Global Visions, Local Ground: FotoFest at 40

Houston has a way of turning scale into a language. Freeways braid the horizon. Warehouses become studios. A single block can hold a theater, a brewery, a painter’s ladder, and a new kind of silence. At Sawyer Yards, that language speaks in industrial bones and white walls, and in spring 2026 it will speak in pictures, hundreds upon hundreds of them, drawn from four decades of FotoFest’s insistence that photography can be both evidence and dream.

FotoFest’s Biennial 2026, Global Visions—FotoFest at 40, runs March 7 through May 10, 2026, returning the spotlight to Arts District Houston and its cluster of Sawyer Yards galleries. Curated by FotoFest co-founder and former artistic director Wendy Watriss, executive director Steven Evans, and co-curators Annick Dekiouk and Madi Murphy, the namesake central exhibition “dives deeply into the international and local archives of FotoFest’s 40-year legacy.” The result is a portrait of an institution that has never treated photography as a closed category. It has treated it as a living instrument that records, provokes, and invents.

“It’s the 40th anniversary of the biennials specifically,” Evans said, and that distinction matters because the Biennial has always been FotoFest’s loudest civic gesture: a recurring moment when the city’s ordinary surfaces, museum walls, gallery partitions, lobbies, hallways, become conduits for other places, other histories, other ways of seeing.

The organization was founded and incorporated in 1984, co-founded by Watriss, Frederick Baldwin, and Houston gallerist Petra Benteler. The spark came through travel. Watriss received recognition for documentary work and, Evans said, “because of that she was able to travel. She and Fred were able to travel to Europe,” where they encountered Paris’s Mois de la Photo and the Rencontres d’Arles.

Arles, Evans noted, “mobilize[s] spaces throughout the city to show photography,” a model that made Houston feel less like a peripheral site and more like an ideal host. “Houston needed this kind of thing,” he said, and the founders believed the city’s “entrepreneurial nature” and “can-do attitude” could support a festival that did not wait for legitimacy to arrive from elsewhere.

Evans described a phrase Baldwin returned to often, and it reads like a thesis for FotoFest itself: “One of, and perhaps the central idea around FotoFest is that it creates energy.” The word carries local resonance, energy as industry, energy as force, energy as catalyst, and it also describes what the biennials have done at their best: they have pulled institutions and audiences into motion, coaxing Houston into a citywide act of looking.

The first Biennial in 1986 arrived as a declaration of scale. “There were six museums, 14 art spaces, 27 commercial galleries and 17 corporate buildings that showed photography,” Evans said, with work “from 16 countries.” The first portfolio review unfolded at the Warwick Hotel (now Hotel ZaZa), and the festival made an immediate impression. But the most telling detail is not press coverage or attendance. It is the founders’ refusal to begin modestly. “Given Houston’s scale, they thought it should begin big,” Evans said. “Some people advise them to start small and build up and they were like, no… we want this to be a big thing.” In that first edition, Evans noted, “almost 800 photographers” showed work across the city, and the amount of exhibition surface became its own kind of urban marker: “There was like the equivalent of a mile of linear feet of wall that was taken up by photographs.”

In the earliest years, FotoFest functioned less like a single thesis than a wide umbrella. “In the beginning there weren’t central themes usually to each biennial,” Evans said. “It was a number of countries.” One of the most significant exhibitions in 1986, he noted, “was heralding British photography,” and it became “one of the first exhibitions in the United States of Martin Parr and Paul Graham,” along with other figures now embedded in the medium’s history. In 1988, FotoFest brought Japanese and Swedish photography into focus, and Evans recalled an exhibition about Nelson Mandela and his release from prison. These were not neutral presentations. They were early gestures toward a biennial identity that understood photography as a vehicle for cultural exchange and political attention.

As the years unfolded, the biennials began to gather around sharper frames. “By the end of the 90s it had started to coalesce into a central theme,” Evans said, though the shift began earlier. In 1992, FotoFest set a contrast between Europe and Latin America, a move that now reads as prescient. Evans described the climate at the time with a bluntness that reveals how institutions decide what counts as visible. The cofounders, he said, encountered a lack of institutional interest in Latin American photography. Colleagues at major institutions responded, “Well, I don’t know why you want to go to Latin America. There’s not much to see down there.” Evans said. “Of course we know that’s played out very differently now.”

That long arc, early breadth, later focus, forms the spine of Global Visions—FotoFest at 40. The 2026 Biennial does not simply commemorate past editions. It reconstructs them, pulling forward what Evans described as “many of the most significant exhibitions in the whole history of biennials.” The show, he said, will include “at least one project from each biennial and re-showing that work. It’s like a retrospective of FotoFest.”

—MICHAEL McFADDEN