The second half of 2026 at Fotografiska Berlin explores the power of images to challenge, connect, and transform. Lauren Greenfield’s immersive social studies leads the way, as we reflect on how digital life reshapes identity, agency, and human connection. Through resilience, we observe history’s unfiltered realities. We see oppression in Thomas Billhardt’s raw documentation of life under a rigid system.
Roger Ballen reinvents the boundaries of photography, drawing, and painting, pushing the medium into new, spontaneous forms. Together with the Emerging Berlin program, this season forms a dynamic dialogue about resilience, truth, and the evolving language of visual storytelling – inviting us to see, question, and reimagine the world around us.
Thomas Billhardt – ‘Die Augen Weit Offen’
28 Aug 2026 – 7 Feb 2027
Memoria presents four decades of Nachtwey’s uncompromising work on the frontlines of global conflict, revealing the human cost of war and reasserting the camera as a tool of empathy, responsibility, and moral witnessing. Die Augen Weit Offen (Eyes Wide Open) reveals the unfiltered reality of East Germany. It does so through the eyes of a photographer who is deeply embedded in its political and social fabric.
From his lifelong observation of Alexanderplatz, that started with his graduation project, to his documentation of the Vietnam War, and his travels to Cuba and the USSR, Billhardt’s images document history as it unfolded: raw, intimate, and free from nostalgia. It is proof that life finds a way, no matter how rigid the system: people loving, laughing, protesting, and surviving despite and within a system far bigger than themselves.
The exhibition is realized in collaboration with Camera Work Gallery.
Lauren Greenfield – ‘Social Studies’
26 Sep 2026 – 12 Jan 2027
What does it mean to grow up in the digital age? In Social Studies, Lauren Greenfield answers this question with a groundbreaking social experiment. For over a year, she followed a group of Los Angeles teenagers. They opened up their lives and their phones to her. This allowed her to record their real-time smartphone data. She also filmed them at school, at home, with friends and parents. The result: an unyielding exploration of modern adolescence and the role of social media, captured in an Emmy-nominated five-part series — now streaming on FX, Hulu and Disney+.
Now that work becomes an exhibition you can walk inside. Across roughly 5,000 square feet, Greenfield enlarges what normally lives on a six-inch screen to the scale of the human body, slowing down the ephemeral scroll so that we can deconstruct and see what young people face every day.
Greenfield uses photographs, typologies, an immersive bedroom installation, an algorithm room, and a screening space for the series. She reveals shocking truths about how social media reshapes identity, connection, and self-worth. Compassionate yet unflinching, she exposes the true cost of digital life while inviting us to reclaim agency — to move from passive consumers to active participants in our digital lives.
This is more than an exhibition. Together with the Education Innovation Lab and Adenauer Campus, we expand our reach beyond the museum. We engage with Berlin’s teenagers through participatory workshops. Their insights will shape a digital learning journey. These contributions will enhance the exhibition’s supporting program, which launches in September with free access for school classes. It continues a conversation about the power and responsibility of images in today’s world.
For more details on the project here.
Roger Ballen – Roger Ballen.! Drawing Meets Photography
6 Nov 2026 – 14 Mar 2027
Roger Ballen.! Drawing Meets Photography explores the blurred boundaries between drawing, photography, and painting, showcasing Roger Ballen’s evolution from narrative photography to a mixed-media practice rooted in spontaneity and Art Brut.
The exhibition at Fotografiska traces the artist’s numerous bodies of work in a loosely chronological order, showcasing iconic black-and-white photographs, recent color works, Polaroids, etchings, and original drawings. The exhibition is completed by lesser-known works that unexpectedly complete his practice. Alongside installations like a new Drawing Man piece, it explores Ballen’s deeply unique aesthetic – the “Ballenesque”. The exhibition is realized in collaboration with Museum Gugging.
Emerging Berlin
The Emerging Berlin program highlights the future of photographic practice influenced by the city. Artists selected through an open call receive solo exhibitions, mentorship, media visibility, and professional support. Together, these presentations form a vibrant index of Berlin’s evolving artistic ecosystems – spaces where experimentation, dialogue, and critical reflection foster new visual languages.
Website: Fotografiska Berlin
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