There are many photography exhibitions to see in Italy until spring

With Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del desiderio, Palazzo Reale is hosting a large and unprecedented selection of works by Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most refined and controversial photographers of the 20th century, from January 29 to May 17, 2026. The second chapter in a trilogy that began in Venice last year and is set to continue in Rome, the Milan exhibition focuses on the artist's aesthetic research: intense and sensual nudes, constructed with formal rigor and a masterful use of light, in which the body becomes a sculptural form and an instrument of sublimation of desire. Curated by Denis Curti and promoted by the City of Milan-Culture, the exhibition is produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and is part of the cultural program of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.

Almost five years after his death, a major exhibition pays tribute to Giovanni Gastel, master of contemporary photography, through more than two hundred and fifty images spanning his entire career: from his first fashion covers to still lifes, from portraits to his most famous advertising campaigns. Curated by Uberto Frigerio and produced by La Grande Brera with the Giovanni Gastel Archive, in collaboration with the Guardans-Cambó Agency, the exhibition offers an immersive and thematic journey, guided by the artist's inner voice. Alongside the photographs – about 140 of which are unpublished – there are personal objects, work tools, and, for the first time, writings and poems, essential parts of his imagination. An innovator who was able to combine analog and digital, Gastel transformed photography into a personal, elegant, and recognizable language. The exhibition also celebrates his deep connection with Milan, the cultural and creative matrix of his style, for which he was a refined interpreter and international ambassador, as defined by Harper's Bazaar USA magazine.

The Magnum America exhibition asks visitors to answer one question: what is America? Organized into ten-year chapters from the 1940s to the present day, the exhibition, promoted by Forte di Bard and Magnum Photos, brings together ordinary and extraordinary events, offering an intense and thought-provoking interpretation of the history, present, and future of the United States. Based on the book of the same name published by Thames & Hudson in 2024, the exhibition traces the deep connection between Magnum and the United States since the founding of the agency in 1947. From the glamour of Hollywood in Robert Capa's photographs to the anthropological perspective of Henri Cartier-Bresson, to the works of Eve Arnold, Elliott Erwitt, and Bruce Davidson, the collective triumphs and traumas of a country emerge, recounted in its impulses toward freedom, its social and political contradictions, and the transformations that have marked its recent history.

From February 21 to July 5, 2026, Le Stanze della Fotografia on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore will host a major retrospective dedicated to Horst P. Horst, master of 20th-century photography. Curated by Anne Morin with Denis Curti, the exhibition Horst P. Horst. The Geometry of Grace offers a comprehensive overview of his work, going beyond the fashion photography that made him famous in Vogue. On display are over three hundred works, many of which have never been seen before, including vintage prints, color photographs, drawings, and documents, which convey a vision of photography as architecture of form and light. Before devoting himself to photography, Horst trained in architecture and collaborated with Le Corbusier: this experience gave rise to a visual language based on proportional rigor, spatial balance, and measured sensuality. The exhibition presents a portrait of an artist who transformed photography into a cultured and timeless pursuit, where beauty emerges as a harmonious synthesis of classicism and modernism.

From February 12, 2026, CAMERA – Italian Center for Photography in Turin will host Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms, a major exhibition organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with CAMERA, for the first time in Italy after stops in Madrid and Barcelona. Curated by Sérgio Mah, the exhibition presents over one hundred and seventy images that trace more than forty years of Edward Weston's work, offering a European perspective on his legacy in the context of modern North American photography. The exhibition traces the artist's evolution from pictorialism to the full affirmation of straight photography, highlighting his central role as co-founder of Group f/64. Through still lifes, nudes, landscapes, and black-and-white portraits of great formal rigor, rooted in the relationship between form, light, and nature, the exhibition presents an essential and modern vision of photography as a poetic language and a tool for interpreting America between the two world wars.

Alongside the exhibition currently on display at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Jeff Wall. Living Working Surviving features a significant selection of works by one of the most influential figures in contemporary photography. The exhibition brings together twenty-eight works created between 1980 and 2021, including lightboxes and large-format color and black-and-white photographic prints from private collections and international museums. The images, only apparently snapshots of everyday life, depict ordinary gestures related to work and urban existence, revealing themselves to be constructed, ambiguous, and enigmatic compositions that invite the observer to question their meaning. Through a process defined as ‘cinematic’, the artist lucidly observes the aspirations and contradictions of the Western world, investigating both the middle class and conditions of marginality, in a constant dialogue between photography, painting and cinema.

From January 16 to February 28, 2026, THE POOL NYC at Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni in Milan presents the second chapter of The Time of the Gaze. 90 Years of Italian Photography in Two Acts, a project dedicated to the history of Italian photography from Futurism to Neorealism, from conceptual research to Luigi Ghirri's Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy). This episode focuses on black and white photography and brings together eighty photographs by twenty-eight artists. The exhibition begins with the Futurism of Renato Di Bosso, moves on to the experiments of Mario De Biasi and the abstract realism of Mario Giacomelli, and ends with Antonio Biasiucci's investigations into the collective memory of southern Italy. The exhibition is completed by the research of Franco Vaccari, Mario Cresci, and Luigi Erba, in dialogue with international artists such as Elliott Erwitt, William Klein, and Minor White.

A true declaration of love for color opens the Franco Fontana. Colors exhibition, hosted at the JMuseo in Jesolo from November 29, 2025, to May 22, 2026. The exhibition pays tribute to Franco Fontana, an international pioneer of color photography, through a selection of his most iconic works created between 1961 and 2017, many in large format. Curated by Cristina Ghelfi Fontana and Gabriele Accornero, this monographic exhibition is the result of in-depth study and restoration work on analog and digital materials. The exhibition recounts a journey in which color becomes a message and a tool for “making the invisible visible,” transforming natural and urban landscapes, asphalt, architecture, and human figures into abstract, geometric, and luminous images. The exhibition, enriched by an exclusive video interview and music by Armand Amar, conveys the poetic vision of an artist who has profoundly innovated the language of contemporary photography.

Stepping into Agnès Varda's world means crossing places she lived in, observed, and transformed into stories. Set up at Villa Medici and curated by Anne de Mondenard and Carole Sandrin, the exhibition Agnès Varda. Here and There. Between Paris and Rome brings back visitors to post-war Paris, starting from the courtyard-studio on Rue Daguerre, the artist's living and creative space for almost seventy years and the heart of her research. The exhibition features one hundred and thirty works, including original prints, film excerpts, documents, objects, and set photographs, opening a profound dialogue between Varda the photographer and Varda the filmmaker. The exhibition reconstructs her beginnings in the 1950s, with her open gaze on the streets of Paris, while a special section is dedicated to her travels in Italy between 1959 and 1963: from Venice to Rome, from Renaissance gardens to film sets, previously unseen images emerge that reveal her free, ironic, and attentive gaze.

In dialogue with the retrospective hosted last year by the Maxxi in Rome, the Civici Musei di Udine, in collaboration with the Archivio Guidi in Cesena, present Qui intorno. Progetti fotografici per il Friuli Venezia Giulia, 1985–2014 (Around Here. Photographic Projects for Friuli Venezia Giulia, 1985–2014) in the rooms of the Castello, an exhibition of 140 images taken by Guido Guidi over the course of thirty years in Friuli Venezia Giulia. The exhibition provides an in-depth overview of the author's work in urban and suburban contexts in the region, including Trieste, Spilimbergo, Venzone, Udine, Gorizia, and Lignano Sabbiadoro. Recognized as one of the greatest contemporary photographers, since the 1960s Guidi has focused his research on reflection on seeing and photography itself, exploring ordinary places with an innovative eye. Constantly renewing his visual language, over time he has constructed a complex iconography of the contemporary landscape, understood as a palimpsest of signs, stories, and practices in which different cultures and stratifications of reality intertwine.

CAMeC – Centro d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia presents Fotosintesi. Photographs from the Carla Sozzani Collection, an exhibition that focuses on one of the most important international photography collections. Curated by Maddalena Scarzella, the exhibition brings together one hundred and fifty works from the Sozzani Foundation, offering a new interpretation of the collection through the metaphor of photosynthesis: just as light is transformed into vital energy, so photography becomes an act of synthesis capable of regenerating visual language. Journalist, publisher, and gallery owner, Carla Sozzani has built a collection over more than fifty years that spans the entire history of photography, from reportage to portraiture, from fashion to still life. The exhibition features works by more than seventy artists, from Karl Blossfeldt and Alfred Stieglitz to Man Ray and Helmut Newton, to Paolo Roversi and David LaChapelle.

A few kilometers from the Italian border, in Mendrisio, an exhibition dedicated to the work of Stefano Graziani and his unique perspective, which rejects the logic of utility and necessity, is currently underway. Stefano Graziani. Reality Show is scheduled to run from November 14, 2025, to March 29, 2026, at the Teatro dell'architettura Mendrisio of the Università della Svizzera italiana. Curated by Francesco Zanot, the exhibition offers a reflection on the status of photography today, suspended between documentation and simulation. Stefano Graziani's works bring together architecture, objects, people, cities, and nature without hierarchy, constructing images as open and ambiguous relational systems. The exhibition is part of a broader exhibition program promoted by the USI Academy of Architecture, which also includes ARCHISATIRE. Una controstoria dell'architettura (ARCHISATIRE. A Counter-History of Architecture), curated by Gabriele Neri and dedicated to the relationship between satire and design.

The exhibition Tina Modotti. L'opera presents a comprehensive and engaging portrait of Tina Modotti, a key figure of the 20th century who is still surprisingly relevant today. Curated by Riccardo Costantini and hosted at Palazzo della Penna in Perugia, the exhibition is the result of a long international research project and features over two hundred images, many of which have never been seen before, along with documents, videos, audio recordings, and personal objects. An actress, photographer, and activist, Modotti developed a rigorous and experimental visual language, attentive to the dignity of work, the condition of women, and the political turmoil of her time. From her Hollywood experiences alongside Edward Weston to the maturity of her photographs from her years in Mexico, the exhibition traces Modotti's work and presents a reconstruction of her only exhibition in 1929, as an ‘exhibition within an exhibition’. Promoted by the Municipality of Perugia in collaboration with CAMERA – Italian Center for Photography and Cinemazero, the exhibition is the most comprehensive tribute ever made in Italy to an artist described as “the most famous unknown artist of the 20th century.”

Flat time is the right time. Bodies, places, and still lifes from the Pier Luigi Gibelli Collection is a photography exhibition running until June 2, 2026, in two venues, Palazzo Bisaccioni in Jesi and Palazzo del Duca in Senigallia, promoted by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Jesi and the Municipality of Senigallia. Curated by Roberto Maggiori and Luca Panaro, the exhibition presents over one hundred images by sixty-seven international artists selected from the Pier Luigi Gibelli Collection. The exhibition explores the relationship between photography and bodies, places, surfaces, and still lifes, divided into two spaces: in Jesi, works dedicated to the body; in Senigallia, works on landscape and still life. The exhibition highlights the role of the private collection as a critical tool for interpreting the evolution of photographic language, including formal experimentation, unconventional perspectives, and the transcendence of photography as a simple document.

Becoming Climate is an exhibition in which World Press Photo invites visitors to develop a collective awareness of the climate crisis and imagine a more just and sustainable future. The exhibition brings together over one hundred images from the World Press Photo archive, dedicated to the most significant environmental stories of the 21st century, and debuts in Pinerolo at the Maneggio Caprilli. The exhibition unfolds through two intertwined narratives: on the one hand, environmental damage, emergencies, and ongoing crises; on the other, the responses of resilience, innovation, and resistance introduced by communities and individuals. The layout is inspired by the four elements, emphasizing the interconnectedness of the global climate system and inviting us to rethink the relationship between humans, nature, and other species.