Mon to Wed 10.00 – 18.00
Thu 10.00 – 20.00
Fri Lates 10.00 – 20.00
Sat: 10.00 – 18.00
Sun: 11.00 – 18.00
The Photographer's Gallery
16 – 18 Ramillies Street
London W1F 7LW
The closest station is:
The Photographers' Gallery was founded by Sue Davies in 1971 as the first public gallery in the United Kingdom devoted solely to photography. Sue Davies was director of the gallery from 1971 to 1991 before Sue Grayson Ford took over. The Gallery first opened in a converted Lyon's Tea Bar in Covent Garden, before moving to No. 5 Great Newport Street in 1980 and then to its final house, in Ramillies Street, Soho in 2012. The gallery's mission is to champion photography for everyone while its vision is to stimulate greater understanding and engagement with its value to society and culture.
In 1996, the Photographer's Gallery set up the Citigroup Photography Prize which became the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2005 after Deutsche Börse, a german company, started sponsoring the prize. The prize has been created to reward outstanding contributions towards the photographic medium and reflects the myriad ways photography engages with the world today. It is open to any living photographer and body of work produced and/or exhibited in Europe the previous year.
In June 2022, the Photographer's Gallery unveiled, in collaboration with Westminster Council, the Soho Photography Quarter (SPQ). the SPQ is a new cultural space, presenting free open-air exhibitions and projections highlighting the very best of contemporary photography and ensuring they are accessible to the widest possible audiences, without restriction.
Livia Foldes questions how computers are taught to see and interpret bodies and identities. In her series NSFW Venus, she appropriates and alters images from a pornography-detection dataset to reflect on the parallels between colonial archives and machine learning datasets. From phrenology to sexology, photographic archives and bodily measurement have played integral roles in constructions of race, gender, and obscenity. Today, as in the past, institutions use technologies of vision and quantification to transform bodies into data — and use that data to classify, predict, discipline and erase.
12 Apr - 23 Jun 2024
Dorothy Bohm at 100 celebrates the remarkable life and work of Dorothy Bohm [1924 – 2023] and coincides with what would have been her 100th birthday. Having originally trained as a studio portraitist in wartime Manchester, she would go on to travel extensively, establishing herself as a leading humanist street photographer. Bohm’s passion for the medium extended far beyond her own practice, supporting photographers, writers, gallerists, and collectors within Britain and abroad. Notably, she played a key role in helping Sue Davies set up The Photographers’ Gallery in 1971 where she worked as Associate Director for fifteen years.