The City’s Second Nature: Photo Interventions in Belfast
The capital of Northern Ireland, where Victorian architecture coexists with postmodern buildings and where scenic hills loom in the background, has for the 15th time transformed into a vibrant art gallery. In this year’s edition of the Belfast Photo Festival, four Polish artists confronted audiences with the changing landscape of their region’s ecology and society.
The independent bookshop No Alibis entices in readers with its colourful window display and painted facade that contrast against the subdued brick-red veneer of the surrounding buildings. It can be found on the way from Belfast’s bustling city centre to the peaceful Botanic Gardens in the southern university district of Queen’s Quarter. Its cosy interior tempts with its wide range of genres and themes. Amid publications dealing with the history and identity of Northern Ireland and the island as a whole, one can find the local bestseller Old Ireland in Colour. The authors – John Breslin, who used AI and image editing software to colourise mostly century-old photographs, and historian Sarah-Anne Buckley – have created a visual portrait of a country that remembers its dramatic past but looks to the future with pride (albeit with some concern).
It seems this is how Belfast is itself: aesthetically rooted in history, adorned with murals narrating the story of its conflicts, attracting tourists with a rich cultural offering and the laid-back atmosphere of its pubs, and deeply connected to nature. If one were to compare smartphone snapshots of the contemporary urban landscape with the archival frames found in Old Ireland in Colour, it seems everything has changed: domestic architecture, infrastructure and fashion. But they do share one thing – earthy tones dominated by the greens of hills and pastures that form a subtle backdrop to all the city’s stories, and the vegetation that hungrily creeps up building walls as if trying to reclaim its rightful place.
So where else, if not in Belfast, should a photography festival be held – one that takes the biosphere as its central theme and features artists who ask questions about ethics and empathy, and about the relationships between humans and other living beings on Earth?
(Re)viewing the present
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Belfast Photo Festival 2025, Botanic Gardens in Belfast, photo: Agnieszka Warnke
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Photography is an invention of the human era – it’s referred to as either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, depending on whom one attributes geological changes. As Marianna Michałowska points out in her publication Materia(ł) Fotografii (The Matter/Material of Photography), this medium, viewed through the perspective of the Capitalocene, is inherently ambiguous:
On the one hand, as a branch of industry and as a tool of representational politics, it fits into the discourse of globalisation and colonialist-driven industrialisation. As such, photography is just part of the brutal market game – a race for patents, the displacement of less profitable techniques by newer, cheaper and more financially efficient results, the expansion of corporations – in short, the same mechanisms that drive capitalist economies. On the other hand, images hold innate emancipatory potential. Photography provides the broad audience of global visual culture with countless documents exposing the Capitalocene’s exploitation and destruction.
While this dual role of photography was already noticeable in the 19th century, its function as an alarm bell about the destructive effects of industry on biodiversity has only grown stronger in the face of rapidly increasing climate change. Environmental humanities advocate Lawrence Buell argues that the ecological crisis is, above all, a crisis of the imagination. Michałowska, in turn, uses the concept of ‘natural imagination’ – not just as a way to highlight certain phenomena and processes, but also as a means of shaping ecological thought and fostering a shared responsibility for the image between the photographer and the viewer. In her book, she demonstrates how important it is to combine scientific perspectives with artistic ones when it comes to the effective activation of audiences. She focuses on visual practices, but she also acknowledges the need to expand the field of inquiry to include sounds, smells and tactile impressions. Shifting these boundaries allows for a fuller and more conscious experience of nature.
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Anna Zagrodzka, 'Alternaria alternata', photo: courtesy of the artist
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A lesson in experiencing nature within city spaces, as mediated through art, was offered by the Belfast Photo Festival in June 2025. Its four organisers – Toby Smith, Michael Weir, Josie Smart and Calvin Ballard – invited dozens of artists to Northern Ireland’s capital to explore a near-Earth biosphere. Exhibitions and installations appeared in public spaces, where there was no way of ignoring them. Traditional gallery venues like Belfast Exposed and the Ulster Museum were overshadowed by more unexpected settings. Diana Lelonek ‘planted’ trash plants in front of Belfast City Hall in the city centre. Anna Zagrodzka revealed the microscopic worlds of extinction zones to visitors of the Botanic Gardens. Drawn by the aroma of coffee, locals and tourists alike could stop by Hustle Coffee on Rosemary Street – and be transported to the parallel realities of Poland’s cleanest lake and the military airport nearby thanks to the photographs of Karol Szymkowiak. Meanwhile, Dyba and Adam Lach presented a sensual filmic portrait – with a river in the main role – at the intimate Queen’s Film Theatre.
So let us pause for a moment in the Queen’s Quarter, where this visual journey through Belfast first began.
Blooming images
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Polly Garnett, 'Hill Pictures', photo: Belfast Photo Festival
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It is heartening to see that the hills Divis and Black Mountain, as well as Cave Hill, are now described as nature trails with city views. This shift is symbolic: those living in the concrete jungle below are now being observed by nature. These hills were the setting for photography workshops led by Irish artist Polly Garnett, where participants got the chance to capture these wild surroundings using Polaroid cameras. The photographer also spoke with local residents and documented the aftermath of fires and tree-planting efforts – all to draw attention to protecting the environment and capturing the interactions between nature and humans.
From Cave Hill, one can look down on the Botanic Gardens, founded in 1828 as a private park before opening to the public by the end of the 19th century. Here, surrounded by roses, a pond and a shell-shaped greenhouse, people could find Garnett’s series Hill Pictures. These towering rectangular works, taller than people, were hard to miss and disrupted any passive contemplation of nature.
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Botanic Gardens, Anna Zagrodzka’s project 'Alternaria alternata', photo: Agnieszka Warnke
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Much more discreet were the photographs from Anna Zagrodzka’s project Alternaria Alternata, placed just a few steps away. Arranged geometrically, these semi-transparent prints of mould seen under a microscope looked more like star constellations or abstract paintings than the aggressive microorganisms that they are – they had been found in former Nazi death camps where they eat the organic traces of the horrors that took place there. But unease only really came from the images neighbouring them, showing photos of the plants and trees in the camps that had been witness to mass killings during the war. Using special infrared-sensitive negatives, Zagrodzka could capture what in these scenes was emitting heat – what, in some way, is still alive.
Much like in Garnett’s workshops, Zagrodzka used Polaroids while documenting her project. However, these were not part of her Belfast exhibition due to the sensitivity of the material. On the one hand, these photos testify to the authenticity of analogue photography (unlike digital images, which are easily manipulated). But on the other, they contain hidden chemicals, and the process of their development – their ‘maturing’ – takes time.
The seductive beauty of the mould in Alternaria Alternata was a contrast to the stark black-and-white landscape of the Irish peatlands captured by Chad Alexander. Both projects were presented in the Botanic Gardens and both invited viewers to reflect on the relationship between humans and nature. While Zagrodzka’s work explores the evolving role of museums in how nature is represented in sites of collective memory, the Belfast-born author of Bog Story depicts the efforts of organisations, activists and local communities to restore unique ecosystems. Both artists are using photography to reveal traces of processes that are otherwise imperceptible at first glance.
Exclusive trash-plants
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Diana Lelonek's 'Centre for Living Things' in front of Belfast City Hall, photo: Agnieszka Warnke
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The organisms that live in peat bogs are well adapted to harsh conditions like high humidity, low temperatures and oxygen deficits. A similar schooling in survival was given to the objects found by Diana Lelonek at illegal waste dumps and other derelict sites that have served as experimental grounds for the artist. A moss-covered wallet (green not necessarily from age), an upholstery sponge overtaken by lichen, and used computer parts inhabited by different moss species – these are just a few examples of the trash-plants collected for her mock research institute project Centre for Living Things. Photographed like luxury products from a catalogue or museum exhibits from a distant culture, they appear on white backgrounds removed from their natural context.
During the Belfast Photo Festival, these works were integrated into the urban fabric – large-format prints of the trash-plants were installed on the lawn surrounding Belfast City Hall. At night, they harmonised beautifully with the illuminated historic building designed by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, who drew inspiration from Renaissance, Baroque and Classicist styles. In daylight, however, against the backdrop of the monumental structure, they looked rather peculiar – but this was likely what the curators intended. After all, this is a city critically engaged with its history – as symbolised, for example, by the table on display inside City Hall, where in 1912, Unionist supporters signed a covenant resisting Irish independence from the Crown (a photo of this event in Old Ireland in Colour shows that the building’s interior has barely changed over the years). Now, the city moves with the times. The trash-objects, in turn, have come full circle: discarded by humans, they return to them as art.
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Joe Laverty, 'Shallow Waters', photo: Belfast Photo Festival
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Lelonek’s works were not the only exhibition with an ‘advertising’ accent at the photography festival. In various parts of Belfast, digital billboards displayed images of Lough Neagh – the largest lake in the British Isles, now dying before our very eyes. Through his project Shallow Waters, Joe Laverty highlights how human negligence may lead to the total collapse of an ecosystem providing 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water. The method of presentation itself by the Irish photographer and filmmaker is designed to provoke direct audience interaction with the topic. But does yet another visual message in the heart of this busy city still have the power to break through?
Coffee with a view of war
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Karol Szymkowiak, from the book '0169-8629 5223-01750', Pix.house Foundation, photo: courtesy of the photographer
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Paradoxically, the art that leaves the most lasting impression is often the one we encounter by chance. In June, tourists and locals visiting the Presbyterian Church on Rosemary Street – the first of its kind in Belfast, founded in the 17th century and rebuilt in 1783 (as noted in the inscription above the entrance) – are likely to have also stepped into the neighbouring café Hustle Coffee. One of its interior walls had been transformed into a mini-gallery: a centrally-placed large photograph depicted a sand fortress on the shores of Lake Powidzkie (using one’s imagination, it could have resembled a castle on the slope of Cave Hill), while black-and-white photographs scattered around it told the story of the lake and Poland’s largest military airport, a potential target in the event of war.
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Karol Szymkowiak, from the book '0169-8629 5223-01750', Pix.house Foundation, photo: courtesy of the photographer
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The unsettling contrast between this recreational space set in nature and the looming spectre of catastrophe was even more powerfully conveyed by the accompanying photobook by the project’s creator, Karol Szymkowiak, which could be browsed on-site. Its title 0169-8629 5223-01750 is a Cold War-era code – a reference number from the U.S. Air Force’s list of strategic targets across the Eastern Bloc and China in case of global conflict. Today, there are US Army troops stationed in Greater Poland’s Powidz, and on the lake’s shore there even stands an ersatz copy of the Statue of Liberty. Szymkowiak captures all these paradoxes through his camera lens, forming a surreal mosaic of the Powidz landscape. He leaves the viewer with questions about human security at the expense of nature, echoing the themes found in the aforementioned Shallow Waters and demonstrating that issues about human-environment relationships are universal, regardless of geography.
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Sitara Thalia Ambrosio, 'Fragile as Glass', photo: Belfast Photo Festival
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But the 15th Belfast Photo Festival didn’t focus solely on ecological disasters. The theme of war, introduced in Szymkowiak’s work, was fully explored in the projects exhibited by Sitara Thalia Ambrosio and Oleksandr Rupeta. Ambrosio, a photojournalist living between Hanover and Kyiv, documented the everyday lives of queer Ukrainians. Her photobook Fragile as Glass contains the stories and photographs of five individuals at particular risk from Russian violence – people whose perspectives are often marginalised. Thematically closer to the Szymkowiak’s work is Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Rupeta’s project Stages of Air, in which he captured the landscape of the Donbas, where its inherent soothing calm is interrupted by echoes from explosions and artillery fire.
These two visual narratives about Ukraine led us back once more to the Botanic Gardens, where a shipping container converted into a photo book library had been installed. Selected by Fotofestiwal Łódź, these publications – predominantly by Polish artists – offered yet another way of experiencing the festival’s narratives.
The festival’s five main photographic exhibitions were centred around the fragility and beauty of Northern Ireland’s natural heritage. We’ve already mentioned three of them – the projects by Polly Garnett, Chad Alexander and Joe Laverty. But it’s worth taking a closer look at the remaining two as well.
Depths of the deep
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Yvette Monahan, 'The Ocean Within', photo: Belfast Photo Festival
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Helio León, a Spanish photographer and filmmaker based in Dublin, offered a visual journey through a protected temperate rainforest that has endured with minimal human interference. Dead trees were left to the forces of nature so they could feed the earth and be reborn. Narrow Valley is a tribute not only to this ecosystem but also to alternative photographic processes. Exposed film was submerged and bleached in County Antrim’s Glenarm River, and the resulting image appeared on fabric. A similar return to traditional techniques could be seen in the work of Diana Lelonek – in her recent pieces, the artist uses solarigraphy, cyanotypes and anthotypes. And just like León’s work, her digitally preserved ‘trash plants’ embrace the changing cycles of the environment, undergoing metamorphoses in accordance with nature.
In The Ocean Within, Yvette Monahan explores the hidden roles of fish as biological custodians of time and history. Their bodies hold a record of lived experiences, a collective memory of the aquatic world. Memory – both human and spatial – is also the theme of Anna Zagrodzka’s project. Both photographers attach great importance not only to the artistic side of their work but also to its scientific foundation: Monahan exhibited her two-metre conceptual prints near the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, while the creator of Alternaria Alternata began her microscopic research during her food technology studies at the Łódź University of Technology.
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'Sowing the Seeds of the Wild', directed by Dyba Lach, cinematography by Adam Lach, photo: Adam Lach
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An interesting counterpoint to Monahan’s oceanic tale is the film Sowing the Seeds of the Wild, directed by Dyba Lach with cinematography by Adam Lach. Together, they accompanied musician Michał Zygmunt on a 40-day journey along the Bug River to the Oder River. The ecological catastrophe on Poland’s second-longest river – in which over 200 million aquatic organisms have perished – prompted the artists to adopt a new medium. Although they are known for their photobooks (such as Stigma and How to Rejuvenate an Eagle), this time they turned to the language of film, enabling them to combine visual and auditory impressions. Sounds from the Bug, Vistula and Oder rivers, along with the surrounding nature, filled Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast. In this poetic documentary, the river was queen – mysterious, gracious, untamed and wildly beautiful.
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'Sowing the Seeds of the Wild', directed by Dyba Lach, cinematography by Adam Lach, photo: Adam Lach
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Throughout the Lachs’ film, one can feel echoes of the School of Ecopoetics – a joint initiative by Julia Fiedorczuk and Filip Springer aimed at cultivating eco-critical reflection and drawing attention to the relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Their guiding thought comes from Buell’s words about a crisis of the imagination, the concept tackled in Michałowska’s book mentioned earlier. The Lachs’ film feels like a remarkable case study for these ideas, moving beyond a purely visual experience of nature and offering diverse forms of immersion.
The symbol of Belfast is the seahorse, a reference to the city’s history as a port. It also appears on the city’s coat of arms, watching over the Latin motto ‘Pro tanto quid retribuamus’. The artists participating in this year’s festival seemed to echo this very question in the context of humanity’s bond with nature: What shall we give in return for so much?
As part of the Belfast Photo Festival, the Polish artists involved presented their work in the Metamorphosis programme. The installations and film screening that were developed in collaboration with Diana Lelonek, Anna Zagrodzka, Karol Szymkowiak, Dyba and Adam Lach, and Fotofestiwal Łódź, could be seen at key locations throughout the city centre between 5th and 30th June 2025. The event was part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute and the British Council.
Translated from Polish by Adam Zulawski