Belfast Photo Festival returns to explore place and personhood

Belfast Photo Festival 2025: Reframing Our Connection to Land and Identity Through the Lens

Now marking its 15th anniversary, the Belfast Photo Festival—the largest photographic celebration across the UK and Ireland—returns with a compelling new theme: ‘Biosphere’. This year, the festival poses an urgent question: What do we owe the land—and each other?

In 2025, the event transcends traditional photography exhibitions, transforming public space into a site of collective reflection. The selected works examine the intricate ties between environment, identity, and belonging—inviting viewers to consider how place shapes personhood and vice versa.

Nature as Gallery, Identity as Canvas

A major portion of this year’s festival is centered in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, where towering 7-foot photographic monoliths emerge organically among trees and winding paths. As visitors wander the mud-lined trails, they encounter striking visual narratives that seem to rise from the earth itself—artwork revealed slowly, almost ceremoniously, between branches and trunks.

This open-air curation stands in stark contrast to the sterile "white cube" gallery model. Rather than stepping away from the world to view art, the audience becomes part of the environment—experiencing the work in communion with nature. Here, the land isn’t just a subject—it’s a collaborator.

A Global Dialogue on People and Place

Much of the work featured in the Botanic Gardens originates from this year’s open submissions, and the theme of human connection to the natural world resonates globally. Notably, several standout pieces come from American artists, whose cultural context adds new layers to the conversation.

Among them is Eli Durst, recipient of this year’s Spotlight Award, whose series The Children’s Melody confronts the complexities of American individualism. Spanning subjects from kindergarten to college-age students, Durst explores the fragile dance between conformity and self-expression. His images reveal how young people construct identity—not in isolation—but through the social ecosystems they inhabit. Family, community, institutions, and peer groups all play silent but powerful roles in shaping who we become.

Other featured American artists include Charles Ford, Constance Jaeggi O’Connor, and Jim Mangan, each contributing thought-provoking meditations on the landscapes—both literal and metaphorical—that define them.

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Why It Matters

By locating artwork in natural spaces and interrogating how land and identity intertwine, Belfast Photo Festival 2025 offers more than visual beauty—it provides a platform for global reflection. In a world increasingly defined by environmental urgency and fractured social identities, this year’s edition acts as a timely cultural intervention.

Whether you're an artist, activist, or simply someone moved by the poetry of place, the festival delivers a rich, immersive experience—one that reminds us our surroundings shape who we are, and we, in turn, shape them.

Belfast Photo Festival 2025: Exploring Identity, Memory, and Ecological Reckoning Through the Lens of Polish and UK Artists

As Belfast Photo Festival 2025 continues to unfold its powerful theme of ‘Biosphere’, the conversation expands beyond borders—amplifying voices from both Poland and the United Kingdom. This year, the festival doesn’t just present photography; it stages a complex visual dialogue on how history, national identity, and ecology collide and coexist.

“Metamorphosis”: Polish Artists Reflect on Land, Memory, and Military Imprint

As part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, with the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, a gripping curated segment titled Metamorphosis brings together five Polish artists confronting the impact of human intervention on natural ecosystems.

Among the most thought-provoking pieces is Anna Zagrodzka’s Alternaria Alternata—a haunting, research-driven exploration of how land absorbs and reflects the trauma of history. Using experimental imaging and printing techniques, Zagrodzka investigates the microbial life that now flourishes at the sites of former Holocaust death camps. Mounted on stark skeletal black frames, her work asks a chilling question: What happens to the earth when it witnesses mass murder? Her photographs don’t just depict terrain—they expose memory embedded in soil.

In contrast, Karol Szymkowiak’s work 0169-8629 5223-01750, exhibited in a quiet café just off Belfast’s main shopping street, offers a deeply personal, yet politically charged reflection. Using monochrome imagery, Szymkowiak documents the environmental consequences of ongoing U.S. military operations near Powidzkie Lake, a once-peaceful holiday retreat from his childhood. The resulting visuals capture a disturbing tension between idyllic nostalgia and the looming presence of militarisation—a sharp commentary on landscapes caught between past innocence and present occupation.

Together, these works form a poignant portrait of Poland’s evolving relationship with land, memory, and power.

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“Nationhood: Memory and Hope” – A UK-Wide Mosaic of Identity

National identity takes center stage once again in Belfast Exposed’s powerful group exhibition, Nationhood: Memory and Hope. This dynamic showcase brings together rising talents from England, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, each inspired by the fabric of their local communities.

Themes of race, gender, faith, and generational memory weave throughout the exhibition, with artists offering deeply personal and socially resonant narratives. At the emotional core of the show is Aïda Muluneh’s newest body of work—a series of surrealist, color-saturated images that explore untold stories from Bradford, Belfast, Cardiff, and Glasgow.

Muluneh’s visual style—immediately recognizable for its bold palettes and Afrofuturist composition—elevates everyday figures to mythic stature. On the exhibition’s back wall, 15 intimate black-and-white portraits stand like a shrine to grassroots leadership, honoring community members who quietly shape and support these cities. These portraits don’t just represent individuals—they symbolize resilience, solidarity, and cultural legacy.

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A Festival That Challenges, Honors, and Imagines

With Metamorphosis and Nationhood: Memory and Hope, Belfast Photo Festival 2025 cements its place as more than just a photography event. It’s a platform for urgent inquiry, bold storytelling, and the elevation of voices often left on the margins.

Whether it’s through microbiological documentation of genocide sites or celebratory tributes to community builders, this year’s festival invites visitors to reimagine what it means to belong—to land, to nation, to one another.

New Perspectives on Natural Heritage: Belfast Photo Festival 2025 Expands Its Reach Across Northern Ireland

For the first time in its history, the Belfast Photo Festival has partnered with The National Lottery Heritage Fund to support the creation of five newly commissioned photographic projects, each offering a bold visual exploration of the natural heritage of Northern Ireland. The initiative aims to bridge what Festival Director Toby Smith describes as “a crucial gap in both awareness and understanding” of the region’s most vital yet often overlooked environmental landscapes.

Unlike traditional exhibitions confined to gallery walls, these new works are displayed not only in Belfast but also within the landscapes that inspired them—transforming the act of viewing into a powerful place-based experience.

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Joe Laverty’s “Shallow Waters” – Where Folklore and Industry Collide

One of the most striking commissions is Joe Laverty’s Shallow Waters, which turns its lens toward Lough Neagh, one of Europe’s largest freshwater lakes. This vast body of water—often hidden from public access due to its largely privately owned shoreline—becomes the subject of a profound investigation into the intersections of folklore, ecology, and environmental degradation.

Laverty’s approach brings the lake back to the people. Using digital billboards across Belfast and exhibition water coolers filled with algae bloom, he not only visualizes the lake but forces the public into contact with its current environmental crisis. The green-tinged water samples serve as both a symbolic and literal confrontation with the pollution plaguing Northern Ireland’s primary water source—a call to re-evaluate our stewardship of natural resources and the cultural memory attached to them.

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Yvette Monahan’s “The Ocean Within” – Mapping Time Through Marine Memory

Another standout is Yvette Monahan’s contemplative project, The Ocean Within, which blends mythology, biology, and place-based memory in a compelling narrative positioned beside the River Lagan in Belfast. Adjacent to John Kindness’ iconic ‘Salmon of Knowledge’ sculpture (fondly nicknamed ‘The Big Fish’ by locals), Monahan presents a pseudo-scientific exploration of how marine life—particularly fish—might serve as living archives of time and space.

Her abstract images focus on the physiology of fish, emphasizing sensory systems and internal mappings as metaphors for deeper truths. Echoing the legend of Finn McCool, in which the hero gains cosmic wisdom by eating the mythical salmon, Monahan reimagines this mythology in a modern context. Her work positions fish as more than just creatures of biology—they are keepers of knowledge, capable of registering environmental history far beyond human perception.

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Reconnecting People with Place

Together, these new commissions act as bridges between memory, mythology, science, and environmental consciousness. Whether viewed on a digital billboard or beside a city riverbank, the works extend the festival’s reach—physically and conceptually—by integrating natural heritage with artistic interpretation.

By placing these exhibitions directly in the environments they depict, Belfast Photo Festival 2025 reaffirms photography’s potential not only as a tool of documentation, but as a medium of public dialogue and ecological awareness.

Exploring Memory, Conflict, and Belonging at the Ulster Museum – A Photographic Reflection on the Troubles

As part of Belfast Photo Festival 2025, the Ulster Museum deepens the conversation around place, memory, and identity with two compelling exhibitions that reflect on one of Northern Ireland’s most complex and formative eras—The Troubles. Through poignant photography and thoughtful curation, these exhibitions invite viewers to revisit the past not through confrontation, but through empathy, intimacy, and reflection.

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Bill Kirk’s Belfast: Documenting Everyday Life During the Troubles

On the museum’s lower level, in a tall and reverent space, Bill Kirk’s extensive photographic archive captures the texture of life across Belfast and Newtownards during the height of the conflict. Far from distant reportage, these images emerge from lived experience—Kirk’s photographs carry the authenticity and familiarity of someone deeply embedded in the communities he documents.

This exhibition forms part of a larger series by Frankie Quinn and The Belfast Archive Project, an initiative committed to “preserving, interpreting, and presenting Belfast’s vanishing photographic heritage.” The curation focuses less on headline-grabbing violence and more on the nuanced daily realities of people navigating conflict—bringing forward faces, streets, and emotions often overlooked in mainstream narratives.

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Akihiko Okamura’s “The Memory of Others”: A Softer, Human Lens

In contrast, Japanese photographer Akihiko Okamura’s The Memory of Others presents a subtler lens on the same turbulent period. Known for his unconventional approach, Okamura rejected the harsh, high-contrast black-and-white style typically associated with war photography. Instead, his images are washed in soft light and subdued color, evoking a tone of contemplation rather than chaos.

His subjects include iconic figures such as Ian Paisley, but the emphasis lies elsewhere—on everyday people, especially women and children, and on the landscape itself. Okamura captures the quiet in-between moments: the aftermath, the waiting, the resilience. This isn't just an exhibition about conflict; it's an elegy to the people who lived through it.

Having previously been shown in Dublin and London, this iteration of The Memory of Others resonates more intimately here. The local audience transforms the space—elderly visitors recognize familiar corners, debate about what's replaced the shops in the photographs, and share memories as if unlocking a collective past. This isn’t history from a textbook; it’s lived memory returned to its rightful place.

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Curating Place and Memory Through Photography

Together, these exhibitions form a powerful, place-based narrative that asks: How does our relationship with land shape our identity? And how does memory—especially visual memory—allow us to reclaim that relationship across generations?

By choosing to explore The Troubles not only through the lens of conflict, but also through community, routine, and resilience, Belfast Photo Festival 2025 offers a much-needed space for reflection. The thoughtful curation turns the Ulster Museum into more than a gallery—it becomes an ecosystem of shared memory, challenging us to reflect on the histories we inherit, the spaces we inhabit, and the legacies we carry forward.

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Published: 01 Jul 2025