August 23, 2025 - to Ballarat International Foto Biennale

The Ballarat International Foto Biennale is a vibrant celebration of photography held biennially since 2005. Featuring diverse works by both established and emerging photographers from Australia and abroad, the festival transforms Ballarat into a cultural hub. Over 60 days, more than 80 venues, including streets and laneways, host exhibitions, workshops, artist talks, and community programs, fostering creativity and artistic exchange. This event stimulates the local economy, attracts tourists, and offers an immersive arts experience.

The 2025 Ballarat International Foto Biennale centres on LIFEFORCE—a theme that pulses with intensity, intimacy, and resistance. This year’s program draws on the power of photography to reveal what it means to be alive: to endure, to question, to create, and to connect. There is a life force in all of us, a force that distinguishes between the living and non-living. In the artistic world, it is more – a spark that propels an artist to leap over barriers to express, interpret and capture this energy in unique ways.

Through bold portraiture, charged documentary work, and evocative explorations of body, conflict, and beauty, this year’s artists capture the emotional and physical truths that shape us. From quiet acts of self-definition to the raw immediacy of frontline witnessing, these images are unflinching and poetic – offering glimpses of life at its most vulnerable and most vital.

The festival’s 11th edition is headlined by British-Ghanaian photographer Campbell Addy, whose Australian-exclusive exhibition, I Love Campbell, will be unveiled at the historic Ballarat Mining Exchange. I Love Campbell presents powerful portraits, fashion photography, and intimate self-reflections that challenge convention and celebrate the beauty of multiplicity. In the context of LIFEFORCE, his lens becomes both mirror and amplifier—inviting audiences to see vulnerability as strength, and identity as a vital creative force.

A landmark exhibition of work by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989) also takes centre stage. Mapplethorpe’s photography is classical and disciplined—an investigation of beauty, control, and desire that challenges societal boundaries. This selection of Mapplethorpe’s work has been curated by Edward Enninful OBE, Ghanaian-born British editor and stylist who was Editor in Chief of British Vogue and European editorial director for Conde Nast magazines. Enninful presents his selection of 46 original Mapplethorpe photographs in pairs, forging new dialogues between them and inviting visitors to experience some of Mapplethorpe’s best-known photographs anew.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, the intrepid young French woman, Catherine Leroy, chose to travel the world to photograph the major conflicts of her day, from Vietnam to Africa, to the Middle East. In February 1966, she flew from Paris to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, and onto Saigon with a one-way ticket and a brand-new Leica M2 camera on her shoulder. She was only twenty-one. See the world premiere of Catherine Leroy: One-Way Ticket to Vietnam 1966-1968 in Ballarat.

From galleries to laneways, city streets to businesses, and historic buildings, the Biennale showcases the works of both international and Australian photographers, each responding to the theme LIFEFORCE. These powerful images explore what drives us—emotionally, politically, spiritually—and offer a compelling lens on resilience, identity, and the forces that shape our lives. Come along and immerse yourself in the beauty, energy, and truth of photography, and discover the vital stories behind the images.

Immerse yourself in the pulse of photography from 23 August to 19 October 2025.

Tickets on sale in July