Rivers are often treated as fixed features on a map, but in reality they’re systems in constant motion. They shape, and are shaped by, the landscapes they pass through. They carry memory, labour, ecology and history downstream, but they’re never the same from one moment to the next.

For this edition of Humberlands, River is not proposed as a subject, but as a way of thinking. A river can be a boundary or a connector; a source or an endpoint; a site of work, migration, extraction or renewal. It can represent continuity and rupture, accumulation and loss.  In that sense it feels close to photography itself, defined by flow, by what passes through, and by what’s left behind.

Under this framework, the festival invites proposals that consider movement, transition and exchange; relationships between people and place; cycles of change, erosion and return; and the ways images circulate through public and private life. River allows space for personal narratives and collective histories, environmental work and portraiture, archival reflection and contemporary practice, each interpreted freely across the festival’s venues and public spaces.