The FotoFocus Biennial has announced that Nancy Rexroth will feature in its 2026 edition, with the Cincinnati Art Museum serving as the presenting venue for her work. The news, reported by L'Œil de la Photographie, confirms that one of the region's most quietly influential photographic voices will return to institutional prominence in the city she has long called home.

For FotoFocus, the commission is a statement of intent. Founded in Cincinnati, the biennial has grown into one of the largest photography gatherings in the United States, pairing its own curated programme with exhibitions staged across museums, universities and independent spaces throughout the Cincinnati region and beyond. Each edition assembles dozens of participating venues under a shared thematic umbrella, and the inclusion of Rexroth at the Cincinnati Art Museum — the city's flagship art institution — places her work at the centre of that constellation rather than at its margins.

Rexroth occupies a distinctive place in American photography. She came to wide attention with Iowa (1977/1981), a book-length meditation on memory and place photographed with a Diana camera — a cheap plastic toy whose soft, vignetted images became, in her hands, a instrument of recollection rather than description. The series pictured not the state of Iowa itself so much as the idea of it: a landscape filtered through childhood memory, family storytelling and longing. Rendered in gauzy gray tones, its images of porches, fields and small-town streets proposed that a photograph could function like a remembered dream, accurate to feeling if not to fact.

That body of work has since been recognised as a landmark of the photographic autobiography that gained force in the 1970s, alongside the books of photographers such as Emmet Gowin and, later, the diaristic turn of the medium's next generations. Iowa was reissued in a new edition, and Rexroth's reputation has steadily consolidated through exhibitions and renewed critical attention to the plastic-camera aesthetic she helped legitimate. What began as a deliberately anti-technical choice — embracing a camera that cost little and controlled less — became a vocabulary that countless photographers adopted for its emotional register.

Rexroth's connection to Cincinnati deepened when she joined the region's photographic community, teaching and influencing students as an educator while continuing her own projects. Her presence in the 2026 biennial therefore carries a local resonance: an artist who shaped photographic practice both through her images and through her teaching, exhibited in the museum of the city where that influence took root.

The Cincinnati Art Museum, for its part, has an established commitment to photography, with a collection spanning the medium's history and a record of monographic exhibitions devoted to major figures in the field. Hosting Rexroth within the biennial framework continues that institutional thread, situating a regionally grounded artist within a national and international conversation about photography's expressive range.

Details of the presentation — which bodies of work will be shown, the exact dates within 2026, and whether the exhibition will include the Iowa photographs, later series or both — remain to be announced by FotoFocus and the museum. What the confirmation establishes already is the shape of the programme: a biennial that, in its 2026 edition, will give one of photography's most sensitive cartographers of memory a platform at the institutional heart of her adopted city. Further specifics, including curatorial credits and the biennial's overarching theme, are expected as FotoFocus releases its full slate of exhibitions in the lead-up to the autumn programme.