What photography means now – New Statesman

An anxiety now surrounds photography: not that people no longer look at images, because we look at them constantly, but that we no longer attend to them with much depth or discernment. Photographs arrive in such endless quantities now that they risk becoming momentary visual stimuli rather than objects of sustained attention. I had recently been listening to the novelist and critic Ben Lerner discussing photography on a New Statesman podcast, arguing that the infinite accumulation of digital images has stripped photographs of their aura and diminished their power. There is obviously something seductive about that argument. We all know the feeling of images dissolving almost as quickly as they appear.

But if photography is supposedly dying beneath the endless glut of images on our phones, nobody seemed to have told Photo London. The fair, now in its tenth year and newly relocated from Somerset House to Olympia, brings together galleries, publishers, photographers and collectors from around the world. But beyond the commercial machinery and social choreography, what struck me most this week was something far simpler: people still desperately want to look at photographs.

Wandering through Olympia this week, watching crowds move slowly from print to print with the concentration usually reserved for religious objects or sleeping infants, the theoretical concerns about our attention began to feel oddly detached from actual human behaviour. Because people were looking. Really looking. Not in the contemporary reflex of “content consumption”, that dead-eyed grazing we now perform online while half-thinking about emails or dinner. They were standing still. Doubling back. Leaning closer to inspect paper surfaces. Discussing framing. Arguing softly. Sitting down. I watched people spend longer with a grid of tiny cyanotypes than they probably spend with hundreds of images online in an entire morning.

Photo London’s move to Olympia perhaps intensifies the experience. Somerset House always carried a certain stateliness, beautiful but faintly ceremonial, though never entirely ideal for photography itself. The small rooms often became overcrowded bottlenecks where work competed for oxygen. Olympia, still smelling slightly of reinvention and wet paint, feels more open to collision. Less mausoleum, more engine room. During the opening night conversations, there was near-universal, and often surprisingly passionate, agreement that Olympia suits the fair far better than Somerset House ever did. People kept mentioning the same things: the light, the airiness, the ability to finally stand back and properly see the work rather than squeezing through overheated rooms and bottleneck staircases. Photography here no longer felt apologetic about taking up space.

Subscribe to the New Statesman today and save 75%

There was one thing people missed from Somerset House: the bar. Or more specifically, the grand terrace overlooking the Thames, where people would routinely drift outside for “one quick drink” and emerge hours later deep in rosé, gossip and cigarettes, having seen approximately four photographs all day. There is probably something revealing in that trade-off. At Olympia, there are fewer opportunities to drift away from the work. The photographs reclaim the centre of gravity.

The fair itself seems to have absorbed that shift in atmosphere. Photography here does not feel nostalgic or defensive. It feels expansive and curious about its own future rather than anxious for its survival. Under the direction of Sophie Parker, the fair feels more confident in embracing photography’s elasticity, the way it now spills into sculpture, installation, archival material, handmade books and experimental processes without worrying too much about category boundaries.

That physicality may also be part of what the “photography is dying” argument misses. Online, photographs increasingly exist without scale, texture or consequence. A masterpiece, an advertisement and a stranger’s holiday snapshot now occupy more or less the same flattened visual territory, all delivered at the same speed, all disappearing upwards beneath the thumb. At Olympia, the body re-enters the equation. You feel size. Grain. Density. You notice shadows cast by frames onto walls. The slight waviness of handmade paper. The distance required to properly see a huge Steven Meisel print whose enormous photographs loom over the fair almost like the godfather of the entire enterprise, coolly presiding over the crowds below.

And everywhere there is evidence of photography reclaiming its objecthood. Antique carved frames curl around 19th-century portraits like fragments salvaged from another life. Tiny cyanotypes sit inside heavy baroque surrounds, suddenly feeling devotional rather than decorative. Elsewhere, contemporary works float inside sculptural glass structures or perch inside cabinets and vitrines that make them feel half photograph, half reliquary. So much of the fair resists the clean frictionless neutrality of digital viewing. These are not merely images. They are artefacts.

That same impulse surfaced elsewhere in the fair. In the thoughtfully curated Antidote exhibition, Cyrus Mahboubian’s emphasis on Polaroids and alternative photographic processes felt less nostalgic than defiant. In a culture of infinite reproducibility, the small imperfect photograph regains a strange authority. A Polaroid cannot quite dissolve into the scroll in the same way. Its scale, scarcity and material awkwardness insist on presence. What emerges across much of Photo London is not a retreat from technology, but a renewed fascination with photographs as physical things, objects capable of carrying memory, texture and time.

I was also drawn to Baud Postma’s haunting American West photographs. Cowboys half-lost in shadow, horses erupting through dust, owls balanced against enormous empty skies. The images feel less documentary than remembered dream. Even the visible panel lines running through some of the works add something crucial, as though these fragments of Americana were being reconstructed from damaged memory rather than cleanly reproduced.

Elsewhere, Herbert Ponting’s Antarctic photographs possessed the tonal depth and stillness of another century entirely. The platinum-palladium printing process gave the ice and smoke an extraordinary luminosity.

David Hill Gallery, which has long specialised in championing overlooked archives and under-seen photographic histories, had one of the most thoughtfully assembled stands in the fair. Among the works that stayed with me was a portrait by James Clifford Kent from Cuba: a young fencer standing inside a faded domestic interior, foil dangling from one hand, caught somewhere between ceremony and ordinary life. The photograph doesn’t over-explain itself, which is precisely its strength. Like much of the material on the stand, it trusts atmosphere, ambiguity and emotional texture over instant readability.

I found myself lingering too over Laura McCluskey’s photographs at Guest Editions, whose booth also featured work by Thomas Duffield, one of the portrait photographers regularly commissioned by the New Statesman and whose book, Poppy Promises, appeared in my favourite photobooks of last year. McCluskey’s images, drawn from her long-running project Close to Home, trace family, memory and place with extraordinary tenderness. Bedrooms glow amber with accumulated time. Elderly relatives appear suspended between familiarity and disappearance. The photographs feel less like documents than attempts to hold fleeting emotional states in place a little longer.

Tucked towards the back of Olympia, the book section became one of the most addictive parts of the fair, independent publishers and booksellers displaying beautifully made zines, small-run artist books and handmade prints from across the world that would rarely exist together under one roof. In an age when so many images arrive detached from material form altogether, these objects insist upon photography as something tactile, collectable and deeply personal.

I was also unexpectedly moved by Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya’s vast wall of cinematic endings, hundreds of frames carrying some variation of “The End”, “Fin”, “Fine”, “Koniec”, stretched across decades of global cinema. Seen together, the clichés somehow become moving again. Umberto Eco’s line quoted beside the work lingered in my mind: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us.” The installation becomes less about endings than collective memory itself, the way images migrate across languages, formats and histories until they begin speaking to one another. Walking past it felt oddly emotional, like overhearing cinema dreaming in its sleep.

And perhaps that is the deeper contradiction exposed by fairs like this. We are constantly told photography has become worthless because images are now infinite. But abundance has not killed the desire for photographs. If anything, it has sharpened the hunger for photographs that feel singular, embodied and intentional. The problem is not that people no longer want to look. It is that most digital environments are designed to prevent looking from happening at all.

Photo London does not quite reach the dizzying scale of Paris Photo beneath the Grand Palais, but perhaps that is partly its charm. It feels distinctly London in temperament: more approachable, less theatrical, less exhausting in its grandeur. You can move through it without feeling crushed by spectacle. Conversations happen easily. Discoveries feel accidental rather than programmed.

Photo London, at its best, becomes an argument against the entire logic of frictionless image culture. A reminder that photographs were never merely information delivery systems. They are objects. Experiences. Social spaces. Little theatres of attention. The most crowded rooms at Olympia did not feel like funerals for a dying medium. They felt like evidence that the desire to look slowly, properly and with feeling has not disappeared at all. It has merely been starved of the conditions in which it can happen.

[Further reading: The Everyman: cinemas make bad restaurants]