Belfast Photo Festival 2026

Belfast Photo Festival explores frontiers known and unknown with ‘Horizons’

The 2026 edition of Belfast Photo Festival takes visitors towards new ‘Horizons’, a theme that positions photography at a critical threshold in an age of AI-generated imagery, automation and algorithmic seeing. This year’s festival returns as the medium undergoes profound transformation and its claims to truth, trust, authorship and materiality are increasingly being questioned. The programme responds to this cultural moment with a series of exhibitions and installations that explore the horizon as both visual subject and metaphor: a space of possibility and uncertainty.

Returning from 4 - 30 June in galleries and across the public realm in Belfast, the festival invites artists and audiences to consider and contribute to what lies beyond our current technological, environmental, social, economic and geopolitical boundaries.

At the centre of the programme is ‘Camera Obsolete?’, a major participatory installation and exhibition that invites audiences to destroy, dismantle, recast or resist the transformation of obsolete cameras into new sculptural forms. Participants can wield hammers in dedicated rage rooms or prise apart equipment in accessible disassembly areas. Alternatively, visitors can choose resistance over destruction by adopting an old camera and returning it to use, asserting the continuing value of photography as a physical medium as we move into digital and AI-driven image culture. Part spectacle, part critique, the project confronts photography’s unstable future by asking what is being lost, remade or abandoned. 

The festival’s Director of Development, Toby Smith said: “We live in a culture saturated with AI-generated and synthetic imagery. The question now is not simply what a photograph looks like, but who made it, what machine made it, and whether it can still be trusted. ‘Camera Obsolete?’ is designed to confront audiences with the pleasure, discomfort and contradiction of destroying physical cameras, a choice many creatives now make silently and privately when choosing to prompt images instead of make them.”

Among this year’s featured artists are Thaddé Comar, whose project ‘How Was Your Dream?’ addresses new forms of demonstration and insurrection in a documentary series created during the Hong Kong protests of 2019, and Vahram Aghasyan, whose project ‘Modality’ reflects on failed futures and the lingering presence of unrealised social ambition in a series capturing unfinished Soviet residences suspended in the Armenian landscape.

The festival’s CEO, Michael Weir, said: “We want people to experience photography in new and unexpected ways through accessible, free exhibitions across the city, whether that means gaining inspiration on a lunchtime break or engaging with our new participatory installation. Belfast Photo Festival is committed to championing photography, homegrown artistic talent and global voices alike.”

The festival’s long-running Open Submission once again provides an international platform for emerging artists. Selected by a jury including curators from MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, TIME and Vogue, this year’s winners feature in a large-scale, open-air exhibition in the city’s scenic Botanic Gardens.

Among the winning Open Submission projects are Thomas Holton’s “The Lams of Ludlow Street’, a long-term photographic portrait of a single Chinese American family living in Manhattan’s Chinatown; Valentina Sinis’ ‘The Last Butterflies’, which follows female Kurdish guerrillas living and training in the mountains between Iraq and Iran; ‘The Song of Invisible Birds’ by Florence Goupil, which explores the violent pressures facing Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in the Peruvian Amazon; and ‘Padre’ by Marisol Mendez, a personal and political excavation of masculinity through a feminist lens, rooted in family history and Latin American experience.

 This year’s festival also has a distinct Northern Irish flavour with work by veteran photographer Paul McCambridge showcased alongside other emerging artists from the island of Ireland and those who now call this place home.

At Digital Art Studios, ‘MSC Napoli’ by McCambridge documents the dismantling of the former container ship that was deliberately beached in 2007 to avoid environmental disaster after sustaining damage. Exactly one hundred years after work began on the Titanic, the hull was brought to Harland and Wolff for decontamination and dismantling, marking a striking shift from maritime construction to industrial deconstruction.

Golden Thread Gallery is presenting a new body of work by French artist Frédéric Huska, who is based in Northern Ireland. Working with photography, Huska explores the relationship between personal experience, time and landscape. This new exhibition, ‘Traces of a Traumatic Future’, features a series of black and white analogue photographs of Taiwan’s coastline, seen as places shaped by political tension and uncertainty.

Belfast Photo Festival runs from 4 - 30 June and is supported by Alexander Boyd Displays, Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast Buildings Trust, Belfast City Council, the British Council, Belfast Festival of Learning, Belfast Exposed, Photo Museum Ireland, Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Cultural Fund UK and Ulster Museum.