Newhaven Open

NEWHAVEN OPEN brings together ten lens-based projects developed in response to Newhaven, BN9 Marine Workshops and the 2026 Photo Fringe theme, Feedback Loop.

A feedback loop begins with an encounter: something is sent out, something comes back, and the exchange produces a new response. In Newhaven, this movement is already embedded in the landscape. The town faces the English Channel, with France visible across the water, while its harbour connects local histories of industry, fishing, migration and movement to wider networks beyond the coast. The sea is both boundary and connection, a space through which people, images, stories and ideas continually travel.

The ten projects gathered here approach Newhaven in different ways. Together, they consider photography as more than a record of place. Images become documents and archives, but also social studies: ways of tracing how communities inhabit a place, how environments change, and how individual experiences connect to wider histories.

A sense of growth also extends through time. The exhibition will develop as the festival progresses, with new elements entering the space and new voices joining the conversation. On 8 October, the Young Photographers OPEN will open around the central wall, bringing another generation of image-makers into the exhibition. Rather than marking a separate moment, their arrival adds another layer to an exhibition that is already in motion.

NEWHAVEN OPEN is less a fixed portrait of Newhaven than a gathering of ways of seeing it. The projects document, collect, remember, question and reimagine the place, while the exhibition itself becomes another kind of archive, one that changes through accumulation.

In this sense, the feedback loop continues beyond the artists and their works. The place shapes the images; the images reshape how the place is seen; artists respond to one another; and audiences bring their own experiences into the exchange. What emerges is a living picture of Newhaven: a coastal town looking across the water, connected to places beyond it, and continually changing through the people, images and stories that pass through.

Find out more about the participating artists below:

Alison Stolwood
Julia Grzegorzewska
Bertie Taylor
Clare Patrick
Emmanuelle Catherine
Cynthia Fan
Gwen Sion
Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck
Daisy Wingate-Saul
Gin Rimmington Jones
Toby Lamborn
Maria de la O Garrido
Sara Hibbert
Ancient//Flippant Collective

Image above: Image: Sara Hibbert, The Lost Village of Tide Mills (2026)