Backlight Photo Festival
The Backlight Photo Festival is an international photography festival organized by the Nykyajan Photography Center, which has been held in Tampere since 1987. Held every three years, the event is one of the oldest photography festivals in Northern Europe, and its exhibitions often link contemporary photography to social, cultural, and global issues.
The next Backlight will take place in Tampere from September 1 to 21, 2026, under the theme “The Art of Lying.” The theme captures a time when the relationship between image and reality is more difficult to grasp than ever before. Photographs, social media feeds, AI-generated content, propaganda, and algorithm-driven visibility are constantly shaping what we consider true, credible, or worth remembering.
Backlight’26 brings 12 international and Finnish artists to Tampere. Their works explore the relationship between photography, artificial intelligence, and visual culture in relation to truth, memory, and the exercise of power. The exhibitions will be spread across galleries, larger exhibition spaces, and public spaces. Alongside photography, visitors will also see moving images, installations, and other forms of lens-based art.
The works in the festival address topics such as political imagery, propaganda, the radicalizing visual cultures of social media, facial recognition, surveillance, the legacy of colonialism, the ecological crisis, and the distorting structures of archives. Some of the artists utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, and synthetic images, while others draw on personal memories, documentary photography, and folklore.
Backlight’26 does not offer a simple answer to the question of what is true in an image. Instead, it asks who gets to define the truth, for what purposes images are used, and how visual culture influences the way we understand the world.