Photoworks Festival returns to Brighton & Hove this October for its first full in-person edition since 2018. The festival, titled Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams, runs from 02 October to 01 November 2026 at venues across the city.

The event, formerly known as Brighton Photo Biennial, survived the pandemic as a "festival in a box" mailed to individuals and organisations, a format repeated in 2022. Photoworks then staged performance-based and participatory activities at the Photoworks Summit and Photoworks Weekender in 2024, followed by the Photobook 101 with the University of Brighton in 2025. This October marks the return of a full festival.

It will be the first Photoworks Festival for current director Louise Fedotov-Clements, who spearheaded the Summit, Weekender and Photobook 101 and previously founded Derby's FORMAT Festival. She is keen to keep innovating. "There are so many festivals in the world, we don't want to just repeat the same formula," she says. The opening weekend of 02–04 October kicks off with an international conference, exhibitions and events; shows and events continue for the month, and the theme extends through the 2026 Photoworks Annual, Cosmophotographies, which launches at the festival.

As the title suggests, the festival takes a strong interest in the environment. At Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Aindreas Scholz confronts the climate crisis in And So I Watch You From Afar and The Most Beautiful Anthropocene, documenting how humans reshape the coastal environment through cameraless photography printed in a sustainable darkroom. The project proposes production methods that are collaborative and exploratory rather than extractive.

The same ethos runs through the rest of the programme. At Regency Town House, Sam Kaufman's film Pseudomorphs explores how threatened cuttlefish camouflage and adapt their bodies, shifting the boundaries between discrete organisms and the marine ecosystem. The same venue hosts Holly Birtles' Fighting Fish, made with AI and analogue techniques and inspired by research into river pollution in the UK and India. Daniele Cimaglia and Giuseppe Odore's La Dote di Latera ("The Latera Dowry") was created with a group of women in the small medieval town of Latera in central Italy; drawing on traditional cultivation and weaving techniques, it features work cyanotyped onto the community's inherited linen.

Fedotov-Clements sees parallels between artists and scientists "in terms of world-building and creating realities that others might enter". Bones of Our Land, a collaboration between artist Tsz Wai Pun and ecologist Coşkun Güçlü at Gallery Lock, is a multimedia installation in which sound, soil analysis, photography, archival materials and scientific fieldwork converge to chart the restoration of an environmentally degraded Hong Kong hillside. Visitors are invited to "read" the history of the changing landscape.

Throughout, the festival emphasises process — how works were made, and the sociopolitical contexts that formed them. "We're not interested in just presenting the images that have been produced, but in the artists' experiences as well as the narratives within the works," Fedotov-Clements explains. "What we're trying to do is to unravel and share information about the creative process."

Putting Ourselves in the Picture 1 & 2 by Fast Forward: Women in Photography, based on two publications featuring work by 52 women challenging gender discrimination and female representation, is a case in point. At Dorset Place Gallery, Two photographs, a forgotten history presents research by artist Jermaine Francis with Deborah Ireland at the Royal Geographical Society Archive, investigating images made in the 1860s; the two images offer divergent accounts, prompting viewers to consider the role interpretation plays in how we consume photographs.

Alma Haser: Playing with Your Eyes at Hove Museum of Creativity pushes photography beyond the frame with playful, crafted works that resculpt the experience of 3D reality; the show expands on Haser's chapter in Thames & Hudson's forthcoming Mini Photographers book, on which Photoworks consulted. Where We Meet at Jubilee Library draws on artists Eva Louisa Jonas, Kairo Urovi and Queer Grounds participants' engagement with a queer DIY building community in West Sussex.

At Phoenix Art Space, Brighton Photo Fringe also leans into collaboration, presenting projects by eight collectives that demonstrate less individualistic, more mutually supportive ways of working. The Fringe is now led by recently appointed curator Ricardo Reverón Blanco, formerly part of the Photoworks team. The city has also recently gained POST, a new lens-based art space founded by Nina Emett and Simon Roberts. "It was long overdue for Brighton, but also the country because hopefully it inspires others that it is possible to get on and do things, though funding is tight and times are challenging," says Fedotov-Clements.

She hopes the festival will encourage collaboration and exchange, support those facing challenging political territories and enable intercultural dialogue. "I want this to be a safe space to have challenging conversations, encountering a variety of ideas and ways of being in a positive light," she says.

Whether the festival's model of process-driven, collaborative programming can help redefine what a photography festival can be is the question its eight-year return now puts to the field.