Top photography exhibitions in London

The so-called ‘king of coloured photography’, mid-century American photographer William Eggleston shaped Americana with his vivid snaps of roadside diners, suburban streets and ordinary domestic spaces across the USA. As quotidian as they are, there’s something otherworldly about Eggleston’s pictures. Partly, this uncanny feeling comes from his dye-transfer process, which saturated the images, making reds appear redder in the print than in real life. Lonely TV sets, an abandoned Cadillac left to rust, the back of a woman’s head in a diner’s booth' everyday scenes become vivid, strikingly beautiful and at times vaguely menacing through his eyes. It’s no surprise David Lynch loved him. 

Photography turns 200 this year. The earliest surviving photograph, ‘View from the Window at Le Gras’, is thought to have been taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, making 2026 the bicentenary of a medium that has been called both an art and a science. So it’s as good a time as any to look back on photography’s early years. Light and Magic’s subject is pictorialism, an expressive, often vaguely defined, style of photography that emerged in the late 19th century as a deliberate attempt to position photography not as an instrument of observation, as it had been thought of up until this point, but as an art in and of itself. 

Tim Walker is a phenomenal fashion photographer. The 55-year-old has created iconic spread after iconic spread for the likes of British Vogue, i-D and Vanity Fair, and he’s shot famous faces including Tilda Swinton, Kate Moss and Harry Styles. If you want to play celebrity bingo, you will adore this. Everyone is in it. Frank Ocean, Chappell Roan, Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, Tilda Swinton and Kate Bush are all in here, shot in Walker’s surreal, Alice in Wonderland-inspired style, which is whimsical, always surprising, and somehow still cool. 

There’s this great quote from the American photographer Cindy Sherman that goes ‘I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful.’ The American artist has spent decades exploring the construction of identity in her elaborate, consciously artificial self-portraits, where she performs the roles of make-up artist, stylist, model, photographer and director all in one go. Over her five-decade career, she’s skewered everything from silent movie-era Hollywood to men’s magazines, and now she’s focusing her attention on the fashion and beauty industries’ attitudes towards older women with ‘Fabric Matrons’, a series ncorporating draped fabrics, backdrops and jewellery from Chanel’s archives.