Daguerreotypes. Photograms. Double exposure. Today, we’re spotlighting five experimental photography exhibitions. These shows feature a mix of 20th century pioneers, like Lillian Bassman, whose visionary work redefined fashion and fine art photography, alongside contemporary practitioners such as Garry Fabian Miller and Liz Nielsen, who continue to explore light, colour and process in groundbreaking ways. Across these exhibitions, each image challenges perception, interrogates memory and celebrates the material and conceptual possibilities of lens-based medium. This is traditional imagery, reimagined.

Liz Nielsen (b. 1975) operates at the intersection of art and science, creating colourful scenes that blur the line between creation and chemistry. The artist works in a pitch-black environment, where tiny blasts of light are systematically emitted, making hundreds of exposures onto sheets of sensitive film. It’s a historic technique, pioneered by figures such as Anna Atkins and Man Ray. The resulting images are both abstract and representational, with shots that reference architecture, landscapes and the moon. There’s one thing running through every piece: colour. In an interview with LensCulture, the artist said: “I have definitely been attracted to colour since I was a tiny kid – especially transparent colour. I used to get allowance for doing chores, and I would spend it on food colouring so that I could put it in water inside plastic bags to hold them over my eyes, just so I could see the world in front of me in different colours.” 

Lillian Bassman was 24-years-old when, almost by chance, she took a job at Harper’s Bazaar. The publication was home to a group of artists and editors who were reimagining how a magazine should look. Together, they introduced an avant-garde sensibility to the American newsstand. Bassman was fundamental to this shift. Now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major retrospective that charts her course from design apprentice to art director and accomplished photographer. Marina Kellen French, Director of the New York gallery, says: “Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond shows an outstanding photographer and trailblazing art director transforming magazine pages into a premier artistic project of experimentation and impact.” Audiences can expect 60 works, spanning inventive layout designs, editorial assignments and darkroom experiments with which Bassman advanced possibilities for photography in print. 

Garry Fabian Miller: Our Garden. Growing. Making. Living. 

Kestle Barton, Helston | Opens 28 March 

“Our life has been shaped by the making of the garden. It has become the most meaningful place in our world. Creating a settled state of being from which pictures have been seen, imagined, made visible. An ongoing act of life.” Kestle Barton presents an exhibition of camera-less photographs by Garry Fabian Miller (b. 1957), an artist widely known for his sustained exploration of light, colour and duration. The show focuses on works made directly from and about the artist’s garden, cultivated with his partner Naomi on the edge of Dartmoor. Fabian Miller places the plants and leaves from this terrain onto light-sensitive photographic paper, transforming the ephemeral materials into something permanent. The setting of the display is particularly poignant, with Kestle Barton’s surrounding gardens and fields designed as part of the gallery’s programme, shaping how artworks are encountered and understood. 

Artist Alison Rossiter (b. 1953) grounds her practice in an expansive personal library of expired vintage and antique photo papers. From this collection, she selects specific sheets to serve as the foundation for her work, then carefully develops them, coaxing each paper’s residual capacity to register light and shadow. She describes this as a process of “finding,” a careful approach in which she embraces imperfection as inherent to her chemically complex medium. In a new exhibition at Yossi Milo, Rossiter draws from a range spanning the mid 19^th to early 20^th century, channeling the artistic movements that unfolded across this period. Some photographs echo paintings by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly, whilst others pay homage to the work of pioneers like Man Ray and Louis Daguerre. She continues: “when I hold one of these prints, it’s like I’m time traveling to the 1920s.” 

Swiss photographer Ester Vonplon seeks out and captures nature in supposedly unspoiled places – before it possibly disappears as a result of climate change and human intervention. Vonplon sees her works as “memento mori,” revealing the strength and transience of the environment. Her subjects include Uaul Scatlè, a primeval spruce forest enclosed by steep rock formations; Val Curcisua, a high alpine valley; the Aclatobel forest nature reserve; and the riparian landscape of Ogna da Pardiala. The artist documents these landscapes and found objects from each location. Careful movement through nature is combined with a spirit of experimentation and an exploration of photographic processes, opening up new perspectives on Swiss landscapes. The Wingbeat series brings together impressions of plants, animals, fungi and stones, capturing their outlines using traditional photogram techniques. 

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Words: Emma Jacob

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Image Credits:

1. Liz Nielsen, Notebook Landscape, 2025.
2. Liz Nielsen, Rotating Landscape, 2025.
3. Lillian Bassman (American, 1917 – 2012) Solarized fashion study ca. 1960 Gelatin silver print 13 × 11 in. (33 × 27.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Lizzie and Eric Himmel, 2025 (2025.889.34) © Estate of Lillian Bassman.
4. Colour Seed 2, 2020, Light, water, Lambda c-type print from unique dye destruction print. 49.6 x 37.5 inches (framed) 126 x 95.25 cm (framed).
5. Alison Rossiter (American, b. 1953) Eastman Kodak Polycontrast F, expired September 1977, processed 2017, 2025 Four Gelatin Silver Prints. Dimensions, each element: 20″ x 16″ (51 x 40.5 cm) Framed: 45 1/2″ x 37 5/8″ (116 x 96 cm) Unique (AR.25447).
6. Ester Vonplon, Untitled, from Wingbeat, 2020–2024 © Ester Vonplon.