The most recent attempt was Miami PhotoFest, held in 2019, which brought together exhibitions, talks, and workshops focused on contemporary photography. While it sparked interest and participation, it did not continue in subsequent years, repeating the pattern of intense but short-lived initiatives.

These cases, including Photo Miami, Miami Photo Salon, Miami Street Photography Festival, and Miami PhotoFest, reveal a recurring pattern: maintaining a stable, dedicated space for photography in Miami’s art ecosystem has historically been extremely challenging.

Another notable project was the Miami Street Photography Festival (MSPF), which successfully celebrated street and documentary photography for several years. The festival created a vibrant international community and offered a space for reflection and exchange between generations and styles. Yet, it too eventually ceased, once again demonstrating the difficulty of sustaining independent photography events in a highly competitive context.

The Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) is a Miami-based nonprofit dedicated to showcasing the contributions of women and nonbinary photographers across the Americas. What started as an archive focused on Cuban women photographers has expanded into an international platform for research, exhibitions, and dialogue that aims to challenge the traditional photographic canon and promote social change.

Its flagship event, the WOPHA Congress, held every two years at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), brings together artists, curators, and scholars from around the world to explore photography through feminist and decolonial lenses. In doing so, WOPHA has established Miami as an important hub for critical discussion and visibility within the global photographic community.

The South Florida Latin American Photography Forum (SoFLaFoto) is a Miami-based nonprofit initiative dedicated to promoting Latin American and Latinx photographic production in the United States, with a particular focus on South Florida. Our mission also includes giving visibility to Latin American photographic practices and fostering dialogue between artists from the Latin American diaspora and their counterparts across the region, exploring how identity, migration, and memory shape visual narratives.

In 2025, SoFLaFoto launched the Photobook Art Lab, a new incubator supporting emerging and experimental voices in the Latin American and Latinx fotolibro field. The program offers lectures and critical resources that guide artists through the process of conceptualizing and producing a photobook, emphasizing collaboration and artistic research. With this initiative, SoFLaFoto continues to strengthen Miami’s role as a cultural bridge, connecting Latin American photographic practices with the global contemporary art discourse.

Miami Photographic Observatory (MPhO): Conceived and directed by Aluna Art Foundation, the Miami Photographic Observatory functions as both an artist residency and a curatorial laboratory hosted at Tower Art Space. The program provides local and international artists with the opportunity to develop commissioned projects that investigate Miami’s urban and social evolution through photography. Participants also exhibit previous works alongside new creations, fostering dialogue between past and present visual narratives.

Although the MPhO is a recent initiative, Aluna Art Foundation has a longstanding history of supporting photographers and visual artists. Over the years, the foundation has cultivated projects, collaborations, and exhibitions that highlight the diversity of photographic practices while engaging critically with social, cultural, and urban transformations in Miami and beyond. Through MPhO, Aluna consolidates this expertise, creating a space where experimentation, research, and artistic production intersect.

Together, these platforms, along with ArtMedia Gallery and Dina Mitrani Gallery, represent a new era of photography in Miami, grounded in collaboration, research, and sustainability, shifting the focus from market spectacle to culture, community, and critical thinking.

From Ephemeral to Enduring

Perhaps the question is no longer why photography fairs have failed to endure in Miami, but what kind of photographic culture the city truly needs. Fairs reflected a Miami defined by immediacy and reinvention. What is emerging now is slower, more deliberate, and sustained, a scene that acknowledges Miami’s role as a bridge between Latin America and the United States, where images do more than circulate: they converse, resist, and preserve memory.

In this new phase, photography seems to have found its place in Miami: not in the ephemeral intensity of fairs, but in the enduring work of thought, community, and shared history.