Kranj Foto Fest 2026 Open Call Winners Announced

This year’s edition marks an important milestone for the festival, with a record 1,608 submissions from 1,239 photographers worldwide.

Kranj Foto Fest announces the winners of its 2026 Open Call for Exhibitions, marking its most competitive edition to date. This year, the festival received a record 1,608 submissions from 1,239 photographers worldwide. Open to photographers of all backgrounds, the call invited submissions of up to two projects on a theme of the artist’s choice and ran from 19th December 2025 to 23rd February 2026 via the Picter platform.

Following an extensive selection process, the international jury selected 13 projects to be presented at the 6th edition of Kranj Foto Fest in August 2026: one Grand Prize winner and twelve finalists. The jury included Emmanuelle Halkin (Independent Curator and Editor), Francesca Hummler (Community Manager and Program Curator at Der Greif), Jelena Janković (Programme Director of the Sarajevo Photography Festival), Tereza Kozinc (Photographer and Co-curator at Kranj Foto Fest) and Fernanda Prado Verčič (Director of Kranj Foto Fest).

The Grand Prize winner will be awarded a solo exhibition, a €1,000 cash prize and travel support to Kranj, Slovenia, while the finalists will be featured in group exhibitions. In selected cases, the curatorial team may choose to present some of the finalists as solo exhibitions. All exhibiting artists will work closely with the curatorial team, with exhibition production costs covered and accommodation provided during the festival’s Opening Week (August 27–30, 2026).

We would like to warmly thank everyone who submitted their work, as well as the jury for their thoughtful and dedicated selection process. Congratulations to all the selected photographers. For those not selected this year, we encourage you to apply again in 2027.

We look forward to welcoming you to Kranj this August, when the city becomes a dynamic meeting point for photographers, curators, editors and publishers, engaging both local and international audiences.

Scroll down to discover the photographers exhibiting their projects at Kranj Foto Fest 2026.

2026 WINNER

Marisol Mendez

(b. Bolivia)

“Padre”

Marisol Mendez

Marisol Mendez is a photographer and researcher from Cochabamba, Bolivia. At the heart of her artistic pursuit lies the exploration of humankind. She is moved by the desire to build genuine connections with the people on the other side of the lens. Her objective is to encapsulate the intimacy of shared experiences, the tenderness or friction of mutual recognition.

The jury of the Kranj Foto Fest Open Call for Exhibitions 2026 stated:

“Drawing from a feminist lens, Padre by Marisol Mendez delves into the foundations of machismo as a living legacy inscribed in bodies and relationships within the Latin American context. Its starting point is archival: letters from the artist’s grandfather to her father and uncle, conceived as intimate yet revealed as deeply ideological. In them, the artist identifies a contradiction at the heart of patriarchal identity – a longing for closeness disciplined by imperatives of toughness, generational imprints of how masculinity is passed down through gestures and silences.

In the current societal and political climate, marked by the rise of the far-right, including in Latin America, it is more essential than ever to empower female artists to offer new narratives, especially those centered on masculinity.

Through her family history and confrontation with masculine stereotypes, Marisol Mendez deconstructs a simplistic and brutal vision of masculinity. The clash between female and male perspectives is not a singular conflict but a phenomenon across multiple, interconnected layers. The subjects are powerful yet vulnerable. Staged portraits, archival interventions, and symbolic gestures construct a visual language of tension between opposites.

The jury of the Kranj Foto Fest Open Call for Exhibitions 2026 awards this project for its strength in transforming the intimate into the universal. Rooted in a Latin American experience, Padre speaks to patterns recognisable across cultures and generations, showing how patriarchal structures shape not only men but all those who live beside them, alongside them and after them – this is a subject that concerns us all.”

“Padre is a personal and political excavation of masculinity, approached through a feminist lens. Rooted in my family history and shaped by my Latin American heritage, the project interrogates the embedded structures of machismo that govern men’s behaviors and the emotional landscapes of those around them. Oscillating between social critique and self-inquiry, Padre traces a lineage of absence, tenderness, violence and care, mapping the way masculine identity is inherited, performed and, at times, unlearned.

The narrative is unsettled by images of vulnerability and the fragility of bodies and bonds. Scenes of decay and erosion echo the slow unravelling of hegemonic masculinity, whose ideals persist as ghostly remnants of a past that still haunts the present. By juxtaposing softness with brutality and presence with absence, Padre opens a space for reflection, asking not only what masculinity is, but what it could become.” — Marisol Mendez