Tate Modern opens 'Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography' on 14 October, assembling around 200 vintage prints that trace Pictorialism from the 1880s to the 1960s — the most substantial institutional statement on art photography in a Frieze week crowded with competing exhibitions and events across London.

The show reaches back to Emma Barton, the Birmingham-born photographer who in 1898 published portraits of Dan Leno, the music-hall star affectionately known as 'the king's jester' after performing for Edward VII at Sandringham. Barton's The Awakening (1903), a carbon print restaging a Renaissance Madonna and Child painting, exemplifies the movement's ambition: photography consciously borrowing the authority of the Old Masters. Her images took direct inspiration from those paintings, and the Tate's hang makes that lineage visible rather than merely asserting it.

The exhibition runs to 21 February 2027, giving it one of the longest runs of the season and positioning it as more than a Frieze-week spectacle. Its chronological span — eight decades — allows Pictorialism to appear not as a Victorian curiosity but as a persistent international idiom.

What does the range of work reveal?

Alongside Barton's staged tableaux, 'Light and Magic' includes delicate landscapes taken in the 1940s by Long Chin-San, whose visual language is clearly rooted in Chinese ink painting. The pairing matters. It widens Pictorialism beyond its usual Anglo-European framing and shows photographers on different continents reaching for painterly precedents — Renaissance canvas in Birmingham, ink scroll in China — to argue that the camera could make art.

The lead image Tate has chosen to promote the exhibition is an untitled print by Lionel Wendt from circa 1933–38, now in the Tate Collection and purchased with funds provided by the South Asia Acquisitions Committee in 2013. Wendt, the Sri Lankan photographer whose work straddles Pictorialist softness and modernist experimentation, anchors the exhibition's claim that art photography's birth was a genuinely global affair.

Around 200 vintage prints is a considerable commitment of gallery space. It signals that Tate Modern regards Pictorialism — often dismissed by modernists of the straight-printing school as so much soft-focus sentimentality — as deserving of sustained curatorial attention.

Is there anything beyond photography this Frieze week?

Across town, the Courtauld opens a display of work by Winifred Gill (1891–1981) on 14 October, running to 20 January 2027. Gill was a key designer at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, the Bloomsbury-adjacent craft enterprise, yet she remains one of the set's many talented shadow members — accomplished, documented, and largely absent from the group's dominant narrative.

The display includes her exuberant watercolours for toy designs, works whose charm lies in their small scale and domestic purpose. In a week when London's galleries compete for attention with blockbuster names, the Courtauld's choice to platform a designer remembered mainly through her association with Fry and the Omega Workshops reads as a deliberate counterweight — an argument that the margins of famous circles can hold exhibitions of their own.

Apollo's editors, surveying the hundreds of exhibitions and events vying for attention during Frieze week, single out both shows as the ones they don't want to miss. For photography in particular, the Tate's eight-decade survey arrives at a moment when the medium's institutional standing in London has never looked more secure.

Both exhibitions open on the same day, 14 October, and both run deep into 2027 — a sign that London's autumn programme is building exhibitions to outlast the fair-week crowds that will first pass through their doors.