Top photography exhibitions in London

Ideas of Black identity dominate the annual Deutsche Börse Prize show this year. Three of the four finalists use photography and photographic imagery to interrogate Blackness: its meaning and historical function, its marginalisation and commodification. The fourth sticks a lot of scruffy to-do lists on the wall and a typed letter explaining why the subject of her major photographic portrait series doesn’t want it to be on display anymore.

Porn is everywhere, just a click away, as freely available as celeb gossip and pictures of your friends’ lunch. But until 1967, any representation of the male nude which even hinted at homosexuality was subject to the Obscene Publications Act. Horniness – and specifically queer horniness – was illegal, so homosexual desire was forced underground. That didn’t stop it from flourishing, obviously, and the results are all over this in-depth exhibition of photos of male bodies from all across London from the '50s to the ’80s.

We think we know what war looks like. And no conflict in history has been as constantly visually documented as the Russian invasion of Ukraine; you can probably watch it live if you really want. So why would you bother going to look at yet more pictures of it?

Now in its fifty-eighth year, the renowned and celebrated annual wildlife photography competition exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum with images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year saw tens of thousands of entries from across the globe, with 100 selected including the winner, American photographer Karine Aignerwas’s remarkable image of a buzzing ball of cactus bees spinning over the hot sand on a Texas ranch. 

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?