Thero Makepe

This June, explore the Biosphere as Belfast Photo Festival’s 11th edition transcends documentation and creativity. Experience new imagery, commissions, and projects that spark positive change in how we view and inhabit our shared Earth.

Belfast Photo Festival is a charitable organisation that curates world-class photography and visual art events in diverse locations across Northern Ireland. For over 14 years, we have fostered creative dialogue, local development, and financial opportunities through commissions, entrepreneurial initiatives, and global arts leadership. We take pride in our adaptability, innovation, and resilience, which has allowed us to continuously engage with national and international audiences, positively impacting communities both locally and abroad.

Akihiko Okamura

ONLINE PORTFOLIO REVIEW 2025

Belfast Photo Festival is hosting two days of virtual, one on one portfolio reviews with 35 Irish, British and International photography experts. Scheduled 20 minute reviews are an opportunity for photographers or artists to receive vital feedback, gain artistic development, expand professional networks and exchange critical ideas from an expert of their choice.

Belfast Photo Festival has recruited international photography and art experts for two days of reviews. The 35 diverse reviewers, profiled below, are interested in new, emerging talent and works and participants hoping to improve their practice whilst expanding their reach and network.

Diana Lelonek

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Centre for Living Things: Diana Lelonek
Belfast City Hall Lawn / 9 – 30 June 25

The Centre for the Living Things is the research pata-institution founded in 2016, in order to examine, collect and popularise the knowledge concerning new humanotic nature forms. All exhibits gathered in the Institute’s collection are abandoned objects, used and no longer needed commodities – wastes of human overproduction, which have become the natural environment for many living organisms….

Joe Laverty

Shallow Waters: Joe Laverty
Antrim Loughshore: 6 May – 30 June 2025
Digital Billboards and Street Level Network, Belfast City Wide: 2 June – 29 June 2025

Lough Neagh is the largest body of water in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It connects five counties and is often referred to as a county in itself. The Lough is central to life in Northern Ireland but also has 9% of its catchment area in the Republic of Ireland. It is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Europe, and it is dying in plain sight. A perfect storm of pollution, sand dredging, poor regulation, invasive species and hereditary ownership is leading to a near collapse of the Lough’s ecosystem, most visibly realised through the blooms of toxic blue-green algae in summer time….

Yvette Monahan

The Ocean Within: Yvette Monahan
The North Coast / 5 – 30 June 2025
Donegall Quay / 5 – 30 June 2025

Otoliths, or ear stones, and salmon scales serve as living records of their lives, much like tree rings. Each layer encodes the fish’s journeys, revealing the duration of their existence and the experiences that have shaped them. These remarkable structures hold a biochronology—a map of life experiences embedded and made visible within their physical forms. Their bodies carry a shared memory, telling a collective story….

Anna Zagrodzka

Alternaria Alternata: Anna Zagrodzka
Botanic Gardens / 5 – 30 June 25

Anna Zagrodzka’s photographs offer intriguing insights into the spaces and microworlds of Nazi camps. Questions of institutionalized violence, dehumanization, trauma, witnessing and commemorating victims with research, in particular work in the field of microbiology. Conservationist’s expert reports identify bacterial cultures, fungi and mushrooms in order to establish the most effective methods of counteracting these “enemies of memory” that seek to efface evidence of the crimes committed at the sites….

Sophie Calle

Beyond The Gaze – Shared Perspectives: Sophie Calle
Golden Thread Gallery / 21 June – 27 August 25

Sophie Calle (born 9 October 1953) is a writer, photographer, and France’s most celebrated conceptual artist. Her highly autobiographical, multi-disciplinary work combines the confessional and the cerebral. Her work, realised in photography and film, writing, performances and installations, is simultaneously emotionally wrought and clinically detached, inducing in its audience a furtive sense of voyeurism and intrusion….

Mathieu Asselin

Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation: Mathieu Asselin
Belfast Exposed / 5 June – 11 July 25

Monsanto’s dozens of Superfund sites ( large contaminated sites of high priority for the US Environmental Protection Agency ) across the United States alone are affecting hundreds of communities and their environment with terrifying health and ecological consequences. Monsanto® maintains strong ties with the US government, and especially with the FDA (United States Food and Drug Administration)….

Helio León

Narrow Valley: Helio León
Tropical Ravine, Botanic Gardens / 5 – 30 June 2025

There’s a narrow valley in the far north, where the forest is left to be, with minimal human interference. Trees are left to die, undisturbed, to fall, to feed the earth and the forest floor, an ecosystem of death and rebirth. Rosemary guides us through this temperate rainforest, and through her knowledge a history is revealed…

Constance Jaeggi O’Connor

Escaramuza, The Poetics Of Home: Constance Jaeggi O’Connor
Botanic Gardens / 5 June – 30 June

Escaramuza is a Mexican tradition of all-female, precision horse-riding teams that perform intricate manoeuvres sidesaddle at high speed while dressed in traditional attire. Escaramuza is widespread in Mexico and is now gaining prominence in the United States….

We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here: Thero Makepe
Botanic Gardens / 5 June – 30 Jun

This project explores Botswana and South Africa’s socio-political landscape through a personal lens, blending staged portraiture, documentary images and re-enactments to weave family history with national events. It is part of a photobook reflecting on the musical and activist legacy within Makepe’s lineage….

Parisa Azadi

Ordinary Grief: Parisa Azadi
Botanic Gardens / 5 June – 30 June

‘Ordinary Grief’ is a story of reconciliation, identity and longing. In 2017, after 25 years of self-exile, Azadi returned to Iran to reclaim her history. Spanning 2017 to 2022 the project reflects the tension between despair and hope, exhaustion and resilience. It is a love letter to a homeland from which she feels estranged and to the people shaping new futures despite the odds….

Belfast Photo Festival 2025
June 5–30, 2025 / Belfast Photo Festival
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