A medium scattered across the city

Painting has its great rooms; sculpture has its plinths; photography in London has a scattered set of homes. There is no single building you can point to and say this is where photography lives, which is both the medium's problem and its strength — you can spend a day moving between a Soho townhouse, a museum's free rooms and a Mayfair dealer without ever repeating the experience.

The map below runs from the most reliable single venue to the free museum rooms to the commercial galleries, with the big ticketed shows at the end. Nothing on it costs more than a cinema ticket, and most of it is free.

The closest thing photography has to a home is the Photographers' Gallery at 16–18 Ramillies Street in Soho, founded in 1971 as the first public gallery in Britain devoted to the medium. The building, a converted office block, holds five floors of exhibition space and a bookshop that is itself worth the visit.

The ground-floor space is free, and the ticketed shows upstairs — around £8 for adults — cover everything from historical surveys to new commissions. The gallery opens Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 18:00 and Sunday from 11:00 to 18:00, and its programme is the most reliable photography calendar in the country.

The free rooms in the big museums

Some of the best photography in London is free, tucked into museums you are probably visiting anyway. The V&A's Photography Centre — a suite of galleries devoted to the medium, opened in 2018 and extended since — draws on one of the world's great photography collections, and entry is free.

Tate Modern's permanent displays include photography in its collection hangs, free to view, and the National Portrait Gallery's photography galleries are free too. Together these three rooms give you more serious photography than any ticketed show in the city, and none of them will cost you a penny.

The dealers: Michael Hoppen and Atlas

The commercial end of photography lives mostly in Chelsea and Mayfair, in galleries that treat photographs as art objects with prices to match. Michael Hoppen Gallery in Chelsea specialises in both historical and contemporary photography, while Atlas Gallery in Marylebone deals in the big names of the twentieth century — and both are free to enter and happy to see browsers.

The shows in these rooms are small and change often, and they offer the best way to see photography at the quality level the museums hoard. Prices are rarely displayed, but no one will pressure you; the photography dealer's patient courtesy is one of the nicer rituals of the London art world.

The big ticketed shows

For the blockbuster end of photography, the venues are the Barbican, the Hayward and the festival Photo London, held each spring at Somerset House. The Barbican's photography exhibitions — around £15 for adults — have set the standard for museum-scale surveys, and Photo London turns the courtyard into a marketplace of the medium's best galleries.

The ticketed shows are worth planning around, but they are not where you should start. See the free rooms first; the big shows are for when you already know what you like.

Practical notes

A practical loop: start at the Photographers' Gallery in Soho, then cross town to the National Portrait Gallery's free photography rooms, then Tate Modern's free displays, then the V&A's Photography Centre — the first is the only one that charges, and the whole route can be done in a day on foot and the Underground.

For the dealer route, do Michael Hoppen in Chelsea and Atlas in Marylebone on a weekday, when the rooms are quiet. Photography rewards close viewing, so give each room the time you would give a painting — the work is usually smaller, and the details are the point.