9 Photography Exhibitions to See This Summer time — 2026

Camille Vivier — Paris

For over twenty years, Camille Vivier has shrouded the pages of i-D, Dazed, and Purple in an air of fantasy and delusion, working in a free custom of surrealist vogue images stretching again to Man Ray. Now, an exhibition in Paris brings her work to museum partitions for the primary time. Whether on project for Cartier, collaborating with feminine body-builders, or dabbling in equestrian portraiture, the French photographer imbues her topics with an alien magnificence and a dreamy eroticism that’s bracingly bereft of conference.

Camille Vivier at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, by September 20, 2026

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026 — France

The annual Rencontres d’Arles, now in its fifty-seventh version, opens within the sultry days of early July and gives an array of exhibitions unfold throughout venues within the historical city dotted with Roman ruins and beloved by Van Gogh. This 12 months’s version options the exhibition Ghana! Dreaming Independence, 1957–1976, with photographs by James Barnor and Paul Strand, who documented an unbiased Ghana (on the invitation of its newly minted chief Kwame Nkrumah), and Carlos Idun-Tawiah, a recent maker of trendy, at occasions retro-inflected imagery. Other standouts embrace meditations on the pure world by the likes of Edward Steichen and Lisa Oppenheim, a thematic present devoted to animals, and an exhibition by the under-the-radar Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo shedding mild on his progressive photo-romans.

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026, at numerous websites throughout Arles, July 6 by October 4, 2026.

Yves Saint Laurent — New York

Yves Saint Laurent all the time understood images as not solely a advertising and marketing software, but in addition a daring extension of his artwork. As Yves Saint Laurent and Photography argues, the couturier was a driving drive behind among the twentieth century’s most ingenious and experimental image-makers, from William Klein and Horst P. Horst to Guy Bourdin and Juergen Teller. His commissions yielded iconic photographs like Richard Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants from 1955 and Helmut Newton’s noirish 1975 photographs of Le Smoking, but in addition hidden gems comparable to Bert Stern’s 1967 {photograph} of Twiggy in a night costume, leaning towards a tv monitor broadcasting her personal close-up—images that seize you by the satin lapels.

Yves Saint Laurent and Photography on the International Center of Photography, New York, by September 28, 2026

Widline Cadet — Milwaukee

Working throughout images, video, and set up, Widline Cadet’s ongoing collection Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance) contends with Black diasporic life and survival. Since 2017, as journey to her dwelling nation in Haiti turned more and more restricted, she turned her digital camera towards herself to create what she’s referred to as a “living archive.” Currents 40 at Milwaukee Art Museum marks Cadet’s first solo museum exhibition within the US, and presents meticulously staged scenes: a framed archival image sits atop a moody scene of a yard; washed-out images are strapped to a C-stand within the water, a determine with their again turned stoically observing the set up. Across the exhibition, Cadet resists the boundaries of mounted narratives by leaning into extra open-ended tableaux that bridge between previous and current.

Currents 40: Widline Cadet at Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by August 9, 2026

Lucas Samaras — Chicago

Lucas Samaras’s nice topic was Lucas Samaras. Though a staple of New York’s artwork scene starting within the Sixties, the Greek-born artist by no means dedicated to a single college or type, as an alternative forming a one-man motion—sprung from the confines of his condo—that expanded the boundaries of self-depiction by work, installations, performances, and a dizzying array of different media. An exhibition in Chicago focuses on his images, together with the well-known Photo-Transformations collection (1973–76), by which he manipulated the moist emulsions of Polaroid movie to create psychedelic selfies avant la lettre.

Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking on the Art Institute of Chicago, by July 20, 2026

Greater New York 2026 — Queens

Greater New York returns to MoMA PS1 for the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, surveying fifty-three artists and collectives dwelling and dealing throughout the town’s 5 boroughs and past, with an emphasis on early and mid-career voices. Photography is especially properly represented, and Devlin Claro’s lush C-prints of Queens are a spotlight. In one {photograph}, blades of glory (2026), a person sits on a lady’s lap outdoors a storefront, their legs and arms crisscrossed, the pink of his curler skates echoing the colour of her hair. The precision of gesture, costume, and shade towards the on a regular basis backdrop lets the picture linger memorably between commentary and stagecraft.

Greater New York 2026 at MoMA PS1, New York, by August 17, 2026

Harold Edgerton — Cambridge

A bullet piercing an apple, a drop of milk splashing onto a pink pan, each section of Bobby Jones’s golf swing: When the engineer and researcher Harold “Doc” Edgerton first utilized the stroboscopic flash to high-speed images, it allowed him to disclose issues beforehand invisible to the bare eye. A retrospective on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the place Edgerton pioneered his method within the Nineteen Thirties, delights in such microsecond spectacles, exploring how his affect rippled past science and into the realms of artwork, struggle, and Hollywood.

Freezing Time: Edgerton and the Beauty of the Machine Age on the MIT Museum, by October 8, 2026

Triennial of Photography Hamburg

“To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice,” wrote bell hooks, a lodestar of the ninth Triennial of Photography Hamburg. At a time of deeply fractured international politics, the creative director Mark Sealy has convened a transnational group of photographers who supply a love letter to the medium that doubles as a blazing polemic. The citywide pageant consists of themed exhibitions, solo exhibits for younger artists together with Melike Kara, Abdulhamid Kircher, and Nina Porter, and an exhibition celebrating the centennial of the triennial’s late founder, F. C. Gundlach, whose exuberant vogue footage replicate the shifting tides of fashion and society.

Alliance, Infinity, Love—in the Face of the Other at numerous venues in Hamburg, by September 22, 2026

Paolo Roversi — Spain

Known for his painterly images, Paolo Roversi started his profession within the Nineteen Seventies with assignments for the Associated Press, garnering the eye of legendary artwork director Peter Knapp of Elle journal. At the guts of these photographs are shut relationships with Christian Dior, Romeo Gigli, Rei Kawakubo, and most famously, Yohji Yamamoto—collaborations which have allowed Roversi to repeatedly problem and renew his follow. Roversi selected Doubts because the title for his profession survey on the MOP Foundation within the Spanish port metropolis of A Coruña as a gesture to uncertainty as an “open door to creativity and imagination.” 

Paolo Roversi: Doubts on the MOP Foundation, A Coruña, Spain, June 20–September 20, 2026