Recruitment for Open Program next year's edition of Fotofestiwal - who knows, maybe it will be your photos we will see in Lodz in June 2026?
Did you end up here by scanning the QR code from our print edition?
This is the right place.
In the presented issue we have shown a carefully selected set of photos from the 24th Fotofestival in Lodz. Here you will find expanded selection of photographs, including both official press materials provided by the festival organizers and original documentation, which we prepared during the event.
We wanted to present in print images outside the festival's mainstream communications - unpublished widely, not obvious. Here, meanwhile, you can see the broader context of this year's edition.
The 24th edition of the Fotofestiwal was realized by a team under the direction of the Krzysztof Candrowicz (Artistic Director), composed of: Marta Szymanska, Franek Ammer, Gosia Slomska, Kamila Golik, Justyna Kociszewska, Paula Strugińska, Patrycja Narozna, Joanna Karpinska, Mafalda Ruão, Martyna Walczak, Wiktor Szkopek, Tomasz Roszczybiuk, Magda Kaminska, Dominika Repetto Czapska, Dorota Schreiber, Ida Czajkowska, Ola Shaya, Jacek Laube.
Organized by The festival was the Foundation for Visual Education.
Co-organizers: Lodz Event Center, Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Art Factory in Lodz.
Major partners: Futures Photography (with funding from the European Union Creative Europe Program), University of Lodz, Heritage Lens, British Council (as part of UK/Poland Season 2025), Pro Helvetia.
Festival Center: Art_Incubator at the Art Factory.
Fotofestiwal 2025 - our choice, our pace
The premiere of the 48th issue of our magazine coincided with this year's Fotofestival. Now, with the publication of the 50th issue, three months have passed since that event. This is a moment too late for a "hot" report, but at the same time good enough to look back and, from a distance, grasp what really stayed in the memory.
And there was a lot going on.
Fotofestiwal in Lodz includes more than 25 exhibitions of the Main Program and the City Program, more than 30 exhibitions in the accompanying SpinOFF program, plus competitions, announcements of results, meetings, screenings, presentations, author's portfolio review (Photo-Match), films, talks, discussions, music, dances, curator tours, performances. And dozens of side events.
Books - lots of books. Slide shows, Photo Night, Ravekjavik Festival, workshops, magazines, publications, walks, city exploration. Lots of stimuli - not always easy to sort out, but memorable.
On this page we present an expanded selection of photos - based on official press materials provided by the festival organizers and an expansion of our publication from the print edition.
In time, we will also add our own photographic documentation - because you come back to this event more than once.
MAIN EXHIBITIONS.
Yorgos Lanthimos - Interference time
MAIN PROGRAM - SYSTEMS, BELIEFS, PROPAGANDA
Exhibitions that analyze the mechanisms we believe in and succumb to:
- Debi Cornwall - Model citizen - we present in this issue!
- Michael Sita - Stories of Poland
- Hoda Afshar - Language of the wind
- Máté Bartha - Anima Mundi
- Maen Hammad - Landing
- Salvatore Vitale - Death by GPS
Children's photography exhibition: Let's play with books -
is a bit of an exhibition and a bit of a playground - books and publications for the youngest from around the world: Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Dominika Czerniak-Chojnacka, Karl Čapek & Karel Teige, Claire Dé, Charles Fréger, Tana Hoban, Jan von Holleben, Eikoh Hosoe, Gabriele Lorenzer, Stefan Themerson & Franciszka Themerson, Jan Styczynski, Jaap Scheeren & Luke Stephenson, Martin Parr, Ylla and many others.
OPEN PROGRAM 2025 - Akshay Mahajan, Carlos Idun-Tawiah, Claudia Fuggetti, Emilia Martin, Hannes Jung and Massimiliano Corteselli
CITY PROGRAM - EXHIBITS IN INSTITUTIONS or places outside the Art_incubator
Or exhibitions realized in cooperation with museums and galleries in Lodz:
- Szymon Roginski and Andrew Strumillo - I don't dream. I don't feel loneliness. I don't have hope. And I am not afraid of death
- Niccolò Rastrelli - They don't look like me
- Anatol Krakowski, Karolina Jonderko, Tim Smith, Czesław Jan Siegieda and Michał Iwanowski - Here and there
- Dorothy and Louis Bohm - Six things that make a person happy
- Not by work alone does a man live- historical photography | Museum of the City of Lodz; curator Marta Madejska
- Sophie Thun - Secret Performance - under the patronage of "FOTOGRAPHY Quarterly" (the exhibition lasts until 20.10.2025 at ms1, 36 Więckowskiego Street).
- Anita Andrzejewska - Dancing Your Dream Awake
- University of Lodz 2 exhibitions -. Community Stories + Photo-photosophic activities: Sampler
- G.R.O.T.E.S.K. - the common language of Eastern Europe
- Exhibitions within the
- SpinOFF - More than 30 exhibitions in galleries, cafes, showcases and studios throughout Lodz. Often surprising locations, independent initiatives, local and international artists.
- Dominika Sadowska and Wojciech Leder, Anamnesis
- Ewa Partum - Change
- Konrad Kuzyszyn - In the Spectrum of Melancholy
- Katarzyna Serkowska - That sounds great
- Jason Fulford - Plenty of plenty - an installation in the historic YMCA pool (not available on a daily basis)
05 May 2024
Pretaporco (45), poses with his parents at their home in Kanagawa, Japan;
Pretaporco is a performer and drag queen who has been cosplaying for about 20 years.
In the photo he plays "Piccolo" one of the main characters from the manga "Dragon Ball".
15 May 2024
Pitan (33) poses with her three cats, her current family, in her bedroom in Tokyo.
Pitan produces costumes for successful young artists from the world of entertainment.
In the photo she plays "Nenekochan" an original cosplay, a doll with the appearance of a cat.
11 May 2024
Uta (19) poses with his family at their home in the city of Chiba, Japan.
Uta is a student and has been practicing Cosplay for 4 years.
In the photo he plays "Toshikazu Hazamada" a secondary character from the manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4;
He chose a secondary character because he describes himself as an introverted person not suitable for portraying a main character.
At Fotofestiwal in Lodz, as at other festivals and large photography exhibitions, prints of works dominate, so it is always with curiosity that we look out for the so-called traditional prints, i.e. analog, black and white prints, produced by hand in a photographic darkroom. Such an exhibition is (can be seen until October 26 this year) a show of Sophie Thun entitled Secret performance, organized by the Museum of Art in Lodz in a building at 43 Gdanska Street.
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Krakow, living in Vienna, she has been fascinated for many years by the nature of the photographic medium and the processes within it, especially in the photographic darkroom; in Lodz, she shows huge (in format) prints on traditional photographic paper, which are most often assemblies from smaller prints re-photographed and then enlarged. She originally photographs, for example, the interiors of photographic laboratories, their fragments, as well as museum warehouses and other less representative museum rooms, creating surprising compositions out of them. The artist also uses the technique of photograms with great freedom, which she skillfully combines with "normal" photographs.
An interesting procedure used in the Secret performance is to combine Thun's works with photographs (vintage prints) by Polish women photographers from the collections of the Łódź Museum of Art, such as Eva Rubinstein, Zofia Rydet, Jerzy Lewczyński, Mikołaj Smoczyński or Bogdan Konopka. Sophie Thun's works also often feature the artist herself, also multiplied. In summary, this is an interesting artistic proposal, referring to the many achievements and realizations of photography - and more broadly: art - conceptual, seeming almost to shout: analog still has great potential. Talk in the same way that all the melodies in the key of C major have not yet been written, surprising and fractious works of art can still be created in the photographic darkroom.
PHOTOGRAPHIC BOOKS (exhibitions and competitions):
In protest we believe - books from the Protestinphotobook collection
Jason Fulford - Stack of books
Photo books about Palestine
Dummy Award 2025
Photographic Publication of the Year
+ PHOTO-MATCH
