Photography is in crisis – and maybe that’s exciting, actually

One of the most high-profile exhibitions at this year’s FotoFocus Biennial – the biggest of its kind in the US – is by Trevor Paglen, an artist who recently suggested that the photograph as we know it is dead. Ok, to be a bit more specific: the idea of the photograph as a faithful representation of reality has been rendered obsolete in the age of generative AI, where images might bear no relation to the reality that they claim to represent. In this world, “Photographs are more akin to magic tricks or acts of conjuring,” he told Dazed back in June, and I’m inclined to agree. So I’ve come to Cincinnati, Ohio, the home of FotoFocus since it launched in 2012, with a specific question in mind: what can photography do in 2026?

The theme of this year’s Biennial, The Long View, leaves plenty of room for reflection. First of all, it can be interpreted in many different ways, incorporating long-exposure photography, photographs that illuminate our long-term relationship with nature, and forgotten moments from the history of the art form that cast the present in a new light. It includes very contemporary work, like Paglen’s, but also, for example, a retrospective of the American photographer Nancy Rexroth.

The main bulk of Rexroth’s work presented at the Cincinnati Art Museum exhibition Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power was produced in the 1970s, and compiled in the 1977 book Iowa. The story goes like this: Rexroth initially learned to take photographs using a professional camera favoured by photojournalists, the 35mm Nikon-F, but discovered the Diana camera – a “toy camera” – while experimenting at graduate school in Athens, Ohio. With a plastic lens and cheap plastic body, photographs taken with the Diana were often plagued by problems: blurriness, vignetting, light leaks.

For Rexroth, though, these weren’t so much problems as opportunities. “I was able to be spontaneous and joyful with the Diana camera,” says the photographer, now 80, at the opening of Secrets of My Power. “There was an opening up in the back of my mind. I was a newborn explorer into the worlds of feeling.”

Iowa is solely made up of dreamlike, poetic photographs taken with the toy camera, depicting white wooden houses, ghostly beds that still bear the traces of bodies, and other scenes from rural Ohio. The place that lends the book its name is notably absent; for Rexroth, the title refers to memories of childhood summers, found in the “atmospheres” of a place several hundred miles east. “Why did I call a book, Iowa, rather than Ohio?” she reflects, almost half a century on. “I had the notion that a photograph does not have to be about the subject matter at hand.”

Returning to Paglen’s exhibition, titled the most merciful thing in the world and staged at Cincinnati’s FotoFocus Center, this statement – that a photo doesn’t have to be about the subject matter at hand – resonates. For the last several years, in fact, the artist has investigated how images can be used to make us believe something very different from the truth, intentionally or otherwise. Much of this research is presented in the exhibition, from interviews with military psy-op experts to images of UFOs, alongside eerily beautiful photographs of spy satellites and reaper drones.

The title of the show is lifted from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, a pioneering story in the cosmic horror genre, which attempts to contend with the sublime terror of existing in a vast, uncaring and ultimately incomprehensible universe. It’s an apt parallel to Paglen’s work, which constantly gestures toward a peculiarly modern sense of terror that the critic Hal Foster has called the “techno-sublime” – you can also see this in Paglen’s artworks that apply software designed for self-driving or missile guidance to images of clouds and mountains, or machine vision installations that categorise visitors in real-time, via a sprawling web of data and algorithms. (Apparently I’m a “redneck”.) If you can’t actually grasp the hyperobjects of technocapital – the ultimate “subjects” of the work – you can at least sense their vibe. 

At Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, a solo show by the Haitian artist Widline Cadet similarly taps into the idea that photographs don’t need to represent the actual thing in front of the lens. Cadet left Haiti as a child, and much of her work is centred around immigration, memory, and the loss of family and community. Unable to physically photograph the relatives she’s been separated from, however, she often turns the camera on herself or other Black women in her immediate orbit, many of them strangers. This process, dubbed “critical fabulation”, is evident from the earliest photo in the show, “Plezi pale menm lang lan #1 (The Pleasure of Speaking the Same Language #1)” (2017), where the photographer appears on a bed with a woman she spotted in a crowd, their hair woven together, suggesting a deeper connection.

There’s another, slightly different case made for photography’s continued relevance in 2026, by other artists in the FotoFocus Biennial. This argument revolves around the idea of lived memory and personal experience: something that can’t be replicated by a machine… at least for now. Take, for instance, Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s collages in his solo show, Compressed Tenses. Created as a kind of reaction to the shortcuts of Photoshop and digital collage – and now, of course, AI – these repurpose print-outs of intimate nude portraits from the photo selection process, ripped, hole-punched, and layered together. They’re physical objects just as much as they’re images, and for Sepuya they carry the memories of the people within the frame (unlike Cadet, these are people he knew intimately before they stepped into the studio). As he tells writer and artist Carmen Winant during a talk at Cincinnati’s Memorial Hall: “I’m really interested in the friendship behind the work.” 

Also making the case for the very human narratives behind the photograph is the work on display in the group show Natural Fictions at The Carnegie: uncanny anthills by Phillip Maisel, local landscapes by Lydia Smith and Joshua Berg, Heesoo Kwon’s virtual feminist universe, archival photos embedded in rock by Mareiwa Miller, uncanny imitations of nature by Sean McFarland, and travelogue visuals projected from the top of a train set by Ruby Que. “Each artist in this show is really conjuring their own landscape,” says curator Lindsay Albert in conversation with co-curator Sso-Rha Kang. “It’s layered with time, memory, and myth.”

The same could be said of many works in the Contemporary Arts Center group show In the Interest of Time, from Lynn Whitney’s documentation of communities around Lake Huron, to Osamu James Nakagawa’s visual preservation of land used as Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II.

The simplest way to foreground the personal narrative in an artwork is, of course, the selfie (for lack of a better word – a self-portrait that includes the camera itself). And this is a recurring theme throughout the FotoFocus Biennial. Following a thread that’s woven throughout his career, Sepuya features the camera and other equipment within his portraits, creating a layer of remove from the viewer. Often, Cadet also holds the shutter release prominently within the frame, as if to claim ownership over her “stand-in archive”. And some of Rexroth’s earliest photographs show her in the act of taking the picture, or getting her mother to hold the shutter release while she hovers, ghostly, in the background. 

These artists are working in a long tradition, of course. The first selfie was supposedly taken by the 30-year-old Robert Cornelius in 1839; the first mirror selfie may be a newly uncovered self-portrait by Virginia Woolf’s grandma, Mia Jackson, dating to around 1850. But how have all these works found themselves in the same place, in 2026, just a few blocks apart and echoing each other in such specific ways? Once again, it could be about affirming the human eyes, minds, and relationships that still lie behind the camera in most contemporary photography. But maybe it also speaks to a deeper insecurity: the camera turning on itself, to figure out what it’s ‘for’ and where it might be going.

Going back to the 1830s once again (yes, this is a youth culture publication), many people believed that painting was in crisis following the invention of the camera. They turned out to be wrong, as painters responded by inventing new forms like Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism. Sure, painting could no longer claim to represent the ‘subject matter at hand’ with as much fidelity as this new art form of lenses and chemicals, but instead it turned toward a new kind of truth: the truth of inner feeling and emotional atmospheres. The age of AI represents a similar turning point for photography, and the diverse exhibitions at FotoFocus offer up a selection of possible responses – some, admittedly, are more convincing than others.

The 2026 FotoFocus Biennial runs across the Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky region until October 31.