Documentary Photography Festival
FotoDoc – International Photography Festival is an event dedicated to fostering the production of documentary photography. It highlights long-term, authorial projects that address pressing contemporary issues, employing a variety of technical and formal approaches.
Documentary photography transcends all genres: street scenes, landscapes, portraits, nature, wildlife, and photojournalism. Its defining feature is a commitment to expressing reality with its social and critical implications, using montage techniques to construct compelling and engaging visual narratives. Through the combination of photographs and texts in diverse formats, it creates immersive storytelling experiences.
FotoDoc celebrated its birth in 2022, the result of a partnership between Vertente Fotografia, the production company of Érico Elias, and the Panamericana School of Art and Design.
With a background in Journalism and Photography, as well as a Master’s and PhD in Visual Arts, Érico Elias served as Communication Coordinator, Curator, and Artistic Director of the Paraty em Foco festival for five editions, from 2015 to 2019. This experience led him to establish his own production company, Vertente, in 2019.
In 2020, Érico Elias created the new website of Fotografe magazine, along with the Grande Prêmio Fotografe, an annual contest held in 2021 and 2022. The winners of the 2021 edition were exhibited at the Panamericana Gallery, an initiative whose success inspired the creation of a festival. Thus, FotoDoc was born, organized by Vertente in partnership with Panamericana.
In its second edition, held in 2023, the festival introduced the FotoDoc Photo Contest, which seeks to give visibility to works and themes relevant to today’s world. The winners of the contest are featured in one of the festival’s main exhibitions.
In its third edition, which took place from November 26 to 30, 2024, the festival expanded the number of winners of the FotoDoc Photo Contest from 17 to 20, strengthening the representation of emerging talents. This edition also marked the internationalization of the festival, with the participation of Dutch guests Elspeth Diederix and Erik Vroons.
The fourth edition of FotoDoc – International Photography Festival is scheduled to take place from November 4 to 8 at the Panamericana School of Art and Design in São Paulo (SP). With the theme Horizons, it will address the challenges posed to humanity by global warming and its consequences, in the same year that Brazil hosts COP-30. The exhibition of FotoDoc Photo Contest winners will also expand, now featuring 25 awardees.
FotoDoc
International Photography Festival
LOCATION:
Panamericana Escola de Arte e Design
Av. Angélica, 1,900 – Higienópolis
São Paulo (SP), Brazil
DATES:
November 4–8, 2025
Opening: November 4 at 6 PM
Closing: November 8 at 4 PM
Exhibitions on display until January 10, 2026
