Reading Time: 4 minutes With new commissions and new urgencies, Belfast Photo Festival is back with a bang for its latest edition, themed ‘The Verge’

Reading Time: 4 minutes With new commissions and new urgencies, Belfast Photo Festival is back with a bang for its latest edition, themed ‘The Verge’
Reading Time: 2 minutes Ripping up the rule book, the festival tackles some of the most pressing issues of our time in a city that maintains a complex relationship to photography.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Running until 30 June, the 2021 programme examines a provocative array of future(s) against the backdrop of Belfast
Reading Time: 4 minutes Currently on show at Belfast Photo Festival, Edgar Martins’ Portrait of Humanity 2021 winning series uses the context of a prison to explore the philosophical concept of absence, and the troubling impacts of state-enforced separation
Reading Time: 2 minutes Lethbridge’s The Archive of Gesture utilises found images, still life photography and digital interventions to explore the role of gesture in communication
Reading Time: 2 minutes “In our era of pandemics, climate chaos, global migration and political turmoil, we believe there has never been a more important time to connect audiences to the work artists are making”
Reading Time: 2 minutes Lupu’s ethereal images straddle fantasy and reality, capturing the liminality of an increasingly online world
Reading Time: 2 minutes Returning this autumn, the 2020 edition of Northern Ireland’s premier visual arts festival celebrates the age of the female gaze in both online and offline events
Reading Time: 3 minutes Questioning the ethics of his own images from North Korea, the French photographer asks whether it is permissible to enjoy an image knowing that the beauty could be masking the suffering of a nation
Reading Time: 5 minutes Put together on little budget, and without subsidies from the Northern Irish government, Belfast Photo Festival gives heft to the claim that Belfast is a hotbed of contemporary photography. Many of the exhibitions on show are themed around sexuality and gender, but there are also more open-ended group shows – many of which were curated through an international open submission process, moderated by a panel of experts from MoMA, MACK, FOAM, Magnum Photos, The New York Times, and BJP