Some moments in a creative life mark a clear before and after. Being selected for the RBSA Summer Show is one of those moments — and I am honoured to share that my work is currently on display at one of Birmingham’s most celebrated galleries.
I have spent years documenting the most intimate and significant moments in other people’s lives — weddings, cultural ceremonies, family gatherings, the quiet seconds between the planned ones. Photography, for me, has always been about bearing witness. About making something permanent from something fleeting.
So when I received word that my work had been selected for the RBSA Summer Show 2026 at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Gallery, it landed differently from most pieces of good news. This is not a wedding commission or a brand brief. It is a panel of experienced artists and curators looking at your work and deciding it belongs in the room. That means something.
What Is the RBSA Summer Show?
The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists has been at the heart of the city’s creative life for over two hundred years. Its annual Summer Show is the biggest open call in the Society’s programme — drawing submissions from artists working in every discipline and from across the globe — and it is regularly described as Birmingham’s equivalent to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London.
This year’s show spans all three floors of the RBSA Gallery on Brook Street in Birmingham, bringing together over 200 works by more than 160 artists across painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, digital, installation, and mixed media. There is no imposed theme and no restriction on technique. The result is one of the most genuinely diverse open exhibitions in the UK calendar.
Selection is anonymous — the panel reviews a digital image of each work without knowing who made it. It is a clean, uncompromising process. Either the work is strong enough or it is not.
Exhibition Information
Exhibition: RBSA Summer Show 2026
Venue: RBSA Gallery, 4 Brook Street, Birmingham B3 1SA
Dates: 18 June – 1 August 2026
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30am – 5:00pm
Admission: Free
Nearest Stations: Birmingham Snow Hill & Birmingham New Street (both walking distance)
Photography at the RBSA: Why It Matters
There is a conversation the photographic community has been having for some years now — about whether photography belongs in gallery spaces that have historically centred painting and sculpture, about what separates a photograph that is art from one that is documentation, about whether the camera can produce something that earns the same sustained attention as a canvas.
I have always believed it can. My work at Aworan — a body of fine art portraiture rooted in African identity, light, and the visual vocabulary of the diaspora — has been part of my answer to that question. So have the exhibitions at Boomer Gallery in London and Atirira Gallery in Lagos, where I have had the privilege of seeing my work hung on walls and considered slowly, by people who came specifically to look.
The RBSA selection extends that conversation to Birmingham — a city that matters deeply to me as a place with one of the UK’s most vibrant Nigerian and African diaspora communities, and as a city I have photographed weddings in, driven through, and returned to repeatedly over the years.
To have a photograph selected for a gallery that has stood for over two hundred years is to be reminded that the image you made is capable of outlasting the moment that produced it. That is the point of all of this, really.
Where Fine Art and Wedding Photography Meet
People sometimes ask me how I hold the two sides of my practice together — the commercial wedding work and the fine art work. As if they are different disciplines that must be kept carefully separated.
They are not. Every wedding I photograph is, in some sense, a fine art project. The light I am reading, the compositions I am finding, the emotional truth I am chasing in the space between two people — these are exactly the same concerns that shape my studio work and my gallery submissions. The wedding is simply a set of conditions: a live event, a fixed date, a crowd of people, a set of cultural moments that will not repeat. The fine art discipline is what allows me to work within those conditions without letting them limit the quality of what I make.
I wrote about this recently in my post on why wedding photography is becoming fine art in 2026. The RBSA selection feels, to me, like a confirmation of that argument.
Come and See It
The RBSA Summer Show runs until the 1st of August 2026 — which means there is still time to visit if you are in or near Birmingham. The gallery is free to enter, beautifully kept, and sits in the Jewellery Quarter, a short walk from both Snow Hill and New Street stations.
If you do go, please share what you see. Tag @thecameraboss on Instagram. I would love to see the gallery through your eyes.
And if you are a couple planning a wedding — Nigerian, multicultural, British, or anything in between — know that the same eye behind the gallery work is the one that will document your day. Book early. 2027 and 2028 dates are filling up, and I take on a limited number of weddings each year to protect the quality of every commission.
Book Cameraboss for Your 2027 or 2028 Wedding
Award-winning. Gallery-exhibited. Now booking a limited number of weddings across the UK and Nigeria. Every enquiry gets a personal response from John.
