Fotografia Europea 2025

Fotografia Europea turns 20 and celebrates this important milestone by dedicating the 2025 edition to a reflection on that precise period of life that most of all seems to open the doors wide to infinite possibilities.

Overview

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the next edition of the Italian festival Fotografia Europea will explore the theme of Being Twenty under the artistic direction of Tim Clark, Walter Guadagnini, and Luce Lebart.

In a person’s biography, 20 marks the shadow line, the end of innocence, and at the same time, the taste of freedom and independence. At 20, you can still become anything, but you discover you are alone, detached from the world and from your family heritage.

Being 20 is like sailing an ocean of possibilities without a precise map. It is an age of contradictions: you are an adult, but often still living at home with your parents; you are connected to the whole world, but the loneliness can be overwhelming. You face immense expectations, both personal and social: finding a satisfying job, building meaningful relationships, giving purpose to your existence, imagining a better world, for ourselves and others.

However, uncertainty is a constant feature: economic instability, climate and social crises, as well as rapid technological transformations create a shifting and often slippery terrain. The widespread increases in anxiety and depression are signs of a progressive deterioration in a society’s ability to care for the new generations, to understand the questions we face from the future.  It is an age of big dreams and immense ideal challenges, where every day can provide an opportunity to discover who you are and who you want to become. In this complex and fascinating journey, you learn to live with fragility and strength, with fear and hope, with anger and joy, trying to find one’s place in the world, day after day.

Exhibitions include A Retrospective by Daido Moriyama, organized by Instituto Moreira Salles and curated by Thyago Nogueira. This retrospective will be the first to exhibit most of his famous series along with dozens of Moriyama’s photobooks and magazines, plus numerous works and large-scale installations. Taken together, is presents one of the most innovative and influential artists and street photographers of our day.

Andy Sewell’s Slowly and Then All at Once is rooted in the climate crisis and the broader contemporary debate surrounding it, with the goal of redirecting attention to the ever-present, though often unevenly experienced, feeling of being immersed in a climate and ecological crisis. The project explores the intertwined relationships between different forms of power, both bottom-up and top-down. It combines photographs of climate protests, high-profile climate diplomacy negotiations, and debates with more personal images, creating a visual diary of the artist’s day-to-day surroundings.

Mal de Mer by Claudio Majorana delves into the theme of adolescence, exploring it as a pivotal stage where we first grapple with the personal issues that often shape our lives. Interested in shedding light on the impact of generational trauma on teenagers and young adults, Majorana travelled to Lithuania, a post-Soviet country with a deeply scarred political past and the highest suicide rates in Europe. Against the background of brutalist concrete witnesses, he pictured a nuanced coming of age between youth summer camps, forests, cemeteries, and other arbitrary settings in Vilnius and on the outskirts of Lithuania.

Raves And Riots Constellation by Vinca Petersen brings together a collection of seminal diaristic photographs drawn from a period spanning 1990–2004, documenting the artist’s experiences as part of the free party and traveller community. The images juxtapose the sense of escapism and euphoria of this unique cultural moment with the oppressive political climate that outlawed the lifestyles of those responsible for Britain’s rave scene.

In We Are Carver, acclaimed photographer Jessica Ingram invites us into George Washington Carver High School in Columbus, Georgia, located just a few miles from Fort Moore, one of the largest military installations in the world. Through vibrant portraits, candid conversations and classroom ephemera, Ingram captures the hopes and fears of a generation on the cusp of shaping their futures. As the country undergoes a presidential transition, these voices remind us of the power of choice and the collective responsibility we bear in creating a better future. In this pivotal moment in American history, We Are Carver serves as a mirror and a compass, illuminating the resilience and determination of youth in the face of uncertainty, and offering a path forward rooted in acknowledgment, compassion and justice.

The wide festival program includes also exhibitions by Thaddé Comar, Ghazal Golshiri and Marie Sumalla, Kido Mafon, Toma Gerzha, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Federica Sasso, Michele Borzoni e Rocco Rorandelli, Matylda Niżegorodcew, Rä di Martino, and more.

Additionally, Fluorescent Adolescent is a photobook exhibition curated by Francesco Colombelli that explores adolescence, a complex and pivotal period of life, in its nuances and contradictions. The images in the photobooks depict a universal journey that transcends the personal, reflecting physical, emotional, and social transformations. The photographs capture moments of rebellion, fragility, discovery, and belonging, offering an authentic snapshot of the inner struggle to find one’s place in the world. Although the selected books tell stories rooted in different cultures and contexts, highlighting how the transition from adolescence to adulthood can vary depending on cultural, religious, economic, and political factors, the emotions and experiences tied to the growth process are both universal and uniquely lived.

Women See Many Things is A WeWorld project along the Swahili Coast which intends to give space to the multiple gazes of young women from Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, where WeWorld held three photography workshops in February and March 2024, directed by photographer Myriam Meloni and led by photographers Halima Gongo in Kenya, Gertrude Malizeni in Tanzania and Nelsa Guambe in Mozambique. The photography workshops that resulted in Women See Many Things were conducted as part of Kujenga Amani Pamoja (Building Peace Together), a project co-funded by the European Union and implemented by WeWorld in the coastal areas bordering Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.

Plus, the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. Lezioni Di Fotografia seeks to revisit Ghirri’s lessons from a new perspective, involving artists Luca Capuano and Stefano Graziani, alongside a group of students from ISIA Urbino. It offers a space to reflect on the intentions and poetics behind the exercises presented in Lezioni di fotografia and, more broadly, on their practice and significance. At the same time, the exhibition also examines the role of photography as a teaching tool. Since its invention, photography has been a privileged medium for the instruction of numerous disciplines, particularly in the arts. In the educational field—where reproduction and transcription are central processes—photography reveals what Monica Maffioli defines as its “double life”, highlighting its authorial, material, ambiguous, and unsettling nature.

Collezione Maramotti presents This Body Made of Stardust, an extensive solo exhibition by Viviane Sassen comprising more than fifty photographs and a video, all dating from 2005 to 2025, with several new works made specifically for the occasion. The show is the most extensive presentation of Sassen’s work in Italy to date and is curated by the artist herself.

Curated by Ilaria Campioli and Daniele De Luigi, Giovane Fotografia Italiana | Premio Luigi Ghirri is the open call dedicated to showcasing under-35 photography talent in Italy. An international jury selected seven projects that will be exhibited as part of the Unire/Bridging collective show: Daniele Cimaglia and Giuseppe Odore with La Dote di Latera, Rosa Lacavalla with La Festa dell’Equatore, Sara Lepore with Ingrediente pentru un tort de miere, cu dragoste, Grace Martella with Memorie del transitare, Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj with Pasqyra e Lëndës (Sommario), Serena Radicioli with Non sei più tornato and Davide Sartori with The Shape of our Eyes, Other Things I Wouldn’t Know.

Unire/Bridging encourages reflection on how images can act as “bridges” and carry out a function of connecting, creating dialogue and bringing people together, as well as caring for the outside world. Bridges not only between photographer and subject, but also between image and viewer, to become a place and space for solidarity.