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Bristol Photo Festival

Bristol Photo Festival is a new and innovative city-wide festival that celebrates the power and dive

26/01/2026

Bristol folks: is talking this Wednesday at a brilliant local venue! 📸

His talks are always special for their warmth and depth of knowledge.

See pic for Booking details.

07/12/2025

With a heavy heart, we mark the passing of Martin Parr (1952–2025), photographer, and festival board member. Martin was instrumental in shaping the Bristol Photo Festival from its earliest days, bringing not only his unmistakable sense of humour but also a generosity of spirit. His encouragement, and enthusiasm for photography in Bristol and beyond will be profoundly missed.

His extraordinary legacy stands as the strongest testament to a life wholly devoted to celebrating and questioning the world through pictures.

We send our deepest condolences to his family and to all our friends and colleagues at the

22/10/2025

We are incredibly happy to celebrate Amak Mahmoodian being shortlisted for the 2026 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize! 🎉🎉🎉

The 2026 Prize highlights themes of exile and memory; gender inequalities and advocacy; identity and belonging; subculture and class; and the shifting boundaries between photographic fact and fiction.

Amak joins a great shortlist alongside: Jane Evelyn Atwood, Weronika Gęsicka and Rene Matić

Amak has been nominated for her exhibition One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, which explores the experience of exile through dreams. Working with 16 collaborators who’ve been displaced from their homelands, Amak used photography, poetry, drawing, and video to evoke the emotional landscapes of memory, longing and imagined return.

We premiered this long-term body of work in collaboration with with a very special exhibition at Bristol Photo Festival last year. We can't wait to see this great project shown again in the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery from March 2026.

matic

13/02/2025

Thanks .houghton8 and
For the review of One Hundred Twenty Minutes by at part of the festival.

with .repost
• • • • • •

Spread across four floors of a Bristol townhouse, Amak Mahmoodian’s recent One Hundred and Twenty Minutes exhibition transforms the space into a chronotopia, writes Max Houghton – where many times, places and stories co-exist, and memories materialise out of nowhere. Fragments of countless lives emerge through photography, sketches and the quiet intimacy of shared dreams, all shaped by Mahmoodian’s 14-year experience of exile – a condition that continues to drive her work. Profoundly reparative, it invites us to see exile not as a marker of difference, but as a shared human experience.

'Photography transcends all its borders in this profoundly affecting work. Sketches, polaroid, poetry, video, still images, text; each forms a layer of meaning, or, (again), feeling. A spectral memory palace is constructed across four floors by Mahmoodian, in which the dreams of 16 people living in exile in the UK illuminate its walls. Over time, Mahmoodian listened to the stories of their dreams, and as first response, drew a sketch of its essence. Then, in a kind of alchemy, she constructed a photographic image; an image of an image. They appear here as offerings, rather than representations. The nature of the collaboration keeps a sense of the artist within the images, yet her role is closer to that of a conduit or a medium.'

1000wordsmag.com/amak-mahmoodian-one-hundred-and-twenty-minutes

houghton8

08/01/2025

Six weeks left to experience these captivating works in person.

📅 Until 16 February 2025. Tuesday to Sunday each week.
🕚 11am to 6pm.
📍 Galleries on all three floors and Dark Studio.
🆓 Entry.
🤗 Donations, no matter the size, always appreciated.

📷 Lisa Whiting Photography

At the edge of the everyday world is presented in collaboration with the Bristol Photo Festival (), an international biennial of contemporary photography, staged across the city’s museums, galleries and independent spaces, and supported by The Japan Foundation.

11/12/2024

Herbert Shergold’s BBC Debut 📰

Throughout the 1950s & 60s, Herbert Shergold operated a commercial photography studio in , often portraying local residents as Hollywood stars. Never famous, after his death his images largely disappeared from view. For this edition of the festival, we worked with photo historian Hedy van Erp () to assemble the first known exhibition of Shergold’s work, staged just down the road from where his studio once stood.

Throughout the exhibition, we were delighted to meet so many visitors who remembered Shergold and his studio. The has just published a must-read article, containing then-and-now photographs of some of those who Shergold originally photographed in the mid-1960s.

Link in bio to read👆

09/12/2024

Celebrating Our Open Call Winner 🌟

In collaboration with Hapax Magazine (), we launched an open-call for new projects with the winner due to receive a solo exhibition at Bristol Photo Festival 2026, alongside a feature in an upcoming edition of Hapax Magazine.

After receiving over 100 applications from 15+ countries, the jury selected artist and photographer Holly Lynton (), for her work ‘Bound the Bounds’, which explores faith across rural communities in the U.S.A. We look forward to working with Holly over the next two years, building towards their solo exhibition. We would like to thank everyone who submitted.

Winner: Holly Lynton
Shortlist: Andrezza Viera Thomas, Annabel Elgar, Garry Loughlin, Kayin Luys, Masha Wysocka, Mohammed Hassan, Phillipa Klaiber, Thero Makepe, Vivian Wan
Selecting Jury: Alejandro Acin (BPF), Gordon Macdonald & Christiane Monarchi (Hapax), Kirsty Mackay (artist), Tamsin Silvey (Curator, Historic England)

29/11/2024

Festival Shop Open 🎉

Our online shop is now live! Browse publications like 'Different Ways Not To Say Deportation' by Ariella Aisha Azoulay with images from the exhibition 'Unshowable Photographs' that exhibited during the festival at IC Visual Lab. On sale for £10, all profits from this publication go to a charity supporting Palestine. Link below to shop.

https://bristolphotofestival.org/shop

24/11/2024

❤️❤️❤️

08/11/2024

In One Hundred and Twenty Minutes artist examines the experience of dreaming for individuals living in exile. Through a series of long-term conversations, 16 collaborators - all of whom have been exiled from their native countries - shared their dreams with the artist. Together they discussed the effects of exile on memory, the feeling of distance and the continuation of daily life.

Following these conversations, Mahmoodian used photography, poetry, drawing and video to explore the lives created through dreams, including the ways in which dreaming enabled individuals to return to a past that could not be reached while awake.

It is on show at , 11am-5pm, Thu-Sun until 17th Nov.

🙏🙏 This project has been supported and commissioned by and . Thanks also to for their generous support with the exhibition. 🙏🙏

Scroll for install images (by ) 🙏

06/11/2024

🚨 DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND: ADDITIONAL MAJAZZ PROJECT SHOW TOMORROW NIGHT 🚨

📅 When: Thursday, 7 November
🕣 Time: Late Show from 8:30 - 10 PM

After tomorrow night’s Palestinian Listening Event sold out, we received lots of messages asking for tickets. With this in mind, we’re organising a LATE SHOW taking place on the same night. If you didn’t manage to snag a ticket to the original show (6 - 8pm), buy one for the second performance now (8.30 - 10pm). Link in bio.

About the night:

Through years of research, digging and discovery, artist Mo’min Swaitat has created The Majazz Project, an archive of Palestinian sound and music. The archive acts as a site of resistance to colonial erasure, weaving tales of joy, grief and love across many generations. On Thursday (7th November) Mo’min will join us at IC Visual Lab to play records from the archive and discussing their significance. Tickets are available now via headfirst (link in bio).

This event has been programmed to coincide with Ariella Azoulay’s exhibition ‘Unshowable Photographs’ which examines archival records of the Palestinian Nakba.

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http://www.bristolphotofestival.org/

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