Photography is a timeless hand that shapes both individual and collective memory. This hand, by touching what the photograph represents as an image, transforms it into either a document or a phenomenon.
In this era where the power of visual memory lies at the very center of our lives, photography—expanding and immortalizing “that moment” and its meaning in time—emerges as a medium that bridges the past, the present, and the future.
In this sense, photography, which is open to the interpretation of its audience and creates a deep and unique bond between the hand that stops “that moment” and the viewer, enables personal, social, cultural, political, temporal, technological, and even spatial transformations to occur over and over again.
This year, from December 12, 2025, to January 12, 2026, the 15th Bursa International Photography Festival (BURSA FOTOFEST-2025), curated by Prof. Dr. Gülbin Özdamar Akarçay and Özcan Yurdalan, will bring together photography enthusiasts in collaboration with Bursa Metropolitan Municipality, Bursa City Council, and the Bursa Photography Art Association (BUFSAD).
Within the scope of BURSA FOTOFEST-2025, we aim to bring together photographers, academics, and experts with diverse perspectives.
Enriched by distinguished artists and photographers from Turkey and around the world, this year’s festival presents the theme “Time of Rupture.”
In line with the “Time of Rupture” theme, BURSA FOTOFEST-2025 seeks to transform photography—as a document, a testimony, and a counter-narrative—into an understanding that opens doors to resistance, hope, and new possibilities in our collective memory.
Because we know that rupture moments are also opportunities to create a new structure from fragments. It is about distilling what we take from the past through the spirit of our present time and carrying it into the future. This, too, is a right, an act, and a form of resistance.
Through photography, BURSA FOTOFEST-2025 will allow us to experience together how our city’s memory confronts the rupture time marked by today’s shattering events, how it creates new possibilities from the fragments born of this confrontation, and how it extends an open call to hope.
American writer Ernest Hemingway beautifully sums up how our helpless witnessing of events can lead to rebirths as time moves forward with his words: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
As it did last year, BURSA FOTOFEST-2025 once again opens the door to hope, counter-narratives, resistance, and new possibilities in times of rupture.
Let us walk through that door together.

Mustafa BOZBEY
Mayor of Bursa Metropolitan Municipality