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photography festival in Barcelona 2025
photography events in Barcelona
international photography festival
Barcelona photography event July 2025

Practical Guides

Each year, IPFA releases a set of practical guides covering the key areas of running a photography festival today. They are open drafts, built from shared experience across the network and open to comments and contributions from members. Use them as a starting point, not a rulebook.

How can your festival go beyond exhibiting images and become a space for dialogue, learning, and real community engagement? This guide looks at how festivals build meaningful contact with their audiences, treating mediation not as a side activity but as something that shapes curatorial choices, programming, and partnerships from the start.

Key concepts: 

Visual literacy, audience activation, co-creation, situated knowledge, dialogic interpretation, non-formal education.

Education and Cultural Mediation

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Sustainable Photography Festivals

How can your festival reduce its impact without reducing its ambition? How can it be more engaged with the ecological and social realities of the world around it? This guide covers how to embed sustainability into everyday decisions across the whole festival, from curating and exhibition production to travel, catering, and international exchange.

Key concepts: 

Enviromental responsibility, local production, conscious mobility, reuse, long-term vision

I want to start a photography festival. What do I actually need to know before the first edition? This guide is written for festivals in their early editions, drawing on the real experience of festivals that started with doubts, mistakes, and limited resources. It walks through identity, team building, legal basics, realistic budgets, and growing at a sustainable pace.

Key concepts: 

Identity, graducal growth, economic realism, legal framework, community, collective learning

Emerging
Festivals

Best Practices for Photography Festivals

How do you run a festival that is built for the future, not the past? Many festivals believe they are already modern. This guide challenges that assumption. It brings together core principles for running a festival responsibly, from financial transparency and fair treatment of artists to open programming, community building, and environmental commitment.

Key concepts: 

Professionalisation, transparency, open calls, gender equality, interdependence, impact measurement

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