“Kinship offers an alternative way of seeing”: Alessia Glaviano on PhotoVogue Festival 2025

PhotoVogue Festival ninth edition forms a love letter to nature

The PhotoVogue Festival, the pioneering fashion photography festival that unites ethics and aesthetics, returns to Milan for its ninth edition. Taking place from March 6 to 9, 2025, at BASE Milano, this year's festival is centered around the theme “The Tree of Life: A Love Letter to Nature.” This thought-provoking theme highlights the resilience, interconnectedness, and beauty of the natural world while confronting urgent global challenges.

Co-curated by Alessia Glaviano (Head of Global PhotoVogue and Festival Director), Caterina De Biasio (Visual Editor, PhotoVogue) and Daniel Rodríguez Gordillo (Senior Manager, Education & Community Initiatives, Condé Nast), the festival's central exhibition features photographers and video makers from around the world, including Greif Alumni Alessandro Bo , Amy Woodward, Ioanna Sakellaraki, and Mohammad Rakibul Hasan. Their works serve as visual tributes to nature, highlighting the fragility and enduring beauty of life on Earth.

A vibrant exhibition celebrating diverse artistic voices from Latin America, showcasing the works of artists selected through a regional open call. These artists explore themes of identity, culture, and environmental interdependence. Greif Alumni Alessandro Bo, Allan Salas , Diego Moreno, Juan Brenner, and Marisol Mendez are among the compelling voices shaping the region’s visual landscape, presenting new and recent works at PhotoVogue Festival.

Our past Guest Room collaborator Alessia Glaviano shares that this edition of the PhotoVogue Festival seeks to deepen our understanding of our interconnectedness with all living beings, inspiring collective action to protect our shared home. She emphasizes the festival’s commitment to amplifying diverse voices in photography, ensuring that storytelling remains expansive and inclusive rather than confined to a singular, monolithic perspective. Glaviano also highlights kinship as an alternative way of seeing—one that fosters empathy, connection, and a more holistic approach to visual storytelling.

Ilaria Sponda: Alessia, your work in image criticism has profoundly influenced a new generation of photographers worldwide. I’d like to begin by exploring the methods and vision that inspired you to launch the PhotoVogue platform in 2011 and the festival in 2016. What do you consider most important when scouting and selecting emerging voices in photography?

Alessia Glaviano: When I launched PhotoVogue in 2011, my goal was to balance democratization with curation – creating a platform that was accessible yet selective in elevating the most authentic and thought-provoking voices. Many platforms allowed photographers to share their work, but none applied rigorous curation to ensure quality. Coming from the fashion world of the 1990s, I saw imbalances in representation, with visual narratives shaped largely by Western, white, male photographers. PhotoVogue – and later, the PhotoVogue Festival –was created to challenge this, amplifying diverse voices and reshaping storytelling. Launched in 2016, the PhotoVogue Festival became more than an event – it evolved into a cultural platform that critically examines the power of images and their social impact. It has since grown into a global movement where aesthetics and ethics are inseparable. When scouting new voices, I seek photographers with a distinctive, personal vision – artists who push boundaries, challenge perspectives, and expand visual language. Photography isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s a tool for representation and storytelling. The most compelling artists engage with identity, power, and experimentation, shaping how we see and understand the world. Discovering talent isn’t just about strong imagery – it’s about nurturing voices that challenge, inspire, and reimagine the future.

IS: “Multitude is a form of political subjectivity,” to quote Negri and Guattari. Images inherently possess political agency, whether displayed in digital or physical spaces – something especially evident during the PhotoVogue Festival in Milan. What inspired you to launch the festival, and how would you describe its evolution nearly a decade later?

AG: When I launched the PhotoVogue Festival in 2016, my goal was to move the conversation around photography beyond the digital realm and into a physical space for critical engagement, collective experience, and political agency. Images are never neutral – they shape our perception of reality, historical narratives, and collective consciousness. In an era of algorithmic visibility and digital oversaturation, I wanted to slow down the gaze, creating a space where photography could be interrogated, discussed, and contextualized with depth. To borrow from Negri and Guattari, multitude is a form of political subjectivity, and photography is one of its most powerful tools. Every image is an act of selection, a negotiation of power, a framing of the world. The festival was conceived as a space to lay bare these negotiations – where photography could be reclaimed as a site of resistance, empathy, and reimagination. While its foundation remains the same, the festival has evolved into a dynamic, ever-changing ecosystem, reflecting the shifting landscapes of photography, representation, and society. It is not just about consuming images but engaging with them critically, challenging dominant narratives, and asking urgent questions: Who tells the stories? How does photography mediate truth? What responsibilities do image-makers carry? In a world increasingly shaped by polarization and information warfare, the PhotoVogue Festival remains a platform for nuance, complexity, and dialogue, insisting on photography’s transformative power – not just as documentation, but as a catalyst for cultural, political, and social change.

IS: Photographers have a responsibility to navigate the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. How does kinship factor into this equation?

AG: Ethics and aesthetics are not opposing forces – they are deeply intertwined. There is a misconception that artistic excellence and ethical responsibility exist in tension, but the most powerful images emerge when they work in dialogue. Aesthetics gain depth when they carry meaning, and ethics are not a constraint but an opportunity to create work that is both resonant and responsible. Photography is inherently relational – it is about how we see and are seen. This is where kinship becomes essential. To photograph someone – or something – is to engage in a relationship involving power, agency, and a shared moment of vulnerability. The best photographers understand this, approaching their subjects with empathy, respect, and responsibility – qualities rooted in kinship. In a world shaped by hierarchies of representation, where dominant narratives have long excluded certain perspectives, kinship offers an alternative way of seeing – one based on connection rather than othering, care rather than extraction, reciprocity rather than appropriation. It challenges the notion of the photographer as an outsider and instead asks: How do we create images from a place of shared humanity? How do we shift from a gaze of power to one of solidarity and coexistence? Kinship is more than a theme – it is a methodology, an ethical stance, and a way of storytelling that acknowledges relationships and responsibilities. It reminds us that every image is an encounter, and that encounter carries weight. Whether photographing people, landscapes, or the non-human world, kinship insists that we are never separate from what we depict – we are always in relation, and with that comes both aesthetic and ethical responsibility.

IS: How do you perceive the evolving relationship between nature, humanity, and technology within the medium of photography?

AG: For me, everything comes down to representation – how we frame reality shapes perception, empathy, and action. Misrepresentation is not just aesthetic; it can perpetuate oppression, exploitation, and erasure, affecting not only people but also nature and non-human life. Photography has long influenced how we see the natural world. Landscapes were historically depicted as pristine and uninhabited, reinforcing colonial narratives of conquest and extraction. Similarly, animals have been visually categorized based on human hierarchies – some revered, others reduced to commodities, stripped of individuality and agency. Consider how cows and pigs are rarely portrayed as sentient beings with emotions and social bonds, unlike pets. This visual erasure justifies their treatment – if an image can diminish an animal’s presence, it can also strip it of moral consideration. Technology, particularly AI and digital manipulation, complicates this further. We are surrounded by synthetic images that blur reality, raising urgent ethical questions: Who controls these representations? What biases are embedded? What truths are being altered, and why? Yet, technology can also be a tool of resistance and reimagination. Many contemporary photographers use AI, data visualization, and digital forensics to challenge misrepresentation – whether by exposing environmental destruction, questioning speciesism, or revealing hidden ecosystems. The most vital photographic practices critically engage with this power. Whether rethinking how we portray ecosystems, confronting biases in visual storytelling, or advocating for justice, photography is not just a means of documenting the world – it is a way of defining it. In this time of ecological and ethical reckoning, the responsibility of image-makers has never been more urgent.

IS: What underlying themes connect all the artists showcased at PhotoVogue Festival?

AG: If there is a common thread among the artists presented at PhotoVogue, it is their drive to challenge dominant narratives and expand the visual language of our time. They are not united by a single aesthetic or theme but by a shared commitment to using photography as a tool for reimagining the world—whether by questioning power structures, reclaiming marginalized perspectives, or uncovering beauty in unexpected places. At PhotoVogue, I seek artists who understand that images are never neutral – those who engage with photography critically, balancing intellectual depth with emotional resonance. Many respond to historical exclusions in the visual world, reclaiming spaces and perspectives that have long been misrepresented. Their work carries a deep sense of kinship and connection, recognizing that photography is fundamentally relational. They are not just capturing images; they are engaging in a dialogue – with their subjects, the viewer, and the world. What sets them apart is their urgency to challenge the status quo. They move beyond passive beauty or empty aesthetics, using photography as a means of interrogation and intervention, addressing issues such as social justice, environmental urgency, gender, identity, and cultural memory. Even in visually delicate or poetic projects, there is often an underlying tension – a questioning of the structures that shape our world. Many also push the boundaries of photography, experimenting with AI, collage, archives, text, performance, and sculpture, expanding the medium beyond the conventional frame. Ultimately, PhotoVogue is about transformation – every artist featured contributes to a collective reimagining of the visual world, challenging the past, reframing the present, and proposing new possibilities for the future. They prove that talent and purpose are not separate forces, but inseparable in shaping meaningful photography.

IS: Where does the PhotoVogue Festival stand this year on AI-generated imagery, following its dedicated exploration of the topic in 2023? How has PhotoVogue's vision evolved in response?

AG: This year, PhotoVogue is not accepting AI-generated images in its open calls or exhibitions, aligning with Condé Nast’s strict policy on AI content. While the 2023 edition was dedicated to critically examining AI’s impact – exploring authorship, originality, labor, and bias – our 2024 focus returns fully to human-made images. Engaging with AI last year allowed us to dissect both its potential and risks from within, rather than reacting from the outside. However, with growing concerns over misuse, bias, and ethical uncertainties, we have chosen to reaffirm our commitment to human creativity and authorship. AI remains an important topic for discussion, but not for inclusion in the works we showcase. That said, PhotoVogue’s vision continues to evolve with the shifting landscape of photography. What remains unchanged is our commitment to thoughtful curation, ethical storytelling, and a critical interrogation of images' power. Our role is not just to reflect photography today, but to actively shape a more ethical, just, and conscious visual future.