Two Weeks Without …

Beyond the Instant – Or: Two Weeks Without Battery Anxiety in South Tyrol

There are places where people take photographs. And there are places where people discuss photography until somebody unfolds a large-format camera and the conversation suddenly lasts three hours longer.

In June 2026, Bruneck became exactly that kind of place.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of photography, the ANALOGUE Photo.Festival launched the first biennial dedicated entirely to analogue photography in South Tyrol. For two weeks, Bruneck and nine additional locations across the Puster Valley, Gadertal, Vinschgau, and Bolzano transformed into a paradise for people who still prefer bathing their images in chemistry rather than Lightroom presets.

The festival’s theme, Beyond the Instant, is a remarkably brave title in an era when billions of photographs are created every day, most of them enjoying approximately the same life expectancy as a ripe banana.

While smartphones can now capture, process, upload, and forget an image before anyone realizes they have been photographed, the biennial embraces a radically different idea:

Slow down.

Take time.

Look again.

And perhaps most importantly, learn from the people who have spent decades doing exactly that.

For me, the festival concluded in the best possible way: with a large-format photography workshop organized by JOBO in cooperation with Silbersalz, where we worked with 4×5 and 8×10 cameras among the dramatic landscapes of South Tyrol. There is something wonderfully humbling about carrying equipment that weighs more than most modern camera bags and requires the patience of a saint just to expose a single sheet of film.

The workshop itself was a pleasure to be part of. The participants were an exceptionally welcoming and knowledgeable group, united by a shared enthusiasm for analogue photography and a healthy willingness to stand around discussing bellows, film holders, and development techniques for far longer than any rational person would consider necessary.

The instructors brought decades of experience and an infectious passion for the craft, generously sharing both technical expertise and hard-earned practical wisdom. Equally memorable was our local guide from the Silbersalz team, whose knowledge of the region helped us discover locations and perspectives we would almost certainly have missed on our own.

By the end of the week, we had exposed sheets of film, developed negatives, exchanged stories, solved photographic problems, created a few new ones, and enjoyed countless conversations about cameras that were already considered old when many modern photographers’ grandparents were still young.

In short, it was one of those increasingly rare experiences that reminds you why analogue photography continues to attract people despite all logic, convenience, and technological progress. Or perhaps because of them.

A memorable festival. A memorable workshop. A memorable week.

Beyond the instant, indeed.