Belfast Photo Festival 2025

Fragility & beauty of NI’s natural heritage visualised in Belfast Photo Festival ‘Biosphere’ edition.
Five diverse projects go on display across NI as part of the festival’s 2025 edition.
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23.05.2025: As part of the 2025 Belfast Photo Festival, five diverse photographers have collaborated with conservation groups and local communities across Northern Ireland to visualise the fragility and beauty of our natural heritage, with focus on Lough Neagh, peatland, marine areas, the wider Belfast Hills, and temperate rainforests.

Visualising Northern Ireland’s Natural Heritage is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, these new co-curated narratives and photographic works are being showcased and discussed across ten exhibitions and more than twelve events in Belfast and throughout Northern Ireland as part of this year’s festival.

From 05-30 June, the festival will animate public spaces in Belfast and beyond with exhibitions from a host of local and international visual artists, alongside a programme of partner exhibitions, talks, workshops, and screenings. This year’s festival, which is also supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Fluxus, and Alexander Boyd Displays, invites viewers to explore new imagery, commissions, and projects that spark positive change in how we view and inhabit our shared Earth.

Hill Pictures by Polly Garnett, exhibited at Divis Barn and the Botanic Gardens, documents the long-term conservation of the Belfast hills and our interaction with them. Collaborating with the Belfast Hills Partnership, the National Trust and its ranger team, Garnett led polaroid workshops with youth groups accessing the area.

Shallow Waters by Joe Laverty, which is on display at Antrim Lough Shore and on digital billboards across Belfast, explores how myth and tradition coexist with the heavy industry surrounding Lough Neagh through a photographic study of its landscape, people and practices. Supported, inspired, and at times challenged by local communities, academic researchers and journalists, Laverty traced the tensions between cultural heritage and environmental degradation around a body of water facing multiple threats and systemic neglect.

The Ocean Within by Yvette Monahan, displayed at Donegal Quays in Belfast and on the North Coast, close to the AFBI research station, scientists and production partners to the work, explores the hidden roles of fish as biological timekeepers and storytellers, embodying a collective memory of the water world.

Bog Story by Chad Alexander, displayed in An Creagán community centre in Omagh and Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, traces the historical and contemporary landscape of peatlands in and around the Sperrins, a designated area of outstanding natural beauty. His exploration delves into the cultural and environmental significance of bogs, examining the personal, economic and mythical relationships between people and land.

Narrow Valley by Helio León captures a protected area of temperate rainforest that endures with minimal human interference: trees are left to die, to fall and to nourish the forest floor in a continuous cycle of decay and regeneration. Using alternative photographic processes which involved washing and bleaching his exposed film in the River Glenarm, León has produced large abstract prints on fabric which will be displayed in theTropical Ravine at Botanic Gardens.

Elsewhere, as part of UK/Poland Season 2025, the festival, with support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute, and the British Council, will present a series of exhibitions by Polish artists, including The Centre for the Living Things by Diana Lelonek, which explores the relationships between humans and other species through photography, living matter, and found objects, Alternaria Alternata by Anna Zagrodzka, a body of work presenting 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, which 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.

Throughout June, Botanic Gardens will be transformed into a festival hub where a series of open-air exhibitions will be on display alongside the festival’s photobook library drawn from its Open Submission initiative which celebrates the most current and compelling photography publishing from 18 countries around the world.

Alongside the reveal of the 2025 programme, the festival has also 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.

Belfast Photo Festival runs from 05–30 June. For more information, visit belfastphotofestival.com.