Fotofestiwal Open Call 2025

Fotofestiwal invites aritsts to present their works to the audience of the International Festival of Photography held in June 2025 in Łódź, Poland.

Overview

Fotofestiwal is looking for artists with exceptional personalities and projects which present bold visions. With no thematic, technique, or age limits, the call invites specialists from the world's most important media and photographic institutions to join the jury. From among the submitted projects, the jury will select six which, in cooperation with the curators of the festival, will be presented in the form of an exhibition.

From the submitted projects, Fotofestiwal nominates at least one artist each year for the FUTURES program. FUTURES is a Europe-based photography platform bringing together the global photography community to support and nurture the professional development of emerging artists across the world.

Practical Info

Applicants must submit a complete photo projects including 10 to 20 photos. Each participant can submit up to two projects. Selected authors receive an exhibition during the festival in Łódź (for 6 artists), a €400 artistic fee, accommodation for the main opening weekend of the festival, reimbursement of travel costs up to €300, and a €500 exhibition production budget.

Jury is composed of Marta Szymańska (Co-Founder of Lodz Fotofestiwal), Femke Rotteveel (Director of FOTODOK), Giuseppe Oliverio (Founder and Director of PhMuseum), Krzysztof Candrowicz (Co-Founder of Lodz Fotofestiwal), Clare Grafik (Head of Exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery).

Among the previous finalists are Lavinia Parlamenti and Manfredi Pantanella, Marcel Top, Peter Pflügler, Adrien Selbert, Tomasz Jan Kawecki, Camilla de Maffei, Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo, Chloé Milos Azzopardi, Agnieszka Sejud, Ngadi Smart, Cemre Yeşil Gönenli, Santanu Dey, Federico Estol, Colin Delfosse, Kata Geibl, Mate Bartha, Federico Clavarino & Tami Izko, Gloria Oyarzabal and more.

About Fotofestiwal

Fotofestiwal was established in 2001 as one of the first photography events in Poland. Since then it has grown into one of the most relevant photographic festivals in Europe but its core mission has not changed: presenting photography in its various ways (via exhibitions, films, slideshows, workshops etc.) but also talking about important social issues and introducing the unobvious beauty and unique history of our city to the audience. For such reason we organize thematic exhibitions in various post-industrial spaces, which Łódź is well known for, we put stress on networking parties – (we are quite famous for those), but also every year we try to develop new ways of talking about photography: via events such as Photo-Match: Completely Different Portfolio Review, during which we focus on having equal status granted to the curators as well as artists, with formula of presentation that numerous festivals are applying worldwide now with a success. Since 2016 we work as a collective, with no board of directors, developing a new way of cultural institution management.