Welcome to Festival Zone for January 2025.

Festival 2025

 Call for submissions - 15th January 2025

Happy New Year. The 22nd annual Auckland Festival of Photography is officially about to open the call, and we are excitedly encouraging submissions from artists, educators, and curators from around the region, nation and the world starting Wednesday 15th January 2025. 

The theme for this year’s Festival has been announced as ‘Sustain’ [tautīnei], and we will be welcoming creative and insightful interpretations on the subject (for more information about our 2025 theme, click here).

Your participation can be in-venue, online, or outdoors and can include a wide variety of activities that celebrate photography and its makers. Exhibitions, talks, events, book launches, pub quizzes, performance projections and everything in between can be suggested to our Festival Trust.

The Festival serves as a gathering of cultural exchange for visual storytellers, lens-based artists, educators, students, and anyone passionate about the art form, to connect with a large and diverse audience and share lived experiences, stories, and dynamic creativity, especially during challenging times.

Our joint programme model has been in place since 2004 allowing for full creative freedoms with work presented by artists, curators, groups and dealer galleries based in New Zealand. The Festival offers an inclusive platform for creative freedom that allows independence to choose how and where they showcase their work.

 Vision - Photography Connecting Communities and People

In late 2024, last year our Kōwhai Residency artist was Ardit Hoxha.

Hoxha's residency new work exhibition 'Anywhere Out of the World' was shown for a weekend at 72 Gallery, Tokyo Institute of Photography, in Kyobashi, and there was artist talk on this new work created and shown in Tokyo. We are delighted to be in planning for showing his new work during the 2025 Festival too.

The Kōwhai Residency, which was first launched in 2023, offers an exclusive opportunity for New Zealand artists to experience one of the world’s greatest metropolises and foster robust, cultural links between Aotearoa and Japan. Through this residency the Trust offered travel to Japan for the selected artists, self-contained accommodation in Yōga, Tokyo and a weekly stipend so they can fully immerse themselves in their projects. We were delighted to have both unique and exciting practitioners take advantage of such a career-advancing opportunity. See our new Kōwhai Residency website www.thekowhairesidency.com for more.

We're thrilled his residency concluded on such a positive outcome for NZ photography excellence. Congratulations to Ardit on his hard work and talent creating a new body of work in Tokyo, Japan and immense thanks to our residency partners, Asia New Zealand Foundation and The Tokyo Institute of Photography.

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