The  2022 edition of Copenhagen Photo Festival was a celebration bringing people together to enjoy the festival filled with a variety of events, artist talks, studio visits, book presentations, guided tours as well as different photo related workshops.

At the Festival Center, the guests had the opportunity to appreciate 9 different exhibitions. Alongside the three exhibitions by the solo artists who won the open call , we exhibited three photographers from the Danihs School of Photography DMJX School of Photography, the Norwegian exhibition “A Female Gaze” and on our outdoor architectural exhibition construction Space Frame, Tofu Collective, a curatorial collective, shared their exhibition by the two Chinese artists Luo Yang and Lin Zhipeng. 

The festival also had the honour to host the Ukrainian photo festival Odesa Photo Days at our Festival Center. Since the Ukrainian festival, for obvious reasons, did not have a venue in their hometown for this year’s edition, they presented the group exhibition “The Thin Line”, as well as the solo exhibition featuring Olena Morozova’s project “Granny” at Copenhagen Photo Festival. The group exhibition was curated by the curator and leader of the Odesa Photo Days, Kateryna Radchenko. 

If you want to learn more about the 2022 edition, take a look at the solo exhibitions here as well as the 2022 photo gallery here.

Despite the cancellation of this year’s festival due to COVID-19, the public still had the opportunity to experience photography on the festival’s digital platforms through this spring’s online campaign #cpfcelebratingphotography. As the city reopened, June 18 was the culmination of the campaign at the CPF Celebrating Photography Day event, an all-day event that celebrated photography in urban space through outdoor exhibits available during the summer.

To make that day possible, we went together with dedicated partners from the private and public sector, including Donkey Republic bicycle rental, and Altan.dk, Denmark’s largest company of balconies and elevators, as well as Café Altanen, Café Dyrehaven, La Banchina and Reffen – Copenhagen Street Food. Each of these partners contributed to the program, which started with the launch of the group exhibition Reconstruction of Identities in Vesterbro, where selected works from the project were installed on containers in the area. Several of the photographers involved were present at the day and each presented their work, including their experiences with the project’s masterclasses and residencies.

The program continued at Refshaleøen, where the audio-visual outdoor installation FRAMES ON FRAME was presented. Here, works by this year’s selected artists and photographers were exhibited in large format and accompanied by videos and audio clips from the artists. The celebration continued in the nearby culture house Werkstatt, where the presented works could be purchased at a pop-up print on demand sale in collaboration with Atla. The print sale marked the end of the day with both free bar and DJ in Werkstatt at Reffen.

In 2018, it was once again the disused transformer station, the Substation, and the surrounding wilderness that formed the framework of the festival’s center. In 2018, Photo City consisted of 11 international exhibitions, with photo-based art indoors and documentary photography outdoors. This year, the festival also launched three program columns, Framing Identity, Framing Vision and Framing Society, from which this year’s exhibitions were themed.

The festival of this year also offered exhibitions all over Copenhagen and in Scania, and activities and workshops gave the audience the opportunity to work and immerse themselves in photography. The range of this year’s program was large: from this year’s international seminar, which focused on photographs depicting everyday life in conflict areas, to guided tours in Photo City, which gave visitors the opportunity to experience the festival’s exhibitions with a gastronomic artist.

In 2018, the festival experienced an overwhelming international interest in both the Solo Exhibitions and our open call to the Censored Exhibition, where the number of applicants doubled.

2016 was a landmark year for the Copenhagen Photo Festival with new management, program selection and new program strategy. Photo City moved out of Carlsberg Byen and instead became a photo route from Bremerholm substation in Indre By to KW3 and the Museumsbygningen in Østerbro.

Picture The Music culminated with the coffee table release of Denmark’s best music photos from three years of traveling exhibitions. For the first time in the festival’s history, an auction of selected photographs from Picture the Music and the Censored Exhibition was held in collaboration with Brun Rasmussen. We held an international full-day seminar in collaboration with the National Museum of Photography, and we launched the Look & Listen app, which offers the audience a completely new way to experience the classic exhibition format. Finally, there were all the exhibitions presented by CPF’s partners.

In 2014, we celebrated the festival’s five-year anniversary with a Photo City program that includes featured cinema, pop-up photo editing with politics photojournalists and the launch of the nationwide music photography project Picture the Music, which was exhibited simultaneously in eight different locations across the country.

We held a masterclass in collaboration with Magnum and presented the Aperture Foundation’s photo book exhibition ‘The Paris Photo’. Josef Hoflehner’s exhibition ‘Jet Airliner’, Astrid Kruse Jensen’s ‘Within the landscape’ and not least Joachim Ladefoged’s personal photo book and exhibition project ‘After My Time’ were among the main names in Photo City. Finally, there were all the exhibitions presented by CPF’s partners.

Nordic contemporary photography and press photography were two major themes in 2012. At the two-day seminar NORDIC NOW, organized by Filter (DK), Objektiv (NO) and Raw (FI), photographers, critics and researchers discussed Nordic photography. The Press Photographers’ Association’s 100th anniversary was celebrated with a special exhibition on Nytorv, and Photo City created a large-scale exhibition with political photographers and for smaller exhibitions of e.g. Henrik Saxgren, Martin Lehmann and Niels Hougaard. The young photojournalists behind Personal Project adorned Byens Hegn at Kogens Nytorv. The entire urban space of Copenhagen was occupied with the City Space Art Project, where advertisements gave way to the space for photographic art in 130 poster stands. Finally, there were all the exhibitions presented by CPF’s partners.

In the festival’s first year, the foundation stones were laid, and ideas tested. Emphasis was placed on having a main exhibition: Day & Night, which consisted of series from 16 prominent Danish and international photographers, including Nicolai Howalt, Todd Hido, Dash Snow, Peter Sutherland, who portrayed the two modus vivendi of the day. The exhibition occupied Copenhagen’s most visited places in the form of billboards, banners and projections on gables, walls and big screens in the evening. The exhibition was followed by a photo competition launched by CPF, Canon and the Copenhagen Museum with the aim of involving the public and spreading knowledge of photography. The winning pictures were exhibited on the WALL, and it was the starting shot for the festival’s citizen-involving. On the other hand, a symposium was offered at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and at gallery openings with a record in visitors on the occasion of the festival opening. Photo City was located in Kødbyen and was a deliberately broad-spectrum presentation of fashion photography as well as photo art and photojournalism. Finally, there were all the exhibitions presented by CPF’s partners.