Olympia Opens Its Doors
Photo London 2026 at Olympia — the fair's eleventh edition and first year in its new Kensington home
Week of 17 May 2026
The dominant event of this past week in photography has been a physical one: the eleventh edition of Photo London, running 13 to 17 May at its new Kensington home in Olympia. Arriving alongside the fair, and overlapping with its public days, are the World Press Photo Contest winners — announced last week but displayed to wide audiences for the first time — while the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, awarded in April, has continued to draw commentary for its choice of winner. A week, in other words, that belongs firmly to photography as cultural practice rather than as technology.
The Photographic Arts
Photo London at Olympia — A New Chapter
After a decade at Somerset House, Photo London has relocated to Olympia in Kensington, and the consensus from those who attended the opening days is that the move has worked. The review in FAD Magazine describes the new setting — the historic National Hall, purpose-built in 1925 and mid-way through its Heatherwick Studio-led remodelling — as having a "Paris Photo style spaciousness", which is a fair summary of what the former Somerset House arrangement, charming but labyrinthine, could not easily offer. The overall verdict in early reviews is that the eleventh edition is "well up to the standard established by the previous ten editions of the fair, perhaps better."
The fair ran from 14 to 17 May for the public (a VIP preview on the 13th). Thematically, the work on display this year gravitates around questions of the environment, the passage of time, feminism, and colonialism, with individual stands also touching on AI's relationship to photographic practice and Eastern European historical memory. Some of the specific highlights noted by reviewers:
Jo Ann Callis — ROSEGALLERY (Santa Monica) presented recent prints from her mid-1970s "Now and Then" series, featuring work from 1976-77. Callis's images of domestic interiors carry what one reviewer describes as "a touch of David Lynch" in their combination of intimacy and unease, and fit neatly into the fair's broader conversation about feminism and the politics of the domestic space.
Denise Webber — Close gallery (Somerset/London) showed work from the Threshold series (2013-15), a project developed from travels during 2006-14 and drawing on Taoist philosophy; the series focuses on legs as its central subject, which sounds more incongruous than it is in execution.
Nhu Xuan Hua — whose exhibition Of Walking on Fire is currently running at Autograph in London (through September 2026) was a natural point of reference for several stands; Hua's work probes family memory and cultural dislocation using archival restaging, with identities obscured by garments and digital manipulation.
For those who did not make it to Kensington this week, Photo London's move to Olympia is intended to be permanent, and there is already a sense that the fair has effectively been reset for its next decade.
Exhibitions Worth Seeking Out This Spring
Beyond Photo London, Aperture's roundup of spring 2026 exhibitions highlights several shows deserving attention. In London, two are particularly strong:
Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the National Portrait Gallery runs through 31 May — Opie's first UK retrospective, tracing her portraiture from its origins in Los Angeles's leather subculture in the 1990s through to her more recent documentation of surfers, football players and protestors. The curators frame the work as making visible "the countenance of American democracy itself," which is perhaps a large claim, but the work supports it. The accompanying catalogue (published by the National Portrait Gallery, 192pp, 103 colour and 21 black-and-white images) is available at $49.95 and was in stock as of this week.
Also in London, Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire at Autograph runs through 19 September, making it a show with enough time still on the clock for multiple visits. Hua has exhibited at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam and at Les Rencontres d'Arles, and this London show is her most expansive solo presentation to date.
Further afield: Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York runs through 26 July. Bassman, who died in 2012 at 94, was both a significant art director at Harper's Bazaar and a photographer of considerable originality — known for extreme darkroom manipulation and her signature technique of bleaching prints to create near-abstract images of high-contrast figures. This show, which includes rare vintage prints and layout designs, is a comprehensive treatment of a photographer who deserves wider recognition.
A quiet moment in a photography gallery — the kind of encounter that exhibition season in May and June routinely provides
Awards — Deutsche Börse Prize and World Press Photo
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize was awarded in April, but its winner warrants extended discussion. Rene Matic (b. 1997, Peterborough) won for AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, an exhibition held at CCA Berlin between November 2024 and February 2025. Matic's practice is rooted in questions of Blackness, queerness and British identity, and the CCA Berlin show — which the prize page describes in detail — was a large-scale installation drawing on vernacular photography, found imagery, and auto-biographical material. Matic, at 28, is among the youngest winners of the Deutsche Börse prize in its history. The three shortlisted artists — Jane Evelyn Atwood (Too Much Time / Trop de Peines, a revised bilingual reprint of work originally published in 2000), Weronika Gesicka (Encyclopaedia, published by Blow Up Press in November 2024), and Amak Mahmoodian (One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, shown at Bristol Photo Festival in collaboration with Multistory) — represent a shortlist of notable coherence and breadth.
The World Press Photo Contest announced its results earlier in April. The winners were selected from 57,376 photographs submitted by 3,747 photographers across 141 countries. The overall Photo of the Year went to Carol Guzy (ZUMA Press / iWitness, for the Miami Herald) for Separated by ICE — a work addressing immigration enforcement in the United States — with Aid Emergency in Gaza by Saber Nuraldin (EPA Images) and The Trials of the Achi Women by Victor J. Blue (for The New York Times Magazine) as joint finalists. The contest's reach and the quality of the finalists reflect a year dominated by geopolitical subject matter, as has become characteristic of recent World Press cycles.
Sony World Photography Awards 2026 — Overall Winners
The Sony World Photography Awards ceremony took place in London on 16 April. The overall winners across the four main categories were:
Photographer of the Year: Citlali Fabian for Bilha, Stories of my Sisters — Fabian is a visual artist from the Yalalteca Indigenous community in Mexico, now based in the UK, whose project was created to inspire young girls with positive representations from her community
Open Photographer of the Year: Elle Leontiev (Australia) — a portrait of barefoot volcanologist Philip, standing on the ash plains of Mount Yasur on Tanna island in Vanuatu, with the volcano smouldering behind him
Student Photographer of the Year: Jubair Ahmed Arnob for The Place Where I Used to Play — a return to Green Model Town in Dhaka, documenting a vibrant community and landscape now disappearing under concrete; Arnob studies at Counter Foto in Bangladesh
Youth Photographer of the Year: Philip Kangas (16, Stockholm) — who captured firefighters transporting artworks to safety during a fire at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in central Stockholm
Photobooks — A Strong Spring Schedule
The spring 2026 photobook release schedule is notably well-populated. Several titles from Aperture and the wider market are worth singling out:
Hal Fischer: Seminal Works (Aperture, February 2026) centres on Fischer's Gay Semiotics, the extraordinary 1977 photo-text project in which he categorised the visible subcultural codes of Castro and Haight-Ashbury residents — the "jock," the "hippie," the "clone" — through a deadpan quasi-sociological framework. The book collects Fischer's early photography alongside the Semiotics series and a range of new essays situating the work in relation to San Francisco history and the gay rights movement. It is an important archive of a genuinely unusual project.
Martin Parr's Grand Hotel Parr (RM, June 2026, 252pp, 100 colour, flexi binding, $68) continues Parr's long-running documentation of hotel culture and leisure class behaviour. Joel Meyerowitz's Morandi's Objects (Damiani, June 2026, 200pp) is likely to be more widely discussed: Meyerowitz's sustained engagement with Giorgio Morandi's studio in Bologna — photographing the actual objects Morandi used in his paintings — is a project that rewards both those who know Morandi's work and those who do not.
From MW Editions, Michael Jang's JANG (160pp, 150 colour, May 2026, $50) is a monograph on one of the more intriguing photographers to emerge from San Francisco in the 1970s — Jang documented Asian-American life, youth culture, and his own family with a loose, naturalistic style that sits somewhere between Gary Winogrand and the vernacular snapshot tradition. MW Editions has done strong work in bringing under-recognised photographers into the book canon, and this is a good addition.
A selection of photography monographs — spring 2026 has produced a notably strong release schedule from publishers including Aperture, Damiani, MW Editions and Steidl.
Rencontres d'Arles — Programme Announced for Summer 2026
Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles has announced its 57th edition programme, running from 6 July to 4 October 2026. The edition title is Des mondes à relire (Worlds to Re-read), with the overarching theme of image transmission and the education of how to look. The programme opens with a journey through the Mediterranean and the African continent — with a particular focus on Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Congo, and South Africa — and culminates in what the organisers are calling "Le Septembre des Rencontres," a special moment coinciding with the bicentenary of photography. For those able to travel to Arles in the summer, this looks like an edition of unusual weight.
Also This Week
Gear, Glass & Light
The Sony A7R VI has now been formally reviewed, and the specifications differ slightly from the rumours preceding the launch. The sensor is a 66.8MP stacked CMOS (rather than the widely predicted 80MP), shooting at up to 30fps with the electronic shutter, with 8K/30 video and a 9.44M-dot HDR viewfinder. DPReview's early assessment is broadly positive, noting the new SA battery, Wi-Fi 6E connectivity, and improved stabilisation, rated at 8.5 EV. The step from 61MP (A7R V) to 66.8MP is modest on paper, but the stacked architecture is the genuine news, offering resolution-class image quality at action-camera burst speeds. A significant camera, even if the headline number underwhelms relative to expectation.
Film & Analogue
Ilford has expanded its Pan F Plus range into large format for the first time. The ISO 50 film — one of the oldest continuously manufactured black-and-white emulsions, known for exceptional fine grain and smooth tonal gradation — is now available in 4x5 and 8x10 sheet film. A pack of 25 sheets in 4x5 is priced at approximately $88; 8x10 at approximately $275. This is a welcome addition for large-format photographers who have had Pan F Plus available in 35mm and 120 for decades, but never in sheet form.
Looking Ahead
With Photo London concluded and the spring exhibition season well underway, attention in the photographic arts turns towards the summer festival circuit. Rencontres d'Arles opens on 6 July — those planning to attend have around six weeks to make arrangements. The Brighton Photo Biennial, though biennial and not running this year, is due to return in autumn 2026 alongside Paris Photo in November. Closer to home, Catherine Opie's National Portrait Gallery retrospective closes 31 May, so there is a fortnight remaining for those in London to see it. Next week's Photography Weekly turns to Film & Analogue.
