Bristol Photo Festival
Bristol Photo Festival is an international biennial of contemporary photography
Date
14 October - 15 November
Sabrina Shutter
Senior Events Project Manager
Supported by Bristol BID, the festival presents exhibitions, talks and workshops alongside long-term projects developed with local communities. Internationally focused yet locally grounded, the Festival believes in photography’s power to reveal the world anew, sharing nuanced and unexpected stories that foster greater understanding of our shared pasts, presents and futures. It supports artists to experiment with the possibilities of photography as a contemporary form of communication.
Founded in 2021, Bristol Photo Festival has now delivered three editions. Its most recent edition, in 2024, welcomed more than 115,000 visitors across 14 exhibitions presented in museums, galleries and independent spaces throughout the city.
Entitled Time Machine, the Festival’s third edition explores time as interwoven, where past, present and future fold into one another. Through photography, memory, imagination and possibility coexist, revealing how histories resurface, time accumulates, and different temporalities continually shape our experience of the present.
The diverse exhibition programme includes BID venues, The Welcome Building, Arnolfini, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Redcliffe Caves, Centrespace Gallery, and Bristol Cathedral, as well as venues further afield: IC Visual Lab, Martin Parr Foundation, and Arnos Vale Cemetery.
Exhibitions spotlight a blend of legends of the medium, such as the late iconic documentary photographer Martin Parr – a past Artistic Director and member of the festival’s board – as well as lesser-known photographers from all over the world.
Main image: Martin Parr – JAPAN. Tokyo. Disneyland (1997)