A Guide To January 2026 Photography Festivals & Exhibitions

Chobi Mela, Focus Festival, Global Warning by Martin Parr at Jeu De Paume, Photo Brussels, This Will Not End Well by Nan Goldin at Pirelli HangarBicocca, and Mid-Air by Blommers & Schumm at FOAM are among the photography events to visit next month.

Chobi Mela XI

Dhaka, Bangladesh / 16 January - 31 January

Founded by Shahidul Alam and organised by Drik Picture Library and Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Chobi Mela is recognised as one of Asia’s most influential photography festivals. It presents a largely curated programme bringing together artists, photographers, and visual storytellers from South of the continent and beyond. The 11th edition is built around the theme Re, exploring ideas of renewal, rethinking, resilience, and regeneration through photography, moving image, and interdisciplinary practices. Exhibitions take place across multiple venues in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and are accompanied by talks, screenings, performances, and educational activities such as workshops, portfolio reviews, and fellowship programmes.

Among the exhibiting artists are Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Amak Mahmoodian, Amanul Huq, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Felipe Romero Beltrán, Indre Serpytyte, Moonis Ahmad Shah, Lisa Barnard, Kazi Sharowar Hussain, Gitartha Goswami, Muhammad Salah Abdulaziz, Myriam Boulos, Ritual Inhabitual, Rena Effendi, Sumi Anjuman, Sheida Soleimani, Taysir Batniji, Walid Saddam, and more.

Learn more on their website.

Focus Festival 2026

Faro de José Ignacio, Uruguay / 6 January - 11 January

Produced by FOLA and Arte x Arte, and led by Director Gastón Deleau and Artistic Director Nicolás Janowski, Focus Festival 2026 will transform the seaside village of José Ignacio into an open‑air gallery, showcasing photography in public and private spaces. The official opening at the historic Galería de las Misiones will feature two major exhibitions: a tribute to Frida Kahlo by Colombian photographer Leo Matiz and a black‑and‑white series by Brazilian artist Gaspar Gasparian. Throughout the festival, urban installations by Latin American artists will appear in the central square, while venues such as Las Musas, Portal de Luz in Pueblo Edén, and La Panadería host site‑specific projects. The programme also includes workshops with photographers like Federico Ruiz Santesteban and Alejandro Chaskielberg, a curated photobook showcase, and last but not least, the International Portfolio Review Programme at Casa Neptuna.

Discover more on the festival’s Instagram account.

Global Warning by Martin Parr at Jeu De Paume

Paris, France / 30 January - 24 May

Curated by Quentin Bajac, Global Warning presents a comprehensive retrospective of Martin Parr’s work, highlighting his critique of contemporary society through photography. Spanning over fifty years, the exhibition brings together around 180 images from Parr’s early black-and-white series in Ireland and Great Britain to his recent international projects, exploring recurring themes such as mass tourism, technological dependence, consumer excess, and humanity’s complex relationship with the environment. While initially humorous and satirical, Parr’s images gradually reveal a deeper engagement with issues like overconsumption, environmental degradation, and climate change, framing these global concerns with a uniquely British bittersweet irony. Organized into five thematic sections, the exhibition examines the ways leisure and lifestyle choices impact the planet.

Further information available at Jeu de Paume platform.

Photo Brussels 2026

Brussels, Belgium / 22 January - 22 February

Celebrating its 10th edition in 2026 with 52 exhibitions and featuring over 100 artists, the festival explores photography as a dynamic, evolving medium, blending local and international perspectives. The program kicks off with PhotoBrussels Days including an outdoor inauguration at Place du Châtelain, evening vernissages across participating venues, portfolio reviews, artist talks, screenings, and public events. Throughout the month, visitors can join guided tours, explore partner places, and follow a program tailored for galleries and collectors, scheduled to complement Brussels’ major art fairs. Highlights include a solo exhibition by Dolorès Marat at Studio Baxton, and the central festival show at Hangar, featuring Lee Shulman’s immersive 1950s-inspired installation alongside a group exhibition, Family Stories, with works by Cristóbal Ascencio, Lee Daesung, Sanne De Wilde, Alma Haser, Francesca Hummler, and Danilo Zocatelli Cesco. Participating galleries such as Modesti Perdriolle, Box Galerie, Galerie Eric Mouchet, and La Forest Divonne present a diverse mix of personal narratives, social commentary, and experimental imagery.

For the full program, check out the festival’s website.

L Is For Look. Children's Photobooks at Photo Elysée

Lausanne, Switzerland / 19 September - 1 February

Co-produced by the Institut pour la photographie in Lille and Photo Elysée, L is for Look. Children's Photobooks explores the evolution of children’s photobooks from the 1930s to the present. The exhibition examines how photography has shaped education, storytelling, and perceptions of childhood in Western societies over more than a century, highlighting both historical and contemporary works. Bringing together around 100 international photobooks, the show emphasizes original photographic creation and the contributions of women photographers, who played a pivotal role in merging education and children’s portraiture, especially from the 1970s onward. Visitors can engage with interactive experiences, gaining insight into the creative processes behind these publications, from shoots to original mock-ups.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Fury by Marie Quéau at Le Bal

Paris, France / 28 November 2025 - 8 February

Fury explores extreme physical and emotional states through photography, capturing stunt performers thrown through windows, actors in trance during motion capture sessions, freedivers suspended at the edge of drift, and individuals releasing raw anger in a fury room. Quéau investigates the tension between control and surrender, transforming moments of confrontation into poetic reflections on vulnerability and resilience. Drawing inspiration from science fiction and mythology, the project considers the body as both a site of danger and a vessel of transformation. Quéau’s work invites us to question our own perception of reality. What if these moments of confrontation with our limits – when body and mind waver between control and surrender – revealed what binds us most intensely?

Explore further at Le Bal's website.

This Will Not End Well by Nan Goldin at Pirelli HangarBicocca

Milan, Italy / 11 October - 15 February

Curated by Roberta Tenconi with Lucia Aspesi, This Will Not End Well marks the first major exhibition dedicated to Nan Goldin as a filmmaker. The show gathers her largest collection of slideshows ever presented together, along with a new commission featuring an immersive sound installation that amplifies the emotional intensity of her work. Visitors experience Goldin’s deeply personal explorations of intimacy, trauma, family, and friendship through key pieces such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, and Memory Lost, while two new slideshows, You Never Did Anything Wrong and Stendhal Syndrome, reflect her ongoing engagement with myth, abstraction, and the passage of time. The exhibition’s installations are presented in unique architectural spaces designed by Hala Wardé.

Discover more on Pirelli HangarBicocca's platform.

Mid-Air by Blommers & Schumm at FOAM

Amsterdam, Netherlands / 20 September - 23 February

Foam presents Mid-Air, a comprehensive retrospective of the Dutch artist duo Blommers & Schumm, exploring more than 25 years of their inventive and provocative photography. Since meeting at Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the late 1990s, Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm have become prominent figures in international fashion photography, known for their unique approach that merges editorial work with unique artistic expression. Their images, though meticulously composed and seemingly serene, capture fleeting moments constructed entirely in front of the camera with no digital manipulation, challenging viewers’ perceptions of reality. Drawing from iconic works featured in publications like Fantastic Man, Dazed & Confused, Purple, and The New York Times Magazine, the exhibition highlights their singular visual language where precision meets play, encouraging audiences to reconsider conventional ideas of fashion photography and artistic creation.

For more insights, go to FOAM's website.

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Also open this month:

Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record at The Photographers' Gallery / London, United Kingdom / 10 October - 22 February

Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record is a monumental photographic project that stands as one of the most ambitious and significant bodies of work in 20th‑century photography. Beginning in 1978, when Rydet was 67 years old, she set out to document the everyday lives of Polish people by photographing the interiors of homes and the people who lived in them, travelling across towns and villages with her camera and knocking on doors unannounced to ask permission to make portraits. Over the course of nearly two decades, she collected an extraordinary archive of almost 20,000 negatives that reveal intimate, black‑and‑white glimpses into domestic life, personal belongings and the cultural fabric of a society in transition. What makes the Record exceptional is its scale and consistency: Rydet insisted on photographing her subjects within their own environments, often using a wide‑angle lens and flash to capture both people and the objects that surrounded them. A curated selection of these rare prints, alongside books and personal letters, is currently on display at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

Brünner Straße by Leo Kandl at Fotohof / Salzburg, Austria / 5 December - 31 January

Leo's Kandl exhibition at FOTOHOF Brünner Straße presents everyday life in the Floridsdorf district of Vienna over decades. The project takes its name from the street where Kandl’s parents ran a family shop until the 1960s, and it uses the formerly rural working‑class neighbourhood as both setting and subject for a body of street photography that resists dramatic gestures and staged moments in favour of quiet observation. Kandl’s images record people as they linger in squares, traverse streets, or simply inhabit public space, revealing through this restrained approach the texture of daily life among long‑standing and immigrant residents alike.

Lehnert & Landrock. Revisiting A Colonial Archive at Photo Elysée / Lausanne, Switzerland / 31 October - 1 February

Lehnert & Landrock. Revisiting a Colonial Archive offers a critical and historically aware look at one of the most famous bodies of early 20th‑century photography. It presents the archival work of Rudolf  Franz  Lehnert and Ernst  Heinrich  Landrock, a photographic studio active in North Africa and later in Cairo, whose images shaped a European‑oriented visual narrative of the “Orient” through postcards and photos in their time. These historic images — which reflect the colonial context and its visual conventions — are shown alongside contemporary works by artists such as Gloria Oyarzabal and Nouf Aljowaysir, whose practice engages with and questions the legacies of colonial representation and the ways museums frame such collections. The show marks the first time the original Lehnert & Landrock archive objects are displayed publicly at the museum, inviting viewers to reflect on both the on their aesthetic and political dimensions and the institution’s role as a mediator of these images.