rotterdam photo 2026: echoes of silence

What does war do to an artist when he or she is not an eyewitness, but becomes a bearer of the emotional legacy? What does the violence sound like in the minds of those who survive, flee, or hear only?

In “Echoes of Silence,” we explore how war, conflict and collective trauma reverberate in the work of photographers who choose not to use the lens as a reporting tool, but as a mirror of their inner struggles.

At a time when images of war are constantly circulating through media and screens, Rotterdam Photo 2026 calls for a different perspective: an introspective, subjective and visually layered approach to war. No reportage photography or direct registration of violence, but photographic autonomous work that departs from personal resonance, psychological processing or symbolic representation.

This edition focuses on artists for whom war is not a scene, but a condition. Where conflict takes place not outside the body, but in the memory, the family story, the subconscious. Here the lens does not register an explosion, but echoes of it: in silence, emptiness, repetition, fragmentation or alienation. We see this as a necessary extension of the discourse around conflict and visual culture, in which the personal, poetic and symbolic perspective is often underexposed.

Visual language and design may vary - from analog distortion to poetic portraits, from abstract landscapes to symbolic still lifes - but the common thread is the inner impact of war on artistry. This project counterbalances the dominant narrative of sensation, making room for reflection, symbolism and empathy by focusing on the artist's inner landscape, and accommodates both established and emerging photographers with idiosyncratic, conceptual and visual approaches.

Cultural and social urgency:

Worldwide artists are inevitably linked to violence, displacement and memory. Think of diaspora, colonial legacies, intergenerational trauma or recent wars. These themes are both topical and universal, and deserve a platform that makes room for the stratification of experience - not just the spectacle of war.

Rotterdam, as a city of trauma and transformation, provides the perfect context for this program. Here, personal histories of migration, bombing and reconstruction come together in an urban identity deeply imbued with traces of conflict - often invisible, but always present. We aim for an internationally diverse selection - with particular attention to voices from (post)conflict areas and diaspora - and seek work that surprises, disrupts, silences.