Top photography exhibitions in London

‘It is an extraordinary experience to live as though life were punishment for being Black,’ says South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). An extraordinary experience that he captured the brutal daily reality of in the 1960s. His photographs, smuggled out of South Africa and published as a book decades ago, were among the first public documents of apartheid shared in the west. They tell a horrifying story of repression, aggression and cultural suppression.

Poor kids, what chance have they got? Back in the 1950s, Influential British street photographer Roger Mayne looked at the world that we bring children into and despaired. His images of brutally deprived Southam Street near Notting Hill capture children playing, living in a London of squalor, filth, poverty and division.

‘No one can tell the story better than ourselves,’ proclaims a quote from artist-photographer Zanele Muholi as you enter this exhibition. Maybe so, but the Tate makes a decent fist of trying in this extended showcase of a visual activist who has spent more than two decades focusing their lens on the lives of the South African Black LGBTQIA+ community through vivid portraits and self-portraiture. An earlier incarnation of the exhibition in 2020 fell prey to Covid restrictions after only five weeks and in the intervening time its narrative has grown, reflecting Muholi’s importance as a creative force for change.

Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy taste. Luckily, Sir Elton John would probably know his art from his elbow even if he hadn’t become one of the world’s biggest, richest megastars. For decades now, he has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, even at the Tate in 2017, and now it’s the V&A’s turn. 

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?