The Belfast Photo Festival celebrated its 11th iteration this year with the theme ‘Biosphere’, inviting artists and audiences to experience new imagery, commissions and projects ‘that spark positive change in how we view and inhabit our shared Earth’.
Displayed in traditional and alternative settings across the city, and further afield in its outreach program, the works transcend documentation and creativity.
Read: Culture Sparks Unity: exploring Poland’s vibrant cultural program
Since its launch in 2009, the Belfast Photo Festival has had a deep and positive influence on the creative ecosystem from which it emerged. This year’s Festival is very much an engine of collaboration between creators and curators, institutions and galleries, and between countries and cultures.
An important element is the Polish program Metamorfoza (Metamorphosis), a dynamic series of exhibitions, events and screenings that highlight the evolving landscapes of Polish ecology and society. Major photographic works by Polish artists Diana Lelonek, Anna Zagrodzka, Karol Szymkowiak, and Dyba and Adam Lach, are installed in key locations across the city, inviting reflection on how we interact with our changing environment. This is part of the ongoing 2025 UK-Poland Season project with support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute and the British Council and in partnership with Fotofestiwal Lodz.
Alongside the Belfast Photo Festival, the Docs Ireland: Festival of International Documentary Film also featured a Polish partnership as it celebrated another year of challenging, creative and unique documentary filmmaking. Docs Ireland this year partnered with the Krakow Film Festival (KFF) for the ‘Focus on Poland’ section to ‘introduce Irish and UK filmmakers to new ways of working with an increasingly important European film industry’. A delegation of Irish filmmakers and industry professionals attended the KFF in May and then the best in new Polish documentary came to Ireland as part of their ongoing collaboration.
A real highlight of the Belfast Photo Festival is Centre for Living Things, Diana Lelonek’s outdoor exhibition of large-scale photographs, boldly displayed in the grounds of Belfast’s impressive City Hall. Lelonek describes her art practice as ‘para-institutional’, emerging from fatigue with traditional institutions and positioned in opposition to them. She explores the relationships between humans and non-human species, offering a critical response to commercial overproduction, limitless growth and our treatment of the environment.
These arresting images reveal how abandoned objects become habitats for living organisms. They feature living matter and found objects to create interdisciplinary works that sit at the interface of art and science. The artist describes the objects in her photographs as ‘wild things’ because they no longer belong to people.
Just a few streets away, Karol Szymkowiak‘s moving photographs are on display at the vegan coffee shop Hustle. These new documentary works and collages address environmental concerns, as well as military and civil defence themes. Entitled 0169-8629 5223-01750, the exhibition focuses on Powidzkie Lake, the largest lake in Poland. It has been identified as the cleanest lake in the country and is a popular leisure and recreation spot. It has vibrant flora and fauna and comes under ‘a silence zone’. That idyll is contrasted with a parallel reality that unfolds nearby.
In 1953, the Soviets built a major airbase that is still Poland’s most immense military airfield. A few years ago, the Pentagon revealed a top-secret Strategic Air Command Nuclear Weapons Requirements Study for 1959. Among the approximately 2300 targets within the Eastern Bloc countries and China that the US Strategic Air Command aimed to bomb with nuclear weapons should World War III break out also stands the Powidz Airport. The target number was 0169-8629 5223-01750 and this gives its name to Szymkowiak’s exhibition. The base houses at least a thousand US troops and, as the base expands, more open space is lost.
It’s estimated that around 100 hectares of forest have now disappeared as the base expands, making Poland’s most loved lake a strategic military target in the advent of war. There’s also a beautiful photobook to accompany the exhibition. The monochrome photograph of the sandcastle stands as a stark metaphor for the nearby military base.
Anna Zagrodzka’s exhibition Alternaria Alternata takes on the elements with an outdoor installation in the vast green spaces of the Belfast Botanic Gardens. These works offer a visual reference to how nature transforms the traces of history, exploring the overlooked worlds of microbiology in buildings and objects, as nature seeps in and fills them with organic matter.
The works take on a much deeper emotional resonance when you realise these were World War II Nazi death camps. As you enter the Botanic Gardens, there’s a special display of photobooks in the Polish Photographic Publication of The Year Archive. This pop-up photobook library was curated by Fotofestiwal Lodz. It houses a fascinating selection of the most compelling new photography publishing from 18 countries.
Another highlight of the Polish program is the screening of Sowing the Seeds of the Wild, an environmental film made by Dyba and Adam Lach about the freedom of rivers and people, and the wildness that exists within us all. The film focuses on the terrible Oder/Odra River disaster in Poland in 2022, a mass mortality event involving fish, beavers, clams, crayfish and other wildlife. Over 100 tonnes of dead fish were removed from the Polish section of the river in this man-made environmental catastrophe that is estimated to have killed over 200 million aquatic animals.
Sowing the Seeds of the Wild follows musician Michał Zygmunt who sailed down the river for 40 days in his small wooden boat, observing the damage. Not surprisingly, the soundtrack features beautiful music mixed with haunting found sounds recorded in the wild. Director Adam Lach spoke about the film after the screening and then with guests to celebrate the official launch of the Metamorfoza program. Lach described the film as ‘slow cinema’ and said that his role as the filmmaker was ‘to be invisible’. The film was borne out of the anger and frustration that a year after the disaster there had still been no official response. The good news that the area has now been declared a national park was greeted with cheers from the audience.
The Belfast Photo Festival constantly strives to spotlight innovation and to challenge existing perceptions of the photographic medium. The themed exhibitions aim to promote positive social change and encourage open dialogue and shared understanding, helping audiences to reflect on both challenges and opportunities.
Toby Smith, Director of Development at Belfast Photo Festival, sees the Festivals as points of optimism. Writing in Photo Researcher, Smith says “what if a festival, a city or an entire sector of photography embodied the principles of mass protest, breaking free of constraints and truly letting images run free in the public sphere?” That ethos of optimism and running free imbues this year’s Festival and will be a guiding light for years to come.
The writer visited Belfast as a guest of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
