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Photo London, the major photography fair, is back once again for its ninth edition and has just opened its doors to the public. It’s heaven for photography fans, and people who just really want to see a lot of photos of David Bowie.
Here are some highlights from our visit to the opening day.
Five things to see at Photo London
The Discovery section
Deep underground beneath the main bit of the fair, you’ll find the Discovery section. This curated area gives space to younger, newer galleries to show wilder, more esoteric, experimental work. As a result, it’s by a significant margin the most interesting bit of Photo London, where you’ll find photographers messing with the medium in a way that makes it feel like a totally different artform to anything in the main fair.
Valérie Belin
Every year, Photo London picks one artist to celebrate as their ‘Master of Photography’ with a major exhibition. This year it’s the turn of French photographer Valérie Belin. Downstairs below the Discovery section, you’ll find a full display of her large-scale portraiture that unpicks the threads of human identity and all the levels of artifice that go along with it.
A lot of celebrities and supermodels
There’s a joke about how you can measure the success of Photo London by how many pictures of Kate Moss the dealers have managed to sell. That’s called the Kate Moss Index, but it could just as easily be the Mick Jagger/Jimi Hendrix/Naomi Campbell Index. I spotted at least 8 David Bowie photos for sale, which is both ridiculous and somehow fewer than in previous years. The fair is rammed full of gross black and white images of celebrities for rich old people to put on their walls, which is fascinating from a sociological point of view, if not from an aesthetic one.
A lot of nature
Nature is always big at Photo London, because people just love buying images of zebras and giraffes for some reason. But bigger than ever this year is the macro abstraction trend. It’s all probably Edward Burtynsky’s fault: you can see the influence of the Canadian photographer everywhere here, with an epidemic of huge, semi-abstracted, weird images of natural phenomena meant to make humans feel all small and insignificant in the face of nature’s vast immensitude. I like Burtynsky just fine, but there’s a limit. The best slice of nature you’ll find at the fair though is the garden installation by Sian Davey at the Trolley Books/Michael Hoppen stand, which features so many flowers that the fair has had to put allergy warnings all over the place.
Helen Levitt
Pioneering street photographer Helen Levitt (1913-2009) gets a solo presentation at Zander Galerie in the main part of the fair. Her understated, intimate visions of everyday New York helped shape the way we think about street photography, and this display has some of her best work in it.
Other highlights included displays of work by Lee Miller, Omar Victor Diop & Lee Shulman and Gilbert McCarragher. Be warned though, there’s a photo by David Bailey of Damien Hirst playing with himself which is among the most stomach turning things you’ll ever see.
Photo London is at Somerset House until Sunday May 19. Details and tickets here.
Want more? Here are the top photography shows in London.
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