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.
A solo show of the work by the trailblazing Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia. • Battaglia mainly photographed in black and white. She also captured daily life: women and children in their neighbourhoods and streets, showing the wealth of the area and at the same time the misery of a city almost abandoned to its fate. Her pictures capture the poverty on the streets as well as the life of the upper classes, religious processions, festivals, funerals and much more.
South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940–1990) is considered one of the most important chroniclers of Apartheid politics. This substantial exhibition revisits Cole’s ground-breaking project House of Bondage. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa and smuggled out his photographs, settling in New York. House of Bondage was published in 1967 and revealed the brutality and injustice of Apartheid to the world, vividly documenting the everyday life of the Black population in South Africa. It became one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century.
09 October - 23 February 2025
A special archive display celebrating the renowned photography journal Ten.8 and its wider influence. Ten.8 in Focus is a snapshot of the dynamic and diverse ways Ten.8 explored ideas around power, representation, race and photography, which are all still relevant today.