Photo London 2025

Amongst these historic images, the photographs of Jamie Hawkesworth embody a more diffuse, liberal approach to image-making and are typical of what has felt like the dominant aesthetic in British photography for the last decade: hand-printed colour portraits, bathed in an almost golden light which celebrate the charisma of culturally and socially diverse strangers, without dwelling on the details of their lives. It is the prevailing aesthetic of the neo-liberal period, informed by the idea that inequality is an issue of representation. As we enter an era of authoritarian power and violence a new kind of photography is needed. It is a photography which began to come into focus at this year’s Photo London.

Leading a tour of the Discovery section, which focuses on the work of emerging photographers and galleries, curator Charlotte Jansen spoke about this shift — noting there had been a marked move away from portraiture and towards abstraction at this year’s fair. In many ways, the Discovery section is the beating heart of Photo London: the work is certainly a better barometer of the culture than other areas of the fair which are often more historical and seem more engaged with the question of saleability, Nat Geo style landscapes, photographs of ageing cultural icons of questionable ethics and elephants and lions running through Sub-Saharan Africa: pretty photos which don’t make you feel bad about yourself or the world.

In contrast, photographs like those of Pia Guilmoth and Amak Mahmoodian are harder to overlook. Presented by Serchia Gallery, both explore the idea of the imagination in exile. In Guilmoth’s case, her nocturnal images find beauty in landscapes which usually exist outside of human observation, drawing on notions of the night and moon as feminine and charged with magic. However, Pia’s solace in the night-time isn’t only aesthetic: as a trans-woman living in conservative rural America the darkness offers her safety. Essential to the making of Pia’s work is her sometimes invisibility, her ability to be unseen. It is in this state that she creates and through her photography invites us to occupy a world outside of the mainstream. Similarly, Amak Mahmoodian’s work uses photography as a means to imagine and inhabit landscapes outside of the physical world. Exploring the migrant experience Mahmoodian understands the dream state as a form of exile from exile, returning us to imagined and past lives. Serchia’s presentation typifies a development in this year’s Photo London, the move away from representation or visibility through portraiture and toward an approach to image-making that focuses on the photographer’s unique vision, not just showing but telling.

Nearby, Jesse Glazzard’s images of young Ukrainian conscripts, presented by The Face, play with the forms of photojournalism and print media. Photographs of young soldiers are reproduced as half-tone prints which mimic newsprint. Far from heroic, Glazzard’s subjects are photographed in moments of rest, recovering from a war they have been thrust into and about which they have no say. A few booths over from Glazzard’s photographs, A/POLITICAL present an installation by Russian designer and photographer Gosha Rubchinskiy featuring large scale images by Rubchinskiy of youth culture in Russia and a book of images made between 2018-19 of young soldiers on Red Square in Moscow and at the Volgograd Memorial ‘The Motherland Calls’, many of them likely carrying out the military service compulsory for men aged 18-30 in Russia. The proximity of these images of countries on opposing sides of the same war feels crucial. Together the works move beyond the blind support of a proxy war between Russia and the West to reveal the reality of the conflict, a meat grinder ending the lives of young men given no choice other than to fight.

The fragility of young life under threat from war is highlighted again in Adam Rouhana’s images of young Palestinians; swimming in a fast-moving river, playing under a cascade of leaves falling from an olive tree and jumping into the sea. They are a beautiful and sensitive depiction of the wonder and possibility of childhood but also a reminder of the childhoods lost and destroyed since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza.

Elsewhere, New Discretions presented a series of polaroid assemblages by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, a pioneer in undoing social constructions around sexuality and gender. Made during P-Orridge’s Pandrogeny Project with their collaborator and partner Lady Jane between the 1990s and 2000s, these works sit on a literal knife edge: exploring the expansion of identity and the body, both through their own anatomy and in their use of photography. P-Orridge’s cut and collaged polaroids, mirroring their and Lady Jane’s experiments with body modification, depict personal effects, artworks and objects now lost or destroyed, playing with the ontological properties of both the self and the photographic medium.

The social and political reverberations of these works are not solely confined to emerging photographers and galleries however, they can be found in the more commercially or historically focused corners of the fair too. In the photography of Brassaï and Bill Brandt shown by Grob Gallery, in images by Nan Goldin at Atlas, in Tee A. Corinne’s work at Webber and in Lee Miller’s second-world-war journalism from the Lee Miller Archives.

The shift occurring in the work of emerging photographers and gallerists seems reflective of a turn, or perhaps return, to a time when photographers struggled to represent a world governed by repression and violence. These works all ask a common question, what does it feel like to be alive right now? It’s a question which is a constant and vital concern for photographers, and one for which the answer isn’t always easy or nice. The best of these artists are trying to answer it honestly and from within. They don’t want you to just see them, they want you to see what they see. They invite you to be brave and truly look at the world, at all the beauty and the bloodshed.