Margaret Howell’s intimate photographic practice reveals decades of quiet observation
The designer's personal archive of photography, made across many decades from family holidays to the Suffolk coast, comes together in a London exhibition that speaks to her enduring preoccupation with surface, form and the natural world.
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There exists a particular kind of visual hunger that guides certain artists through life, one that cannot be satisfied by intention alone. For Margaret Howell, the camera has always been a quiet companion to curiosity, a means of pausing when something arrests the eye. An unusual texture caught in afternoon light. The particular geometry of a winter landscape. The way fabric falls, or how a corner of her workroom reveals itself through shadow and time.
Her photography, she explains, has never been a deliberate project so much as a personal habit sustained across many decades. These are not images made with commercial purpose or curatorial forethought, but rather the accumulated evidence of a sensibility attuned to the beautiful and the unexpected. From family holidays with her children to the early life of her Blackheath studio, from the long, wind scoured walks along the Suffolk coast that have long nourished her imagination, each photograph bears witness to a particular kind of attention.
What emerges from this intimate exhibition is perhaps unsurprising given her life’s work: an abiding preoccupation with surface and form, with the tactile qualities of things, with the way nature reveals itself through repetition and variation. A leaf. Stone worn smooth by weather. The grain of weathered wood. These are the subjects that excite her, that prompt her to reach for the camera in those moments when the ordinary becomes luminous.
The exhibition at 34 Wigmore Street gathers these images together for the first time, allowing them to speak across decades and contexts. What they reveal, collectively, is a deep connection to the natural world and an unwavering commitment to looking closely. They reflect the same values that have shaped her approach to design: an appreciation for quiet quality, for materials understood in their essence, for form that serves function without pretence.
A selection of these photographs will also form the foundation of the Margaret Howell Calendar 2027, bringing this private visual language into a format that extends the conversation between observation and living. To encounter these images is to understand that for Howell, the camera has simply been another tool in a lifelong practice of noticing, of capturing those moments when the world reveals something of itself that cannot be unseen.
Imagery courtesy of Margaret Howell (@margarethowellltd).