There's so much more to London art than just painting or sculpture. Instead of boring old brushstrokes and dull old canvases, you can lose yourself in all kinds of new worlds by tracking down the best photography exhibitions in London.
From sweeping landscape scenes to powerful portraits captured by daring individuals, photography in London offers a full-exposure of thought-provoking, visually captivating art. So in this list, we've compiled reviews of the best photography exhibitions in London. How do we know they're the best? Because we've been: we've quite literally dragged ourselves (well, our art critic has) to every photography exhibition worth going to and figured out what's snappy and what's crappy.
Eddy Frankel is Time Out's art editor, every day he wakes up and consumes endless, copious amounts of art and photography. It's a terrible physical diet, but it's very mentally enriching.
RECOMMENDED: Check our complete guide to photography in London
‘No one can tell the story better than ourselves,’ proclaims a quote from artist-photographer Zanele Muholi as you enter this exhibition. Maybe so, but the Tate makes a decent fist of trying in this extended showcase of a visual activist who has spent more than two decades focusing their lens on the lives of the South African Black LGBTQIA+ community through vivid portraits and self-portraiture.
Why go: Muholi's depictions of marginalised lives are as unique as they are striking.
Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy taste. Luckily, Sir Elton John would probably know his art from his elbow even if he hadn’t become one of the world’s biggest, richest megastars. For decades now, he has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, even at the Tate in 2017, and now it’s the V&A’s turn.
Why go: These are some of the best modern photographs by the best modern photographers, it's genuinely great.
Why did a young photographer spend five years obsessively photographing a single street in west London, visiting it 27 times and taking 1,400 photos?
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