Open Doors Gallery

Home
United Kingdom
London
Open Doors Gallery

Championing emerging photographic artists Founded in 2017, OPEN DOORS GALLERY is a global platform for contemporary photographic artists.

The gallery aims to give the world’s best emerging talent an opportunity to reach new audiences, and works with a very broad range of artists. From unique collage and sculptural artworks to dark room creations, landscapes, portrait and street artists. As well as representing the developing careers of several award winning photographic artists, OPEN DOORS believes in making art accessible, affordab

le and obtainable. We aim to surprise people by challenging what they believe photographic art to be whilst also respecting the more traditional photographic methods. Art is for all and our aim is to show art lovers that photography is the perfect medium to explore and to collect. Open Doors has a strong presence online () choosing to showcase a wide variety of styles from beyond our family of represented artists. Hoping to broaden people’s understanding of the medium. Whilst the digital side is important, we also believe wholeheartedly in the value of seeing and experiencing these artworks up close through our programme of exhibitions and art fairs that we host and participate in throughout the year.

02/06/2026

Identification, 1973 | Karel Miler

Karel Miler [b. 1940] was at the core of Czech action art in the 1970s, a movement in which the deed or event, rather than any permanent object, is the artwork. Coming from visual poetry, Miler turned to the body in 1971 as another way to make spare, conceptual statements, staging quiet existential situations alone before a tripod-mounted camera; the resulting black-and-white photograph isn’t documentation of the work but the work itself. His aim was a kind of timeless poetics, drawn from an admiration for Zen and a desire to find the universe reflected in extreme bodily gestures. Made privately within a closed circle of friends under the political “normalization” that followed 1968, these pieces sit within the broader action-art umbrella (which, in the Czech framing, also folds in body art, performance and land art). They are distinct from Land Art proper, whose medium is the earth and the site rather than the human act. The two are parallel offspring of the late-1960s “dematerialization of the art object” rather than one being born from the other.

In the artwork above, ‘Identification, 1973’, a curled-up figure falls from a pile of prefabricated panels, reducing the body to a single, generalised gesture lifted out of time. It belongs to the same 1973 group as Limits, images conceived as a form of visual poetry exploring corporeality and spatial constraint, where you see only the beginning and end of an action and infer everything in between, so the documentation becomes a moment entirely out of time. The choice of austere black and white [when colour film was readily available] is deliberate, intensifying the meditative simplicity. There’s also a quiet local charge worth noting for collectors: those prefab panels are the raw material of socialist mass housing, so even as Miler reaches for the universal and timeless, the work is grounded in the concrete texture of 1970s Czechoslovak life.

— — — — — — — — —

OD Photo Prize | 2026
Opens for submissions from 11 June
Find out more via our website

28/05/2026

Carlotta Valente [b.1992, Rome] is an artist whose research focuses on exploring and experimenting with historical photographic printing processes.

Her work examines the relationship between photography and memory, emphasizing the material value of the print in an era dominated by fleeting and easily forgotten digital images. Her pieces act as “instruments of resistance against oblivion”, where time and matter become essential elements of visual storytelling.

In her series ‘Stones have always slept beneath the open sky’ Carlotta writes: I have been photographing and printing stones for years, a seemingly immutable subject that I find has a profound connection with the photographic process for some reason. Roger Caillois, in “Stones,” writes: “(The stones) Come from the beginning of the planet, sometimes from another star [...] I speak of stones older than life itself [...] in which a mystery slower, vaster, and graver than the fate of an ephemeral species is both hidden and revealed” These unmovable and almost eternal objects, silent witnesses of geological eras, come into contact with the ephemeral nature of photographic supports, establishing a dialogue between what resists time and what is inevitably consumed by it... Planets, stones, stars, rocks, sand, and glass interact with photosensitive supports, becoming images but also photographic objects that try to express their stubborn, but impossible, permanence. Just like stones.

Follow

This series was Longlisted for the OD Photo Prize, which receives over 1,000 submissions each year from photographic artists around the world. We open for submissions again from June 11th 🗳️.

Get submission ready!

15/05/2026

We are delighted to announce that Marisol Mendez has won the Salzman-Leibowitz Prize! The 2026 Prize celebrates the next generation of female visual storytellers, in honour of Annie Leibovitz’s book Women, and is designed to spotlight emerging talent at a pivotal moment in their creative journeys. Marisol’s series, Madre, is available to explore via our website and you can read the feature in the Guardian now [see our stories].

Work from this series is also on display at Photo London this weekend at Booth J17, Olympia.

Artist
🏆 Prize Winner

DM for more information

14/05/2026

Open Doors Gallery is at Photo London this week, presenting new work and new artists at the refurbished Olympia venue. Hopefully see you soon! You can preview our artists work above.

Booth 101 • 14—17 May
Kensington Olympia

We are also delighted to announce that Marisol Mendez has won the Salzman-Leibowitz Prize! The 2026 Prize celebrates the next generation of female visual storytellers, in honour of Annie Leibovitz’s book Women, and is designed to spotlight emerging talent at a pivotal moment in their creative journeys. Marisol’s series, Madre, is available to explore via our website.

You can find out more from each artist via the link in our profile and via our website.

Exhibiting Artists

rapaccini

magdalena &

05/05/2026

Philip-Lorca diCorcia [b.1951, USA] made the Hustlers series between 1990 and 1992. He travelled to Los Angeles and worked along Santa Monica Boulevard, an area then known for male s*x work, drug use and homelessness. Each subject was paid the amount they would normally charge for their services. The titles record their name, age, hometown, and the fee. Major Tom; Kansas City, Kansas; $20, for example.

“They were performing for me. I was paying them to perform. That was honest. Most documentary photography is not.”
— Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Although the images may appear candid, diCorcia pre-rigged hidden flashes in the environment hours before each shoot, choreographing the light to fall exactly where he wanted it. The subjects walked into a scene already composed. What looks like a fleeting moment of documentary observation is in fact a meticulous tableau, lit with the precision of cinema. These are not anonymous subjects either. They are named. Their fees are stated. The economic exchange is part of the picture. The viewer is implicated in looking.

The work was funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1989. When the subject matter became public, it triggered political controversy in a Washington already inflamed by the culture wars surrounding Mapplethorpe and Serrano. The grant was nearly rescinded.

The now iconic Hustlers series sits between documentary and fiction, between empathy and detachment, between the tradition of street photography and the staged tableau that would come to define a generation of artists working after him. Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and others all owe a debt to what diCorcia made possible here.

Sixth in the series, sharing the photographers who shaped the medium.

© Philip-Lorca diCorcia
odmasters contemporaryphotography

01/05/2026

“I began to use archival images because I wanted to try something more challenging, and to delve deeper into the meaning of an image. More risk means that I have to think twice before cutting the originals, and that is important.”

Kensuke Koike [b.1980, Japan] creates unique artwork by manipulating found photographic material. His approach revolves around using the assets within an image to create something new and contemporary. The process often begins as a puzzle begging to be solved, with each image setting its own unique challenges.

Kensuke’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world. Open Doors Gallery is the UK representative for his work.

Tournament Good Luck, 2022 | Kensuke Koike
Black and white inkjet prints on transparent paper and metal wire
90 × 70 × 70 cm

DM for availability
OR see our website
First exhibited with back in 2022

————————
Upcoming Art Fair
Photo London • Booth 101
14—17 May
————————

24/04/2026

Claudia Corrent | All’ombra simile o al sogno

The title “In the Shadow, Like a Dream” draws inspiration from a verse from the Odyssey (XI, 207), in which Ulysses, having descended into Hades, encounters his mother’s shadow. Three times he tries to embrace her, but she escapes: no longer earthly, but like a dream, ethereal and intangible.

The episode becomes the central metaphor of this project, which explores the fragility of images suspended between dream and waking, between visible and invisible, in that latent moment between the end of the night and the beginning of the day, when images are imprinted on the memory and sensations persist throughout waking life.

The construction of the photographs reflects this layered nature of the dream: the images emerge from chemigrams created in the darkroom, where light, chemistry, and chance generate shadows, abrasions, and material traces. These are interwoven with my photographs and others from online archives, introducing archetypes and fragments of the collective imagination.

The project thus delves into that intimate and opaque space that precedes awakening: a time in which images, still unstable, remain suspended for an instant in consciousness before dissolving, leaving only a trace.

Follow

This series was Longlisted for the OD Photo Prize, which receives over 1,000 submissions each year from photographic artists around the world. We open for submissions again in June 🗳️.

21/04/2026

Perhaps her most famous image. L’homme qui court, 1953 [The running man, above], photographed at the foot of the Garigliano Bridge in Paris. The running figure was her husband, the American painter Hugh Weiss.

Sabine Weiss [1924-2021] was born in Switzerland and moved to Paris in 1946 to apprentice under fashion photographer W***y Maywald. He taught her that natural light was a source of emotion... By 1952, a chance meeting with Robert Doisneau opened doors. She joined the Rapho agency and signed a nine-year contract with Vogue. But unlike many of her peers, Weiss worked in both worlds without conflict. She photographed Dior’s first show, celebrities, musicians, and the streets of Paris with equal grace. Stravinsky, Giacometti and Chanel all sat for her. As well as anonymous street characters. Often labelled the last of the humanists.

“What moves me in life is the loneliness of people.”

Her work was selected by Edward Steichen for The Family of Man in 1955, a photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York seen by nine million people worldwide. She continued working for sixty years, moving between fashion, advertising, reportage and street photography

The fifth in our series, sharing the photographers who shaped the medium.

© Sabine Weiss

18/04/2026

Marco Rapaccini | Untitled no.35 [Bird III], 2026

Artwork info…

101x73cm [9.2x6.4cm each]
100 unique hand toned cyanotype prints on Fabriano paper
Signed by the artist

DM for availability and to see a preview of the work we will be exhibiting.

Marco Rapaccini [b.1982] is an Italian photographic artist based in Rome whose practice explores the interplay between memory, place, and the passage of time. Drawing inspiration from both classical and contemporary influences, Rapaccini’s images balance documentary precision with a poetic sensibility.

Artist .rapaccini

See more work from this ongoing ‘Litorali series’ via our website or explore more on

14/04/2026

Josef Koudelka [b.1938, Czechoslovakia] trained as an aeronautical engineer but began photographing Romani people, their everyday lives, their struggles, and their traditions. Mainly in central European countries in the early 1960s, later committing to photography full-time that decade. In 1968, he photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, publishing his work under the initials P.P. (Prague photographer). Koudelka, who was anonymously received the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for those photographs, sought political asylum in England in 1970 with assistance from the Magnum Photos cooperative. His first book, Gypsies, was released by Aperture in 1975, and he has since produced more than a dozen publications of his work.

Koudelka travelled with a rucksack and a sleeping bag, never staying anywhere longer than three months. His subjects were the marginalized, the displaced, the overlooked. Festivals, funerals, wastelands, borders, ruins. The human spirit inside dark landscapes.

“What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.” – Josef Koudelka

Koudelka worked alongside Letizia Battaglia [another photographer shared here as an recently] in Palermo in the late 1970s. According to her grandchildren, he taught her how to ‘read a photograph’.

The fourth in our series, sharing the photographers who shaped the medium.

© Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos

Address

London

Website

http://www.opendoors.gallery/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Open Doors Gallery posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Establishment

Send a message to Open Doors Gallery:

Shortcuts

Want your establishment to be the top-listed Arts & Entertainment in London?