Upcoming exhibitions to explore art and history through photography
Upcoming exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), and the Image Centre, will put a spotlight on various photographers.
The Image Centre opens its fall 2025 exhibition season with Magnum’s First, a landmark presentation that aims to bring the famed picture agency’s long-forgotten first exhibition to North American audiences for the first time.
Originally titled Gesicht der Zeit (Face of Time), the exhibition premiered in 1955 and toured venues across Austria prior to being placed in storage and lost to time. It features 83 of the original gelatin silver prints, mounted to fibreboard as first presented. The display brings together some of the 20th century’s most celebrated photojournalists, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Werner Bischof, Inge Morath, Ernst Haas, Marc Riboud, Jean Marquis, and Erich Lessing.
Together, their work aims to offer a portrait of postwar life across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. With images ranging from Gandhi’s funeral procession to scenes of daily life in Dalmatia and Japan, the exhibition captures a moment in the evolution of humanist photography.
Collective Visions: Celebrating 25 Years of Photography
This exhibition is shaped by over 80 artists, collectors, donors, curators, community leaders, and scholars, beginning with a selection by curator emeritus Maia-Mari Sutnik. Structured as an “exquisite corpse,” the game popularized by the Surrealists in the 1920s, each participant selects a photograph in response to the previous choice. “Unfolding image by image, the exhibition reveals a web of relationships, sensibilities, and perspectives, offering a living portrait of photography’s evolving place in Toronto’s cultural landscape,” reads the AGO’s website.
Organized by Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s curator of photography, the collection aims to highlight the breadth of the AGO’s photography collection, representing a diverse range of artists, artistic genres and approaches, subject matter, and materials. Accompanied by responses from the participants, the works on view aim to offer a perspective on the medium of photography.
The exhibition will open on November 7, 2025.
Enemy Alien, which will be on display at the VAG, is the first major solo exhibition and retrospective of works by documentary photographer Tamio Wakayama.
His career, which spanned more than 50 years, began with his photographs of the Civil Rights Movement in the southern United States. Wakayama documented many of the social justice movements and countercultures of the 1960s and 70s, and his work tells stories of community, joy and resistance in the face of injustice.
The exhibition also highlights Wakayama’s documentation of Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan and the Doukhobors of eastern BC and culminates with Wakayama’s activism and work organizing and documenting the Redress movement for Japanese Canadians and his deep connections to Vancouver.
Enemy Alien: Tamio Wakayama will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue featuring Wakayama’s unpublished memoir Soul on Rice.
The exhibition will run from October 3, 2025, to February 22, 2026.