Frieze London Opens 14–18 October With Photography Front and Centre

Frieze London and Frieze Masters open in Regent's Park from 14–18 October, and photography, lens-based media and image-adjacent presentations figure large across both fairs and the city's institutions.

At Frieze London, curator Carol Yinghua Lu — director of the Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, and co-curator of the 19th Istanbul Biennial (2027) — has selected The Code Universe: Artists Interrogating a Post-Digital Age. The section includes work dating back to the late 1970s and examines how popular culture is produced, circulated and consumed.

Its highlights include:

• Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake (greengrassi and Take Ninagawa), who works across media to create collages and sculptural pieces
• A new multi-channel video installation by Payne Zhu (Spurs Gallery), exploring the relationship between human perception and machine cognition

What can visitors see beyond the curated sections?

PM8 / Francisco Salas will present historical colour photographs by Lithuanian artist Algirdas Šeškus, taken on the only official commission he received during Soviet times — and rejected because they did not fit the given standards of 'official art'.

Edel Assanti will present a 'memory box' booth designed by Polish artist Marcin Dudek after his childhood home, showing works by artists including Vinca Petersen and Sheida Soleimani. Maureen Paley's presentation includes Anne Hardy, Peter Hujar and Wolfgang Tillmans. Soft Opening's artists include Ebun Sodipo, whose work includes mixed-media photographic collages.

At Frieze Masters, a trail titled Queering Modernism: A New Visual History, conceived by German curator Anke Kempkes, features image-pioneers Claude Cahun (Alberta Pane Gallery) and Ruth Bernhard (Galerie Albrecht). The Masters spotlight section includes other artists neglected by the Western canon, among them Chinese image-maker Lang JingShan (Each Modern), a pioneer of composite photography in the 1930s and 40s who combined multiple negatives with painting, inscription and scratching.

Frieze also returns to the Institute of Contemporary Arts with a new programme of artists' film and moving-image works, screening on a continuous loop during Frieze Week and online at ica.art.

Which museum shows anchor the autumn season?

The Photographers' Gallery focuses on colour, with classic images by William Eggleston and colour portraits by Sanlé Sory, some previously unseen. The National Portrait Gallery stages Tim Walker's Fairyland, exploring queer identity, love and community.

Tate Britain's The 90s: Art and Fashion has just opened to mixed reviews, but features celebrated photographic projects by Juergen Teller, Eileen Perrier and Nigel Shafran. Tate Modern presents Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography, a long-awaited show on Pictorialism that emphasises the movement's international spread and looks set to revitalise interest in the long over-looked genre. Works on view include Luo Bonian's Drawing Water from a Well, May 1932.

Where does collage surface this season?

Graces Mews presents What Rose from the Cut, a new evolution of the hit feminist collage exhibition The Rose, assembled by artist Justine Kurland, curator and collector Sarah Miller Meigs, the venue, and Fiona Rogers — Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography at the V&A and author of Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage. The show reaches back to Claude Cahun and up to the present day with Keisha Scarville.

Collage also features at Hauser & Wirth in a double-hander pairing Lorna Simpson — whose paintings and sculpture appear alongside her collage work — with Cindy Sherman, including works from Sherman's new series Fabric Matrons.

Elsewhere, Phillida Reid presents Joanna Piotrowska's solo installation Wyrwa, which includes images of the artist's home town mounted in bespoke aluminium and hand-blown glass frameworks, childhood drawings and close-cropped fragments from her father's negatives shown behind tinted glass. Katherine Hubbard's The Great Room at Studio Voltaire addresses the artist's experience of caring for her mother, the medium of photography and an architectural installation.

Phaidon launches Great Women Photographers, edited by Charlotte Flint and including Letizia Battaglia, Myriam Boulos and Rinko Kawauchi, with an accompanying exhibition at Dorchester Collection's 45 Park Lane.

Historical photography has a strong presence too:

• Large Glass gives Italian photographer Mario Cresci a second show, People I Care About, documenting people in the Southern Italian town Tricarico between 1966 and 1967
• Hamilton's Gallery stages Daido Moriyama, picking out Japan's abrupt shift into hypercapitalism and Andy Warhol's influence on the photographer
• No.9 Cork Street, Frieze's permanent Mayfair gallery space, presents To Seek, To Find, celebrating photographic commissions by the Mr & Mrs Smith hotel group — classic commissions by Tina Barney and Martin Parr, plus brand-new work by Kalpesh Lathigra

What lies beyond photography?

Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK at William Morris Gallery surveys alternative communities over the last 200 years, including Dial House, the self-sustaining anarcho-pacifist open house founded in 1967 by Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher of punk band Crass.

The Design Museum stages Es Devlin: Other Worlds, a retrospective of the designer's work with space, spanning installations, set design and kinetic sculptures. Gagosian's Davies Street gallery presents The Clip-On Method by Cady Noland, a survey of four decades exploring the material and symbolic architecture of American identity, power structures, celebrity and racism. At Gagosian Gallery, This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte pairs the Surrealist painter's work with contemporary artists' and emphasises his continuing relevance in image-saturated lives.

With photography threading through both fairs, the museums and the commercial galleries, Frieze week 2026 positions lens-based art at the centre of London's cultural calendar.