Mohamed Hassan, Our Hidden Room

We’re celebrating an anniversary. In this 2026 edition, Getxophoto turns twenty, so we want to celebrate in style and take the opportunity to reflect on the long journey we’ve made.

To give you an idea of how much time has passed, around 2007, when the Festival started, post-teen pop star Britney Spears appeared before the world with a shaved head to protest against the media’s overexposure of her image. At the same time, the first iPhone was released, destined to transform, among other things, the visual codes of portraiture and photography. Smartphones would quickly go viral, spreading from the world of celebrities to the lives of ordinary people, also infecting them with the disorders associated with their overuse.

Mohamed Hassan, Our Hidden Room

Closer to home, just a year after the Vizcaya Transporter Bridge was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site – the first Basque heritage site to receive this designation – Deusto Bridge was preparing to open for the last time, marking the end of an era when large ships sailed from the mouth of the Nervión river to the heart of Bilbao. Over these two decades, much has changed, from visual creation techniques and the flow of images online to our region, which has shed its less-than-glamorous industrial past to become a photogenic destination and, in some places like Getxo, highly Instagrammable.

Anniversaries, like any commemoration, are powerful markers of time; moments to reflect and take stock, to decide what stays and what goes, which parts of our history we want to preserve and which we will say farewell to because they no longer represent us. Usually accompanied by rituals, anniversaries are a time of mourning and renewal, the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, the burial of the past and a projection into the future with renewed energy. That’s why, after a trilogy dedicated to PAUSE, PLAY, and REC, the theme of this very special edition could only be RESET, an invitation to reboot the system.

Gohar Dashti, Home

Karolina Wojtas, Abzgram

Mohammad Rakibul, The Blue Fig

Lisa Barnard, The Canary and the Hammer

Cristina de Middel, Snap Fingers and Whistle

Chloé Azzopardi, Non Technological Devices

Eugenia Maximova, Destination Eternity

Burn It All

In the empire of novelty, everything is constantly being reinvented. Every January, gyms hound us to change our bodies, and every September, some cool brand of cheap furniture encourages us to change our home decoration, since we can’t change our lives. The cult of the new is particularly demanding in the arts, driven by the historical rhythms of the avant-garde, the front lines of aesthetic innovation that periodically proclaim the death of one style and the birth of the next. The history of culture is a mad reset machine, a shredder that relentlessly spews out pronouncements of death or, worse, of wear and tear, obsolescence, or incompatibility with the present. And their counterpart: certificates of contemporaneity that attest to whether an artist, a work, or a language captures the zeitgeist, while others no longer do. As Rimbaud, the symbolist poet who revolutionised European literature at 19 (eat your heart out, Gen Z), said, we must always be utterly modern.

Mark Formanek, Standard Time

Phillip Kwame, No Place Like Home

Simon Weckert, The Republic Of Null Island

Alejandro Acín, El Último Lunes (using images from the Kutxa Fundazioa archive)

Tamara Janes, Copyright Swap

Yunping Li, 回家 (Huí Jiā)

The paradox is that culture is like a composter: nothing disappears; everything remains, even if it is unrecognisable or transfigured into something else. It is like the geological layers that create the landscape, the history of ideas and their forms is an accumulation of all the arts from all eras. Or a recombining game, like an anagram making many words from different combinations of the same letters. Some names and styles are replaced by others without questioning the foundation of what produces artistic validity, nor the idea of creation, nor the institutions that sustain its productive arc. As Eloy Fernández-Porta points out in Homo Sampler, the paradigm of surface cultural change would be two young artists, camera in hand, saying something like: “Culture? Look how it’s going under: let’s film it and upload it to YouTube, on a channel called Sighting of Great Thinkers in the Catastrophe”. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa put it so aptly in his novel The Leopard, if we want things to stay as they are, everything must change.

Getxophoto: RESET
May 28 – June 21, 2026 / Getxophoto International Image Festival
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