PhotoMonth 2026, a month-long festival of photography exhibitions and events, is taking place across artist-run spaces, independent galleries and major cultural institutions in London until 30 October 2026. The programme includes a symposium, exhibition tours and an open call, Unity and Community, showing at the Arts Pavilion in Mile End Park.
A celebration of community and diverse perspectives
By including exhibitions by independent photographers and galleries, the event brings together longstanding members of London's photography community and young breakthrough artists and thinkers who are actively shaping the future of the city's art scene. PhotoMonth was founded with the belief that photography is for all, and aims to uphold these values and represent diverse communities and perspectives, reflective of the divergent and diverse cultures, practices and people that make up the city.
The festival has encouraged artists for this year's open call to draw inspiration from their own experiences or observations amid drastic regression toward division and discrimination. The Open Call exhibition runs from 14-25 October 2026.
Highlights from the programme
Seamus Murphy's Para (পাড়া) Kolkata, 2026, captures a city constantly coming apart, breaking away and remaking itself. Writer Amit Chaudhuri notes: 'In a city that's constantly coming apart, breaking away and remaking itself, Seamus Murphy's camera uncovers a calm, deeply moving formalism. Vertical lines, borders, gaps between things: all these fascinate Murphy, as do the punctuations of everyday life (animals, human figures, machines, the remnants of a habitation) they contain.'
Edmund Clark's series Guantánamo: If the Light Goes Out, a Geography of a Siege, brings together three experiences of home. Clark explains: 'Since 2001, the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay on Cuba has been home to hundreds of men, all Muslim, all detained in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on suspicion of varying degrees of complicity or intent to carry out acts of terror against American interests.'
Sanlé Sory, one of West Africa's most prolific photographers, took an estimated one million portraits over six decades, showing profound social and political changes in Burkina Faso. His Colour Years exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery, until 21 February, captures a lesser-known chapter of his career, with colour prints restored from his archive alongside Volta Jazz record covers.
Other works include Lou Melchior's The Van, the Sock and the Shadows, which captures incidental overlooked objects, and Tahmineh Monzavi's Grape Garden Alley, 2011, showing women living together within a shelter in southern Tehran, attending to lives shaped by constraint without letting those lives be exhausted by the conditions imposed on them.
