Peckham’s Lens: How Photography Became Britain’s New Protest Language

When the Frame Fights Back

The carpets are dirty. Not in the way of a student flat after a house party, but deliberately, aggressively so—stained with the weight of stories that refuse to be swept under. At Peckham 24, London’s most vital photography festival, the images on display don’t just document; they indict. A Ukrainian family’s kitchen table, still set for a meal that will never be eaten. A Congolese grandmother stitching her country’s wars into tapestry. A Palestinian skateboarder carving lines through rubble. This isn’t art for art’s sake. It’s art as ammunition.

And the timing couldn’t be more pointed. While the British Museum quietly scrubs the word “Palestine” from its exhibits—replacing it with the clinical “Gaza and the West Bank”—these artists are doing the opposite. They’re naming. They’re claiming. They’re forcing the UK to look at what it would rather forget.

The Museum’s Quiet Erasure

The Palestinian ambassador didn’t mince words. In a letter to the Foreign Office, Husam Zomlot called the British Museum’s decision to remove references to Palestine from its ancient Levant exhibits an act of “cultural erasure.” The museum’s defence—that it’s merely reflecting “modern political realities”—is a masterclass in institutional gaslighting. The UK recognised Palestine as a state in 2025. The museum’s panels, however, now read like a geography lesson from a Tory manifesto.

This isn’t just about labels. It’s about who gets to tell history. The British Museum, that grand temple of colonial plunder, has spent centuries deciding which stories deserve to be seen. Now, as the world outside its walls burns with questions of land, identity, and justice, it’s choosing to look away. Again.

Meanwhile, in Peckham, artists like Kristina Yenza and Lucie Kamusekera are doing the work the museum won’t. Yenza’s series on Palestinian skateboarders—kids who’ve turned bombed-out streets into ramps—isn’t just documentation. It’s defiance. Kamusekera, an 82-year-old Congolese artist, stitches her country’s conflicts into tobacco sacks, turning trauma into textile. “I have no idea how I am still alive,” she says of Goma’s fall to rebels in 2025. But she is. And she’s making sure the world remembers why.

The Climate Storytelling Gap

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the UK’s cultural institutions are failing on climate as spectacularly as they are on colonialism. While David Attenborough turns 100 and the nation collectively weeps into its organic oat milk, the hard questions go unasked. Where are the blockbuster exhibitions on the North Sea’s dying ecosystems? The plays about the families displaced by last year’s floods? The novels that treat climate collapse not as dystopian fantasy, but as Tuesday?

Peckham 24 offers a glimpse of what’s possible. Among the festival’s highlights is a series on the “invisible infrastructure” of climate adaptation—images of Thames Barrier workers, of council estate residents turning car parks into allotments, of fishermen in Hull hauling up nets full of plastic instead of fish. These aren’t the usual polar bears on melting ice. They’re people. And they’re here, now, in Britain.

The contrast with Westminster is stark. While the Conservatives backtrack on net-zero pledges and Reform UK calls renewables a “scam,” artists are doing the unglamorous work of imagining a future that doesn’t involve mass extinction. Lydia Ourahmane’s Venice Biennale project—a coin-operated light installation in a former quarantine island—feels like a metaphor for the whole damn country. Stick a euro in the slot, and the lights flicker on. For a while.

The Comedy of Avoidance

And then there’s Amandaland. Lucy Punch’s sitcom about a narcissistic influencer returned this week for a second series, and it’s as painfully accurate as ever. Amanda, the titular nightmare, spends the opener obsessing over a rival’s “authentic” content—while her own life is a carefully curated lie. The show’s brilliance lies in its refusal to let the audience off the hook. We laugh at Amanda, but we recognise her. She’s the UK in 2026: all performative outrage, no follow-through.

The timing is deliberate. As the local elections loom, the cultural conversation is dominated by distraction. Amandaland is escapism, but it’s also a mirror. The same week the British Museum erases Palestine, the BBC serves up a comedy about a woman who can’t even be bothered to feel guilty about her privilege. The message is clear: if you want real stories, you’ll have to look outside the mainstream.

What’s Left Unsaid

Peckham 24’s most powerful images are the ones that don’t need captions. A child’s shoe, half-buried in Ukrainian mud. A Congolese woman’s hands, calloused from stitching history into fabric. A Palestinian teenager mid-kickflip, airborne for a second that feels like freedom.

These are the stories the UK’s cultural gatekeepers won’t touch. Not because they’re too political, but because they’re too true. The British Museum’s erasure of Palestine isn’t an oversight. It’s a strategy. The lack of climate narratives in mainstream art isn’t an accident. It’s a choice.

But here’s the thing about images: they’re harder to ignore than words. A photograph doesn’t need a panel to explain itself. It doesn’t need a museum’s permission to exist. And in Peckham, at least, it’s winning.