Today, everything we witness in the world we live in points to a state of rupture at the very heart of change and transformation. Time does not simply move forward in a straight line—it cracks, it trembles, it is interrupted. As all beings—living and non-living—individuals, societies, images, truth, and justice are swept about in this fragility, some voices fall silent, some faces fade, and some stories are forgotten. Societies exist as much through the stories they remember as through those they forget. In every forgotten or remembered story, a moment of rupture is experienced. And it is precisely at that moment that photography appears.

Photographs shape our individual and collective memory. As an image, a photograph transforms into a miniature, a document, or a fragment of what it represents. Today, photography has evolved beyond being an absolute reality made up of singular moments into a temporal mosaic where the past, present, and future intertwine. In this context, it becomes open to the interpretation of the viewer/recipient. The photograph itself creates a deep connection between its creator and its audience. In doing so, photographs, standing in the shadow of personal, social, cultural, political, temporal, and technological changes and transformations, come to represent them. These representations sometimes blur reality and distort truth. The images derived from them are reproduced through technological media and devices, multiplying the meanings they convey.

The 15th Bursa International Photography Festival (BURSA FOTOFEST-2025), with this year’s theme “Time of Rupture”, invites us once again to reflect on photography in the context of memory, resistance, hope, and new ways of seeing. Because Time of Rupture is a call to pause and look closely during moments of uncertainty, unease, and resilience. This festival reminds us that photography is not only a document but also a testimony, a refuge, and a form of defiance.

Photography is, at times, a pause. Every image and every word presented at the festival becomes a tool that fixes, recalls, and sometimes tenderly repairs the rupture of our times. Moments of rupture are also moments when new possibilities are born. Photography, precisely in this interval, breaks the silence and focuses on the moments that make these possibilities possible. It shapes what it takes from the past in the present and carries it into the future. For remembering is a right, an act, and a form of resistance.

Time of Rupture calls not only for mourning a loss but also for repairing and nurturing hope through remembrance. For both individual and collective ruptures hold the potential for radical hope by questioning hegemonic narratives.

With BURSA FOTOFEST-2025, we seek ways to build a collective memory amidst upheavals and tides, to create a common language embracing all our differences, and to open a channel for visual expression.

This call is built on four main pillars:

To Remember – To Resist – To Multiply Hope – To Enable New Perspectives

Gülbin Özdamar Akarçay – Özcan Yurdalan