A Soho, London gallery and charity, opened in 1971 as the UK's first public gallery devoted to photography, home of the Deutsche Boerse Photography Foundation Prize.
The Photographers' Gallery in London's Soho is a public gallery devoted entirely to photography. It describes itself as "a place for the discovery, exploration and understanding of photography in all its forms". Visitors can see exhibitions by international photographers alongside UK pioneers, and the building also has an education studio, a print sales gallery, a bookshop and a cafe. The gallery publishes books for some exhibitions and the quarterly Loose Associations, and it keeps an online archive.
It opened on 14 January 1971 in a converted Lyons tea bar at 8 Great Newport Street in Covent Garden, founded by Sue Davies, who was its director until 1991. Sources say she conceived the gallery, found the building and secured the funding, reportedly re-mortgaging her house to do so. The first exhibition, The Concerned Photographer, was curated by Cornell Capa. In May 2012 the gallery moved to a five-storey building at 16 to 18 Ramillies Street, designed by the architects O'Donnell and Tuomey, with three floors of exhibition space. Shoair Mavlian became director in January 2023, after Brett Rogers, who led the gallery from 2005 to the end of 2022.
The gallery is in the West End of London, just north of Oxford Circus. Since 2022 it has also run the Soho Photography Quarter, an outdoor space that shows contemporary photography free of charge, day and night. The Deutsche Boerse Photography Foundation Prize, which the gallery set up in 1996 to recognise a photographer who has made a major contribution to the medium in Europe, is one of the best-known photography awards in the world. The Bar-Tur Photobook Award, created in 2014, helps unpublished photographers make a photobook with an independent publisher.
The gallery's story is one of people committed to photography. Besides Sue Davies, the photographer Dorothy Bohm is credited with supporting her work. In 2021 the gallery marked its 50th year with a retrospective called 50 Exhibitions for 50 Years and a charity auction. We found no staff-culture material, so we cannot comment on working life beyond these public projects. The gallery says its aim is to be a home for photographers and photography fans and a place to discuss and develop the medium.
A gallery like this needs curators and exhibition organisers, learning and public programme teams, shop and cafe staff, visitor hosts, marketing and press officers, fundraisers, and technicians who install shows. If you love looking at pictures and talking about them, or enjoy organising events and working with artists, this is a place where those interests become a job. The gallery's website lists current openings.
Website: thephotographersgallery.org.uk
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