At this year’s Photo London fair, which took place in the middle of last month, non-traditional approaches to photography took centre stage. While sales of black-and-white portraits by the medium’s biggest names appeared slow, gallery’s parted relatively easily with innovative, mixed media works by emerging image makers. At this year’s London Gallery Weekend, this trend looks set to continue.
Visitors seeking out photography can expect themes of femininity, colonialism and perceptions of truth, explored through collage, digital manipulation, unusual pairings and more.
There will be long-overdue celebrations of women image-makers and an interrogation of the value of the self-portrait in the social media age. Overall it is an offering filled with conflicting realities and ethereal worlds, likely to delight even the most staunch traditionalists.
Joanne Leonard: Vintage Photographs and Early Collages
HackelBury Fine Art, 4 Launceston Place, W8 5RL, until 8 July
Joanne Leonard, Artemesia’s Suzanna and the Elders and Men Conspiring (2006_
Courtesy of HackelBury Fine Art
Somewhat surprisingly, Vintage Photographs and Early Collages is Joanne Leonard’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The show spans the 1960s to 1980s, demonstrating the length of the photographer’s service to her cause: the creation of “intimate documentary”, through a doggedly feminist lens.
Leonard’s images blend documentary photography with poetic, dreamlike compositions, drawing inspiration from intimate family scenes, the realities of motherhood and political and social unrest. She often focuses on the domestic objects and responsibilities that have—and in many cases continue to—dominate the lives of women, subverting them via a masterful application of collage and a rejection of the male gaze.
Me and You in The Continuum (Now: Zero)
New Art Projects, ground Floor, 357 City Road, EC1V 1LR, until 12 July
Dorje de Burgh, Untitled (ii), Berlin, 2024
Courtesy of New Art Projects
In his widely acclaimed novel The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick famously imagines an alternative reality in which the Allies did not triumph during the Second World War. Within Dick’s story, another novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, offers yet another imagined history—closer to, though still different from, our own.
Brian Teeling and Dorje de Burgh’s show at New Art Projects takes inspiration from this book-within-a-book narrative device, raising questions about perceptions of reality and the nature of truth. The two Irish artists’ work is shown in pairs, interweaving their own often clashing facts and fictions through a mix of photographs, text and short film.
Best Self
Brooke Benington, 76 Cleveland Street, London W1T 6NB, until 28 June
Juno Calypso, Silent Retreat
Courtesy of Brooke Benington
This group show asks us to consider the many faces we present to the world—and whether they would like each other should they meet. Through her image of a masked young woman, her reflection fragmented by five mirrors, Juno Calypso’s Silent Retreat exemplifies this question.
The increasingly noteworthy self-portraitist, known for building kitsch, hyper-feminine worlds, is an appropriate choice for an exhibition which critiques representations of womanhood in the social media age. A robotic silicone mask by Mat Collishaw and immortal, AI-generated portraits by Boo Saville, alongside works Polly Morgan, Christopher Page, Julia Thompson and Bengt Tibet, assist the photographer in interrogating not just our best but worst, aged and public selves.
The Garden
Hannah Berry, 4 Holly Grove, SE15 5DF, until 13 September
Courtesy Harley Weir and Hannah Barry Gallery
Harley Weir has photographed Cara Delevingne for Stella McCartney, Chloe Sevigny for Dazed and Charli XCX in 2024—the year of “brat summer”. Away from her editorial pursuits, meanwhile, the image maker is no stranger to experimental.
For The Garden Weir returns to her pandemic project, Sickos. The series of analogue images are created by incorporating blood, sperm, perfumes and spices into traditional darkroom processes. The alchemical results are unpredictable, sometimes uncomfortable and often burning with colour.
She also presents a series of new works, created using ancient Japanese paper-making techniques. Despite the introduction of new materials, by merging photographs with objects from her childhood, Weir continues her focus on unexpected but often intimate forms.
For want of a horse, a button was lost
Tiwani Contemporary, 24 Cork Street, W1S 3NG, until 20 September
Felix Shumba, Which way from here?, 2024
Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary. Photography by Deniz Guzel
In 1978, photojournalist J. Ross Baughman won the Pulitzer Prize for his series on the treatment of Black suspected guerrillas by white soldiers in what was then Rhodesia. The brutal images, which offer unflinching evidence of colonial violence, inspired the multi-disciplinary artist Felix Shumba to create his own colonial era dystopian fiction.
In For want of a horse, a button was lost, the Zimbabwean artist explores the documentary value of photography through charcoal drawings. Employing his usual haunting figures, he explores the settler-colonial perspective in a show that features no photography, but which should nonetheless prove engaging for anyone interested in the ethics and power of the image.
