A Information To July 2026 Photography Festivals & Exhibitions

Les Rencontres d’Arles, Cortona On The Move, BAQĀ/بقا (The Unforgotten) by Mursal Mohammadi at The Image Centre, Photography from A to Z at MEP, and Minor Tides at Centre De La Photographie Genève are among the many pictures occasions to go to subsequent month.

Arles, France / 6 July – 4 October

The 57th version of the Rencontres d’Arles embraces complexity and attentiveness by means of pictures, utilizing the medium to uncover hidden narratives, problem conventions, and provide new views on an unsettling world. The competition honors main masters like William Klein, Martine Barrat, Ming Smith, and Harry Gruyaert, whereas mapping out a world dialogue targeted on reminiscence, liberation, and identification throughout Africa and the Mediterranean. Through deeply private and historic exhibitions, this system highlights how pictures acts as a fluid area for reimagining geographies and unearthing suppressed histories.

Simultaneously, this version focuses on the dwelling world and the transformation of the photographic medium itself. Exhibitions like Animal Model look at humanity’s relationship with different species, whereas modern artists similar to Meghann Riepenhoff and Lisa Oppenheim deal with pictures as a dwelling, evolving course of formed by pure and natural forces. Rounded out by a devoted showcase of youngsters’s photobooks and the Louis Roederer Discovery Award for rising expertise, the competition finally unites numerous eras and geographies beneath a shared mission: utilizing pictures to not freeze the world, however to disclose its persistence and assist us see it anew.

Check the complete program on the competition’s website.

Cortona, Italy / 16 July – 1 November

Marking a brand new chapter with journalist and curator Renata Ferri, together with director Veronica Nicolardi, the brand new version of the Cortona International Photography Festival presents Beautiful Country. In an period overwhelmed by pictures, the competition serves as an incomplete atlas of Italy over current many years, encouraging viewers to decelerate and observe the world’s fragile stability. Blending the romantic spirit of the historic Grand Tour with rigorous modern documentary inquiry, the occasion options greater than thirty exhibitions and cross-generational dialogues that seize a posh nation the place surprise and disenchantment intertwine.

A central spotlight of the competition is Peninsula, a commissioned mission bringing collectively ten modern artists who have interaction with the nation’s liminal landscapes, constructing upon the legacy of the seminal 1984 Viaggio in Italia exhibition. Featuring a large listing of worldwide photographers, the competition finally presents a collective area for reflection. It celebrates pictures’s poetic and enduring energy to chart areas, spark the creativeness, and invite audiences into the deep journey of wanting.

Find out extra on their website.

Toronto, Canada / 24 June – 1 August

BAQĀ / بقا (The Unforgotten) is an intimate exhibition that explores the intergenerational trauma, silence, and reminiscence surrounding the 1997 kidnapping of the artist’s uncle, Baqauddin, throughout the civil struggle in Afghanistan. Despite years of determined looking out by his household, no solutions have been ever obtained, leaving his destiny unknown. Born after his disappearance, the artist grew up along with his framed {photograph} as a vivid image of absence, studying about him by means of tales handed down over time. The mission’s title, derived from the phrase for endurance or survival, displays how this profound loss continues to form household life, home areas, and the physique throughout generations.

The multi-sensory set up integrates movie, textiles, and sound to research how households carry emotional inheritance. At its middle is a movie combining marriage ceremony footage, archives, and private interviews, accompanied by an intimate soundscape of oral storytelling and the artist’s father singing as types of therapeutic. The exhibition additionally incorporates a textile piece embroidered with conventional Afghan patterns, which underscores the important position ladies play in sustaining reminiscence and carrying emotional labor. By preserving unaltered archival paperwork and pictures with deep care, Mohammadi goals to interrupt the silence and honor a historical past of political violence and enduring loss.

Read extra on The Image Centre’s website.

Paris, France / 10 June – 13 September

Curated by Clothilde Morette, Photography from A to Z is an accessible exhibition that ditches linear chronology and hierarchy in favor of an associative, alphabet-based structure. Produced for the bicentenary of pictures, it creates an surprising dialogue between the Neuflize OBC Corporate Collection and the MEP collections. Inspired by John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing, the show prioritizes visible juxtaposition and enigma over formal clarification, permitting stunning pairings – like LIFE journal alongside Kodak advertisements – to kind playful, nostalgic narratives that problem viewer expectations.

Each letter on this inventive lexicon introduces a gaggle of conversing works, supported by texts and anecdotes that illuminate somewhat than restrict the artwork. Among the exhibited artists are Elina Brotherus, Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, Alexandra Catiere, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Claudine Doury, Agnès Geoffray, Ralph Gibson, David Goldblatt, Nan Goldin, Florence Henri, Candida Höfer, Frank Horvat, Malik Sidibé, Patrick Tosani, and extra.

Learn extra on their website.

Pretoria, South Africa / 14 May – 13 February 2027

We Didn’t Choose To Be Born Here is the primary main institutional exhibition by Botswana-born artist Thero Makepe. The ongoing mission blends staged portraiture, documentary pictures, reenactments, and archival supplies to intertwine Makepe’s private household lineage with the broader socio-political histories of Botswana and South Africa. The exhibition juxtaposes the contrasting paths of his maternal members of the family beneath Apartheid, highlighting his grandfather Hippolytus Mothopeng, who fled to Botswana to dwell peacefully as a city clerk and jazz musician, alongside his grandfather’s activist uncle, Zephaniah Mothopeng, who was imprisoned on Robben Island because the president of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.

The mission’s title captures the collective household mindset throughout eras of political disaster, separation, and migration. Serving as the inspiration for each this exhibition and an upcoming photobook to be launched by PhMuseum in 2026, the work traces over half a century of endurance, drawing direct traces to Makepe’s personal modern activism throughout the 2016 #FeesMustFall college protests in Cape Town. Additionally, Makepe makes use of a non-linear narrative to have a good time his household’s lasting kindred bonds, structuring the varied photographic languages to evoke a profound sense of hope, triumph, and resilience regardless of a historical past of profound adversity.

Find out extra about Makepe’s solo present on Javett-UP’s website.

Amsterdam, Netherlands / 6 June – 28 August

Reflecting the worldwide attain and power of rising pictures, the 15 chosen Foam Talents deal with essential modern themes together with political oppression, grief, battle, and technological innovation. Across their numerous practices, a central give attention to “home” repeatedly surfaces – not as a hard and fast bodily location, however as an evolving community of recollections, relationships, and emotional connections that people form and carry inside themselves to construct resilience towards international uncertainty.

Exhibiting artists are Sean Cham, Yiding Chen, Sara De Brito Faustino, Liubov Durakova, Nad E Ali, Nazanin Hafez, Paola Jimenez, Ramona Jingru Wang, Daniel Mebarek, Ali Monis Naqvi, Alvin Ng, Adam Rouhana, Ammar Yassir, Farren van Wyk and Sasha Velichko. 

More data on Foam’s website.

Barcelona, Spain / 22 July – 26 July

Gathering over 300 worldwide artists and pictures fans, the Experimental Photo Festival creates a collaborative area devoted to exploring each side of experimental pictures, from customized digital camera creation to different printing processes and photobook manufacturing.

Built on core ideas of horizontality, gender equality, and transparency, the five-day summer time occasion incorporates a packed itinerary of conferences, workshops, portfolio critiques, and exhibitions operating from morning till midnight.

Find out extra on the competition’s website.

Geneva, Switzerland / 2 July – 10 October

Curated by Danaé Panchaud, Minor Tides brings collectively the portraiture-focused practices of three worldwide authors to critically re-examine colonial histories and reclaim collective identification. Egyptian artist Lina Geoushy presents a cinematic black-and-white self-portrait collection impressed by mid-Twentieth-century Egyptian cinema that honors pioneering historic ladies. Meanwhile, German artist Sarah Jade Sullivan explores post-colonial Caribbean identification in Hairouna, utilizing fashion-forward portraiture, archives, and interviews to depict how the youthful era in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines navigates hybrid cultural roots and financial migration. South African and Dutch artist Farren van Wyk presents a collaborative collection of household portraits that subverts the racist, colonial-era pictures used throughout apartheid to justify oppression.

Together, these three main initiatives replicate the exhibition’s title, symbolizing the almost imperceptible but highly effective undercurrents driving profound, transformative social change by means of modern artwork.

Read extra on Centre De La Photographie Genève’s website.

Dublin, Ireland / 30 May – 5 July

Spanning a decade, Shane Hynan’s Beneath | Beofhód – which means “life under the sod” in Irish – deeply engages with the social, cultural, and environmental evolution of the peatlands within the Irish Midlands. Tracing the realm’s transition from industrial peat extraction – which as soon as drove native economics and cultural identification – to trendy de-industrialization, the work highlights the modern tensions between small-scale conventional turf chopping and pressing ecological preservation.

Examined by means of post-colonial and late-capitalist lenses, Hynan’s work explores the shifting notion of those endangered habitats as they adapt to new renewable power infrastructures, finally urging a restoration of our historical, advanced connections to the earth in a time of local weather disaster.

Read extra on Photo Museum Ireland’s website.

Biel/Bienne, Switzerland / 14 June – 29 August

Rebetez’s work paperwork the bodily exhumation of her grandparents’ graves following a non-renewed burial concession, capturing each stage by means of movie, sound, and pictures as she and her household bodily labored within the pit. The exhibition additionally incorporates a retrospective room displaying her previous long-term initiatives, together with L’Inconnue, her devoted effort to arrange a funeral for an unidentified lady present in Geneva’s River Arve in 2014.

Grounded in a deep moral impulse, her total physique of labor serves as a young, attentive refusal to look away, questioning what it means to visually bear witness to those that can now not communicate.

More data on their website.

New York, United States / 23 April – 2 August

Serving as the primary museum survey devoted to the pioneering photographer Sophie Rivera, Double Exposures presents a long-overdue reevaluation of her important contributions to Nuyorican visible tradition and her historic relationship with El Museo del Barrio. The exhibition title displays each a technical layering course of and Rivera’s exploration of her personal intersectional identification as a Puerto Rican feminist artist working in New York from the Seventies by means of the Nineteen Nineties.

Bringing collectively classic prints and never-before-seen archival supplies – together with portraits, subway documentary pictures, and experimental self-portraits – the exhibition expands conventional histories of American illustration and is accompanied by the primary complete monograph on her work, co-published with Aperture.

Learn extra on their website.