From June 12 to 22, Łódź once again becomes a charged arena for contemporary photography. The 24th edition of Fotofestiwal sprawls across more than 20 venues, from repurposed textile factories to public squares, each site revealing how image-making confronts the systems that shape — and often constrain — daily life.

The theme this year is precise: the invisible architectures of power, ideology, and belief. But the programme doesn’t settle for essays in theory. It moves between subversive installations, AI-generated experiments, archives of protest, and portraits of resistance — across Poland and far beyond.

 

Highlights

Among the most anticipated works is Jason Fulford’s Lots of Lots, installed not in a white cube, but in a disused YMCA swimming pool from the early 1900s. Fulford’s photographs, drawn from his photobook of the same name, sit inside the tiled ruin of a space once designed for bodily order and discipline — now reimagined as a site of reflection and mischief.

 

Jason Fulford, Lots of Lots. ©Fotofestiwal Łódź 2025

 

In Taiga, Polish artist Szymon Rogiński confronts the legacy of Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art by turning to artificial intelligence and shamanic nature. Blending AI-generated imagery with Andrzej Strumiłło’s documentary photos, he explores whether the algorithm can access the “incredible.”

 

 

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Rare Photographic Work

In a European debut, Fotofestiwal presents a solo exhibition by Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos — not behind the camera on set, but as a photographic artist in his own right. Known visual language in films like Dogtooth and Poor Things, Lanthimos reveals the scaffolding behind cinema — its constructed realities, rehearsed gestures, and curated chaos. This marks only the second time his photographic work is being shown, and the first time European audiences can encounter it outside the context of filmmaking.

 

Main Exhibition: Systems We Live By — and Resist

The heart of the festival lies in the Main Programme, housed in the Art_Inkubator at Fabryka Sztuki. The exhibition threads together global narratives that expose the frameworks of power we inhabit — from political regimes to cultural mythologies, from digital empires to divine weather.

 

Debi Cornwall (US) presents Model Citizens, a surreal document of fake American towns built by the military for training purposes, where civilians play insurgents and everyday life is acted out for the purposes of war. A former lawyer turned visual critic, Cornwall also screens a film and exhibits a second project, reinforcing her place as one of the most politically sharp image-makers working today.

Hoda Afshar (IR/AUS) explores an ancient belief from Iran’s Hormuz Island, where the wind is thought to possess people. Her series Speak the Wind reflects on landscape, myth, and the afterlives of colonial logic embedded in air and soil.

 

Salvatore Vitale (IT) dissects algorithmic colonialism in Death by GPS, where virtual systems of surveillance and control have replaced old-fashioned borders. It’s a project as abstract as it is alarming — and increasingly real.

Michał Sita (PL) documents Polish historical reenactments — ordinary people stepping into mythic pasts, blurring where commemoration ends and nationalism begins.

 

Maen Hammad (PS/US) shifts the tone entirely, with a series that follows young Palestinian skateboarders navigating occupied streets. Movement, here, becomes political.

 

Máté Bartha (HU) turns to the contemporary city as a site of alienation and structure. His flaneur-style visual diary resists order, finding meaning in unpredictability.

 

Open Programme

 

• Hannes Jung (DE) Hannes Jung’s photographic series Men don’t cry explores the invisible trauma of sexualised violence experienced by men during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Rather than attempting to depict the horror directly, Jung constructs a visual language rooted in absence, suggestion, and emotional resonance. His finely toned black-and-white images present people, places, and objects in heightened physical presence, yet deliberately evade clear interpretation.

 

Carlos Idun-Tawiah’s (GH) Hero, Father, Friend reconstructs the presence of his late father through staged portraits based on imagined memories. Working with friends and family as subjects, he builds cinematic scenes—carefully styled with vintage clothes, props, and warm lighting—to evoke moments of care and routine. Shot with a production team, the series becomes what he calls “photographic biopics,” blending fiction and memory in a personal attempt to fill an archival void.

Claudia Fuggetti (IT) blends photography with digital painting and color manipulation to explore the shifting line between nature and technology in her series Metamorphosis. Drawing on influences like Kandinsky and Monet, she alters natural scenes through chromatic interventions that distort perception. Her images invite viewers to reconsider landscapes not as static, but as fluid, altered entities shaped by human and digital interference.

 

SpinOFF and Futures: A City-Wide Unfolding

Outside the main venue, the SpinOFF programme stretches across Łódź, with over 30 independently curated exhibitions responding to the festival’s central themes. Among them is a show of historic photography at the Museum of the City of Łódź, and a solo by Sophie Thun at the Muzeum Sztuki, known for her tactile, process-based work that challenges authorship and reproduction.

This year’s Futures Talents — five artists selected as part of the European platform for emerging photographers — are given prominent space, alongside the finalists of the Open Programme, whose works range from intimate personal narratives to large-scale sociopolitical investigations.

 

Books, Protest, and the First Photobook Show for Kids

Fotofestiwal doesn’t sideline the photobook — it gives it its own pulse. Let’s Play Photobooks! is Poland’s first photobook exhibition designed specifically for children, an interactive, tactile space that invites younger audiences to touch, interpret, and play with photographic storytelling.

 

 

The In Protest We Trust exhibition brings together politically charged books from the Protestinphotobook collection, while a dedicated section highlights recent and historical photobooks on Palestine — turning the printed image into a vehicle of solidarity and witness.

The beloved Dummy Award returns, along with the informal brunch with photobooks — a casual ritual where publishers, artists, and audiences come together over coffee and conversation.

 

Ravekjavik and the Sound of the City

On the main festival weekend, Łódź’s industrial past finds new energy in Ravekjavik, a sound and music programme pulsing through abandoned textile warehouses. The collaboration extends Fotofestiwal’s interest in site-specificity — not only showing art in the city, but showing the city through art.

 

More Than a Festival

Organised by the Foundation of Visual Education with support from the Łódź Centre of Events, Fabryka Sztuki, the Ministry of Culture, and international partners like Futures Photography and the British Council (as part of UK/Poland Season 2025), Fotofestiwal has long been more than a place to view work. It’s where difficult conversations take shape — in images, spaces, and the systems they push against. Fotofestiwal Łódź 2025 doesn’t just present images — it presents questions.

 

 

Header image: ©Debi Cornwall