11 Photography Exhibitions to See This Winter – 2026

Michella Bredahl — Amsterdam

Having begun a modeling profession at fourteen years outdated, Michella Bredahl felt the intrusions of a digital camera’s gaze early on. By distinction, her personal portraits of younger girls, many with unstable upbringings that mirror her personal, are grounded in belief and collaboration. In the Danish photographer and filmmaker’s first museum exhibition, portraits of pole dancers, new moms, creative friends, and chosen household derive their energy from shows of unguarded tenderness. “She had a specific vulnerability,” Bredahl has mentioned of Sybilla, a buddy and recurring topic. “It’s as if there was always a tear in her eye.”

Michella Bredahl: Rooms We Made Safe at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, by way of February 8, 2026

Boris Mikhailov — London

A towering determine in Ukrainian artwork, Boris Mikhailov absolutely embraced images after being fired from an engineering job in 1969, when the KGB realized he was creating nude portraits of his spouse within the manufacturing facility’s darkroom. It’s a becoming origin story for this inveterate rule breaker, whose images of on a regular basis life in Kharkiv—each behind the Iron Curtain and after its collapse—skewer ideology with a bracing intimacy and a sly amateurism. Planned earlier than the Russian invasion, Mikhailov’s largest exhibition to this point explores the complexities of Ukrainian id at a time when the nation is combating for its future.

Boris Mikhailov: Ukraine Diary on the Photographers’ Gallery, London, by way of February 22, 2026

Alejandro Cartagena — San Francisco

Between 2011 and 2012, Alejandro Cartagena waited each morning on an overpass in Monterrey, Mexico, leaning over to {photograph} day laborers sprawled throughout numerous pickup beds, the place they learn newspapers, scrolled their telephones, or napped throughout their commute into the town heart. Carpoolers exemplifies Cartagena’s cumulative, serial method to visible storytelling, in addition to his mixture of political critique and deadpan humor. The artist’s first museum retrospective—coinciding with a monograph revealed by Aperture—reveals the absurdity surrounding border tradition, disastrous growth schemes, and modern image-making itself, lending new credence to André Breton’s declare that Mexico is “the Surrealist place par excellence.”

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, by way of April 19, 2026

Ralph Eugene Meatyard — Atlanta

In 1950, a twenty-five-year-old optician named Ralph Eugene Meatyard purchased his first digital camera, and what began as a strategy to doc his new household led to an incredible addition to the historical past of outdated, bizarre America. Part of a close-knit inventive neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky, Meatyard usually photographed his spouse and youngsters, who gamely portrayed the figments of his Southern Gothic creativeness utilizing masks, dolls, and different props. The prints on view within the High Museum’s The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard are drawn from a monograph that the photographer assembled on the finish of his life—tragically lower quick in 1972—and supposed because the end result of his peculiar imaginative and prescient.

The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard on the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, by way of May 10, 2026

Photography and the Black Arts Movement — Los Angeles

Flourishing within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, the Black Arts motion fashioned a revolutionary cultural entrance towards the marginalization of Black life and artwork within the United States. This substantial present, curated by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, is the primary to historicize the function of images in what is commonly known as the Second Renaissance, whose picture makers—amongst them Barkley L. Hendricks together with his pioneering portraiture that commemorated on a regular basis Black folks—superior a brand new visible language of self-representation and neighborhood constructing.

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

William Eggleston — New York 

For a reduction from doomscrolling, strive The Last Dyes, an exhibition of William Eggleston’s incandescent shade images from the Seventies. The automobiles, meals, bedrooms, and fuel stations that might in any other case be unremarkable are, on this elegant exhibition at David Zwirner, elevated to icons of Americana, and burned into reminiscence by way of a rare vary of colours. Eggleston ushered shade images into creative consciousness precisely fifty years in the past together with his controversial 1976 solo present on the Museum of Modern Art, New York—shade being related, on the time, with the lurid commercialism of print promoting. The poisonous and arduous dye-transfer course of which Eggleston made well-known, and which an explainer on the Zwirner web site helpfully illustrates, renders banal scenes each surprising and superb—a crimson sweater, a blue ceiling, a sundown like cotton sweet. But Kodak stopped making the chemical substances within the Nineties, and the works on show are the final of the dyes ever to be made with the remaining provide. The latest iPhone digital camera has nothing on the expertise of encountering these prints in particular person, every one a vivid dream that’s all too actual. 

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes at David Zwirner, New York, by way of March 7, 2026

Jeff Wall — Toronto

It’s arduous to overstate the affect of Jeff Wall’s breakthrough photos: staged narrative images mounted in gentle packing containers that, once they debuted in Vancouver within the late Seventies, confounded and thrilled viewers. They nonetheless thrill. Exploring reminiscence, warfare, and on a regular basis life, his post-truth tableaux demand a stage of sustained consideration vanishingly uncommon as we speak, every one ensuing from meticulous location scouting, rehearsals, a number of shoots, and post-production magic. If visiting this present in Toronto—his first main Canadian survey in twenty-five years—feels slightly like going to the cinema, that’s not by mistake. As the artist famously put it, “I guess you could say I’m like a director, but my movies have only one frame.”

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

Nan Goldin — London and Paris

Throughout her profession, Nan Goldin has photographed her buddies, lovers, and household she made for herself. Her candid, visceral images captured a world teeming with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and introduced essential visibility and consciousness to the AIDS disaster. First revealed by Aperture in 1986, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has had a profound affect on images and visible tradition world wide. Marking the fortieth anniversary of Ballad, two new exhibitions discover its undimmed depth and towering affect. In London, Gagosian Gallery presents Ballad in full for the primary time within the United Kingdom, and later this spring, a retrospective dedicated to her movies and slideshows will fill the Grand Palais in Paris.

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

Dana Lixenberg — Paris

Portraiture has been central to Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg’s documentary follow for greater than three many years, and it likewise anchors her newest solo exhibition, American Images. Bringing collectively work she has made within the United States because the early Nineties, the exhibition spans two flooring of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and ranges from portraits of popular culture icons corresponding to Tupac Shakur to Polaroid check photographs and pictures from her incisive examinations of race and sophistication, together with The Last Days of Shishmaref (2007) and Jeffersonville, Indiana (1997–2004). The museum’s high ground is devoted to Imperial Courts (1993–ongoing), a physique of labor begun within the Nineties in regards to the residents of a Los Angeles housing undertaking, to which Lixenberg continues to return as we speak.

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

Janna Ireland — Chicago

Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles explores the final residential undertaking designed by visionary American architect Bruce Goff. Ireland’s images delve into the origin story of the Al Struckus House, commissioned in 1979 for the engineer, woodworker, and artwork collector Al Struckus. Located in Woodland Hills, in northwestern Los Angeles, the four-story cylindrical construction options natural components, from radical ground joists to rotating round closets, that create an open but dizzying ambiance, reflecting the architect’s eccentric aptitude in addition to the character of its proprietor. As Ireland notes, the home is “organic and singular in form, it is a shining example of Bruce Goff’s design philosophy, moving forward through time unimpeded, always somehow in the ‘continuous present.’” The exhibition enhances the retrospective Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, additionally on view this spring on the Art Institute.

Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles on the Art Institute of Chicago by way of May 18, 2026

Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré — New York

In Latitudes, two distinctive but complementary photographers current meditations on reminiscence and place in Côte d’Ivoire. François-Xavier Gbré, who was born in France and has labored throughout West Africa, is understood for his exact examination of how structure varieties a dwelling archive of a rustic’s aspirations. His latest sequence, Radio Ballast (2025), follows a rail line that connects Abidjan to Niger. He spent a 12 months photographing its ageing infrastructure: practice automobiles, stations, and rusted monitor, towards the backdrop of the verdant Ivorian panorama. Nuits Balnéaires is a Grand-Bassam–primarily based visible artist who started his profession within the trend business. His work explores the multicultural nature of Côte d’Ivoire’s southeastern shores and its deep connection the atmosphere. Inspired by the Nzima and Agni-Bona folks’s perception in a return to a single human origin on the finish of life, his sequence Eboro (2025) takes viewers on a metaphorical journey to seek out his ancestors—and himself. The wealthy, cinematic palette of colours in Eboro evoke nostalgia and quiet longing. Together, these works supply a exceptional take a look at how Côte d’Ivoire’s previous—non secular, cosmological, and ecological—seeps into its current.

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