Photo Vogue Festival: Women by Women

10th Edition: March 1-4, 2026 in Milan

Celebrating Women’s Vision in Photography

The PhotoVogue Festival, the first conscious fashion photography festival to bridge ethics and aesthetics, returns to Milan for its tenth anniversary in 2026.
From March 1 to 4, during Milan Fashion Week, the festival will take place at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, one of Italy’s most historic and prestigious libraries—a fitting venue for a milestone edition that underscores the festival’s commitment to thoughtful, socially engaged photography.

This year, the festival embraces the theme “Women by Women”, highlighting the multiple ways women see, represent, and imagine themselves.
It challenges assumptions that women’s rights, visibility, and recognition are guaranteed, emphasizing how gains once considered secure are increasingly under pressure in today’s political and cultural climate.

Through exhibitions, panels, presentations, and digital showcases, PhotoVogue Festival 2026 explores representation as a site of power and resistance.
The festival asserts women’s right not only to be seen, but also to see, define narratives, and shape visual culture on their own terms.
Moving beyond traditional binaries such as the Male and Female Gaze, the program embraces fluid, intersectional, and self-determined ways of seeing, reflecting the richness and complexity of women’s lived experiences today.

In conjunction with the festival, Vogue Italia’s March issue will dedicate significant editorial space to the Women by Women theme, extending the conversation across print, digital, and cultural platforms.
This integration demonstrates the festival’s influence beyond exhibitions, connecting photography to wider societal debates about identity, agency, and visual culture.

“At a time when women’s rights and identities are increasingly contested, this edition of the PhotoVogue Festival affirms women’s vision as a powerful force in its own right, plural, dynamic, and free to shape its own narrative,” says Alessia Glaviano, Head of Global PhotoVogue and Festival Director.

The festival is co-curated by Caterina De Biasio, Visual Editor at PhotoVogue, and Daniel Rodríguez Gordillo, Senior Manager of Education and Community Initiatives at Condé Nast.
Together, they bring a global perspective to the program, highlighting artists, filmmakers, and thinkers who challenge dominant visual paradigms and assert women’s agency through photography and video.

Now in its tenth year, the PhotoVogue Festival continues to play a crucial role in celebrating and amplifying the voices of women photographers, demonstrating the transformative power of visual storytelling to redefine culture, identity, and representation.

Exhibitions:
WOMEN BY WOMEN
The festival’s central exhibition brings together 45 artists, photographers and video makers selected through a global open call that received nearly 100,000 submissions from over 9,500 artists across 149 countries and territories. Their works explore what it means to see as women, examining the many forms, perspectives, and lived realities that womanhood can encompass. Through personal, political, and poetic approaches, the exhibition foregrounds self representation as an act of agency and authorship.

Featured Artists: Agathe Breton | Alice Poyzer | Anaïs Kugel | Angela Cappetta | Avery Norman | Bettina Pittaluga | Carla Rossi | Chantal Pinzi | Clara Belleville | Delali Ayivi | Elizabeth Bick | Elizabeth Haust | Elsa Hammarén | Forough Alaei | Francesca Allen | Giulia Gatti | Hillary Foxweldon | Jana Margarete Schuler | Jip Schalkx | Keerthana Kunnath | Kiana Hayeri | Kristina Podobed | Laila Annmarie Stevens | Laura Pannack | Lexi Hide | Lily Dabe | Luisa Dörr | Magdalena Wosinska | Manyatsa Monyamane | Maya Inès Touam | Mirielle Rohr | Myriam Boulos | Nora Lorek | Ofi r Berman | Pretika Menon | Priscillia Saada | Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda | Rehab Eldalil | Rhiannon Adam | Silvana Trevale | Suzie Howell | Tara L. C. Sood | Turkina Faso | Vera van Dam | Youn Jung Kim

Patterns of Home © Nora Lorek

This Too Shall Pass © Kristina Podobed

Bellissima © Carla Rossi

Dhon © Pretika Menon

Where the Dream Rests © Ahuei Zhang

They Told Me We're Heading Somewhere © Devin Blaskovich

My friends are cyborgs, but that's okay © Ramona Jingru Wang

Girls and Their Rooms © Jiayue Li

A LIBRARY WITHIN THE LIBRARY
A curated selection of books and magazines invites audiences to deepen their understanding of the festival’s theme, offering historical, theoretical, and contemporary perspectives that expand the conversations explored throughout the exhibitions.

WOMEN IN DIALOGUE
A series of slideshows, videos, and visual contributions from organizations and artists operating within the visual sphere and sharing the core values of the festival’s theme. These projects explore representation, authorship, and visibility as tools for advocacy, cultural refl ection, and social impact, echoing the festival’s broader commitment to women’s voices and self determination.

FUTURESPECTIVE - IN COLLABORATION WITH VOGUE UKRAINE
This exhibition presents the results of the PhotoVogue and Vogue Ukraine Futurespective Open Call in the form of a slideshow, showcasing the work of a new generation of Ukrainian artists. Through fashion and visual storytelling, the exhibition foregrounds their perspectives, resilience, and creative vision within an international context.

Temporary Homes, Ukraine, 2021 - 2023 © Daria Svertilova

Brothers, Lviv, Ukraine, 2023 © Mykola Maychuk

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast

By Anastasia Samoylova

Publisher : Aperture and the Norton Museum of Art

2025 | 144 pages

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast opens a vast, quietly unsettling portrait of the American East Coast — one in which nostalgia, dislocation and transformation are sewn into the landscape itself. In this new monograph, Samoylova retraces the route pioneered by Berenice Abbott in 1954, journeying from Florida to Maine to revisit the places Abbott once documented, and to observe what has become of them decades later. Her images — in vivid color and stark black and white — reveal the tension between myth and reality, between promises of progress and the traces of decay or displacement.

Where once small towns and coastal communities had a certain stillness, Samoylova finds change carved into facades and roadside signs, into suburban sprawl and shuttered shopfronts. She frames these scenes with a photographer’s patience and a poet’s sensitivity — capturing abandoned diners, empty motels, decaying houses, ghostly intersections. At the same time, there is stubborn life: occasional portraits of people, wildlife, reminders that behind every sign of decline, someone, something endures.

Her book does not simply document physical places. It traces the shifting contours of identity, belonging and memory in a nation where the open road has long symbolized freedom — and where that ideal has become tangled with consumerism, environmental degradation, and socio-economic upheaval. Through Atlantic Coast, Samoylova asks whether the “American Dream” remains intact, or if it has fractured along with the towns her car passes through.

Reading this volume is to experience a slow, attentive journey — as a witness, as a traveller, as someone invited to reconsider what America has become. Her photographs linger, subtly unsettling the viewer’s assumptions about beauty, progress and decline. In its silence and restraint, the book whispers that memory, identity and place are fragile — and that every road carries stories worth listening to.

Lisette Model

By Lisette Model

Publisher : Prestel

2026 | 256 pages

Lisette Model presents a definitive exploration of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, whose bold vision reshaped the way urban life and society were captured on film. This stunning hardcover features over 200 reproductions, ranging from her early Parisian portraits to the striking images of New York streets that defined her career.

Model’s photographic journey began in Vienna and matured in France, where her keen eye for social observation developed. Early works, including portraits of idle elites in Nice, reveal her sharp sense of critique tempered by empathy. These images, at once confrontational and intimate, established her as a formidable observer of human behavior. After emigrating to the United States, Model brought this incisive approach to New York, producing iconic images such as the Coney Island Bather and the Cafe Metropole series, which juxtapose vitality, vulnerability, and the stark contrasts of city life.

Her lens captured both the glamour and grit of her surroundings: the bustling streets of the Lower East Side, the grandeur of high-society gatherings, and the nuanced everyday gestures that reveal the inner lives of her subjects. Model’s distinctive framing, bold compositions, and unflinching attention to human detail created a visual language that remains influential to this day.

This collection also includes lesser-known works from her travels along the U.S. West Coast and Venezuela, highlighting her continued exploration of character, form, and place. Insights from scholar Walter Moser contextualize her work within the broader trajectory of twentieth-century photography, illuminating her enduring impact as both an artist and a teacher.

Lisette Model is more than a retrospective; it is an immersive journey into a world seen through a lens of unvarnished reality and poetic observation. It celebrates a photographer whose fearless engagement with her subjects, combined with her artistic rigor, forged a path for generations of street and documentary photographers, offering an essential resource for enthusiasts and scholars alike.

All About Lisette Model

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy

By Fred Herzog

Publisher : Hatje Cantz

2026 | 144 pages

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy opens a fresh chapter on the streets of Vancouver and beyond, offering the public previously unseen images from the archives of a man whose eye for color and life defied the conventions of his time. Herzog’s work in the 1950s and 60s stands out because he chose Kodachrome — a decision nearly heretical when art photography still equated seriousness with black and white. What emerges through his Leica’s lens is a world awash in warm reds, neon signs, and the soft glow of streetlights — a world that feels alive, tactile, and tender.

After emigrating from Germany to Vancouver in 1953 and working by day as a medical photographer, Herzog spent his evenings and weekends roaming the city streets. He captured storefronts, everyday people going about their lives, second-hand shops, Chinatown alleys, decaying cars, neon reflections — details often overlooked, but rich with character. He treated photography not as artifice but as observation, documenting modern urban life with precision and empathy. His photographs turned ordinary city scenes into a tribute to human presence and urban texture.

The volume collects these rediscovered gems alongside his best-known photos, offering a more complete portrait of a photographer who stubbornly trusted color when many of his peers turned away. The images span Vancouver and also trace Herzog’s travels to the U.S., the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, showing a restless spirit and a worldwide curiosity. Each frame is infused with intimacy, subtle humor, and a respect for the quotidian — light on one face, a reflection in a shop window, the curve of a car hood shimmering in rain.

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy is not just a homage to a photographer but a statement about memory, time, and beauty in the urban fabric. It reminds us how much of a city’s soul lives in small moments — a street sign, a storefront, a quiet onlooker — and how color, long seen as frivolous in serious photography, can reveal more truth than monochrome ever could.

All About Fred Herzog

Critical Photojournalism: Contemporary Ethics and Practices

By Tara Pixley, Judy Walgren

Publisher : ‎ Routledge

2025 | 226 pages

An essential introduction to the complexities of visual representation, this book offers a critical new framework for understanding and practicing photojournalism in a global digital context.

Critical Photojournalism guides readers through a variety of ethical, technical and business skills, plus the mental health, self-care and safety considerations necessary to thrive in the field. Drawing on their extensive industry and teaching experience, the authors provide real-world advice on how to navigate the demands of the profession while addressing the impact that photojournalism has on society and ways that photojournalists can mitigate harm. Consideration is given to understanding and disrupting implicit bias and power structures in newsrooms, as well as issues around access, working in breaking news environments and balancing informed consent with varying media laws around the world. In accessible language, this book highlights the importance of collaboration and community engagement in contemporary photojournalism and encourages students to adopt a decolonial approach to their work. Readers will learn to balance the needs for accuracy and thoughtfulness with the priorities of a global, social-media-engaged audience.

This is a key textbook for those seeking a nuanced introduction to visual journalism and/or a fresh approach to their craft. This book is supported by a website which can be accessed at www.criticalphotojournalism.com. The website includes a full-length bonus chapter on video and photojournalism, interviews with professional visual journalists, further tips and tools, and a glossary of key terms.

Photo Vogue Festival: Women by Women

10th Edition: March 1-4, 2026 in Milan

Celebrating Women’s Vision in Photography

More information about the Festival

Selected Books