Issue 48 - Contents

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.

We speak with the winner of the OD Photo Prize 2025, J.A. Young, who turns to an ongoing body of work wrought from trauma, research and experiments in the darkroom. Between lived experience and occult inquiry, the series, Angels considers how violence, control and intuition inscribe themselves into the materiality of hand-made prints, and what it might mean to summon images from forces that, though invisible, are anything but absent. 

An exhibition at MAST, Bologna, brings together two decades of work by Mohamed Bourouissa, known for granting visibility to lives historically erased from mainstream representation. From Philadelphia’s Black cowboys to staged moments with friends and acquaintances from the French banlieues, Bourouissa explores the codes, postures and poetics of everyday existence. Rica Cerbarano reflects on the question of community itself, on the intricate webs of relationship in which we live and asks what role artistic creation can meaningfully play in society today.

On the uninhabited island of Illa del Rei, where a former British naval hospital now houses Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Cindy Sherman’s latest exhibition and her first solo show in Spain in over two decades is on view. Spanning eight series from across her near 50-year career, The Women stages a carnival of ageing flappers, social climbers and fashion phantoms; with deadpan wit and grotesque precision, Sherman’s portraits expose the desperate contortions of femininity and the moment the mask begins to slip, writes Charlotte Jansen.

Books

Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2025

Selected by Tim Clark and Thomas King

Features

Excluded or Exoticised? The European Gaze in Indigenous Spaces