Five photographers to see at Photo London 2024
The annual showcase of some of the best global photography includes works from hundreds of exhibitors from over 40 cities around the world
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Photo London returns to Somerset House for its ninth edition this week to showcase some of the best photography from around the world. Taking place 16-19 May, the fair is directed by Iranian art collector and curator Kamiar Maleki and brings together hundreds of exhibitors from more than 40 cities across four continents.
Highlights this year include French photographer Valérie Belin, who is the recipient of the fair’s 2024 Master of Photography award, and a Discovery section, curated by writer and critic Charlotte Jansen, which showcases the best emerging photographers and galleries. For the first time eight galleries from Turkey are included in the line-up, with the support of TurkishBank UK. The aim is to extend the fair’s international reach and bring in new audiences.
From the hundreds of photographers whose works are being exhibited, Hyphen has curated five notable picks for this year.
Omar Victor Diop (work pictured above)
Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop is best known for his self-portraits. Presented by Paris-based galleries Binome and Magnin-A, the Being There series comes from Diop’s encounter with filmmaker Lee Shulman’s The Anonymous Project. Shulman’s project, one of the world’s largest collections of amateur photography, is about collating and preserving photographs from the past. Here, Diop reckons with the absence of Black figures in Shulman’s collection and seeks to repair this by editing himself into the frame.
Mohamed Bourouissa
Winner of the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, Mohamed Bourouissa has work being presented as part of See/Change: Art Collection Deutsche Börse @25. In this work from his series Périphérique, Bourouissa brings his Algerian-French community into frame, commenting on the marginalisation and exclusion of ethnic minorities in France.
Sabiha Çimen
Also on show as part of the See/Change exhibition is the work of Turkish photographer Sabiha Çimen. Hyphen previously interviewed Çimen about her series Hafiz, which takes us into the world of the young women and girls in Turkey’s Qur’an schools. In photographs shot over three years and in five cities, Çimen takes on a subject she knows intimately, having attended a Qur’an school herself as a young woman.
Ali Tahayori
Iranian-Australian artist Ali Tahayori’s series Archive of Longing is presented by New York-based Roya Khadjavi Projects and Nemazee Fine Art. This work is shortlisted for the 2024 Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer Award. Tahayori inherited a family photo album from his mother and the photographs are enlarged, cropped, and printed on glass. The glass is then broken and reassembled. He takes inspiration from Āina-kāri, the Persian art of assembling small mirror shards in walls and ceilings. Tahayori migrated to Australia in 2007 and his work reflects on the homophobic climate of 1980s Iran that he grew up in.
Mitra Tabrizian
The work of Iranian-British photographer and film-maker Mitra Tabrizian is presented by the New York and Dubai-based Leila Heller Gallery. Tabrizian’s work deals with the everyday life of Muslim communities, both in the UK and Iran. In Untitled (2009) she captures a group of Iranian students in the desert before the protests following the country’s presidential election. The figures take on an eerie quality in the middle of the image. Her works are concerned with the in-between and the feelings of alienation that communities can feel when they don’t fully belong to a single world.
Photo London 2024 is at Somerset House, 16-19 May.
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