In at the moment’s screen-mediated world, images has by no means been extra prevalent. However it’s the bodily, quite than digital, side of the medium that’s more and more within the body this week in London—which remains to be seen as considerably lagging behind Paris and New York on the subject of exhibiting and dealing in images.
“We dwell in a world saturated with photographic pictures, so it’s by no means been extra vital to assume by way of the historical past of the medium and its wealthy legacies within the current,” says Hilary Floe, the curator of a serious survey of the US photographer Lee Miller at Tate Britain (till 15 February 2026).
The Miller present has acquired rave critiques and is joined by a number of marquee images exhibitions at business galleries across the metropolis, in addition to at each Frieze artwork gala’s.
Away from the tents, there’s Wolfgang Tillmans’s intensive exhibition put in throughout Maureen Paley’s three London galleries, whereas Sadie Coles is exhibiting Arthur Jafa’s photographic pictures of musicians. At Saatchi Yates, two of Marina Abramović’s movies from 1998 have been became 1,200 stills.
In the meantime, again at Frieze Masters, Tempo Gallery has devoted its sales space to the US photographer Peter Hujar, who chronicled New York’s Seventies and Nineteen Eighties homosexual scene. The tender black-and-white backstage portraits of performers have been all printed by Hujar himself (costs vary from $25,000 to $45,000; six prints bought on the opening day). The artist died of an Aids-related sickness in 1987. “He was such a grasp printer; the way in which he caught the sunshine in the dead of night room,” says Lauren Panzo, the pinnacle of Tempo’s images division. “There’s one thing in regards to the distinction and tonality that makes you wish to dive into the picture.”
Tempo’s presentation builds on the current success of Hujar’s exhibition on the East London non-profit Raven Row, although Maureen Paley has been constructing an viewers for Hujar’s work within the UK for a number of years. She can also be exhibiting his work at Frieze London in addition to co-hosting a screening of Ira Sachs’s movie Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) at London’s Institute of Modern Arts at the moment.
Industrial performs catch up
Whereas Tempo has a protracted historical past of exhibiting images by way of its sister gallery Tempo/MacGill, which merged with Tempo in 2020, different main business galleries have been catching up over the previous few years, and notably because the pandemic when the artwork market started to interact extra totally with digital displays. Pictures, it emerged, leant itself nicely to on-line viewing rooms.
In 2023, Gagosian appointed the New York-based images curator Joshua Chuang because the director of its images division, a newly created function designed to broaden the gallery’s market share of the medium. The appointment got here months after Gagosian added Nan Goldin to its roster. David Zwirner can also be backing the medium. Subsequent month, the vendor brings intimate photographs Diane Arbus took in individuals’s properties between 1961 and 1971 to London. Following her groundbreaking 2019 present on the Hayward Gallery, it’s the first time the photographer has been proven in a business context within the UK. Zwirner can also be exhibiting prints by Arbus on the stand at Frieze London (priced between $40,000 and $90,000).
James Inexperienced, the pinnacle of David Zwirner’s London gallery and a images specialist, thinks the current heavy funding in images “displays how the road between images and the remainder of effective artwork [is] turning into blurred—each when it comes to the institutional context and the non-public gathering one”.
Pictures’s relationship with the effective artwork world has traditionally been uneasy. Some, equivalent to Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman, are persistently thought of artists, whereas others stay resolutely within the images camp. In recent times, in a bid to minimize the excellence, many photographers have began working in small version runs, generally producing solely single prints.
At New York’s Firm gallery at Frieze London, the US artist Katherine Hubbard is exhibiting images of her and her mom, who was experiencing extreme reminiscence loss when the photographs have been taken. Every {photograph} is on the market in an version of two (priced at $5,000-$12,000), whereas her physique prints are distinctive ($14,000-$20,000). “We now dwell with plenty of pictures all of sudden, greater than we want,” says Ken Castaneda, a director at Firm. “Conserving the editions low retains images jewel-like.”
An accessible medium
The Lee Miller present at Tate Britain is additional proof of a long-overdue acceptance of images as an inventive medium in its personal proper. As Floe factors out, “images’s standing as an artwork kind was marginal at finest” throughout Miller’s lifetime, which means she was “doubly marginalised as a girl and a photographer”. The Tate Britain present additionally reframes Miller’s modelling as “participative and co-creative” quite than presenting her as a passive muse, as has usually been the case. “Particularly, we’ve deeply explored the inventive partnership between Miller and Man Ray, proposing far more advanced fashions of their inventive alternate and probing questions of attribution,” Floe provides. Such exhibitions are having a optimistic impression in the marketplace for Surrealist images; Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche just lately bought for £2.1m at Sotheby’s in London, the very best value achieved for {a photograph} to date this yr at public sale.
In a shaky market, prints and editions are faring nicely; collectors can purchase works by well-known names for a fraction of the value of a portray or sculpture. The identical holds true for images. As Tempo’s Lauren Panzo places it: “Pictures is accessible to individuals in some ways—and that features the value level.”
Andreas Pampoulides, the co-founder of Lullo Pampoulides, which specialises in Outdated Masters, is tapping into the glamorous facet of images, exhibiting classic silver prints by Albert Rudomine of actors Charles Boyer and Joan Crawford at Frieze Masters (priced between £3,000 and £6,000). He concurs that the lower cost factors imply that images is a better promote. “I all the time promote out images right here; I’d like to do an all-photography present subsequent yr,”he says.
Youthful collectors are being lured by the reasonably priced costs, too. At Saatchi-Yates, the Abramović prints are priced at £1,800 every—a transparent technique to enchantment to the gallery’s Gen Z and Millennial viewers. Nevertheless, Castaneda thinks images is “nonetheless a tough medium for individuals to gather”. He provides: “The humanity of a picture could be confronting. Persons are scared to confront the true world.”
Peter Hujar’s Georg Osterman Backstage at ‘Camille’ (1974). Tempo Gallery has devoted its Frieze Masters stand to the photographer
Photograph: David Owens
Zwirner’s James Inexperienced thinks that, as a result of images is rooted in the true world, it all the time has the potential to be political—“even when that’s not the intention of the photographer”. He provides: “Pictures has this fashion of being subversive; maybe, then, the perceived fact of images feels fairly related within the present local weather.”
For all of the obvious funding in images within the UK capital (elsewhere at Frieze London, Victoria Miro is exhibiting images by Khadija Saye, the artist who died within the Grenfell Tower fireplace; Frith Avenue Gallery is exhibiting photographic installations by Dayanita Singh; and Lisson Gallery has a large-scale seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto), there’s nonetheless the sense that London lags behind New York and Paris. Paris Photograph, which opens its twenty eighth version within the Grand Palais subsequent month, is extensively considered the world’s premier images honest. Photograph London, against this, has failed to seek out its ft because the pandemic and is because of transfer once more in 2026, to the Olympia exhibition centre in West London.
However the place there are gaps out there, Inexperienced sees alternative. “When it comes to galleries exhibiting images, London has extra room to develop,” he says. Of all of the artwork varieties, he thinks images has the potential to draw the widest gathering base. As he places it: “Inherently, we’re all photographers and takers of pictures, that’s the great thing about the medium.”
