Photo London 2026: Essential Exhibitions Beyond Olympia
Our guide to the exhibitions worth catching during Photo London, one of the UK’s most important events in the photography calendar. As the fair begins a new chapter at the National Hall in Olympia after a decade at Somerset House, we’re spotlighting exhibitions across the city — from leading commercial gallery presentations to off-the-beaten-path stops, plus the shows that deserve a detour.
1000 Words | Resource | 11 May 2026
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John Gossage, From the Garden to the Darkness – Large Glass Gallery
14 March – 30 May
John Gossage’s first UK exhibition arrives at Large Glass, one of London’s most discerning photography-dedicated spaces. The show comprises two bodies of work that operate as elegant bookends. The first is Gardens, a 1978 portfolio of 24 photographs made in Washington, D.C. between 1973 and 1977, with text excerpts selected by Walter Hopps and published by The Hollow Press and Castelli Graphics. The second is a group of Berlin photographs from 1982–86 — images that, as the gallery puts it, ‘photograph the darkness’ — which feed into Gossage’s books Stadt des Schwarz and Berlin in the Time of the Wall. Between these poles, Large Glass presents what Gossage calls his ‘photographs with distractions,’ which are small, single photographs mounted on board and edged with collage-like elements and handmade marks. ‘I think of them as assemblages. They are not collages because none of the elements intrude upon the photographic reality,’ says Gossage.
Carrie Mae Weems – Goodman Gallery
17 April – 23 May
Carrie Mae Weems’ solo presentation at Goodman Gallery London marks her first with the gallery in the capital. A defining and soaring voice in contemporary photography, Weems presents bodies of work — Seaside, The Law of Diminishing Returns and Ocean Line — that attend to places of beauty, passage and irreparable loss, where the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and contemporary economic displacement press against the limits of representation. The show also includes works from Painting the Town, in which boarded-up storefronts from the period of the Black Lives Matter protests become ‘accidental abstractions,’ their ‘found’ painterly surfaces actually formed through acts of erasure, concealment and censorship. Weems remains singular in her ability to make history appear at once monumental and intimate.
Jermaine Francis, Linn Phyllis Seeger, CHIRAL DEFLECTIONS – Meadow Conservatory
11 May – 19 May
Chiral Deflections takes place at Mason & Fifth’s Meadow Conservatory Exhibition Space in Westbourne Park, a canal-side cultural setting within the brand’s largest London building. Here, Jermaine Francis and Linn Phyllis Seeger extend an ongoing dialogue, following Seeger’s recent curatorial presentation of films, including work by Francis, during her residency at Shipton Gallery. For this presentation, Francis stages CYMKISS_BLACK_0: REGISTER FUGITIVITY, a work that turns the photographic landscape into a site of fracture and refusal. Its fragmented images resist the demand that Black presence be made immediately legible, available or possessed. Instead, the body is displaced into opacity, registration, trace. Seeger’s true idle approaches fugitivity through the screen, using video sculpture to examine the dead drift of contemporary navigation, where scrolling produces movement without progress and digital time loses its sequence.
Nhu Xuan Hua, Of Walking on Fire – Autograph
16 April – 19 September
Curated by Bindi Vora, Nhu Xuan Hua’s first UK solo exhibition, Of Walking on Fire fills both galleries at Autograph with a body of work that draws on Hua’s Vietnamese family history, her parents’ migration to Europe after the Vietnam War and the linguistic gaps that shaped her childhood — including a household in which, as Autograph notes, ‘there was no common language spoken.’ Reworking photographs from Vietnam and the family’s early years in Europe, Hua digitally bends, doubles and dissolves figures. In the second gallery, the tone shifts toward restoration and feminine force, with new works invoking Đạo Mẫu, the Vietnamese spiritual tradition honouring mother goddesses. For example, Promise of Spring (the English translation of Nhu Xuan Hua’s Vietnamese name) is a self-portrait in which Hua reclaims a name long subject to mispronunciation and places herself within a lineage of maternal protection and cultural transmission.
Sarah Pickering, Vanishing Act – Hapax Living Room
20 April – 18 May
At the HAPAX Living Room, a first-floor Victorian Flat conversion in West Brompton, Sarah Pickering’s residency begins with Vanishing Act, an exhibition staging the home as a theatre of disappearance and belief. The show brings together extracts from two new bodies of work, The Reveal and Apport, through photography, sound and video. Pickering has long been interested in staged evidence and controlled unreality, and here that inquiry moves into a more intimate register. The Enfield Poltergeist, the magician Fay Presto, analogue darkroom processes, X-rays, and Kirlian aura imaging all feed into a project in which the domestic object becomes part proof, part prop, part apparition. HAPAX describe Pickering as a ‘re-emerging artist’ returning to practice after a difficult period of parenting, while the title also points to the social disappearance of middle age, especially for women.
Sarah Moon – Michael Hoppen Gallery
16 May – 17 July
Sarah Moon was a model before she moved behind the camera, so her long association with Yohji Yamamoto, and her recent three-volume meditation on Dior might therefore seem inevitable. Yet her photographs are never merely beholden to the conventions of fashion or commerce. Across decades, Moon has produced images of rare poise, both elusive and quietly seductive. Her latest exhibition at Michael Hoppen Gallery, her fifth solo with the gallery, brings together a selection of recent colour and black-and-white photographs made between 2003 and the present. These works offer a particularly refined encounter with Moon’s printed image, colour and monochrome works whose dreamlike atmosphere and muted palette invite slow, wondering attention, and which, in the gallery’s words, affirm her position as ‘one of the most distinctive and influential voices in photographic history.’
Peckham 24 Festival of Contemporary Photography, The Eras Edition – Copeland Gallery
15 May – 17 May
Peckham 24 returns to the Copeland Gallery and the Bussey Building for its 10th-anniversary edition, billed as The Eras Edition. What began in 2016 as a 24-hour pop-up on the fringes of Photo London Week has become one of the UK photography calendar’s liveliest independent fixtures. This year, the organisers are leaning into the anniversary, framing the programme around photography’s relationship to time — memory, decay, ecological duration, nostalgia, political urgency, and the persistence of the past inside the present. Exhibiting artists include Vinca Petersen, Max Ferguson, Maen Hammad, Kristia Yenza, and others. A Bigger Book Fair also returns to Unit 8 with 90+ independent publishers across photobooks, zines and magazines, and the talks programme sees the return of The Messy Truth Live, hosted by Gem Fletcher with a new series of ever exciting guests.♦
–1000 Words
Images:
1-John Gossage, Beobachtungsstand, Cuvrystr, 1984. © John Gossage
2-Carrie Mae Weems, From The Law of Diminishing Returns, 2026. Courtesy Goodman Gallery
3-Linn Phyllis Seeger, true idle, 2026. © Linn Phyllis Seeger
4-Nhu Xuan Hua, Promise of Spring. Courtesy the artist. © Nhu Xuan Hua
5-Sarah Pickering, The Reveal (Duster Jacket) Pocket #1, 2026. © Sarah Pickering
6-Sarah Moon, Maria Grazia pour Dior II, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
7-Vinca Petersen, From the series HULALA. © Vinca Petersen
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