Experience Kyoto’s Soul at Kyotographie Festival: A Journey Through Art and Humanity

As visitors and locals move through Kyoto Station, they are greeted by a massive mural displaying over 500 local faces, marking the launch of Kyotographie 2025, an international photography festival celebrated throughout the city for a month. This impressive work is the creation of renowned French photographer JR, who chose to highlight the varied faces of the city’s residents.

This edition’s theme is “humanity”. During the previous fall, JR converted Kyoto into an enormous live studio, installing temporary portrait booths around the city to capture the diverse faces of its inhabitants, from monks and artisans to politicians, schoolchildren, and drag queens, showcasing the full spectrum of the city’s populace.

Creating a Photographic Tapestry

JR’s approach involves photographing each individual against a green screen with consistent lighting to facilitate seamless integration into a digitally constructed cityscape. These backgrounds are crafted from various city scapes, combining them into a vast, interactive mural.

Subjects have full control over their representation, choosing their attire and poses without any guidance or staging from JR. His primary aim is to encapsulate the spirit and distinctive traits of Kyoto’s residents.

Additionally, many participants share personal reflections or daily thoughts in short audio clips, enriching the visual representation with a narrative layer that captures the essence of the current moment.

Inside the Exhibition Space

Inside the Shimbun Building, which has been transformed from a printing press into a gallery, visitors can explore JR’s creative process through an exhibition that also features his large-scale public installations from around the globe.

True to its roots, Kyotographie maintains a tri-continental dialogue among Japan, France, and Africa, reflecting the diverse backgrounds of festival co-directors Yusuke Nakanishi and Lucille Reyboz. Each year, the festival hosts an African photographer for a residency; this year, it is Laetitia Ky from Ivory Coast, renowned for her self-portraits using her hair to create intricate sculptures that comment on her cultural identity and the colonial legacy.

Ky’s work, often humorous yet pointed, challenges traditional beauty standards that favor straightened hair and lighter skin, norms she confronted growing up in Abidjan. Through her art, she promotes self-acceptance and explores the complexities of female identity, sharing her message of self-love with global online communities.

In Kyoto, she merges her style with local influences, using hair extensions and wire to craft pieces that celebrate cultural pride and personal expression.

Exploring Broader Narratives

The festival also features “Being There,” a collaborative series by British artist Lee Shulman and Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop. This project revisits family album-style photographs from 1950s and 60s North America, a period marked by racial segregation, incorporating Diop into these historical contexts to question and fill the racial absences.

Displayed in a traditional Japanese home styled after a mid-century domestic setting, the series offers poignant insights into representation, memory, and belonging.

Japanese perspectives are also prominently featured, with a notable return of Mao Ishikawa, an influential Okinawan photographer whose work in the 1970s documented women in Okinawa’s bar scene frequented by African American GIs. These powerful, candid shots challenge enduring stigmas and reflect on the complex socio-political aftermath of the US military presence in post-war Okinawa.

Highlighting Global Photographic Talent

The festival also presents the first Japanese retrospective of Graciela Iturbide, a legendary Mexican photographer whose career spans six decades. The exhibition showcases her travels through deserts, mountains, and indigenous cultures, capturing moments of profound spirituality and documentary precision.

Continuing to actively photograph today, Iturbide’s recent work includes a series commissioned by Dior for Vogue Mexico in 2023, demonstrating her unending capacity to intertwine poetic imagery with dynamic narratives.