Best Rising Photographers of May 2026

Lee Friedlander: Life Still is a landmark monograph that brings together mostly unpublished photographs from one of America’s most influential photographers.

Spanning nearly seventy years, Friedlander’s career has been defined by a unique vision that finds poetry in the everyday. Life Still offers readers a rare glimpse into his expansive archive while introducing new work that underscores his continued relevance and insight. The book creates a compelling dialogue between past and present, showing how Friedlander’s eye consistently discovers humor, irony, and subtle complexity in the ordinary landscapes, urban spaces, and domestic environments he photographs.

Known for his compositional inventiveness and his ability to transform mundane scenes into layered visual narratives, Friedlander captures America in all its contradictions. Streets, signage, storefronts, fences, trees, and reflections become more than background—they become actors in his ongoing exploration of how we inhabit space and interact with culture. Often witty, occasionally surreal, and always meticulously observed, his photographs invite viewers to reconsider what they notice in the world around them.

Life Still features an insightful essay by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, which contextualizes Friedlander’s work within both historical and contemporary photographic practice. This combination of visual and written perspective illuminates the ways Friedlander’s images continue to challenge conventions and inspire new generations of photographers.

More than a retrospective, Life Still is both a summation of Friedlander’s decades-long career and a testament to his ongoing creative vitality. It is a celebration of observation, a meditation on American life, and a masterclass in seeing with clarity, humor, and empathy. For anyone interested in the art of photography, this monograph offers an intimate and expansive view into the work of a photographer whose vision remains as compelling and relevant today as ever.

Newsha Tavakolian: And They Laughed at Me is a bold and disarming return to the fragile beginnings of a photographer who would later gain international recognition. Instead of assembling a volume of celebrated images, Newsha Tavakolian turns to what she once dismissed as her “eyesores”—photographs made in her teenage years when she began working as a photojournalist in Tehran. Taken at sixteen, in the charged atmosphere of a country shaped by political tension and social constraint, these early frames carry the urgency and uncertainty of youth.

Revisiting these photographs decades later, Tavakolian confronts not only her technical inexperience but also the emotional terrain of growing up under scrutiny. The images reveal crowded streets, intimate domestic moments, and fleeting expressions that hover between defiance and vulnerability. What once felt flawed now reads as raw testimony. Through this act of excavation, she reframes imperfection as evidence of persistence, tracing the arc from youthful aspiration to the sobering awareness of reality’s weight.

The book unfolds as a rite of passage. Tavakolian reflects on the tension between hope and disillusionment, between the instinct to withdraw into darkness and the determination to move toward light. Her career, later marked by international exhibitions and major honors, including the Carmignac Photojournalism Award and the Prince Claus Award, began in these formative encounters with the camera. The photographs capture the seeds of a voice that would grow increasingly nuanced, attentive to identity, censorship, and the quiet resilience of everyday life in Iran.

And They Laughed at Me becomes more than an archival project; it is a meditation on self-doubt and endurance. By embracing images she once rejected, Tavakolian asserts the value of vulnerability in artistic growth. The result is an honest and reflective volume that invites readers to reconsider failure, to see in missteps the contours of becoming, and to recognize that the path toward clarity often begins in uncertainty.

This volume offers a compelling visual record of the people, organizations, and coalitions that shaped the civil rights movement in Los Angeles, presenting a first-of-its-kind photographic history of activism on the American West Coast.

In 1963, during a landmark speech at Wrigley Field before nearly forty thousand people, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged Angelenos to confront inequality at home, stating that meaningful change required action within their own city: “The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free, because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”

Marching West traces this urgent call through the lens of photography, revealing how images not only documented the struggle for Black equality but also actively participated in shaping its visibility and momentum. The book brings together more than one hundred photographs, including previously unpublished works, that connect local activism in Los Angeles to broader national movements.

Spanning churches, street demonstrations, cultural gatherings, and political organizing, these images highlight the role of a diverse network of participants—community leaders, religious figures, Hollywood personalities, and everyday citizens—who collectively advanced the fight for civil rights in the American West.

Drawn from significant archives such as the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge, the Getty Research Institute, and other Southern California collections, the volume features work by photographers including Harry Adams, Howard Bingham, Charles Brittin, Joe Flowers, Vera Jackson, and Charles Williams.

Together, these photographs offer more than documentation. They form a layered narrative of resistance and solidarity, expanding the historical understanding of the civil rights era by foregrounding voices and events often overlooked in mainstream accounts of American social progress.

Albert Watson: Kaos is a masterful survey of one of photography’s most influential voices, spanning five decades of work that oscillates between intimacy and spectacle. Watson’s photographs are at once meticulously composed and viscerally immediate, capturing both the iconic and the unexpected with equal authority.

KAOS charts Watson’s journey from his breakthrough Alfred Hitchcock portrait in 1973 to the present, revealing the astonishing range of his vision. Across its pages, readers encounter a kaleidoscope of subjects: celebrities in revealing vulnerability, strangers in fleeting urban moments, wildlife in arresting stillness, and landscapes that shimmer with elemental power. Each frame is a study in light, shadow, and narrative tension, embodying Watson’s extraordinary ability to render the familiar as extraordinary.

The book moves fluidly between worlds. Supermodels and pop icons—David Bowie, Kate Moss, Jay Z, Jennifer Lopez, Mick Jagger—sit alongside anonymous figures in neon-lit cities and remote Scottish landscapes, their presence amplified by Watson’s uncanny sense of timing and composition. From sensuous nudes to stark urban street photography, his work explores surface beauty while hinting at the emotional and psychological depth beneath. Watson’s camera captures not only what is seen, but the subtle textures of human experience: desire, humor, solitude, and magnetism.

Accompanied by an essay from Philippe Garner and enriched with Watson’s own reflections, as well as previously unpublished Polaroids from his personal archive, KAOS is both an authoritative career retrospective and a deeply personal document. The photographs pulse with cinematic allure, formal precision, and the irrepressible vitality of a life spent observing the world in its most dynamic and intimate moments.

Presented in a sumptuous hardcover, with optional signed Art Editions including exclusive prints, Albert Watson: Kaos is a definitive celebration of an artist whose work continues to inspire photographers, collectors, and enthusiasts around the globe, capturing a universe simultaneously chaotic, poetic, and utterly compelling.