London Gallery Weekend 2025: the very best exhibits for images lovers

At this 12 months’s Photograph London truthful, which happened in the midst of final month, non-traditional approaches to images took centre stage. Whereas gross sales of black-and-white portraits by the medium’s largest names appeared gradual, gallery’s parted comparatively simply with modern, blended media works by rising picture makers. At this 12 months’s London Gallery Weekend, this development appears set to proceed.

Guests searching for out images can anticipate themes of femininity, colonialism and perceptions of fact, explored by means of collage, digital manipulation, uncommon pairings and extra.

There will probably be long-overdue celebrations of ladies image-makers and an interrogation of the worth of the self-portrait within the social media age. Total it’s an providing stuffed with conflicting realities and ethereal worlds, more likely to delight even essentially the most staunch traditionalists.

Joanne Leonard: Classic Pictures and Early Collages

HackelBury Advantageous Artwork, 4 Launceston Place, W8 5RL, till 8 July

Considerably surprisingly, Classic Pictures and Early Collages is Joanne Leonard’s first solo exhibition within the UK. The present spans the Nineteen Sixties to Eighties, demonstrating the size of the photographer’s service to her trigger: the creation of “intimate documentary”, by means of a doggedly feminist lens.

Leonard’s photographs mix documentary images with poetic, dreamlike compositions, drawing inspiration from intimate household scenes, the realities of motherhood and political and social unrest. She usually focuses on the home objects and obligations which have—and in lots of instances proceed to—dominate the lives of ladies, subverting them through a masterful utility of collage and a rejection of the male gaze.

Me and You in The Continuum (Now: Zero)

New Artwork Tasks, floor Flooring, 357 Metropolis Street, EC1V 1LR, till 12 July

In his extensively acclaimed novel The Man within the Excessive Citadel, Philip Okay. Dick famously imagines another actuality through which the Allies didn’t triumph throughout the Second World Warfare. Inside Dick’s story, one other novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, gives one more imagined historical past—nearer to, although nonetheless totally different from, our personal.

Brian Teeling and Dorje de Burgh’s present at New Artwork Tasks takes inspiration from this book-within-a-book narrative machine, elevating questions on perceptions of actuality and the character of fact. The 2 Irish artists’ work is proven in pairs, interweaving their very own usually clashing details and fictions by means of a mixture of images, textual content and brief movie.

Greatest Self

Brooke Benington, 76 Cleveland Road, London W1T 6NB, till 28 June

This group present asks us to think about the various faces we current to the world—and whether or not they want one another ought to they meet. By means of her picture of a masked younger lady, her reflection fragmented by 5 mirrors, Juno Calypso’s Silent Retreat exemplifies this query.

The more and more noteworthy self-portraitist, identified for constructing kitsch, hyper-feminine worlds, is an applicable alternative for an exhibition which critiques representations of womanhood within the social media age. A robotic silicone masks by Mat Collishaw and immortal, AI-generated portraits by Boo Saville, alongside works Polly Morgan, Christopher Web page, Julia Thompson and Bengt Tibet, help the photographer in interrogating not simply our greatest however worst, aged and public selves.

The Backyard

Hannah Berry, 4 Holly Grove, SE15 5DF, till 13 September

Harley Weir has photographed Cara Delevingne for Stella McCartney, Chloe Sevigny for Dazed and Charli XCX in 2024—the 12 months of “brat summer time”. Away from her editorial pursuits, in the meantime, the picture maker is not any stranger to experimental.

For The Backyard Weir returns to her pandemic challenge, Sickos. The collection of analogue photographs are created by incorporating blood, sperm, perfumes and spices into conventional darkroom processes. The alchemical outcomes are unpredictable, typically uncomfortable and sometimes burning with color.

She additionally presents a collection of recent works, created utilizing historic Japanese paper-making methods. Regardless of the introduction of recent supplies, by merging images with objects from her childhood, Weir continues her concentrate on surprising however usually intimate varieties.

For need of a horse, a button was misplaced

Tiwani Up to date, 24 Cork Road, W1S 3NG, till 20 September

In 1978, photojournalist J. Ross Baughman gained the Pulitzer Prize for his collection on the remedy of Black suspected guerrillas by white troopers in what was then Rhodesia. The brutal photographs, which supply unflinching proof of colonial violence, impressed the multi-disciplinary artist Felix Shumba to create his personal colonial period dystopian fiction.

In For need of a horse, a button was misplaced, the Zimbabwean artist explores the documentary worth of images by means of charcoal drawings. Using his ordinary haunting figures, he explores the settler-colonial perspective in a present that options no images, however which ought to nonetheless show partaking for anybody within the ethics and energy of the picture.