A Guide to March 2025 Photography Festivals & Exhibitions

PhotoVogue Festival, Turn Around, Turn Around, Turn Around by Cécile Monnier at Photoforum Pasquart, MIA Photo Fair, Bravo by Felipe Romero Beltrán at MAPFRE, and Festival De Fotografia De Tiradentes are among the photography events to visit next month.

PhotoVogue Festival 2025

Milan, Italy / 6 March - 9 March

PhotoVogue returns to Milan, Italy, in a month dedicated to fashion. Since its inception, the festival has championed ethically and aesthetically significant themes, exploring topics such as the female gaze, representation, masculinity, inclusivity, and the reframing of history. This year's theme transcends the traditional scope of visual art, advocating a fundamental shift in how we interact with our planet and its inhabitants. At the heart of the festival are three key exhibitions: The Tree Of Life: A Love Letter To Nature showcasing the works of the artists selected from the global open call, the Latin American Panorama which celebrates the creativity from Latin America and its diaspora, and In Vogue With Nature celebrating Vogue’s legacy of promoting environmental awareness, sustainability, and the deep connection between fashion and the planet across its global editions.

The wide agenda also includes a series of presentations, round tables, digital showcases and contributions from organizations involved in environmental advocacy. Among them are The World On Fire, a Lectio Magistralis by Richard Mosse, the round table Our Planet, Our Responsibility: Environment, Climate Change And Social Issues moderated by Afsaneh Rafii, and Human Visions by PhMuseum, featuring works reflecting on humanity's relationship with the environment, selected for the PhMuseum 2024 Women Photographers Grant.

Learn more on PhotoVogue's website.

Turn Around, Turn Around, Turn Around by Cécile Monnier at Photoforum Pasquart

Biel/Bienne, Switzerland / 16 February - 21 April

Curated by Danaé Panchaud, the exhibition presents two works that explore Cécile Monnier’s personal and artistic reflections on the relationship between man and nature. In Tout Est Fichu Comme Un Sandwich À La Soupe, she looks at the practice of fly fishing – a symbolic interface between humans and their environment. She is interested in the way in which anglers care for the habitat that is the river, while at the same time disturbing it. Photographs of hand-made artificial flies, combined with a video installation, question the aesthetics and ambivalence of an activity that connects humans to a habitat and an ecosystem, but also reveals the power relationships and dependencies that are established between them. In Turn Around, Turn Around, Turn Around, Cécile turns to her own past. The photographic installation, in which images are suspended from the ceiling in the form of continuous strips, is not only a visual tribute to her childhood in the countryside, but also a reflection on the way in which our experience shapes our relationship with nature.

Discover more on their website.

MIA Photo Fair 2025

Milan, Italy / 20 March - 23 March

Created to highlight the transverse role that photography has come to play between the languages of expression of the contemporary art system, MIA Fair provides a rich cultural program, with events and conferences dedicated to the world of art and photography. The 14th edition's Main Section delves into the theme of Dialogues, embracing the conversations between artists and the public, diverse cultures, historical and contemporary photography, as well as interactions with other conventional art forms and new technologies. Beyond Photography - Dialogue, curated by Domenico de Chirico, intends to further stimulate exchanges and sharing, which are fundamental for individual development, social cohesion and collective advancement.

Among the highlights, curated by PhMuseum and promoted by Portofino Dry Gin, Portofino Residencies 2021-2024 reunites works by Carolina Pimenta, Alejandro Chaskielberg, Piergiorgio Sorgetti, and Martina Giammaria, shaping a narrative that ranges from social commentary to dreamlike visions, from landscape re-elaborations to the analysis of a collective memory.

More info on MIA Fair's website.

Bravo by Felipe Romero Beltrán at KBr Fundación MAPFRE

Barcelona, Spain / 15 February - 18 May

Like many of his other works, Bravo offers a reflection on a scenario of tension and conflict: a stretch of the Rio Grande (known as the Río Bravo in Mexico) that forms part of the more than one thousand kilometres of border between Mexico and the United States that coincide with its course. Through images of people, landscapes, and architecture, Bravo constructs a visual essay, sober and poetic, centred around the idea of waiting and border identity.

Find out more on their website.

MAST Photography Grant On Industry And Work 2025 at MAST

Bologna, Italy / 30 January - 4 May

Every two years, through the MAST Photography Grant on Industry and Work, the MAST Foundation gives young international artists the opportunity of delving into the industrial, technological world and exploring its systems of labour and capital, invention, development and production. Curated by Urs Stahel, the exhibition presents the works of the five finalists selected from among forty-two candidates under the age of 35 from all over the world. Exhibiting artists are Felicity Hammond, Gosette Lubondo, Silvia Rosi, Kai Wasikowski, and Sheida Soleimani, the prize recipient of this 8th edition. Her project Flyways is a series of photographs centered around two modes of labor that are urgently needed in a world marked by the direct and indirect destruction of human and non-human life. In this work—the first to explicitly connect the artist’s research and practice to her role as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator—Sheida Soleimani creates symbolic flight paths, linking the devastation of life to the potential for more just, multi-species futures. As both a wildlife rehabilitator and the daughter of Iranian political refugees who were hunted, imprisoned, and tortured for their activism, Soleimani has spent her life learning how infrastructures wound and kill in distinct ways.

Learn more on MAST's website.

Festival De Fotografia De Tiradentes 2025

Tiradentes, Brazil / 26 March - 30 March

With the aim of bringing the most relevant figures in Brazilian photographic production to Minas Gerais, Foto em Pauta is an initiative that began in Belo Horizonte in 2004 and encourages dialogue between the public and artists. They organize meetings, lectures, exhibitions, workshops, and, since 2011, the Tiradentes Photography Festival, a national benchmark in the dissemination of Brazilian photography. This festival annually connects thousands of people with significant works and artists, fostering an exchange of ideas, experiences, and perspectives that leads to individual, cultural, and artistic growth.

Discover more on their website.

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Also open this month:

Protektorat by Silvia Rosi at C/O Berlin / Berlin, Germany / 1 February - 7 May

The Italian-Togolese artist Silvia Rosi explores post-colonial themes such as migration, identity and collective memory from a diasporic perspective in an interplay of staged photography, video, performative elements and edited archive material. In Protektorat, Rosi sheds light on the complex history of language under colonial occupation in Togo. Based on archive material from the Togolese National Archives in Lomé, she thematizes the mechanisms of power and resistance that are anchored in colonial language policies.

Scomparsa/Disparition by Sibylle Duboc at Mucho Mas! / Turin, Italy / 13 February - 5 April

Sibylle Duboc was invited to Turin by Mucho Mas! to continue her research on climate change and the anthropization of the Alpine landscape in collaboration with the National Mountain Museum (TO) and the Musee des Merveilles (Tende), and supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation and the CRT Foundation. The exhibition inverts the narrative of humanity's dominion over the geological history of the Earth: here the mineral world reigns. While revealing its own anthropization, the rock announces the end of the era of the domestication of its mountains. From here emerge works that cross the melting of the glaciers of the Alps, the dissolution of the Arctic, the flow of the millennial rock engravings that proliferate in the Valley of Wonders.

No Longer Not Yet by Katja Mater at FOMU / Antwerp, Belgium / 28 February - 4 January 2026

Upon FOMU’s invitation, visual artist Katja Mater explores the museum’s collection and creates a remarkable selection around the theme of time. The exhibition allows visitors to experience ‘time’ in a variety of ways: from solar time and the rhythm of the body to times of remembrance and asynchronous, cosmic, or even invisible time. ​Every first Sunday of the month, the Kaiserpanorama​ - a stereoscopic viewing cabinet from 1905 that introduced mass audiences to a photographic 3D spectacle - will be set in motion with 50 new stereo photographs that play with language, spatiality and perception.