Backlight Photo Festival 2026 Open Call – The Art of Lying
Backlight Photo Festival is inviting photographers and artists working with lens-based media to submit their work for the Backlight Photo Festival 2026. We are looking for work that is artistically, critically and socially engaged and uncompromised. This year’s theme The Art of Lying can be considered as a provocation. It probes the evolution of photographic truth in our contemporary world where the material and online realities we inhabit are shifting at accelerating speed.
Throughout its history, photography has manipulated reality – it is an instrument of framing, omission and abstraction. Furthermore, since our digital landscapes have grown bloated with AI-generated images, deepfakes and other post-truth aesthetics, it feels increasingly difficult to discern photographic truth from magical thinking. Our screens are overwhelmed by a vast network of premeditated misinformation, and this aesthetic panorama is further saturated by the tint of biased algorithms, and computer vision models. What are we not seeing?
We would like to consider truth (and lies) as a construct that is shaped by the surrounding social, technological and political fabric. Truth may be biased, approximating facts while bordering fiction. It may be personal, intimate, political. Truth may be hiding behind the photographic pixel or film grain. It may be noisy or clean – washed out or subsumed by shadows.
The current political climate is propelling people into binaries – either for or against, truth or lies. As a result, the layered multiplicity of human thought is watered down into passivity. How do we then maneuver through the influence of binaries and banalities as image makers? The Art of Lying encourages participants to think through subjects that converge two opposing truths, methods or technologies, and to be open to contradictions that may pertain to truth regardless of their apparent incompatibility.