At Leipzig Photobook Festival, photography stages the entangled states of power and fragility

The Leipzig Photobook Festival reopens for its fifth edition at Halle 14

“Power drifts between what is visible and what is hidden,” state Sarker Protick and Donald Weber’s Der Greif Guest Room from fall 2025. Power settles into structures, interfaces, habits of seeing and unseeing. It determines who is visible and who is rendered peripheral, whose stories circulate and whose are quietly suppressed. Fragility, meanwhile, is usually framed as a deficit, something to be fixed, reinforced, or overcome. Yet in moments of rupture, it is precisely fragility that exposes the fault lines of power and opens space for transformation. The fifth edition of the Leipzig Photobook Festival, which will be held in Leipzig at Halle 14 on March 7-8 intends to grapple with these very concepts and engage critically with their entanglement.

Proposing a program of workshops, portfolio reviews and exhibitions running until April 2 in parallel with the photobook market, this year’s festival is led by Founder and Director Calin Kruse alongside Jenny Starick for the artistic conception. According to their statement, the festival roots in the concept of antifragility (cf. Nassim Nicholas Taleb), instability and disruption, “understood as productive forces: what breaks open creates new perspectives; what becomes unstable can lead to unexpected renewal.” Thus a new understanding of “fragility” emerges and merges with “power”.

The festival’s exhibitions particularly foreground this concept with urgency and clarity. Lina Scheynius’ work, grounded in intimacy and self-representation, confronts the paradox of visibility in the digital age. While her images circulate widely and resonate with a global audience, they are simultaneously subject to censorship and suppression by corporate platforms. Here, power is exercised not through overt prohibition, but through opaque moderation systems and silent exclusions. Scheynius’ practice becomes an act of self-empowerment: a refusal to relinquish authorship over the body, desire, and vulnerability, even when operating at the limits of permissible visibility. Arko Datto’s documentation of the Sundarbans confronts power at a planetary scale. The slow violence of climate change, like rising water levels, eroding land, and disappearing ecosystems, reveals a profound asymmetry: those who contribute least to environmental destruction are often those who bear its most devastating consequences. Datto’s nocturnal flash-lit images fracture any illusion of distance or abstraction. They insist on proximity, on discomfort, on witnessing.

Workshops run throughout the festival and address a broad range of approaches and urgencies. From 6–7 March 2026, Mathieu Asselin leads a collaborative think tank on documentary practices, inviting participants to reflect collectively on authorship, responsibility, and long-term research. On 7 March, a hands-on workshop focuses on bookbinding as a craft, exploring the photobook as a tactile, constructed object. That same day, Linda Zhengova offers “Empathetic Seeing,” a workshop centered on building connections with strangers through photography. On 8 March, Patricia Morosan leads “How Do Artists Earn a Living?,” opening an honest conversation about income, precarity, and sustainability in the arts. Workshop places are limited, with registration through the website open until 15 February.

Portfolio reviews form another key pillar of the programme. Participants can present photographic works, series, or photobook dummies to an international jury of editors, curators, and publishers, including Christian Gogolin, Andrea Holzherr, Lars Lindemann, Yann Linsart, Helena Melikov, Diane Smyth, Ilaria Sponda, and Christina Töpfer. Places are limited to eight and registration is open until 15 February, with priority given to first-time participants. Applications are done through the website

Taken together, the festival’s programme insists on understanding photography not as a closed statement, but as a mutable, relational language. Framed by “Power / Fragility,” the photobook becomes less a repository of images than a site of encounter: one that invites slowness, proximity, and critical attention, and asks what it means to stay with an image rather than move past it. Keep updated with the participating publishers via the official channels of the Leipzig Photobook Festival.