Toronto's CONTACT Photography Festival is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a citywide edition spanning May 2026. Over three decades, the festival has welcomed more than 20 million visitors and showcased over 8,500 artists. This year's program brings together Canadian and international photographers whose work explores decolonization, memory, migration, and identity, through exhibitions, public billboards, photobook fairs, and more.
There's something worth acknowledging when an arts festival reaches its 30th year. In a cultural landscape where programming budgets are perpetually stretched, and audience attention is hard to hold, CONTACT Photography Festival has kept going—and kept growing. Photography has always been a medium I've been passionate about, sitting as it does between documentation and interpretation, between what happened and how we remember it.
So when CONTACT announced its 30th-anniversary edition for May 2026, it caught my attention, and I took a closer look at the program. It's a strong one, thematically coherent and geographically wide-ranging, and it's worth knowing what's on offer before the month gets away from you.
Three decades, some notable numbers
Before getting into the specifics of this year's programming, it's worth pausing on what thirty years of running a citywide photography festival actually adds up to:
- Over 20 million visitors since the festival's founding
- More than 8,500 artists presented
- Over 4,500 exhibitions organized
- 200 public art projects delivered
- More than 2,000 free public programs are offered
The free programming stands out to me. Photography, like most art forms, can feel inaccessible when it's concentrated in expensive galleries or aimed at a specialist audience. CONTACT has consistently worked against that, and the numbers reflect it.
What this year's program is actually about
The 2026 Core Program features over 40 Canadian and international artists working in lens-based and mixed-media practices. The thematic threads running through the work include decolonization, community-building, activism, protest, and revolution. Several artists are working with collage and photomontage to address personal and collective memory, displacement, migration, diasporic experiences, and queer identities. Others are revisiting gaps in historical archives or reaching back to the medium's experimental early days to apply those approaches to contemporary concerns.
It could easily feel scattered across a program this large, but the curatorial choices read as deliberate, and the conversations between works feel intentional.
Highlights worth tracking down
The program is extensive, so here's a closer look at the projects I find most compelling.
Delali Cofie's Independence Square II
Delali Cofie is a Ghanaian-Nigerian photographer based in Toronto whose work moves between the personal and the political without making a fuss. A recent OCAD University graduate and recipient of multiple program awards, he's already shown at Patel Brown and Gallery 44, and had work featured in James Barnor's exhibition catalogue at the Arles Photography Festival in 2022.
For CONTACT 2026, he's presenting a large-scale, black-and-white billboard at Queen St W and Augusta Ave, running April 27 to May 24, alongside his solo exhibition A Place of Ours at United Contemporary. The image captures an ordinary moment from everyday life in Accra. At billboard scale, dropped into a Toronto streetscape, it takes on a different weight. Cofie has described his photographs of Ghana as "a love letter and salute to the people and moments that decorate everyday life." That comes through.
Sin Wai Kin at the CONTACT Gallery and Sankofa Square
Toronto-born, UK-based artist Sin Wai Kin is presenting work across three sites, including the Canadian premiere of an advertising campaign called ESSENCE. Through the framing of a fragrance ad, one of the artist's characters becomes the brand ambassador for a male cologne, promising "your true self awaits." It's a quiet yet effective way to question how advertising and cultural narratives shape identity. The work spans the CONTACT Gallery at 80 Spadina Ave, Sankofa Square, and billboards at College and Delaware Streets.
A nice detail: both CONTACT Photography Festival and Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival are marking their 30th anniversaries in 2026, and this presentation is a joint project between the two organizations.
Bo Wang and Lu Pan: billboard art that bends time
Collaborators Bo Wang (China/Amsterdam) and Lu Pan (Hong Kong) are presenting a public artwork across two double-sided billboards at Lansdowne Ave and Dundas St W/College St. The piece uses archival photographs of a Canadian and a Chinese painter, with the paintings within each image swapped between the two artists' cultural contexts. A simple intervention on the surface, but one that opens up a layered conversation about how images travel across time and whose visual histories get told.
Dawit L. Petros at The Image Centre
SPA is a survey exhibition celebrating the career of Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Dawit L. Petros, winner of the 2025 Scotiabank Photography Award. Spanning over twenty years, the exhibition presents more than 80 photographs, serigraphs, and books tracing his long-standing inquiry into the legacy of colonial history across Africa, Europe, and North America. It runs from May 6 to August 1 at The Image Centre (33 Gould St), so there's time to get there without rushing.
Sheida Soleimani's Ghostwriter
Iranian-American artist and activist Sheida Soleimani builds elaborate, dream-like montages from photographs, props, found objects, live animals, and people. Her work is being presented across both the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver and CONTACT in Toronto, with Toronto billboards on Dundas St W and Rusholme Rd running from April 27 to May 24.
Yann Pocreau and the Prefix Prize
The sixth annual Prefix Prize goes to Québécois artist Yann Pocreau, whose practice centres on the nature of light, approached from both philosophical and aesthetic angles. His exhibition at Prefix ICA @ Urbanspace Gallery (401 Richmond St W) includes the world premiere of Les éclipses 1 (2026), alongside new and recent work not previously shown in Toronto. He's also presenting two public art projects in the city, including A Light Kiss at 650 Dupont Street.
Celia Perrin Sidarous and family archive
Montreal-based artist Celia Perrin Sidarous is presenting Into the House of the Heart at Patel Brown (21 Wade Ave). Using a collagist approach, the work draws on her Egyptian family's photographic archive to explore memory, lineage, and what she describes as the "inherent hauntedness" of family photographs. It's the kind of work that tends to resonate more the longer you sit with it.
The CONTACT Photobook Fair
On Saturday, May 2, at Stephen Bulger Gallery, the fifth edition of the CONTACT Photobook Fair brings together independent publishers and photographers from around the world. For anyone who follows photobooks seriously, this is a worthwhile afternoon. Publishers attending include names from Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Prague, London, and Bogotá, as well as Canadian publishers from Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Quebec City.
The festival is also presenting two reading rooms: Imprint: Contemporary Latin American Photobooks (with Punto de Fuga Bogotá, in partnership with Sur Gallery), and the Women's Image Library, presented by Artexte at the CONTACT Photobook Lab.
Worth planning around
The 30th edition runs throughout May 2026, with some installations beginning in late April and others extending into the summer. If you're in Toronto or considering a visit in May, the program gives you plenty of reasons to map out your time in the city. Photography festivals tend to reward the effort you put into navigating them, and after three decades, CONTACT has put together a program that holds up to that kind of attention.
It's also a good reminder of what a sustained, community-rooted arts institution can build over time. Twenty million visitors, 8,500 artists, and a commitment to keeping a significant portion of it free to the public. That's a reasonable way to spend thirty years.
This year’s Core Program artists include: Shannon Bool, Ernesto Cabral de Luna, Bob Carnie, Kristi Chen, Delali Cofie, Marlene Creates, Dylan Dae-Shin, Larry Fink, Tim Georgeson, Mickey Green, Hassan Hajjaj, Alex Hall, Leala Hewak, April Hickox, Risa Horowitz, Spring Hurlbut, Philip Jessup, Aaron Jones, Marie-Claude Lacroix, Parker Lily, Lilly Lulay, Alvin Luong, Arnaud Maggs, Robert Mapplethorpe, Caroline Mauxion, Marzieh M. Miri, Marlene Hilton Moore, Sophia Oppel, Lu Pan, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Dawit L. Petros, Yann Pocreau, Kenna Robinson, Gabe Seamon, Jessica Slipp, Sheida Soleimani, Adam Swica, Ho Tam, Anouk Vervier, Sin Wai Kin, Bo Wang, Yujie Wang, and Ian Wilms.
