Photoville is a free, family-friendly photography festival featuring 80 exhibits by local and international artists, on view from May 16 to May 30 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to know: details on the Opening Weekend celebration at Emily Warren Roebling Plaza, a roundup of the most kid-friendly exhibits, exhibit hours, plus additional locations beyond Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The festival will kick off with a free Opening Weekend Community Celebration in Brooklyn Bridge Park on Saturday, May 16 and Sunday, May 17. The celebration will include family-friendly programming, as well as food and beverage vendors from Smorgasburg. Plus, on the evening of Saturday, May 16, there will be an evening celebration of music, community, and visual storytelling from 7-9pm.

Kid-friendly Photoville exhibits

Photoville offers a wide array of exhibits that families will love—here are just a few highlights!

REFLECTING NEW YORK

Using a hand held mirror in locations around New York, photographer Stefan Falke invites distant buildings, structures, or other visuals into the main photo to create a viewing experience that requires a second look. His goal is to visually loosen up the obvious, to create images that will surprise and intrigue the viewer, and himself. By deliberately showing his hand holding the mirror Falke makes his presence known, which adds a story-telling quality to the images.

Landing

Landing by Maen Hammad explores the lives of Palestinian skateboarders in the occupied West Bank as they navigate the layered realities of Israeli settler-colonial domination. The series, also a book, offers a thesis on skateboarding as a form of resistance to a headspace of violence. Against the backdrop of ongoing genocide and nearly a century of erasure, Landing presents a vital portal into the tenacity, creativity, and decolonial struggle of this generation in Palestine.

LOVE, PEACE, POWER, FREEDOM: CLASSROOM PORTRAITS BY CENTRAL BROOKLYN YOUTH

This project is in dialogue with Dawoud Bey’s pedagogical portraiture practice, which treats portraiture as an act of dignity, listening, and self-authorship. Students engage this approach as a methodology, using the camera as a tool for care, reflection, and narrative agency. By photographing one another, the classroom becomes a shared space of looking, listening, and mutual recognition.

MADE IN NYC: MEET THE MAKERS

The Made in NYC: Meet the Makers series celebrates the brilliance, resilience, and innovation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color entrepreneurs who are manufacturing right here in New York City. This body of work centers BIPOC-owned businesses and makers who are quite literally building their dreams—often against steep odds—within one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world.

MISTY COPELAND’S FINAL BOW

For more than four decades, Henry Leutwyler has photographed the world of dance from the inside—backstage, in rehearsal, and in moments of quiet reckoning. This project centers on Misty Copeland, culminating in her final performance with American Ballet Theatre on October 22, 2025, commissioned by New York Magazine.

Wild Hope

Wild Hope illuminates the resilience of nature and humanity, offering hope, empathy, and a call to protect the living world.

Seeing Life Through a Bug’s Eyes

The realm of insects is right in front of our eyes, filled with kaleidoscopic characters flaunting vibrant colors and dramatic action. But it’s so minuscule, it’s easy to miss. When a Japanese photographer hacked his camera, he revealed a strange and curious scene right underfoot.

Our World Above and Below (Washington Street and Prospect Street)

By capturing the same thing from very different perspectives, a NASA astronaut and an intrepid photographer create a whole new way of seeing our world.

PUPPIES BEHIND BARS

For almost two years, photographers Ashley Gilbertson and Ava Pellor, came into the men’s maximum-security prison, Green Haven, to document Puppies Behind Bars. These photos trace the incarcerated “puppy raisers” and the puppies they are raising to become service dogs.

Birds of a Feather

Birds of a Feather is an interactive, large-scale outdoor book sculpture that reimagines Claire Rosen’s recent photography book featuring a series of portraits of live birds, set against opulent, historically inspired backdrops. This work takes the familiar intimacy of a book and expands it into an unexpected scaled object designed for collective engagement.

Odd Apples

Odd Apples is a celebration of the apple, a humble fruit whose unique wonders and idiosyncrasies are often overlooked and flattened by  commercialization and commodification. The project documents the unusual, stunning, and strange world of apples outside of the grocery store.

FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

The women in this documentary series are, for the most part, defined as “Masters”. They participate in USA Boxing’s Master division as amateurs, age 40 and over. Most came to boxing later in life, after marriage, kids, careers, and other sports. Their reasons for boxing are as varied as the women themselves, but they all find meaning in combat, camaraderie and strategy.

Memorial ’76

I made these photographs on Memorial Day in 1976. The parade began on 25th Street and 5th Avenue, across the street from the entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery. I walked ten blocks from my apartment in pre-gentrified South Brooklyn and arrived in time to see marchers and musicians warm up and tune up. Because the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence would take place in the summer of 1976, this year’s Memorial Day Parade was larger than usual, and included references to “America’s Birthday.” As I photographed the Parade, I took a slow walk through the Brooklyn I knew very well. Italian-, Puerto Rican-, Irish- and Polish- American community members participated as both marchers and observers.

FRAMING FATHERHOOD: A CELEBRATION OF BLACK FATHERS

Framing Fatherhood: A Celebration of Black Fathers began as an act of love, a deliberate counter-narrative to the stories so often told about Black fathers rather than by and for them. A love letter to Black men, their children, and the young people their love impacts. Through the lenses of 15 prominent Black male photographers, this exhibition captures timeless tenderness, unapologetic vulnerability, the intimate moments between father and child, and the love that legacies leave.

A QUESTION OF BALANCE

As the American Southwest endures the worst drought in 1,200 years, A Question of Balance shares a story of a water supply divided along racial lines. Water is not taken for granted in the Navajo Nation—the largest Native reservation in the United States.  “We must prioritize humans, not corporations. Prioritize balance.”