BELFAST.- Belfast Photo Festival, the UK and Ireland’s largest annual photography festival, has officially launched, transforming public spaces across the city of Belfast and beyond into a living gallery with over 30 exhibitions from homegrown and international photographic talent.
This year’s ‘Biosphere’ theme transcends documentation and creativity, inviting audiences to experience new imagery, commissions, and projects that spark positive change in how we view and inhabit our shared Earth.
Five major photographic commissions explore the fragility and beauty of Northern Ireland's natural heritage. Made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund, they focus on Lough Neagh, peatland, marine areas, the wider Belfast Hills, and temperate rainforests.
As part of UK/Poland Season 2025, the festival is presenting ‘Metamorfoza’ – a compelling collaboration with renowned Polish artists Diana Lelonek, Anna Zagrodzka, Karol Szymkowiak, and the duo Dyba and Adam Lach, alongside Fotofestiwal Łódź. Supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, this series of exhibitions, events, and screenings explores the evolving landscapes of Polish ecology and society.
On 23rd June, Queen’s Film Theatre will host a screening of ‘Sowing the Seeds of the Wild’ by Dyba and Adam Lach, followed by a Director’s Q&A and the official programme launch of Metamorfoza. Diana Lelonek’s ‘The Centre for the Living Things’, installed around Belfast City Hall, explores the relationships between humans and other species through photography, living matter, and found objects; ‘Alternaria Alternata’, showing in Botanic Gardens, by Anna Zagrodzka, presents observations, and subsequent visualisations, of the matter that is left behind in the former death camps of the Holocaust; and ‘0169-8629 5223-01750’, by Karol Szymkowiak, documents the collision of parallel realities: the story of Lake Powidz and the neighbouring military airport considered a prime nuclear target in the advent of global conflict.
Toby Smith, Director at the Belfast Photo Festival said: “Last October, thanks to the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, we met with over 20 artists and photography organisations across Poland. The strength of photography, particularly photobook publishing, across Central Europe is remarkable and deserves greater international recognition. Curated under our festival theme of 'Biosphere', we’re excited to host these artists and bring their works to audiences in Northern Ireland and internationally.”
Olga Brzezińska, Deputy Director of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, said: “Photography, at its best, is not just a way of seeing the world – it’s a way of transforming it. The Polish artists presented at this year’s Belfast Photo Festival confront us with powerful, unsettling, and deeply poetic reflections on memory, ecology, and the politics of presence and absence. Their work speaks to our time – a time of planetary fragility and urgent reimaginings. We are proud to support this dialogue between Polish visual culture and Northern Irish landscapes, where art becomes a lens through which we can reframe both history and the future.”
Roisin Mcdonough, Chief Executive of the Arts Council Northern Ireland said at the Biosphere launch event: “Congratulations, as always, to the Director, Michael Weir, and his team at the Belfast Photo Festival. The Belfast Photo Festival is an opportunity for everyone – professionals, amateurs, enthusiasts – people from all parts of Northern Ireland and from all and every walk of life - to encounter and be inspired by the world’s greatest photographers; to see works that we wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to see, in this extraordinary way. I’m delighted to say that we have seen the establishment of a festival of photography that would be the envy of any modern city, anywhere in the world.”
An open-air gallery has been installed in the city’s Botanic Gardens and features a range of thought-provoking exhibitions, including ‘A Question of Balance’ (Elliot Ross), which investigates water inequities in the Navajo Nation of the American West; ‘Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home’ (Constance Jaeggi O’Connor), explores the Mexican tradition of escaramuza, all-female, precision horse riding, and the women who practice it in the United States; ‘All of Them Witches’ (Bego Anton), which recreates visuals of the witch-hunt in the Basque Country during the Middle Ages, based on documented confessions given to the Spanish inquisitors; and many more.
Meanwhile, the festival has announced artist Eli Durst as the recipient of its annual Spotlight Award for his project ‘My Children’s Melody’. The Texas-born photographer’s work investigates how institutional and invisible cultural forces shape human behaviour, turning his gaze on the youth of America where individualism is prized but identity is shaped by ritualistic belonging and social forces.
