The almost unimaginable horrors of WWII. The US Civil Rights Movement. The HIV/AIDS crisis. Deindustrialisation in the UK. 20th century photographers were right at the heart of some of the world’s most historic moments. Lee Miller witnesses the liberation of Paris before taking a bath in Adolf Hitler’s tub. Nan Goldin brought the lives of the LGBTQ community to the fore, immersing herself in New York’s drag culture. Gordon Parks documented the realities of life for Black people under segregation laws. The best photographers capture the essence of a moment, a movement, a place. They remind us to think critically about our society and encourage us to view things from a new angle. Here are ten titans of the craft who have exhibitions not to be missed this year.  

The 1970s and 1980s in the Northeast of England were years of intense turbulence, marred with the closure of industry, unemployment and poverty. Chris Killip (1946-2020) is known for his documentary photography of the region during this period, taken with a uniquely empathetic yet honest eye. The artist moved to Newcastle in 1975 to take up a Northern Arts fellowship at British Gas, where areas such as Skinningrove, Durham and Middlesborough caught his attention. Killip often lived within these neighbourhoods for extended periods of time, establishing long-term relationships with people. He witnesses the solidarity among shipbuilding and coalmining communities and the importance of the industries they relied on. He stayed long enough to see them rapidly lose everything through deindustrialisation. His photographs are considered one of the most important visual records of Britain in the 1980s, telling the story of the people with no control over their destiny as global economic developments destroyed local communities and their livelihoods. Fotomuseum Den Haag’s exhibition includes more than 100 photographs, making it the most comprehensive survey of his work to date. 

Neue Nationalgalerie seeks to return to the roots Nan Goldin’s (b. 1953) creative practice with This Will Not End Well. The exhibition features her work in the form of a slideshow and film projection, accompanied by soundtracks and music – echoing Goldin’s desire to be a filmmaker and her perception of her work as being like movie stills. There is a profound sense of intimacy to her work, capturing tender moments of both quiet everyday life and wild parties. She is known for exploring LGBTQ subcultures, the HIV/AIDS crisis and the opioid epidemic. As phrased in the Museum of Modern Art, her “photographs are like pages of a diary, sharing at once the intimacy of ordinary connections, the isolation of abuse and the joyful abandon of being with friends.” She effortlessly traverses both art and activism, using the intense realism of her images to create a frank and riveting portrait of the lives of those pictured. This Will Not End Well ties in with the artist’s original vision for how people should interact with her art. It excellently highlights how Goldin’s work gets to the heart of the struggle between autonomy and dependency in all forms of relationship, continues to shape our perception of our society and culture today. 

In 1980, Robert Frank (1924-2019) created the film Life Dances On… in which he reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook. As part of the film, Frank’s wife, artist June Leaf, looks at the camera and asks Frank “Why do you make these pictures?”. In an introduction to its screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.” A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art takes its name from this poignant piece of media. The show coincides with the centenary of the artist’s birth and will explore his restless experimentation across mediums, including photography, films and books, as well as his dialogues with other artists. Frank’s work defined a generation of photography. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant which freed him to travel throughout the country in 1955 and 1956. The result was The Americans, one of the most revolutionary volumes in the history of photography. First published in France in 1957, when it was released in the US in 1959 it was a source of controversy for its cutting perspective on American culture and carefree attitude towards traditional techniques. The book saw Frank’s photography become a touchstone of image-making, both in the 1950s and today.  

In a monograph about Luigi Ghirri’s (1943-1992) work art critic and curator Francesco Zanot said that his photographs: “alter the perception we have of the world without proposing a single path to follow, rather they provide us with the tools we need to find the ones we’re looking for.” Ghirri’s curiosity with scale and illusion gives his work a dreamlike quality and his method of framing real objects and places in the camera’s viewfinder creates a style that mimics photomontage. His work is imbued with a deadpan, ironic wit and his observations of the world give each image an absurd edge. in this exhibition, MASI Lugano recounts the artist’s profound fascination with travel, both real and imaged, through 150 original prints. He mainly photographed his Italy, travelling to places frequented by tourists from the Dolomites to the lakes of northern Italy, from seaside resorts along the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts to museums, classical ruins and theme parks. Within this, Ghirri includes ideas of maps, atlases, advertising materials and postcards, integrating the materials into his work. Through this collection of photographs, a profound reflection on the way photography frames the experience of place in modern life emerges. 

Guided by humanist ideals, US documentary photographer, storyteller and portraitist Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) focused her gaze on people with diverse backgrounds, often drawn to those overlooked or marginalised by society. She said: “I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society. What I want to do more than anything is to acknowledge their existence.” Her empathetic and honest photography saw her gain recognition across the world, and her images were featured in publications including Life, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. This exhibition, at the famed annual photography festival Les Recontres d’Arles, showcases six of her most in-depth projects. Each series sees Mark focus on a different group of people who operate on the fringes of society – institutionalised women in Oregon State Hospital, street children in Seattle, sex workers in Mumbai, the needy and dying in Mother Teresa’s charities and travelling circus families in India. Alongside these remarkable photographs, the exhibition offers visitors a chance to view rare archival materials like Mark’s contact sheet, personal notes and official correspondence to create a full impression of a remarkable artist. 

Cinema. Classical painting. Literature. Jeff Wall’s (b. 1946) photography is rooted in its relationship with other art forms. He describes his work as ‘near documentary’, explaining that it “means that they are pictures whose subjects were suggested by my direct experience, and ones in which I tried to recollect that experience as precisely as I could, and to reconstruct and represent it precisely and accurately.” His work blurs the line between reality and staged modality, and his work during the 1970s pioneered ‘staged photography’. His artistic trademark – backlit, often large-scale, photographic transparencies that combine the richness of oil painting with the fluorescent display of advertising – was inspired by an illuminated advertisement at a bus kiosk after visiting an exhibition of the Old Masters in Madrid. It is this marriage of the classic with the overtly modern that marks out Wall’s work, synthesising his two impulses as both artist and art historian. Visitors to the White Cube’s retrospective can expect to see the iconic light box series, as well as new pictures from the pioneering artist’s oeuvre.   

In 1927, Lee Miller (1909-1977) was on the cover of Vogue. She’d first been discovered after Condé Naste prevented her from stepping in front of a car, and her image was what the magazine’s editor-in-chief was looking for to represent the emerging idea of the ‘modern girl.’ Two years later, she travelled to Paris to apprentice with Man Ray, working with him on the development of solarisation. By the outbreak of WWII in 1939, Miller was living with surrealist painter and curator Richard Penrose in London. She soon turned her attention to photojournalism, becoming the official war photographer for Vogue. Over the course of the conflict, she documented the Blitz, liberation of Paris and the horror of Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Her goal was to document war as historical evidence. In the years following the war, Miller and Penrose bought Farleys, a farmhouse in the East Sussex countryside, where they entertained friends such as Picasso and raised their son Antony. This unique exhibition brings together photographs from throughout the 1950s, showcasing the tongue-in-cheek, convivial style that Miller brought to this era and shining a light on a whole different side of this multifaceted artist. 

Since the beginning of her career, Ming Smith (b. 1947) has been a trailblazer. She was the first female member to join Komoigne, a collective of black photographers in New York in the 1960s, working to document black life. Smith was also the first black female photographer to be included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Many of her subjects were well-known black cultural figures like Nina Simone, Grace Jones and Alice Coltrane, and Smith described her work as being like blues music, saying “in the art of photography, I’m dealing with light, I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment. Getting the feeling – to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues”. Now, visitors to Wexner Centre for the Arts will be treated to an immersive, multimedia experience, all set to an ambient soundscape created by the artist’s son, Mingus Murray. It includes exclusive images taken from her Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast and Egypt over the span of three decades. The expansive series of photography documents everyday scenes from across the continent and shares a narrative of the places she visited from her perspective as a Black woman. 

Daido Moriyama (b.1938) work is defined by the Japanese ‘are, bure, boke’, which translates to ‘grainy, blurry, out of focus’. Over the course of his 60-year career, Moriyama as challenged the conventions of photography and invites us to experience images in a new way. Moriyama captured the clash between Japanese tradition and Westernisation that followed the US military’s occupation of Japan after WWII. Inspired by American artists and writers like Andy Warhol and Jack Kerouac, he brought to life the emerging consumer culture of the country in bold and unconventional style. His career is the result of constant reinvention and the pursuit of the unexpected, chaotic and intensely personal, mirroring the rapidly transforming society in which he lived. Moriyama has spent his career asking the fundamental question: “what is photography?” and Photo Elysee’s impressive retrospective documents his decades-long pursuit of an answer. The exhibition documents the way the artist contextualises and reframes his images over time, continuing to explore and push the bounds of the form. More than anything, the it is a reminder of why his pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain innovative today. 

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Words: Emma Jacob

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Image Credits:
1. Mary Ellen Mark. Feminist demonstration, New York City, 1970. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery.
2. Nan Goldin, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973, Detail, courtesy the artist.
3. Robert Frank. Mabou Winter Footage. 1977. Gelatin silver print, 23 11/16 × 14 3/4″ (60.1 × 37.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation.
4. Luigi Ghirri, Trani, 1986, C-print, new print. CSAC, Università di Parma. © Eredi di Luigi Ghirri.
5. Jeff Wall, Boy Falls from Tree, 2010. Lightjet Print, 226 x 305.6cm, 89 x 120 3/16 in. © Jeff Wall, Courtesy of White Cube.
6. Picasso by the signpost, 1950 © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2024. All rights reserved.
7. Gordon Parks, Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, archival pigment.
8. Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos.
9. Ming Smith, Womb, 1992. Archival pigment print, 24 x 36 in. Courtesy of Ming Smith Studio.
10. Daido Moriayama, Tokyo, 1982 © Daido Moriyama/Diado Moriyama Photo Foundation.