The MOP Foundation, based in the Galician city of A Coruña, has announced it will stage a major solo exhibition of the British photographer David Sims. The show, scheduled to open later this year, will bring together Sims’s most iconic fashion editorials alongside lesser-known personal work, tracing the arc of a career that has shaped how the industry sees itself. The announcement marks another ambitious step for a foundation that has quietly become one of Europe’s most important photography institutions.
For fashion audiences, the exhibition is an opportunity to reconsider a photographer whose work has become so influential that it risks being taken for granted. The MOP Foundation’s treatment of Sims as a serious artist — not just a fashion image-maker — reflects a broader institutional shift in how the industry’s visual culture is being preserved and studied.
The Sims exhibition is expected to include rarely seen contact sheets, Polaroids, and correspondence with designers and art directors, offering a behind-the-scenes view of how his most famous images were made. The foundation’s curatorial team has been working with Sims’s archive for over two years, selecting works that span his entire career rather than focusing only on the commercial peak of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The MOP Foundation’s focus on fashion photography is deliberate. Founded by Marta Ortega Pérez, the daughter of Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, the institution has used its resources to preserve and promote the work of photographers whose contributions to fashion have been historically undervalued by the fine-art establishment. Previous exhibitions have featured Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, and Paolo Roversi, each show drawing international visitors to the northwest coast of Spain.
Sims emerged in the early 1990s as part of a generation of British photographers — alongside Corinne Day and Mario Sorrenti — who rejected the glossy artificiality of 1980s fashion photography in favor of a raw, naturalistic approach. His images for Calvin Klein, Yohji Yamamoto, and British Vogue defined the visual language of minimalism in fashion: stark lighting, unretouched skin, clothes that seemed to exist in a state of quiet tension with the body.
