Belfast Photo Festival 2025

Belfast Photo Festival 2025 is now open for entries!

Belfast Photo Festival 2025 : Belfast Photo Festival 2025, Northern Ireland’s international premier visual arts festival and biennial event once again celebrates some of the finest national and international contemporary photography and visual culture inviting all photographers, artists, curators, archives, collectives around the word to participate.

Short description

Belfast Photo Festival 2025, one of the leading International Festivals of photography in the United Kingdom and the Visual Arts Festival of Northern Ireland, now accepting entries from artists and photographers. This major photographic event celebrates some of the finest national and international contemporary photography and visual culture.

Belfast Photo Festival is offering artists/photographers the opportunity to exhibit their work in the main Festival gallery alongside some of the biggest names in the field of photography and have their work taken on tour to be exhibited at the 2026 Photo Schwiez (Zurich, Switzerland), with a number also having the opportunity to be featured in the arts magazines Abridged and Aesthetica. Through a range of national and international interactive events the festival aims to inspire the countries future photographers, artists and entrepreneurs, offering new, exciting, welcoming and sometimes challenging experiences to audiences through the program of events.

Launched in 2011, this annual photographic event has been described as one of the “best photography festivals in the world” (Capture Magazine) and attracts upwards of 100 thousand visitors a year, celebrating some of the finest National and International contemporary photography across 30 museums, galleries and public spaces. Capturing wide appeal through popular culture, accessible themes and unexpected encounters with photography, the festival aims to instil and inspire public enjoyment and participation by utilising the most accessible artistic medium and bringing it to new audiences in cool and unusual ways. The theme has been left open to remove any restrictions; submissions must be photographic or lens-based but can include incorporations of other art forms with the photographic medium (i.e. performance, painting, sculpture, music, literature etc).

You can submit both a photo-book and photographs of the same project, but a fee will need to be paid for both. If submitting only a photo-book and not photographs, it will be your photo-book that will be selected for presentation and not photographic prints for exhibition. It will be considered photographs, photo-media, performance, photo-films, photo-books, new media, archives and sculptural forms.

Panel of influential international experts in the field of photography will assist in the shortlisting and selection of artists alongside the Festival team. The Jury will be looking for high quality work.

The 2025 Belfast Photo Festival is scheduled for 5 - 30 June 2025 in Bellfast, Northern Ireland.

Who may enter?

The International Belfast Photo Festival 2025 is open for submissions to all photographers, artists, curators, archives, collectives from anywhere in the world.

Prize:

The main award for 2025 is the Spotlight Award, is £2,000. In addition the Aesthetica Editorial Award and Abridged Editorial Award will also be awarded. The best works will also be exhibited at the 2025 Photo Schweiz (Zurich, Switzerland).

Entry fees:

During the Early Bird (by 1 November 2024) you can benefict of 25% of discount on your entry fee.