By Marcus Bennett

Taryn Simon will become the first photography-based artist to fill Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim rotunda with a solo show, anchoring an autumn calendar that runs from a Johannesburg retrospective to a Shanghai study of one dead tree.

"Father Country I Do Love You" opens 18 September at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and runs through 14 March. Nearly a decade in the making, the project orbits an unnamed federal agent whose career placed him at the edge of defining political and violent events in modern American history. Simon reconstructs that life across 42 chapters, weaving photography, text, video and sculpture into what the Guggenheim calls her most expansive project to date.

Her own father — a US government veteran who later ran an arcade and now lives with Alzheimer's — shadows the narrative.

The exhibition arrives in the United States' 250th anniversary year. The coincidence sharpens its question: what can a country, or a parent, be known by when the archive stays necessarily partial?

What else is on the calendar?

Ten shows make up the autumn slate, and most stake out political or biographical terrain. In Johannesburg, Mikhael Subotzky returns to Goodman Gallery on 27 August with A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick) — twenty years after his first show there.

The ten-panel centrepiece presses fragments of Ponte City, mining imagery and the city's flora into one fractured composition. His An Idea of Africa (2023–26) inverts the continent to trace migration routes across its surface.

Berlin offers the heavyweight retrospective. Carrie Mae Weems's The Heart of the Matter opens at C/O Berlin on 12 September and runs through 3 February. Works from Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), Kitchen Table Series (1990) and the recent Preach (2024) share the floor. C/O Berlin organises the show around Weems as a "creative form" rather than a linear career.

London's Photographers' Gallery gives Sanlé Sory his colour close-up. Colour Years runs 14 October through 21 February, restoring chromes from the Bobo-Dioulasso photographer's archive and pairing them with Volta Jazz record covers.

Which shows push past the gallery walls?

Two autumn projects turn the camera on absence. Rhiannon Adam's Rhi-Entry arrives at Dublin's International Centre for the Image on 11 September. It recounts the 2024 cancellation of Yusaku Maezawa's dearMoon lunar mission, which had named Adam the first openly queer woman set to cross the Kármán line. The title puns on re-entry: the return through Earth's atmosphere, but also the difficulty of dropping back into ordinary life.

Robert Zhao Renhui's Trying to Remember a Tree runs through 6 November at Fotografiska Shanghai. The Singaporean artist logged 28,017 leaves from a single fallen rain tree, plus trunk sections and 24-hour surveillance of its decay. "Before we engage with broader discussions of ecosystems or environmental futures," Zhao says, "we must first return to a grounded, micro-level act of looking."

Tereza Zelenková's Haus at Fiducia in Ostrava — her native city — runs 10 September through 16 October. Medium-format photographs track an abandoned house in northern Bohemia across three years of decay. Nadav Kander's The Edge of Things opens 18 September at FOAM Amsterdam, curated by David Campany, and gathers a career built around portraits of David Lynch and Barack Obama alongside the Yangtze and the Thames.

What does the calendar signal?

Three threads tie the season: state power, domestic life, and the documentary limits of the archive. Simon's federal agent, Weems's kitchen tables, Billingham's council-flat portraits — all press on what a photograph can and cannot tell us.

Richard Billingham's Ray's a Laugh — 30 Years opened 5 September at Images Vevey, inside a former railway worker's apartment. Made in 1990s Birmingham, the photographs of his father Ray, mother Liz and brother Jason return in a reconstruction of the two family homes.

At Montpellier's reopened Pavillon Populaire, First Times / First Photos runs through 1 November with a playful argument against the cult of the inventor. Édouard Boubat put it bluntly: "There is no first photo. There are only 'new' photos. The light is 'new' today." Artistic director Luce Lebart frames that obsession as the cult of the new.

What does this change for curators and viewers? The autumn schedule suggests photography's institutional weight keeps climbing: a Guggenheim spiral for Simon, a Goodman anniversary for Subotzky, a thirty-year reassessment of Billingham in Switzerland. The medium sits at the centre of every major venue on the calendar, not on its margins — a position the roundup's curators expect the spring slate to extend.