Kegham Djeghalian Sr was born in Anatolia in 1915, with his family shortly forced to flee due to the outbreak of the Armenian genocide. They first moved to Syria, later settling in British Mandate Palestine, where in 1944 he established Photo Kegham, the first commercial photography studio in Gaza. The studio documented Palestinian daily life despite the often violent upheaval that was taking place during this time, most notably marked by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Much of the archive of Photo Kegham has been tragically lost. However, three boxes of photographs remain, now in the possession of Kegham Djeghalian Jr, the grandson of the studio’s original founder. The exhibition presents the images and materials that remain, focusing on the story of Djeghalian Sr, as well as the visual history of Gaza itself. For Djeghalian Jr, the project is a way of connecting with the history of a place to which he cannot physically return, while also disrupting the dominant narratives that surround Gaza.
Biography
Kegham Djeghalian Jr is a Cairo- and Paris-based Palestinian-Armenian visual artist, creative director and fashion practitioner, whose work lies at the intersection of photography, image, the archive and fashion practices. His artistic pieces and interventions have been exhibited and presented internationally at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and they have been published by Afterall Books, Central Saint Martins (UAL), London. He is a professor of Fashion Practices and Visual Culture at the German International University, where he is also the artistic director of the Fashion Design Department.
Djeghalian is working on a multifaceted long-term project activating the endangered archive of his grandfather, Kegham Djeghalian Sr (1915–1981), the founder of Gaza’s first commercial photography studio. Djeghalian Sr is known as the most prominent photographer of mid-twentieth-century Gaza, as he documented the city through its transitions as well as its people.
In 2005, the Canadian photographer Michel Campeau set out to document photographic darkrooms – spaces increasingly rendered obsolete by the rise of digital photography. Once essential sites of image-making, these workspaces are reimagined through Campeau’s photographs as places of ritual, labour and memory, prompting reflection on what is lost as they disappear.
Campeau has photographed more than 75 darkrooms, primarily in his native Canada but also across countries including Cuba and Niger. Each image bears witness to the repetitive, tactile processes of analogue printing. Worn surfaces reveal years of photographers leaning into the same positions to adjust enlargers and equipment; improvised repairs, with duct tape holding together ageing tools that can no longer be easily replaced, speak to the ingenuity of their users. Handwritten notes taped to walls and enlargers hint at the meticulous routines, technical precision and quiet obsession that underpin the printing process.
Photographed with a digital camera and direct flash, the series deliberately resists nostalgia. Rather than advocating a return to analogue photography, Darkroom foregrounds the material culture of photographic practice, revealing the traces of human labour embedded within these spaces. In doing so, Campeau invites viewers to consider how photographs are shaped not only by the images they depict, but also by the technologies, environments and rituals through which they are made.
This exhibition has been produced by Martin Parr Foundation to accompany the MPF exhibition Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic, curated by Isaac Blease.
Biography
Michel Campeau (b. 1948) is a Canadian photographer, writer and collector whose work explores the subjective, narrative and material dimensions of photography. Over the past two decades, his research has focused on the material culture of photographic practice, examining the spaces, tools and histories of analogue image-making. His celebrated Darkroom series (2005–2010) has been exhibited internationally, including at the Rencontres d’Arles and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, while major solo exhibitions include Icons of Obsolescence at the National Gallery of Canada (2013) and Life Before Digital at the McCord Museum (2018). Campeau received the Jean-Paul Riopelle Career Grant in 2009 and the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in 2010. He lives and works in Montréal.
Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic, curated by Isaac Blease
With images spanning a period of more than 80 years, Dark Tales explores the complex relationship between the Gothic and British documentary photography, depicting Britain from the post-war period to the present day. The photographs in the exhibition reveal waning industrial powers, claustrophobic domestic scenes, and menacing nocturnal activities.
The exhibition brings together a selection of renowned images alongside lesser-known photographs, drawn primarily from the Martin Parr Foundation Collection. Together, they reveal people and places that are both resilient and haunted, charged with both fear and desire. Throughout the exhibition, the Gothic principle that horror thrives in close proximity to the familiar resonates, uncovering the uncanny within the everyday.
“Interest in the Gothic resurfaces during times of uncertainty, and documentary photography itself is in a dark moment, with its purpose and role in question, public distrust of ‘photographers’, and the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. This moment of turmoil presents intriguing conditions to explore the Gothic imagination as a relevant lens through which to re-examine the medium, while also reveling in the ambiguity of images and the multitude of meanings they evoke.” – Isaac Blease, Curator
The exhibition includes work by Kjell-Åke Andersson, Bill Brandt, Anna Fox, Robert Frank, Don McCullin, Lee Miller, John Myers, Akihiko Okamura, Sue Packer, Martin Parr, Charlie Phillips, Sarah Pickering, Alice Poyzer, Jo Spence, Janine Wiedel and Donovan Wylie, among others.
In avian ecology, ‘persistence studies’ is a field of research measuring how long birds can persist within a given landscape; how long their bodies remain present before ultimately disappearing. Used to estimate mortality, population change and the unseen impacts of human infrastructure, these studies rely on the tension between presence and absence, survival and disappearance.
Focusing on European starlings and house sparrows— species native to the United Kingdom but introduced to North America—the exhibition considers the instability of categories such as native and invasive, alongside broader questions of belonging. While both birds are widely regarded as invasive pests in the United States, their populations have undergone significant declines across parts of their native range. Through these shifting ecological narratives, Persistence Studies examines how value is assigned to life, how movement transforms identity and what it means to endure within landscapes irrevocably altered by human intervention.
This new commissioned work is produced in response to the 30,000 bird collection currently held at the Bristol Museums and Art Galleries.
Biography
Sheida Soleimani’s work explores intersections of art and activism, melding sculpture, performance, film and photography to highlight critical perspectives on events across the Middle East, unpicking the complex power dynamics between the region and western nations. Soleimani’s work interrogates the dissemination of information in digital contexts, adapting found images from press and social media leaks to exist within alternative scenarios. Her photographs document constructed sets within her studio, in which repeating images carve out trompe l’oeil perspectives in a visual metaphor for the competing political narratives relayed by her source materials.
Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include Flyways, Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels, Belgium (2026); Forest of Stars, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2026); What a Revolutionary Must Know, Cincinnatti Arts Center, Cincinnatti, OH, US (2025). In 2026 Soleimani was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Sheida Soleimani lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.
In July 1936, a fascist uprising led by General Franco attempted to overthrow Spain’s democratic government. In response, workers and peasants took up arms to fight back. What followed was a brutal civil war that foreshadowed the global conflict to come. Yet the war was also a moment of social revolution as ordinary workers mobilised to fight for a different vision of society. This sparked unprecedented international solidarity with volunteers from across the world—including Bristol and the surrounding region—joining the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic.
To mark the 90th anniversary of the war, the exhibition No Pasarán brings together the work of three Spanish artists and researchers engaged with themes of history and memory:
Julián Barón’s The Magic Labyrinth documents historical reenactments of the Spanish Civil War, staged across the country by reenactment troupes and attended by local audiences. Often described as the first media war due to its extensive documentation by photographers and filmmakers, the conflict established many of the visual tropes of war. Barón’s images play with these archetypes, creating a visual labyrinth of symbols that connects past and present while questioning how history is remembered, performed, and mediated.
In The Dead Hours (Las Horas Muertas), Barón documents the fading graphite drawings and writings left by Republican militia members on the walls of an abandoned factory in Bajo Aragón that served as a barracks during the war. Through a forensic visual approach, he reveals these fragile inscriptions as an intimate archive of memory, preserving traces of lives that continue to inhabit the ruins.
Anna Jornet’s work centres on the story of her grandfather, who, shortly after the Spanish Civil War, was assigned by the Franco regime to a battalion of forced labourers tasked with repairing roads damaged during the conflict. He worked on the construction of a mountain pass intended to facilitate the movement of troops in preparation for a potential attack on British-controlled Gibraltar. The road becomes an allegory for the end of his youth, marking his conscription into a state project founded on coercion and violence. Through this deeply personal history, Jornet reveals the hidden narratives embedded within everyday infrastructure, asking how landscapes continue to bear the physical and psychological traces of authoritarian power.
Best known as a curator and writer, Natasha Christia is currently researching the visual history of the International Brigades, drawing upon state archives and informal collections, found across Spain, Greece and the UK. A selection of Christia’s materials will be presented as part of the exhibition, bringing to life memories of shared resistance.
Biographies
Julián Barón is a photographer and educator, focussed on the role of photography as a catalyst for social thought. His practice examines how images shape memory, history and identity, challenging dominant narratives and collective imaginaries. Originally trained as an industrial engineer, Baron left his job as a quality assurance manager for a road signage company to join Blank Paper Collective, ultimately directing the Blank Paper School in Valencia (2008-2015). His first book, CENSURA (2011), was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award. In 2015, he was nominated for the Discovery Prize at Rencontres d’Arles. Since then, his work has been shown at the Centre d’Art Pompidou-Metz, the Netherlands Fotomuseum, the ChangJiang Biennale and Arts Santa Mònica.
Anna Jornet initially studied economics and law before pursuing a career in photography. Her work explores the relationships between photography, memory and place, with a particular focus on personal and collective histories. She has exhibited widely, including: Ressons de la Memòria (Castell de Montjuïc, Barcelona, 2024-2025); This Story Will Never Get Finished (Museu d’Art Modern de Tarragona, 2023-2024); C-3331/CA-8201 (Casa de Cultura de Girona, 2022); and Ventura (Biennal d’Art de Tarragona, 2021-2022). Her debut book, C-3331/CA-8201, was published by Ventura Edicions (2022).
Natasha Christia is an independent curator, writer and educator based in Barcelona, specialising in photography, photobooks and archives. Her research explores how photographic documents shape and challenge dominant historical narratives and ideological myths. She has led projects for institutions and festivals including DocField Barcelona, Photo Saint Germain, Krakow Photomonth, PHOTO Australia and SCAN Festival. Alongside her curatorial practice, Christia writes extensively on photography and has edited award-winning publications. She has served on numerous international photography juries and has taught photography and visual culture in Spain and internationally since 2008. Born in Athens, she lives and works in Barcelona.
George Hallett (1942–2020) developed his practice as a self-taught street photographer in Cape Town, South Africa, during the 1960s. His early photographs, often made in the District Six neighbourhood, documented everyday life within Black communities alongside portraits of key cultural figures. As a South African of mixed heritage, Hallett experienced the discrimination of apartheid, and the restrictions placed on professional opportunities led him into exile. He first settled in England in the early 1970s before later moving to France and the Netherlands. Throughout this period, he continued to photograph South Africans living in exile, creating a visual record of resistance, resilience and cultural identity while restoring dignity to communities frequently absent or misrepresented in mainstream media.
This exhibition focuses on Hallett’s years in England, highlighting his portraits of South African artists, musicians and writers in exile. These include visual artists such as Gerard Sekoto, Deie Feni and Gavin Jantjes; jazz musicians including Chris McGregor, Mongezi Feza, Dudu Pukwana, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo; and a series of book covers he designed for Heinemann’s African Writers Series, featuring authors including Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe.
The exhibition concludes with Hallett’s return to South Africa and his celebrated series documenting Nelson Mandela’s campaign for the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. These images earned Hallett the World Press Photo Award for People in the News in 1995.
First presented at Clémentine de la Féronnière in Paris in March 2025 as part of Centre Pompidou’s Échos Paris Noir programme, the exhibition was subsequently shown at Liverpool John Moores University Gallery. For Bristol Photo Festival, it is presented at IC Visual Lab, located at 6 West Street—the former home of the South Africa Resource Centre, an organisation that campaigned against apartheid. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Uprising.
Biographies
George Hallett (1942–2020) was a self-taught photographer from Cape Town, South Africa. He exhibited at Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris (2025); Peltz Gallery, London (2023); Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town (2022); Bozar, Brussels (2018); Bamako Encounters: African Biennale of Photography, Bamako (2017); and EVA International, Ormston House, Limerick (2016). He was also included in Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the International Center of Photography, New York (2012), which toured to Haus der Kunst, Munich and Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2013), and Museum Africa, Johannesburg (2014–15).
His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including Iziko – South African Art Gallery; Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town; District Six Museum and Bo-Kaap Museum, Cape Town; and the Library of Birmingham, UK.
Christine Eyene is an art historian and curator. She is co-Director of Exhibition Research Lab (ERL) at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool. She has recently been appointed as curator for French Institute Cameroon’s 2027 cultural season.
Her areas of research and curatorial practice encompass contemporary art from a global perspective, with an interest in African and Diaspora arts. Her practice also engages with socially-engaged initiatives, urban culture, new media, music, design, and architecture.
In 2024 she completed her PhD in Art History at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis focused on the relationship between text, African literature, and visual representation in the work of South African photographer George Hallett (1942–2020) under the supervision of Professor Annie E. Coombes.
“It took me many years to notice that, in the hush between conversations, she would sing. Simple tunes tinged with a gentle melancholy drifted through the room, sung in a tongue I had yet to decipher — folk songs belonging to a people all but erased from the map. ‘What are folk songs for?’ I once asked her. ‘They’re like prayers, or like roadmaps of a people,’ she answered. Those melodies became my compass.” Akshay Mahajan
Akshay Mahajan’s People of Clay (2016–present) traces the hidden histories embedded along the Brahmaputra River as it winds through India’s Goalpara region and across the border into northern Bangladesh. As Mahajan writes, “colonial survey lines cleaved one landscape into many, and the people caught in between were flattened into shorthand.” The project seeks to reverse this erasure by reconstructing the layers of story, myth and memory that shape the region. The result is a subjective cartography, formed through slow observation, listening and engagement.
The work draws extensively on myths and folktales. In the legend of Behula, a husband is cursed and killed by a snakebite, his body set adrift on the river. Refusing to abandon him, his grieving wife climbs onto the raft and accompanies him downstream. Though dismissed by others as mad, her devotion is ultimately rewarded when a goddess restores her husband to life. In People of Clay, Mahajan reimagines this moment, depicting Behula leaning gently over her husband’s body to retrieve a water hyacinth. Through such reinterpretations, the artist brings folklore into the present, allowing ancient stories to continue evolving.
Throughout the exhibition, Mahajan combines photography, collage and found materials, working through an iterative process in which a single image becomes the starting point for layers of addition and transformation. He compares this approach to the telling of a grandmother’s tale, where new details emerge with each retelling. The resulting works function as mnemonic devices, revealing narratives and memories overlooked or erased from official archives.
Yet People of Clay is not only an act of remembrance. As Mahajan writes: “My intention is simple: to recall that we are all people of clay, our contours forever provisional, never fully bound to the frontiers we inherit. And, like me, you may find that a single, unguarded song is enough to press a new, more generous outline into being.”
Biography
Akshay Mahajan (b. 1985, India) is an artist that uses photography and collage as tools to explore collective memory. His practice examines postcolonial cities, landscapes, folklore and mythology, to reveal how past, present and future are always entangled, shaped through varied forms of power. His work observes how our postcolonial reality is often anchored in pre-colonial stories and memories, using the camera as a tool to lay bare these connections. With a discerning eye, Mahajan explores how the physical structures and spaces in the non-western world can become emblematic of unfulfilled aspirations and unrealised potentials due to unresolved historiography. In terms of method, he uses images as a starting point to build large-scale assemblages that combine both found and archival materials. He describes this process as one of ‘radical citation’, allowing multiple voices to flow through his work.
Mahajan has exhibited widely, including: Vezasca Photo Festival, Singapore International Festival of Arts, Jogja Fotografis Festival, Athens International Photo Festival, Foam Museum, Cairo Biennale, Bamako Encounters and the Jakarta International Photography Festival. Awards include the Verzasca Foto Festival Award (2024), Foam Talent (2024), and the Aperture Portfolio Prize shortlist (2023).
The birth of photography has long been a contested narrative between the United Kingdom and France, often centred around figures such as Nicéphore Niépce and William Henry Fox Talbot. One of Many opens that conversation outwards, acknowledging that the history of photography is not singular but multiple. Histories are shaped as much by what they exclude as by what they include this project seeks to foreground those omissions and propose alternative viewpoints.
Through a cross-cultural dialogue between France and the United Kingdom, we bring together perspectives from leading curators, scholars, and institutions to explore how photographic histories are constructed and how they might be reimagined.
Invited selectors: Mark Seally (Autograph), Taous Dahmani (The Photographers’ Gallery), Christine Eyene (Independent Curator), Sergio Valenzuela (ENSP Arles) and Annabel Lacour (Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac).
Biographies
Annabel Lacour (Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris)
Annabel Lacour is a curator and researcher at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris. Her work explores the histories of photography, colonial archives and cross-cultural visual histories, with a focus on expanding photographic narratives beyond the traditional Western canon.
Christine Eyene (Independent Curator)
Christine Eyene is an art historian, curator and writer. Her research and curatorial practice focus on contemporary African and Diaspora art, with particular interests in photography, feminism and the politics of representation.
Mark Sealy (Autograph, London)
Mark Sealy OBE is Director of Autograph, London. A curator, writer and researcher, his work examines photography’s relationship to race, representation, human rights and the legacies of colonialism. Through his exhibitions and publications, he has played a leading role in expanding the histories and critical discourse of photography.
Sergio ValenzuelaEscobedo (École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP), Arles)
Sergio Valenzuela is an independent curator, founder of DoubleDummy and Head of Research at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP), Arles. His work spans curating, research and publishing, with a particular focus on contemporary photography, exhibition-making and the critical histories of the medium.
Taous Dahmani (The Photographers’ Gallery, London)
Taous Dahmani is an art historian, curator and writer specialising in photography. Since 2015, she has been curator at The Photographer’s Gallery in London. Her research explores the relationship between photography and politics, with a particular focus on the representation of social struggles, migration, race and feminist histories through the photographic image.
Drawing on the work of Liu Hsing Yu and Annie Wang, Family Times explores how family relationships are never fixed but continually reshaped by time, memory, care and changing social expectations. Both artists use photography to revisit intimate relationships across many years, treating time not simply as subject matter but as an active material within their practice.
In 2009, while visiting his family in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Liu Hsing Yu discovered his parents’ 1984 wedding photograph alongside the suit his father had worn for the ceremony. Recreating the image with his parents’ roles reversed—his mother in the suit and his father in a borrowed wedding dress—became the starting point for an ongoing series My Father and Mother. Liu went on to photograph his parents wearing one another’s wedding attire at the former homes of long-deceased relatives across rural Taiwan. These performative acts became a ritual through which he communicated the social transformations of contemporary Taiwan, including the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the growing visibility of LGBT+ communities, to his ancestors. At the same time, the project marked a deeply personal homecoming, allowing Liu to navigate his own coming out through a return to family history and ancestral landscape.
Annie Wang’s The Mother as a Creator (2007–present) offers a sustained meditation on motherhood over seventeen years. Each year, Wang photographs herself and her son before returning the following year to make another portrait in front of the previous image. As successive photographs accumulate, multiple moments in time collapse into a single image, producing what Wang describes as a visual “time tunnel”. Different versions of mother and child coexist, revealing motherhood not as a fixed identity but as an evolving relationship shaped by duration, intimacy and change.
Together, these two practices reveal family as both subject and method. Rather than presenting family as a stable unit, they foreground it as something continually remade through ritual, repetition and care. One work reflects on the changing relationship between parents and their child, the other on the evolving bond between mother and son. They offer complementary perspectives on kinship, identity and belonging, demonstrating how photography can make visible the slow, often imperceptible transformations that shape family life across generations.
Biographies
Liu Hsing Yu’s work centres on themes of gender, sexuality and human relationships with ecological environments, particularly in relation to Taiwan. For Liu, photography is a participatory medium that enables collaborations with others, working together to challenge conventional perspectives. Major international presentations include Centre Pompidou Paris (2019) and Kyotographie Japan (2025), where he was the recipient of the inaugural KG+Select Award. He was also nominated for the 2018 Taipei Arts Awards. Liu holds an MFA degree from the National Kaohsiung Normal University.
Annie Wang’s artistic practice focuses on issues of gender and the role of women within society. She has presented her work internationally, at festivals including: Images Vevey, Switzerland (2020), Daegu Photo Biennale, Korea (2021), Photo Australia (2022) and Paris Photo (2023). Her works are held in multiple permanent collections, including: the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (U.S.A), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, U.S.A), the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, U.S.A), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, U.S.A), the Harry Rison Center (Austin, U.S.A), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (San Francisco, U.S.A) and Tainan Museum of Art (Taiwan). She is also the director of the Cing Tien Art Space and an Assistant Professor at National Hong Dwa University (Taiwan).
Festival opening week 14 – 18 October 2026. Festival runs until 15 November 2026 bristolphotofestival.org Press kit with initial images HERE
Drawing on the success of the second edition, which drew over 115,000 visitors, the third edition of Bristol Photo Festival, the international biennial of contemporary photography, will open this autumn with exhibitions and events staged across Bristol’s major visual arts institutions as well as independent and unconventional spaces. Alongside the programme, the Festival will deliver a series of long-term engagement and education projects, working with local communities to explore overlooked aspects of the city’s story.
Entitled Time Machine, the third edition explores time as interwoven, where past, present and future fold into one another. Rooted in these understandings of time as cyclical, the Festival considers our present moment as a porous convergence — haunted and nourished by memory, imagination and anticipation. In this context, photography becomes more than documentation; it is an active entanglement with time itself. Images are spaces where memory and possibility coexist, and where time accumulates, loops and returns.
As Alejandro Acín, Festival Director, explains “This edition of the Festival explores how photography unsettles the idea of time as a single line. By bringing together international and local artists, the programme offers a constellation of fresh and thoughtful practices that engage with history, memory and dreams of the future in layered and unexpected ways. We cannot wait to announce the exhibition programme in July. At a moment when the arts and cultural sector is facing significant challenges across the UK, this edition required new ways of thinking, working and collaborating. We are especially excited to partner with outstanding local and international cultural organisations whose shared commitment and support make the Festival possible.”
Bristol Photo Festival is shaped by the movements, ideas and histories of Bristol. The festival includes exhibitions, talks and workshops, bringing together leading international photographic voices in dialogue with the city’s many communities.
The opening week of Bristol Photo Festival will take place from 14 – 18 October 2026, with a wide range of talks and events organised across the city. All exhibitions will be open until 15 November 2026, with presentations in the main partner institutions continuing beyond this date. Please see the website for further details – bristolphotofestival.org
The main cultural partners are: Arnolfini, Bristol Museums, Martin Parr Foundation, Watershed, University of the West of England, Brigstow Institute and University of Bristol alongside independent art and community organisations.
For further information, images and interview requests please contact Sam Trenerry:samtrenerry@yahoo.com/ +44 (0)7780 991 811
