As Photo London expands into its historic new Kensington home, these are the unrepresented talents and international voices worth tracking.
Photo London returns for its eleventh edition from 14 to 17 May 2026. This year, after a decade at Somerset House, it has moved to the historic National Hall at Olympia.
The new venue hosts Photo London following a £1.3 billion redevelopment, led by Thomas Heatherwick’s studio. The move will make a drastic change for the setting of the event, contrasting with the cozy, labyrinthine feel of Somerset House the new venue is grand, expansive, and filled with light.
Beyond the atmosphere, this venue change allows for bigger installations, better movement through the space, and a new art film screening room which will be featuring collective film work including Alys Tomlinson’s Mother Vera and Carolina Baldomá’s Nature Prints.
This year Steven Meisel is honoured as the Master of Photography, as he presents a rare exhibition of portraits from his early career, with a focus on his series Anglo-Saxon Attitude. Meisel is a legendary fashion photographer, renowned for being elusive, Anglo-Saxon Attitude features icons like Stella Tennant and Bella Freud and captures the anarchic, raw energy of London’s fashion culture.
This year's fair leans heavily into incredible international narratives, specifically from South Asia, Latin America, and Central/Eastern Europe.
Here’s a round up of the exhibiting photographers who are on The Plum Edit’s radar.
Vasudhaa Narayanan
Narayanan’s practice engages with a range of themes including gender, domesticity, and the body through photography, text, sound, and performance. Narayanan’s work interrogates gender, domesticity, and the conditioning of women’s bodies in South Asia.
Wu Chia-Yun
Wu presents her first UK solo exhibition as part of Photo London. Wu’s work captures her exploration of Taiwanese identity and cultural memory, representing how she has been affected by politics, as well as her response to the inherent question of existence.
Her work continues to expand, from film to installation and conceptual art. By incorporating different techniques such as printmaking, drawing and image-transfer techniques, Wu creates pieces that reflect a layered experience and draw attention to the themes of freedom, a sense of belonging, and nothingness.
Ketaki Sheth
Sheth’s work will be presented as part of PHOTOINK’s inaugural presentation, which highlights the societal complexity of India through 75 years of Indian photography.
Sheth’s Twinspotting follows a series of staged portraits of the Patel twins which she counterparts with portraits of the Patel twins in India. The portraits explore how the homeland acts as a site to address a deeper engagement with issues of personal and cultural identity of a community.
Weronika Gęsicka
Gęsicka deliberately blends AI image generation, stock photography, and digital manipulation to create unsettling images that question human memory and truth.
The use of AI allows Gęsicka to delve into the realms of the hypothetical and visually uncertain in conversation with the themes of identity and self-awareness. It creates an interesting perspective of how contemporary artists are using AI as a tool to add new levels of exploration to their work.
From Steven Meisel’s nostalgic, raw look at 1990s British subculture to Weronika Gęsicka’s cutting-edge interrogation of truth through artificial intelligence, this year's lineup proves that photography is anything but static.
The relocation of Photo London to Olympia’s National Hall represents far more than an operational change of venue; it marks a structural turning point for how photographic art is exhibited, consumed, and valued in the international market. For years, lens-based art fairs have struggled to balance traditional fine-art print displays with contemporary, technology-driven installations. The architectural grandiosity of Heatherwick Studio’s redeveloped site provides the physical scale necessary for photography to break free from traditional framed wall displays.
Weronika Gęsicka’s inclusion in this year's lineup highlights one of the most pressing debates in modern visual art: the role of generative artificial intelligence. Rather than viewing synthetic image generation as a threat to traditional photography, artists like Gęsicka are actively adopting AI as a conceptual tool. By deliberately blurring the line between historic stock photography and synthetic render engines, her work highlights the fragility of photographic truth. In an era saturated with deepfakes and algorithmic media, using AI to critique human memory turns the medium's technological anxieties into compelling art.
The strong presence of South Asian and East Asian perspectives, represented by practitioners like Ketaki Sheth, Vasudhaa Narayanan, and Wu Chia-Yun, signals a welcome departure from Eurocentric documentary traditions. Historically, photojournalism from the Global South was predominantly filtered through Western editorial lenses. The works presented at Photo London 2026 offer a distinct counter-narrative: intimate, self-determined stories created by artists investigating their own heritage, domestic spaces, and political realities.
Finally, spotlighting Steven Meisel’s early British subculture photography provides a crucial historical anchor for the entire fair. Meisel’s work serves as a reminder that fashion photography, at its highest level, functions as an invaluable historical record. By contrasting Meisel’s analog, grit-infused 1990s portraiture with today's digitally altered and AI-assisted works, Photo London 2026 illustrates how dramatically our relationship with the camera has evolved over the last thirty years.
By pairing archival research with experimental techniques such as image-transfer and sound design, these artists demonstrate that contemporary portraiture is no longer just about capturing a moment in time, it is about layered storytelling, personal agency, and cultural preservation.
Image credit: Steven Meisel, Vasudhaa Narayanan, Wu Chia-Yun, Ketaki Sheth, Weronika Gęsicka
