Athens Photo Festival 2020

Athens Photo Festival is the leading international festival of photography and visual culture in Southeastern Europe. Constantly reinventing itself, Athens Photo Festival, furthers its long-standing commitment to encouraging diversity, inclusion, creativity and critical thinking, with the aim to challenge the boundaries and experience of a traditional festival of photography. Through its expanded programming, Athens Photo Festival is committed to offering a dynamic platform for exchange of ideas, artistic expression and engagement with photography in all its forms.

Announcing New Dates

Athens Photo Festival and the Benaki Museum on 25 May agreed new dates for the Athens Photo Festival, in 2020. The Festival will now run from 16 September until 15 November 2020.

These new dates give all involved in the organisation of the Festival the maximum time to deal with the constantly changing landscape and the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The new dates, exactly three months after those originally planned for 2020, will provide sufficient time to finish the submission and the selection process, and to prepare the curatorial plan. Since we now have concrete new dates to aim for, the organising committee of the Athens Photo Festival will commit all its resources, and work closely with our partners towards ensuring the success of this year’s Festival with an even greater level of participation in September.

At the same time, due to the evolving nature of COVID-19, we will continue to follow the updates on COVID-19 closely. The safety of the artists, visitors, partners venue staffing and teams has always been our first priority, and we will adapt all our planning to the developing situation. Until then, please stay connected, stay safe — and remember that we’re all in this together.

Open Call for Entries

Entry Deadline – 14 May 2020

Athens Photo Festival 2020 is accepting submissions from emerging and established artists and photographers from around the world for its exhibition program. The selected works will be exhibited at the Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, one of the most prestigious museums in Greece. The exhibition program will be comprised of a wide variety of works from all the image-based genres, ranging from fine art and conceptual to documentary and photojournalism, photo-based installations, performance, interactive and multimedia works.

Athens Photo Festival 2020 welcomes proposals from photographers, artists, collectives and curators. The Festival aims to feature a diverse selection of over 100 photo-based projects from around the world, selected through this international open call for entries.

Submit your work

Events & Initiatives

At the core of the Athens Photo Festival, in addition to exhibitions, is an engaging and multi-layered program of onsite and online events and the year-round activities, including education and public programs, talent development initiatives, social practice, and community outreach.

Portfolio Reviews

An opportunity for artists to meet with international experts to get feedback on their work as well as to create meaningful connections.

Labs

Educational programs offer intensive learning experiences for current and future generations of artists and photography enthusiasts.

Performances

Experimenting with the ways through which performance and photography can cross boundaries and create interesting hybrids.

Artist Talks

Under the motto “We Speak Photography”, the Artist Talks program is designed as a set of short talks to share thought provoking images and words.

Screening Night

This one night event brings together multiple perspectives on the use of images –both moving and still– in contemporary culture.

Athens Photo Marathon

Over 1.500 contestants will participate in a “photography marathon”, to visually interpret four given topics inspired by urban life and its experience.