A trip to the future: the best of Belfast photo festival – in pictures

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Laura Pannack, Bus Stop, The journey Home.

Cape Town schoolkids heading home and rules for maintaining a long-distance relationship feature in photos exploring the theme of unknown futures

Laura Pannack’s Bus Stop, The Journey Home

Wed 27 May 2026 08.00 CEST

Laura Pannack, The Journey HomeFor many, the journey home is a space for reflection, laughter and daydreaming. In the Cape Flats, however, each step is deliberate and every route carefully considered. Gang violence shapes the rhythm of daily life, turning a simple walk into a passage through uncertainty. By sharing cameras and creative authorship, ‘The Journey Home’ moves beyond sensationalised narratives, offering a layered portrait of friendship, humour, danger and determination within these communities.

Luis Díaz, In The Song of Invisible Birds by Luis Díaz Crossing the Alto Madre de Dios River under a red sky caused by fires in the southern Amazon. Luis works for the Ministry of Culture as a protection agent for the Mashco-Piro, serving as one of the few intermediaries who communicates directly with them. Although some encounters occur with their consent, Luis has witnessed how clearly they express that they want nothing to do with the Western world—a world they see as one that only destroys. (Florence Goupil / Belfast Photo Festival)

Evanna Devine, Exploring Antrim and NewtownabbeyExploring Antrim and Newtownabbey is a series of four photographic commissions and a public photography competition unfolding across the four seasons. Beginning with inspiration from Evanna Devine in spring, the project invites audiences to discover the landscapes, history, and natural and built heritage of Antrim and Newtownabbey through their year-round beauty, ready for the full competition launch in August 2026.

Toby Smith, Camera Obsolete‘Camera Obsolete?’ is a participatory installation and major public exhibition confronting the collapse of photography’s mechanical era. Conceived and produced by Belfast Photo Festival, audiences are invited to destroy, dismantle, repair or recast obsolete cameras into new sculptural forms. Part participation, part spectacle and part material transformation, the exhibition forces questions of authorship, truth and the erosion of photography as a physical, tangible medium.

Lean Lui, The White BarracksThe White Barracks imagines a fictional island inhabited by girl cadets engaged in endless military drills, using allegory to examine power, patriarchy and the reproduction of ideology. Moving between fiction and documentary, Lean Lui asks what might emerge when inherited myths begin to fracture.

LouiseDesnos, Acedia ‘Acedia’ reflects on laziness, idleness and introspection as both a personal state and a quiet form of resistance. Through images of stillness, drift and everyday non-events, Louise Desnos explores time, doubt and the fragile line between freedom and melancholy. In many of these images, very little happens. Signs of time remain discreet. Slowness, embodied by her subjects, suggests both a search for freedom and a space for introspection. ‘Acedia’ asks whether laziness is a form of renunciation leading towards melancholy, or a kind of wisdom and clarity found in stillness.

Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli, One Bed, Two Blankets, Eighty-Five RulesA project in continuous evolution, ‘One Bed, Two Blankets, Eighty-Five Rules’ by Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli explores the shared rituals, expectations and tensions of a relationship through a set of imagined rules for living together.

Joe Laverty, Still StandingStill Standing is a collaborative photography project shaped by Belfast Buildings Trust, Belfast Photo Festival and Joe Laverty as part of Creative Belfast, a partnership programme creating paid skills opportunities for young people across Belfast’s cultural and heritage sectors.

Valentina Sinis, The Last ButterfliesThe Last Butterflies follows female Kurdish guerrillas training in the mountains between Iraq and Iran, examining militancy, sacrifice and political belief. Beyond combat alone, Sinis looks at how armed struggle intersects with gender, truth, solidarity and survival. Many of the women come from Kurdish regions of Iran and belong to the Kurdistan Free Life Party, while the Women’s Protection Forces form an all-female unit within that movement

Laura Pannack, Bus Stop, The Journey HomePannack’s The Journey Home explores the daily walk to and from school in Cape Town’s gang-governed Cape Flats, where the threat of violence shapes ordinary childhood routines. Made collaboratively with young participants, the work offers an intimate portrait of adolescence, danger and resilience. Making our way home from school is a simple and widely shared ritual. Yet in South Africa, a country marked by deep social divides, this daily journey can carry very different realities, as young people navigate the daily threat of gang crossfire

Thomas Holton, The Lams of Ludlow StreetThe Lams of Ludlow Street is a long-term photographic portrait of a single Chinese American family living in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Over more than two decades, Thomas Holton has used the work to move beyond stereotype and build a deeper understanding of family, identity and belonging

Thadde Comar, How Was Your Dream?How Was Your Dream? is a documentary photographic project created during the Hong Kong protests between June and October 2019. The work addresses new forms of demonstration and insurrection in an era shaped by increasingly seamless systems of control. The title refers to a phrase used by demonstrators to speak discreetly about their experiences of protest

Vahram Aghasyan, ModalityModality presents Armenian artist Vahram Aghasyan’s images of unfinished Soviet residential buildings suspended within a snow-covered Armenian landscape. Construction began in 1988 as part of a planned urban development intended to house people displaced by a major earthquake, but the project was never completed. Photographed in 2008, and still unchanged decades later, these structures remain suspended between intention and realisation. The work therefore reflects on interruption, failed futures and the lingering presence of unrealised social ambition

Paul McCambridge, MSC NapoliIn 2007, the UK container ship MSC Napoli was damaged in the English Channel and deliberately beached in Lyme Bay to avoid a larger environmental disaster. 100 years after work began on the Titanic, Harland and Wolff undertook its first ship dismantling project with the MSC Napoli, marking a striking shift from maritime construction to industrial deconstruction. This immersive exhibition by Paul McCambridge traces the aftermath of the MSC Napoli. The work reflects on labour, industry, salvage and the changing meanings of a historic shipyard.

Alice Poyzer, Other Joys‘Other Joys’ is an ongoing body of work exploring the intensity of special interests through self-portraits, documentary images and constructed scenes. Rooted in Alice Poyzer’s experience as an autistic woman, it becomes both an expression of autistic joy and a call for greater representation.The feeling surrounding a special interest can be difficult to describe. For many autistic people, it brings warmth, euphoria and excitement. Poyzer began making this work as a way to communicate that feeling visually.

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