Top photography exhibitions in London

Ahead of a major Kate Winslet-helmed biopic, TJ Boulting is hosting a show of rarely seen photographs by the great Lee Miller from the photographer's own archives. She was most known for her war time photography and her work with the surrealist Man Ray, but this show explores every stage of her varied, fascinating career and life, from portraits of women to Blitz-ravaged London and experimental nudes. 

Lee Miller is at TJ Boulting, Nov 23-Jan 20 2024. Free. More details here.

When is a photograph not a photograph? When it's conceptual art, obviously, and that's what pioneering British conceptualist Keith Arnatt focused his efforts on. Though there is some sound work here (the word 'now' repeated every four minutes, a recording of someone eating crisps) most of the work is photographs of crumbling walls, old folk in their gardens, dead trees and an actual pile of poo. Arnatt was questioning the contexts and meanings of photography, that's the idea, the concept, even if it doesn't lead to particularly good photography. 

Keith Arnatt is at Sprüth Magers, Nov 22-Feb 3 2024. Free. More details here.

This exhibition starts with a lie. ‘I don’t know if individual photographs contain ideas, worlds, history, humanity, beauty, ugliness or nothing at all. I actually do not really care. I just extract and record things around me, without pretence,’ says influential Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (1938-). And he doesn’t mean a word of it. 

You should be deeply suspicious of anyone who thinks they can neatly sum up a whole continent’s artistic output. Because even if you focus on just one artform – like photography, in the case of the Tate’s latest exhibition – you’ve given yourself a pretty impossible task.

Why did a young photographer spend five years obsessively photographing a single street in west London, visiting it 27 times and taking 1,400 photos?