

A new exhibition at Hartford, Connecticut's Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art will pair the works of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe for the first time. The show will investigate the turbulent era through which both artists lived and worked, in which notions of the 'self' – relating to gender, sexuality and beauty – all underwent huge changes as the gay rights movement flourished.

'Guise and Dolls' explores the 'particular disguises, characters and ambiguous personalities' that both Warhol and Mapplethorpe employed in their work, with a particular focus on their portraits of each other. The show will bring together a vast number of art works, ranging from paintings to throw away goods, which have been taken from prominent series in the artists' careers.

Warhol's 1975 'Ladies and Gentlemen' series of drag queen portraits will feature, along with Mapplethorpe's 1938 photographic series and book 'Lady: Lisa Lyon', which records the female bodybuilding title holder in a number of 'gender-bending' costumes.

Pictured: Patti Smith, 1986

Writer: Rhiannon McGregor

'A distinct style' – Christer Strömholm at Pace/MacGill
13 January

A new exhibition at Pace/MacGill Gallery brings together a selection of works by Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm. Featuring intimate portraits from his series Les Amies de Place Blanche, 1958–68, which follows members of Paris’ transgender community, together with images from his French and Spanish travels, this display showcases a range of works by this revered artist.

Born in 1918, Strömholm was one of the first to realise the expressive qualities of photography, highlighting the line and tone of his subjects rather than their three-dimensionality. For this reason, despite the ready availability of colour film in the 1940s, Strömholm continued to work almost exclusively in black and white for the whole of his career. Although, he was upheld by his peers as a pioneer from as early as 1965 when he exhibited 'To the memory of myself' at NK department store in Stockholm, it was not until 1986 that he received widespread recognition from the public.

The artist’s love of travelling led him to spend much of his time during the late 1950s and early 1960s in Paris, where he developed a ‘distinct style of street photography’. In 1983, Strömholm wrote a book on Les Amies de Place Blanche, in which he asserted his connection to his subjects, which transcended mere working relationships.

'These are images of people whose lives I shared and whom I think I understood,' he wrote. 'These are images of women – biologically born as men – that we call “transsexuals”. As for me, I call them “my friends of place Blanche".'

'Christopher Strömholm' is on view until 20 February.

Pictured: Untitled, by Christopher Strömholm, 1955

Writer: Rhiannon McGregor

Metropole
12 January

'Metropole' was a term originally coined to describe London’s relationship with the rest of the British Empire. London existed as a nucleus of power, claiming its unequivocal position at the top of the hierarchy despite a relatively small size. The British Empire is no longer a tangible entity but its influence shapes the new global power; ‘global capital’.

Lewis Bush's book of the same name documents night-time walks through the city. Routes have been mapped out in such a way that they take in the ‘numerous new corporate high rises and luxury residential blocks as they are constructed and occupied’.

The detrimental effect of capitalism on the infrastructure of London is highlighted as the viewer progresses through the series. The structures become ‘threatening, obliterating scale, perspective and orientation’ to create the disorientating sensation that we are all becoming strangers in our own home.

An exhibition, on view at London Metropolitan University's Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design in Whitechapel, sees Bush’s imagery re-mastered as large-scale prints, created using large format plotters more commonly associated with producing architectural plans.

‘Metropole’ is on view until 22 January.

Photography courtesy the artist

Writer: Rhiannon McGregor

David Bowie: 8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016
11 January

David Bowie has died at the age of 69, after an 18 month battle with cancer.

The news appeared on the artist's official Facebook feed early in the morning of 11 January, reading, 'David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.' The news was confirmed on Twitter by his son, film director Duncan Jones, shortly after.

The man born David Robert Jones was a singular icon in contemporary pop culture; a true polymath whose practice incorporated music, film, fashion and art across a career spanning over four decades. His most recent album, Blackstar, was released just two days before his death – on his 69th birthday – to overwhelming critical acclaim. A record of unerring strangeness, it further typifies the restlessly, relentlessly groundbreaking output of a true creative.

'He always did what he wanted to do,' said longtime producer Tony Visconti. 'And he wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way. His death was no different from his life – a work of Art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn’t, however, prepared for it. He was an extraordinary man, full of love and life. He will always be with us. For now, it is appropriate to cry.'

Photography: David James. Courtesy the David Bowie Archive 2012, C Studiocanal Films Ltd and V&A Images via Bloomberg

Writer: Tom Howells

21 Pictures
8 January

They say that variety is the spice of life, and photographer Peter Hujar certainly proves that to be the case in his photographs for new exhibition '21 Pictures', which has just opened at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Prior to his premature death in 1987, Hujar spent his 30-year career exploring a plethora of different subject matter, embracing everything from street portraiture to landscape photography to portrayals of animals. The American photographer was perhaps best known for his black and white portraits of the New York intellectual elite – people that Hujer counted among his close-knit circle of friends and admirers. The collection features intimate shots of personalities like Paul Thek (1965), Susan Sontag (1975), Diana Vreeland (1975), and Ethyl Eichelberger (1983), along with a self-portrait taken in 1974. As well as these well-known images, '21 Pictures' also shines a light on some of Hujer's less recognisable photographs, including dramatic seascapes and captivating portraits of animals. The works will be exhibited side-by-side, offering a chocolate box assortment of visual imagery, which explores themes of 'sexuality, death, and life'. Until 5 March.

Pictured: Divine at the Metropolitan Museum, 1976

Writer: Rhiannon McGregor

Life and death
7 January

Oscar-winning artist/film-maker Steve McQueen's fifth exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris (and the gallery's first for 2016) comprises a two-channel synchronised video, Ashes, and a new neon light installation. The former explores two 'narratives': the first depicting a young Grenadian man, sat at the prow of a boat on the Caribbean, playfully taunting the camera in a pared down form of cinema-verité; the second a Grenadian cemetery, a stark, morbid flip-side to conventional picture-postcard conceptions of the island. The juxtaposition – of 'life and death' and 'boundless… and enclosed space' – serves to evoke, explains writer Jean Fisher, the intense heterotopias conceptualised by Michael Foucalt. Until 27 February.

Pictured: Ashes, 2014–15 (installation view from the 56th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – la Biennale di Venezia, 2015). Photography: Roberto Marosi. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Writer: Tom Howells

The love life of plants
6 January

Anticipating spring, Joseph Bellows Gallery in California presents 'Dr. Dain L. Tasker: Floral Studies' - an important collection of early x-ray photographs - which runs from 9 January to 19 February this year.

When radiology was in its formative phase, Dr. Tasker was chief radiologist at Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles. Inspired by the x-ray image making process he mastered at work, he was one of the first to translate the scientific practise into an artistic one, with his delicate renderings of garden flowers. Dr. Tasker had the foresight to see that the x-ray process would lend itself beautifully to fragile floral structures, resulting in this collection of scientifically exciting images.

As well as being uniquely accurate records, there's no mistaking the romantic tone of the radiographs, echoed by Dr. Tasker's sentiment, 'Flowers are the expression of the love life of plants'.

Pictured: A Rose, by Dr. Dain L. Tasker, 1936. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery

Writer: Elly Parsons

Street theatre
5 January

Opening this Thursday (7 January) at New York's Laurence Miller Gallery, 'Helen Levitt: Twists and Turns' collects many of the photographer's kinetic social images taken on the streets of New York City over a 60 year period.

Frequently making children the focus of her images, Levitt captures her subjects' florid, intuitive gestures, as well as street scenes that appear unerringly surreal plucked from their banal surroundings.

'What she captured was every-day people performing a gritty yet graceful dance on the stage afforded by the sidewalks and stoops of New York City,' explains the gallery.

Pictured: NYC 1940, by Helen Levitt. Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery

Writer: Tom Howells

New adventures in lo-fi
4 January

On view at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art until 7 February, 'Rachel Rose: Everything and More' is the American artist's inaugural solo exhibition in her home country, taking place in the museum's Kaufman Gallery.

Deriving its title from a book by David Foster Wallace, the show comprises an eponymous new video work exploring human perception in the cold void of outer space, structured around interviews the artist conducted with NASA astronaut David Wolf about his experiences in the immediate cosmos. 

These were laid over oil-based visual abstractions created by Rose herself – extremely lo-fi iterations of the images of space she used as inspiration – and interspersed with music as diverse as warped Aretha Franklin numbers and EDM, to create 'a work that goes beyond its constituent parts to address ideas of human perception through direct experience and an emotive sensibility', says the gallery.

Pictured: Everything and More (still), by Rachel Rose, 2015. Courtesy Pilar Corrias, London

Writer: Tom Howells