TOKYO.- T3 Photo Festival Tokyo, one of Asia’s leading international photography festivals, will return from October 3–26, 2026 with a preview day on October 2, transforming the urban landscape of Tokyo’s Yaesu, Nihonbashi, Kyobashi, and Ginza districts, where office towers, commercial complexes, and public spaces converge, into a citywide platform for photography.

Now in its eighth edition, the photo festival will host special exhibitions under the theme “&(と)”, exploring photography’s capacity to connect seemingly opposing forces and reveal new relationships across cultures, histories, and lived experiences.

Ihiro Hayami, founder and director of T3, describes; "This year, T3 turns its attention to the smallest of conjunctions: ‘＆(と)’. To consciously reconsider the meaning of a single word we use every day may seem like a small act. Yet it has the power to change the way we see the world, and the worlds of others.

I think of it as something akin to discovering a constellation. By connecting one point to another with “and,” we begin to see patterns and landscapes that were always there, yet remained invisible in our daily lives. The photographers gathering at T3 this year are, in a sense, people who draw constellations. Like Lucas Foglia, who connects the migration of monarch butterflies with the movement of people across national borders, they reveal unexpected relationships between seemingly distant things.

T3 itself seeks to draw a new constellation in Tokyo. By bringing together a festival and an art fair, connecting the worlds of critical discourse and the market, we aim to create a place where diverse photography communities can meet. But this is not something reserved only for experts. Across the urban spaces of Yaesu, Nihonbashi, and Kyobashi, people who come seeking exhibitions and those simply passing through may find themselves standing before the same work, sharing the same moment.

That moment, too, is ` ＆(と)`."

Exhibition plan

The festival will host two main exhibitions and more than ten special exhibitions. One of the two main exhibitions, Constant Bloom by Lucas Foglia, will be presented at Tokyo Midtown Yaesu. The exhibition follows the longest butterfly migration across continents, pairing photographs of Painted Lady butterflies with portraits of people they encounter. Tracing routes shaped by changing weather and political borders, the prints offer a hopeful vision of a delicate, interconnected, and resilient world.

The special exhibitions include Dutch photographer Sarah van Rij, Atlas of Echoes (tentative title) creating a site-responsive exhibition spanning indoor and outdoor locations in Nihonbashi. Known for her dreamlike images that blur reality and memory, van Rij’s work will enter into dialogue with Tokyo’s urban landscape and architecture. Following last year’s successful co-curation between the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) and T3 photo Festival, STUDIO + Expanding Contemporary Photography #2 presents works by British artist Antony Cairns and Chinese artist PIDAN. The exhibition examines how photography continues to evolve beyond the traditional boundaries of image-making into expanded forms of installation, information, and material practice. Another duo exhibition will bring together two Japanese artists, Nozomi Suzuki and Sayaka Uehara, whose practices engage with memory embedded in landscapes, exploring photography as a medium that reconnects past and present, place and experience.

The complete exhibition list will be announced in early August.

T3 initiatives

T3 comprises three core initiatives: the festival T3 Photo Festival Tokyo, the photo fair T3 Photo Asia, and a talent development program T3 New Talent. And the theme, “&” (と), will serve as a unifying concept across all projects.

T3 Photo Asia will take place from October 17–19, 2026, with a preview day on October 16, where galleries will gather to foster and elevate photographic culture in Asia. The T3 Talk Program and T3 Book Marche will run concurrently, further enriching the festival and the fair, bringing together artists, curators, publishers, and audiences from around the world.

T3 Talk Program will bring together leading figures from the international photography world, and develop the dialogue between Japanese and International photography from October 17–19, 2026. Guest speakers are;

• Florian Ebner, Curator of Photography Collection at Centre Pompidou

• Julie Jones, Director of Fotografiska New York

• Drew Sawyer, Curator of the Whitney Museum

• Yichen Zhao, Curator of the Department of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago

The T3 Book Marche will take place on October 17–18 during T3 Photo Asia, bringing together emerging artists and publishers for whom the photobook is a central part of their creative practice. The photo fair will present a diverse range of publications, offering visitors an opportunity to explore the evolving landscape of contemporary photobook and print culture in Asia.

Launched with the aim of discovering and supporting contemporary artists and curators capable of working on the world stage, T3 New Talent presents the exhibition Five Views at the Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris (www.mcjp.fr), from October 6–November 14, 2026. The participating artists are THE COPY TRAVELERS, Kenji Chiga, Mayumi Suzuki, Eri Minamikawa, and Shohei Miyachi. Each approaches photography from their own distinctive perspective, developing expressions that explore connections between thought, narrative, and society.

Florian Ebner, Head of Photography, Centre Pompidou says: “To understand contemporary photography, it is important to pay attention to which works function best on the wall and which find their proper form on the page of a book. The possibilities are becoming ever more differentiated: some works exist only in physical space, while others exist solely within the space of the book.

In light of the ongoing debate surrounding photography and artificial intelligence, what better response could there be than working with photography’s light-sensitive materials themselves, or with the complex narrative form of the photobook, together with all the original and idiosyncratic shapes such a narrative can assume? It is difficult to imagine that Robert Frank’s The Lines of My Hand, first published in Japan, or Daido Moriyama’s Farewell Photography could ever have been conceived by an AI.

It is therefore particularly welcome news that this year’s edition of the T3 will also host a dedicated fair for publishers and books, especially given the rich culture of the book throughout Asia. I am delighted to return, not least because it offers an opportunity to discover artistic works and books that one would otherwise rarely encounter in their original form in Europe—or have the chance to hold in one’s hands.”