The fourth edition of the Photo London, which take place at Somerset House between May 17 and 20, 2018, includes this year 101 galleries from 18 different countries. The galleries exhibiting in 2018 were selected by an expert curatorial committee led by Philippe Garner, former director at Christie’s.
For the first time, a selected group of participating galleries have created special projects: Olivier Castaing/School Gallery (Paris) who presents an installation on “1968”; Hans P. Kraus Jr. (New York) who curated a major exhibition on the legacy of William Henry Fox Talbot with vintage prints shown alongside contemporary artworks by Adam Fuss, Cornelia Parker, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mike Robinson and Vera Lutter; and White Cube (London) who created a solo show by Darren Almond.
In 2017, Photo London inaugurated its Discovery section – a showcase for emerging galleries and artists – and the 2018 edition, curated for the second time by art consultant Tristan Lund, is expanded. The 22 galleries featured in Discovery include a strong group from London alongside a number of international galleries including LhGWR (The Hague), Jo van de Loo (Munich), Espace JB (Geneva), Kana Kawanishi (Tokyo), Almanaque (Mexico City) and On Gallery (Beijing). The Eye of Photography presents in the portfolio above a selection of the works exhibited at emerging galleries.
Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky chronicles human impact on the planet and his images are widely regarded as key visual documents of our time. As part of Photo London’s 2018 Public Programme, Burtynsky presents a special exhibition of new and rarely-seen work including a preview of his latest project Anthropocene, a five-year project on the Anthropocene, a proposed name for our present geological age in which humans have had a profound influence on the earth and its systems. A multi-disciplinary endeavor with longtime collaborators Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, the show features images exploring diverse subjects such as urbanization, industrialization and extraction, from oil bunkering and sawmills in Nigeria to the salt mines of the Ural Mountains; at once conveying the sublime qualities of human-marked landscapes and the unsettling reality of sweeping resource depletion. “We’ve had five great extinctions,” Burtynsky says, referring to prehistoric devastations from the “Great Dying” of the Permian eruptions to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. “Now our species is having a similar effect—we are the equivalent of a meteor impact.” Known for pushing the technical limits of photography in his work, Burtynsky also presents a newly developed Augmented Reality (AR) experience.
The 2018 public programme of Photo London features still and moving image, as well as new technologies, in a series of special exhibitions taking place throughout Somerset House during the Fair. In addition to the special gallery projects, highlights include Exit from Paradise: Japanese & Chinese Contemporary Photography, presented by the Korean curator Jiyoon Lee Director of SUUM (Seoul) and a special photography themed installation created by the set designer Es Devlin.
Additionally, the International Center of Photography (ICP) and Photo London present a new version of the installation Unwavering Vision, an interactive multimedia presentation by Alan Govenar, Jean-Michel Sanchez, and Julien Roger, incorporating more than five thousand images dealing with social change from the ICP’s permanent collection.
Photo London
May 17 to 20, 2018
Somerset House
Strand, London WC2R 1LA
United Kingdom
