“I am looking for life, in the middle of this death and destruction,” Fatma Hassona told me one day, in one of the numerous messages that we exchanged during the year that we spent with each other, from afar. She, blocked in her native Gaza, under the Israeli bombs, and I, travelling around the world, trying to be there as much as possible, whenever she had some connection.

Rarely have I seen someone evolving in such a limited perimeter, acting with so much agency. Rarely have photos taken with so many limitations transpired this much freedom.

Hassona’s gaze on the destruction of Gaza is implacable. No sensationalism. No voyeurism. Frontal wide shots that show the extent and the intent of destruction, make her photography such an essential comment on the act of genocide. And yet, the gentleness of her eye redeems the stolen dignity of the Gazan population, showing proud people, even when they have nothing left.
Hence, a patch of colour, amid vast layers of shattered concrete becomes the proof of a never ending humanity.

“They cannot defeat us,” she told me, the first day we met. And seeing my puzzled face she continued:“They cannot defeat us, because we have nothing to lose.”

Fatma Hassona's nickname was ‘The eye of Gaza’. She had just turned 25 when she got killed in a targeted attack by the IDF, along with six of her family members. Her legacy, though quite compact, will remain an indelible proof of the existence of the Palestinian people.

Text by Sepideh Farsi

About Program

Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! is the first exhibition globally to explore South Africa’s history of photobook publishing. Initiated in 2020, this project describes the emergence of a cosmopolitan photobook culture in South Africa through the presentation of a large and contradictory archive of publications made between 1945 and 2025.

As the variant spelling of the exhibition’s title implies, clarity and meaning around this area of bookmaking are still fluid. Alongside classical examples of photobooks, the exhibition presents artists’ books, literary experiments, coffee-table books, activist pamphlets and various examples of state and corporate propaganda. Almost all the books on display are browsable.

This gesture is central to the exhibition. Books are not decorative objects, they are meant to be touched, their ideas engaged. In 2022, when Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! was presented at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town, the books were chronologically displayed on a ledge that ran along the perimeter of the gallery. The timeline is a tested conceptual device that offers a useful means to tell a complicated story.

The books here on the second floor of Kyoto’s Hachiku-an (former Kawasaki residence) are also chronologically displayed in a timeline, albeit across three tables. This timeline presents evidence of the beginnings of a cosmopolitan book culture during the politically charged years of high apartheid years (1948–94), when state repression and censorship ensnared even photobooks. It also includes abundant examples of innovation in photography and book design in the democratic years that followed (1994–present).

Additionally, there is a curated display of important and outstanding photobooks from the last four decades.

Text by Sean O’Toole

About Program

Anton Corbijn’s photographs are far from perfect. They can be grainy, blurred, and distorted; sometimes unconventional in composition, or breaking the rules of form. And yet it is precisely these imperfections that give his work its signature gritty style that has become his unmistakable trademark.

The Dutch photographer was born in 1955 and raised by a family of minis-ters in a conservative village near Rotterdam. Music became an escape from this reality. “Music was, I guess in my mind, an amazing world – liberal and exciting,” he says. At 17, when they just moved to a bigger town in the north of Holland, Corbijn borrowed his father’s old camera to photograph a band in the town square. He sent the photos to a music magazine, and they were picked up. In the following decade, he went on to become the NME’s official photographer and created images of some of the most influential cultural figures of our time – from musicians and artists to designers, models, paint-ers, and cultural figures.

This exhibition presents nearly 100 works across 50 years of his career, beginning with some of his earliest portraits and ending with Cemetery , a series of photographs taken in graveyards around Europe in the 1980s. Whether stone or star, Cobijn always aims to reveal a deeper layer of psychology and presence. “There’s a very human touch to my work,” he says. And it is through this touch – imperfect and unpolished – that the many characters in his images come to life in a way we have never seen before.

About Program

Linder: Goddess of the Mind is a retrospective of the work of artist and punk provocateur Linder, brought to Japan for the very first time.

For more than 50 years, Linder Sterling has assembled images that remain as urgent and iconoclastic today as when she first conceived them. Born in Liverpool in 1954, she emerged from the late 1970s punk scene to become one of Britain's most influential contemporary artists. Linder is celebrated for her radical use of photomontage to challenge and reimagine ideas of desire and the human body.

Treating images as malleable objects, the artist confronts conformist constraints with beauty and humour. She draws on the spirit of Hannah Höch and the Berlin Dadaists as well as the dreamlike provocations of the Surrealists. Her method—cutting, collaging, and reconfiguring found imagery—reclaims the body from the machinery of desire and exposes the systems that drive power.

Developed in close collaboration with Linder, the exhibition at KYOTOGRAPHIE 2026 assembles formative works from her oeuvre. It builds on the momentum of her celebrated touring retrospective Linder: Danger Came Smiling at London’s Hayward Gallery last year and affirms her position as one of the great feminist mavericks of the British art scene.

About Program

Dawn breaks in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. A row of masked figures stand on the hillside, their capes drifting in the bitter wind as they look down upon the neighbouring city of La Paz. For many years these streets were haunted by two supervillains Mr. Barro and Mr. Humo, who cursed civilians with clouds of yellow smoke that dirty their shoes. But thanks to the shoe shiners, who descend upon the city every day to ward off evil, cleanliness and peace can be restored once more.

Shine Heroes is a participatory photography project initiated by Uruguayan artist Federico Estol. Initiated in 2015, it was developed in collaboration with 60 shoe shiners of La Paz, Bolivia and the charity newspaper Hormigón Armado with the aim to dispel harmful narratives about streetworkers.

In the areas around La Paz and El Alto, roughly 3,000 shoe shiners head out into the streets each day in search of customers. They wear ski masks to avoid being recognised, because in their neighborhoods, no one knows they work as shoe shiners. They hide their faces when travelling to the city center – even some of their own families don’t know their real jobs. The mask is their most powerful form of identity – it makes them invisible, while at the same time uniting them. This collective anonymity gives them strength and serves as a means of resistance against the exclusion they suffer because of their work.

Estol has worked as a community organiser in South America for over 15 years. The foundations of his practice are largely inspired by two great Brazilian thinkers: Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. In his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire refimagines teaching as a collaborative act rather than a one-way transmission. Out of that came Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed in the 1970s, a theatre practice that turns spectators into participants, using performance to challenge real-world oppression.

In Estol’s practice, fiction is harnessed as a powerful tool for social change. One key takeaway from this method is the idea that reality can be rehearsed. “Performance can show a way out of our daily life,” says Estol. “The fiction becomes a way out. It gives hope and can trigger change.” Staging their own mythology within the vibrant neo-Andean architecture of El Alto, the shoe shiners created a whole new narrative, and here they invite you to explore it.

About Program

Thandiwe Muriu’s journey into Camo began with a desire to redefine womanhood and express her feelings of invisibility. Shaped by her own journey of breaking out of the space of so-called “women’s work” to become an advertising photogra-pher, Muriu grappled with the societal expectations surrounding the place of women. Engaging in a dialogue between tradition and modernity, she employs textiles and common household items, making her subjects a canvas for reflec-tion on identity, representation, and community.

In Camo, wax textile is used as social vocabulary. Generationally, wax has been worn, shared, reinterpreted, and emotionally invested in as a tool of expression across the African continent. A widely accepted symbol of ‘Africanness’, it is deeply embedded in social and cultural practices.

Muriu’s subjects blend into these patterned fabric backgrounds yet remain in undeniable focus. Both a reflection of the pressure for women to occupy space quietly, and a rejection of the historical objectification of women’s bodies, Muriu’s works create a tension between visibility and erasure.

Asking questions about womanhood, Muriu turns to history in a process she calls ‘modernising history’ – reflecting on the past to expand the future. By doing so, she reflects on the expansive panorama of womanhood while presenting an offering of hope and joy.

The title of the series references ‘camouflage’ evoking thoughts of disappear-ance and blending in. But in Camo, what might otherwise remain overlooked or dismissed is given space to endure, to be seen, and to thrive.

About Program

During her residency in Kyoto, Thandiwe Muriu immersed herself in the tradition of Japanese textile craftsmanship. Her journey through Kyoto’s fabric landscape inspired a new chapter of her Camo series, titled More Than Half, where she reflects on themes of belonging and one's place in a community.

Muriu shifts her focus from camouflage to coexistence, anchoring her subjects in the renowned symbol of Japanese culture, the kimono, while setting them against a widely accepted backdrop of ‘Africanness’, the wax textile. By doing so she aims to recognise the experience of Afro-Asian (Blasian) women, whose identities naturally bridge two cultures.
Although multiculturalism has been promoted in recent years in Japan, judgment rooted in appearance continues to draw lines between “Japanese” and “non-Japanese.” Within this context, the duality of the Blasian identity can become a struggle. The term hāfu (half), commonly used in Japan to describe persons with one Japanese parent and one parent of another origin, reflects an assumption of incompleteness rather than wholeness.
Muriu’s portraits assert that both origins form a singular, unified presence, channelling the spirit of 一如 (Ichinyo): the Buddhist term meaning “all things are fundamentally one” and expressing that what may appear divided is, at its core, already whole.

Through her artistic choices and by employing a spectrum of skin tones as her palette, identities overlap, diverge and merge, challenging fixed definitions of purity. In 一如 (Ichinyo), Muriu evokes a world where belonging is not granted by resemblance, but expanded by existence.

About Program

Juliette Agnel uses her camera to make the invisible visible, capturing what she calls “the vibration of the world”. Her interests are deeply shaped by her journey to the Dogon country in Mali when she was in her early 20s. It was a formative experience that reshaped her understanding of humanity’s place within the cosmos. Immersing herself in animist philosophies, she encountered a worldview in which nature is alive with forces beyond human sight.

In this exhibition, Agnel presents two colour series created in collaboration with Van Cleef & Arpels: Dahomey Spirit, and Susceptibility of Rocks, alongside a new, previously unseen work Eternity. In the former, she moves through the Essay Garden of the Zinsou Foundation in Benin at night, letting smoke and coloured light conjure the invisible life of ancient plants. In the latter, she turns a scientific vocabulary inward, photographing specimens from the Sorbonne’s mineral collection as though they were human portraits. Agnel also presents Eternity, a black-and-white Super 8 film made in the sacred forest of Yakushima, where she surrendered to the silence of moss.

These three works share a common grammar. Each asks us to let go of our habitual senses – to let the very small become vast, and the still become alive.“ My work is rooted in the relationship between the real and the invisible, an absolute that surpasses us and urges us to question the foundations of our humanity,” she says. “I tirelessly pursue the same quest: observing the forces that surround us but remain unseen, to grasp what unites us in depth and to remember that the small human body is a meaningful fragment of the cosmos.”

About Program

“I don't know if individual photographs contain ideas, worlds, history, humanity, beauty, ugliness or nothing at all. I actually do not really care. I just extract and record things around me, without any pretence.”
— Daido Moriyama (Asahi Camera, June 1973 Special Issue)

With a career spanning more than 60 years, Daido Moriyama continues to ask a fundamental question: What is photography? Internationally recognised as one of the greatest street photographers of our times, he also used his camera to interrogate Japanese society and reflect on image circulation and consumption.

Born in Ikeda, Osaka, in 1938, Moriyama grew up in post-war Japan – a period marked by the General Headquarters (GHQ) occupation and also rapid westernisation, industrial and economic growth. During these decades of enforced change, Moriyama envisioned photography as a democratic medium, which he used to address his daily reality as well as the clash of Japanese tradition and western influences. Inspired by American artists such as William Klein and Andy Warhol, he also showed the contradictions of the effervescent capitalist society.

Freshly reimagined for its Kyoto presentation, this retrospective retraces Moriyama’s photography and his conceptual investigations, starting from his works for Japanese magazines, his progressive distrust of photojournalism, his contribution to the Provoke generation, and radical approach epitomised by his photobook Farewell Photography (1972). During this period, he also established a unique aesthetic, famously known as are bure boke (grainy, blurry, out of focus). Books and magazines are central to this exhibition as they were the fertile ground for this photographic production and debates.

In the early 1980s, Moriyama slowly overcame a creative and personal crisis. His subsequent work developed a visual lyricism with which he reflected on his identity, and the definitions of photography, memory and history. From that period on, Moriyama also renewed his interest in street photography, covering hundreds of miles in Japan, New York, Paris, São Paulo, and other cities. Well known for his gritty black and white images, he also embraced colour and digital photography to address our consumerist society. The exhibition ends with Record magazine, a love letter to the cities that Moriyama continues to produce to this day.

Daido Moriyama transformed the way we see photography and the world. He rejected the elitism of art, instead embracing the accessible and reproducible aspects of photography as a democratic contribution to our society.

Text by Thyago Nogueira

This retrospective has the cooperation of Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, the consultancy of Yutaka Kambayashi, Satoshi Machiguchi and Kazuya Kimura, and the curatorial assistance of Daniele Queiroz (IMS). It was originally presented at Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo), C/O Berlin, The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki), The Photogaphers’ Gallery (London), Photo Elysée (Lausanne), Fotografia Europea Festival (Reggio Emilia) and Foto Arsenal Wien (Vienna). The show is accompanied by a full monograph catalogue published in Portuguese, English and Japanese by IMS, Prestel and Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.

About Program

Ernest Cole’s publication House of Bondage (1967) is a sustained photographic investigation into the everyday realities of life under apartheid. Over years of clandestine work, Cole documented mines, hospitals, courts, police stations, prisons, and townships, using stark black-and-white images to reveal systems of forced labour, surveillance, and degradation. His photographs combine intimate portraits with incisive documentary sequences, emphasising both individual experience and the structures that constrained it. Shot with quiet empathy and unflinching clarity, House of Bondage maps routines of control – work, transport, housing, and legal coercion – so viewers confront how ordinary spaces were organised to enforce racial domination. Conceived as a cohesive narrative, House of Bondage is not only told through images. Cole’s own texts – written in exile and first published alongside the photographs in 1967 – are an essential part of the work. In them, he speaks in his own voice: analytical, angry, and lucid. His words provide context, sharpen the political meaning of the images, and make clear that this work is not neutral observation, but an act of resistance.

This exhibition brings together Ernest Cole’s photographs and his writings to restore the full scope of House of Bondage. As a personal and collective indictment of apartheid, it is a landmark work in the history of photojournalism, where images and words combine to bear witness – and to accuse.

Presenting Ernest Cole: House of Bondage in today’s context is of great significance. As one of the most powerful photographic testaments to life under apartheid, the exhibition not only highlights the enduring relevance of Cole’s courageous work but also opens a vital dialogue between South African history and contemporary global struggles for freedom and dignity. It is an act of remembrance and resonance – connecting histories across continents and reminding us of the transformative power of the image.

Text by Andréa Holzherr

About Program

Comprising more than 100 images taken over the last 23 years, What the Light Falls On is Pieter Hugo's meditation on life – focusing on birth, death, and the rites between. The title is a response to photographer Helmar Lerski's assertion that "in every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on". Hugo answers this by accumulating a vibrant archive of human presence. While his earlier projects took the form of photo essays built around defined themes, here he attempts to give a visual answer to one of life's most profound questions: what it means to be alive.

Two key photographs bookend the project. One depicts the birth of Hugo’s first child, and the other his father on his deathbed. These poignantly convey an awareness of life’s transience; two images – one of arrival, one of departure – function as emotional anchors. In the middle, a sprawling range of moments that define the human condition engulf the viewer like a stream of consciousness.

Middle age, Hugo seems to suggest, is a moment when one can look in both directions without flinching. From this vantage point, Hugo moves through the project playing with the distance he places between himself and his subjects. His approach is free and soft, and it is this softening – an earned porosity, an openness – that gives the series its particular force.

What transpires is Hugo’s direct and composed approach, nurtured out of his willingness to be present and to sit in ambiguity rather than search for an easy resolution.

Text by Federica Angelucci

About Program

In 2018, Atsushi Fukushima, who had recently left his job delivering meals to elderly people living alone, was invited by a friend to enter the world of farming. He had expected it to be “a more peaceful life”, but the daily routine of a farmer – cultivating and harvesting nearly ten kinds of vegetables each year – turned out to be unimaginably grueling. Summer in particular, when all living things burst with vitality, is a constant battle against nature in the form of weeds, insects, pests, sunlight and heat, and typhoons.

Farm work starts at 5am and continues until mid-afternoon, with every second counting. If left unharvested, the vegetables quickly rot as the temperature rises. Among periods of endless weeding and the ravages of extreme weather, there were countless moments when, at the mercy of the great forces of nature, Fukushima felt a strangely liberating sense of ease and acceptance, unlike anything he had ever experienced in his previous life in the city.

"When I found myself in a vulnerable position, overwhelmed by the immense workload, I felt for the first time that I was living on the same level as other creatures. At first, I wanted to capture in my photographs the sense of fulfillment that comes from battling nature, but I gradually came to understand that that fulfillment stemmed from the realisation that I, too, am a part of nature. This was a sensation I was only able to experience after reaching this stage of my life. I began to wonder if this world – where I’m covered in dirt and sweat, competing with other living creatures for crops – might actually be a beautiful utopia. And I began to hope that through photography, I could capture that beauty and bring it to life.”

With these thoughts, Fukushima aimed his 6x7 medium-format camera at the summer fields. He captured lush, glistening crops, his fellow labourers working alongside him, vegetables on the verge of rotting, and maggots swarming among them. By photographing everything – including himself – from a bird’s-eye view, Fukushima reveals not the binary opposition of life and death in the fields, but the very energy that encompasses both life and death. The fierce struggle unfolding under the scorching sun and the overwhelming energy that lays everything bare, captured by Fukushima, reflect the myriad phenomena existing within the small universe of the summer field that nurtures the vegetables we eat every day.

About Program

Sari Shibata was born in the mountains of Nanto, Toyama, and grew up watched over by her grandparents, great-grandmother, and the local community. The exhibition title Dotok Days derives from dotoku (literally “virtue of the soil”), a term used by Sōetsu Yanagi , founder of the Mingei movement, to describe the spiritual climate of Nanto. It means knowing that one cannot live without mutual support. It means entrusting oneself to a force far greater than anything one could plan. It means that the labours and prayers of unnamed people accumulate in the land, quietly supporting daily life from beneath.

After leaving for the city to study, Shibata returned 12 years later, prompted by the birth of her nephew and her aging relatives. While the population had declined and the town had changed, the rhythms of life – cultivating rice fields, dancing at festivals, supporting one another, praying – continued. As the experiences invisible in childhood come into view, a child’s gaze gradually draws close to a grandmother's. “I came to realise,” Shibata says, “that birth and loss are not separate dots, but form a circle within me. And that this circle is also part of a much larger circle that has accumulated in this land”.

This series was created during a residence at the first-established champagne house, Ruinart, in Reims, France, following Shibata’s receipt of the Ruinart Japan Award at KYOTOGRAPHIE 2025. Every woman in the photographs is a self-portrait of the artist. Using her own body as a vessel, she embodied the lives of Nanto’s women in Reims. The white paper that occasionally appears in the works is Gokayama washi, handmade from plants native to Nanto. As Shibata walked through the forests of Reims, whenever she sensed the presence of “something”, she would cut the paper, place it, and photograph it.

Pruning and harvesting in the vineyards, fermentation and aging – working with nature and entrusting oneself to time resonates with the bodily sensibility nurtured in Nanto. The same light falling on Nanto and Reims folds the two lands into one, quietly illuminating the value of days that circle through everyone in this world.

About Program

In The Shape of What Remains, Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre chart a journey through modern ruins. They do so by working within the old Jushin Kaikan dormitory, where empty rooms amplify the echo of disused buildings that have fascinated them for more than 20 years.

Their approach took shape in 2002 in the south of Paris, during their first explorations of abandoned places. The astonishment they felt when faced with the heritage weight of certain sites quickly transformed that initial excitement into an impulse to archive. They then directed their research toward architectural ensembles marked by obsolescence, where abandonment implicitly sketches a portrait of our societies.

In 2005, their quest took them to Detroit, a city that was once known as the ‘Motor City’ but now a real American Pompeii. Their investigation eventually led them to Japan in Gunkanjima (2008 —2012) and to their long-term project Theaters (2005 — 2021). Their practice, influenced as much by the Bechers’ serial rigour as by urban exploration and an attention to pictorial academicism, found recognition with The Ruins of Detroit (Steidl, 2010), which became an experimental work that uses generative AI to transform the city of Paris itself into a post-apocalyptic ruin.

For a long time, photography carried a promise of indexicality — what appears in the image existed before the lens, bound by a tacit pact with reality. The rise of generative AI and its imitative power shook this already fragile principle. From this sense of vertigo, Les Ruines de Paris was born: an illusory game between imagining a city's future ruins and resisting the obsolescence that seems already foretold. And in this exhibition, they premiere a new body of work that applies the same method used for Paris to transform the cityscape of Kyoto into a desolate ruin through generative AI. By mixing archives and personal photos, the duo enacts a ‘crumbling’ of the city, extending a reflection on the representation of ruins and questioning our fascination with collapse.

About Program

Memory is a gesture repeated, a shadow returning across time; it rehearses itself in light, in paper, in wood. In Rehearsal of Memory, Lebohang Kganye presents a constellation of four major bodies of work that explore how families, nations, and identities are shaped by absence, inheritance, and imagination. Across photography, cut-out silhouettes, diorama lightboxes, patchwork fabric, and sculptural interventions, the exhibition transforms personal archives into immersive, living spaces where the past and present coexist.

Visitors enter a layered narrative in which South African histories, family stories, and postcolonial realities converge. Kganye repeatedly positions herself inside her own archive, inhabiting the silhouettes of ancestors, wearing her mother’s clothes, or appearing as a spectral double. In doing so, she rejects the distance between storyteller and story, making memory itself a fragile, performative practice.

Installed within Higashi Honganji, one of Kyoto’s most significant wooden temple complexes, the exhibition enters into dialogue with centuries of craftsmanship and the poetry of light filtered through wood and paper. Shadows, silhouettes, and material presence echo Japanese aesthetics, recalling the subtle gradations praised by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki in In Praise of Shadows. Here, memory becomes architecture, and history unfolds like a rehearsal: repeated, imagined, and experienced anew. Kganye invites viewers not merely to observe, but to inhabit memory, feeling its rhythms, gaps, and resonances, and recognising how the past continues to live within the present.

Text by Marina Paulenka

About Program

Hachiku-an (Former Kawasaki Residence) hosts two Main Program exhibitions: [1] Fatma Hassona – The Eye of Gaza and [2] Photo Book! Photo-Book! Photobook! (in collaboration with A4 Laboratory, curated by Sean O’Toole).

It is also home to the Information Machiya, the festival’s main hub—where you can purchase tickets, books, and goods; enjoy a tea room experience; get exhibition and tourist information; and rent bicycles (passport ticket holders only).

If this is your first time visiting KYOTOGRAPHIE, we recommend stopping here first.

Concierge

At the Information Machiya, concierge staff are available to assist with choosing tickets, navigating exhibitions, and planning routes. Feel free to ask about lunch spots, cafés, and nearby sightseeing as well.

Goods & Book Shop

The festival’s largest gift shop offers a wide selection of original goods and publications.

KYOTOGRAPHIE Lounge

A space where you can freely browse catalogues and videos from 2013 to 2026. Some books from the shop are also available to read. Relax while enjoying views of the garden.

Bicycle Rental

Free bicycle rental is available for passport ticket holders (no reservations, first-come first-serve basis. Bicycles must be returned by 18:00).

Tea Ceremony

Paid tea ceremony sessions are held in the afternoon on:
April 19 (Sun), 26 (Sun), May 4 (Mon), 6 (Wed), 9 (Sat), and 16 (Sat).
Advance reservations are recommended.

About Hachikuan

A traditional Kyoto machiya over 100 years old, built in the “Taishō-era style” incorporating Western elements influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Western-style section was designed by Goichi Takeda, a pioneer of modern architecture in Kansai, while the tea room and Japanese-style rooms were designed by master sukiya architect Asajiro Uesaka. The property spans approximately 820 square metres and includes a tea room, salon, Western-style building, entrance wing, garden, a two-storey main house, bathroom facilities, and two storehouses.

About Program

On weekends and public holidays, visit the KYOTOGRAPHIE Information Kiosk, located on the first floor of JR Kyoto Station Plaza (north side) —the gateway to Kyoto. Our staff are available to assist with festival information, tickets, KYOTOPHONIE and KG＋, as well as local sightseeing recommendations.

About Program

During the festival, NTT WEST Sanjo Collaboration Plaza becomes a dedicated photography space for children, featuring two special exhibitions, a photo studio (during Golden Week), and a space for the Kids Workshop Events.

『KODOMOGRAPHIE』

Launching in 2026, KODOMOGRAPHIE is a child-friendly, bite-sized version of the main festival programme. It features selected works by Thandiwe Muriu, Federico Estol, Atsushi Fukushima and Ernest Cole. Take your time, look closely, move around, imagine, and freely explore this exhibition at your own pace and height.

KYOTOGRAPHIE Kids Competition Exhibition 2026
『Looking beyond the EDGE: What will we discover?』

Supported by Petit Bateau

In 2026, the KYOTOGRAPHIE Kids Competition was open to students from grades one to nine, from schools in the Kansai and Kanto areas. Many young photographers demonstrated their talent in capturing pictures of what the EDGE means to them.
We received more than 700 photographs from 14 schools, and 124 from the Petit Bateau Kids Competition. In total, 46 photographs were selected by the jury for this exhibition.

『Thandiwe Muriu Dress-up Studio』

Photo Booth for children inspired by Thandiwe Muriu’s photographs. From May 2–6 , shoot your own portrait!

About Program