Responding to this year’s festival theme – TRUTH – photographers were invited to submit work that engage personal, political, social, historical, or technical truths. Thank you to our judges.

The response to the call for SOLO exhibitions exceeded all expectations, and the selected projects reflect the growing international reach of the Festival as well as the continuing relevance of photography as a medium through which contemporary realities are questioned, challenged, and reimagined.

Among the selected SOLO projects is Alain Schroeder with Chains of Madness which explores mental healthcare practices and confinement in Indonesia.

Oleksandr Rupeta’s photographs demonstrates the contrast between the natural beauty of the Donbas landscape in the Ukraine and the horrific reality of frontline warfare.

Streetmax captures surreal moments of everyday people within uncanny compositions, often appearing fictitious and constructed. These images are nonetheless shot in real time.

South African photographer Marguerite Oelofse presents a deeply personal body of work reflecting on her experience of receiving another person’s heart at the age of seventeen.

Che Jingyin’s project Harmless: to be proven examines the often invisible precarity experienced by Chinese scholars working within American academic and scientific institutions. Combining staged photography with documentary research, the project interrogates systems of suspicion, surveillance, and institutional mistrust.

South African photographer Tony Meintjies‘ exhibition explores the relationship between photography, memory, and interpretation through the construction of diptychs drawn from a personal archive spanning several decades.

The non-profit platform, The Photographic Collective supports emerging photographic practices from Africa and aims to bring visibility to overlooked archives and underrepresented artists. This group exhibition will be presented at the Desmond Tutu Foundation.

We are also very pleased to share the names of the participants in the festival group exhibition, Looking at TRUTH.