Five Photographers to Know at Photo London 2026

The 11th edition of Photo London opens today at Kensington Olympia in west London, marking the fair’s first edition in the newly refurbished venue after a decade at Somerset House. This year’s edition is more tightly curated than previous iterations, with an emphasis on what the fair’s director Sophie Parker described in an interview with The Art Journal as “documentaries of the everyday, across regions and perspectives.”

In the past, the fair has been dominated by large prints, portraiture of familiar faces and dramatically staged imagery. Many of this year’s strongest presentations focus on the fleeting details of everyday life: little known photographers who turned street market stalls, factories, prison cells, kitchen tables and cramped family interiors into lasting historical records. Across India, Poland, France and the United States, the photographers platformed by this edition document how people lived, on a minute level, through what we now regard as significant historical periods of political, economic and social change.

The work spans different generations, cultures and photographic traditions, from mid-century street photography in Delhi to long-form documentary projects in Soviet-era Poland and downtown New York. Yet, throughout, ephemera such as furniture, work clothes, shopfronts and prison cells become enduring records of their time.

Ahmed Ali

PHOTOINK, Delhi, India

Ahmed Ali, Worker drilling inside a coal mine, Asansol, 1951, (Macneil and Barry Limited). Courtesy Ahmed Ali Archive & PHOTOINK

Ahmed Ali spent decades photographing Old Delhi and surrounding parts of north India during the mid-20th century. Born in 1901, he built a large archive covering the years before and after Indian independence and Partition.

Represented by PHOTOINK, Ali’s photographs concentrate on the rhythms of street life. Markets, alleyways, tea stalls and shopfronts recur throughout the work. Many images were made between the 1940s and 1970s, when Delhi was reshaped by unprecedented levels of internal migration and urban growth.

The photographs often frame individuals moving through crowds: cyclists navigating traffic, traders sitting outside small businesses and pedestrians crossing busy junctions. Old Delhi appears as a working city organised around constant informal exchange.

Interest in Ali’s archive has grown alongside wider institutional attention towards South Asian photography, particularly as museums, gallerists and publishers have increasingly reassessed overlooked photographic histories from the region beyond the better-known post-independence modernists and studio photographers. The work now also functions as a record of parts of contemporary Delhi that have since transformed beyond recognition.

Pricing: £7,500 - £125,000

Janet Delaney

EUQINOM Gallery, San Francisco, US

Janet Delaney, from Too Many Products Too Much Pressure, 1980s. Courtesy Janet Delaney and EUQINOM Gallery

Janet Delaney is best known for photographing San Francisco’s South of Market district before the area was transformed by the big tech era. Born in California in 1952, she spent years documenting the neighbourhood during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Her series South of Market, produced between 1978 and 1986, focused on industrial streets, union workers, bars, local parades and children playing near warehouses and freeways. The district still contained factories, small businesses and working-class housing, long before monthly rents in the area began exceeding several thousand dollars for small apartments.

Delaney was part of a wider generation of American photographers using colour to push documentary photography away from its black-and-white traditions, manipulating colour palettes and urban surfaces to reshape the visual language of the medium.

Living in the neighbourhood shaped her work. Delaney used painted signage, work uniforms and faded shopfronts to observe community life as it was found, rather than treating the area as a symbol of urban decline or renewal.

Today, the series is frequently revisited in discussions around housing pressure, gentrification, wealth inequality and the disappearance of working-class districts in San Francisco and comparable American cities.

Pricing: £3,000 - £4,000

Melissa Shook

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA, New York, US

Melissa Shook, Untitled, c. mid/late 1970s, gelatin silver print, 21.9 x 21.9 cm. Courtesy Kristina Shook and Estate of M. Melissa Shook

Melissa Shook built much of her work around the daily experience of New York during the 1970s and 1980s. Born in 1949, she worked across humanist documentary photography and a distinctive form of self-portraiture before her death in 2020.

The presentation by MIYAKO YOSHINAGA centres on photographs made over long periods of time, including her series Daily Self-Portraits. Shook photographed herself repeatedly in the years after becoming a mother to her mixed-race daughter, Krissy. A white woman raising her child alone, Shook meditated on the experience of living within and relying on a close-knit, multi-ethnic community on the Lower East Side. Alongside self-portraits, she documented friends’ apartments, shared childcare and community spaces in a time when much of downtown Manhattan was marked by extreme poverty. Mirrors, kitchen tables and cramped interiors appear as motifs throughout the work.

The photographs belong to a broader generation of feminist documentary practice that treat domestic labour and motherhood as a serious photographic subject, recording repetition, fatigue and the mundane practical realities of combining artistic work with everyday responsibilities.

She also taught photography for decades, including at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Pricing: £3,500 - £5,700

Zofia Rydet

Raster Gallery, Warsaw, Poland

Zofia Rydet, From the Sociological Record, Krakowskie (Babice), 1985, silver-gelatin print, 23,7 x 30,1 cm. Courtesy Zofia Rydet Foundation and Raster Gallery.

Zofia Rydet created one of the largest photographic records of domestic interiors in postwar Europe. Born in 1911, she began her major documentary work later in life and spent years travelling across Poland while the country remained behind the Iron Curtain.

Her project Sociological Record, initiated in 1978, eventually expanded into tens of thousands of photographs. Presented by Warsaw's Raster Gallery, the series documents families, pensioners, farmers and children standing inside carefully arranged rooms across towns and villages throughout the country.

Rydet used a highly consistent structure. Subjects usually face the camera directly while surrounded by personal possessions and household decoration. Soviet-era television sets, lace curtains, religious portraits, clocks and patterned wallpaper recur throughout the archive.

The photographs provide a detailed record of material life during the late communist period. Political conditions and cultural tensions appear indirectly through furniture, domestic objects and the organisation of private space.

Viewed together, the series becomes both a portrait of postwar Poland and a study of how people choose to present themselves inside the home.

Pricing: £2,600 to £3,700 tax included

Jane Evelyn Atwood

In Camera Galerie, Paris, in partnership with L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, New York

Jane Evelyn Atwood, Autoportrait Serpent, 1979, gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm © Jane Evelyn Atwood. Courtesy In Camera / L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

Born in New York in 1947 and based largely in Paris, Jane Evelyn Atwood is known for documentary projects centred on marginalised communities. One of her best-known series, Rue des Lombards, documented sex workers in Paris during the late 1970s. Atwood spent extended periods with the women she photographed, recording moments of waiting, conversation, dressing and rest alongside street-based labour.

At Photo London, In Camera Galerie and L. Parker Stephenson Photographs are presenting Rue des Lombards alongside later work focused on women’s prisons across Europe and the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Atwood used the details of cells and personal belongings alongside portraits of family visits to create a varied portrait of institutional systems and the routines of human activity inside them.

Pricing: Modern prints in the region of £2,000. Vintage prints in the region of £7,000 with a few exceptions at higher prices