What the picture 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 look at them with much depth or discernment. Photographs arrive in such infinitesimal quantities now that they risk becoming momentary visual stimuli rather than objects of sustained attention. I had recently heard the novelist and critic Ben Lerner discuss photography in one New statesman podcast, arguing that the endless accumulation of digital images has stripped photographs of their aura and diminished their power. There is clearly something seductive in this argument. We all know the feeling of images that go viral almost as quickly as they appear.

But if photography is supposed to be dying under the endless glut of images on our phones, no one 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 much simpler: people still desperately want to look at pictures.

Wandering around Olympia this week, watching crowds move slowly from press to press with a concentration usually reserved for religious objects or sleeping babies, theoretical concerns about our attention began to feel strangely disconnected from actual human behavior. Because people were watching. Really looking. Not in the contemporary “content consumption” reflex, that dead-eyed grazing we now do online while half-thinking about emails or dinner. They were standing. Doubling up. Leaning closer to inspect paper surfaces. Discussion of framing. Arguing softly. Sitting down. I’ve seen people spend longer with a grid of small blueprints than they can spend with hundreds of images online in an entire morning.

Photo London’s move to Olympia perhaps intensifies the experience. Somerset House always held a certain charm, beautiful but slightly ceremonial, though never quite ideal for the photograph itself. Small rooms often became overcrowded bottlenecks where work competed for oxygen. The Olympia, still smelling a bit of reinvention and wet paint, feels more vulnerable to collision. Less mausoleum, more engine room. During the opening night talks, there was almost universal, and often surprisingly passionate, agreement that the Olympia suits the fair far better than Somerset House ever did. People kept mentioning the same things: the light, the ventilation, the ability to finally stand and see the work properly instead of squeezing through overheated rooms and narrow staircases. Photography here no longer felt sorry for taking up space.

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There was one thing people missed about Somerset House: the grass. Or more specifically, the grand terrace overlooking the Thames, where people would pop out for “a quick drink” and emerge a few hours later deep in rosé, gossip and cigarettes, looking at about four pictures all day. Perhaps there is something revealing in that exchange. In Olympia, there are fewer opportunities to quit. Photographs regain the center of gravity.

The fair itself seems to have absorbed that change in atmosphere. The photography here doesn’t feel nostalgic or patronizing. He feels stretched and curious about his future rather than anxious about his survival. Under Sophie Parker’s direction, the fair feels more confident in embracing the elasticity of photography, the way it now spills over into sculpture, installation, archival material, handmade books and experimental processes without worrying too much about category boundaries.

This physics may also be part of what’s missing from the “photography is dying” argument. On the Internet, photographs increasingly exist without scale, texture, or consequence. A masterpiece, an ad, and a stranger’s party photo now occupy more or less the same flattened visual territory, all delivered at the same speed, all disappearing up under the thumb. At Olympia, the body re-enters the equation. You feel the size. The grain. Density. You notice shadows cast by the frame on the walls. A slight ripple of handmade paper. The distance needed to properly see a giant print of Steven Meisel, whose large 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 object. Antique carved frames swirl around 19th-century portraits like salvaged fragments from another life. Small cyanotypes sit within heavy baroque surrounds, suddenly feeling pious rather than decorative. Elsewhere, contemporary works float inside sculptural glass structures or sit inside cabinets and display cases that make them feel half-photograph, half-reliquary. So much of the fair resists the pure frictionless neutrality of digital viewing. These are not just images. They are artifacts.

The same impulse appeared elsewhere at the fair. In the carefully curated Antidote exhibition, Cyrus Mahboubian’s emphasis on Polaroids and alternative photographic processes felt less nostalgic than defiant. In a culture of endless reproducibility, the small imperfect photograph regains a strange authority. A Polaroid cannot be completely distributed on the roll in the same way. Its scale, scarcity and material clumsiness insist on its presence. What emerges in much of Photo London is not a withdrawal from technology, but a renewed fascination with photographs as physical things, objects capable of holding memory, texture and time.

I was also drawn to Baud Postma’s haunting photographs of the American West. Cowboys half-lost in the shadows, horses bursting through the dust, owls balanced against vast empty skies. The images feel less documentary than remembered dream. Even the visible panel lines that run through some of the works add something substantial, as if 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. The platinum-palladium printing process gave the ice and smoke an incredible shine.

The David Hill Gallery, which has long specialized in protecting overlooked archives and unchecked photographic histories, had one of the most thoughtfully assembled booths at the fair. Among the works that remained with me was a portrait of James Clifford Kent from Cuba: a young fence standing within a dim domestic setting, sheet metal dangling from one hand, caught somewhere between ceremony and ordinary life. Photography does not exaggerate itself, that is precisely its strength. Like much of the material on the stand, it trusts atmosphere, ambiguity, and emotional texture over immediate readability.

I found myself lingering over the photographs of Laura McCluskey at Guest Editions, whose booth also featured work by Thomas Duffield, one of the portrait photographers regularly commissioned by New statesman and whose book, Poppy Promisesfeatured in my favorite photo books of the past year. McCluskey’s images, drawn from her long project Near the housefamily traces, memories and the place with an extraordinary tenderness. Bedrooms glow amber with accumulated time. Elderly family members seem suspended between recognition and disappearance. The photographs feel less like documents than attempts to hold transient emotional states in place a little longer.

Located at the back of the Olympia, the book section became one of the most addicting parts of the fair, independent publishers and booksellers showcasing beautifully made newspapers, small artist books and handmade prints from around the world that would rarely exist together under one roof. In an age when so many images arrive completely detached from material form, these objects insist on photography as something tangible, collectable and deeply personal.

I was also taken aback by Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya’s great wall of cinematic endings, hundreds of frames bearing some variation of “The End”, “Fin”, “Fine”, “Koniec”, spanning decades of global cinema. Seen together, the clichés somehow become moving again. Umberto Eco’s downfall quoted next to the work stuck in my mind: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés touch us.” The installation becomes less about the endings than the collective memory itself, the way images migrate through languages, formats and histories until they begin to speak to each other. Walking next to him felt strangely emotional, like listening to the cinema while dreaming in your sleep.

And perhaps this is the deepest contradiction exposed by fairs like this one. We are constantly told that photography has become worthless because images are now infinite. But abundance has not killed the desire for photography. If anything, it has sharpened the hunger for photographs that feel special, embodied and purposeful. The problem isn’t that people don’t want to watch anymore. It’s that most digital environments are designed to prevent viewing from happening at all.

Foto London doesn’t quite reach the dizzying scale of Foto Paris under the Grand Palais, but perhaps that’s part of its charm. It feels distinctly London in temperament: more accessible, less theatrical, less overwhelming in its grandeur. You can move through it without feeling overwhelmed by the spectacle. Conversations happen easily. The revelations feel random rather than programmed.

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

(Further reading: The Everyman: movie theaters make bad restaurants)