Photography

How cartomania captivated even Queen Victoria

13 July 2024 9:00 am

The craze for photographic cartes de visite that swept Victorian Britain was further boosted by the Queen’s own enthusiasm for the format

John Deakin: the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene

20 April 2024 9:00 am

The photographer never attempted to show anyone in a good light, making his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho habitués look like dress rehearsals for morgue shots

The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter

6 April 2024 9:00 am

This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first,…

No one should trust the camera in the age of AI

28 October 2023 9:00 am

Bryan Appleyard on photographic manipulation, past and present

The stuff of nightmares: Retrievals podcast reviewed

22 July 2023 9:00 am

It is the stuff of nightmares, or a queasily dystopian film plot. A woman is undergoing a surgical procedure in…

Huge, impersonal canvases designed for the walls of billionaires: Tate Modern’s Capturing the Moment reviewed

22 July 2023 9:00 am

‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…

Barbara Ker-Seymer – Bright Young Person in the shadows

8 July 2023 9:00 am

Though she photographed many society figures of the 1930s, Ker-Seymer lacked ambition and remains largely unknown – as she herself seems to have wanted

The woman who pioneered colour photography

17 June 2023 9:00 am

Hermione Eyre on Yevonde, the pioneering 1930s photographer whose colour portraits evoke a vanishing world

When Lee Miller met Picasso

17 September 2022 9:00 am

During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue…

Promethean grandeur: Maurice Broomfield – Industrial Sublime, at the V&A, reviewed

10 September 2022 9:00 am

When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper…

The beauty of gasholders

16 April 2022 9:00 am

Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders

Was Thomas Edison guilty of murder?

16 April 2022 9:00 am

In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris,…

Valuable reassessment of British art: Barbican's Postwar Modern reviewed

19 March 2022 9:00 am

Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…

Meet climber, photographer and filmmaker extraordinaire Jimmy Chin

4 December 2021 9:00 am

Jimmy Chin is part Bear Grylls, part David Attenborough: he both climbs snow, ice and rock and films other mountaineers doing it too, writes Theo Zenou

The art of seizing the moment in photographic portraiture

13 November 2021 9:00 am

A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits,…

Fortifying snapshot of the gardener’s year: Saatchi Gallery's RHS Botanical Art show reviewed

25 September 2021 9:00 am

Elizabeth Blackadder, who died last month at the age of 89, was probably the most distinctive botanical artist of our…

Hugely pleasurable – a vision of summer: Jennifer Packer at the Serpentine Gallery reviewed

7 August 2021 9:00 am

We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits…

A high-end car-boot sale of the unconscious: Colnaghi’s Dreamsongs reviewed

17 October 2020 9:00 am

In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…

William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue

9 May 2020 9:00 am

William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue

Mother nature is finally getting the art she deserves

14 March 2020 9:00 am

Exhibitions about fungi, bugs and trees illustrate the depth, range and vitality of a growing field of art, says Mark Cocker

The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge

18 January 2020 9:00 am

A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving…

Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot

21 December 2019 9:00 am

I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot…

The truth about food photography

2 November 2019 9:00 am

While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly…

A modern-day El Dorado: the Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, 1986

Sebastiao Salgado – master of monochrome, chronicler of the depths of human barbarity

5 October 2019 9:00 am

Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only…

Untitled #122, from the Fashion series, by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman – selfie queen

29 June 2019 9:00 am

The selfie is, of course, a major, and to me mysterious, phenomenon of our age. The sheer indefatigability of selfie-takers,…