Humanity Has Been Asked to Hold Still for 167 Years, and We Still Look Uncomfortable

There is something wonderfully audacious about calling anything the world’s longest-running photography exhibition. It sounds less like an art event and more like an endurance test conducted by people who refuse to admit that everyone else has gone home.

Yet here we are. The Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition has reached its 167th edition, which means it has survived wars, recessions, cultural revolutions, technological upheavals, the invention of the selfie stick, and the arrival of people who photograph their dinner from six angles before allowing it to become cold. Empires have disintegrated in less time. Entire political ideologies have risen, acquired merchandise, embarrassed themselves, and vanished. This exhibition, meanwhile, continues quietly asking photographers to show us what humanity looks like when it is not carefully pretending to have everything under control.

The latest edition, presented at London’s Saatchi Gallery, includes clowns with elongated noses, queer kink communities, displaced children dressed as superheroes, Ukrainian soldiers, threatened public baths, damaged landscapes, reproductive rights, fascist demonstrations, family grief, migration, climate change, dating apps, food banks, and the bewildering emotional architecture of being alive.

In other words, it resembles the contents of my brain after fifteen minutes on the internet, except composed by people with actual artistic discipline.

At first glance, the exhibition’s title image appears determined to test whether I can take a serious subject seriously while two women dressed as trolls wear enormous noses and tails. It is an unfair challenge. The photograph comes from Kate Peters’s Embodied Fictions, a series about female and nonbinary clowns, performance, vulnerability, gender, and identity.

Naturally, it contains more psychological honesty than most professional headshots.

The modern portrait usually asks a person to stand against a neutral background, tilt their chin slightly, and project competence. The result is an image suggesting that the subject has never missed a deadline, whispered an insult at a malfunctioning printer, or eaten shredded cheese over the kitchen sink at midnight. It is not a portrait of a human being. It is a hostage photograph taken by corporate optimism.

Put someone in a clown costume, however, and the performance becomes visible. The disguise admits that it is a disguise. The absurd nose may tell us more about the person than the professionally illuminated face ever could.

That is the contradiction running through much of this exhibition: the stranger the image appears, the more recognizably human it becomes.

The Camera Is Not a Neutral Witness

I have always been suspicious of the idea that a camera merely records reality.

A security camera records. A passport booth records. The tiny camera pointed at the supermarket checkout records me attempting to look innocent while purchasing enough snacks to concern a physician.

A photographer does something else.

A photographer chooses where to stand, what to include, what to exclude, when to press the shutter, and which fraction of a second deserves to outlive all the others. Photography does not simply preserve reality. It edits reality with such confidence that we eventually mistake the edit for the truth.

The best photographers understand this. They do not pretend the camera is impartial. They acknowledge that every photograph contains at least two people: the person being seen and the person deciding how we will see them.

Robert Coxwell’s Flowers, for example, examines the clothing worn by queer men in London’s kink and BDSM community. One photograph shows Tom in an inflated latex body suit in Hackney. It is the kind of image that may cause a conservative uncle to drop his newspaper into his porridge.

But the photograph’s real subject is not shock. It is the distance between an outsider’s assumptions and another person’s lived reality.

Coxwell acknowledges that he was not part of the community and had to confront his own misunderstandings. That detail matters. Too many people approach unfamiliar lives as though they were explorers discovering an uncharted continent, despite the inconvenient fact that other human beings have been living there the entire time.

There is humility in admitting that the person holding the camera may be the one who needs to learn something.

That should not be revolutionary, yet it feels nearly subversive in an age when everyone arrives at every subject already carrying a fully furnished opinion. We no longer investigate. We select the conclusion that best matches our existing emotional décor and begin arranging facts around it.

Photography, when practiced honestly, can interrupt that reflex. It can make us remain in the presence of someone we might otherwise reduce to a category. It cannot force understanding, but it can make ignorance slightly less comfortable.

Everyone Is Performing

Michael James O’Brien’s portrait of drag performer Mona Foot belongs to his series Girlfriend, begun in 1991, when drag still operated openly as an act of civil disobedience.

That phrase stopped me.

Today, drag is frequently treated as either mainstream entertainment or an emergency requiring several state legislatures, a convoy of television commentators, and at least one man shouting outside a library. In the early 1990s, it occupied a more precarious cultural position. It challenged the rules not only by breaking them, but by exposing how theatrical the rules had always been.

Drag understands something the rest of society spends enormous energy denying: identity involves performance.

We all have costumes. Some are made of sequins. Others are made of navy-blue suits, sensible shoes, wedding rings, uniforms, makeup, tattoos, job titles, expensive watches, or the particular facial expression people adopt while pretending to understand a financial presentation.

The costume is not necessarily false. Performance does not automatically mean deception. Sometimes we perform a self because performance is how the self becomes possible.

A judge puts on a robe. A soldier puts on a uniform. A priest wears vestments. A graduate wears a square hat that looks as if someone folded a placemat during a power outage. Society accepts all these costumes as dignified because we have agreed to forget they are costumes.

A drag performer simply refuses to participate in the forgetting.

That refusal makes certain people deeply uneasy. Once one performance is acknowledged, every performance becomes visible. Masculinity begins looking rehearsed. Respectability develops stage lighting. Tradition starts fumbling for its script.

The camera catches all of it.

Childhood Should Not Require Superpowers

Then there is Thomas Mandl’s 5 Superheroes, showing children displaced from eastern Ukraine wearing costumes they made themselves.

This is where the exhibition takes my clever observations, folds them neatly, and places them somewhere out of reach.

Children living through war are routinely described as resilient. Adults love that word because it sounds admirable and costs us nothing. We praise children for adapting to circumstances no child should encounter, then congratulate ourselves on noticing their courage.

Resilience is real, but it can become a polite name for suffering that adults have decided not to prevent.

The children in the photograph wear superhero costumes because imagination remains one of the few territories war cannot fully occupy. A cape does not stop a missile. Cardboard armor cannot restore a home. But play gives children a temporary authority over a world that has become terrifyingly uncontrollable.

That is not childish foolishness. It may be one of the most sophisticated psychological responses available to them.

Adults do something similar, though our costumes are less imaginative. We put on work clothes, answer emails, discuss interest rates, and behave as though maintaining a calendar proves the world is coherent. Children tie fabric around their shoulders. We create spreadsheets. Everyone has a method.

The photograph does not ask me to pity these children. Pity places the viewer above the subject, safely removed from the conditions being observed. The picture asks something harder: that I recognize their agency without romanticizing the cruelty that made such agency necessary.

They should not need to be superheroes.

They should be allowed to be children who lose gloves, complain about vegetables, invent games with rules that change whenever they begin losing, and become furious because somebody gave them the wrong-colored cup.

Ordinary childhood is a privilege most visible when it has been stolen.

Climate Change Without the Courtesy of Spectacle

Alexander Williamson’s Unseasonably Warm documents the effect of climate change on Scotland’s ski industry. One image records Glenshee Ski Centre on March 3, 2025, at 10:52 a.m., with the temperature sitting at four degrees Celsius.

The precision is quietly devastating.

Climate change is often communicated through spectacular imagery: blazing forests, collapsing ice, flooded cities, desperate animals standing on diminishing fragments of habitat. We have apparently decided that planetary breakdown must maintain the production values of a disaster film if it hopes to retain our attention.

But climate change usually enters everyday life less dramatically. It arrives as the wrong temperature on an ordinary morning. It appears as missing snow, an altered season, an insurance policy that becomes unaffordable, a crop that fails, a job that disappears, or a business model built on weather that no longer behaves according to the historical agreement.

The ski centre photograph presents no cinematic apocalypse. That is precisely why it works. The place has not exploded. It has simply become less like itself.

That may be the defining experience of environmental decline. Landscapes remain recognizable while gradually losing the qualities that gave them meaning. Winter still appears on the calendar, wearing the name badge and occupying the correct months, but it is no longer performing all its assigned duties.

Human civilization responds by holding another conference.

We are the only species capable of detecting a global crisis, modeling its likely consequences, creating color-coded charts, and then delaying meaningful action because several men with excellent tailoring have concerns about quarterly growth.

If an asteroid were approaching Earth, I suspect someone would propose forming a public-private partnership to study whether stopping it might negatively affect the asteroid sector.

Damaging the Photograph to Describe Damaged Sight

Sîan Cann’s The Retinopathy Forest may be the most conceptually elegant work in the exhibition. Diagnosed with proliferative diabetic retinopathy, Cann creates Polaroids and decays them in saltwater. The damage to the photographs echoes the visual interference, drifting forms, and branching veins that have entered her field of vision.

Here the photograph is not simply an image. It becomes a physical analogy for the act of seeing.

We usually treat vision as transparent. I open my eyes, and there is the world, conveniently delivered in high resolution. I rarely think about the biological machinery involved until it malfunctions, which is how humans approach most essential systems. Eyes, electrical grids, democracy, knees—we assume they will work indefinitely because examining their fragility would interfere with lunch.

Cann makes that fragility visible.

The damaged Polaroid carries a strange beauty, but it does not turn illness into decoration. Instead, it reveals how beauty and fear can inhabit the same perception. The altered image is both aesthetically compelling and evidence of loss.

That is a difficult tension to hold. We prefer experiences to arrive with clean moral labels. Beauty should be good. Damage should be bad. Healing should be inspirational. Illness should teach a meaningful lesson before the final commercial break.

Reality has no obligation to organize itself so politely.

Sometimes damage produces beauty without becoming worthwhile. Sometimes suffering creates insight without justifying the suffering. Sometimes a person adapts magnificently to a condition they would still choose to erase in an instant.

The photograph allows those truths to coexist.

War Turns Places Against Memory

David Hadland’s Kozak follows Ukrainian soldiers from the 35th Marine Brigade on the front line. The project looks at daily life in combat zones and at the way war transforms homes, roads, streets, and landscapes once connected to memory.

War is often photographed through action because action is easy to recognize. Smoke rises. Soldiers run. Buildings burn. The viewer immediately understands that something important is happening.

But war also destroys through estrangement.

A road once used to visit relatives becomes a supply route. A bedroom becomes a firing position. A field becomes a suspected minefield. A house remains physically present while becoming psychologically inaccessible. The landscape survives, but its meaning is conscripted.

This is one reason displacement cannot be measured only in miles. A person can remain geographically close to home while being separated from everything that made the word home intelligible.

Photographs of soldiers during ordinary moments can communicate this better than images of combat. Routine continues because human beings are biologically incapable of living at the emotional pitch of history. People drink tea near devastation. They make jokes in terrible circumstances. They wait. They become bored. They complain about equipment. Someone misplaces something important.

History later compresses war into dates, arrows, leaders, and outcomes. Photography restores the unbearable detail that history removes.

A war is not only a territorial contest or geopolitical calculation. It is millions of private lives forced to reorganize themselves around decisions made by people who will never learn their names.

A Town Buried, but Not Entirely Gone

Abbey Hepner’s Reconstructing Uravan examines a Colorado town tied first to radium production and later to uranium processing during the Cold War. Residents were relocated, and the buildings were eventually buried. Hepner created tintype portraits of former residents using a historical photographic process, allowing dust from Uravan and water from the river flowing through the former town to become physically involved in the images.

It is hard to imagine a more literal collaboration between memory and contamination.

The town helped feed the grand machinery of scientific ambition, medicine, warfare, and national power. Then it became inconvenient. Its residents were moved, its structures erased, and the physical community was placed beneath the ground as though history could be handled by applying enough soil.

Governments are remarkably fond of burial as a management strategy.

Documents are buried in archives. Mistakes are buried in committees. Costs are buried in budgets. Towns are buried beneath remediation projects. The language becomes passive, administrative, and pleasantly free of identifiable responsibility.

Uravan was “decommissioned.” Residents were “relocated.” Buildings were “removed.”

Language enters wearing rubber gloves.

Hepner’s portraits reverse that erasure. The former residents return through a process in which the vanished town leaves a material trace on their images. The dust becomes both flaw and signature. The place authorities attempted to remove from view participates in making itself visible.

A photograph cannot rebuild a town, but it can challenge the idea that disappearance and nonexistence are the same thing.

History Lives in the Body

Several works in the exhibition deal with inheritance—not merely money or property, but memory, trauma, culture, expectation, and the strange emotional debts passed between generations.

Léa Chen’s The Stars That Don’t Look Back draws on the memories of three generations of women in Taiwan, combining family archives, literature, and historical events shaped by colonial disorder and political terror.

Shizza Majeed’s Babaji’s Britain centers on her grandfather, Ghulam Abbas, who migrated from Pakistan to Britain in the early 1960s. The photographs explore an identity built across more than six decades of living between cultures.

Oliver Woods’s You Are My One and Only turns toward a more private inheritance. His younger brother and sister died in infancy from a rare genetic condition. After his parents died, he photographed the family home, searching through its rooms and objects while trying to understand what it meant to have once been a brother and then be treated as an only child.

These projects understand that history is not located exclusively in museums. It lives in accents, recipes, silences, furniture, family jokes, inherited caution, repeated phrases, and rooms nobody has changed since someone died.

Official history wants clean sequences. One event causes another. A law is passed. A war ends. A border moves. A government falls.

Family history is much less cooperative.

It lingers in habits whose origins nobody remembers. It appears in the things people refuse to discuss. It survives inside objects that are objectively worthless and emotionally priceless. It is stored in the body, where it disguises itself as instinct.

I may not know why a family behaves in a particular way. I may only know that everyone becomes tense whenever a certain subject appears. Somewhere behind that tension is a story, and behind that story is another story, and eventually I am standing in the emotional aftermath of an event that occurred before I was born.

Photography cannot fully explain these inheritances. What it can do is give them a surface.

A house becomes evidence. A face becomes an archive. A gesture becomes a bridge between eras.

The Fascist Is Also Having His Photograph Taken

Jeremy Knowles’s One of Us documents fascist and nationalist gatherings in contemporary Germany. His position is complicated: he is a foreigner, but his whiteness allows him to move through far-right spaces without immediately being treated as one.

The work confronts an uncomfortable fact about extremism: it does not always look extreme.

We prefer fascism in historical costume. Grainy black-and-white footage provides emotional distance. Uniforms identify the villains. The symbols are familiar, the outcome is known, and everyone watching can imagine they would have recognized the danger immediately.

Contemporary authoritarianism is less courteous. It wears ordinary jackets. It checks its phone. It worries about parking. It discusses “security,” “tradition,” and “common sense.” It rarely introduces itself by announcing that it has arrived to dismantle pluralistic democracy.

It says it only wants to restore order.

It says reasonable people are no longer permitted to ask questions.

It says the nation is being taken away.

It says certain groups are responsible for every complicated problem because complexity is difficult and scapegoats fit beautifully on signs.

Photography is useful here because it returns ideology to the people performing it. Fascism is not an abstract cloud drifting across history. It is assembled through individual choices, gestures, gatherings, slogans, permissions, evasions, and silences.

It requires participants.

It also requires bystanders who insist it cannot possibly be serious until seriousness becomes impossible to deny.

The Ordinary Is Where Life Keeps Hiding

Not every image in the exhibition arrives carrying war, political extremism, environmental collapse, or historical trauma.

Tom Dryden-Kelsey’s Raising Doron observes ordinary life with his adopted child: bedtime stories, meals, domestic routines, and the pauses between disorder and calm.

These photographs may be quieter, but they are not less consequential.

The domestic moment is easy to underestimate because it does not announce itself as history. Nobody hears orchestral music while washing a cup. No museum label appears when a child falls asleep on the couch. We rarely recognize the final occurrence of a familiar ritual while it is happening.

One day, without warning, a parent picks up a child for the last time.

The parent does not know it is the last time. The child has simply grown. The moment passes with no ceremony, and only years later does absence reveal what happened.

Photography rebels against that disappearance. It declares that the ordinary moment was not ordinary merely because it was common. Repetition did not make it meaningless. Repetition was the meaning.

That realization is inconvenient because I spend so much of life waiting for the important part to begin. I clear tasks, answer messages, make plans, and endure minor obligations so I can eventually arrive at some imagined state in which life feels fully present.

Meanwhile, life keeps occurring during the administrative delay.

The exhibition’s quieter photographs remind me that the moments I dismiss as background may constitute nearly the entire picture.

We Are All in the Frame

What makes the 167th International Photography Exhibition compelling is not simply its age or range. Longevity alone is not proof of significance. Some institutions continue for centuries because nobody can locate the correct form required to stop them.

The exhibition matters because it keeps demonstrating that photography is not merely about beautiful composition. It is about attention, and attention is a moral act.

To photograph someone is to say: this person occupied space; this experience occurred; this body carried a history; this place held meaning; this moment is not interchangeable with every other moment.

Of course, a camera can exploit, distort, sentimentalize, and deceive. Photography has been used to classify people, sell fantasies, manufacture consent, turn suffering into spectacle, and convince customers that a hamburger resembles the picture above the counter.

But it can also slow perception.

It can keep me from glancing at another person’s life, assigning it a convenient label, and moving on with my prejudices undisturbed. It can make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. It can expose the costume without pretending there is always a pure, costume-free self underneath.

The clowns, soldiers, children, migrants, parents, performers, patients, activists, workers, and families in this exhibition do not form one tidy argument about humanity. Thank goodness. Any exhibition claiming to explain humanity in one coherent thesis should be required to meet humanity.

What these images share is a refusal to flatten their subjects.

The displaced child is not only a victim. The kink participant is not only a provocation. The drag performer is not only a symbol. The soldier is not only an instrument of war. The grandfather is not only an immigrant. The person with impaired vision is not only a diagnosis. The grieving son is not only his loss.

Each person exceeds the category available to describe them.

That may be the deepest value of photography. It preserves excess—the details that refuse to fit inside the official explanation.

After 167 editions, the world’s longest-running photography exhibition is still pointing a camera at humanity and discovering that we remain impossible to summarize. We are ridiculous and courageous, theatrical and sincere, destructive and tender. We dress as trolls to reveal ourselves. We dress as professionals to conceal ourselves. We build homes, bury towns, invent borders, damage climates, survive wars, raise children, repeat old hatreds, create new identities, and photograph all of it as though evidence might eventually lead to understanding.

Perhaps it will.

Or perhaps, 167 exhibitions from now, another audience will stand before another collection of human faces and wonder how a species capable of such tenderness remained so committed to making life unnecessarily difficult.

Either way, the camera will be waiting.

Humanity has been asked to hold still.

Naturally, we cannot manage it.