Four unmissable photography exhibitions

Kyoto’s compelling city-wide festival

Next month will mark the 12th edition of Kyotographie, the Japanese cultural capital’s annual multi-artist, multi-show celebration of the photographic image. This year, it takes as its theme the idea of source – “the space in which something is found, born or created,” write co-founders and directors Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi. “It is from this sacred space that the symphony of life, love and pain reverberates.” They’ve invited photographers to participate in 13 discrete exhibitions across 12 Kyoto-wide venues, ranging from palaces and temples to former printing plants and contemporary galleries. Among the artists featured are the Chinese photographic collective Birdhead, Rinko Kawauchi and Kenyan-born, Venice-based James Mollison – a sometime HTSI contributor, whose ongoing interiors series Where Children Sleep is a showcase here. 13 April to 12 May, kyotographie.jp

Stay: Hoshinoya’s Tokyo flagship was one of the first to fill the space between luxury hotel and old-world ryokan. The brand has since expanded to several properties across Japan and in Bali; the Kyoto resort is especially lovely, existing at a tranquil remove from the bustle of the city – a riverside setting, surrounded by forest, with breakfasts of vegetables and savoury miso broth served on the terrace in spring. hoshinoresorts.com, from $230

In San Francisco, a timeless vogue for Irving Penn

In his 92 years, most of them actively working across the 20th century, Irving Penn turned his lens to fashion, portraiture, landscapes, travel, and still life. As a favoured son of Condé Nast – one of his first jobs in New York was as assistant to celebrated Vogue art director Alexander Liberman, and he still holds the record as the magazine’s longest-standing contributor – he was one of a handful of artists working in editorial contexts who set the visual tone. Now showing until midsummer at San Francisco’s de Young Museum is a sprawling retrospective comprising 175 images spanning Penn’s nearly 70-year career. Among them are nudes, celebrity portraits, the culinary-themed still lives commissioned to accompany Jeffrey Steingarten’s food features for Vogue, and a special room dedicated to the photographer’s local work during the city’s Summer of Love in 1967. Until 21 July, famsf.org

Stay: treat yourself to one of San Francisco’s most scenic urban-greenery settings, and a built environment with fascinating heritage: the Lodge at the Presidio, a 42-room former military headquarters inside 1,500 acres of state-managed woodland crisscrossed with walking and cycling paths at the northern edge of the city. presidiolodging.com, from $350

Of beauty and belonging: portraiture two ways in Berlin

C/O is Berlin’s go-to for all things photography, a non-profit exhibition space for visual media located inside the midcentury landmark Amerika Haus building. It often stages multiple shows simultaneously: on 1 June, two exhibitions – very different but not thematically unrelated – will open. The American artist Tyler Mitchell will have his first solo show in Germany, a collection of expository work ranging from editorial commissions (a series on skateboarders and street life in Havana, taken when he was 20) and the portraits, both formal and spontaneous, of Black America that have made him famous (among them a seminal Vogue cover shot of Beyoncé, taken in 2018 when he was just 23).

The show will also include sculpture and video works. Opening the same day is Studio Rex, which represents two decades of portraiture from a Marseille studio founded in 1933 by an Armenian-Cypriot immigrant family. Collector Jean-Marie Donat, who owns much of the studio’s archive, has made available dozens of photos and negatives from between 1966 and 1985; they chronicle the lives of immigrants who arrived from across the Mediterranean – and, in a wider context, tell stories about ideas of identity and home. From 1 June to 5 September, co-berlin.org

Stay: The Hoxton Charlottenburg opened last year, right off the fancy Kurfürstendamm (and just a few blocks from Amerika Haus) – with a buzzy bar, an Indian-inflected restaurant, some nice early-20th-century styling in the 234 rooms and the amenities you need (but nothing extraneous). thehoxton.com, from €149

Burtynsky’s industrial landscapes touch down in London

In Duke of York Square, in the heart of Chelsea, the largest exhibition to date of work by Edward Burtynsky (b1955) is currently showing at the Saatchi Gallery. More than 100 images – including large-format photos, murals and a film chronicling his evolution alongside that of the technology he used – chart a career in which Burtynsky captured the natural world and the alterations inflicted on it in the name of human progress. “Nature transformed through industry” is how he encapsulates the dominant theme in his oeuvre, which prosecutes topics ranging from climate change to poaching, mining to mass-production. It’s full of colour, beauty and sobering questions. Until 6 May, saatchigallery.com

Stay: Number Sixteen, for proximity to the gallery – along with cosiness, ebullient design and a nice situation close to South Kensington tube station. firmdalehotels.com, from £330