Photo Oxford 2025 review - photography all over the town

Photo Oxford 2025 presents a programme of exhibitions, lectures and events ranging from well-known artists and documentary photographers to new talent, spread over the town at 26 venues in colleges, galleries and bookshops. In a way this is reminiscent of the rencontres de la photographie at Arles. Unlike at Arles however, admission is free and the weather is less sunny.

This year’s festival takes as its theme the relationship between truth and photography and includes artists who use artificial intelligence to create their images. Given the difficulty in agreeing on a definition of either truth or photography, the theme is wide enough to ensure that traditional photography finds a prominent place.

There is a lot to see. Most of the exhibitions are within walking distance of the centre of Oxford. Most powerful are Jillian Edelstein's famous images of the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Paddy Summerfield, who died last year, has a major retrospective of his black and white images, shot on 35mm film, showing us a personal vision of ordinary life in England, often in Oxford. These are sad and compelling (main picture: Paddy Summerfield from The Holiday Pictures).

A highlight is Daniel Meadows’ Shuttles, Steam and Soot (pictured right: Mari Parker and Sheila Dugdalemed). In 1975, Meadows began a two-year post as photographer-in-residence to the Borough of Pendle in Lancashire, and photographed the last remaining steam-powered cotton weaving mill in the district. First shown in 1978, the exhibition was lost but has now been recreated and shows once again the magical ability of the camera to convert the here and now into the there and then. It is difficult to believe that in the 1970s men and women worked in England in such conditions of deadly danger. Meadows has a photographer's eye and a steeplejack’s nerve. These images belong in the V&A.

Sticking with tradition, just about, is Bog Jobs. Between 1979 and 1996, Phil Polglaze photographed “cottaging” locations around London commissioned by criminal defence lawyers in aid of gay men standing trial for gross indecency. The photographs have never been seen outside the courtroom.

And then off we go into the wild blue yonder, accepting the invitation of the editor of the British Journal of Photography, the festival’s media partner, to “abandon the world of pseudo-certainty.” Surface Tension is an exhibition of photographs in which artists have departed from reality in various ways, combining negatives, drawing, painting or scratching on their negatives, and manipulating their emulsions. And there is plenty more adventure - exhibitions about faith, ego, death, skin, ancient Egyptian textiles, climbing around Oxford by night and contracts issued by the US Defense Department. Nobody can say that the festival does not have range (Pictured below: Nightclimbers of Oxford by Austin Bradley).It takes a major effort to mount a festival like this, and Katy Barron, the festival director, and her team are to be congratulated on putting it on. If we took photography as seriously as the French, we would copy Arles with larger exhibitions, more marquee names and better signage. Photo Oxford shows us the way; the Arts Council should follow.

• Photo Oxford 2025 runs from 25 October to 19 November.
• The full programme is at: www.photooxford.org
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk