The once-local project turned global movement brings together shutterbugs and international experts to share, exhibit, and discuss alternative photography, fashioning it as a rising subsociety.
This is a guest post from Nshan Melkonian, art sector practitioner, writer and founder of InCulture.
The highly anticipated 2025 Barcelona Experimental Photo Festival (EXP.25) ended on 27 July, marking a defining 6th year of the festival with first-rate conferences, workshops, exhibitions, and a contagious energy and troop of participants from all four corners of the world. Beyond its commercial success, the festival offered beautiful sites and a unique knowledge exchange between a community of photographers, curators, and researchers, asserting it as a seminal cultural event.
Over five days, EXP.25 welcomed around 300 participants from over 30 different countries, supporting dozens of offbeat events from Collage with AI-Generated Images by Céline Pilchor and Anthotypes: Printing Images with Plants by Anne Kalinic, to sessions in liquid emulsion and tricolour cyanotypes with Maria Solaguren-Beascoa. Collective exhibitions also decorated the Centro Cívico Pati Llimona, a community photography centre that has been running since 1991. Akin to all this, unique activities like Justin Quinnell’s ice lens and turmeric photography workshop reaffirmed the ethos of the festival: ‘The future is experimental and nonconformist’.
The Barcelona Experimental Photo Festival had its humble beginnings locally then grew into an international movement. By 2018, founder and co-director Pablo Giori, along with nine other photographers, created the Barcelona Double Exposure Movement. It incorporated 80 artists from around 80 different countries to participate in a global film swap to double expose rolls of film — coining the hashtag #FilmSwapWorldWide.
A serendipitous head nod to the mid-century photo group Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya (AFC), where burgeoning urbanisation met modernist photography, EXP would similarly invoke this vision and, like them, ‘took to the streets and put a changing Barcelona in their sights, [where] they sought to map the architecture and spaces of the city to describe the reality that surrounded them.’ AFC would respectively go on to become a breeding ground for new generations of photographers in Barcelona, while EXP went beyond, setting the stage for a new, globalised photography scene.
After hosting a variety of exhibitions and producing a photobook of the project, they decided to gather all the photographers in one place. As a result, EXP.20 was born. Giori described the mission of the festival in his 2020 interview with the Catalonian News publication:
‘This festival is the direct product of how important experimental photography is in today’s world […]. Since the 1940s, we have yet to come to a clear conclusion or definition of what exactly experimental photography is. This festival was not an attempt to define it in the technical definition, but an attempt to define an attitude and outlook on photographers’ efforts in their ability to always being able to find something new to do within the craft. This festival’s purpose was to bring together the people who will be sure to become a driving force in the alternative and experimental photography movement.’
Among these drivers is Justin Quinnell, a pinhole photographer from Bristol, England. Quinnell steered a large group through turmeric anthotypes on bread followed by a crash course in making ice lenses. With a concoction of isopropyl alcohol (essentially washing-up liquid), turmeric, bread, and an assortment of swan and butterfly stencils, added with fifteen minutes of sun, participants were left with their own edible creations. The anthotypes were then bound by al dente spaghetti into a bread photobook.
The brevity of making ice lenses gave the second workshop all of its charm. Armed with a plate and two hands, participants rounded out the ice into a circular form. Held to the sun, the ice imitated a focused lens. However, moments later, they were left with puddled paper plates and drippy hands. Their ice, sweat, and tears vaporised by the sun. A humming banter broke out and it rose like hot air above the enclosed façades, while below mousy smiles scurried amidst the crowd. The spirit of experimentation was at work and everyone was loving it. It is easy to compare Quinnell’s workshop to a performance rather than a course, where jester-like antics and intermediate harmonica tunes turn the activities into a theatre musical. Bravo!
Justin Quinnell, Turmeric and Ice Lens workshop, Centro Cívico Pati Llimona Barcelona, 2025.
Justin Quinnell is considered a leading expert in pinhole photography and has been teaching it for over 23 years. Quinnell’s career spans freelance pinhole photography, hosting photography workshops, and lectures in the US, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia. He’s even managed a safari camp in the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Under his belt are appearances across The One show, Jonathan Ross Show, Blue Peter, and Radio 4 ‘Today’, among others. Photographer confrère Millee Tibbs, who was also a workshop facilitator at EXP.25, had her exhibition Landscape curated by Justin last year at the PRSC. While this year, his timeless pinhole series Mouthpiece (2006) literally became the face of Michael Seyer’s 2025 album Boy Life.
The Barcelona Experimental Photo Festival’s mission in mentoring, cultivating photography, and desire to ‘[ . . .] reflect urban and human transformations [. . .]’, as Giori stated, places the festival alongside the AFC photo group or even the 70s Spanish counterculture movement. Although not overtly political like the latter, EXP.25 places itself as a thriving subsociety too, not only in Spain but internationally, where avant-garde aesthetics and smart photographic quips challenge pre-existing conventions. EXP.25 ticked all the boxes: connection, collaboration, and exploration. Ultimately, it harboured a welcoming environment where novice or experienced photographers could discover their voice and craft in context with the wider world.
The Barcelona Experimental Photo Festival took place 23 July – 27 July, 2025. Registration is open for next year’s festival 22 – 26 July, 2026.
Main image: Barcelona Experimental Photo Festival, Centro Cívico Pati Llimona, Barcelona 2025.