Discovery, Photo London’s showcase for emerging galleries and artists, returns this year under the curation of critic and author Charlotte Jansen. With many of the presentations resisting spectacle in favour of process and tactility, the section feels intimate and materially driven. Noctis takes a closer look at some of the most exciting new artists from around the world.
Part of the Antidote presentation: Nail fetish figure, Congo, late 19th century. Alexei Riboud (2001-2026).
Among the strongest presentations was Antidote by Beirut-based Maison Pan, an artist-run organisation that produces cross-cultural projects internationally. The exhibition brought together seven artists working exclusively with Polaroid photography, though each approached the medium in entirely distinct and unique ways. The line threading through the presentation was a shared attention to what it means to produce singular photographic objects at a moment when images have become endless, disposable, and increasingly detached from physical experience.
Curated by artist Cyrus Mahboubian, co-director of Maison Pan, Antidote proposed the Polaroid as a response to photographic excess. Across the exhibition, there was a transmitted interest in slowness and emotional immediacy, foregrounding the photograph as an artefact rather than a digital image.
Transit Aegean. Halit Can Uzun (2023).
Several Turkey-based galleries also stood out within Discovery this year. Istanbul gallery Ambidexter presented nine photographs by Halit Can Uzun, produced between 2020 and 2025 across Turkey, the Aegean, Europe, and the United States. Uzun’s work focused on overlooked moments and passing details: gestures, fragments of landscape, and brief encounters that might otherwise disappear unnoticed. The photographs carried a restrained sense of nostalgia without becoming sentimental, maintaining a special clarity while remaining both deeply personal and shared.
Waiting to be a flower. Gökhan Tanrıöver (2022).
Another Istanbul-based gallery, Bosfor, presented works by Gökhan Tanrıöver. Using analogue photography and darkroom printing, Tanrıöver’s series explored his connection to a small village on the Turkish Aegean coast through stories passed down within his family. The work considered the instability of memory and the way personal histories shift through retelling, as photography became a means of constructing and preserving a visual archive.
Carmina and her wedding portrait, Havana, Cuba. James Clifford Kent (2025).
Yuma Studios, a London-based creative studio founded in 2025, presented a body of work by James Clifford Kent centred on Cuba and its changes over the past two decades. Returning repeatedly to the country over twenty years, Kent has developed an archive shaped as much by personal relationships as by documentary observation. The presentation deliberately featured primarily black-and-white shots, rejecting the saturated visual shorthand so often associated with Cuba and replacing it with something quieter and more intimate.
One of the most affecting photographs in the presentation was Carmina. Kent first met Carmina upon arriving in Cuba and returned to photograph her and her family over many years. The image shown at Photo London depicts Carmina holding her wedding portrait after the death of her partner, José Luis. The photograph carries a striking stillness to it, not simply documenting grief but tracing the way photographs themselves become vessels for memory, mourning, and continuity. Rather than attempting to monumentalise its subject, the work remains grounded in tenderness and proximity.
Conversation with the sea. Tjitske Oosterholt (2024).
Rotterdam’s Contour Gallery presented The Threshold of Perception, a group exhibition featuring Emile Gostelie, Tjitske Oosterholt, Steffi Reimers, Margriet Smulders, and Studio Sodalime. A sustained interest in the instability of vision itself was seen across the presentation: how images fracture, dissolve, and reform under scrutiny.
This was particularly evident in the work of Tjitske Oosterholt, whose chemically altered Polaroids hovered between abstraction and landscape. Grids, stains, and ruptures interrupted the image surface, pushing photography to the edge of legibility. Looking at the tension between the visible and the obscured, the works questioned not only what a photograph shows, but how much an image can withstand before it ceases to function as representation altogether. The photographs felt less concerned with capturing reality than with testing the limits of perception itself.
Open wounds, closed loops. Philip Steele and Moses Tan (2025).
Another standout presentation came from Starch, the Singapore-based artist-run space conceived as a site for experimentation and reorientation. The booth unfolded less like a conventional exhibition and more like an inhabited interior. Heavy rose-coloured drapery, magazines, suspended objects, and fragments of domestic architecture transformed the space into something theatrical yet convivial.
Artists Philip Steele and Moses Tan engaged with the idea of the autopsy as a lens through which to examine queerness. Throughout the works ran an atmosphere of melancholy, though not one rooted solely in loss. The exhibition considered the emotional labour involved in constructing spaces of visibility and belonging within Singapore’s queer communities, where forms of gathering and self-definition are often shaped through improvisation and care. Photography here moved beyond the image itself, becoming spatial and sculptural; something to move through, inhabit, and return to.
Father Cuts my Hair, Poppy Promises. Thomas Duffield (2025).
London-based Guest Editions, the independent publisher and gallery dedicated to contemporary, documentary, and fine art photography, approached the fair through the idea of home, as something unstable and continually renegotiated. Known for their collaborative approach to publishing and printmaking, the presentation brought together works concerned with intimacy, family, and the fragile structures that hold personal histories together.
Particularly affecting was Poppy Promises by Thomas Duffield, a long-term project tracing the gradual rebuilding of a relationship fractured by addiction. Developed over nine years, the work reflects on the lasting impact of the artist’s father’s heroin addiction on his family, while also recognising the previously overlooked resilience of his mother as a single parent during his father’s absence. The photographs remain attentive to the uneven process of reconciliation. The work avoids sentimentality, allowing tenderness and distance to coexist within the same frame.
Throughout Discovery, many of the presentations resisted immediacy. These were not images designed for quick consumption, but works that asked for slowness and attention. Across the section, artists repeatedly engaged with memory, materiality, family histories, and the instability of the photographic image itself.
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Words: Carolina Vlachakou
Editor: Florentyna Syperek