Issue 49 - Contents

Kusukazu Uraguchi’s decades-long study of the ama, an exclusively female community of fishers and divers from Japan’s Shima region where he was born, is currently on show at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. In black-and-white photographs that evoke both nostalgia and immediacy, Uraguchi captures the rigour of the ama’s labour and the quiet poetry of their daily lives on the coast. His work moves between anonymity and intimacy, tradition and modernity, and the delicate tension between the photographer’s gaze and the world it reveals, writes Bas Blaasse.

Around the world, politicians are stepping up efforts to criminalise migrants. In the UK, Reform has been calling to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain. France is implementing sharp cuts in legal immigration and massive deportations of undocumented people. And in the U.S., Trump’s administration issued the Executive Order 14159 ‘Protecting the American People Against Invasion’, which, amongst other directives, expands expedited removal. Against such a backdrop, Stacy Mehrfar’s The Moon Belongs to Everyone, included in this year’s Glaz Festival in Rennes and Bretagne, France, becomes especially pertinent. A visual poem on what it means to relocate, what it means to come back, and the ever-shifting polymorphic meaning of home, the artist speaks with Raquel Villar-Pérez about migration, belonging and identity.

Resistance – co-curated by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen after four years of research – follows the mutual shaping of photography and protest in Britain throughout history, debuting at Turner Contemporary and now on show at National Galleries of Scotland. Charting a century of activism in the UK, Resistance gathers a powerful archive of overlooked dissent. Yet, as Mark Durden writes, in stripping protest of its urgency and historical texture, it risks flattening its force through decontextualised display and selective memory.

French writer Hervé Guibert (1955–1991) was the author of twenty-five novels and autobiographical works, but he also took photographs. The Only Face, Guibert’s second and final collection of photographs, was originally published on the occasion of a 1984 solo exhibition at Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris and has now been reissued by Magic Hour Press. Presented in its original sequence, this new edition largely comprises images of small private interiors, revealing itself not merely as an exhibition in book form, but as a novel in its own right, one that speaks to community, friendship and the distances that both separate and sustain them, writes Thomas King.

Ryudai Takano’s photography, now on view at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, asks us to recognise the body not just as a subject of the image, but as an actor, agent and sense-maker within the exhibition experience. Moving through his installations across multiple visits, Duncan Wooldridge writes that Takano’s staging of seriality, surprise and fragmentary montage – spanning portraits, cityscapes, photograms, and experimental display methods – unseats fixed categories of photography to reveal a field of continuous becoming.

Donna Gottschalk and Carla Williams make their French debut in Le Bal’s latest exhibition, We Others, accompanied by an interpretive text by Hélène Giannecchini. Bringing together first-person narrative and a wide range of photographs spanning decades of work to tell stories, explore invisibility and consider intergenerational connections, it is the nuance and fragility that stand out; a quiet yet political manifesto about absent bodies, writes Eve Hill-Agnus.

Books

Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2025

Selected by Tim Clark and Thomas King

Features

10 Must-See Exhibitions: Winter 2026