A trip to the future: the best of Belfast photo festival – in pictures
Guardian Sta·2026-05-27·via The Guardian
Cape Town schoolkids heading home and rules for maintaining a long-distance relationship feature in photos exploring the theme of unknown futures
Laura Pannack’s Bus Stop, The Journey Home
Wed 27 May 2026 07.00 BST
Laura Pannack: The Journey Home
The Belfast photo festival returns for 2026 and is the largest annual festival of photography in the UK and Ireland. This year’s central theme is Horizons: Visions of Futures Unknown, which challenges creators and audiences to explore technological, environmental, geopolitical and automated AI boundaries in photography. The Belfast photo festival runs from 4–30 June at venues across the city
Florence Goupil: Luis Díaz, The Song of Invisible Birds
Crossing the Alto Madre de Dios river under a red sky caused by fires in the southern Amazon region. Díaz works for the Peruvian ministry of culture as a protection agent for the Mashco-Piro people, serving as one of the few intermediaries who communicates directly with them. Although some encounters occur with their consent, Díaz has witnessed how clearly they express that they want nothing to do with the western world – a world they see as one that only destroys
Evanna Devine: Exploring Antrim and Newtownabbey
Exploring Antrim and Newtownabbey is a series of four photographic commissions and a public photography competition unfolding across the four seasons. Beginning with inspiration from Evanna Devine in spring, the project invites audiences to discover the landscapes, history and heritage of Antrim and Newtownabbey through their year-round beauty, ready for the full competition launch in August 2026
Toby Smith: Camera Obsolete?
Camera Obsolete? is a participatory installation and public exhibition confronting the collapse of photography’s mechanical era. Audiences are invited to destroy, dismantle, repair or recast obsolete cameras into new sculptural forms. Part participation, part spectacle and part material transformation, the exhibition forces questions of authorship, truth and the erosion of photography as a physical, tangible medium
Lean Lui: The White Barracks
The White Barracks imagines a fictional island inhabited by girl cadets engaged in endless military drills, using allegory to examine power, patriarchy and the reproduction of ideology. Moving between fiction and documentary, Lean Lui asks what might emerge when inherited myths begin to fracture. The work reflects on how images circulate in the digital age, endlessly reproduced and stripped of context, shaping collective memory and normalising systems of control. Yet the cadets also carry the debris of history, fractured symbols and institutional power
Louise Desnos: Acedia
Acedia reflects on laziness, idleness and introspection as both a personal state and a quiet form of resistance. Through images of stillness, drift and everyday non-events, Louise Desnos explores time, doubt and the fragile line between freedom and melancholy. In many of these images, very little happens. Signs of time remain discreet. Slowness, embodied by her subjects, suggests both a search for freedom and a space for introspection. Acedia asks whether laziness is a form of renunciation leading towards melancholy, or a kind of wisdom and clarity found in stillness
Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli: One Bed, Two Blankets, Eighty-Five Rules
One Bed, Two Blankets, Eighty-Five Rules by Hess and Polli explores the shared rituals, expectations and tensions of a relationship through a set of imagined rules for living together. After meeting in Ticino, Switzerland, and continuing a long-distance relationship, the couple decided to move in together in 2023 and began a project about their shared life. The project plays with standards and ideas held, establishing rules for living harmoniously
Belfast Buildings Trust and Joe Laverty: Still Standing
Still Standing is a collaborative photography project shaped by Belfast Buildings Trust, Belfast photo festival and Joe Laverty for Creative Belfast, a partnership programme creating paid skills opportunities for young people across Belfast’s cultural and heritage sectors. Alongside leading the workshops, Laverty has his own photographic response to Belfast, with his long-standing interest in place, marginal spaces and the quiet tensions of the built environment into dialogue with the perspectives of participants across generations
Valentina Sinis: The Last Butterflies
The Last Butterflies follows female Kurdish guerrillas training in the mountains between Iraq and Iran, examining militancy, sacrifice and political belief. Beyond combat alone, Sinis looks at how armed struggle intersects with gender, truth, solidarity and survival. Many of the women come from Kurdish regions of Iran and belong to the Kurdistan Free Life party, while the Women’s Protection Forces form an all-female unit within that movement
Laura Pannack: Bus Stop, The Journey Home
Pannack’s The Journey Home explores the daily walk to and from school in Cape Town’s gang-governed Cape Flats, where the threat of violence shapes ordinary childhood routines. Made collaboratively with young participants, the work offers an intimate portrait of adolescence, danger and resilience. Making our way home from school is a simple and widely shared ritual. Yet in South Africa, a country marked by deep social divides, this daily journey can carry very different realities, as young people navigate the daily threat of gang crossfire
Thomas Holton: The Lams of Ludlow Street
The Lams of Ludlow Street is the long-term photographic portrait of a Chinese American family living in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Over more than two decades, Thomas Holton has used the work to move beyond stereotype and build a deeper understanding of family, identity and belonging
Thaddé Comar: How Was Your Dream?
How Was Your Dream? Is a documentary photographic project created during the Hong Kong protests between June and October 2019. The work addresses new forms of demonstration and insurrection in an era shaped by increasingly seamless systems of control. The title refers to a phrase used by demonstrators to speak discreetly about their experiences of protest
Vahram Aghasyan: Modality
Modality presents Armenian artist Vahram Aghasyan’s images of unfinished Soviet residential buildings suspended within a snow-covered Armenian landscape. Construction began in 1988 as part of a planned urban development intended to house people displaced by an earthquake, but the project was never completed. Photographed in 2008, and still unchanged decades later, these structures remain suspended between intention and realisation. The work therefore reflects on interruption, failed futures and the lingering presence of unrealised social ambition
Paul McCambridge: MSC Napoli
In 2007, the UK container ship MSC Napoli was damaged in the Channel and deliberately beached in Lyme Bay to avoid a larger environmental disaster. This immersive exhibition by Paul McCambridge traces the aftermath of the MSC Napoli. The work reflects on labour, industry, salvage and the changing meanings of a historic shipyard
Alice Poyzer: Other Joys
Other Joys is a continuing body of work exploring the intensity of special interests through self-portraits, documentary images and constructed scenes. Rooted in Alice Poyzer’s experience as an autistic woman, it becomes both an expression of autistic joy and a call for greater representation. The feeling surrounding a special interest can be difficult to describe. For many autistic people, it brings warmth, euphoria and excitement. Poyzer began making this work as a way to communicate that feeling visually
