August 2026
August Issue
August moves between public histories and private presence: Japanese photography rewritten across generations, East London read through Tom Hunter’s archive, new work at Serpentine and Hayward, and fashion campaigns shaped by the street, architectural shadow and cinematic tension. In the studio, Kyazi Lugangira brings the month back to portraiture.
01 — On the Field
Field Notes from the studio: one portrait sitting, sequenced from stillness to sound.
Kyazi: Presence, Practice
This month I sat with Kyazi Lugangira, the Tanzanian singer-songwriter, composer and guitarist who funded the bande Kihaya Blues. His music brings East African roots, soul, funk, blues and Latin rhythms to the dancefloor, with lyrics in Kihaya — the language of the Bahaya people of Kagera — moving through love, politics and hope. Having toured as a rhythm guitarist and vocalist with Sona Jobarteh, he brings a performer’s command of stillness to the frame.
Against darkness, Kyazi first appears standing and composed: dark tailoring, brim lowered, hands at rest. The frame gives him room, allowing posture and gaze to carry the portrait before the sequence begins to close in.
A line of light catches the hat, glasses and beard as the guitar enters the image, shifting the mood from formal study to something warmer and more tactile. In the final frame, face gives way to hands, timber and strings; the instrument becomes a second portrait.
Together, the photographs move from presence to practice. They do not try to illustrate a genre or perform a biography. Instead, they hold on to the quiet details around a musician: the stance before a note, the touch of an instrument, and the concentration that remains when everything else falls into shadow.
02 — Art
A London-facing edit for photography, portraiture, contemporary art and image culture.
Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now
Bringing together 27 artists and more than 200 photographs, videos, installations and rare photobooks, this landmark exhibition rewrites the history of Japanese photography through women’s perspectives. From post-war pioneers to experimental contemporary voices, it moves through identity, pop culture, fashion and everyday life, placing overlooked practitioners beside internationally recognised figures.
Why it matters visually: Its breadth makes authorship visible: shifts in gaze, intimacy, sequence, colour and social record show how a photographic history changes when the frame includes those long excluded from it.
Book ticketsTom Hunter Selects
Co-curated by Tom Hunter and the V&A East Youth Collective, this free display places East London at the centre of an archive-driven visual essay. Hunter’s photography appears beside Dorothea Lange, Paul Trevor, punk graphics, protest ephemera and historic maps, tracing how communities record change, resilience and the right to shape their own image.
Why it matters visually: It treats the museum collection as living material, connecting documentary photography, neighbourhood memory and youth-led interpretation across one changing part of London.
View displayCecily Brown: Picture Making
New paintings made for Serpentine sit beside works dating to 2001, recent monotypes and drawings. Brown returns to the park as subject and memory, moving between vigorous brushwork, amorous figures, woodland scenes and the darker undertow of cautionary tales. The exhibition is her first major UK institutional presentation of paintings since 2005.
Why it matters visually: Brown’s layered surfaces reward photographers interested in movement, visual ambiguity and the point where a figure appears, dissolves and reappears inside an image.
Book free entryMusquiqui Chihying: A Life of Navigation
Four works bring Musquiqui Chihying’s humorous and quietly critical practice into focus. Early pieces on high-pressure urban life sit with two new video installations examining artificial intelligence, gaming, automation and the colonial attitudes embedded in technological progress. Photography, sculpture, moving image and performance keep reality and the surreal in productive tension.
Why it matters visually: The work uses humour as a visual instrument, letting staging, objects and screen language expose the human assumptions hidden inside apparently neutral technologies.
View exhibition03 — Fashion
A compact visual edit of campaigns and creative direction selected for image-making rather than product noise.
Fall 2026: Venice, Unfiltered
Bottega Veneta’s Fall 2026 campaign, photographed by Chris Rhodes under Louise Trotter’s direction, moves through Venice without turning the city into a postcard. Vintage wallpaper, terrazzo, private interiors and metropolitan fragments hold craft against ordinary surroundings. The interplay of digital and analogue, day and night, lets each frame feel observed rather than over-staged.
Source visual: Official Bottega Veneta Fall 2026 collection image from the house’s media stream.
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L’heure du loup
Antonin Tron’s first Balmain campaign turns the twilight phrase entre chien et loup into a neo-noir sequence photographed by Suffo Moncloa. A John Lautner house becomes an architectural set for bold shoulders, leather and draped silhouettes. The frames feel like suspended film stills, charged by controlled shadow, modernist geometry and exchanges that remain deliberately unresolved.
Source visual: Official Balmain Fall/Winter 2026 campaign image. Photographer: Suffo Moncloa.
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Winter 2026-2027 Campaign
David Sims reduces Dior’s winter campaign to a few precise cues — violin, delphiniums, polka dots and check — then arranges them across a dreamlike French countryside. Landscape, prop and garment share the frame without becoming decorative shorthand. The stillness feels painterly, but the odd juxtapositions keep each image gently unsettled rather than nostalgic.
Source visual: Official Dior Winter 2026-2027 campaign image. Photograph: David Sims.
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