The second Cape Town Photography Festival, taking place from 2 to 26 September, will feature 40 exhibitions and more than 160 photographers across the city. New venues include the Castle of Good Hope and Company’s Garden.

Now twice the size of its inaugural edition, the festival explores the theme of ‘Truth’. Festival director Heidi Erdmann said the theme reflects a moment in which both photography and truth are increasingly contested.

“Photography has traditionally carried a certain authority as a record of what was in front of the camera, but today images can be easily manipulated, re-contextualised and weaponised,” she said.

“I chose ‘Truth’ because both truth and photography feel under pressure. The festival is not a search for certainty, but an exploration of how truths are produced, challenged, and resisted.”

The response from photographers had been remarkably diverse.

“The programme demonstrates just how many ways there are of engaging with the idea of truth,” said Erdmann.

Programme highlights

Following market research conducted after last year’s festival, the public programme has been reshaped in response to audience feedback.

“We’ve moved away from an emphasis on formal talks towards more opportunities for people to engage with photography and photographers through conversations, workshops, a masterclass, demonstrations, a film screening and guided walks across the city,” Erdmann said.

The International Student Photography Exhibition, now four times larger than last year, will showcase the next generation of photographic voices across three venues.

“If the festival is to have a future, we need to invest in those who will shape it,” Erdmann noted.

Programme highlights include “Cape Rhythm: Goema, Klopse and Memory in the Company’s Garden”, an outdoor exhibition exploring the relationship between photographs, the city and its history; two exhibitions from Reunion Island; and workshops by PICHA Stock from Nairobi, Kenya, an African platform for photography and visual storytelling.

Exhibitions at the Central Library will bring photography into an accessible public institution.

Truth and representation

Erdmann said photography’s traditional role as evidence had fundamentally changed. “We can no longer automatically assume that because something is photographic, it is necessarily evidence of something that happened in front of a camera.”

She noted a strong return to analogue photography among festival submissions. “Film doesn’t make an image inherently truthful, but its physicality, the negative, contact with the material and trace of light, offers a different relationship to image-making.”

The question of who has the authority to tell a story is particularly significant in an African context, Erdmann said. “The continent has so often been photographed through an external gaze, and African photographers are increasingly reclaiming the right to represent their own histories, communities, and realities.”

“I Witnessed This”, presented at the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation and curated by Pippa Hetherington, brings together photographic voices from across the continent.

The festival is also contributing to conversations around a national music photography archive, an initiative that grew from concerns about preserving South Africa’s photographic record of its musical heritage.

“We have an extraordinary visual archive of our musical heritage, yet much of it remains scattered across private collections, personal archives and the studios and homes of the photographers who created it,” Erdmann said.

“I’d like visitors to encounter an image that makes them stop, question something they thought they understood, or see their own world in a new way.”

Visit www.capetownphotofest.co.za for the full programme.

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