Photo Oxford 2025

Photo Oxford, Oxford’s biennial photo festival, returns for its fifth edition in 2025. This year the theme for the festival will be Truth and we will explore what this increasingly loaded word means within the context of photography.

Overview

Every two years, the festival fills spaces across Oxford with a vibrant programme of exhibitions and events, celebrating contemporary practice as well as the rich history of photography. 

Founded in 2013, Photo Oxford is a charity dedicated to making photography accessible to everyone. Our programme explores big ideas and current debates, and is grounded in current photographic discourse, theory and debate, while also recognising photography’s relevance to people beyond the photographic community. 

Featuring local, national and international photographers, the festival offers audiences moments of discovery and reflection, while providing photographers with opportunities to develop their practice and network. 

From images that reveal current debates around Artificial Intelligence, to those that highlight the stories missing from photographic records, an exploration of truth in photography is about more than documentary. What happens when photographers challenge their medium’s relationship to reality? What truths lie beneath the surface? Photo Oxford 2025 invites you to look closer and find your own truths in photography.

There are many ways to get involved. Join their one-day symposium with photographers, thinkers and curators, or attend artist talks and exhibitions, or bring your own work for review by a panel of experts. Photo Oxford also offers workshops for artists as well as the opportunity to see contemporary photographs within some of Oxford’s colleges on a special ‘photo walk’.