photo basel 2026
- Jun 7
- 2 min read
In its first decades, photography often had the scale of an object held close to the eye. The daguerreotype, introduced publicly in 1839, was made on a silver-plated copper plate; each plate produced a single, unrepeatable image. Paper negatives and prints soon changed how photographs travelled. A photograph could find its way into an album, an archive, a newspaper, a book, a display case, or onto a wall.
Across the twentieth century, photography entered museum collections, art schools, magazines, private collections, and auction rooms. Large formats changed photography’s relationship with space. In the work of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall, the photographic image began to take on the scale of architecture, cinema, and history painting, occupying a wall on its own terms and drawing the eye back into detail.
From 16 to 21 June 2026, photo basel returns to Volkshaus Basel at Rebgasse 12–14. The fair’s eleventh edition brings together more than 40 international galleries, over 450 works, and almost 170 artists. At the time of publication, the 2026 exhibitor list included 42 galleries from Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Argentina, Peru, and Monaco.
The fair is dedicated to photography and photography-based art. Its programme spans historical and contemporary work, traditional presentations, new projects, experimental printing processes, artist talks, panel discussions, guided tours, and curated routes.
The programme segment Beyond Photography centres on works in which the photographic image takes the form of objects, sculptural works, and installations. Susa Templin works with layers, fragments, and spatial constructions; Ayo Banton uses light, floral sculptures, solarised prints, and cyanotype processes; Inka and Niclas transfer fragments of photographs onto hand-shaped objects coated with emulsion.
Novum brings together works shown publicly for the first time, either made for photo basel or previously unseen.
At Volkshaus Basel in June 2026, photography will appear as print, archive, wall, screen, light box, emulsion, and object. From a nineteenth-century silver-plated copper plate to a work shown to the public for the first time, the basic act remains: light leaves a trace on a surface, and the surface takes its place in the room.
