Viewing Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey at Whitechapel Gallery

A highlight of Frieze season is Joy Gregory’s Catching Flies with Honey, on view at Whitechapel Gallery from 8 October 2025 to 1 March 2026, a richly woven, sweeping survey that traces over forty years of work by one of the UK’s most experimental and important photographic artists.

With more than 250 works—including photographs, film, installation, textiles and performance—the exhibition emphasises Gregory’s commitment to expanding what photography can do, as well as how we might see. Moving between analogue and digital techniques, Victorian photographic methods like cyanotypes and kallitypes, and contemporary media, it’s a riveting deep dive into the possibilities of the medium.

The show’s title, Catching Flies with Honey, comes from a proverb Gregory’s mother used—”you catch more flies with honey than vinegar”—and encapsulates her approach: art that is alluring and pleasurable but also quietly radical. Key works on view include her 1990 self-portraiture work, Autoportrait (1990) exploring visibility, erasure and identity through fragmented presentation of face and body, and series such as Women and Space, Objects of Beauty, The Handbag Project, Girl Thing, The Blonde, and Cinderella Tours Europe further probe issues of femininity, beauty standards, colonial history, diaspora, and what it means to belong.