I just spent three days at Kyotographie, an annual photography festival held in Kyoto between mid-April and Mid-May.
Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu showed Camo, her ongoing series of bold portraits using wax-print textiles and everyday objects. Her models often blend into patterned backdrops, playing with the tension between being seen and being expected to disappear. Muriu describes her work as “modernising history,” drawing on textile traditions to rethink how African women are viewed today. Based in Kenya, she has shown her work at the 60th Venice Biennale (Collateral Event Passengers in Transit), at Musée de l’Homme in WAX!, and in the solo show I Am Because You Are at New York University, along with residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the National Museum of Kenya.
Anton Corbijn’s exhibition looks back over 50 years of portraits of musicians and cultural figures. His photographs are often grainy, slightly blurred, and unconcerned with technical perfection, which helps bring out a more human, less polished side of his subjects. Born in 1955 near Rotterdam, he started by photographing local bands as a teenager and later moved to London to work as the main photographer of the music magazine NME. Since then, he has made images and films with artists such as Nirvana, U2, Depeche Mode, and Joy Division and directed more than 80 music videos, as well as feature films like Control, The American, A Most Wanted Man, Life, and the documentary Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis).
French duo Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have spent more than twenty years photographing modern ruins. For The Shape of What Remains, they work inside the disused Jushin Kaikan dormitory, showing large-format images of abandoned buildings and a new series where they use generative AI to imagine Kyoto as a ruined city. Their practice began in 2002 with empty buildings around Paris and became widely known through The Ruins of Detroit (Steidl, 2010), now a shorthand for post‑industrial decline. They look at what happens when architecture outlives its purpose, and here they push that further by asking what “ruins” mean when AI can fabricate them.
Founded in 2013 by Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, KYOTOGRAPHIE has grown into a premier international photography festival that pairs world-class artists with exhibition design tailored to each venue. Its exhibitions are immersive, often developed in dialogue with local architects and artisans, and supported by talks, workshops, portfolio reviews, and educational programs. The 2026 theme “EDGE” threads through studies of urban decay, colonial histories, and lives lived on the margins, alongside more experimental work probing photography’s own limits in an era of AI and image overload.
This year, Kyotographie included more than 200 exhibitions. I managed to see about 50. Here are some of the artists and their work showcased at the festival.
Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu showed Camo, her ongoing series of bold portraits using wax-print textiles and everyday objects. Her models often blend into patterned backdrops, playing with the tension between being seen and being expected to disappear. Muriu describes her work as “modernising history,” drawing on textile traditions to rethink how African women are viewed today. Based in Kenya, she has shown her work at the 60th Venice Biennale (Collateral Event Passengers in Transit), at Musée de l’Homme in WAX!, and in the solo show I Am Because You Are at New York University, along with residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the National Museum of Kenya.
Links: Instagram,
Website, NYU show
Anton Corbijn’s exhibition looks back over 50 years of portraits of musicians and cultural figures. His photographs are often grainy, slightly blurred, and unconcerned with technical perfection, which helps bring out a more human, less polished side of his subjects. Born in 1955 near Rotterdam, he started by photographing local bands as a teenager and later moved to London to work as the main photographer of the music magazine NME. Since then, he has made images and films with artists such as Nirvana, U2, Depeche Mode, and Joy Division and directed more than 80 music videos, as well as feature films like Control, The American, A Most Wanted Man, Life, and the documentary Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis).
Links: Instagram,
artnet
profile
French duo Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have spent more than twenty years photographing modern ruins. For The Shape of What Remains, they work inside the disused Jushin Kaikan dormitory, showing large-format images of abandoned buildings and a new series where they use generative AI to imagine Kyoto as a ruined city. Their practice began in 2002 with empty buildings around Paris and became widely known through The Ruins of Detroit (Steidl, 2010), now a shorthand for post‑industrial decline. They look at what happens when architecture outlives its purpose, and here they push that further by asking what “ruins” mean when AI can fabricate them.
I was particularly interested in the images of Paris in Ruins. The pictures show famous Paris landmarks overgrown, ruined and without people. Viewing the images felt like traveling into a dystopian future, a future that has already arrived to many rural parts of Japan. As a result of depopulation and, the country already has 9 million empty houses and many small settlements are becoming ghost towns. As humans disappear, vegetation takes over, and also animals, including mokeys, wild boar and bears. As the examples of Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown, when humans disappear, all other life thrives.
This projection-based tribute introduces the work of Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, known as “the eye of Gaza”. Working within the severe limits of everyday life under bombardment, she photographed Gaza’s destruction without drama or spectacle, using wide views that show both scale and intent, while still holding on to people’s dignity. Hassona studied multimedia at the University of Applied Arts in Gaza and used her camera to “look for life in the middle of death and destruction,” as she put it. She was killed on 16 April 2025, at age 25, in an Israeli airstrike on her home in Al‑Tuffah, along with six members of her family; this exhibition keeps her short but powerful body of work visible, on her own terms. The photos are powerful, moving and heartbreaking. They are also personal for me, having lived and worked in the Gaza strip for more than three years during the first Intifada.
In Rehearsal of Memory, Johannesburg-based artist Lebohang Kganye brings together four major projects that all revolve around memory, family, and how stories are passed down. Using photography alongside cut-out silhouettes, lightboxes, fabric, and sculptural elements, she builds installations where personal and national histories overlap. Kganye often appears inside her own work—wearing her mother’s clothes or stepping into the shapes of ancestors—closing the gap between photographer and subject. Born in 1990, she has shown work at MoMA, Fotografiska Berlin, Tate Modern, Foam, and LE BAL, and has received the Foam Paul Huf Award (2022), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2024), and the ICP Infinity Award (2025); her work is in collections such as the Met, Centre Pompidou, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, V&A, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Getty, and the Chazen Museum.
Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage is shown in Japan for the first time and remains a tough, essential document of apartheid South Africa. First published in 1967, it brings together years of covert photography in mines, hospitals, courts, townships, and other ordinary spaces where apartheid was enforced. The exhibition presents the brutality and insidiousness of apartheid through Cole's photographs and his own texts, which are direct, angry, and very clear about the project’s purpose as a form of resistance rather than neutral reporting. Born in 1940 in Transvaal, Cole worked for publications such as Drum and The New York Times before fleeing South Africa in 1966; he later lost his South African passport, struggled to continue his work, and died in New York in 1990, aged 49.
Pieter Hugo’s What the Light Falls On covers more than two decades of pictures and turns into a kind of visual diary about life’s milestones and everything in between. The series is framed by two key photographs—the birth of his first child and his father on his deathbed—with a wide range of images between them that touch on everyday encounters, relationships, and ageing. Born in Johannesburg in 1976 and now based in Cape Town, Hugo has shown his work at Museu Coleção Berardo, the Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée, Fotografiska, and MAXXI, and has received awards such as the Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles and the KLM Paul Huf Award, with later shortlists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and Prix Pictet.
The Daido Moriyama retrospective brings the story back to Japan. Over more than 60 years, Moriyama has used a rough, high-contrast style to question what photography is and what it can do. Born in Osaka in 1938, he came of age in the post‑war decades shaped by occupation, rapid economic growth, and the clash between older traditions and new consumer culture. He worked for magazines, contributed to the Provoke movement, and published influential books such as Farewell Photography (1972), later returning to street photography in Japan and abroad and embracing both colour and digital work; his long-running magazine Record continues to follow the cities he walks. Moriyama has exhibited widely, including at SFMoMA, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Tate Modern, and Instituto Moreira Salles, and has received awards such as the ICP Infinity Award, the French Order of Arts and Culture, and the Hasselblad Award.
Links: Website, Instagram,
Artsy, Galerie
Fontana, Polka Galerie
This projection-based tribute introduces the work of Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, known as “the eye of Gaza”. Working within the severe limits of everyday life under bombardment, she photographed Gaza’s destruction without drama or spectacle, using wide views that show both scale and intent, while still holding on to people’s dignity. Hassona studied multimedia at the University of Applied Arts in Gaza and used her camera to “look for life in the middle of death and destruction,” as she put it. She was killed on 16 April 2025, at age 25, in an Israeli airstrike on her home in Al‑Tuffah, along with six members of her family; this exhibition keeps her short but powerful body of work visible, on her own terms. The photos are powerful, moving and heartbreaking. They are also personal for me, having lived and worked in the Gaza strip for more than three years during the first Intifada.
Links: Instagram,
Magnum – Voices from Gaza, Plan International photostory, Plan Canada diary, Electronic Intifada profile
In Rehearsal of Memory, Johannesburg-based artist Lebohang Kganye brings together four major projects that all revolve around memory, family, and how stories are passed down. Using photography alongside cut-out silhouettes, lightboxes, fabric, and sculptural elements, she builds installations where personal and national histories overlap. Kganye often appears inside her own work—wearing her mother’s clothes or stepping into the shapes of ancestors—closing the gap between photographer and subject. Born in 1990, she has shown work at MoMA, Fotografiska Berlin, Tate Modern, Foam, and LE BAL, and has received the Foam Paul Huf Award (2022), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2024), and the ICP Infinity Award (2025); her work is in collections such as the Met, Centre Pompidou, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, V&A, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Getty, and the Chazen Museum.
Links: Website, Instagram,
LensCulture feature
Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage is shown in Japan for the first time and remains a tough, essential document of apartheid South Africa. First published in 1967, it brings together years of covert photography in mines, hospitals, courts, townships, and other ordinary spaces where apartheid was enforced. The exhibition presents the brutality and insidiousness of apartheid through Cole's photographs and his own texts, which are direct, angry, and very clear about the project’s purpose as a form of resistance rather than neutral reporting. Born in 1940 in Transvaal, Cole worked for publications such as Drum and The New York Times before fleeing South Africa in 1966; he later lost his South African passport, struggled to continue his work, and died in New York in 1990, aged 49.
Links: Magnum
Photos, MoMA artist page, World of Interiors article
Pieter Hugo’s What the Light Falls On covers more than two decades of pictures and turns into a kind of visual diary about life’s milestones and everything in between. The series is framed by two key photographs—the birth of his first child and his father on his deathbed—with a wide range of images between them that touch on everyday encounters, relationships, and ageing. Born in Johannesburg in 1976 and now based in Cape Town, Hugo has shown his work at Museu Coleção Berardo, the Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée, Fotografiska, and MAXXI, and has received awards such as the Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles and the KLM Paul Huf Award, with later shortlists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and Prix Pictet.
The Daido Moriyama retrospective brings the story back to Japan. Over more than 60 years, Moriyama has used a rough, high-contrast style to question what photography is and what it can do. Born in Osaka in 1938, he came of age in the post‑war decades shaped by occupation, rapid economic growth, and the clash between older traditions and new consumer culture. He worked for magazines, contributed to the Provoke movement, and published influential books such as Farewell Photography (1972), later returning to street photography in Japan and abroad and embracing both colour and digital work; his long-running magazine Record continues to follow the cities he walks. Moriyama has exhibited widely, including at SFMoMA, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Tate Modern, and Instituto Moreira Salles, and has received awards such as the ICP Infinity Award, the French Order of Arts and Culture, and the Hasselblad Award.
Links: Daido Moriyama website,
Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation – Instagram, MoMA artist page
I will try to return to future editions of Kyotographie whenever I can.
Disclosure: I used AI in drafting this blog.
Impressive!
ReplyDeleteThis is super inspiring! I have to get my camera out!
ReplyDeleteFor the cognoscenti: picture #2 is Miles Davis, who would have been 100 years this May.
Here is the music: Tutu
DeleteThank you for sharing. Really appreciated the introduction to the photographers which enriched the experience- there is so much happening in the world which is beautiful yet we ….,….
ReplyDeleteTo the author and XUnicef editors: Thanks for this terrific profiling of the Kyoto photography festival. Thanks also to Joachim for acknowledging his use of generative AI to create this blog commentary. I strongly recommend that the editors require all to advise if they use genAI in their contributions and that this be added to the author credit at the TOP of the page. (I understand that some summary info on XUnicef uses genAI - this should also be noted at the top of any summary.) Likewise, all photographs that are genAI creations, or lens-based images altered by genAI, should be tagged as such either on the image itself or at the top of any accompanying caption information. This would include the #3 "Paris in Ruins" image profiled above (even tho the text below notes this). This tagging is now common practise by reputable news organizations and should be adopted by all blogs or other online outlets: both to alert readers to its use and to maintain its credibility as a reliable info source. Please consider.
ReplyDeleteGuilty as charged: I use AI in all writing. I also use electricity instead of candlelight, a computer instead of a typewriter, and spellcheck instead of a dictionary.
DeleteWhen I was young, well over 70 years ago, we used hand-cranked calculators and slide rules. Electronic calculators, computers, and word processors came later, and now AI. Each new tool made it easier to write, calculate, and communicate more clearly.
I use AI much the same way I use a calculator or a word processor: to improve grammar, spelling, structure, and accuracy. The opinions, arguments, and conclusions are entirely my own, and I have no intention of returning to the quill and inkwell.
If you are looking for a slide rule here (click) it is
DeleteSorry, I should not exaggerate. I am old, but I never actually wrote with a quill pen. Things had already moved on by then. In first grade, however, I used a nib pen with a wooden handle, which had to be dipped into an ink well every paragraph or two before you could continue writing.
DeleteIt was not a very good writing tool. It often left large ink stains on the paper, forcing you to start all over again. Imagine how far we have come since then.
When ballpoint pens first appeared, some people considered it cheating to use them because they made writing too easy.
Disclosure: this short note has been written with the help of AI and Grammarly
Did those suspicious of ballpoint pens also demand disclosure?
DeleteResistance to AI is often less about fear of technology itself than fear of losing economic security, professional status, authority, or relevance.
DeleteThank you very much for your suggestions, Ellen. I completely agree. Here is the link to the explanation of the process of generating the Ruins of Paris images: https://www.marchandmeffre.com/parisruins
ReplyDeleteLovely article and great contrast of images and exhibits chosen!
ReplyDeleteHi Joachim, What a great piece of writing! I greatly enjoyed.Thank you for sharing. It has given me few points which will continue to churn in my head for a while. This is truly “food for thought” . Thank you!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing Joachim. It was a treat.
ReplyDelete