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, with its claims to truth, trust, authorship and materiality increasingly questioned. The programme responds to this cultural moment through 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 what lies beyond current technological, environmental, social, economic and geopolitical boundaries.
At the centre of the programme is
“Camera Obsolete?”, a major participatory installation and exhibition inviting audiences to destroy, dismantle, recast or resist the transformation of obsolete cameras into new sculptural forms. Participants can use hammers in dedicated rage rooms or disassemble equipment in accessible areas. Alternatively, visitors can choose to adopt an old camera and return it to use, asserting the continuing value of photography as a physical medium in an increasingly digital and AI-driven image culture. Part spectacle, part critique, the project questions what is being lost, remade or abandoned in photography’s unstable future.
The festival’s Director of Development, Toby Smith, said:
“We live in a culture saturated with AI-generated and synthetic imagery. The question is no longer 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.”
Among this year’s featured artists are Thaddé Comar, with “How Was Your Dream?”, addressing new forms of demonstration and insurrection during the Hong Kong protests of 2019, and Vahram Aghasyan, whose “Modality” reflects on failed futures and the remnants of unrealised social ambition through unfinished Soviet residences in Armenia.
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. Belfast Photo Festival is committed to championing photography, homegrown artistic talent and global voices alike.”
The 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 are featured in a large-scale open-air exhibition in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens.
Among the winning projects are Thomas Holton’s “The Lams of Ludlow Street”, a long-term portrait of a Chinese American family in Manhattan’s Chinatown;
Valentina Sinis’ “The Last Butterflies”, following Kurdish women fighters in the mountains between Iraq and Iran; “The Song of Invisible Birds” by Florence Goupil, exploring pressures facing Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation in the Peruvian Amazon; and “Padre” by Marisol Mendez, a personal and political study of masculinity through a feminist lens rooted in Latin American experience.
This year’s festival also highlights Northern Irish perspectives, with work by veteran photographer Paul McCambridge alongside emerging artists from across the island of Ireland and those now based there.
At Digital Art Studios, “MSC Napoli” by McCambridge documents the dismantling of a container ship deliberately beached in 2007 to avoid environmental disaster, marking a shift from maritime construction to industrial deconstruction.
Golden Thread Gallery presents new work by French artist Frédéric Huska, based in Northern Ireland. Working with photography, Huska explores personal experience, time and landscape in “Traces of a Traumatic Future”, a series of black-and-white analogue images of Taiwan’s coastline 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.
