In today’s screen-mediated world, photography has never been more prevalent. But it is the physical, rather than digital, aspect of the medium that is increasingly in the frame this week in London—which is still seen as somewhat lagging behind Paris and New York when it comes to exhibiting and dealing in photography.
“We live in a world saturated with photographic images, so it’s never been more important to think through the history of the medium and its rich legacies in the present,” says Hilary Floe, the curator of a major survey of the US photographer Lee Miller at Tate Britain (until 15 February 2026).
The Miller show has received rave reviews and is joined by several marquee photography exhibitions at commercial galleries around the city, as well as at both Frieze art fairs.
Away from the tents, there is Wolfgang Tillmans’s extensive exhibition installed across Maureen Paley’s three London galleries, while Sadie Coles is showing Arthur Jafa’s photographic images of musicians. At Saatchi Yates, two of Marina Abramović’s videos from 1998 have been turned into 1,200 stills.
Meanwhile, back at Frieze Masters, Pace Gallery has dedicated its booth to the US photographer Peter Hujar, who chronicled New York’s 1970s and 1980s gay scene. The tender black-and-white backstage portraits of performers were all printed by Hujar himself (prices range from $25,000 to $45,000; six prints sold on the opening day). The artist died of an Aids-related illness in 1987. “He was such a master printer; the way he caught the light in the dark room,” says Lauren Panzo, the head of Pace’s photography department. “There’s something about the contrast and tonality that makes you want to dive into the image.”
Pace’s presentation builds on the recent success of Hujar’s exhibition at the East London non-profit Raven Row, though Maureen Paley has been building an audience for Hujar’s work in the UK for several years. She is also showing his work at Frieze London as well as co-hosting a screening of Ira Sachs’s film Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts today.
Commercial plays catch up
While Pace has a long history of exhibiting photography through its sister gallery Pace/MacGill, which merged with Pace in 2020, other major commercial galleries have been catching up over the past few years, and particularly since the pandemic when the art market began to engage more fully with digital presentations. Photography, it emerged, leant itself well to online viewing rooms.
In 2023, Gagosian appointed the New York-based photography curator Joshua Chuang as the director of its photography department, a newly created role designed to expand the gallery’s market share of the medium. The appointment came months after Gagosian added Nan Goldin to its roster. David Zwirner is also backing the medium. Next month, the dealer brings intimate shots Diane Arbus took in people’s homes between 1961 and 1971 to London. Following her groundbreaking 2019 show at the Hayward Gallery, it is the first time the photographer has been shown in a commercial context in the UK. Zwirner is also showing prints by Arbus on the stand at Frieze London (priced between $40,000 and $90,000).
James Green, the head of David Zwirner’s London gallery and a photography specialist, thinks the recent heavy investment in photography “reflects how the line between photography and the rest of fine art [is] becoming blurred—both in terms of the institutional context and the private collecting one”.
Photography’s relationship with the fine art world has historically been uneasy. Some, such as Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman, are consistently considered artists, while others remain resolutely in the photography camp. In recent years, in a bid to lessen the distinction, many photographers have started working in small edition runs, sometimes producing only single prints.
At New York’s Company gallery at Frieze London, the US artist Katherine Hubbard is showing photographs of her and her mother, who was experiencing severe memory loss when the shots were taken. Each photograph is available in an edition of two (priced at $5,000-$12,000), while her body prints are unique ($14,000-$20,000). “We now live with a lot of images all at once, more than we need,” says Ken Castaneda, a director at Company. “Keeping the editions low keeps photography jewel-like.”
An accessible medium
The Lee Miller show at Tate Britain is further evidence of a long-overdue acceptance of photography as an artistic medium in its own right. As Floe points out, “photography’s status as an art form was marginal at best” during Miller’s lifetime, meaning she was “doubly marginalised as a woman and a photographer”. The Tate Britain show also reframes Miller’s modelling as “participative and co-creative” rather than presenting her as a passive muse, as has often been the case. “In particular, we’ve deeply explored the creative partnership between Miller and Man Ray, proposing much more complex models of their artistic exchange and probing questions of attribution,” Floe adds. Such exhibitions are having a positive impact on the market for Surrealist photography; Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche recently sold for £2.1m at Sotheby’s in London, the highest price achieved for a photograph so far this year at auction.
In a shaky market, prints and editions are faring well; collectors can buy works by well-known names for a fraction of the price of a painting or sculpture. The same holds true for photography. As Pace’s Lauren Panzo puts it: “Photography is accessible to people in many ways—and that includes the price point.”
Andreas Pampoulides, the co-founder of Lullo Pampoulides, which specialises in Old Masters, is tapping into the glamorous side of photography, showing vintage 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 price points mean that photography is an easier sell. “I always sell out photographs here; I’d love to do an all-photography show next year,”
he says.
Younger collectors are being lured by the affordable prices, too. At Saatchi-Yates, the Abramović prints are priced at £1,800 each—a clear strategy to appeal to the gallery’s Gen Z and Millennial audience. However, Castaneda thinks photography is “still a hard medium for people to collect”. He adds: “The humanity of an image can be confronting. People are scared to confront the real world.”
Peter Hujar’s Georg Osterman Backstage at ‘Camille’ (1974). Pace Gallery has devoted its Frieze Masters stand to the photographer
Photo: David Owens
Zwirner’s James Green thinks that, because photography is rooted in the real world, it always has the potential to be political—“even if that’s not the intention of the photographer”. He adds: “Photography has this way of being subversive; perhaps, then, the perceived truth of photography feels quite relevant in the current climate.”
For all the apparent investment in photography in the UK capital (elsewhere at Frieze London, Victoria Miro is showing photographs by Khadija Saye, the artist who died in the Grenfell Tower fire; Frith Street Gallery is showing photographic installations by Dayanita Singh; and Lisson Gallery has a large-scale seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto), there is still the sense that London lags behind New York and Paris. Paris Photo, which opens its 28th edition in the Grand Palais next month, is widely regarded as the world’s premier photography fair. Photo London, by contrast, has failed to find its feet since the pandemic and is due to move again in 2026, to the Olympia exhibition centre in West London.
But where there are gaps in the market, Green sees opportunity. “In terms of galleries showing photography, London has more room to grow,” he says. Of all the art forms, he thinks photography has the potential to attract the widest collecting base. As he puts it: “Inherently, we are all photographers and takers of images, that’s the beauty of the medium.”
