Summit Photo programme
Find out more about the line-up of speakers at Summit Photo.
Friday 17 July – Humanitarian
10.00am – Doors open
11.00am – Anne Nwakalor, Savannah Dodd, and Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo
Panel discussion: ethics in photography
12.45pm – Giles Duley
Resilience: focusing on what you can control
In this inspiring talk, photographer and humanitarian Giles Duley shares the principles that have guided him through profound personal and professional challenges: focus on what you can control, stay true to your purpose, and approach everything with love. Through powerful stories from his life and work, he reveals why resilience is not just survival – it is life’s greatest gift.
1.45pm – Lunchtime lecture with Jermaine Francis and Deborah Ireland
Two photographs, a forgotten history
This is the story of two photographs, taken by two very different photographers, using different processes, taken within three years of each other, divided by a continent.
Both are a testament to the same forgotten history, which is not clear or easy to read and open to misinterpretation. By researching the photographers, their process and intent, it is possible to unravel an account which we forget at our peril.
These photographs should have been impossible to take in the 1860s because of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, with full emancipation in 1838. These photographs, taken in 1860 and 1863 tell a different story.
2.45pm – Chris Rainier and Olivia McKendrick
Cultures on the edge: at the crossroads of culture and conservation
To the backdrop of Chris Rainier's portraits of indigenous peoples taken over a 40 year period including as a National Geographic Fellow and photographer.
Chris and Olivia will present on why culture matters and the crucial importance of indigenous understanding and traditions. They will explore the link between culture and conservation, the threats to indigenous cultures, languages and landscapes and the growing power and energy of their revitalisation.
Finally, they will touch on the work that their charity, The Cultural Sanctuaries Foundation, is doing together with indigenous communities around the world.
Theirs is a passion project – for cultural and linguistic diversity, for indigenous guardianship of land and for extra places around the fireplace discussion of what it means to be human in and how to face the challenges of the 21st century.
3.45pm – Long form documentary – Roundtable with Earth Photo 2025 Awardee Lorenzo Poli chaired by Photoworks
4.30pm – Pooran Desai
Reimagine – the neuroscience of creating the future
We can't separate the way we understand reality from the way our brains work. Imagination needs to lead and thinking needs to inform.
6.00pm – Ciril Jazbec
7.30pm – Shahidul Alam
Vocabularies of resistance
Vocabularies of resistance examines how artists and activists forge new languages of dissent, not only through the images and stories they create, but through the very conditions and spaces in which art is made and encountered.
Drawing on a rich range of practices, the talk traces Shahidul Alam’s career, throughout which photography has been a means of critical engagement, alongside the organisations he founded Drik Picture Library, Pathshala, Chobi Mela, and Majority World. These are not merely institutions, but acts of world and community building, platforms through which dominant narratives are challenged and vital forms of representation are created.
From works including Crossfire and Kalpana’s Warriors, to the powerful presence on the Flotilla, and the performative public showing of Crossfire – a moment where the act of gathering itself became an act of resistance the talk highlights how creative collaboration, actions and practice can intervene in urgent political realities.
Together, these examples illuminate how different approaches to art production, from documentary to performance, from gallery to street, to structural transformation shape the political force of creative work, and ask: what does it mean to speak, show, and be seen when the stakes are highest?
Join us for an evening that challenges us to think differently about the role of art in movements for justice.
8.30pm – Bar
9.30pm – Doors close
Saturday 18 July – Environment
10.00am – Doors open
11.00am – Selene Magnolia Gatti
Long shadow: life under the veiled grasp of factory farming in Europe
12.45pm – Gideon Mendel
Out of Ash
Gideon Mendel will discuss his immersive video practice and showcase his new three channel film, ASH, (21m,10s, 2026) created with his footage from the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires, 2025.
Best known as a photographer, in recent years Mendel has been developing a uniquely personal filmic language to address the key environmental challenges of our times, to counteract a more conventional photojournalistic approach to climate catastrophe, and to consider ways in which to both contemplate the urgency of climate engagement and consider our capacities for change and action.
Mendel will discuss his process and practice – his moving beyond conventional documentary approaches to engender empathy and create a truly visceral experience for his audiences – and reflect on the research and methods that inform his video and installation works.
2.45pm – Aaron Gekoski
Conflict zones: imagery from the frontline of conservation
Across the globe, animals are being hunted, traded, consumed, and exploited - pushed to the brink of extinction by human hands. For nearly two decades, renowned photojournalist Aaron Gekoski has been on the frontlines of this crisis, documenting the stark realities of human-animal conflict in some of the planet’s most unforgiving environments.
In this powerful presentation, Aaron shares stories from the trenches: from Cambodia’s dog-drowning facilities and West Africa’s voodoo markets to brutal wildlife tourism sites and the murky underworld of the exotic pet trade.
Blending firsthand accounts with hard-hitting imagery, Aaron challenges audiences to reflect on our often troubled relationship with wildlife, and reveals how powerful visuals can spark real, lasting change.
3.45pm – Resistance through photography – Roundtable with Shahidul Alam and Savannah Dodd, chaired by Photoworks
4.30pm – Mandy Barker
Our plastic ocean
A visual journey from the international award-winning photographic artist, whose work involving marine plastic debris over the past 16 years has received global recognition.
Mandy speaks about her inspiration, collaboration with scientists, expeditions and global engagement on all platforms. She will be wearing clothes recovered from the sea for her talk, in support of her recent project.
6.00pm – Areeba Hamid
How Greenpeace creates change
On a fortuitous day in 1971 a few activists from Vancouver, Canada sailed to Amchitka, Alaska, to protest U.S. nuclear testing – they had a small boat and a mighty weapon – a camera. Not just telling but showing what was happening far away from the public eye created outrage that led to the banning of nuclear testing at sea.
Since then, telling compelling stories using images has remained at the heart of how Greenpeace creates change.
7.30pm – James Balog
When mountains move: an odyssey to a new vision of planetary change
For 45 years, James Balog has broken new artistic ground on some of the most important environmental issues of our era, from climate change, receding glaciers, and wildfire to endangered wildlife, the world’s great trees, and deforestation.
In this captivating presentation, James will share his adventures and historic insights – and inspire hope for the environmental future.
8.30pm – Bar
9.30pm – Doors close
Sunday 19 July – Multiple themes day
10.00am – Doors open
11.00am – Lorenzo Poli
Through the Earth-Body: From the Glacial North to the Geoglyphs of the Anthropocene
From the glacial silence of the North, across the Amazon and into Latin America’s extractive territories, Lorenzo Poli unfolds a personal journey into the living body of the Earth. From the technological frontiers of sustainable architecture, his practice expanded into visual art through self-immersion in untamed biomes, scientific labs, ancestral territories and anthropogenic voids carved by industrial ambition.
Across the Land, photography becomes more than witnessing: it is an embodied practice of transformation — bridging visual evidence, Earth sciences, post-Anthropocene imagination and a renewed sacred relation with the living world.
The talk culminates in Geoglyphs of the Anthropocene, a long-term transdisciplinary investigation across South America’s mining territories, where sites of extraction are revealed as the geoglyphs of our time — monuments to the values we pursue. From this descent into the Earth emerges a luminous seed of regeneration: an opening towards humanity’s reconciliation with Nature.
12.00pm (noon) – Special Collections talk: Hidden Narratives - RGS/Italian Cultural Institute/Photoworks Residency with Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj
The Royal Geographical Society, in partnership with Photoworks and the Italian Cultural Institute in London, launched an open call for photographers with a focus on archives and archival research.
The winning artist Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj will immerse herself in the Society’s historic Collections, and engage with materials in relation to the environment and the humanitarian
The outcome of the residency would be to develop a presentation for Summit Photo 2026 with resonance to the themes of hidden narratives, loss and human impact.
12.45pm – Rhiannon Adam
1.45pm – Affecting change – Roundtable with James Balog and Mandy Barker, chaired by Sue Flood and Ian Dawson
2.30pm – Simon Townsley
4.15pm – Bertie Gregory
Searching for the world’s largest whale gathering
Bertie Gregory, National Geographic Explorer and BAFTA award-winning filmmaker, delivers a rare blend of strategic insight and cinematic storytelling drawn from a decade-long quest to document one of the greatest wildlife events on Earth.
Tasked with locating the world’s largest gathering of fin whales across vast, unpredictable oceans, Bertie and his team faced years of uncertainty, shifting conditions, and incomplete data. Through breathtaking footage and behind-the-scenes insight, he reveals how passion, persistence, and collaboration ultimately led to a breakthrough.
Equal parts informative and awe-inspiring, this talk draws clear parallels to today’s world closer to home, showing how meaningful milestones often require long-term thinking, resilience, and the willingness to pivot along the way.
Audiences leave inspired and learn that the biggest wins rarely happen overnight.
