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.
Celebrated visual artist Zanele Muholi opens the festival with a keynote presentation on their practice. Through powerful portraits and self-portraits, Muholi confronts issues of visibility, identity, and resistance, using photography as a tool for empowerment and social change. 12:45-13:30
What does it mean to photograph Black skin, and how has the camera shaped perceptions of identity and history? Photographer Cedric Nunn and analyst Angelo Fick come together for a conversation about representation, memory, and the evolving role of images in telling Black stories. 14:30-15:30 Roundtable: Photojournalism in a Changing World Jodi Bieber, Neo Ntsoma, and Sphamandla Dlamini
The field of photojournalism is shifting—technologically, politically, and socially. In this roundtable, photographers Jodi Bieber, Neo Ntsoma, and Sphamandla Dlamini, moderated by Andiswa Mkosi of This Audio Is Visual, discuss the challenges and possibilities of documenting truth in turbulent times.
From personal memory to collective struggle and frontline reporting, each artist will present their projects, bringing their own perspective on how they’re pushing and expanding photography. Together in an open conversation, they will explore how photography continues to shift and surprise, and reimagines what the medium can be.
