Photo Fringe is thrilled to reveal our new festival website today, Friday 2 October, so you can now browse and discover everything this year’s festival has to offer.
There’s so much to experience this October, with over 100 exhibitions and events across more than 20 venues to explore. To help you plan your festival, we’ve picked out some must-see events for opening weekend.
Newhaven Open
2–31 Oct (Thu–Sun, 10–4)
BN9 Marine Workshops, Newhaven
Responding to the venue setting and the 2026 Photo Fringe theme, Feedback Loop, ten lens-based projects gather, seeing Newhaven in different ways.
Participating artists: 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, María de la O Garrido, Sara Hibbert and Ancient//Flippant Collective
Private View Thu 8 Oct, 6–8pm
Photo Fringe Collectives Hub
2 Oct–22 Nov (Wed–Sun, 12–5)
Phoenix Art Space, Brighton
Returning to Phoenix Art Space for its twelfth edition, the Collectives Hub features eight selected photography and lens-based artist collectives. The artists will respond to the venue’s 30th anniversary theme, Future Histories. Together, they create a space to reflect on where we have come from, where we are now, and where we might go next.
Participating artists: 20 Degree Collective, DG03 Collective, Folo Collective, Inner Room, Elephant, Work Show Grow, Whence We Came and Zinnia Collective
LULL
Laura El-Tantawy
Co-curated with Laura Summerton
3–16 Oct, 10am-6pm
Unit 6, Duke’s Lane, Brighton
LULL is a sensory portrait of Brighton, shaped by the presence of its gulls and the rhythms of a seaside town Laura has come to call home. Moving between still photography, moving image and sound, LULL follows these rhythms as they appear, disappear and return.
Artist Talk & Exhibition Walk Sun 4 Oct, 3-4.30pm
LULL Live Lab Sat 10 & Sun 11 Oct, 106pm
Ghosts in the Field
Murray Ballard
2–31 Oct (Wed–Sun, 12–5)
Phoenix Art Space, Window Gallery, Brighton
A photographic exploration of Salento, a region in southern Italy where ancient traditions exist in contrast with ecological crisis and modernity. Developed through visits over more than a decade and with subtle references to local folklore and mythology, Ballard considers the fragile and unpredictable nature of progress, and the cycles of change through which landscape, culture and people continually reshape one another.
Richard Billingham
Fishtank
2–31 Oct (Thu–Sat, 6–9pm)
Satellite Storefront, 26 St John’s Road,
BN3 2FB, Brighton
Richard Billingham’s book Ray’s A Laugh was published in 1996 and hailed as the photo book of the decade. Billingham then used the hi-8 footage shot in the family flat at the same time to create Fishtank for BBC 2’s acclaimed TX series. Dispassionately yet compassionately, Billingham’s film registers the emotional roller-coaster of life inside the flat: the chaos, the pathos, the despair and the hope.
The Queer Beach
Queer Beach responds to Photo Fringe’s theme Feedback Loop by asking how places produce photographs—and how photographs produce spaces. The beach is not a backdrop but a threshold between land and sea, visibility and concealment, freedom and surveillance: a commons shaped by desire, cruising and resistance.
This Photo Fringe enjoy exploring venues in Brighton & Hove and along the South Coast, from Portsmouth to Newhaven, plus uncovering shows online.
Expect new perspectives, conversations and ways of seeing.