Photo London 2025
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
This weekend I attended Photo London. My friend Alex suggested that I attend the event which I'd never been to before as it would be a good place to make connections for the show. Additionally, future guest of the show Dan Rubinwas going to be leading a photo walk in conjunction with Charys from Silvergrain Classics, the analogue photography magazine.
I didn't really have a mental model for what an event there would be like. Somerset House is one of those funny places in London with a magnificent history situated right on The Strand. If you live in or around London you may well go past it all the time and not realise it's even there. From the outside it could be any number of ancient government or royal buildings.
I arrived at midday to find row after row of really exciting work presented by photographers and galleries I'd never heard of. This is the great joy of being an amateur. If you can arrive with eyes and heart open you're bound to find something that inspires and excites you. Images brought by The Helsinki School met me as I came in and a fellow attendee delighted in telling me how a particular effect was being achieved in camera. Photos of sky by Mikko Rikala blew me away. I've said before that I think I could photograph the sky for the rest of my life and be happy doing it but I won’t achieve the beauty of their diptych. I am also in love with a series of landscapes by French photographer and teacher David de Bayter. He made these images not using a tripod to pan across the landscape, but rather by moving the camera sideways so that the perspective remains constant as if we were also walking in that location. The series being shown was inspired by Spanish UFO reports. David has been back to those locations to photograph and has scored the negatives with a blunt instrument to create lines that highlight where the UFOs were reportedly seen. The prints were huge, over a metre in height, and framed individually in pairs or quartets. I'm hopeful that I can speak to David on the show soon, so if this sounds like your jam, stay tuned.
In the 6 hours I was there I made a very long note on my phone, filled with photos and the names of photographers. I managed to meet a few who were doing an incredible job of staying calm and collected on their 4th day of this chaos. At one point, fairly sure that my eyes couldn't take any more, I decided to pop out, get some food and charge my phone. This turned out to be less of a break than a change as I walked out of Somerset House and straight into a protest march in support of Palestine. It had blocked the whole of London Bridge and The Strand, and was loudly facing off against folks demanding an end to hatred directed at Israel. For the most part people seemed well behaved but I grabbed a few shots while I was there. Within 30 minutes it was all over and everyone was packing up.
Post snack, a quick dash back inside took me downstairs to the basement levels where lots of the emerging artists seemed to be as well as a collected exhibit called London Lives. Once again I roamed, eyes on stalks, trying to process everything I was seeing. I met an exciting portrait photographer and talked about the work of a new artist who is making landscapes that play with motion.
At 6pm a group gathered for the photowalk that took us from The Strand all to the Photobook Cafe in Shoreditch by way of St Paul's and a few other landmarks. As I was hanging with the cool analogue kids, I made sure to take my Polaroid I-2with me which I used to shoot some portraits and even some fun street candids. On the walk I met a thoughtful photographer called Artemis who is organising an analogue retreat in Wales this July. You should go, it sounds like it’ll be loads of fun!
When my eldest son was a baby, maybe only about one, we took him to Camera Obscura in Edinburgh. It's filled with optical illusions, lights and colours. You could see how much he enjoyed it all over his face, it just lit him up, and I think I came away from Photo London feeling the same. Imagine having an incredible international festival of photography on your doorstep, well relative doorstep, I still had to fly from The Highlands on a Saturday morning, but I was in London by 9:30am!
Now, the work begins. Start by following up with folks I met with to put wheels in motion, I have a busy summer ahead for the podcast so these folks can slot in after that. I also need to look ahead to Paris in November. If London was this good, imagine what I might see in Paris.
