The newest issue of Foam Magazine asks “what makes an image timeless?”

Foam Magazine is not your regular photography magazine. Now in its 67th issue, the forward thinking publication is thinking ahead more than ever, with its newest arrival centering around the question: “what makes a photograph timeless?” For over two decades, the magazine has been a stepping stone for emerging artists as well as an archive of an evolving medium. “Someone once said to me: ‘If you look at the entire archive of Foam Magazine, you see photography history passing through the pages’,” says Foam Magazine curator and managing editor Katy Hundertmark. Now the magazine is delving into the core of what makes those photographs exist beyond the day and age in which they were created.

The topic of what makes an image timely is a difficult one, especially in an accelerated culture of images, which is what makes this issue of Foam Magazine so respectable. The starting point was getting into the nitty gritty of the ways that societies choose to remember and forget information. “Photographs don’t endure because of what they capture per se, but because of where and through whom they are allowed to live,” says Katy. “Therefore, canonic memory has been built not only by image-makers, but by editors, curators, colonisers and gatekeepers that repeatedly reprint and redistribute them.” Here lives, as Katy suggests, the deeper paradox: what we often call timeless “is shaped by historical forces that are solidly entangled within a wider net of hierarchical structures”.

It’s a chewy subject, but this issue delivers on the task of answering these age-old questions in photographs that pack a lot of information into simple, beautiful compositions. In A Glint of Possibility by Tyler Mitchell, a man dangles from a tire swing just close enough to the water to see his own reflection, risking falling right into the murky waters – a timeless commentary on the importance and risk of seeing oneself. In Palestinian documentarian Sakir Khader’s featured photograph, a man naps on an abandoned sofa – in the background, a desolate landscape rolls into the sky’s edge, showing the audience what a brief reprieve from violence looks like in Palestine.

In an effort to make the magazine “future-proof”, the team have introduced a hybrid way of publishing from this issue onwards, with a redesigned annual print edition which will accompany online content on a revamped digital platform. The move is one they hope will make photography even more accessible and relevant for the magazine’s dedicated readers. “As always, we invite you to look at the world gently, but not any less lucidly,” says Katy.

Other featured photographers included in the 67th issue include, Sara Cwynar and the late Ernest Cole, who all had their first museum solo shows at Foam Museum in Amsterdam. Myriam Boulos will follow this trajectory with her Foam Paul Huf Award winning exhibition in 2026. “There is however a growing movement of image-makers – many working from within oppressed or silenced communities – who are retuning the acoustics of visual memory and amplifying or retelling what has been muted,” says Katy. “Foam Magazine offers a starting point for conversation and contemplation on the potential of images today and a projection of those we wish to see tomorrow.”