Identity, memory, community & environment at Photoworks Festival

Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams is the theme for Photoworks Festival 2026 as it returns to Brighton for its first live festival since before the pandemic.

This year it will be considering how identity, place, memory, community and the environment are interconnected, asking what it means to live through uncertainty while imagining or creating hopeful futures.

The festival addresses issues including climate change, belonging, resilience and social change and is directed by Louise Fedotov-Clements, with the Photoworks team and partners across the city and beyond.

Exhibitions presented in various locations across Brighton & Hove, from October 2 to November 1, encourage us to question assumptions, embrace multiple perspectives and think critically about the relationships between people, histories, landscapes and technology, Louise says.

It will feature artworks created by a range of artists – young people, emerging and established practitioners, each exploring subjects that include ecosystems, global and personal archives, forest restoration, ecological and social renewal, including interconnections between human and non-human worlds.

“Photoworks is long established,” Louise said: “Brighton has always been its home. It's a national organisation, a charity, and our mission is to make photography accessible to everyone.”

Obviously we are in an era where everyone seems to be taking photos on their phones all the time: “But we want to support people in making images and we want to help people be discerning in the quality of the images. It's about how we understand images. We have always been quite experimental in terms of what photographs are and what they can be.”

And these are questions which are “especially important in our burgeoning age of trying to understand what AI means. There is a huge amount of misdirection but there has always been misdirection in photography. It's just that it is really a heightened time for people now to understand the images they are seeing.”

Our understanding is encouraged through the festival through reading and making and doing and seeing: “The festival is an amazing melting pot for people to encounter a whole range of ways of working with image making. I think our future is really dynamic. I think we should be hopeful and it's our responsibility to make people hopeful. It's about understanding how to read our archives and understanding our role as ancestors of the future and it's also about understanding of ethics. We are photographed hundreds of thousands of times if you walk through a city. We can't control those images. We are documented in multiple dimensions, and that is good and also bad. There are many negative aspects to that but there are also practical positives.”

As for the theme, the idea is to explore the fact we are living in changing times, times of uncertainty in terms of politics and mental health and climate change: “There is huge instability around the world with the conflicts that we are experiencing, and there is a huge amount of misinformation. It's about how we navigate this period of time.”

The festival will see around 20 events in around 11 venues. Exhibitions and events taking place throughout October will offer a wide range of activity from conferences, portfolio reviews, talks, tours, workshops and film screenings.

This year, the annual publication titled Cosmophotologies, edited by Photoworks Annual Editor Diane Smyth, explores the festival theme through the enquiry into what kinds of worlds photography makes possible. The essays and artists invite us to think about photography as a cosmological practice, one that explores relationships between time, history, ecology and place. Drawing inspiration from Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, the Annual proposes that technologies are never culturally neutral. They embody values, assumptions and ways of knowing, while simultaneously shaping them

More details on https://photoworks.org.uk/festival2026/about/