Stuart Hall Archives

London city guide

Top five photography galleries

Selected by Tim Clark and Thomas King

As the dust settles on Photo London 2024 and Peckham 24 – the capital’s two key points of reference within the UK photography calendar – we benchmark five leading London galleries and museums who are making a sustained effort to create productive and welcoming spaces for the encounter, use and consideration of photography today.

Tim Clark with Thomas King | City guide | 14 June 2024 | In association with MPB

At a time when the funding climate in the UK is at its least favourable in decades, setting up – let alone sustaining – a gallery dedicated to the art of photography, public or otherwise, is far from straightforward. The sector is currently groaning under the weight of government funding cuts, exorbitant energy bills, messy logistical and bureaucratic ramifications arising from Brexit, the fallout of the pandemic and cost of living crisis; not to mention the constant undermining of the arts in education in favour of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects at the hand of the outgoing Tory party, allied with pedalling culture wars and all round anathema.

Yet, despite – and even in spite of – these significant challenges, the UK government’s own estimates show that the creative industries generated £126 billion in gross value added to the economy and employed 2.4 million people in 2022 alone. A global leader clearly, but one that is woefully underfunded, leaving an increasing amount of arts organisations out to dry as they struggle to thrive in one of the world’s most expensive cities. In a parallel universe, the city of Berlin’s culture budget for 2024 is set at €947 million (with a population of 3.56 million) while the entire culture budget for England in 2024 pales in comparison at £458.5 million (with a population of 57 million): two wildly different per capita spends.

Meanwhile, in March this year, opposition party leader Kier Starmer spoke at the Labour Creatives Conference claiming he would “build a new Britain out of the ashes of the failed Tory project” and restore, what he called, the UK’s “diminished” status on the global stage. His top line pledges were as follows: getting art and design courses back on the curriculum, supporting freelancers’ rights, cracking down on ticket touting and improving access to creative apprenticeships. Essentially, promising to ensure creative skills are a necessity, not a luxury. To use the creative industries as a form of soft power. But it will require a detailed arts strategy coupled with fierce and charismatic advocates, and, crucially, increases in funding for the arts to European levels to get the UK’s cultural infrastructure back on sturdier ground. It is nothing short of a miracle, then, to have London gallery and museum spaces fully participating in a civic society at such a high calibre level.

What follows is a rundown of five leading London galleries and museums who are making a sustained effort to create productive and welcoming spaces for the encounter, use and consideration of photography today. It should be noted that there are a handful of medium specific spaces that haven’t been included, but doubtless could be. Among them: the ambitious British Centre for Photography currently looking for a permanent home; Tate, whose new Senior Curator of Photography and International Art, Singaporean Charmaine Toh, is just a few months in post; beloved and sorely missed Seen Fifteen (its founding director Vivienne Gamble now channels her energies towards growing the annual photography festival Peckham 24); Webber Gallery, which has seemingly shifted the emphasis of its exhibitions’ focus to a vast Los Angeles space; not neglecting to mention stalwart dealer Michael Hoppen whose eponymous gallery no longer operates from its multi-floor premises on Jubilee Place, instead opting for a location in Holland Park. Hopefully that goes some way to account for their omissions. There are other bricks and mortar spaces too: Hamiltons, MMX, Atlas, IWM’s Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries, TJ Boutling, Huxley-Parlour, Leica, Photofusion, Albumen, Purdy Hicks, Camera Eye, Augusta Edwards Fine Art and Doyle Wham, all worthy of a mention and giving much cause for celebration.

Autograph

Autograph
Rivington Place, London, EC2A 3BA
+44 020 7729 9200
autograph.org.uk

Every exhibition that Autograph stages is unmissable. The organisation’s remit is to ‘champion the work of artists who use photography and film to highlight questions of race, representation, human rights and social justice’, and it offers opportunity after opportunity to see powerful and vitally important work. Far from jumping on any bandwagon, this mission has long been embedded within the organisation, its practices and via ambitious work. Autograph was established in 1988 to support black photographic practices, and began in a small office in the Bon Marché building in Brixton, when it was known as the Association of Black Photographers (ABP). It applied for charitable status and moved to a permanent home at Rivington Place in Shoreditch in 2007, the first purpose-built space dedicated to the development and presentation of culturally diverse arts in England, decades before museums considered it necessary to start rethinking themselves.

Autograph punches significantly above its weight, and has long been an essential port of call for any photography lover living in or coming through the city, not to mention the impact on the capital’s culture at large. Largely owing to the skill and determination of visionary director Mark Sealy OBE – in post since 1991 – and talented and rigorous curator Bindi Vora, exhibitions at Autograph are born out of a professional methodology that is fundamentally interdisciplinary and grounded in both real-life research and experience. Yet it also moves past cultures of “them and us” to routinely bring to life transgressive and inclusive commissions, projects and publications.

As one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations (NPO), Autograph saw a 30% uplift increase from £712,880 to £1,012,880 a year to support its work for the period of 2023–2026 (as per the last round of funding decisions announced in 2022). Stuart Hall once served as a chair on the board and Autograph’s unique collection contains works by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Zanele Muholi, James Barnor, Lina Iris Viktor, Yinka Shonibare, Ingrid Pollard, Joy Gregory, Colin Jones, Phoebe Boswell, Raphael Albert, Ajamu and others.

V&A Photography Centre

V&A Photography Centre
Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL
+44 020 7942 2000
vam.ac.uk/info/photography-centre

Two transformative moments in the recent history of the V&A’s longstanding relationship with photography have been, firstly, the appointment of scholarly curator Duncan Forbes as the inaugural Director of Photography in 2020, who came from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and then the launch of The Parasol Foundation in Women Photography Project in 2022, spearheaded by the prodigious Fiona Rogers. Dedicated to supporting women artists though acquisitions, research and education, augmented through a commissioning programme with support from the Parasol Foundation Trust, Rogers’ programme also features an increasingly important prize established to identify, support and champion women artists. It attracted over 1,400 submissions for the 2024 edition produced in partnership with Peckham24.

Prior to this, its vast photography holdings were bolstered when the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Collection was transferred in 2017, and the collection now runs to over 800,000 photographs that span the 1820s to the present day. Programmes have evolved amidst a backdrop of institutional accountability and inclusivity during the dramatic changes we’ve witnessed in recent years and has embraced dynamic contemporary practices as well as pivoted to account for the medium’s many histories. It’s now the largest space in the UK dedicated to a permanent photography collection, with a total of seven galleries, three rooms of which focus on contemporary international practices with Noémie Goudal and Hoda Afshar commanding ample space, the mighty impressive resource that is The Kusuma Gallery – Photography and the Book, and The Meta Media Gallery – Digital Gallery. Fledging curators: take note of The Curatorial Fellowship in Photography opportunity, supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, aimed to facilitate in-depth research into under-recognised aspects of the photography collection.

The Photographers’ Gallery

The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies St, London, W1F 7LW
+44 020 7087 9300
thephotographersgallery.org.uk

While the restrictive nature of its building – a converted, six story former textiles warehouse situated off Oxford Street in the heart of Soho – doesn’t make for an optimum exhibition experience, The Photographers’ Gallery remains an important and well-visited public gallery for photography in London. TPG spaces are tricky given the premises’ vertical orientation and warren-like galleries, but recent exhibitions such as the exemplary Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective, guest curated by Thyago Nogueira of São Paulo’s Instituto Moreira Salles, did well to turn the entire gallery into something coherent.

Founded by the late Sue Davies OBE (1933-2020) in 1971 as the UK’s first public gallery dedicated to photography, TPG has a strong legacy and recently saw is funding maintained at £918,867 per year as one of Arts Council England’s NPOs during the 2022 announcement, the same year it launched its outdoor cultural space, Soho Photography Quarter – a rotating open air programme with much potential. It’s the world-class education and talks offer, programmed and curated by Janice McLaren and Luisa Ulyett, that are among its standout qualities. Workshops and short courses are just some of the events that broaden access and steer conversation. At street and basement level there is an innovative Digital Wall catering for photography’s increased automated and networked lives, a print sales gallery, well-stocked bookshop and much-loved café area providing a condensation point for a range of different publics. TPG’s annual exhibition, The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, an award of £30,000, has also entered a new phase since 2020 to include a broader range of voices as evidenced by the past five winners: Mohamed Bourouissa, Cao Fei, Deana Lawson, Samuel Fosso and Lebohang Kganye.

Former Photoworks director Shoair Mavlian took the helm in 2023, positive news given her curatorial background, NPO experience and canny thought leadership. Of course, it takes a couple of years for a new incumbent to put their stamp on a place like this but TPG is primed to reap the benefits of Mavlian’s ethos – contemporary, generous and diverse – and question what the space can be and who it can be for in order to thrive into the future.

Large Glass Gallery

Large Glass Gallery
392 Caledonian Road, London, N1 1DN
+44 020 7609 9345
largeglass.co.uk

In 2011, former director of Frith Street Gallery, Charlotte Schepke established a contemporary art gallery that leans heavily into photography: the innovative and elegant Large Glass Gallery based near Kings Cross on the edge of central London. Large Glass bills itself as an ‘alternative to the mainstream commercial gallery scene’, a description that is wholly warranted in light of its original and inquisitive approach to exhibition-making. From the inaugural exhibition, a precedent was set: channelling the energy of Marcel Duchamp by way of eclectic presentations of artworks, design pieces and found objects that take inspiration from the father of Conceptual Art, not only nodding to his famed work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), more commonly known as ‘The Large Glass’, but through embracing experimental juxtapositions.

Playful use of concepts and materials are still to be found and the current “rolling” exhibition is in case in point. Staged in three parts, After Mallarmé is curated by Michael Newman, who is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. The heady thematic exhibition riffs off the works and legacy of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé to reflect on ideas of spaces, the page, the book, chance, mobility and contingency. Whereas, previously this year, Francesco Neri: Boncellino offered a more classic take via a selection of quiet and meditative, mostly black-and-white portraits of farmers and the farming community in the countryside around Modena in northern Italy, ‘a census of a village’s population’. Large Glass’ represented artists are: Hélène Binet, Guido Guidi, Hendl Helen Mirra, Francesco Neri and Mark Ruwedel.

Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery
21 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LZ
+44 020 7439 7766

82 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8DP
+44 020 7920 777
flowersgallery.com

Heavyweight Canadian photographer Ed Burtynsky may occupy much of the limelight at Flowers Gallery and their presence at art fairs such as Photo London and Paris Photo (Burtynsky was recently the subject of back-to-back exhibitions at the gallery’s Cork Street space which coincided with Saatchi Gallery’s major 2024 retrospective, BURTYNSKY: EXTRACTION / ABSTRACTION, the largest exhibition ever mounted in Burtynsky’s 40+ year career), but it boasts an impressive roster of photographers. This has been built up over years, first by Diana Poole then Chris Littlewood who established the department now run by Lieve Beumer. Among them: Edmund Clark, Boomoon, Shen Wei, Robert Polidori, Julie Cockburn, Gaby Laurent, Tom Lovelace, Simon Roberts, Esther Teichmann, Lorenzo Vitturi, Michael Wolf, Mona Kuhn, Nadav Kander and Lisa Jahovic, all recognised for their engagement with important socio-cultural, political and environmental themes. Aficionados of the medium may hope for further in-depth and major photography exhibitions in due course from the esteemed gallery, but despite Flowers’ deep commitment to photography, it works across a range of media within contemporary art.

Flowers has presented more than 900 exhibitions across global locations, including from New York and Hong Kong outposts, and lists a total of 80 represented artists. Established in 1970 by Angela Flowers (1932–2023), Flowers has long held East End venues, initially in the heart of Hackney with Flowers East on Richmond Road, set up in 1988, before moving to Kingsland Road in Shoreditch in 2002, a 12,000 square foot venue spread over three floors of a 19^th century warehouse, arguably London’s most elegant white cube space within which to view photography. ♦

—
Tim Clark is a writer and curator based in London. He is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words, Artistic Director at Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Thomas King is Editorial Intern at 1000 Words and a student on BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism, Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Images:

1-Autograph, London. © Kate Elliot

2-Hélène Amouzou: Voyages exhibition at Autograph. 22 September 2023-20 January 2024. Curated by Bindi Vora. © Kate Elliot

3-Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta / Future-Cosmos exhibition at Autograph. 16 February-1 June 2024. Curated by Mark Sealy. © Kate Elliot

4-Gibson Thornley Architects, V&A Photography Centre. Installation view of Untitled (Giant Phoenix), 2022, Noemié Goudal, Photography Now – Gallery 96 © Thomas Adank

5-Gibson Thornley Architects, V&A Photography Centre – Photography and the Book – Gallery 98 © Thomas Adank

6-Gibson Thornley Architects, V&A Photography Centre – Photography Now – Gallery 97 © Thomas Adank

7-The Photographers’ Gallery, London. © Luke Hayes

8>9-Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery. 6 October 2023-11 February 2024. © Kate Elliot

10-Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Memoryscapes exhibition at Large Glass Gallery. 13 May-1 July 2023. © Stephen White and Co

11-Francesco Neri: Boncellino exhibition at Large Glass Gallery. 19 January–16 March 2024. © Stephen White and Co

12-Guido Guidi: Di sguincio exhibition at Large Glass Gallery. 3 February-11 March 2023. © Stephen White and Co

13-Flowers Gallery, Cork Street. © Antonio Parente

14-Edward Burtynsky, New Works exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street. 28 February-6 April 2024. © Antonio Parente

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Mark Sealy

Author of Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time and Director at Autograph ABP

London

For the latest instalment in our Interview series, Caroline Molloy speaks with British curator and cultural historian Mark Sealy MBE on the occasion of his new book published by Lawrence & Wishart, Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time. Since 1991 Sealy has held the position of Director at Autograph ABP, the London-based organisation championing the work of artists who use photography and film to highlight issues of identity, representation, human rights and social justice. Here he discusses the importance of challenging the matrix of colonial epistemic power that surrounds the reading of photographic images; how the history of photography can only be completely encompassing if the ‘voice of the subaltern is made critically present within it’; and the need for artists to be brave and to work in the knowledge of what has gone before but to not allow oneself to be chained to the past.

Mark Sealy would like to dedicate the text to Peter Clack “a brilliant Project Manager”, a friend and friend of Autograph ABP. Also to Bisi Silva, Alanna Lockward and Okwui Enwezor, all great decolonial curators and activists who have passed away during 2019.

Caroline Molloy: Thank you for agreeing to add your voice to this publication. To open the conversation for our readers it would be good to introduce how you hope the book adds to, and moves forward existing post-colonial literature, following on from the likes of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) and Stuart Hall’s ‘New ethnicities’ essay in The Post-Studies Reader (2006), to name but a few.

Mark Sealy: I think it’s important for us to keep working through new and established ideas all the time. We must stay in dialogue with critical theory and make sure we work in multiple directions at once. These days I’m as much influenced by the music of John Coltrane because of the way he makes me feel and think along with work produced by some cultural theorist. The brilliance of scholars such as Professor Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha is that they have gifted us some wonderful tools to work with. Hall’s text titled New Ethnicities, for example, is as critical now as it was when it was published 30 years ago. Part of the work I wanted Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time to do is to encourage the reader to challenge the matrix of colonial epistemic power that surrounds the reading of photographic images.

CM: A main argument in the book seems to highlight the need to understand and acknowledge that the history of photography can only be completely encompassing if the ‘voice of the subaltern is made critically present within it’, as you put it. Could you share your thoughts about how it redresses notions of cultural erasure?

MS: Within the book I suggest that decolonising the photographic image is an act of unburdening it from the assumed, normative, hegemonic, colonial conditions present, consciously or unconsciously, in the moment of its original making and in its readings and displays. This is therefore a process of locating the primary conditions of a racialised photograph’s coloniality and, as such, decolonising the camera works within a form of black cultural politics to destabilise the conditions, receptions and processes of Othering a subject within the history of photography. I guess in short what I am claiming is that there can not only be one cultural perspective on reading the work an image does in culture. I think a plurality of cultural voices amplified in the world helps us all work towards a greater understanding of the different ways of being and signs of recognition. Emancipation of the mind also means learning to unlearn and allow different knowledge systems into the realm on thinking. I like the idea of thinking with images rather than thinking for them.

CM: In your introduction you write: ‘A key function of decolonising the camera is to not allow photography’s colonial past and its cultural legacies in the present to lie unchallenged and un-agitated, or to be simply left as an unquestioned chapter within the history of the medium.’ In tandem with this, how would you describe the act and processing of decolonising the ‘image’?

MS: There is no one correct way of decolonising or reading an image. That notion, or prescription, works as being counter to what has been said over many years by scholars working against the grain of colonial aggression. I agree with Walter Mignolo and the late Alanna Lockward when they encouraged us to delink thought from the academy and to encourage new ways to re-exist and resist the aggression of colonialism in all its forms.

CM: I am intrigued to read the critical complexity with which Alice Seeley Harris’ photographs, documents of the violent atrocities inflicted on the Congolese people at the end of the 19th century, are unpacked within the book. Accepting the shift in the reading of these photographs, and what it illuminates within a contemporary socio-political context, do you think there is a need to re-read photographs from the past at different historical moments (those relating to race, rights and human justice, or otherwise)?

MS: I absolutely think we have to begin a re-reading of the past, especially concerning the work historical and contemporary images do on us in the present. There is so much for us to learn and unlearn, so many knowledges systems to engage with and new ways of seeing, being and listening that I think a reading of the past concerning photography is both essential and exciting.

CM: There is a politic to how all the photographs are discussed in this book. I am particularly interested in the analysis of Wayne Miller’s Chicago’s South Side 1946-48 that were eventually published in book form in 2000, within the context of (consciously or unconsciously) white privilege. Miller, an experienced war photographer, funded by the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and 1948 spent prolonged periods photographing Chicago’s African American communities. Given the long overdue publication of this work, do Miller’s photographs still have value for the viewer?

MS: Miller’s photographs are really important documents. We have to recognise that Miller was working in one time and his subjects were caught within another. They meet only for a short period of time. This moment is key, it’s a sentence in a much wider visual chapter. I like to think about photography as being part of the journey, a story or a visual puzzle that has so many missing pieces. As human subjects I am convinced that we are not in the same space-time dynamic that’s why we have to read the work of Miller both within and outside of the frames he made. He has to be positioned within the privileges he had and we also have to look at what he photographed as an opportunity to discuss the place of race in the world immediately after WWII.

CM: This book offers an important contribution to the histories of photography and representation of the Other. Within this frame of reference, could you explain the milieu that locates the following sentence? ‘The black gaze is a radical oppositional act that has its location in many different origins associated with power.’

MS: The idea of a black oppositional gaze is located in the work of many important photographic histories from the work of James Van Der Zee to Carrie Mae Weems. From Vanley Burke to Joy Gregory. From Frederick Douglass to Kobena Mercer. From Rotimi Fani Kayode to Zanele Muholi and many others in different times and locations. It’s clear however that there is an on-going battle over the dignity of black lives and the fight over images of black people and the right to be seen with dignity is very real. This battle spans centuries and there are clear lines of affiliation that can be drawn into and across the history to these radical acts of decolonial photography dialogues.

CM: Having built an argument across the book for decolonising the camera, a linear connection can be made between the decisive turn in Stuart Hall’s Reconstruction Work: Images of post war black settlement (1984), and the concluding chapter Rights and Recognition in the Late Twentieth Century, both of which shape arguments concerning the construction of black subjectivities in the face of Western visual culture. You assert that the 1980s was a ‘critical decade’ for black British photography, while the 1990s should also be read as a ‘transformative period that heralded the arrival of the Other as photographer within mainstream Western cultural institutions’. Given these conditions, how does this discourse continue in the 21st century, in terms of the politics of representation and market for black subjects or identities?

MS: We have to now consider that we are in an image sphere. Images circulate around the globe faster than ever before. This image velocity is creating cultural heat and this heat is producing a new energy flow of images especially from those who are designated as being ‘new’ to the means of production. This image flow or production of meaning is being interrupted and that turbulence is what I believe we are now witnessing. Work from outside of Europe and North America or from designated marginalised communities is now part of an unstoppable flow of image meaning that is transforming the traditional way photography has been understood this is a massive challenge to the museum and gallery world.

CM: Finally, it is fascinating how the work of conceptual photographers, such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Joy Gregory are discussed within a decolonised framework. Having constructed this framework, what advice would you give emerging BAME artists when thinking through and developing their own practice?

MS: I invite all artists to be brave and to work in the knowledge of what has gone before but do not allow oneself to be chained to the past or simply replicate what has been done. I think we have to think about the Jazz of it all and make work that is multidirectional, pluriversal and hybrid in nature. Most importantly, I think we have to make work that has generosity at its heart that is open and inviting to make images that help us out of the matrix of colonial violence. ♦