Photo London ‘26
"So, what was Photo London like?"
That's a very good question!
Cutting straight to it - it was, on the whole, a really good experience.
Yes, there were things that weren't so good, so let's start there and end on the highs.
The Negatives
It's quite pricey for what it is. My Friday ticket was £32, plus a £1 booking fee. That felt fairly steep - particularly as a Friday ticket only grants admission from midday, which compresses your visit into the afternoon. Photography talks were £10 each, which isn't bad in isolation, but I wanted to catch two on the Friday, so my total crept past £50.
It is expensive when you consider this is effectively a trade show for photography galleries and collectors. That said, the high pricing does achieve one thing: it thins out the crowd. It keeps away a lot of people who might otherwise come - students, enthusiasts, the general public. It was busy, but not as busy as it might have been had it been free, or say, £15 cheaper. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's a good thing or not.
The lighting and glare issue. It's a bright hall, with generous natural light pouring through roof skylights. In many ways this is wonderful - far better than the flat, artificial light of some exhibition venues. However, very little consideration appears to have been given to glass reflection in areas exposed to that natural light. Some of the massive Steven Meisel prints were quite badly affected, which is surprising given that the framing on prints that size probably ran into the thousands - and yet low-reflective glass was nowhere to be seen, or at least not that I could tell. A lot of work on the main ground floor suffered the same problem, which was a shame and more than a little surprising given the price tags attached to many of the pieces.
The demographic. My observation of the crowd: predominantly middle-aged to senior, and heavily male. Rather depressingly, a lot like me - and it did give me pause. Walking in, I thought, "this is going to be really grim if it's the same crowd as a Dead Kennedys or PiL gig" (basically, everyone from 1986, just forty years older). I'm glad to report it must have been a coach party of sixty-year-olds bottlenecking the entrance, because it felt considerably less geriatric once I was inside.
Very little seating or food. For the amount of floor space, there's remarkably little to sit on or eat at. Seated areas do exist - tucked away near the book section - but they're easy to miss. My own lunch was a Sainsbury's chicken caesar wrap, bought strategically in Hammersmith, washed down with a bottle of fizzy drink. I knew I'd have a lot to cover and I like to keep moving, so it made sense.
The Positives
The location - Olympia. Perfect for me. It's an easy ten-minute walk from Hammersmith, or two minutes on the bus. I'd never been to Photo London before, so I had no nostalgic attachment to Somerset House, its previous home. Olympia is a big space, but not so big as to be overwhelming. You can comfortably cover the ground floor and upper deck in about two to three hours and feel you've seen the majority. Allow four hours if you want to browse the books and have a coffee. Add a talk or two and you're looking at a six-hour visit - but you'll leave with that satisfying "I've done it" feeling.
The breadth of discovery. I saw the work of 53 different photographers, many of whom I'd never encountered before. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm not academic about this, and I don't easily remember names unless I can build a visual frame of reference around them. This exhibition made that possible in a way that browsing online simply doesn't.
The variety was impressive too. From big names - Misan Harriman and Joel Meyerowitz were both present and doing live talks; Misan in particular was actively engaging with everyone who stopped to look at his work - to genuinely surprising discoveries. One that stayed with me was Wanda Martin, a Hungarian photographer showing The Ballad of Eternal Youth - a collaborative project in which her own contemporary work sits seamlessly alongside her father's photography, despite a forty-year gap between the shutter clicks. What strikes you is how little changes: people, habits, environment, situation - all remarkably similar across decades and generations. It's thought-provoking on many levels, and I found myself seeing clear connections with my own My Father, My Son project and its themes of family and relationships. Wanda's stand was also painted a deep, warm red - it stood out beautifully against the sea of white around it.
On that note: the exhibition did feel a little old-fashioned in its presentation - all large white boards, it had the feel of an upscaled degree show. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It kept the atmosphere relaxed, and it needed that, because this is ultimately a collector's exhibition - the kind where some of the photography costs as much as a Range Rover.
The archive work. Some genuinely wonderful capsule collections on show. Right by the entrance, there were beautiful prints by Ahmed Ali - including a photograph from 1952 of a miner drilling in a tunnel, and a wall-filling sequence called Assembly, documenting factory workers. Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler also had stunning archive work, including several beautiful black-and-white portraits from Mona Lisa's of the Suburbs (2010), featuring female subjects from across Europe.
My Shortlist - Photographers Worth Your Attention
Dileep Prakash - gorgeous print, The Anglo-Indians
Stéphane Couturier - colourful photographic montages that push into abstraction; almost paintings
Sakiko Nomura - My Last Remaining Dream (2018)
Eiji Ohashi - Roadside Lights #155 (2026)
Laurence Demaison - Vanité (2023); 3,132 pins, painstakingly assembled - a genuinely unique piece
Weronika Gęsicka - Cliff Hanger, Smash, Holiday, Cocoon, Fun & Games (2019–2023); darkly funny photo-manipulated images with a strange dystopian undertow
Joseph Rodriguez - East Village, Outside the Vault, Happy Camper, Homeless Family (1984); sensitive, candid, occasionally funny archive work. Loved these.
Anne Bean - Divided Self (1974–1982); montage work that took me straight back to things I dabbled with at college in the eighties
Tom Wood - Me and My Mates (1975); more brilliant archive. I am clearly and unapologetically drawn to 1970s and 80s documentary and portrait photography
Jane Evelyn Atwood - a must-research photographer. Her 1976–77 Paris work - apparently shot in a brothel - is extraordinary. Three Women in a Stairwell and Claudine Goes Downstairs are exactly the kind of photographs that make you wish you'd taken them
Janet Delaney - Too Many Products, Too Much Pressure; a lovely set of photographs of her father and his work around the family beauty salon
James Clifford Kent - a small stand near the Meisel work, but a real discovery. His Cuba project is just wonderful. Firmly on my research list.
Thomas Duffield - for his work exploring his relationship with his father. A small stand, but I stood in front of these photographs for a long time.
Indu Antony - her photographs of Cecilia are worth seeking out: humorous, sensitive, bold, and surprising. The written text adds an extra layer that rewards attention.
The Talks
I attended the Jess T. Dugan and Charlotte Cotton talk and got a great deal from it. I hadn't come across Jess's work before, but I was immediately struck by it - the portraiture is so sensitively made. I had the chance to ask about the ethics of photographing family and presenting that work publicly, and Jess's reflections on this were genuinely useful. A lot of what I make is about my own family and close relationships, so these were real take-aways.
And a final, well-deserved shout-out to Antony Cairns, who was running a live studio recreating night scenes using old computer punch cards from the 1970s. His work is really worth checking out.
Thank you for your attention in this matter.
Max McGonigal © 2026
