The August 2026 edition of FRAMES Digital is now available, bringing together photography concerned with memory, ritual, community, identity, relationships, music, and the simple but profound act of looking.
We begin with Tinglan Li and The Egg in Her Palm, a black-and-white photographic journey into a pilgrimage among the Bai people in China. Following the procession to Shengyuan Temple, Li observes rituals, offerings, music, food, prayer, and the older women who carry on traditions. At the heart of the story is the quiet image that gives the series its title: an elderly woman holding a single egg in her palm as part of a communal act of devotion.
Anthony Smith takes us to southern Spain with Semana Santa in Malaga. Having lived in Andalusia and followed its Holy Week traditions for years, Smith photographs the processions across the city while also looking at their history and extraordinary visual language — the brotherhoods, enormous thrones, penitents, incense, music, crowds, faith, theatre, and civic identity that come together during one of Europe’s most remarkable public celebrations.
In the latest installment of Gina Williams’s Stop Looking Away series, we meet photographer Darren Vargas. What an Image Can Be explores his deeply personal project Moretón, made at the Lee Espinoza Coachella Valley Boxing Club. What begins with a boxing gym expands into a story about community, immigrant experience, family, memory, mentorship, grief, healing, and the influence one person can have across generations.
Then Paul Carpenter asks a deceptively simple question: Does the Rock Photograph Have a Soul? Drawing on Jim Marshall’s belief that a photograph should be remembered for its soul rather than its technique, Carpenter reflects on three decades of photographing rock music and considers what separates a technically successful concert photograph from an image that actually communicates something of the experience itself.
Samuel Vovsi’s TWOs is built around a wonderfully simple visual premise. Every photograph contains precisely two principal characters. They may be lovers, friends, strangers, family members — even a person and a dog — but there is always something else present: the relationship between them. It is this invisible third element that gives the photographs their tension and curiosity.
Our cover photographer, William Molander, presents Preserving Wisdom. Created by the eighteen-year-old Swedish photographer, his Words of Wisdom project combines portraits of older people with their own reflections, stories, experiences, and advice. It is an unusually mature attempt to preserve voices that might otherwise disappear and to consider what one generation can leave behind for another.
In Overcoming Masculinity, Alasdair Foster talks with Mexican photographer Roberto Tondopó about his long-term project Tránsito. Rooted in the Fiesta Grande of Chiapa de Corzo, the work moves between ritual and performance, masculinity and femininity, family history and cultural inheritance. Tondopó’s participation as a Chuntá becomes part of a deeply personal process of examining — and dismantling — the masculinity he inherited.
W. Scott Olsen returns with Reading Frames, this time considering Jane Howie’s Afternoon on the Beach. Through Howie’s use of intentional camera movement, Olsen reflects on beauty, nostalgia, sentimentality, and how a photograph can sometimes convey an emotional memory more precisely through softness and ambiguity than through perfect sharpness.
Finally, Marty Gervais reviews Olsen’s new book Reading Frames: Explorations in What Makes a Photograph Work. His essay considers Olsen’s distinctive approach to photographs: not as puzzles to be decoded, but as experiences we enter — images that can awaken memory, association, imagination, and emotion without having to explain themselves completely.
Nine very different contributions, but a common question runs quietly through much of this edition: what makes a photograph stay with us after we have stopped looking at it?
FRAMES members: You can download the new edition right now.
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Each year, we publish twelve issues of FRAMES Digital – PDF publications complementing the main printed editions of the FRAMES Magazine. They feature additional imagery and written content in a high-resolution digital publication delivered directly through the FRAMES Subscriber Area.
