This year the acclaimed writer and curator Charlotte Jansen has been announced as the new Curator of the Discovery section, Photo London’s showcase of the best emerging photographers and galleries.
Emphasising the importance of this aspect of the Fair, Jansen states:
It is vital to this ecosystem to have an area to encounter different kinds of projects outside the conventional gallery model, as well as different propositions about what photography might be and how it might be presented. Overall, this year, you’ll notice a majority of artists of all ages who have been long overlooked by the art and photography world, and devote their practice to interrogating dominant perspectives and inquiring deeply into their own; there’s a focus on durational projects, contrary to the idea of photography as the ‘point and shoot’ medium; also recurrent across the work on show is photography’s abiding power to bolster communities and empower.
Andi Galdi Vinko, who published the award-winning ‘Sorry I Disappeared I Gave Birth But Now I’m Back’ (a second edition of the book launches with Trolley Books at Photo London) is presenting a new collaborative project on the climate emergency and parenthood, with Deák Erika Galéria. Cierra Britton Gallery is bringing two incredible photographers exploring portrait photography as an act of reclamation of Black bodies: Kennedi Carter and Satchel Lee.
Palm* Studios, from the photographic duo behind the renowned Palm Photo Prize, present a three-artist booth of Caroline Tompkins, Lola & Pani (a project on global teenhood) and fine art/fashion photographer Jacob Lillis, an overlooked British landscape photographer, also known for his work for Simone Rocha.
Koop Projects presents a booth dedicated to African women artists exploring personal and political fractures through their family histories, folklore narratives and imagined archives, including one of the most significant artists working on the continent today, Senzeni Marasela, who represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and whose work will be shown alongside photographs by Tshepiso Maroposa, Maheder Haileselassie and Yassmin Forte.
The young Accra-based fashion fine art photographer Kweku Yeboah will present a solo booth with Bright Gallery, exploring masculinity and queering gender, from a Ghanaian perspective.
Norwegian artists Tonje Birkeland and Maria Pasenau present a two-person booth — both concerned with building their own worlds through performative self-portrait photography, but with very different approaches: Birkeland carefully constructs and choreographs ‘Characters’, embarking on expeditions into the mountains, and creating meticulously researched costumes and using period cameras, to fill the gaps in Norway’s history and landscape where women’s bodies have been excluded; while Pasenau is known for her spontaneous, improvised and humorous self-portrait projects.
In tandem, JK Lavin will stage an epic, groundbreaking 8-year self-portraiture project ‘Crisis of Experience’, made during a turbulent time in her personal life in the late 1970s and 1980s shot on Polaroid and never seen before in the UK, which is presented by Alta Vista, Los Angeles.
Also presented for the first time in the UK is a major, extensive project by an unknown German artist, Birgit Glatzel: ‘Friends of Friends of Friends’, began in 1998, for which Glatzel travelled the world to photograph — as the title suggests — friends of friends of friends with fascinating, surprising and deeply moving encounters recorded in the pictures that resulted.
Also working with the photography as a material is Taiwanese artist Mia Liu, presented by UP Gallery, who has a fascinating process: she goes on walks to collect found objects, creates photographs of them in the darkroom, and then shreds the silver gelatin to create photo-object sculptures. Meanwhile Vivian Galban, shown by Rolf Art from Argentina will be building a camera obscura within Discovery, where visitors can come and participate by having their photo taken and added to her ongoing archive with visitors given a digital file of their portrait.
Photo London 2024, 16th – 19th May, Somerset House Photolondon.org
