Once a year, Kyoto hosts an independent, international photography festival that brings together artists’ perspectives from around the world, installing them in a mixture of art spaces and historical private buildings around the city. Working with scenographers and curators, they adapt each space uniquely to showcase the work they are presenting. The festival connects the photography world in Japan, shifting perspectives while pushing sometimes radical themes. They also have a sister music festival, Kyotophonie.
Following their focus on humanity in 2025, the Kyotographie team have chosen ‘The Edge’ as the theme for their 2026 edition, bringing together a series of exhibitions that explore the fringes, the dark and the extremes of life on this planet.
Photographers on view this year include a posthumous exhibition of work by Fatama Hassona, The Eye of Gaza. They also have a focus on South Africa that brings together exhibitions and music from the country through the work of Lebohang Kganye, Pieter Hugo and a peripatetic library of South African photobooks, A4 Arts Foundation, music from the peerless Msaki and Tubatsi and an address by Dr Siyabulela Mandela.
Ernest Cole at Kyotographie
(Image credit: Kenryou Gu)
Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art takes on his seminal book. Upon being published in 1967, during apartheid, Cole was exiled from the country, as the book explores the devastating portrait of life for Black people in South Africa during that time. Curated by Andrea Holzherr of Magnum, which represents the late photographer’s estate, the exhibition shows his work in Japan for the first time, telling the story not only of his work but also of his life. After moving to the United States in exile, Cole worked for a few years before dropping off the map and becoming homeless, dying in the 1990s. Failed by the systems that supported the publishing of his book, he was devastated at the lack of change it brought on and never lived to see Apartheid end, dying months beforehand. Decades later, he is celebrated as one of the greats in his field, and his moving photographs live on as a portrait of oppression.
Also on view is another artist showing work in Japan for the first time, Linder Sterling. ‘Linder: Goddess of the Mind at the Museum of Kyoto Annex’ is a survey of her 50-year career and the feminist practice that began by creating self-portraits and record covers while still at college (famously the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict) – work that still has a contemporary charge, to this day. Her work with collage and pornography explores tropes of femininity and female and queer sexuality in a manner that feels radical.
(Image credit: Takeshi Asano)
‘Despite cultural differences and histories, there’s thankfully always a mutually shared curiosity when I exhibit works away from home.’ Linder explains. ‘Photomontage can create an instant visual Esperanto regardless of where one is in the world. I always tell visitors that there are no right or wrong meanings in my work, what’s most important are the meanings that they themselves generate. This sometimes brings great delight on my part. Recently, sixteen-year-olds saw the women in the 1970s photomontages as cyborgs who were co-opting domestic utensils to enhance their superpowers, rather than being bowed down with domesticity. I was thrilled at such a reading!’
Another exhibition steeped in pop-culture lore is legendary rock photographer, art director and filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s Presence at the Shimadai Gallery. Corbijn worked for music magazines such as NME in their heyday, and the level of creative freedom and ability to connect with his subjects bonded him to many of the artists he shot. He ended up working as an art director for Depeche Mode and U2, before he made the film Control in 2007, which tells the story of his creative collaborators, Joy Division.
Anton Corbijn’s Presence at the Shimadai Gallery
(Image credit: Kenryou Gu)
‘I knew them as part of my history, in a way, but I don’t want to become the guy who does these kinds of biopics,’ he says. ‘I want to develop myself as a movie maker, because I know very little about filmmaking, to be honest. So, it’s a learning curve. So that’s why, after Control, which is a story I knew a lot about, I choose a different film, The American, which was fictional.’
In the course of his tour of some of the most recognisable portraits – of iconic musicians, from David Bowie in a loincloth to Brian Eno shot from a distance walking in the countryside – he revealed his next film will be about the writer Patricia Highsmith. This set of portraits, instantly recognisable in their black and white graininess, are a passion project, a mixture of assignments and quests to find subjects as elusive as Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.
The darkness that bleeds into his work is not dissimilar to that in the work of photography master Daido Moriyama, in a stunning iteration of his seminal survey by the curator Thyago Nogueira. ‘A Retrospective at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art’ dives into his work chronologically, from his Provoke images to the are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) motif.
(Image credit: Kenryou Gu)
Throughout, the theme of ‘The Edge’ is also explored through nature, notably in the work of Juliet Agnel and Atsushi Fukushima. Agnel has created portraits of minerals, rocks and plants that bring out their otherworldly qualities, alongside Fukushima’s images of the extreme ups and downs of life as an arable farmer. We rely on photography to show us the edges of life and society that we can’t access ourselves, and in this conservative era, the definition of what is seen as radical exists on shifting sands. Today’s edge can be tomorrow’s mainstream.
Linder had some words of support for today’s radicals and edge-dwellers: ‘Tread carefully but determinedly, there are those in the world would silence all forms of protest and dissent. Use humour, have a light touch, but be deadly serious about what you do. Turn up! Experience life without any filters, there’s a visceral beauty in and around you beyond that of the lens on your phone. Rather than checking in with your phone, check out the big wide world and have your say there. Leave a mark, a breadcrumb trail of sorts, so that others can find you in years to come.’
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