In the body: images involves the fore at Frieze London and past – The Artwork Newspaper

In right now’s screen-mediated world, images has by no means been extra prevalent. But it’s the bodily, relatively than digital, facet of the medium that’s more and more within the body this week in London—which continues to be seen as considerably lagging behind Paris and New York on the subject of exhibiting and dealing in images.

“We live in a world saturated with photographic images, so it’s never been more important to think through the history of the medium and its rich legacies in the present,” says Hilary Floe, the curator of a serious survey of the US photographer Lee Miller at Tate Britain (till 15 February 2026).

The Miller present has acquired rave opinions and is joined by a number of marquee images exhibitions at business galleries across the metropolis, in addition to at each Frieze artwork gala’s.

Away from the tents, there may be Wolfgang Tillmans’s intensive exhibition put in throughout Maureen Paley’s three London galleries, whereas Sadie Coles is exhibiting Arthur Jafa’s photographic photos of musicians. At Saatchi Yates, two of Marina Abramović’s movies from 1998 have been became 1,200 stills.

Meanwhile, again at Frieze Masters, Pace Gallery has devoted its sales space to the US photographer Peter Hujar, who chronicled New York’s Nineteen Seventies and Eighties homosexual scene. The tender black-and-white backstage portraits of performers have been all printed by Hujar himself (costs vary from $25,000 to $45,000; six prints bought on the opening day). The artist died of an Aids-related sickness in 1987. “He was such a master printer; the way he caught the light in the dark room,” says Lauren Panzo, the top of Pace’s images division. “There’s something about the contrast and tonality that makes you want to dive into the image.”

Pace’s presentation builds on the current success of Hujar’s exhibition on the East London non-profit Raven Row, although Maureen Paley has been constructing an viewers for Hujar’s work within the UK for a number of years. She can be exhibiting his work at Frieze London in addition to co-hosting a screening of Ira Sachs’s movie Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts right now.

Commercial performs catch up

While Pace has an extended historical past of exhibiting images by means of its sister gallery Pace/MacGill, which merged with Pace in 2020, different main business galleries have been catching up over the previous few years, and notably because the pandemic when the artwork market started to interact extra totally with digital shows. Photography, it emerged, leant itself nicely to on-line viewing rooms.

In 2023, Gagosian appointed the New York-based images curator Joshua Chuang because the director of its images division, a newly created function designed to develop the gallery’s market share of the medium. The appointment got here months after Gagosian added Nan Goldin to its roster. David Zwirner can be backing the medium. Next month, the seller brings intimate photographs Diane Arbus took in individuals’s houses between 1961 and 1971 to London. Following her groundbreaking 2019 present on the Hayward Gallery, it’s the first time the photographer has been proven in a business context within the UK. Zwirner can be exhibiting prints by Arbus on the stand at Frieze London (priced between $40,000 and $90,000).

James Green, the top of David Zwirner’s London gallery and a images specialist, thinks the current heavy funding in images “reflects how the line between photography and the rest of fine art [is] becoming blurred—both in terms of the institutional context and the private collecting one”.

Photography’s relationship with the wonderful artwork world has traditionally been uneasy. Some, corresponding to Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman, are persistently thought of artists, whereas others stay resolutely within the images camp. In current years, in a bid to minimize the excellence, many photographers have began working in small version runs, typically producing solely single prints.

At New York’s Company gallery at Frieze London, the US artist Katherine Hubbard is exhibiting images of her and her mom, who was experiencing extreme reminiscence loss when the photographs have been taken. Each {photograph} is on the market in an version of two (priced at $5,000-$12,000), whereas her physique prints are distinctive ($14,000-$20,000). “We now live with a lot of images all at once, more than we need,” says Ken Castaneda, a director at Company. “Keeping the editions low keeps photography jewel-like.”

An accessible medium

The Lee Miller present at Tate Britain is additional proof of a long-overdue acceptance of images as an inventive medium in its personal proper. As Floe factors out, “photography’s status as an art form was marginal at best” throughout Miller’s lifetime, that means she was “doubly marginalised as a woman and a photographer”. The Tate Britain present additionally reframes Miller’s modelling as “participative and co-creative” relatively than presenting her as a passive muse, as has typically been the case. “In particular, we’ve deeply explored the creative partnership between Miller and Man Ray, proposing much more complex models of their artistic exchange and probing questions of attribution,” Floe provides. Such exhibitions are having a constructive influence available on the market for Surrealist images; Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche not too long ago bought for £2.1m at Sotheby’s in London, the very best worth achieved for {a photograph} thus far this yr at public sale.

In a shaky market, prints and editions are faring nicely; collectors should buy works by well-known names for a fraction of the value of a portray or sculpture. The similar holds true for images. As Pace’s Lauren Panzo places it: “Photography is accessible to people in many ways—and that includes the price point.”

Andreas Pampoulides, the co-founder of Lullo Pampoulides, which specialises in Old Masters, is tapping into the glamorous facet of images, exhibiting classic silver prints by Albert Rudomine of actors Charles Boyer and Joan Crawford at Frieze Masters (priced between £3,000 and £6,000). He concurs that the lower cost factors imply that images is a better promote. “I always sell out photographs here; I’d love to do an all-photography show next year,”
he says.

Younger collectors are being lured by the reasonably priced costs, too. At Saatchi-Yates, the Abramović prints are priced at £1,800 every—a transparent technique to enchantment to the gallery’s Gen Z and Millennial viewers. However, Castaneda thinks images is “still a hard medium for people to collect”. He provides: “The humanity of an image can be confronting. People are scared to confront the real world.”

Zwirner’s James Green thinks that, as a result of images is rooted in the actual world, it all the time has the potential to be political—“even if that’s not the intention of the photographer”. He provides: “Photography has this way of being subversive; perhaps, then, the perceived truth of photography feels quite relevant in the current climate.”

For all of the obvious funding in images within the UK capital (elsewhere at Frieze London, Victoria Miro is exhibiting images by Khadija Saye, the artist who died within the Grenfell Tower hearth; Frith Street Gallery is exhibiting photographic installations by Dayanita Singh; and Lisson Gallery has a large-scale seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto), there may be nonetheless the sense that London lags behind New York and Paris. Paris Photo, which opens its twenty eighth version within the Grand Palais subsequent month, is broadly considered the world’s premier images honest. Photo London, in contrast, has failed to seek out its ft because the pandemic and is because of transfer once more in 2026, to the Olympia exhibition centre in West London.

But the place there are gaps out there, Green sees alternative. “In terms of galleries showing photography, London has more room to grow,” he says. Of all of the artwork types, he thinks images has the potential to draw the widest gathering base. As he places it: “Inherently, we are all photographers and takers of images, that’s the beauty of the medium.”