Pop-Up Festival: What Have We Done? Johannesburg, South Africa
20 September 2025
to 24 September 2025 The Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, South Africa
World Press Photo and the Market Photo Workshop present a pop-up festival to accompany our 70-year anniversary exhibition in Johannesburg.
Join us as we mark World Press Photo’s 70th anniversary with the exhibition What Have We Done? Unpacking Seven Decades of World Press Photo curated by Cristina de Middel. Including over 100 images spanning 70 years, the exhibition invites us to question how images shape meaning and how we might interpret them.
Running alongside the exhibition, the pop-up festival, co-created with our regional partner the Market Photo Workshop, brings this exploration to life with a public program designed to elevate visual literacy, engage with the exhibition’s themes, and spark dialogue and reflection.
Bringing together local photographers, critical thinkers, and audiences, the festival will invite you to learn how photographic images communicate and influence understanding, explore how they speak to assumptions, bias, and narrative frameworks, and engage in conversations about how visual storytelling shapes society.
Program
Highlights of the festivals include:
Talks and panels with visual thinkers and creators, exploring how archives inform our present and future.
Workshops to help us make meaning and create understanding through what we see in a picture.
Interactive sessions exploring how archives are selected, described, curated, and contextualized.
The full program will be announced soon.
Speakers and facilitators
We’re honored to welcome a dynamic lineup of experts, selected with the Market Photo Workshop, each bringing unique perspectives and experience. Key to the program is the inclusion of diverse African perspectives whose participation will bridge archival insight with contemporary challenges—creating a space for reflection, connection, and critical engagement.
