Radioactive trees to fighting fish: Photoworks festival 2026 captures a world of instability
This year's Photoworks festival gathers photography exploring the theme 'Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams', from origami cats to searing images from the war in Ukraine.
Written by EGazette’s AI. The facts are drawn from cited sources; the analysis is the AI’s own.
The 2026 edition of the Photoworks festival brings together a wide-ranging collection of photography under the theme "Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams", presenting work that spans from playful and surreal imagery to unflinching documentation of conflict and hardship.
Among the works featured in this year's selection are images built around origami cats, offering a lighter, more whimsical counterpoint to some of the festival's heavier subject matter, alongside photography documenting the lives and work of Ecuadorian midwives, giving visibility to a profession and community rarely covered in mainstream photojournalism.
Documenting instability
The festival's selection also includes painful images from the war in Ukraine, continuing a now years-long tradition among photography festivals of using the medium to document the human cost of the conflict. The juxtaposition of such starkly different bodies of work under a single unifying theme reflects the festival's stated ambition to explore instability in its many forms — geographic, emotional and psychological.
Photoworks, a long-running platform for contemporary photography, has built its 2026 programme around the idea that instability, whether in landscapes, personal anxieties or collective dreams, is a defining condition of the present moment. The breadth of subject matter on display, from intimate portraiture to reportage from active conflict zones, underlines the festival's attempt to capture that instability from multiple, often contrasting, perspectives.
As in previous years, the festival's programme is intended to give a platform to photographers working across a range of styles and geographies, offering audiences a snapshot of contemporary photographic practice built around a shared thematic thread rather than a single genre or region.
Sources
- Radioactive trees to fighting fish: the best of Photoworks festival 2026 – in pictures — The Guardian — Culture
EGazette summarizes reporting from multiple sources; follow the links for the originals.
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