11 Photography Exhibitions to See This Fall 2025

Don McCullin – New York

A Desecrated Serenity charts seven many years of Don McCullin’s photojournalistic work throughout conflicts in Greece, Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, and Beirut. The exhibition, his first New York present at Hauser and Wirth, presents his harrowing portraits and reportage from the entrance traces alongside cherished objects—just like the Nikon F digital camera that after caught a stray bullet throughout battle. The exhibition strikes from the stark landscapes of crime and poverty in postwar Britain; by unflinching information of world battle; to pictures of vibrant cultural rituals in India, Indonesia, and the Sudan; to painterly meditations on the countrysides of France, Scotland, and Somerset, the place McCullin sought solace late in his profession.

Don McCullin: A Desecrated Serenity at Hauser & Wirth, by November 8, 2025.

Tyler Mitchell – Paris

Growing up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Tyler Mitchell made skateboarding movies impressed by Spike Jonze and Ryan McGinley. After enrolling at New York University with plans to grow to be a filmmaker, he started to make portraits stuffed with power, brash shade, and sartorial panache, honing a signature look that landed him commissions for i-D and Vogue. This fall, Mitchell’s exhibition Wish This Was Real arrives in Paris after stops in Berlin, Helsinki, and Lausanne, Switzerland. Covering roughly a decade of picture making, the present gives new views on his abiding themes of masculinity, pleasure, and wonder. As the critic Salamishah Tillet writes in an accompanying monograph revealed by Aperture, “Mitchell’s work brilliantly reconceptualizes familiar spaces and teaches us that Black utopia has always been a place, constantly moving, unfolding, and being remade—like freedom.”

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real on the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, October 15, 2025–January 25, 2026

Katy Grannan – San Francisco

California’s Humboldt County is taken into account a spot the place individuals go to vanish. Katy Grannan first got here to this bucolic backcountry in 2023 and started making portraits of individuals she discovered by Craigslist adverts, flyers, and finally phrase of mouth. Known for constructing long-term relationships along with her topics, Grannan conspired with these she photographed to create a sort of collaborative fiction, working each within the studio and in nature to string collectively connections between web site and self. Mad River unites these portraits for the primary time, providing an intimate glimpse of the impartial spirit of Humboldt County’s inhabitants.

Katy Grannan: Mad River at Fraenkel Gallery, New York, by October 25, 2025.

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging – New York

This 12 months marks the fortieth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography program of annual exhibitions which have, over the many years, introduced then-emerging artists, together with Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Lieko Shiga, to wider renown. MoMA’s newest version considers themes of belonging as explored by a baker’s dozen of artists and collectives—hailing from Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City—who weave private tales with broader colonial histories. Gabrielle Goliath and Prasiit Sthapit are among the many photographers, together with Sandra Blow—whose whose tender portraits of associates in Mexico City’s queer underground attest to pictures’s community-making potential.

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging on the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 14, 2025–January 17, 2026

Samuel Fosso – New York

“I wanted to show how good I look,” Samuel Fosso as soon as stated of 70s Lifestyle (1975–78), a collection he started as a youngster. Autoportrait, Fosso’s first solo exhibition in New York in twenty years, actually succeeds on this objective. The present celebrates the Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer’s self-portraiture, which calls upon and reinvents traditions of studio pictures from West Africa and the African diaspora. In addition to 70s Lifestyle, which fuses the visible language of highlife tradition with the daring angle of younger Black Americans as seen in magazines of the period, African Spirits (2008) options Fosso adopting the personae of such revolutionaries as Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait at Yossi Milo, New York, by November 8, 2025.

Man Ray – New York

“I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself,” declared a younger American in Paris upon his invention of what he named, after himself, the “rayograph.” In 1921, Man Ray had found that, by putting on a regular basis objects—comparable to scissors, keys, a wishbone, and a mousetrap—on photosensitive paper and exposing it to mild, a brand new sort of pictures was attainable, one which distributed with the digital camera totally in its spectral, likelihood mash-ups, which rapidly grew to become the toast of Dadaist Paris. When Objects Dream contains some sixty rayographs, illuminating how the artist’s “crimes against chemistry and photography” (as he winkingly described them) knowledgeable the remainder of his rebellious experimentation, which spans portray, cinema, drawing, and pictures.

Man Ray: When Objects Dream on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 14 by February 1, 2026.

Black Photojournalism – Pittsburgh

At its peak within the Nineteen Thirties, the Pittsburgh Courier was learn by lots of of hundreds of readers throughout the United States, one amongst many Black newspapers to report on the burgeoning civil rights motion and the struggles for equality and social justice. Newspapers such because the Courier, Atlanta Daily World, and The Chicago Defender take middle stage in Black Photojournalism, an exhibition on the Carnegie Museum of Art centered on Black photographers who, from the submit–World War II period by the Eighties, helped create the primary draft of historical past. One searing image by Ming Smith, made in 1976, the 12 months of the US bicentennial, factors up the aspirations of the American Dream and its limitations: A person gazes outward in reflective sun shades whereas the stripes of three flags appear as if jail bars.

Black Photojournalism on the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, September 13, 2025–January 19, 2026

Cecil Beaton – London

Renowned photographer, illustrator, costume designer, diarist, arriviste, and court docket photographer to the British royal household, Cecil Beaton is synonymous with glamour. Cecil Beaton: Fashionable World explores his groundbreaking society portraits, tracing an illustrious profession from the Jazz Age of “Bright Young Things” to the glitterati of My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958). The present’s trove of pictures, costumes, and ephemera locations the viewer into the thoughts’s eye of the acclaimed “King of Vogue,” whose stylized, extremely theatrical portraits of a bygone beau monde as soon as supplied starry escapism in the course of the interwar and early postwar period.  As Beaton as soon as stated, “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

Cecil Beaton: Fashionable World on the National Portrait Gallery, London, October 9 by January 11, 2026.

Ben Shahn – New York

The painter Ben Shahn spent his profession chronicling and confronting the social problems with his period—from censorship and authoritarianism to the labor motion and civil rights. Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity marks the primary US retrospective of the artist’s work in almost half a century, showcasing the enduring relevance of Shahn’s imaginative and prescient. A spotlight features a choice of pictures—each these taken by Shahn himself and by friends, comparable to those that labored for the Farm Security Administration—that served as his muse. “One of the main goals of this exhibition is to illuminate the under-appreciated complexity of his aesthetic, the multifaceted layered quality of his work, which is largely indebted to photography, both his own photographs and those of others,” notes curator and artwork historian Laura Katzman. “Photography was central to Shahn’s vision and his working process.”

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity at The Jewish Museum, New York, by October 26, 2025.

Seydou Keïta – New York

Seydou Keïta captured the dignity and the goals of the individuals who posed in his studio in midcentury Bamako, throughout Mali’s flip to independence. With his ingenious use of props and backdrops, the photographer struck a sublime steadiness between formality and intimacy, timelessness and urgency. As Kobby Ankomah Graham writes in Aperture’s Summer 2025 cowl story, “Keïta’s subjects gaze directly into the camera and claim their place in history on their own terms.” A retrospective on the Brooklyn Museum celebrates Keïta’s personal rightful place in historical past—as an all-time nice whose title must be as well-known as that of August Sander, Irving Penn, or Richard Avedon.

Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 10 by March 8, 2026.

Germaine Krull – Germany

Germaine Krull, the legendary modernist photographer, had many nicknames. One anarchist good friend dubbed her the “Iron Valkyrie” for her curiosity in industrial varieties, as seen in Métal (1928), a slight however epochal photobook whose tightly cropped, strange-making pictures of the Eiffel Tower and different metal constructions launched her profession in interwar Paris. She referred to as herself chien fou—loopy canine—and that is the title of an exhibition opening at Museum Folkwang, the house of her property since 1995. The present examines how Krull balanced her experimental imaginative and prescient along with her function as a working photojournalist, drawing overdue consideration to an oeuvre that spans reportage, writing, portraiture, and avant-garde photomontage throughout 4 continents.

Germaine Krull: Chien Fou at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, November 28, 2025–March 15, 2026