Author: Ellis Stevenson

The hallways of Xposure 2026’s recently unveiled Documentary Zone at Aljada this year were filled with a certain kind of silence that descends upon a room full of long-form documentary photography. Not the quiet of a museum. Something more substantial. Compared to the other halls, visitors moved more slowly, lingering in front of frames as people do at gravesites or old family albums, as if they were trying to read something beneath the picture instead of just staring at it. This year’s zone consisted of thirteen exhibitions, each the result of years rather than weeks, and this distinction was more…

Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staff prevented photojournalists from covering his updates on the Iran war twice this spring at the Pentagon, leaving only images approved by the government. Reports indicated that it was related to unfavorable photos from a previous session, but no one really explained why. Regardless of the true cause, the incident brought to light a more significant issue that has been developing for some time: a growing concern about who is in control of the image and whether it can be trusted after it is taken. What this story covers: Because of this fear, a feature that the…

Around closing time, you can smell a certain combination of overripe bananas, wilted lettuce, and something slightly sweet that has gone wrong in the back hallway of any supermarket. The majority of consumers never come across it. Pallets of food that didn’t sell in time are sorted, written off, and transported away behind swinging doors, in walk-in coolers, and on loading docks. It’s simple to think that this is just the expense of operating a grocery store. Since practically everyone handled it that way for decades, that may be the exact issue. When you actually look at the numbers, it’s…

There is a specific type of tomato that is no longer found in nature, or rather, it does exist but is rarely found on grocery store shelves. It’s the one that tastes better than its neighbors but appears to have lost a battle; it’s the lopsided one with a faint green shoulder. Instead, you are greeted by a wall of produce that is so uniform that it almost seems uncanny when you walk into any major grocery chain in America or Britain. Apples are polished to a shine. Shrink-wrapped cucumbers become stiff little soldiers. The majority of consumers may no…

The face and armless torso of nine-year-old Mahmoud Ajjour gazed out at commuters hurrying past with their coffee cups and briefcases somewhere in the Barcelona metro, on the walls flanking an ascending escalator. The picture, which was captured by Gazan photographer Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times, won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year award. It depicts a child injured in an airstrike in a truly moving and devastating way. It was worthy of praise. However, seeing it repurposed as exhibition advertising on a metro wall raises an issue that the photojournalism community has been debating…

Hundreds of glowing rectangles rise into the air like a digital dawn as the lights go out and the crowd roars. Everybody is filming. Everybody is capturing. It’s also possible that no one is genuinely watching the show somewhere in that forest of raised phones. The moment is both abandoned and preserved at the same time. This isn’t merely nostalgia or a generational grievance disguised as philosophy. Underneath it all is true psychology. Dr. Linda Henkel of Fairfield University led students through a museum and asked them to take pictures of some items while merely observing others in a study…

There is a sort of theater going on when you walk through the produce section of any supermarket. The rows of peppers were almost identical. No apple hanging from a real tree ever quite reaches the shine of an apple that has been waxed. Geometrically consistent cucumbers could have been engineered, and in a regulatory sense, they were. You’re not witnessing abundance. It’s a meticulously crafted illusion with a price that most consumers are unaware of. Globally, up to 40% of fresh fruits and vegetables are rejected before they ever make it to retail shelves. This is not because they…

Jim Mortram’s photographs have a certain stillness to them. Welfare letters piled on kitchen tables, people sitting in tiny rooms with half-drawn curtains, and light coming in sideways are examples of lives that have slowed to almost nothing. Mortram has been documenting people living on the very edge of Britain’s social safety net for more than ten years in Dereham, Norfolk. Small Town Inertia is the title of the piece. Nearly everything is stated in the title. These folks are not being visited by Mortram for a weekend assignment. He returns to them, sits with them, and lives among them.…

Maeve Gilmore created a gentle oil painting of a bowl of pears around 1949 while giving birth to her daughter. She just went to her painting room and got to work. At first glance, the image appears unremarkable. Perhaps a bit domestic. Silent. However, understanding the circumstances surrounding its creation alters every aspect of it. In the same way that some rooms retain the memory of what happened there long after the furniture has been removed, the canvas contains a birth that is both invisible and permanent. The long, contentious history of the genre revolves around this tension between what…

On a gloomy Tuesday morning, as you stand on the outskirts of Shoreditch, you notice something that the computer-generated imagery never quite captures. Rising in the middle distance like a diagram of financial ambition is the City of London’s cluster of towers, all polished glass and neat projections, recently mapped in computer-generated imagery by Didier Madoc-Jones for the City of London Corporation. The hyper-saturated portraits wheat-pasted above chicken shops, the peeling murals on shutters, and the visual cacophony of a city that defies neat rendering are all situated between you and those towers. A generation of artists has discreetly taken…