Europe's photography calendar opens 10 April in Turin and closes 4 October at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Between those dates sit ten exhibitions, four major festivals and one Polish photographer's first show in Scotland. Les Rencontres d'Arles carries the gravitational centre, opening 6 July with two flagship shows; PHotoESPAÑA's 29th edition leads the rest.

Where the season opens

Turin gets there first. Diana Markosian's Replaced runs at Gallerie d'Italia from 10 April to 6 September, sitting inside the third EXPOSED Torino Photo Festival and its theme Laid Bare. Markosian hired an actor to embody her former partner, then retraced their decade-long relationship through staged reconstructions — same hotels, same cities, same private rituals. A photograph here behaves less like evidence than like a confession.

Kraków follows on 11 April with In Common: 20 Years of the Sputnik Photos Collective at MuFo Rakowicka, a converted 19th-century military building. The collective was founded in 2006 across Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Belarus, Latvia and Georgia, and has spent two decades training its lens on Central and Eastern Europe's post-1989 transformation. Curator Marta Szymańska skips the victory lap. She asks the harder question instead: what happens when documentary photography stops being a noun and becomes a verb?

A Scottish detour

Joanna Piotrowska's A Moment of Darkness at Noon runs at The Common Guild in Glasgow from 23 May to 18 July — the Polish photographer's first exhibition in Scotland. Devoted entirely to collage, it splices faces, limbs, animals and family images into strange constellations that lean on Jung: a charged, faintly threatening chamber of bodies and fragments.

Three weeks later, Wendy McMurdo lands her largest exhibition yet at National Galleries Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh. The Digital Mirror runs 30 May to 25 October and gathers more than 50 works made chiefly between 1995 and 2018, mapping three decades of children, screens and the unstable image. Surrealist scholarship, classroom observation, and the cyborg, all pressed into the same diary.

The April pulse continues through June

Paris opens 20 May at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, where Daido Moriyama: Love Letters to Photography runs through 4 October. Sixty prints mingle with books, magazines and archival documents, tracing the restless, ecstatic vein running through more than six decades of his work. A 256-page companion publication brings 22 of his essays into French for the first time. Not a retrospective, exactly — more a love letter signed both ways.

June belongs to Madrid. Laia Abril's Endometriosis takes over the Museum of Romanticism from 2 June to 13 September as part of PHotoESPAÑA's Official Section. She frames her subjects in poses echoing the reclining women of 19th-century Spanish Romantic painting, building on her long project A History of Misogyny and its predecessor On Mass Hysteria. The timeline starts in 1860, when the condition was first described medically; the focus stays pointedly contemporary. Abril frames her work as an indictment of male-bodied medicine: inadequate research, delayed diagnoses and the routine dismissal of symptoms as a slow, sustained violence.

Hamburg opens its Triennial of Photography on 5 June with Abdulhamid Kircher's Rotting from Within at PHOXXI, Deichtorhallen, running to 1 November. The German-Turkish artist folds analogue photography into family snapshots, archival documents and diary-like texts to trace emotional inheritance across three generations of men. The earlier showings centred on his father; this iteration draws his late paternal grandfather into the frame. Migration, displacement and patriarchal authority, charted without flinching.

The Arles double-bill

The calendar crests in Arles. From 6 July to 4 October, two flagship shows share the bill. Damarice Amao's GHANA! Dreaming Independence, 1957–1976, developed through the 2020 Curatorial Research Grant, opens with Ghana's independence on 6 March 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah and stretches to 1976. Studio portraits, street scenes and landmark publications — Willis E. Bell and Efua T. Sutherland's The Roadmakers (1961) and Paul Strand's Ghana: An African Portrait (1976) — circulate a fresh image of the country at home and abroad. Visual sovereignty as a working method, not a slogan.

Inside the Église Saint-Blaise, the former conventual church of the Abbey of Saint-Césaire, Katia Kameli opens The Algerian Novel (A New Chapter), a chapter of a project begun in 2016 that turns to Assia Djebar's 1978 film-poem La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua. Postcards, press images and remembered voices collide inside a layered, polyphonic film essay. The translation keeps travelling.

The autumn send-off

London rounds things out. Dulwich Picture Gallery opens Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography on 28 July for a run to 4 October. Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark and Margaret Bourke-White lead a survey that places canonical modernist images alongside humanist documentary, social witness and street grit. A century of metropolitan voltage installed in one of London's most refined period rooms — an act of mild atmospheric violence.

Ten shows, four festivals, two Scottish capitals waiting to be crossed off. By October the festival cycle will have rotated once more, and the curator quietly assembling next summer's list is, presumably, already at work.