11 Exhibitions to See This Fall

Don McCullin – New York

A Desecrated Serenity charts seven decades of Don McCullin’s photojournalistic work across conflicts in Greece, Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, and Beirut. The exhibition, his first New York show at Hauser and Wirth, presents his harrowing portraits and reportage from the front lines alongside cherished objects—like the Nikon F camera that once caught a stray bullet during battle. The exhibition moves from the stark landscapes of crime and poverty in postwar Britain; through unflinching records of global conflict; to images of vibrant cultural rituals in India, Indonesia, and the Sudan; to painterly meditations on the countrysides of France, Scotland, and Somerset, where McCullin sought solace late in his career.

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

Tyler Mitchell – Paris

Growing up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Tyler Mitchell made skateboarding videos inspired by Spike Jonze and Ryan McGinley. After enrolling at New York University with plans to become a filmmaker, he began to make portraits full of energy, brash color, 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 image making, the show offers new perspectives on his abiding themes of masculinity, joy, and beauty. As the critic Salamishah Tillet writes in an accompanying monograph published 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 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, October 15, 2025–January 25, 2026

Katy Grannan – San Francisco

California’s Humboldt County is considered a place where people go to disappear. Katy Grannan first came to this bucolic backcountry in 2023 and began making portraits of people she found through Craigslist ads, flyers, and eventually word of mouth. Known for building long-term relationships with her subjects, Grannan conspired with those she photographed to create a kind of collaborative fiction, working both in the studio and in nature to thread together connections between site and self. Mad River unites these portraits for the first time, offering an intimate glimpse of the independent spirit of Humboldt County’s inhabitants.

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

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging – New York

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography program of annual exhibitions that have, over the decades, brought then-emerging artists, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Lieko Shiga, to wider renown. MoMA’s latest edition 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 personal stories with broader colonial histories. Gabrielle Goliath and Prasiit Sthapit are among the photographers, along with Sandra Blow—whose whose tender portraits of friends in Mexico City’s queer underground attest to photography’s community-making potential.

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging at 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 once said of 70s Lifestyle (1975–78), a series he began as a teenager. Autoportrait, Fosso’s first solo exhibition in New York in two decades, certainly succeeds in this goal. The show celebrates the Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer’s self-portraiture, which calls upon and reinvents traditions of studio photography from West Africa and the African diaspora. In addition to 70s Lifestyle, which fuses the visual language of highlife culture with the bold attitude of young Black Americans as seen in magazines of the era, African Spirits (2008) features 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, through 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 young American in Paris upon his invention of what he named, after himself, the “rayograph.” In 1921, Man Ray had discovered that, by placing everyday objects—such as scissors, keys, a wishbone, and a mousetrap—on photosensitive paper and exposing it to light, a new kind of photography was possible, one that dispensed with the camera entirely in its spectral, chance mash-ups, which quickly became the toast of Dadaist Paris. When Objects Dream includes some sixty rayographs, illuminating how the artist’s “crimes against chemistry and photography” (as he winkingly described them) informed the rest of his rebellious experimentation, which spans painting, cinema, drawing, and photography.

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

Black Photojournalism – Pittsburgh

At its height in the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Courier was read by hundreds of thousands of readers across the United States, one among many Black newspapers to report on the burgeoning civil rights movement and the struggles for equality and social justice. Newspapers such as the Courier, Atlanta Daily World, and The Chicago Defender take center stage in Black Photojournalism, an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art focused on Black photographers who, from the post–World War II era through the 1980s, helped create the first draft of history. One searing image by Ming Smith, made in 1976, the year of the US bicentennial, points up the aspirations of the American Dream and its limitations: A man gazes outward in reflective sunglasses while the stripes of three flags appear like prison bars.

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

Cecil Beaton – London

Renowned photographer, illustrator, costume designer, diarist, arriviste, and court photographer to the British royal family, Cecil Beaton is synonymous with glamour. Cecil Beaton: Fashionable World explores his groundbreaking society portraits, tracing an illustrious career from the Jazz Age of “Bright Young Things” to the glitterati of My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958). The show’s trove of photographs, costumes, and ephemera places the viewer into the mind’s eye of the acclaimed “King of Vogue,” whose stylized, highly theatrical portraits of a bygone beau monde once offered starry escapism during the interwar and early postwar era.  As Beaton once said, “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 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, October 9 through January 11, 2026.

Ben Shahn – New York

The painter Ben Shahn spent his career chronicling and confronting the social issues of his era—from censorship and authoritarianism to the labor movement and civil rights. Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity marks the first US retrospective of the artist’s work in nearly half a century, showcasing the enduring relevance of Shahn’s vision. A highlight includes a selection of photographs—both those taken by Shahn himself and by peers, such as those who worked 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 art historian Laura Katzman. “Photography was central to Shahn’s vision and his working process.”

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

Seydou Keïta – New York

Seydou Keïta captured the dignity and the dreams of the people who posed in his studio in midcentury Bamako, during Mali’s turn to independence. With his ingenious use of props and backdrops, the photographer struck an elegant balance between formality and intimacy, timelessness and urgency. As Kobby Ankomah Graham writes in Aperture’s Summer 2025 cover story, “Keïta’s subjects gaze directly into the camera and claim their place in history on their own terms.” A retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum celebrates Keïta’s own rightful place in history—as an all-time great whose name should 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 through March 8, 2026.

Germaine Krull – Germany

Germaine Krull, the legendary modernist photographer, had many nicknames. One anarchist friend dubbed her the “Iron Valkyrie” for her interest in industrial forms, as seen in Métal (1928), a slight but epochal photobook whose tightly cropped, strange-making photographs of the Eiffel Tower and other steel structures launched her career in interwar Paris. She called herself chien fou—crazy dog—and this is the title of an exhibition opening at Museum Folkwang, the home of her estate since 1995. The show examines how Krull balanced her experimental vision with her role as a working photojournalist, drawing overdue attention to an oeuvre that spans reportage, writing, portraiture, and avant-garde photomontage across four continents.

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