In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce captured from his window at his home in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes the Point de vue du Gras, using a pioneering process called heliography, a technical milestone that not only inaugurated the official history of photography but also ignited an impulse that would forever transform the way we inhabit, remember, and decode the world.
Two centuries later, image capture has transcended the limits of light on silver salts to delve into the complex tangle of algorithms, social networks, and artificial intelligence. To commemorate this bicentennial and delve into the radical transformation of visual culture, the Panoràmic festival celebrates its tenth edition from October 15 to December 27, 2026, through an unprecedented deployment in duration, scope, and content.
Under the stimulating motto Cremar de desig (Burning with desire), this edition takes the anniversary as a pretext to reflect on the role of the image in the construction of contemporary sensibility. The festival does not celebrate two hundred years of photography as a mere nostalgic look at the past, but as a critical opportunity to question what it means to photograph in a present saturated by the visual and how to preserve the poetic and political potential of images.
To respond to the magnitude of the bicentennial, Panoràmic extends its dates, multiplies its cultural offerings, and consolidates a polycentric structure that reorients the artistic debate throughout the Catalan territory.
The festival's growth is particularly notable in its geographical expansion, configuring a circuit that connects four key cities through staggered inaugurations. Granollers begins the journey on October 15, maintaining its role as the historical and industrial core of the event from the Roca Umbert creation factory. On October 17, Vic joins for the first time in the festival's history, expanding the map of venues and effectively decentralizing visual arts. Barcelona follows on October 22, articulating critical and photographic reference institutions such as MACBA, Foto Colectania, Fundació Lluís Coromina, or the KBr Centre of Fundació MAPFRE, and finally Terrassa on November 5, contributing its deeply rooted heritage and photographic tradition.
This plural and cartographic perspective translates into a carefully curated exhibition selection where essential voices of documentary photography and contemporary narratives coexist.
The American photographer Donna Ferrato presents the exhibition Holy in Granollers, a brave proposal that condenses her pioneering career by making gender violence visible and defending women's rights, confronting the harshness of domestic violence with desire and sexual freedom. At the same time, the event brings for the first time to Spain the solo exhibitions of the Japanese creator Kensuke Koike, who in A Familiar Stranger dissects old photographs through cuts and folds without adding external elements; and of the British artist Leah Gordon, whose exhibition Monument to the Vanquished Peasant analyzes memory, social struggles, and colonial vestiges in Haiti and the United Kingdom.
The value of the image as an unrepeatable document and research into its supports also underpins very unique proposals. Coinciding with the centenary of his birth, Panoràmic recovers the figure of the Czech Miroslav Tichý, an absolute dissident who built his own cameras with discarded materials to capture imprecise images that acquire an almost pictorial texture.
This visual archaeology dialogues with avant-garde installations such as Spin, the immersive projection created by the Playmodes studio at La Tèrmica de Roca Umbert; the work of Anna Rierola that transforms biomedicine data into the mosaic The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the light architecture created by Josep Poblet in the site of the old medieval tannery of Granollers. In addition, the project Panoràmic Arxius promotes seven unpublished interventions created expressly by artists such as Domènec, Marina Planas or Pep Agut based on the documentary collections of Barcelona, Granollers and Terrassa.
In Barcelona, the program unfolds an intense network of exhibitions that dialogue with memory and territory in emblematic spaces. You can see such suggestive projects as Refugi by Domènec at the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, Impressions d'ultramar by Nathalie Rei at the Casa de l'Ardiaca, or Cossos d'aigua by Marina Planas at the Maritime Museum, in addition to the proposals by Oscar Holloway at the Archive of Ethnography and Folklore, Sylvie Bussières at the Photographic Archive and the collective Open Panoràmic at the Lluís Coromina Foundation.
Beyond the exhibition halls, the Catalan capital will also become the intellectual heart of the festival thanks to events such as the International Meeting Fotoescriptures at the CCCB, which will reflect on literature and photography in connection with the bicentenary. And in the Panoràmic PRO space, reference lectures and conferences will be hosted —such as the first Conferences on the History of Photography at Foto Colectania and Pompeu Fabra University— to debate archives, cultural mediation, and the future of the image.
Completing this deployment with nearly 50 activities aimed at opening fissures in contemporary critical thought, the tenth edition will feature the first visit to Spain by Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt, co-founders of the legendary cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix (now reunited as In Her Interior), who will offer a performative conference at MACBA.
In the field of experimental cinema, filmmaker Bill Morrison will star in a session at Zumzeig cinema to discuss the fragility of deteriorated celluloid based on the screening of his films, while artists Randa Mirza and Aya Metwalli will bring a sound and visual performance to Granollers articulated around the collections of the Arab Image Foundation. The theoretical debate will also be enriched with presentations by Julie Jones, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and historian Geoffrey Batchen.
As a lasting testimony to this first decade and coinciding with the two hundred years of the first preserved photograph, the organization has published the book Panoràmic. A Decade of Visual Culture. The publication brings together essays by researchers and curators such as Andrés Hispano, Mercè Alsina, Federica Matelli, Fèlix Pérez-Hita, and Joan Fontcuberta —with a prologue by Rosa A. Cruz—, to analyze the aesthetic shifts on memory, identity, post-truth, and the hyperproduction of images in the era of artificial intelligence.
The presentation of the volume on October 29 at the CCCB will reinforce the event's vocation as a platform for thought, supported by the professional space Panoràmic PRO, which will bring together more than 60 international and local agents around conferences on the history of photography, archive management, and cultural mediation.
Under the direction of Joan Fontcuberta and Albert Gusi, Panoràmic 2026 reaffirms itself as an essential event in the Catalan cultural agenda. Celebrating the bicentenary of photography here does not consist of petrifying history in a museum, but of placing the image at the center of the current debate to continue questioning, from artistic practice and criticism, the world we inhabit.
True art lies in re-igniting in the viewer that curious, critical, and dazzled gaze that Niépce first glimpsed from his window.