Photo50 is London Art Fair’s annual exhibition of contemporary photography, providing a critical forum for examining some of the most distinguishing elements of current photographic practice.
Guest curated each year, it highlights a timely theme in current photography and adds a space and context to the photography presented by galleries at the Fair.
Explore highlights from the 2022 exhibit curated by Rodrigo Orrantia below.
2023 PHOTO50: BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS
The 2023 edition of Photo50, Beautiful Experiments, curated by Pelumi Odubanjo and Katy Barron, will bring together the work of a group of multigenerational women photographers whose practice engages with their diasporic heritage, and through their lens explores domestic life and the home as not only a physical place but also a space of memory and generational exchange.
The title is taken from the 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by the American writer Saidiya Hartmann, who writes about the lives of Black women in the US through a lens of fiction, using photographs from the archive and taking a sensory approach to narrating such histories.
The majority of selected artist are based in the UK, but they have a range of diasporic heritages and have made work that reflects their particular histories and ideas around home.
![Sarah Pickering, Landmine [Detail], 2005. Image Courtesy of the Artist](https://www.londonartfair.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Sarah-Pickering-Landmine-2005-Image-Courtesy-of-the-Artist.jpg "Sarah Pickering, Landmine, 2005, Image Courtesy of the Artist")
![Eva Stenram, New Meridians 3 [Detail], 2019. Image Courtesy of the Artist](https://www.londonartfair.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Eva-Stenram-New-Meridians-3-2019-Image-Courtesy-of-the-Artist-scaled.jpg "Eva Stenram, New Meridians 3, 2019, Image Courtesy of the Artist")
2023 EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Heather Aygepong | Joy Gregory | Adaeze Iehbom | Marcia Michael | Bernice Mulenga | Sandra Poulson | Sofia Yala | Marlene Smith | Rubee Samuel
‘Some of it is experimental, some of it is unknown, some of it is very well known. Beauty is not an aesthetic idea, it’s an emotional idea. We hope to enable people to see a different point of view.’
– Pelumi Odubanjo and Katy Barron
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2022 PHOTO50: NO PLACE IS AN ISLAND
The 2022 edition of Photo50, No Place is an Island, curated by Rodrigo Orrantia, presented works by British and UK-based artists responding to the idea of an island. Echoing John Donne’s celebrated book No Man is an Island, the exhibition explored what it means to be an island and its multiple possibilities towards the future.
The title of the exhibition also alludes to the idea that contemporary photography is not an island or an isolated medium, and the selected artists will showcase photography as part of a wider practice, pushing and redefining its boundaries through sculpture, performance, moving image and sound.
This exhibition also celebrated 10 years since the seminal Photo50 show entitled The New Alchemists, curated by Rodrigo’s mentor and friend Sue Steward, who passed away in 2017. No Place Is An Island references Steward’s work and ideas, bringing them to the present by looking at how photographic art has evolved in the last decade. The exhibition connects a generation of established and mid-career artists, with emerging practices working around the same interests and, in most cases, directly inspired by artists in the show.
Several of the works in No Place is An Island focused on the theme of our relationship to landscape, and suggest new ways of understanding how we perceive and interact with our surroundings.
![Aliki Braine, Where Two Seas Meet, Skagen #2 [Detail] 2018. Image Courtesy of the Artist](https://www.londonartfair.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Aliki-Braine-Where-Two-Seas-Meet-Skagen-2-2018-Image-Courtesy-of-the-Artist-scaled.jpeg "Aliki Braine, Where Two Seas Meet, Skagen #2, 2018, Image Courtesy of the Artist")
2022 EXHIBITING ARTISTS
John MacLean | Eva Stenram | Dafna Talmor| Martin Seeds | Tom Hunter | Tom Lovelace | Andy Sewell | Aliki Braine | Esther Teichmann | Bindi Vora | Shepherd Manyika | Alexander Mourant | Sarah Pickering | Hannah Hughes
The works in this show connect with the topical issues of our time, but also to a universal narrative, the journey to an idealised place. I’d like to start conversations about what it means to be an island, and how we construct it in our minds. No Place Is An Island talks about connectivity, about the fact nothing exists in isolation, it is merely a fiction, a fantasy. – Rodrigo Orrantia
Rodrigo Orrantia is an independent curator, interested in expanded practices of photography also working with sculpture, performance and localised installation.
Orrantia believes that exhibitions and publications are devices for experimentation and debate, where curators can work with artists from the outset of the project in a collaborative way. He is particularly interested in the connections between photography, geography and place, especially the topical relationship between nature and humans in the geologic time of the Anthropocene.
Following this interest, in 2017 he was awarded Format Festival’s Habitat Award for an exhibition project entitled Modern Ornithologies, an experimental installation featuring a selection of photo books and films placed within the collection of Pickford’s House Museum in Derby. In 2020 he was the winner of the Landskrona Foto Festival Open Call, with an exhibition project entitled The State of Things, another experimental installation, this time inviting five artists to respond to the architecture and history of this Swedish town.
Orrantia believes that contemporary photographic practices interested in the materiality of the medium could also be interested in its history, and certainly in its many adjacent worlds, from printmaking through to sculpture, film and video, and live performance.
PHOTOGRAPHY FOCUS DAY AT LONDON ART FAIR
London Art Fair’s Photography Focus Day, Friday 2 January 2023, will feature a day of talks and tours led by practitioners and experts. Join the mailing list, here, to be the first to hear about the full details of the 2023 Talks Programme.
Book your ticket today to join a critical forum for examining some of the most distinctive elements of current photographic practice.
FRIDAY 22 APRIL – 1:00PM
Lovelace and Ryalls create collaborative works sitting within spaces between photography and performance. Unfolding as a live collage installation, the artist will explore the ever-evolving notion of home and the relationship we share with landscape. What began with insular thoughts between the two, we now see as an exhibition, forming space for collective connections to landscape, asking how we deal with and negotiate disappearing landscapes. Through sculptural framing and collaborative curation, Lovelace and Ryalls will activate images and objects – allowing them to move, fold, disappear and reappear. In turn, places, memories, images will collide, expand and collapse.
FRIDAY 22 APRIL – 2:30PM
TALKS THEATRE
Photo50 is the Fair’s critical forum for examining distinctive elements of current photographic practice. For 2022, Photo50 is curated by Rodrigo Orrantia presenting works by British and UK-based artists responding to the idea of an island, looking at practices expanding the possibilities of photography. This panel chaired by Rodrigo Orrantial explores photography, sculpture and performance in conversation with artists Sian Bonell and Shepherd Manyika.
FRIDAY 22 MARCH – 3 – 3.45PM
FAIR GUIDE SALES POINT, GROUND FLOOR
Join an immersive and informative tour led by Sotheby’s Institute of Art’s students. Tours are 45mins longs and start at the Fair Guide sales point by the ground floor entrance.
FRIDAY 22 APRIL – 4 – 4.45PM
Join an immersive and informative tour led by Sotheby’s Institute of Art’s students. Tours are 45mins longs and start at the Fair Guide sales point by the ground floor entrance.
FRIDAY 22 APRIL – 4PM TALKS THEATRE
Join Brett Rogers OBE, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery for a panel discussion exploring the relationship between landscape, photography and politics. The panel discussion will feature Sarah Pickering, Martin Seeds and Eva Stenram and look at how their work encapsulates political subject matter within an expanded view of photography. All three artists subvert the usual photojournalistic and documentary tropes to explore new ways of storytelling. Chaired by Brett Rogers OBE, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery.
FRIDAY 22 APRIL – 5:30PM TALKS THEATRE
This year’s Photo50 ‘No Place is an Island’ is curated by Rodrigo Orrantia presenting works by 14 British and UK-based artists responding to the idea of an island, looking at practices expanding the possibilities of photography. This marks 10 years since Photo50’s revered 2012 presentation ‘The New Alchemists’ curated by the late Sue Steward, a show that continues to be noted for how it challenged our assumptions of what photography can be. This panel chaired by Rodrigo Orrantia includes curator, Ann Braybon, and artists Dafna Talmor and Aliki Braine who will discuss notions of photography explored, a decade apart.
Photo50 at London Art Fair 2022 is kindly supported by Genesis Imaging.
To discover previous Photo50 exhibitions, click below
Guest curated by Rodrigo Orrantia, No Place is an Island presents a selection of works by British and UK-based artists, interested in questioning the idea of an island and the associated concepts of isolation and isolationism. The selection, especially made for Photo50, focuses on practices expanding the possibilities of photography, especially where the medium overlaps with sculpture and performance.
Echoing John Donne’s celebrated No Man is an Island, this exhibition examines what it means to be an island in the contemporary moment. As we slowly emerge from the covid19 pandemic to a post-Brexit Britain, the topical issues of our day (climate emergency, mass migration, travel and movement restrictions) confront us with the reality of an interconnected world: no place is really an island, we only make it one in our imagination.
Rodrigo Orrantia is an art historian and curator, specialised in photography.
His practice focuses on exhibition and publication projects, and critical writing. He is a regular speaker at Universities in the UK and France, and a reviewer and juror for international photography festivals and awards.
He is currently researching connections between photography, geography and place, with an interest in nature and its relationship with the urban/ manmade/ artificial environment.
In his poignant body of photographic work Hometowns, John MacLean pays homage to the subtle yet important influence of the hometown, particularly in relation to the visual development of artists themselves. Beginning with a simple idea that he quickly jotted down in a notebook several years ago –“Photograph the hometowns of your heroes” –MacLean has explored and photographed more than twenty cities, towns and neighborhoods around the world where a number of his artistic heroes spent their childhood, such as Bridget Riley, James Turrell and Wassily Kandinsky. MacLean’s project searched for the everyday places that served as the most basic visual experiences and foundations for those artists who have inspired him, and for his own creative inspiration.
PHOTO50: LONDON ART FAIR 2020
OCCUPY THE VOID
Occupy The Void, was the 14th edition of Photo50 for London Art Fair 2020, guest curated by Laura Noble. The space presented ten female photographers aged over 50. The exhibition explored the vast pool of talented living female photographers aged over 50 and the cultural ‘space’ that they inhabit.
Through the work of ten contemporary female artists working in the UK and internationally, the exhibition interrogated the physical, psychological and ephemeral nature of space and our experience of existing within it, both during our lives and after death.
The exhibition reflected on the variety of photographic formats in 2D and 3D, and the diverse traditional and non-traditional materials employed in photography today.
Occupy the Void was an inclusive exhibition, presenting both established names and artists in the early stages of their careers, all of which were female and over the age of 50.
Although 85% of women studying photography at university are women, only 15% of the industry is female. Thus Noble provided a platform for a diverse group of artists who are commonly underrepresented in the cultural dialogue, and offered them the opportunity to reclaim their space and the void.
2020 EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Wendy Aldiss | Samantha Brown | Elaine Duigenan | Miranda Gavin | Elizabeth Heyert | Sandra Jordan | Rosy Martin | Mercedes Parodi | Danielle Peck | Kim Shaw
Laura Noble, photographed by ©Chloe Rosser
LAURA NOBLE
Photo50 was supported by Photography Focus Day and took place on Friday 24 of January 2020 with a dedicated programme of talks and tours led by practitioners and experts.
Photo50 at London Ar Fair 2020 was kindly supported by Genesis Imaging.
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