The idea of edges evokes a world of associations \u2013 of peripheries, of lives lived on the margins, of perilousness, or collapse. It suggests reaching a tipping point while offering no clue of what lies beyond the brink. Yet, inherent in that uncertainty is an opportunity for discovery and hope; new realities and possibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This year, one of the world\u2019s most exciting photography festivals is bringing together image-makers from around the world whose work addresses the compelling and complicated concept of \u2018edge\u2019. Now in its 14th edition, KYOTOGRAPHIE International Photography Festival<\/a> will open this month in Kyoto, taking over many of the historic city\u2019s institutional spaces and galleries as well as non-traditional sites such as the Hachiku-an building (the former Kawasaki Residence), Demachi Masugata Shopping Arcade, Higashihonganji O-genkan temple, Kyoto Station, and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n The festival\u2019s founders, Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, elaborate on this year\u2019s theme: \u201cKYOTOGRAPHIE 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,\u201d they explain. \u201cWe also explore the transcendental force of nature, and see how reaching an edge can open up new ways of seeing, thinking, and creating \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Below, we take a look at just a few of the vast festival\u2019s highlights…<\/p>\n Daido Moriyama, Kyotographie 2026<\/p>\n Gallery \/ 3 images<\/p>\n Daid\u014d Moriyama<\/a> is widely regarded as Japan\u2019s most influential and renowned photographer. Best known for his striking black-and-white street photography and his association with the cutting-edge magazine Provoke, he played a pivotal role in the post-war wave of Japanese avant-garde image-makers. Influenced in part by American artists such as Andy Warhol, William Klein and Jack Kerouac, Moriyama used photography as a tool to examine representations of reality, truth and fiction, memory and history.<\/p>\n Of his own practice, he once said, \u201cI don\u2019t 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.\u201d Curator Thyago Nogueira elaborates on his words, \u201cThe quote addresses Moriyama\u2019s\u00a0unpretentious 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.\u201d<\/p>\n His exhibition at Kyotographie embodies these ideas. Nogueira describes it as \u201cmore than a traditional photography show\u201d. He says, \u201cThis show is an opportunity to dive not only into Moriyama\u2019s extraordinary body of work, but also into his mind, through his writings and reflections on the medium.\u201d<\/p>\n Linder Sterling, Kyotographie 2026<\/p>\n Gallery \/ 5 images<\/p>\n Known for her radical, scalpel-sharp photo montages, Linder Sterling<\/a> describes her work as \u201crebellious, curious and forensic\u201d. Drawing on punk, pop, surrealism, and a touch of occultism, her collages are iconoclastic, feminist visions, reconfiguring and subverting ideas of women\u2019s bodies, desire, consumerism, and more. In a conversation<\/a> with Dazed last year, she talked about the disruptive quality of photo montage, \u201cSometimes 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\u2019s head and mouths over her breasts, the optic nerve struggles to work out what\u2019s happening on that pictorial plane because we shouldn\u2019t see a woman with a steamer on her head.\u201d<\/p>\n The act of cutting is integral, literally and conceptually. \u201cCollage and photomontage emerged in the early 20th Century from a world in a state of flux,\u201d she explains. \u201cIn times of such urgency, we need a medium that can literally cut through and offer imaginative alternatives to mainstream dogma.\u201d Following her 2025 retrospective at London\u2019s Hayward Gallery, her presentation at Kyotographie this year affirms her status as one of Britain\u2019s most visionary and provocative artists whose work continues to feel modern, even while it draws on the past. \u201cTo me, the past is ever present,\u201d she says. \u201cOut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Anton Corbijn, Kyotographie 2026<\/p>\n Gallery \/ 6 images<\/p>\n \u201cMy 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,\u201d explains Anton Corbijn<\/a>. \u201cHence, all my initial photographs were of musicians.\u201d He did venture into the worlds of film, fashion and art, but the eminent photographer is perhaps best known for his memorable portraits of musicians, many of which have become seared into the cultural imagination as defining images.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the past 50 years, he\u2019s worked with many of the most important artists of our age, from Bj\u00f6rk<\/a> to Joy Division<\/a>, Nirvana<\/a> to Kate Bush<\/a> and David Bowie<\/a>. His selective retrospective at Kyotographie will display some of his iconic portraits alongside his lesser-known but equally arresting images, tracing half a century of his striking portraiture practice. The throughline of the exhibition is the consistently compelling nature of his pictures, which all reflect his guiding principles as an image-maker: \u201cA 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Thandiwe Muriu, Kyotographie 2026<\/p>\n Gallery \/ 4 images<\/p>\n Kyotographie\u2019s African Artist in Residence, Thandiwe Muriu<\/a>, draws on Kenyan traditions and crafts to explore questions of identity, womanhood, societal roles, and the effects of cultural forces through her images, which combine a deep reverence for tradition with strong Afrofuturist elements.\u00a0<\/p>\n Deeply inspired by traditional textiles, she uses these fabrics with their bold geometric prints as a backdrop or canvas for her striking figures of women. In anticipation of her two presentations at Kyotographie, Muriu has incorporated Japanese fabric and prints into her work, tracing and articulating the connections between Kenyan and Japanese visual languages.\u00a0During her residency, she learned about the art of Japanese textile production traditions, particularly in relation to the kimono. \u201cMy journey through Kyoto\u2019s 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,\u201d she explains. \u201cBy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Federico Estol, Kyotographie 2026<\/p>\n Gallery \/ 11 images<\/p>\n Federico Estol<\/a> collaborates with the shoe shiners in La Paz, Bolivia, to honour this unrecognised and disenfranchised community. Every day, over 3,000 workers take to the city streets to polish shoes, wearing disguises to hide their identities due to the stigma surrounding shoe-shining. Vulnerable to discrimination and unprotected by any form of workers\u2019 rights, they are operating on the margins. But Estol\u2019s portraits reframe these anonymous labourers as heroes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Working with a group of shoe shiners and Hormig\u00f3n Armado, a local initiative that produces a monthly newspaper to raise money for the workers, his series, Shine Heroes, seeks to reframe the perceptions of Bolivia\u2019s shoe shiners and restore their dignity. \u201cWe continue to drive social transformation with these 60 workers \u2013 not only through the new visibility they\u2019ve gained among citizens, but also in their daily income,\u201d says Estol. \u201cOur goal is to finally overcome the stigma in the city and take off the mask \u2013 to be seen as normal workers.\u201d<\/p>\n KYOTOGRAPHIE<\/a> runs from 18 April until 17 May 2026.<\/p>\n