Photo London 2026: Gökhan Tanriover

Gökhan Tanrıöver is one of the most quietly compelling voices to emerge from the Royal College of Art’s Photography programme in recent years, a photographic artist whose work sits at the intersection of constructed imagery, autobiographical memory and cultural identity. Born in Izmir, raised between Turkey and London, trained as a junior doctor before abandoning medicine for the darkroom, and now based in Barcelona: his biography alone maps the kind of layered, in-between existence that his photographs investigate with sustained precision.

At Photo London 2026, in the Discoveries section curated by photo critic Charlotte Jansen, Tanrıöver presents Waiting to be a Flower Underneath the Fig Tree, a series of meditative, handprinted silver gelatin photographs that reconstruct a visual family archive from memory, story and inherited myth. The work represents a significant evolution in his practice: where earlier bodies of work turned the lens on institutional structures and personal psychology, this series reaches outward, and generationally backward, into the stories that shape who we become before we have language for them.