Two frames are better than one: this new show demonstrates what the diptych can do for your photography

Few of us would ever walk around an aquarium thinking about pole dancing. But clearly, Los Angeles-based photographer Elizabeth Waterman did. The result is Propulsion, one of two striking diptych series coming to Photo London this May, and it might just make you rethink the most underused compositional tool at a photographer's disposal.

Albumen Gallery will present Waterman's work alongside Ancient Dialogues by William Stewart at Olympia from May 14-17. Both series are built entirely around the diptych: two images placed in deliberate conversation, neither quite complete without the other.

The diptych has a long history in painting, where hinged altarpieces presented paired images meant to be read together. Yet in photography, the format remains oddly neglected. We're trained to think in single frames: the decisive moment. Yet the diptych asks something harder of us. It demands that we think about meaning made in the gap between images.

Asa Stephan Schmid, director of Albumen Gallery, puts it: "Their diptychs act not simply as a formal device, but as a conceptual engine." In other words, when two images are placed side by side, the viewer's brain cannot help but search for connection, contrast or tension. The diptych exploits this instinct ruthlessly.

Analog approach

Waterman's Propulsion, which receives its world premiere at Photo London, is shot entirely on 35mm film. That choice is not incidental. The physical constraints of analogue photography – no chimping, no instant editing, no digital safety net – mirror precisely what she's shooting. Dancers whose bodies move through space with practiced precision, and jellyfish that navigate water by rhythm alone.

The pairing sounds eccentric until you look at the images themselves. A dancer's sweeping arm meets the trailing tendrils of a jellyfish; the curve of a torso answers the dome of a bell. On film, both subjects are rendered with the same grain, the same tonal palette, the same commitment to the moment. The analogue process collapses the difference between nightclub and ocean.

Waterman has spoken of feeling the same awe in dance clubs as she did watching jellyfish pulse through an aquarium tank: "Different environments, yet the same choreography of light and motion," as she put it. For photographers drawn to natural light, or to subjects defined by movement rather than pose, Propulsion offers a masterclass in looking for structural kinship rather than surface similarity.

The past in present tense

Stewart's Ancient Dialogues, meanwhile, works a different way. The Australian photographer and writer places images of ancient statuary alongside contemporary nudes, staging a visual dialogue across millennia. A bearded elder draped in red sits opposite a Roman river god from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. The resemblance is uncanny, and that's the point.

Where Waterman uses the diptych to find the universal in the unexpected, Stewart uses it to collapse time. His viewpoint is that the sensuality of classical antiquity, suppressed for centuries by Christian morality and academic convention, is still present in living bodies today. The diptych makes that argument visible without a single word.

Both series reward close attention from anyone who makes photographs for a living or for pleasure. The diptych format imposes a useful discipline: it forces you to ask not just "is this a good photograph?" but "what does this photograph do that another image could extend, challenge or complete?" That is a harder question, but it can ultimately be a more creative and productive one.

Elizabeth Waterman's Propulsion and William Stewart's Ancient Dialogues are presented by Albumen Gallery at Photo London 2026, Booth B10, National Hall, Olympia, London, May 14–17 (preview May 13).