A Guide To November 2026 Photography Festivals & Exhibitions

Vorort by Marge Westreich at PhMuseum Lab, Paris Photo, Polycopies, Not What You Saw by Keerthana Kunnath at FOAM, Bristol Photo Festival, and Colour Years by Sanlé Sory at The Photographers' Gallery are among the photography events to visit next month.

Vorort by Marge Westreich at PhMuseum Lab

Bologna, Italy / 26 November - 14 January

Vorort explores the unstable boundary between documentation and fiction within the rural outskirts of Linz, Austria, reflecting artist Marge Westreich’s perspective as an American expatriate navigating distance and community. Combining candid flash photography, staged scenes with actors, and screenplay fragments, the project plays on the dual meaning of its title – shifting from "suburb" to "on site." Through subtle visual disruptions like wrinkled fabric backdrops and casting-style headshots juxtaposed with photos of real residents, the series continually destabilizes the reliability of photographic truth.

Visually bridging American and Austrian artistic traditions, the work balances cinematic deliberation with candid spontaneity. Ultimately, Vorort creates a haunting, liminal world that explores themes of loneliness, performance, and the experience of never fully belonging.

Attend the vernissage with the artist on 26 November from 6pm to 9pm – more information on PhMuseum.

Paris Photo 2026

Paris, France / 12 November - 15 November

Founded in 1997 and held annually in November, the event takes place under the iconic glass roof of the Grand Palais in Paris. The fair serves as a crossroads for the photography market, bringing together over 200 exhibitors – including galleries and publishers – from dozens of countries. Its programming is known for balancing historical masterpieces with cutting-edge contemporary works, often organized into specialized sectors, along with the renowned Book sector.

Beyond its commercial significance, Paris Photo is a major cultural event that draws collectors, curators, and enthusiasts. The fair features a dense schedule of curated exhibitions, conversations with artists and critics, and prize ceremonies like the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards. By fostering a dialogue between the medium's 19th-century origins and its future in the digital age, it remains the definitive benchmark for the international photography community.

Check the full program on Paris Photo's website.

Polycopies 2026

Paris, France / 11 November - 15 November

Coinciding with Paris Photo, Polycopies transforms the Concorde-Atlantique boat into a large ephemeral gathering fully dedicated to photobooks – a meeting place for many amateurs, collectors, authors, and publishers who like to share and confront their ideas on photography practices. The wide program includes events, round tables, signings, professional meetings, and portfolio reviews for five days.

Among the attending publishers, bookstores and artists are Hapax Magazine, Asola Press, Dunes Éditions, Breadfield Press, Hectic Books, Artphilein Editions, Charcoal Press, Dalpine, Disko Bay, Deadbeat Club, Ediciones Anómalas, Grani Edizioni, KABK, Kominek Books, Kult Books, La Chancleta Voladora, Libraryman, Nazraeli Press, Nearest Truth Editions, Saetta, The Eriskay Connection, Vernacular Social Club, ZYZ, Zoetrope Athens, Raya Editorial, Overlapse, Jiazazhi Press, and more.

Discover this year's contributors on Polycopies' website.

Not What You Saw by Keerthana Kunnath at FOAM

Amsterdam, Netherlands / 18 September - 27 November

Foam 3h presents Keerthana Kunnath's first museum exhibition, featuring her debut series Not What You Saw, which documents female bodybuilders in Kerala, South India. Strikingly set against lush landscapes and warm, sunset-toned palettes, Kunnath’s images juxtapose physical strength with grace, sparking vital conversations on gender, sexuality, and mental health in India. What began as an organic project grew to encompass over a dozen athletes, capturing not only their physical prowess but also the emotional, financial, and personal commitments required by their discipline.

Functioning as both an intimate tribute and a cultural provocation, the series actively challenges established norms around femininity and body image. By following these trailblazing women into their homes, communities, and competitions, Kunnath creates a visual dialogue that disrupts traditional Indian constructs of beauty and gender roles. Not What You Saw invites viewers to re-examine their preconceptions, signaling a profound shift in what is considered typical, acceptable, or possible for women.

Find out more on Foam's website.

Bristol Photo Festival 2026

Bristol, United Kingdom / 14 October - 15 November

Entitled Time Machine, this edition investigates the concept of layered time, proposing that temporal experience is non-linear – looping, folding, and repeating rather than moving in a straight line. Focusing on overlooked histories, collective rituals, and imagined futures, the festival examines how the present is continuously shaped by lingering echoes of the past and speculative dreams of what lies ahead. Within this shared sea of memory and aspiration, the project considers how temporal coexistence defines human experience and collective identity.

Among the highlights are a festival tribute to Martin Parr’s Common Sense, Joy Gregory’s Catching Flies with Honey, and The Prison Mobile Library. The program also incorporates collaborative and archival works, such as Photo Kegham by Kegham Djeghalian Jr., Magnum Foundation's HEAT, and Inherited featuring Kelly O'Brien and Yuko Edwards, offering audiences an immersive look into overlooked histories, shared rituals, and contemporary storytelling.

Discover the exhibitions program on the festival's website.

Colour Years by Sanlé Sory at The Photographers' Gallery

London, United Kingdom / 14 October - 21 February

Colour Years highlights the lesser-known color portraits of photographer Sanlé Sory, tracing the dynamic evolution of modern Burkina Faso through the lens of daily life. Famous for his iconic black-and-white studio and nightlife imagery, Sory shifted to color photography at his Volta Photo studio in Bobo-Dioulasso during the mid-1980s. Meticulously restored from archived negatives, the exhibition features studio portraits of families, couples, friends, and local traders, capturing a society navigating significant political change and global exchange through personal style, music, and social gestures.

By showcasing album covers for Volta Jazz alongside candid and formal portraits, the exhibition underscores how music, fashion, and self-expression became vital markers of identity following Burkina Faso’s independence. Colour Years offers an intimate historical record of West African post-independence culture, celebrating the resilience, individuality, and optimism of Bobo-Dioulasso's residents across shifting decades.

You can visit the exhibition until 21 February 2027. Read more on their website.

Singapore International Photography Festival 2026

Singapore / 16 October - 31 January

The 10th Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) serves as a biennial hub for critical discourse and visual culture in Southeast Asia, operating across multiple venues under the theme In My End, My Beginning. Artistic Director Gwen Lee frames the theme to explore photography as a medium perpetually in flux – balancing memory and forgetting, document and fiction, and evidence and interpretation. Key festival features include Shifting Images, a multi-venue survey featuring 48 local artists, and Singapore Index, an exhibition of rarely seen 1990s black-and-white work by filmmaker Tan Pin Pin that documents intimate public and private rituals during an era of national transition.

Featuring 20 portfolios from 16 countries, the Portfolio Showcase presents diverse perspectives spanning ecological collapse, gender identity, ancestral memory, and critiques of state power through modes ranging from traditional documentary to experimental mixed-media. Concurrently, the Photobook Showcase celebrates print culture as an enduring, tactile medium for narrative depth, utilizing both published and dummy photobooks to invite quiet reflection on how recorded histories continuously generate new meaning for future generations.

Learn more about the exhibition and festival program on their website.

OFF Bratislava 2026

Bratislava, Slovakia / 6 November - 20 November

Titled White Noise, the 17th edition of the OFF Bratislava addresses the tension between density and legibility in modern media culture. Since its founding in 2010 as a platform for emerging talent, the festival has tackled critical social issues, and this edition turns its focus to informational saturation. Drawing on the acoustic and optical definitions of white noise, the theme serves as a metaphor for an era of visual overproduction. Rather than offering richness, the overwhelming volume of data, images, and stimuli manifests as mental fatigue, distraction, and a loss of orientation, forcing new modes of perception based on selective filtering and intentional slowing down.

Artistically, White Noise explores this sensory overload through layering, digital distortion, glitch aesthetics, and immersive environments that draw viewers into the physical reality of hyper-connectivity. However, the festival balances this chaotic intensity by embedding quieter, contemplative spaces within the program, positioning reduction as a deliberate gesture to restore clear thought.

Exhibitions are open until 20 November. Read more on their website.

Battle Royale di Federica Sasso at Mucho Mas!

Turin, Italy / 24 October - 30 January

Federica Sasso’s visual research explores the body as a dynamic interface and projection surface, investigating the complex intersections of adolescence, digital culture, and new media. Through a multidisciplinary practice spanning photography, video, virtual reality, and immersive environments, her work navigates the ambiguous threshold between physical reality and virtual simulation. In Battle Royale, digital avatars and online universes function as interactive identity devices – suspended between aspiration, intimacy, and spectacle – offering distinct emotional and psychological spaces where younger generations test alternative modes of existence.

Through performative, large-format self-portraits and immersive environments, Sasso visualizes the tension between individuality and technological mediation. Drawing on digital aesthetics and "-core" online subcultures like vaporwave, weirdcore, and liminal spaces, the artwork constructs claustrophobic, timeless settings that evoke themes of encirclement, connection, and isolation. Ultimately, Sasso’s practice exposes how cognitive embodiment becomes a dramatic performance, highlighting an emotional present where the individual constantly oscillates between the desire to be seen and the urge to disappear.

Learn more on their website.

Biennale De L'image Possible 2026

Liège, Belgium / 17 October - 13 December

Marking the 200th anniversary of photography's invention, BIP2026 explores the image's power to reflect humanity and confront us with both ourselves and others. The festival argues that while photography has revolutionized portraiture and social representation – acting as a tool for connection and memory as well as narcissism and social control – it retains a vital capacity for genuine cross-cultural gaze amidst a turbulent world. Centered on the hypothesis that meaningful connection can exist from a position of shared, precarious balance, the edition frames portraiture and visual art as dynamic, fluid encounters with difference that challenge static notions of identity, truth, and community.

To address these themes, the event presents five distinct, interrelated thematic strands. Aller de pair and FOMU's .tiff showcase emerging talents examining youth, social groups, and contemporary political issues through expanded visual practices. Through the Looking Glass investigates image manipulation, AI generation, and disinformation, while Tanguy Poujol's installation The Execution Of The Doge Marino Faliero draws from major museum collections and open calls to analyze portraiture across diverse eras and media. Finally, the family-focused exhibition ANIMALS, inspired by Louis Martens' Animal Books, pays homage to illustrative photography, completing a comprehensive exploration of the medium's role as a mirror of individual and collective experience.

Learn more on the event's website.

Foam x Middle East Archive at MAQAM and Mercatorplein

Amsterdam, Netherlands / 1 October - 20 December

Middle East Archive and Foam have partnered to present two exhibitions in Amsterdam-West, utilizing photography to preserve cultural memory, challenge stereotypes, and highlight diverse female perspectives from the MENA region. At the creative space MAQAM, the group exhibition Al Nisa / النساء, curated by Romaisa Baddar and based on her book, features photographs of women living at the intersection of societal expectation and self-expression. Installed on the building's exterior windows to integrate into neighborhood life, the display allows women to tell their own stories while navigating the paradoxes of visibility, tradition, and modern identity.

Concurrently at Mercatorplein, Egyptian-French photographer Yomna El Beyaly presents her outdoor solo exhibition, In Her Own Way / شوية وراجعة. Through vibrant images of Cairo capturing fragments of daily life, color, and movement, El Beyaly explores identity, femininity, and self-definition. Her reflective visual practice offers a space where femininity is both observed and inhabited in all its complexity – balancing solitude with community, and imperfection with grace – to connect her personal experiences with those of the women she photographs.

Discover more on their website.