8 Exhibitions to See This Summer

American Photography — Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum may have come late to acquiring photography, but in three decades it has amassed a collection of more than two hundred thousand photographs, a fraction of which is on view as part of American Photography, the first comprehensive survey of its kind in Europe. Spanning three centuries, the show corrals marquee names (Sally Mann, Irving Penn, James Van Der Zee) alongside amateur and commercial obscurities in a sprawling visualization, and vivisection, of the American dream. As we know from the Swiss-born Robert Frank, whose epochal The Americans is included in the exhibition, sometimes it takes an outsider to see the place clearly.

American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, through June 9, 2025

Lucia Moholy — Winterthur, Switzerland

The Bauhaus existed only from 1919 to 1933, but its ideas transformed modern society—in no small part due to Lucia Moholy, whose legacy was long eclipsed by that of her male peers. As the Bauhaus’s house photographer, Moholy helped define the visual identity of the design school, immortalizing its architecture, objects, and circle in photographs that distill their subjects’ quintessence. She also played a key role in perfecting the photogram technique often solely credited to her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, and, in 1939, published one of the first histories of photography in English. As this current retrospective makes clear, any history of the medium today would be utterly incomplete without her.

Exposures: Lucia Moholy at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, through July 13, 2025

Annegret Soltau — Frankfurt am Main

For more than six decades, the German artist Annegret Soltau has sought to exceed the strictures of the self through the visceral manipulation of images. Her hallmark is the use of black thread; she stitches representations of her own body and that of other women into photo collages that delve into themes of mother- hood, pregnancy, and aging. Soltau, a product of the feminist movement, is now having her first retrospective—an opportunity for audiences to encounter remarkable multimedia work by an artist decidedly unbound by aesthetic and social conventions.

Uncensored: Annegret Soltau–A Retrospective at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, through August 17, 2025

Wolfgang Tillmans — Paris

The name Wolfgang Tillmans more readily evokes nightclubs and daylong raves of the sort he chronicled in the 1990s than the hushed environs of a library. But this summer, the German photographer is taking over the bibliothèque of the Centre Pompidou, which will go dark in September for a five-year renovation. Given carte blanche, the artist will bring together photographs, videos, music, text, and archival material to transform the mostly empty, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot Public Information Library into a node of epistemological inquiry and Tillmansesque togetherness.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait (Nothing prepared us for it – Everything prepared us for it) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 13–September 22, 2025

Kunié Sugiura — San Francisco

Since the 1960s, Kunié Sugiura’s genre-blending practice has defied the boundaries of photographic expression. Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art spans the arc of Sugiura’s career across six decades, and marks the first major survey of the artist’s work in the US. Employing a range of experimental techniques—prints made on canvas, photograms, compositions from X-ray negatives, and so on—Sugiura melds these mediums together to create artworks that, as she has said, “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.”

Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through September 14, 2025

Carrie Mae Weems — Turin

In Turin, the Gallerie d’Italia, Intesa Sanpaolo, presents Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Meister, Aperture’s executive director, and featuring Weems’s landmark bodies of work, such as Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Museums (2006–ongoing). In her newest work, Preach (2024), a series commissioned specifically for the exhibition, Weems considers religion and spirituality among Black Americans across generations. The exhibition orients Weems’s oeuvre around explorations of her own subjectivity as a way of discovering herself as “a muse and a guide into the unknown,” using her own photographic selfhood to show the intertwined historical, personal, spiritual, and institutional dimensions of otherness that her work unsparingly represents.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at the Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, through September 7, 2025

Stan Douglas — New York

Stan Douglas produces painstakingly composed “speculative histories” that trouble the boundaries between history, fiction, and myth, using the supposed objectivity of the camera as a starting point. Ghostlight, his first United States retrospective in over twenty years, will draw out themes of collective memory and rupture in works that include a new multichannel video installation reimagining D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation. As Douglas once said, “Maybe by breaking the rules of realism in photography—the rules of this automatic, perspectival image—we can get back to a trace of the humanity of looking.”

Stan Douglas: Ghostlight at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, June 21–November 20, 2025

Marta Astfalck-Vietz — Berlin

Marta Astfalck-Vietz’s contributions to photography’s story may not be as familiar as that of her peers working in Germany in the vital, if imperiled, cultural scene of the 1920s. One reason is that Astfalck-Vietz’s archive was partially destroyed during the bombing of Berlin in World War II. What survived—and have recently been restored—are dreamy, surreal pictures, often embracing formal experimentation, ranging from portraits, to nudes, to performative self-portraits that foreshadow modes of art-making that would become dominant in the 1970s.

Marta Astfalck-Vietz: Staging the Self at the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, July 11–November 30, 2025