“In 2015, life was full of surprises in the UK. The Conservative government scraped through a general election and Leicester City were heading to victory in the Premier League. The thought of a photography fair in London was almost equally improbable.” So says Michael Benson, ahead of next month’s 10th anniversary edition of Photo London, a fair he co-founded with his wife and business partner Fariba Farshad that year.
It was not an obvious call. While other cities — notably Paris and New York — had long-standing and thriving fairs for photography, “there was a sense that London had missed the boat, in favour of the rest of contemporary art. A handful of London’s dealers told us there’s no photography market here,” Benson says. He and Farshad sensed otherwise. “At the same time, London’s museums were putting resources into photography, some small, dedicated galleries were opening and young photographers were coming on to the scene,” he says. Plus, he smiles, “Fariba and I absolutely hate being told not to do something.”
Certainly, photography has long suffered from the perception that it is a lesser medium than painting, which dominates value in the art market. The feeling is not helped by the multiple nature of photos, in a world that prizes the unique. Edition sizes are in fact fixed — including sometimes for just one work — but “there is an innate Anglo-Saxon suspicion of multiples, that it is too easy to make copies. Our role is partly to explain why this isn’t the case,” Benson says.
London has had its challenges too. “We had Brexit,” Benson says, head in his hands. “Some collectors moved out of London, while galleries and dealers outside of the UK felt we had slapped them in the face.” Then, he says, “like everyone, we had the pandemic, which really could have flattened the fair.” Instead, says Sophie Parker, director of the fair for the first time this year, “it demonstrated the resilience of the art world.”
Such endurance is part of the thinking behind this year’s 10th anniversary exhibition, called London Lives (to rhyme with gives, not hives), part of the fair’s public programme. Showing about 135 works by 29 artists, images range from raw street photography by Nick Turpin, including one image of a weary commuter on the top deck of a London bus, to highly produced, staged tableaux by Julia Fullerton-Batten. Renowned fashion photographer David Bailey features too, with work from his East End series dating to the 1960s, including an early photo of the model Jean Shrimpton (with whom he was in a relationship).
The chosen artists are mostly based in the capital and their work “somehow connected” to it, says the show’s curator, Francis Hodgson. Content-wise, he says, “there are different opinions, different ways. It’s a bit of a mess, like London.”
It is a microcosm of the huge range of works within the photography field that fill the rest of the fair through its 100-plus exhibitors in Somerset House, a step up from the 69 showing there in 2015. While Photo London’s strength is in new discoveries, its offering also stretches from photography’s beginnings — this year’s edition includes an 1846 image of London’s Wellington Arch by pioneer Henry Fox Talbot (Robert Hershkowitz gallery). Styles encompass photojournalism, fashion photos, documentary works, abstract and conceptual imagery, all from photographers around the world and through a variety of techniques. Prices range from £1,000 to more than £100,000, such as for Nil Yalter’s “Estranged Doors (Exile Is a Hard Job)”, a 1983 mixed-media polyptych that includes photographs of Turkish immigrants in Paris interweaved with poetry (Ab-Anbar Gallery).
Among the themes that emerge from it all is that, in this age of sophisticated digital technology, younger artists are increasingly exploring more traditional techniques, Parker says. This includes work by the British-American photographer Robin Hunter Blake, who uses a multi-exposure, silver gelatin process that involves coating a light-sensitive emulsion on to the paper base. The effect, in images such as “Feast II” (2024), creates a glistening tone from the silver, while the multi-exposure gives a sense of rapid motion as well as confusion — it isn’t clear if the two figures are embracing or fighting (Guerin Projects).
Parker notes too that many of the latest crop of photographers have moved away from figuration and portraits, towards more landscapes and nature-based works, often used to reflect our place within the planet. The politics are visually more nuanced than in previous times — for example, the Venezuela-born artist Lucia Pizzani makes meticulous photographic collages on Amate tree bark paper. These are delicate and pretty but tell a deeper story — the paper dates back to Mayan civilisations and, as such, was banned by Spanish colonisers (Victoria Law Projects). Similarly, the Brazilian photographer Caio Reisewitz creates gorgeous, dense images of landscapes, urban and natural, to illustrate the impact of human activity (Bendana-Pinel Art Contemporain).
More strident politics feature too. Among the London Lives works are photographs taken by Hannah Starkey at the 2017 Women’s March in London, with titles such as “Fuck the patriarchy not the planet” and “My clothes are not my consent”. In the main fair, Podbielski Contemporary brings a booth of Middle East photographers, including work by Steve Sabella, from Palestine, and Yuval Yairi, from Israel, as well as artists from Lebanon and Iran, to “create a dialogue between cultures, faith and current realities of the region”, a statement says.
Despite the efforts of events such as Photo London, overall photography sales at auction look stagnant over the past 10 years, totalling $61mn in 2015 and $59mn in 2024, according to analysis published last week by ArtTactic. This notes, though, that a fall of 6 per cent from 2023 to 2024 was markedly less than for the wider art market (down 27 per cent), while higher-value photos fared much better (up 56 per cent), demonstrating “the sector’s resilience and continued appeal to collectors”.
Parker says that Photo London’s success can be measured in other ways. “We now see a contemporary art audience at the fair,” she says, a sign that photography’s appeal has broadened beyond its niche buyers and enthusiasts. Benson adds that “people now admit that they have photography collections, which they didn’t do before” — for this year, Farshad notes, a group of collectors and patrons are putting their names and money behind a new section dedicated to photographers without formal gallery representation. As Benson sees it, “There is still work to do, but we have come an awfully long way.”
May 15-18, photolondon.org
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