What Next for Photography?

Frieze magazine, n. 263, 2026

Taous Dahmani I was surprised that an art-world publication like frieze would dedicate an entire feature to the history of photography. That says a lot, so perhaps we could start there: is photography still understood as something singular within art, or does it belong elsewhere? It exists everywhere now, so does it still need its own field, with a stable place for specialists like us? In 2026, where does photography stand within visual culture more broadly?

David Campany  My feeling is that it stands at the centre and at the edges, presuming we live in a predominantly visual culture. I say ‘presuming’ because I tend to understand visual culture as visual-textual culture. It’s rare that you encounter photographs without writing around them. But nobody would say 2026 is the year of photography, or that it carries the character of our times, culturally or technologically. For a good half-century, it has been an eclipsed medium. Not exactly obsolete, eclipsed media are historically very interesting. Once a certain overemphatic burden is lifted from them, they are freed up in interesting ways.

Documentary, still the dominant idea of photography, began as an experimental practice. What we now call the legacy media of the 20th century formalized its operations: its regimes of truth, through things like the magazine photo essay with its normative relation between image and language. Once those media broke down, documentary returned to its experimental state, which is a good thing.

Nadine Isabelle Henrich Earlier this year, in preparation for the 9th Triennial of Photography in Hamburg, I spoke to its artistic director Mark Sealy about the notion of a ‘ground zero’ in photography. We were trying to find words to describe the feeling that photography, in the past decade, has reached not a completion but an end of a chapter – a certain ‘undoing’ of the legacies of photography. Critical reflections on the medium’s ties to power that important theorists such as Ariella Azoulay, Allan Sekula, Shawn Michelle Smith and John Tagg have dissected since the 1980s have now, I think, finally been absorbed across photographic, archival and institutional curatorial practice.

Now, there’s a sense that a different grounds for artistic practice is possible – a new chapter that identifies photographic processes and circulation as a form of metabolism. It might also bring an interconnected transformation and mutual sharpening of photography and generative AI in art practice. There’s an interesting momentum around these developments as we mark the medium’s 200th anniversary, according to the French calendar.

Hoda Afshar I’d like to approach that question as a photographer/artist who works with the documentary genre and has always been conscious of this separation between photography and the visual arts. I made it my mission to force my way into the visual-art scene. I struggled to embrace the title of ‘photographer’ because of the limitations and isolation it can impose on an artist. The photography scene also insists on that separation, in some ways. But for me, this separation is slightly artificial, if inevitable. I think there’s room for photography in art and art in photography. It’s precisely in those areas where things blur or merge that some of the most interesting questions arise.

TD Photography has been sold as a ‘democratic medium’; people feel they know it because they use it daily. Yet it also carries a whole body of theory around it, and the two rarely meet.

DC  I’m sympathetic to that confusion because it’s intrinsic to the medium. Immanuel Kant, writing before photography, proposed the idea of distributive unity, that something could be dispersed and difficult to define and yet somehow remain an it. People have long discussed  photography’s dispersal across the social, artistic, scientific and political areas of life. This dispersal withholds it from a full presence in the world of art and I don’t mind that. I think we should be careful what we wish for when we worry about photography’s lack of acceptance in the art world. What would it mean if it fully was? It would be dead.

The pilot issue of frieze, included feature on work I made with a friend under a pseudonym, sandwiched between pieces on Damien Hirst and Art & Language. We made politically interventionist work on billboards, photographed it and those photographs were in the magazine. I’ve always understood art magazines and art websites as photographic. Everything that you see in frieze has been photographed unless it’s generated in a computer and goes straight to the page somehow. Every installation, painting, sculpture, every still from a film, all of it is photographic. So it would be interesting to understand frieze as a photography magazine. Why don’t we? Because photography has always had this double relation to art. It’s an art form in its own right and it’s the supposedly artless means by which all of the arts are documented and distributed.

NIH From a curatorial perspective, photography is challenging and interesting precisely because it transgresses all these registers. In institutional spaces, we are still dealing with issues of class and access: photography is a shapeshifting medium and still holds the power to reach a broad spectrum of audiences, far beyond the sphere of fine art.

HA I’m reminded of Susan Sontag’s famous line from her book, On Photography [1977], that ‘today everything exists to end in a photograph.’ It suggests that a photograph is not simply a document of reality, but the form through which something is recognized or remembered. That’s the power photography holds. I think its simplicity and proximity to the real are precisely what gives it its philosophical complexity.

TD Photography has lived through many crises in its 200 years. As people celebrate its invention, some are already declaring its slow death by AI. Are those tensions and crises just photography’s default condition? Is AI simply its newest challenge? If we pick up a crystal ball, how do we see this unfolding?

DC  Susan Sontag wrote that images ‘thicken’ and complicate the experience of the world. Around me now are images on my desk; I see you as images on my laptop screen; but outside my window, I see buildings, a bridge and cars. Photography always involves thinking through other images (deconstructing or critiquing previous practices and regimes) and looking directly at the world itself, considering how it might be translated into an image and for what purpose.

The photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot interests me because he was very good friends with Charles Babbage, the father of modern computing. They were thinking about the potential of information being converted to ones and zeros, and then being used to calculate. If Talbot had a crystal ball, I don’t think an iPhone would have surprised him: a strange little 19th-century technology connected to networks. He would have just said, ‘Well, of course that was going to be.’

HA I wonder if this anticipation of photography’s death stems from its connection to the real. That relationship has been both a blessing and a curse for the medium, and is partly what has contributed to doubts about it as an art form, or being labelled as a mechanical tool for reproduction. AI might actually free photography from having to prove its relationship to truth and reality.

So much of how we read images comes down to what we desire or are conditioned to see. AI images are, in a way, the outcome of that desire. Donald Trump, for example, posted idealized AI images of himself – younger and more powerful – or of his fantasies of taking over Iran, to which the Iranian regime responded with counter images.

What interests me with photography is the way images have shaped our knowledge of ourselves and the world. I don’t see AI as a crisis or as the cause of the death of photography, but as a moment of change, in the way that painting was liberated from the burden of realism after photography was invented.

NIH  I understand that argument of liberation. But outside of artistic practice, in the realms of documentary and information ecosystems, I don’t think photography has been disentangled from truth. We are navigating a crisis not of truth, but of trust.

In the case of Trump, different narratives of reality compete for our attention, and we select from them like consumer products. We might choose the reality that offers us benefits, resources, attention or access to certain networks. Against this, I’ve observed a renewed interest in authorship and process. Now, we care more about what lies beyond the image frame: the process behind making a photograph and the human decisions and power structures behind it.

HA I agree. I didn’t mean liberating photography from truth – rather, a renewed or more careful assessment of its function as evidence. Photography has had to answer for the way that it constructs reality through selection, distortion and so on, long before AI. But it does not construct reality in the way that AI does. If anything, AI seems to be pushing us towards the desire to explore these connections more deeply – not in theoretical terms, but as something that is felt and experienced.

DC  If a medium is truly liberated, it’s also free to carry on as it was. Photography did not just suddenly produce a wholesale rush towards abstraction in painting. Liberation means you can do whatever you want. The image itself never makes a truth claim; a claim is made on its behalf. If there’s a crisis of trust, it’s a crisis of the institutions that once spoke on behalf of photography. In The Pencil of Nature [1844], Talbot has a photograph of intricate pieces of china. He speculates that if somebody steals the china, the photograph might constsitute “evidence of a novel kind”, but he leaves that decision to those with greater legal acumen. We’re still fighting over it. You can’t drop a photograph down the chimney of a courtroom and expect it to convict or exonerate.

There’s nothing wrong with photography existing within frameworks for witnessing and truth-telling, but a journalist could legitimately use AI imaging because the claim still comes from the framework around the image. Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life [1863], writes of Constantin Guys, who was an illustrator-reporter who sketched in Parisian courtrooms and on battlefields. Those observations, combined with journalistic writing, produced the account. Breaking the supposedly indexical connection does not necessarily harm photography’s capacity to aid witnessing or the telling of truths.

HA André Bazin’s idea that all art began with a desire to preserve life through representation and to resist disappearance through time goes back to ancient Egypt. I see photography as part of that same desire. There’s always truth in it, but it’s inevitably mixed with imagination, interpretation and projection.

DC The photojournalist Don McCullin worried about one of his photographs being used in a report because it looked too much like a film still (Don McCullin, A Turkish Defender Leaving the Side Entrance of a Cinema, Limassol, Cyprus, 1964). He felt that the image’s incidental formal perfection would undermine its truth claims as a journalistic picture, as if such images must have a particular appearance. But the world can look cinematic, sometimes.

TD What interests me about the medium is its power in storytelling and narrative construction. Who holds the camera and who looks at the photograph, shapes the knowledge and the image produced. It’s entangled with many emotions – whether in family albums or documents of political events, surveillance and colonization. The question isn’t whether photography is a good or bad tool, but rather: what have we learned, what must we leave behind and what do we still need to question? Where do we stand in our understanding of the ethics of photography?

HA There’s the more ‘innocent’, ‘personal album’ archive that is growing larger every second, and then there’s the political landscape of images and its potential to control what we see. Systemic control has been part of photography’s history since its invention, including its use as an instrument and fertilizer of colonial thinking and racial classification.

I’m interested not just in what photography has revealed, but also what it has concealed or excluded. Jacques Rancière describes politics in terms of what is made visible and audible to us; what is left out of that sensory landscape becomes a site of political struggle for recognition. Having worked around questions of visibility in my practice for some time, I now face an existential crisis: what do we do in a time of hypervisibility, when visibility itself is working against us?

DC Younger image-makers are acutely aware of photography’s implication in networks of power while they confront an overabundance of photographic imagery. I’ve never quite felt that overabundance. Its vocabulary appeared in the 1920s and ’30s, in the first decades of what came to be called the ‘mass media’. There were commentators writing about floods of images, worrying that it would overload and destabilize civil society. Since then, algorithms have introduced targeting. For me, the excess lies not in the volume or the algorithm, but within every photograph. You open the shutter and the world floods in as light. What enters the image outside of intention is destabilizing, even though it’s reality effect was for a while understood as its guarantee of authenticity.

NIH  A group show I co-developed with Tina M. Campt for the Walther Collection, titled ‘Into the Unseen’, featured work by the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng. Since I encountered Mofokeng’s work, I have wondered about how to transgress an ocular-centric understanding of photography, one that goes beyond ‘visibility’. Occlusion can result from the selective documentation of history and gaps in archives, but it can also be resistant. In this era of hypervisibility, artists and individuals are reconsidering their relationship to exposure; visibility has acquired more negative connotations.

Some images seem to sit down with you and tell you a story. But the shadows in Mofokeng’s work seem to instead contain whispers that I try to access. By contrast, the opaque black shadow in an AI-generated image is mathematical silence. No matter how much you edit or retreat into the image, nothing can be revealed because it is a mathematical void.

DC  I understand the metaphor of photographs whispering, but there is also something radical about their literal silence and stillness. Documentary film and television seem terrified of those qualities. They won’t let photographs remain onscreen in their mute stillness: someone must speak over them, or the camera must zoom in, as if the photograph were essentially difficult.

Photographers rarely make single pictures; they make bodies of work – sets, suites, series, archives and clouds – usually relying on writing or discourse for positioning. Victor Burgin called this the ‘scripto-visual’. Whenever we discuss photography, we are discussing combinations of photography and writing, or of one photograph with another, as if a single image were insufficient. Yet if you choose photography, if you like it, the stillness and silence must be part of the appeal, either in themselves or because of what they allow you to do. 

HA I find these qualities to be the ones I’m most drawn to as an image-maker. That silence is what leaves photographs open to multiple interpretations. I see a lot of potential in that, in shaping or reshaping how we see. I always have strong opinions about the subjects I make work about, but I try my best to remove my opinions from the pictures I make and instead create images that draw the audience in while prompting questions. I never want my images to offer answers.

DC What’s the relationship between shaping an image and keeping it open?

HA That’s a good question. A few years ago, I was part of the selection committee for the Australian National Photographic Portrait Prize. I was struck by the consistency of the visual language with which non-Indigenous entrants photographed Indigenous subjects. It reminded me of images I saw in 2018 at the National Gallery of Victoria, in the exhibition ‘Colony’, a survey on the visual history of Australian colonialism. In some of the earliest documents, First Nations people were depicted through particular conventions, such as exaggerated proportions. I saw echoes of that language persisting in contemporary photography through the use of a wide-angle lens, the bush as a backdrop and so on. These conventions can have a dehumanizing effect and remind me how much photographic language has inherited from its history – what Ariella Azoulay calls the ‘imperial shutter’. I’m trying to think through that history and how to counter its inheritance, to find a more just and less didactic visual language.

DC Taous, you and I both work at photography institutions founded in the 1970s: The Photographers’ Gallery in London and the International Center of Photography in New York. Both emerged at a key moment in that eclipse of photography, as television became more dominant. These institutions not only championed photography as art, they allowed visitors to reconsider it in all its forms, including its implication in colonialism, patriarchy, advertising and capital.

The photography institution can be a slower space, removed from the white heat and speed of visual culture, where images can be reconsidered. Its purpose is not to argue that anything placed on a wall is art, but that anything placed in this space is worth slowing down to rethink.

TD When I compare today to the 50-year period after World War II, I’m struck by similarities in global tensions and wars. We keep having the same conversations, making the same discoveries, forgetting them and starting over. We seem unable to learn from the medium’s own history.

My practice is guided by a series of questions: who makes the image? Who is represented, and under what conditions? Who circulates it? Who benefits? I’m interested in the politics of how images enter our lives. David, I have told you before that I may be more interested in photographers than in photographs, which horrified you.

DC It did! When viewers encounter ambiguity or complexity, I worry that they default to the photographer’s intentions rather than owning their own response. Institutions often encourage this old-fashioned notion of intention in an effort to be helpful, but they may be taking away the viewer’s difficult agency, what John Cage called ‘response-ability’. Hoda, how do you feel about that, given your interest in a certain kind of suspension?

HA In the past, I’ve admired works whose impact has changed for me once I got to know the artist’s intention. But there’s another kind of art whose simplicity allows for a complex reading. My interpretation of the work might have nothing to do with the artist’s intention, and I love that. Good art is something that makes life or the world a little better – something that changes you, however slightly, after you experience it. It’s the ‘unselfing’ that happens in the process, as Iris Murdoch put it, that for a moment you find yourself outside of yourself.

Recently, I rewatched Abbas Kiarostami’s film Where Is the Friend’s House [1987], a simple story about two schoolchildren. My heart raced from beginning to end at the beauty of its scenes and the simplicity with which it communicates complex questions of morality, guilt and human nature. I cried – not from an identifiable emotion, but as a bodily response to its sublime beauty.

NIH That brings us back to what the photography institution can offer. Hoda describes a transformative experience that cannot be fully rationalized, but changes one’s perception of being in the world. Ideally, an institution offers the openness an audience needs for such an encounter, rather than offering strictly intellectual experiences.

Context remains important. We have discussed discomfort with photography’s history, but institutions are also uncomfortable with their power to decide who is given space to be seen. Some have responded by retreating and handing their spaces to artists, with exhibition texts composed of artist quotes. Ultimately, the question is how intentions are framed and that remains a curatorial responsibility.

TD Finally, I want to ask: what are you still learning and what are you still asking of photography?

DC I’ve learned that, despite our compulsion to define it, photography is somewhat untheorizable. When you’re fascinated by something, you want a definition or a theory that will establish your relationship to it. I remain amazed by the profusion of theories of photography, both in writing and in the work image-makers produce. The space opened by the untheorizable continues to interest me.

NIH In curating for different audiences, I have learned that the opacity, ambiguity and openness of the image are beyond control. You can never determine the interpretative experience of someone moving through a photography exhibition. While that is also true of other media, still photographs possess a particularly radical openness. I am learning to accept and work with that.

I want to keep exploring the medium’s power to bridge individualized, fractured realities and create a shared space for discourse. That feels especially urgent under the current political conditions. Photography offers a space for difference and dissonance while keeping a conversation open.

HA I am not sure what I want from photography at this moment. The excess of violent images over the last few years has done some serious damage to my psyche and to my relationship to the medium. I’m suspicious of this degree of exposure to violence, especially amid the escalation of wars, aggression and fascism in the world. That’s partly why I’m returning to the quietness of Kiarostami’s cinema. I think, now, I need images that restore something in me, that remind me of our capacity for tenderness and of what is still worth holding onto.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 263 with the headline ‘PICTURE PERFECT’