Charlotte Jansen

A review of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, which traces the development of the modern US city and photographic practice through works by major 20th-century photographers. The exhibition moves from pictorialism and Depression-era social documentary to postwar urban alienation, nightlife, racial and class diversity, and 1980s subway culture. Although its exclusive reliance on the DNB Savings Bank Foundation collection limits the curatorial scope, the show is praised for its powerful exploration of how photographers used composition, light and darkness to interpret the overwhelming energy and contradictions of American urban life.

Photographer Alessio Mamo recalls photographing Manal, a 12-year-old Iraqi girl recovering from severe burns caused by a missile explosion, at the Médecins Sans Frontières Al-Mowasah hospital in Amman. The portrait, made as part of his project The Hospital of All the Wars, later won a 2018 World Press Photo award. Mamo describes Manal’s resilience and continued connection with her family while reflecting on the enduring impact of war on children. Having recently become a father, he says he plans to document children harmed by the ongoing war in Beirut and hopes such work will raise awareness of civilian suffering.

Ray Exworth spent six decades creating vast, intricate sculptures in seven sheds and shipping containers on a remote Cornish smallholding, allowing only a small number of people to see them. His work drew on wartime childhood memories and used salvaged materials to create environments such as The Circus, which occupied a decade of his life. Photographer Jem Southam, who first met Exworth in the 1980s, spent ten years documenting the sculptures after Exworth’s death in 2015. His book Ray’s Sheds offers rare access to the largely unseen work and is presented as vital to preserving Exworth’s legacy and establishing his place in 20th-century British sculpture.

The 2026 Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles is praised for looking beyond established names to eccentric, amateur and overlooked photographers. Standout exhibitions include UFO imagery exploring the power of belief, Paul Kodjo’s staged photo novels of Abidjan, a wide-ranging history of animal photography, Saodat Ismailova’s spiritually charged films about Central Asian forests, and acclaimed work by Ming Smith and Martine Barrat. Despite some stale collection-based group shows and weak celebrity exhibitions by Patti Smith and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the festival succeeds by questioning photographic hierarchies and placing popular, unfamiliar and historically neglected images on equal footing.

Alan Gignoux’s Homeland Lost presents black-and-white portraits of Palestinian refugees alongside photographs of the villages and landscapes their families were forced to leave during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The exhibition traces displacement, violence, erased communities and intergenerational trauma across Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon, while also emphasizing resilience, particularly through the portrait of Palestinian Olympic athlete Sana Abubkheet. Originally produced with British Council support in 2004–05, the project gains renewed urgency from the war in Gaza and the destruction of its infrastructure. Despite a somewhat difficult gallery layout, the exhibition’s central concern is preserving individual histories and documenting how Palestinians continue to survive amid prolonged dispossession.

Japan House’s first free photography exhibition pairs Kikuji Kawada’s fragmented, impressionistic images of Hiroshima after the atomic bombing with Iwane Ai’s poetic photographs addressing environmental catastrophe, Japanese diaspora and personal loss. Kawada’s work uses traces of obliteration, fire, ash and damaged American consumer objects to express trauma that resists direct representation, while a projection of his recent digital images creates a fleeting, immersive atmosphere. Ai’s works connect Fukushima, Hawaii and Japan through Bon dancing, volcanic landscapes, archival projections and cherry blossoms, combining destruction with survival and renewal. The review concludes that both photographers create haunting images in which beauty is inseparable from grief.

A review of the National Portrait Gallery’s Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait finds that the exhibition compellingly traces Monroe’s transformation from Norma Jeane Baker into an American icon and emphasizes her control over her public image. It also highlights experimental photography, pop-art representations and the exploitation surrounding a pre-fame nude photograph. However, the show is criticized for presenting too many radiant, smiling portraits while offering too little insight into Monroe’s sadness, fragility and private contradictions. Its strongest emotional impact comes from the contrast between her vitality and the finality of her death at 36.

Artist Roni Horn discusses her exhibition Seizure of Hope at Hauser & Wirth in London, including 76 graphite drawings repeating the phrase “I am paralysed with hope” and a cast-glass sculpture titled What Happens to the Hole When the Cheese Is Gone? The works reflect her response to political decline in America, environmental pollution, illness, grief and the difficulty of preserving hope. Horn also recounts being removed from a flight and surviving a traumatic motorcycle accident in Iceland, experiences that reinforce her interest in shock, ambiguity and the space between horror and optimism.

Martin Parr’s funeral near Bristol was organised as a personal, unconventional tribute reflecting his fascination with the awkward details of everyday life. After a simple ceremony featuring his favourite music and family and friends’ recollections, guests attended a colourful country-fête-themed reception with cakes, sandwiches, teapots, a tombola and food recreated from Parr’s photographs. Photographer Sophie Green documented the event with the support of Parr’s family and foundation, continuing her Death Rituals project and challenging the British taboo around photographing funerals. Friends and family described the celebration as affectionate, humorous and fittingly characteristic of Parr, including the comic finale of the guests’ bus becoming stuck in mud.

Photographer Silvana Trevale discusses a 2018 photograph of two brothers returning from a fishing trip at Playa Medina, Venezuela. The image became the starting point for her decade-long Venezuelan Youth project, which explores young people growing up amid Venezuela’s economic and social crisis while emphasizing beauty, cultural identity, innocence and resilience. Trevale describes leaving Venezuela after violence and shortages, later returning to document its people, traditions and coastal life. The project has been published as a book by Guest Editions.

Phyllida Barlow’s exhibition at Wolterton Hall, Norfolk, uses rough, inexpensive materials and unruly forms to challenge the estate’s Palladian grandeur and assumptions of permanence. The review praises works including Untitled: Stacked Chairs, Loaf and Barlow’s wall sculptures for their energetic, punk-inflected disruption, while noting that the outdoor sculpture PRANK: jinx is less convincing. Simon Oldfield’s decision to remove historic portraits and expose older construction markings is presented as part of a broader effort to reinvent the stately home through contemporary art. A concurrent exhibition by Daisy Parris responds to Wolterton in a more emotional register.

Charlotte Jansen acknowledges Rene Matić’s significance as the youngest winner of the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and praises earlier work such as Upon This Rock for its exploration of masculinity, fatherhood and British identity. However, she argues that the Photographers’ Gallery presentation of Matić’s diaristic snapshots is immature, insular and overly dependent on elaborate installation, comparing it unfavorably with the work of Wolfgang Tillmans and Nan Goldin. The review concludes that Matić’s identity and self-marketing may have influenced the award more than the originality or depth of the photography, and that the work needs more time to develop.

Puerto Rican artist Angel Otero discusses how his childhood homes, family relationships and memories shape his dreamlike paintings for Agua Salada at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. His participation in Bad Bunny’s La Casita performance set gave him a powerful sense of cultural validation, while the new exhibition explores vulnerability, grief, fatherhood and the meaning of home. Otero’s signature paint-skin technique combines collage and sculpture with oil painting, and his temporary life in Bruton has prompted connections between Somerset and his native San Juan.

Photographer Paula Hornickel describes visiting a care home in Albershausen, Germany, where Emma, a social robot developed by a Munich startup, was being piloted to engage residents amid staff shortages and loneliness. Emma entertains residents with conversation and jokes but sometimes malfunctions, exposing the limits of simulated companionship. Resident Waltraud develops a relationship with the robot while stressing that she would still prefer human contact. Hornickel’s photograph explores the tension between technological assistance and genuine care, suggesting robots may support overstretched care systems but should complement rather than replace people.

Martin Parr’s final exhibition, Global Warning at Paris’s Jeu de Paume, presents his saturated, comic photographs of tourism, leisure and everyday absurdity while revealing a darker concern with consumption, inequality and environmental decline. The exhibition moves from British seaside resorts and mass tourism in Spain to images of wealthy visitors alongside local workers in Bali and Gambia, implicating both tourists and photographers in the creation of desire. A photograph of a Trump doll extends this critique of commodification, while a deflating globe-patterned beach ball becomes a metaphor for the planet’s precarious condition. The review concludes that Parr’s unpretentious, complicit observation and increasingly dark humour make the exhibition a powerful final chapter in his career.

Dean Sameshima's Wonderland exhibition at London's Soft Opening presents 1990s photographs of queer sex clubs, bathhouses and cruising sites in Los Angeles, especially Silver Lake. The formally composed images show these locations as ordinary, often windowless buildings and quiet public spaces, while their titles reveal the sexual activity and communal refuge once found there. The review interprets the photographs as records of loss following the AIDS pandemic, police surveillance, raids and the closure of several clubs, while emphasizing anonymity as a means of safety. Sameshima's understated approach is contrasted with the more outspoken work of Catherine Opie and Kohei Yoshiyuki, and is praised for finding tenderness, tension and political significance in otherwise hidden spaces.

Peter van Agtmael reflects on his 2006 photograph of a dejected US soldier sitting in an Iraqi living room during a military raid. He says the image captures the absurdity and domestic proximity of war: soldiers equipped with overwhelming military power often searched homes for suspected terrorists and found nothing. Van Agtmael describes how covering Iraq shaped his understanding of the United States, war photography and the moral complexity of embedding with troops. He characterizes the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as unmitigated failures, remains pessimistic about military-led regime change, and says fatherhood has ended his plans for further Middle East assignments.

The review examines Donna Gottschalk’s exhibition We Others, which documents lesbian life, family, identity and violence in New York from the 1960s onward, alongside the 2026 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize exhibition at London’s Photographers’ Gallery. The prize shortlist, featuring women and non-binary artists, includes Rene Matić’s intimate queer-community images, Jane Evelyn Atwood’s damning documentation of abuse in women’s prisons, Weronika Gęsicka’s fabricated encyclopaedic imagery exploring AI and misinformation, and Amak Mahmoodian’s dream-based work with exiles. Together, the exhibitions present photography as a means of solidarity, activism, memory and resistance, while warning about incarceration, displacement and the erosion of trust in images.

Catherine Opie’s exhibition To Be Seen at London’s National Portrait Gallery is praised for its bold portraits of queer communities, butch identities, families and motherhood. Drawing on classical portraiture while embracing tattoos, costume, performance and body modification, Opie explores tensions between subversion and tradition, public visibility and private care. The review highlights works including Being and Having, Self-Portrait/Cutting and Self-Portrait/Nursing, as well as photographs of protests, couples, surfers and her son Oliver. The exhibition ultimately presents family, love and protection as necessary forms of resistance amid the violence and marginalisation experienced by queer communities.

Moroccan artist Hiba Baddou explains her photograph Parabomobile, depicting a man riding a Peugeot 103 motorcycle through the desert with 21 satellite dishes pointing in different directions. The image forms part of her multidisciplinary Paraboles project, which examines Moroccan identity, colonial influence, media saturation, exile and the search for direction. Drawing on her upbringing in Rabat, education in France and later return to Morocco, Baddou uses fictional elements—including the Hertzian Republic, invented passports and a satellite-based language—to explore cultural hybridity, memory and contemporary Moroccan society.