FOTODOKS 2023, titled Future Perfect, shows photographic work by 13 international artists and collectives who deal with the current conditions and consequences of climate change. Through the works, central questions of environmental protection are brought into view: Challenges of the final storage of nuclear waste, the consequences of monocultures and factory farming or the role of the building materials industries. The artists also deal with the social and societal effects of global warming. They produce an image of the present that is shaped by migration and discrimination as well as populism and growing climate activism within the youngest generations. Looking in all directions – whether to Brazil, Australia or Bangladesh, to the Dolomites or the Ahr Valley – it becomes clear that floods, drought and forest fires are dramatically affecting, but are no longer confined to, the Global South.
The 2021 festival 'A house is a house is a house' opened with an exhibition and a diverse accompanying programme of the current perception of home and makes the social inequality visible which is increasing due to the colonial, patriarchal and capitalist power structures that exist around the world.
In 2019, the Festival looked to France and with the theme Vis-à-Vis opened the dialogue with the most long-standing and diverse culture in documentary photography. FOTODOKS presented an exemplary and concentrated selection of photographic positions which shed light on economic, social and socio-political power structures and questions supposed „truths“.
In dialogue with the partner country USA, Fotodoks 2017 dedicated itself to the relation between "Me" and "We" on a personal, political and media level. The connection between the individual and the collective describes a dynamic movement in both directions. If we find a balance, we all can have enough space to develop. But what if not?
In 2015 the partner region Ex-Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia) was our guest at Fotodoks. Exhibitions and festival programme focused on the current state and the potential of yesterday in today, on shifting boundaries and the promise of Europe.
In cooperation with the partner region "the North" (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) Fotodoks 2013 asked for the forms of representation of a world that seems to be increasingly disconcerting and thrown out of sync. We focused on the photographic views of otherness, the strange and unfamiliar, on courageous and special people but also on aesthetic and stylistic approaches to topics that deviate from the common visual language.
In its fifth year Fotodoks and the partner country Great Britain discussed the surveillance of places and people, the dividing line between public and private spaces as well as the responsibility of the photographer towards his medium and protagonists.
2011 was the year of Fotodoks premiers: with Italy we invited our first guest country. The group exhibition was presented at the Münchner Stadtmuseum for the first time and the festival centre with a bookstand by the Hamburg Deichtorhallen moved into the art space MaximiliansForum. Unbelievable and new as well were the first festival catalogue and cooperations with MAGNUM Photos and the documentary film festival DOK.fest.