LONDON.- Atlas Gallery is turning its attention to the sea, the swimming pool and the rituals of summer in SPLASH: Sea, Beach and Pool, a group exhibition on view in London from June 10 through August 29, 2026.
Bringing together photographs spanning nearly a century, the exhibition explores the many ways artists have approached water and the shoreline: as landscape, playground, stage, abstraction and backdrop for fashion, leisure and human drama. The selection moves freely between documentary photography, portraiture, fashion imagery and more conceptual approaches, creating a wide-ranging visual history of life beside — and sometimes inside — the water.
Among the earliest works is George Hoyningen-Huene’s 1929 photograph Horst and Models, Swimwear by Lelong, an elegant image from the formative years of fashion photography. Edward Weston is represented by Shells from 1927, while later works by Bill Brandt bring the British and French coastline into the exhibition through photographs including East Sussex Coast, April (1958), Nude, East Sussex Coast (1959) and Vasterival Beach, Normandy, May (1967).
The beach also appears as a setting for some of photography’s most recognizable personalities. Robert Capa’s 1948 photograph of Pablo Picasso and Franoise Gilot at Golfe-Juan captures the celebrated couple on the French Riviera, while Terry O’Neill’s Audrey Hepburn, St Tropez from 1966 places another cultural icon within the Mediterranean world of sun and leisure.
Fashion and celebrity recur throughout the show. Patrick Demarchelier’s photographs made in St. Barthlemy include a nude from 1989 and his 1995 portrait Nadja, St. Barthelemy. Arthur Elgort’s Stella Tennant Diving, Watermill, NY, American Vogue (1995) captures the British model in motion, while Norman Parkinson’s 1975 image of Jerry Hall and Lawrence Schiller’s 1962 photograph of Marilyn Monroe extend the exhibition’s dialogue between photography, glamour and popular culture.
Elsewhere, the exhibition shifts from figures to the visual qualities of water itself. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes reduce ocean and horizon to meditative bands of tone, with views including the Tyrrhenian Sea, Black Sea, Ionian Sea, Caribbean Sea and South Pacific Ocean. Franco Fontana approaches the Mediterranean through saturated color, while Harry Cory Wright’s Blue to Orange Cosmos offers another expansive meditation on color and atmosphere.
Not every beach scene is idyllic. Martin Parr’s photograph from his celebrated The Last Resort series, made in New Brighton, Merseyside between 1983 and 1985, introduces his sharply observed view of British leisure culture. Andreas Gefeller’s large-scale Untitled (Beach), NL-Domburg (2006) offers a more distanced contemporary perspective, while Karine Laval’s color photographs transform swimming and recreation into vivid compositions that hover between observation and abstraction.
The exhibition also extends into environmental and experimental territory. Mandy Barker, whose practice has frequently examined marine pollution, is represented by Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections, a cyanotype printed by the artist on historic J. Whatman paper. Works by Jan C. Schlegel include platinum-palladium prints from his Life on Earth series as well as an image from his Carybdea branchi series.
From Lev Borodulin’s energetic Gold Fish (1966) and Ernst Haas’s Swimmer, Greece (1977) to Elliott Erwitt’s St. Tropez, France (1979), SPLASH presents water as both subject and setting — a place where bodies, landscapes, fashion and social life repeatedly converge.
Seen together, the works reveal how enduring the appeal of the seaside and swimming pool has been for photographers. Across generations, these spaces have provided a setting for elegance and escapism, solitude and spectacle, formal experimentation and everyday life.
SPLASH: Sea, Beach and Pool is on view at Atlas Gallery, 49 Dorset Street, London, through August 29, 2026.
