14 Photography Exhibitions to See This Fall — 2026

Hailun Ma — Amsterdam

It was solely after shifting to New York to check style pictures that Hailun Ma started to acknowledge the inventive potential of her native Xinjiang—China’s westernmost area, dwelling to 25 million individuals and greater than forty ethnic teams, a lot of them Muslim majority. “If you search for images of Xinjiang online, you get these very National Geographic images,” she as soon as instructed Vogue. “I wanted to present a younger perspective of what is happening.” Her first main solo present outdoors of China gathers pictures that delight within the on a regular basis traditions and elegance of Uyghur youngsters, Kazakh cowboys, and different communities sidelined in mainstream depictions of the nation.

Hailun Ma at Foam, Amsterdam, September 18, 2026–January 20, 2027

Taking Back Our Space — New York

From 1972 to 1977, Marianne Wex collected 1000’s of photos tracing the connection between gesture and gender. The end result, Let’s Take Back Our Space, juxtaposes Wex’s personal snapshots of physique language from the streets of Hamburg with sources reaching again to antiquity—exhibiting, say, how the pose of a manspreader on a park bench descends from the uninhibited contrapposto of Doryphoros. In this exhibition, Wex’s opus, arrayed throughout systematized panels à la Aby Warburg, is paired with work by up to date artists resembling Nona Faustine, K8 Hardy, and Wendy Red Star, who prolong statement of on a regular basis public house into defiant acts of reclamation.

Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives on the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 20, 2026–May 2, 2027

Taryn Simon — New York

For over 20 years, Taryn Simon has mined the hidden methods of energy and affect that covertly order our lives. Father Country I Do Love You would be the largest debut of a brand new work ever on the Guggenheim, and the primary single-artist exhibition by a photographer within the rotunda. Across forty-two works of pictures, textual content, video, and sculpture, Simon traces the lifetime of an actual, unnamed federal agent, inspecting how his particular person choices reverberated throughout lives and nations in methods he by no means knew. It’s Simon’s most private challenge but, because the work lives within the shadow her personal father, who traveled the globe for the US authorities earlier than transitioning right into a profession promoting arcade video games. “America is the best story on earth,” he as soon as instructed her, “if you could find someone to tell it.”

Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 18, 2026–March 14, 2027

Roy DeCarava — Los Angeles

Listening, for Roy DeCarava, was removed from a passive act. For his sequence the sound i noticed, he tuned his digicam to the rhythms of midcentury New York’s jazz world, immortalizing titans—Trane, Count, Duke, Lady—in his signature palette of charcoal and smoke. He additionally captured peripheral scenes: tender embraces, dancehall silhouettes, quiet moments of downtime. The result’s a deeply private exploration of how American life, as Ralph Ellison as soon as wrote, “comes to focus” by jazz. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, this exhibition brings collectively 130 pictures from the sequence, accompanied by a listening room impressed by the information DeCarava cherished most.

Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw at David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 19–October 31, 2026

The 90s: Art and Fashion — London

Hoist the Union Jack: The 90s: Art and Fashion appears to be like again at a decade when Britain’s irreverent cultural renaissance dominated the runways, airwaves, museums, and magazines. Curated by Edward Enninful, The 90s will convey collectively style by Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, and Alexander McQueen; works by the (previously) Young British Artists; and, after all, pictures by the likes of Corinne Day, David Sims, and Juergen Teller, who chronicled a brand new period of Swinging London within the pages of i-D and The Face.

The 90s: Art and Fashion at Tate Britain, London, October 8, 2026–February 14, 2027

Deana Lawson — New York

Diane Arbus has all the time been a north star for Deana Lawson, the artist famend for her regal pictures of Black individuals she meets in numerous eventualities, typically pictured in home settings and bestowed with a transcendent, otherworldly, but generally surprisingly particular presence. Like Arbus, Lawson can astonish and unnerve. For her first solo exhibition with Gagosian since signing with the gallery in 2022, Lawson presents latest portraits that gesture to vernacular pictures and Old Master portray, along with a brand new sequence known as Edge Control, in regards to the phenomenon of surveillance in magnificence provide retailers, the place shoplifters are tracked on cameras and their likenesses posted to retailer home windows to discourage theft. Beauty—and scrutiny—is within the eye of the beholder.

Deana Lawson at Gagosian, New York, September 10–October 24, 2026

FotoFocus — Cincinnati

FotoFocus returns with its eighth version, The Long View, providing seventy-four exhibitions in sixty-five venues all through Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky. The “long view” of the title refers, partially, to the quarter-millennium of the United States, inviting artists and viewers to take care of the nation’s previous, current, and attainable futures. Standouts embrace exhibitions by Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Nancy Rexroth, and Trevor Paglen, whose work—spanning facial recognition applied sciences, alternate-reality video games, and AI rabbit holes—probes the darkish infrastructures of surveillance and energy that govern how we see the world, and the way it sees us.

FotoFocus Biennial 2026: The Long View, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 1–31, 2026

Sanlé Sory — London

Sanlé Sory reduce his tooth photographing automobile crashes for newspapers. When he acquired his personal gear, in 1960, he opened the Volta Photo studio and turned to a extra celebratory topic: the colourful youth tradition of newly unbiased Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Like his better-known friends Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, Sory redefined the pictures of West Africa by portraying its individuals on their very own phrases. This present focuses on his hardly ever exhibited coloration portraits—photos of irrepressible panache made in the course of the restive Eighties and ’90s, when his nation sought a brand new id targeted on anti-imperialism and self-reliance.

Sanlé Sory: Colour Years on the Photographers’ Gallery, London, October 14, 2026–February 21, 2027

Barbara Norfleet — Cambridge, MA

In the Seventies, the sociologist and curator Barbara P. Norfleet started assembling an unlimited archive of photos from the Thirties to Nineteen Sixties taken by photographers engaged on fee throughout the United States. Consisting of over twenty-thousand pictures depicting social rituals from weddings to company gatherings, the archive fashioned what Norfleet known as a “unique and valuable record of American life.” This fall, the Harvard Art Museum levels the exhibition The Way We Never Were, drawn from Norfleet’s archive. Thematic sections starting from the rise of suburbia and cultural conformity to rising struggles for equal rights facilities the function of the skilled photographer and commissioned picture in shaping how midcentury America got here to outline itself.

The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection at Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, by May 9, 2027.

Flashback — Baltimore

In Paula Gillen’s Hostage Situation (1979), a younger, masked youngster yanks a lady’s leg—clad in fishnets and yellow peep-toe heels—protruding by an unfinished ceiling. It’s considered one of numerous gems in Flashback, an unprecedented survey of Baltimore pictures spanning nearly 2 hundred years, from daguerreotypes of Frederick Douglass, to A. Aubrey Bodine’s deadline-driven pictorialism, to the zany world of John Waters (that dangling leg belongs to Susan Lowe, a daily in Waters’s movies), to youthful abilities resembling Devin Allen and Gioncarlo Valentine who’re shaping the town’s photographic panorama in the present day.

Flashback: Two Centuries of Baltimore Photography on the Baltimore Museum of Art, October 4, 2026–February 7, 2027

Baldwin Lee — New York

Raised in New York’s Chinatown, Baldwin Lee studied with Walker Evans at Yale within the early Seventies. He would return to New York within the following years to {photograph} the town’s empty, early-morning streets with a 4-by-5 digicam. These photos, which resonate with German photographer Thomas Struth’s equally unpeopled streetscapes from the identical period, had been printed in 2025 for this exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery, which beforehand introduced Lee’s now-celebrated large-format portraits made within the Eighties on street journeys by the American South. Lee’s portrayal of New York exhibits how each the skyline and the sidewalk have modified, as in his picture of seemingly deserted Financial Center lofts beneath the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center—a monument to a bygone period.

Baldwin Lee: New York at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, September 18–October 31, 2026

Arthur Jafa — New York

Named for the pioneering jazz drummer Tony Williams, Arthur Jafa’s exhibition I Am Tony presents video installations, work, pictures, and sculptures throughout two flooring of the just lately expanded New Museum. Renowned for his trenchant explorations of race and American tradition, the artist will premiere new works alongside searing video montages together with Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and The White Album (2019), in addition to early works such because the {photograph} Monster (1988), an unflinching self-portrait of the artist as a younger man.

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony on the New Museum, New York, September 24, 2026–January 3, 2027

Japanese Women Photographers — New York

A much-needed counterpoint to the male-centric canon of Japanese pictures, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the Nineteen Fifties to Now reframes the historical past of the medium by the work of twenty-eight intergenerational artists. Presented in partnership with Aperture along side the 2024 monograph, this exhibition is curated by the ebook’s editors, Pauline Vermare, Lesley A. Martin, and Takeuchi Mariko. I’m So Happy spans the medium from installations to photobooks, offering an indispensable introduction to the contributions of Japanese ladies to pictures by showcasing intimate observations of on a regular basis life, essential views on historical past, and radical experiments with type.

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now at International Center of Photography, New York, October 15, 2026–January 11, 2027.

Aperture Loves New York — New York

Aperture Loves New York pays tribute to photographers who’ve formed—and been formed by—the town. Showcasing artists lengthy championed by Aperture and anchored in our publishing historical past, the presentation brings collectively essential and memorable pictures with corresponding Aperture books which have superior the medium of pictures and captured the advanced spirit of New York City. Organized by Aperture’s government director, Sarah Meister, the set up options pictures by greater than twenty artists starting from previous to current—together with Diane Arbus, Deana Lawson, Stephen Shore, Awol Erizku, and extra.

Aperture Loves New York at Aperture, New York, September 18–November 1, 2026.