OpenWalls is a British Journal of Photography award in collaboration with WePresent and Galerie Huit Arles
©Nancy Floyd – OpenWalls 2026 Series Winner
Nancy Floyd’s Weathering Time will be exhibited at Galerie Huit Arles from 06 July, alongside 25 single image winners responding to the theme of Homecoming
In messy bedrooms, tidy living rooms, swept porches, Nancy Floyd often stands alone in her self-portraits, shot first thing in the morning, initially with a tripod and cable release. Weathering Time began with a simple question, “What would it be like to photograph myself and watch myself grow older?” Four decades and 2500 photographs later, the answer is a monumental, ongoing ‘visual almanac’, recently announced as the 2026 OpenWalls Spotlight series winner. British Journal of Photography, in collaboration with WePresent and Galerie Huit Arles, will exhibit the project alongside Rencontres d’Arles from 07 July.
Oregon-based Floyd has built a career using photography to trace how vast forces surface in the everyday, forces such as the environment and ecology, American individualism, mortality and grief. With a background in Fine Arts, she is currently Professor Emerita of Photography at Georgia State University. Alongside her acclaimed project She’s Got a Gun, it is Weathering Time, a 40+‑year commitment to self‑documentation, that has become her defining series.
For the first 20 years, the project remained unpublished. In 1991, 1992 and 1995, she shot nothing at all. When she couldn’t or didn’t feel like taking a photograph, she would advance the film and leave an empty negative. “At 20 years, I scanned all my negatives for the first time… That was when I noticed that it wasn’t just my body that was shifting,” she notes. “The younger and older members of my family, the stuff in my room, and my clothes showed distinct changes.” Repeating the same basic set‑up became less a restriction than a form of freedom, allowing her to explore the almost-imperceptible flow of time.
Each photograph records a specific encounter but it is in sequence that the real subject emerges, across Floyd’s many contact sheets and grids. “My generation experienced the rise of feminism, digital technology, and the slow rise of extreme conservatism. When I started WT, we had Roe v Wade and the Voting Rights Act,” she says. “What makes my self-portraits stand out is the period of US history in which I live and navigate, and what’s changed in the last 44 years.”
From darkroom to computer, analogue to digital, the series also makes photographic time, though for Floyd the topic shifted in May 2002, when her father died. Marked by a contact sheet filled more with negatives than portraits, this marked a turning point at which the project became about loss. Time became experimental, something maybe not linear, but circular; in around 2012, Floyd started to reenact particular images to create jumpcuts, or explicitly folded images from her parents’ archive into the project, retroactively extending it before 1982, and linking herself into a familial and generational history.
“This year’s photographs remind us that the search for a sense of home, a feeling of belonging, is the cornerstone of what it means to be human”
– Holly Fraser, Editor in chief, WePresent and OpenWalls 2026 judge
The seminal series, which engages with the theme of Homecoming, is exhibited in Arles alongside 25 single images, shot by other artists but similarly unfolding across emotional and political landscapes. Marc Provins retraces routes first mapped on Grindr’s GPS, constructing an archaeology of chat traces and performative self-portraiture, for example; the resulting long-scrolling screenshot reaffirms queer presence in suburbia. Greg Holland’s documentary image of a young Palestinian shepherd bringing his flock home carries a quiet spiritual weight.
Meanwhile, Ievgen Stepanets, who moved from Ukraine to Georgia in 2022, presents a solitary image of a playground, set within an empty landscape. “Its history of violence and unresolved conflict felt familiar,” he writes, “pushing me to observe my surroundings and explore how safety, connection, and a sense of belonging begin to form.”
Homecoming is neither simple nor linear: in returning, we cross borders into somewhere that has changed. “Time doesn’t stop,” Floyd observes, “[It is] more like a crooked river that meanders, circles back a little, but never meets again”. The idea ricochets across OpenWalls’ 2026 winners, with each work, whether diaristic or documentary, exploring how an image is never fixed, but continually reactivated through looking.
Single Image Winners
Angela Echanove | Lara Ciarabellini | Alicia Bruce | Amy Dyduch | Artur Leão | Phuong Vo | Cedric Zellweger | Cani Galan | Ievgen Stepanets | Greg Holland | Oyè Diran | Nicolás Bernal | Jonathan Small | María Andrea Parra | Kristina Varaksina | Lea Marti | Christian Kieffer | Marina Dego | Vicky Viola | Marc Provins | Miro Kuzmanovic | Robin Alysha Clemens | Sandra Chen Weinstein | Joseph P Smith | Victoria Ruiz
