A Guide to August 2024 Photography Festivals & Exhibitions

Verzasca Foto, PhEST, Eastern European Beauty at Capa Center and Kranj Foto Fest are among the photography events to visit this month.

Verzasca Foto 2024

Gordola, Switzerland / 30 August - 6 October

Directed and curated by Alfio Tommasini, the festival takes place in a mountain valley, made up of small villages of stone houses and surrounded by dense, lush nature. During the festival opening days, 30-31 August, the program includes a series of exhibitions outdoors and indoors, as well as artists presentations, guided visits, meetings with artists, portfolio reviews, live music, and project screenings, including the projection of the 34 shortlisted PhMuseum 2024 Photography Grant projects.

Over the years, the curation has focused on different themes that share a profound interest in humanity with its feelings, its positions, and its surroundings. The exhibitions examine local, national, and international realities and narratives with an emphasis on diversity, inclusivity, and conservation.

Discover more on their website.

PhEST 2024

Monopoli, Italy / 30 August - 3 November

Under the artistic direction of Giovanni Troilo and the photography curatorship of Arianna Rinaldo, and produced by the cultural association PhEST, the festival is born out of the need to give back a voice to the thousand identities that form the “sea within the lands”, the need to redefine a new, original imagery. Dream is the theme chosen for PhEST's 9th edition. In the year in which the 100th anniversary of Surrealism is celebrated, the festival celebrates the dream as a disinterested game of thought and explores it in all its forms. The exhibition program also includes Esperanto solo show by Matthias Jung, selected by the festival team on the occasion of the PhMuseum 2024 Photography Grant.

Find out more about the festival's program on their website.

Eastern European Beauty at Capa Center

Budapest, Hungary / 21 June - 6 October

Through seventeen photographic projects, the exhibition Eastern European Beauty offers possible explanations of what the Eastern European aesthetic consists of, what its main characteristics are, and what meanings it can assume in the international art, photography, and fashion scenes. The exhibition space functions as a kind of three-dimensional anthology. The exhibition is developed in two areas. In the first section Hungarian photographers present their ideas about their profession and the Eastern European aesthetic through their work. In the other section, various experts express their views on the topic through their selections of fashion photography, photojournalistic images, photo books, and publications, or by presenting a distinctive figure or fashion icon from the region.

Discover more on the Capa Center's website.

Kranj Foto Fest 2024

Kranj, Slovenia / 21 August - 28 September

Co-founded by Fernanda Prado Verčič and Petra Puhar Kejžar, Kranj Foto Fest is an annual festival of contemporary photography that was established in 2021 with the aim of transforming the Slovenian town into an exciting hub of contemporary photography in this part of Europe. Exhibited artists include Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier, Farzana Akhtar, Marta Bogdańska, Jordi Ruiz Cirera, Luciana Demichelis, Imane Djamil, Ismail Ferdous, Blaž Gutman, Issam Larkat, Diambra Mariani, Karim Mottaghi, Chidinma Nnorom, Matthieu Paley, Andrés Pérez, Valentina Piccinni and Jean-Marc Caimi, Jaka Teršek, Marcel Top, Marieke van der Velden and Philip Brink, Kinga Wrona and Amin Yousefi. Events include workshops with Kela and Blow Up Press, evening projection including the screening of the shortlisted PhMuseum 2024 Photography Grant projects.

Visit Kranj Foto Fest's website to discover more.

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Also open this month:

Built Photography at MAPh / Wheelers Hill, Australia / 8 June - 25 August

Curated by artists Kiron Robinson and Izabela Pluta, with support from MaPh Director Anouska Phizacklea, the exhibition brings together 16 artists who explore photography as a physical construction, proposing a conversation between photography’s material, its surface and form and especially its objectness, against which the flatness of the photographic plane is interrogated. Through processes of ‘inflation’, photographs disrupt the two-dimensional surface to complicate the spatial relationship between the content of an image and its physical form.

Ragusa Foto Festival 2024 / Ragusa, Italy / 30 August - 30 September

The charming village of Ragusa Ibla, a Baroque jewel and Unesco heritage site, is the ideal setting to host the 12th edition of Ragusa Foto festival entitled Taking A Break, led by founder Stefania Paxhia and artistic director Massimo Siragusa. We live in a time when the temporary has the upper hand over the permanent and we are unable to look clearly to the future. The continuous tension generated by the speed that characterizes modernity has now become a significant aspect of life and is bringing about a profound transformation in the relationship between both human beings and humans and the environment. The festival program includes exhibitions, a workshop with Angelo Raffaele Turetta, and portfolio reviews with experts such as Benedetta Donato, Tiziana Faraoni, Irene Alison, Luca Santese and Paola Sammartano.

Pebbledash Wonderland by Shane Lynam at Photo Museum Ireland / Dublin, Ireland / 24 August - 12 October

Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the premiere of Shane Lynam's Pebbledash Wonderland, a photographic account of his adopted home city, Dublin. In Pebbledash Wonderland, Lynam offers a timely reminder that the complex elements of a contemporary city are almost impossible to grasp in their entirety but must be felt, lived, and recorded,  in small, seemingly insignificant moments. Returning over and over to the same sites, the author obsessively photographed the city to create a series of subjective, abstracted spaces that sit somewhere between reality and his own experience.