Rotterdam Photos 2026

Rotterdam Photos an annual photo fair with a festival flair. The event celebrates the spectrum of contemporary photography in all its diversity.

Overview

What does war do to an artist when he or she is not an eyewitness, but becomes a bearer of the emotional legacy? What does the violence sound like in the minds of those who survive, flee, or hear only?

In Echoes Of Silence, Rotterdam Photo explores how war, conflict, and collective trauma reverberate in the work of photographers who choose not to use the lens as a reporting tool, but as a mirror of their inner struggles.

At a time when images of war are constantly circulating through media and screens, Rotterdam Photo 2026 calls for a different perspective: an introspective, subjective, and visually layered approach to war. No reportage photography or direct registration of violence, but photographic autonomous work that departs from personal resonance, psychological processing, or symbolic representation.

This edition focuses on artists for whom war is not a scene, but a condition. Where conflict takes place not outside the body, but in the memory, the family story, the subconscious. Here the lens does not register an explosion, but echoes of it: in silence, emptiness, repetition, fragmentation or alienation. The festival sees this as a necessary extension of the discourse around conflict and visual culture, in which the personal, poetic and symbolic perspective is often underexposed.