The thought of edges evokes a world of associations – of peripheries, of lives lived on the margins, of perilousness, or collapse. It suggests reaching a tipping level whereas providing no clue of what lies past the brink. Yet, inherent in that uncertainty is a chance for discovery and hope; new realities and prospects.
This 12 months, one of many world’s most enjoyable pictures festivals is bringing collectively image-makers from around the globe whose work addresses the compelling and complex idea of ‘edge’. Now in its 14th version, KYOTOGRAPHIE International Photography Festival will open this month in Kyoto, taking on most of the historic metropolis’s institutional areas and galleries in addition to non-traditional websites such because the Hachiku-an constructing (the previous Kawasaki Residence), Demachi Masugata Shopping Arcade, Higashihonganji O-genkan temple, Kyoto Station, and extra.
The pageant’s founders, Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, elaborate on this 12 months’s theme: “KYOTOGRAPHIE 2026 explores the edge as a site of both tension and transition. We see radical approaches to photography alongside studies of urban decline, while documents of marginal communities intersect with ongoing issues of colonisation and territorial disputes,” they clarify. “We also explore the transcendental force of nature, and see how reaching an edge can open up new ways of seeing, thinking, and creating – even in the face of the bleakest environmental, political, and personal turmoil. The edge is a place of uncertainty, yes, but also of possibility. A place where something ends to make way for something new.”
Below, we check out only a few of the huge pageant’s highlights…
Daidō Moriyama is extensively thought to be Japan’s most influential and famend photographer. Best recognized for his putting black-and-white avenue pictures and his affiliation with the cutting-edge journal Provoke, he performed a pivotal position within the post-war wave of Japanese avant-garde image-makers. Influenced partially by American artists similar to Andy Warhol, William Klein and Jack Kerouac, Moriyama used pictures as a device to look at representations of actuality, fact and fiction, reminiscence and historical past.
Of his personal apply, he as soon as mentioned, “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.” Curator Thyago Nogueira elaborates on his phrases, “The quote addresses Moriyama’s unpretentious approach to photography, his down-to-earth vision on the media, which led him to experiment so freely as opposed to the fine art tradition. And, at the same time, it describes all the amazing ideas a photo can transmit or embody.”
His exhibition at Kyotographie embodies these concepts. Nogueira describes it as “more than a traditional photography show”. He says, “This show is an opportunity to dive not only into Moriyama’s extraordinary body of work, but also into his mind, through his writings and reflections on the medium.”
Known for her radical, scalpel-sharp photograph montages, Linder Sterling describes her work as “rebellious, curious and forensic”. Drawing on punk, pop, surrealism, and a contact of occultism, her collages are iconoclastic, feminist visions, reconfiguring and subverting concepts of girls’s our bodies, want, consumerism, and extra. In a dialog with Dazed final 12 months, she talked concerning the disruptive high quality of photograph montage, “Sometimes it feels like a form of alchemy where something is greater than the sum of its parts. When you place an iron over a woman’s head and mouths over her breasts, the optic nerve struggles to work out what’s happening on that pictorial plane because we shouldn’t see a woman with a steamer on her head.”
The act of reducing is integral, actually and conceptually. “Collage and photomontage emerged in the early 20th Century from a world in a state of flux,” she explains. “In times of such urgency, we need a medium that can literally cut through and offer imaginative alternatives to mainstream dogma.” Following her 2025 retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery, her presentation at Kyotographie this 12 months affirms her standing as one among Britain’s most visionary and provocative artists whose work continues to really feel fashionable, even whereas it attracts on the previous. “To me, the past is ever present,” she says. “Out of my respect for tradition, I am inspired to innovate with material and subject matter. I feel my work will resonate for precisely these reasons.”
“My work exists because I saw music as an escape from my reality when I was a teenager, and that led, at age 17, to discovering that a camera could bring me closer to that world,” explains Anton Corbijn. “Hence, all my initial photographs were of musicians.” He did enterprise into the worlds of movie, vogue and artwork, however the eminent photographer is probably finest recognized for his memorable portraits of musicians, a lot of which have develop into seared into the cultural creativeness as defining photographs.
Over the previous 50 years, he’s labored with a lot of an important artists of our age, from Björk to Joy Division, Nirvana to Kate Bush and David Bowie. His selective retrospective at Kyotographie will show a few of his iconic portraits alongside his lesser-known however equally arresting photographs, tracing half a century of his putting portraiture apply. The throughline of the exhibition is the persistently compelling nature of his photos, which all replicate his guiding rules as an image-maker: “A good photo would, in my opinion, touch three elements: it would say something about the subject, it would say something about the photographer, and it would show us an image that is new.”
Kyotographie’s African Artist in Residence, Thandiwe Muriu, attracts on Kenyan traditions and crafts to discover questions of id, womanhood, societal roles, and the results of cultural forces by way of her photographs, which mix a deep reverence for custom with sturdy Afrofuturist parts.
Deeply impressed by conventional textiles, she makes use of these materials with their daring geometric prints as a backdrop or canvas for her putting figures of girls. In anticipation of her two shows at Kyotographie, Muriu has included Japanese material and prints into her work, tracing and articulating the connections between Kenyan and Japanese visible languages. During her residency, she realized about the artwork of Japanese textile manufacturing traditions, notably in relation to the kimono. “My journey through Kyoto’s fabric landscape inspired me to create a body of work that intertwines the bold languages of both the kimono and the wax textile, to reflect on the expansive theme of belonging and one’s place in a community,” she explains. “By using both textiles in a single image, I aim to recognise the experience of Afro-Asian (Blasian) women, whose identities naturally bridge two cultures to form a singular, unified presence. In this new work, I evoke a world where belonging is not granted by resemblance, but expanded by existence.”
Federico Estol collaborates with the shoe shiners in La Paz, Bolivia, to honour this unrecognised and disenfranchised neighborhood. Every day, over 3,000 staff take to town streets to shine footwear, carrying disguises to cover their identities because of the stigma surrounding shoe-shining. Vulnerable to discrimination and unprotected by any type of staff’ rights, they’re working on the margins. But Estol’s portraits reframe these nameless labourers as heroes.
Working with a bunch of shoe shiners and Hormigón Armado, an area initiative that produces a month-to-month newspaper to boost cash for the employees, his sequence, Shine Heroes, seeks to reframe the perceptions of Bolivia’s shoe shiners and restore their dignity. “We continue to drive social transformation with these 60 workers – not only through the new visibility they’ve gained among citizens, but also in their daily income,” says Estol. “Our goal is to finally overcome the stigma in the city and take off the mask – to be seen as normal workers.”
KYOTOGRAPHIE runs from 18 April till 17 May 2026.