We often speak of LIFE as if it begins and ends with ourselves, confined to what can be seen, measured, or touched. But life rarely makes itself known in such straightforward ways. It resists simplicity.

 

Life exists in multiplicity. It can move quietly - through memory, through repetition, through inherited rituals. It might take shape in the weight of grief, or in the unnoticed labour of survival. At times, life is carried not by the living, but by what has been lost.

 

The inaugural edition of FOTO Bali Festival invites lens-based practitioners - photographers, artists, and storytellers - to respond to the theme LIFE with work that interprets it in ways both seen and felt. Submissions may include still images, photo books, multimedia installations, or moving image projects that reflect on, challenge, or reframe our understanding of what it means to live.

 

This festival offers a space for work that listens - images that hold tension, embrace ambiguity, or draw attention to what quietly persists. We’re interested in photographic practices that reveal what often escapes the frame: histories embedded in place, acts of care and stories carried in the everyday.

 

Photography can give shape to what resists language. Through light, sequence, and composition, it captures presence and memory - what slips from reach but remains significant. The act of photographing itself can become a form of witness, a way to insist that something mattered, and still does.

 

This is an invitation to approach photography not only as a record, but as a form of attention. We seek practices that notice what lingers in the margins: the quiet, the unresolved, the invisible stories that live alongside us.