Top photography exhibitions in London

The work of 51 contemporary photographers from around the world will be on display at the Saatchi gallery this summer for the 166th annual Royal Photographic Society exhibition. More than 4,000 amateur and professional photographers submitted work to be included in this year’s show, with the final selection being chosen by a guest judging panel. Highlights include Keerthana Kunnath’s series of South Indian female bodybuilders, Lydia Goldblatt’s work on grief and motherhood and Tine Poppe’s psychedelic botanical photographs. 

London-based artist Felicity Hammond works at the intersection of photography and installation, interrogating how power, politics and data shape the images we consume. Her latest project is a bold, four-part touring exhibition that investigates how artificial intelligence is transforming photography. Each iteration of the exhibition builds on the last, using images and data gathered from previous venues as training material for the next, mirroring the recursive feedback loops of machine learning. The project raises questions about authorship, truth and the collapsing boundaries between the artificial and the real. V3: Model Collapse asks: what happens when the artificial becomes the original?

‘Instagram face’, CGI influencers and AI sex dolls are all going under the microscope in the new Somerset House exhibition, Virtual Beauty.  Through more than 20 works, this pay-what-you-feel show explores the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The exhibition traces the origin of the digital selfie from the first flip phone with a front-facing camera, to today’s minefield of deepfake pornography, augmented reality face filters and Instagram algorithms. It’s primarily concerned with the ‘Post-Internet’ art movement, a 21st-century body of work and criticism that examines the influence of the internet on art and culture.

 There are lots of complex ideas at play: verbose gallery text tells me that we are in a post-internet, post-facial and post-physical age. One artwork highlights how AI tools have a racial bias, another reclaims technology used in deepfake pornography to make a gender-defying portrait of a woman with a bodybuilder’s physique in skimpy black lingerie. There’s arguably too much going on, but fans of Black Mirror will be entertained by this unsettling and sometimes beautiful exhibition.

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display.