Migration was not chosen as the 2026 theme by a group of people. It is worthwhile to pay attention to this. Photographers, curators, institutions, and festival programs from twelve different countries have all come to a similar conclusion in quite different ways. The accumulation of this information, when viewed all at once, is hard to write off as a coincidence.
Bieler Fototage in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, has the most straightforward curatorial framework. This year’s theme for the festival is vulnerability, but not the intimate, reflective kind that photography festivals occasionally turn into. It is organized around four axes: reparative artistic gestures, feminism and body politics, affective ecologies, and explicitly migration narratives. The framing gives the impression that the organizers have had enough of treating displacement as a subcategory and are now presenting it as a crucial aspect of modern life. Making that editorial argument is more difficult than it seems.
Similar work is being done by Photo London, which is currently in its eleventh edition and recently opened at Olympia in Kensington, but with a stronger focus on the market. South Asian, Central European, and Latin American voices are particularly highlighted in its Source section, which focuses on underrepresented artists of great cultural significance. These regions’ relationships with mobility, belonging, and external perception have seldom been given sustained platform space in a fair of this size. It’s really difficult to say whether that’s a commercial positioning or programming principle. Most likely both.
Perhaps the most intimate version of this discussion can be found in Farren van Wyk’s Mixedness Is My Mythology exhibition at Fotomuseum Den Haag in The Hague. Born in South Africa during the last year of apartheid and reared in the Netherlands, Van Wyk explores what it means to be categorized by color by shooting in black and white. In addition to being about family history and colonial legacy, the work is unmistakably about the experience of always being in the middle and falling into a category that was created by others. It’s difficult to ignore how many of the most captivating pieces on the 2026 circuit return to that exact emotion.
Johny Pitts’s Black Bricolage at MEP in Paris documents two decades of Afro-European and Afro-diaspora realities throughout the continent, not through grand thesis photography but through everyday afternoons, cafés, commutes, and community centers. According to Pitts, his method is based on closeness and listening, and the work demonstrates this restraint. This is not a spectacle of migration. In cities that have never quite figured out how to accept who they have become, migration is the texture of everyday life.
It’s possible that what’s taking place at these festivals represents a kind of reckoning that has been developing within the photography community for years and has finally surfaced in the program notes of enough institutions at once to be recognized as a shift, something that the larger culture hasn’t yet caught up with.
Alternatively, photographers who work in documentary or social practice may be drawn to the same content almost uncontrollably because the events that push people across borders are so obvious, so persistent, and so hard to ignore. Both explanations seem insufficient. It’s more likely that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and it’s probably this ambiguity, this inability to fully explain the convergence, that makes it feel important rather than just topical.
FAQs
1. Why are so many 2026 photography festivals focusing on migration?
Multiple institutions independently converged on displacement as the defining condition of contemporary life.
2. Which festival most explicitly frames migration as a core theme?
Bieler Fototage in Switzerland names migration narratives as one of four structural axes.
3. How does Photo London address migration and displacement in 2026?
It spotlights South Asian, Central European, and Latin American voices through its Source section.
4. What makes Farren van Wyk’s work relevant to the migration conversation?
She explores the colonial legacy and the experience of permanent in-between cultural belonging.
5. Is the migration focus in 2026 festivals a planned curatorial trend?
No single body coordinated it — the convergence appears organic and reflects broader cultural pressures.
