A Guide 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 photography events to visit next month.

Les Rencontres d'Arles 2026

Arles, France / 6 July - 4 October

The 57th edition of the Rencontres d’Arles embraces complexity and attentiveness through photography, using the medium to uncover hidden narratives, challenge conventions, and offer new perspectives on an unsettling world. The festival honors major masters like William Klein, Martine Barrat, Ming Smith, and Harry Gruyaert, while mapping out a global dialogue focused on memory, liberation, and identity across Africa and the Mediterranean. Through deeply personal and historical exhibitions, the program highlights how photography acts as a fluid space for reimagining geographies and unearthing suppressed histories.

Simultaneously, this edition focuses on the living world and the transformation of the photographic medium itself. Exhibitions like Animal Model examine humanity's relationship with other species, while contemporary artists such as Meghann Riepenhoff and Lisa Oppenheim treat photography as a living, evolving process shaped by natural and organic forces. Rounded out by a dedicated showcase of children's photobooks and the Louis Roederer Discovery Award for emerging talent, the festival ultimately unites diverse eras and geographies under a shared mission: using images not to freeze the world, but to reveal its persistence and help us see it anew.

Check the full program on the festival's website.

Cortona On The Move 2026

Cortona, Italy / 16 July - 1 November

Marking a new chapter with journalist and curator Renata Ferri, along with director Veronica Nicolardi, the new edition of the Cortona International Photography Festival presents Beautiful Country. In an era overwhelmed by images, the festival serves as an incomplete atlas of Italy over recent decades, encouraging viewers to slow down and observe the world’s fragile balance. Blending the romantic spirit of the historic Grand Tour with rigorous contemporary documentary inquiry, the event features more than thirty exhibitions and cross-generational dialogues that capture a complex nation where wonder and disenchantment intertwine.

A central highlight of the festival is Peninsula, a commissioned project bringing together ten contemporary artists who engage with the country's liminal landscapes, building upon the legacy of the seminal 1984 Viaggio in Italia exhibition. Featuring a wide list of international photographers, the festival ultimately offers a collective space for reflection. It celebrates photography's poetic and enduring power to chart spaces, spark the imagination, and invite audiences into the deep adventure of looking.

Find out more on their website.

BAQĀ/بقا (The Unforgotten) by Mursal Mohammadi at The Image Centre

Toronto, Canada / 24 June - 1 August

BAQĀ / بقا (The Unforgotten) is an intimate exhibition that explores the intergenerational trauma, silence, and memory surrounding the 1997 kidnapping of the artist's uncle, Baqauddin, during the civil war in Afghanistan. Despite years of desperate searching by his family, no answers were ever received, leaving his fate unknown. Born after his disappearance, the artist grew up with his framed photograph as a vivid symbol of absence, learning about him through stories passed down over time. The project’s title, derived from the word for endurance or survival, reflects how this profound loss continues to shape family life, domestic spaces, and the body across generations.

The multi-sensory installation integrates film, textiles, and sound to investigate how families carry emotional inheritance. At its center is a film combining wedding footage, archives, and personal interviews, accompanied by an intimate soundscape of oral storytelling and the artist's father singing as forms of healing. The exhibition also features a textile piece embroidered with traditional Afghan patterns, which underscores the vital role women play in sustaining memory and carrying emotional labor. By preserving unaltered archival documents and photographs with deep care, Mohammadi aims to break the silence and honor a history of political violence and enduring loss.

Read more on The Image Centre's website.

Photography from A to Z at MEP

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 layout. Produced for the bicentenary of photography, it creates an unexpected dialogue between the Neuflize OBC Corporate Collection and the MEP collections. Inspired by John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing, the display prioritizes visual juxtaposition and enigma over formal explanation, allowing surprising pairings – like LIFE magazine alongside Kodak ads – to form playful, nostalgic narratives that challenge viewer expectations.

Each letter in this creative lexicon introduces a group of conversing works, supported by texts and anecdotes that illuminate rather than limit the art. 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 more.

Learn more on their website.

We Didn't Choose To Be Born Here by Thero Makepe at Javett-UP

Pretoria, South Africa / 14 May - 13 February 2027

We Didn't Choose To Be Born Here is the first major institutional exhibition by Botswana-born artist Thero Makepe. The ongoing project blends staged portraiture, documentary photography, reenactments, and archival materials to intertwine Makepe’s personal family lineage with the broader socio-political histories of Botswana and South Africa. The exhibition juxtaposes the contrasting paths of his maternal family members under Apartheid, highlighting his grandfather Hippolytus Mothopeng, who fled to Botswana to live peacefully as a town clerk and jazz musician, alongside his grandfather's activist uncle, Zephaniah Mothopeng, who was imprisoned on Robben Island as the president of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.

The project’s title captures the collective family mindset during eras of political crisis, separation, and migration. Serving as the foundation for both this exhibition and an upcoming photobook to be released by PhMuseum in 2026, the work traces over half a century of endurance, drawing direct lines to Makepe’s own contemporary activism during the 2016 #FeesMustFall university protests in Cape Town. Additionally, Makepe uses a non-linear narrative to celebrate his family's lasting kindred bonds, structuring the diverse photographic languages to evoke a profound sense of hope, triumph, and resilience despite a history of profound adversity.

Find out more about Makepe's solo show on Javett-UP's website.

Foam Talent 2026 Exhibition at Foam

Amsterdam, Netherlands / 6 June - 28 August

Reflecting the global reach and energy of emerging photography, the 15 selected Foam Talents address critical contemporary themes including political oppression, grief, conflict, and technological innovation. Across their diverse practices, a central focus on "home" repeatedly surfaces – not as a fixed physical location, but as an evolving network of memories, relationships, and emotional connections that individuals shape and carry within themselves to build resilience against global 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 information on Foam's website.

Experimental Photo Festival 2026

Barcelona, Spain / 22 July - 26 July

Gathering over 300 international artists and photography enthusiasts, the Experimental Photo Festival creates a collaborative space dedicated to exploring every facet of experimental photography, from custom camera creation to alternative printing processes and photobook production.

Built on core principles of horizontality, gender equality, and transparency, the five-day summer event features a packed itinerary of conferences, workshops, portfolio reviews, and exhibitions running from morning until midnight.

Find out more on the festival's website.

Minor Tides at Centre De La Photographie Genève

Geneva, Switzerland / 2 July - 10 October

Curated by Danaé Panchaud, Minor Tides brings together the portraiture-focused practices of three international authors to critically re-examine colonial histories and reclaim collective identity. Egyptian artist Lina Geoushy presents a cinematic black-and-white self-portrait series inspired by mid-20th-century Egyptian cinema that honors pioneering historical women. Meanwhile, German artist Sarah Jade Sullivan explores post-colonial Caribbean identity in Hairouna, using fashion-forward portraiture, archives, and interviews to depict how the younger generation in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines navigates hybrid cultural roots and economic migration. South African and Dutch artist Farren van Wyk presents a collaborative series of family portraits that subverts the racist, colonial-era photography used during apartheid to justify oppression.

Together, these three major projects reflect the exhibition's title, symbolizing the nearly imperceptible yet powerful undercurrents driving profound, transformative social change through contemporary art.

Read more on Centre De La Photographie Genève's website.

Beneath | Beofhód by Shane Hynan at Photo Museum Ireland

Dublin, Ireland / 30 May - 5 July

Spanning a decade, Shane Hynan’s Beneath | Beofhód – meaning "life under the sod" in Irish – deeply engages with the social, cultural, and environmental evolution of the peatlands in the Irish Midlands. Tracing the area's transition from industrial peat extraction – which once drove local economics and cultural identity – to modern de-industrialization, the work highlights the contemporary tensions between small-scale traditional turf cutting and urgent ecological preservation.

Examined through post-colonial and late-capitalist lenses, Hynan’s work explores the shifting perception of these endangered habitats as they adapt to new renewable energy infrastructures, ultimately urging a restoration of our ancient, complex connections to the earth in a time of climate crisis.

Read more on Photo Museum Ireland's website.

Ajouter un Tiret by Virginie Rebetez at Photoforum Pasquart

Biel/Bienne, Switzerland / 14 June - 29 August

Rebetez's work documents the physical exhumation of her grandparents' graves following a non-renewed burial concession, capturing every stage through film, sound, and photography as she and her family physically worked in the pit. The exhibition also features a retrospective room displaying her past long-term projects, including L'Inconnue, her dedicated effort to organize a funeral for an unidentified woman found in Geneva’s River Arve in 2014.

Grounded in a deep ethical impulse, her entire body of work serves as a tender, attentive refusal to look away, questioning what it means to visually bear witness to those who can no longer speak.

More information on their website.

Double Exposures by Sophie Rivera at El Museo Del Barrio

New York, United States / 23 April - 2 August

Serving as the first museum survey dedicated to the pioneering photographer Sophie Rivera, Double Exposures offers a long-overdue reevaluation of her vital contributions to Nuyorican visual culture and her historic relationship with El Museo del Barrio. The exhibition title reflects both a technical layering process and Rivera's exploration of her own intersectional identity as a Puerto Rican feminist artist working in New York from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Bringing together vintage prints and never-before-seen archival materials – including portraits, subway documentary images, and experimental self-portraits – the exhibition expands traditional histories of American representation and is accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph on her work, co-published with Aperture.

Learn more on their website.