Highlights and Snapshots from Brighton’s 2026 Photoworks and Photo Fringe Festivals

A cool morning sun settled over Brighton’s seafront as waves lapped calmly at the shore, constantly moving and changing with the tide, they crafted a perfect backdrop for a festival devoted to living with uncertainty and instability whilst still finding hope and beauty in the world.

The two photography festivals in Brighton spoke directly to that morning’s setting. Photoworks Festival’s theme, Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams, treats instability as something to sit with and work through rather than something to solve. Photo Fringe, which runs alongside it and stretches along the coast to Newhaven and Portsmouth, takes Feedback Loop as its theme: a reminder that photography is a practice of exchange, where images and ideas take shape in conversation rather than in isolation. Across both, artists returned again and again to things we might assume are fixed: the places we call home, the family stories we inherit and the landscapes we take for granted. Yet they also laid bare how fragile these are, from Murray Ballard’s photographs of burned trees in Salento for Photo Fringe to Serena Radicioli’s images of her father, who was incarcerated before his death, at Photoworks. Much like that sunny Brighton morning, though, both programmes remained hopeful, as concerned with what can be rebuilt from unstable foundations as with what has been lost.

The theme of Photo Fringe, the UK’s most expansive photography festival, really returned to its roots as it re-committed itself to the artist-led, self-curated spirit it has championed since 2003. As producer Ricardo Reverón Blanco put it, “Photo Fringe is built on connection.” Seen side by side over a single day, the two festivals make a natural pair with one asking how we hold steady on unstable ground, and the other suggesting we do it together.

In the Wilmot Gallery, the Luigi Ghirri Emerging Talent exhibition, presented with the Italian Cultural Institute and curated by Danit Ariel and Amin Yousefi, brings together five young Italian artists. A particularly striking image is that of Serena Radicioli’s photograph of an abandoned sports car, sunk into long grass against a blank, striped wall. Shot in soft, grainy black and white, it is a picture of something once sleek and fast, now going nowhere, as weeds and prickly pear creep up around its wheels. Above it, almost easy to miss, a security camera appears to be fixed to a drainpipe, watching.

Serena Radicioli, Abandoned Car. The Wilmot Gallery, Photoworks Festival 2026. Image credit: Serena Radicioli.

 The image belongs to Non sei più tornato (“You never came back”), Radicioli’s investigation into her father, who was incarcerated and later killed in a clash between two criminal groups in 2012. She never knew what he really did for a living. A decade on, she began piecing his story together from public records, family albums and her own photographs. Her personal context makes her photograph of the car poignantly feel like a stand-in for her father, a grand physical presence left behind, with the story of how it got there just out of reach. Elsewhere in the show, Cimaglia and Odore reactivate community archives through the darkroom, Rosa Lacavalla takes us across the equator with King Neptune, and Anie Maki untangles a century of silenced family history.

On the ground floor, Putting Ourselves in the Picture turns the camera over to more than 52 refugee, migrant and nonbinary participants. Rather than being photographed, they tell their own stories, and the result dismantles the stereotypes often attached to marginalised groups of people. Across campus at Dorset Place Gallery, Jermaine Francis and researcher Deborah Ireland present a photographic film reclaiming the identities of those forced into American slavery, centred on the individuals depicted in two photographs from 1860 and 1863. These images, ironically enough, by rights should never have existed decades after abolition. Amid the theme of instability, these shows serve as a stabilising force, working to steady the record, and refusing to let people on the margins, or those once denied a place in the archive at all, slip from it again.

The archive takes a different shape at Phoenix Art Space, where Tessa Boffin: Where We Touch the Archive, Draft 3 revisits the work of an artist whose practice spanned photography, writing, performance and activism. Boffin consistently challenged dominant ideas about gender, sexuality and visibility, and her work still speaks directly to queer and feminist communities today. Rather than presenting her archive as something finished, the exhibition treats it as a living resource, a “generative, collective space”. New commissions by Sophie Mak-Schram and Leah McLaine respond to Boffin’s images, teaching and politics. The show itself was shaped collectively by four emerging curators: Polly Wright, Jazz Swali, Ricardo Reverón Blanco and Danit Ariel.

Aindreas Scholz, The Most Beautiful Anthropocene. Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Photoworks Festival 2026. Image credit: Aindreas Scholz.

Aindreas Scholz, And So I Watch You From Afar. Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Photoworks Festival 2026. Image credit: Aindreas Scholz.

At Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Aindreas Scholz brought the festival’s environmental concerns into sharp focus. His two bodies of work, The Most Beautiful Anthropocene and And So I Watch You From Afar, are made without a camera. Instead, plants, water and chemistry leave their own marks directly on the surface. In one diptych from The Most Beautiful Anthropocene, dried flower heads sit embedded in dark, spreading blooms of blue and black on a dusky pink ground, like specimens caught in a spill. And So I Watch You From Afar complimentarily, offers a more elemental with deep blues give way to rust-orange washes, the surface crusted and pitted like a coastline seen from above.

The process is as considered as the images. Scholz cleans his photographic chemicals in a cyclical system inside an ecological wet room of his own design, making the work’s footprint part of its message. Arranged as an island-like installation shaped by erosion, water and time, the show is given a fragile instability nodding to Photoworks’ own theme, as its images record landscapes which are still changing. Fittingly, Scholz told us he was resistant to formal archiving, often leaving the location of a piece unlabelled. It allows the works to become unstable lands in their own right as they become impossible to categorise neatly.

Alma Haser, FOUR LEGS. Hove Museum of Creativity, Photoworks Festival 2026. Image credit: Alma Haser.

Playfully continuing some of the liveliness in the images of Scholz, over in Hove, Alma Haser’s Playing With Your Eyes at the Hove Museum of Creativity posed the simple question of what is real? For Haser, the photograph is only the starting point and through paper-folding, collage and mixed media, she turns her images into puzzling sculptural objects that seem to shift as you move around them, sitting somewhere between two and three dimensions. Her work FOUR LEGS is typical of her approach. Photographed paper chairs in chalky pinks, some full-sized, some tiny, are stacked and tilted into a precarious pile against a painted pink backdrop. It is hard to tell at first glance what is flat, what is solid, and what is holding what up but it makes a neat light-hearted take on the festival’s theme of instability, taking structures which although looking seconds away from collapse somehow still stay standing.

That idea of holding firm was clearest, though, at POST, where we ended the day. It was a fitting place to finish, because it is as much about photography’s future as its past. Founded by photographers Simon Roberts and Nina Emett as an artist-led collaborative space for photography on the south coast, it sits in an underserved part of Brighton & Hove. Its plans go well beyond exhibitions, encompassing affordable studios and co-working spaces for lens-based artists, a community darkroom, a daylight studio, workshops, masterclasses and residencies, along with a shared kitchen and reference library. During the festival it hosted When the Earth Gives Birth by Johanna Alarcón, the 2026 Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award winner, alongside a decade of award-winning projects and work by Stafford herself. After a day of shows about unstable ground, POST offered something solid, anchored in a mission to create a place where photographers can make, share, and build their work together.