PhotoVogue Festival 2026

Fashion photography is not just about aesthetics, nor just about showing a beautiful dress or a cool design. Thanks to it, we create narratives, we communicate complex, layered ideas through a visually seductive language. It is, in all its forms, a cultural production. And this is what the PhotoVogue Festival stands for: a space where aesthetics meets ethics. And for this milestone edition, the festival goes back to where it all started: Women by Women. Literally, women written by women, where stories are shaped by lived experiences shared among women, not filtered or romanticised from an outside perspective.

The main exhibition brings together forty-five artists, photographers, and video makers who explore what it means to ‘see as a woman,’ including Bettina Pittaluga, Francesca Allen, Luisa Dörr, Rihannon Adam, Young Jung Kim, Agathe Breton, Jip Schalkx, or Magdalena Wosinska, among many others. That doesn't mean one simple thing. It’s fluid, layered. Personal and political at the same time. Some works are intimate, others are confrontational. Some feel poetic, others feel urgent. As Alessia Glaviano, Head of Global PhotoVogue and Festival Director, put it, this edition affirms women’s vision as something plural, dynamic and free to shape its own narrative. 

But as we were saying, the festival unfolds through a much more articulated and complex discourse. Besides the main exhibition, it hosts other shows like East and South East Panorama, which reflects on a wide range of cultural perspectives, and features artists like Ziyi Le, Minh Nhon, Farid Renais Ghimas, Ahuei Zhang, Fumi Nagasaka,  Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Juno Seunghui Joo, or Ramona Jingru Wang. 

Or Pleasure and Disobedience, curated by Sofia Kouloukouri and Alexios Seilopoulos, where women and queer filmmakers explore intimacy and desire as radical acts, especially when reclaimed by women on their own terms, featuring the works of Nan Goldin, Vivienne Dick, May Ziadé, and Romy & Laure.

The conversation expands even further with Women in Dialogue, where projects like You Don’t Think It Will Happen To You: A Deep Friendship Forged on Ukraine’s Frontline demonstrates how sisterhood can become an act of resilience in contexts of war and erase the illusion of distance and neutrality we often project onto realities and situations we perceive as far from us.

The return of the theme feels like asking: where are we ten years later? Because the question still stands, maybe even louder. Is being a woman today that different from ten years ago? How much has society changed? One step forward doesn’t count if it’s followed by two steps back, does it? Until March 4, these uncomfortable questions we often try to avoid are translated into images that make our reality a little easier to process.