First stop on the journey to Trieste Photo Days 2026: URBAN Photo Awards at Trieste Airport
URBAN Photo Awards returns to Trieste Airport. From 7 August to 30 September 2026 the first floor of the terminal hosts a new group exhibition curated by URBAN: a now well-established appointment that every year turns the airport into an exhibition space and opens the journey towards Trieste Photo Days, running from 22 to 25 October.
Trieste Airport is today a reference hub for Friuli Venezia Giulia and for a wide cross-border catchment area: almost 2 million passengers a year, traffic growing for three seasons running and a route network in constant expansion, with new Italian and European destinations. An increasingly wide, international public, for whom the airport also becomes a meeting point between mobility, culture and the region.
A selection from thousands of images
The 200-plus photographs on show were chosen from the thousands of entries that reach URBAN each year from photographers all over the world. They tell the present of our cities in very different visual languages: spare reportage at one end, experimental visual research at the other.
Among them are eight portfolios, and the approaches could hardly be more varied: environmental reportage, an enquiry into architectural form, street photography, inward-looking introspection. The places range just as widely: the Roman coastline and the streets of New York, the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh and a small island in the Azores, the Bosphorus in winter. What holds them together is a shared question: what happens to a place when people pass through it, and what remains once they have gone. Few places pose that question more sharply than an airport.
Adriano Marchesi – Deep Blue
The coastline at Fiumicino, where a harbour has been under construction since 2010 and is now set to become a cruise port. Among the lighthouse, the wooden lift-net fishing huts and the brackish marsh, an area suspended for more than a decade between sea and concrete.
Donatella Venturi – Utopia and Contrasts in Chandigarh
The geometries of the Capitol Complex designed by Le Corbusier, where the near-total absence of the human figure heightens scale, silence and suspension. An urban landscape that contradicts the usual imagery of Indian cities.
Thierry Gonzalez – Le Seuil
A journey through psychological landscapes with no set destination, where familiar landmarks begin to waver. The photographer’s presence surfaces among the architecture as a fragile apparition, on the threshold between memory and absence.
Marcel Van Beek – After the Footfall
The gradual withdrawal of human presence from urban space. Stairways, bicycles, graffiti, underpasses and construction sites register what is left after bodies have moved on: not emptiness, but trace.
Peter Wach – Moments Preserved, 2026
Street moments gathered across California, Cleveland, Totnes, Philadelphia and New York, held together by the same attention to the instant in which a scene composes itself.
Imiro Vlad – Su gibi git, su gibi gel
Winters spent on the Bosphorus, in the fog and darkness of Istanbul, recording a generation’s nostalgia for a city that is changing fast. The ferry deck as a place of comfort and introspection.
Nadezhda Kosenko – Tied to the Tradition
The Tourada à Corda on the island of Terceira, in the Azores, seen from the side of the people: the focused faces of the pastores, the rope as a thread binding the community from one generation to the next.
Kevin You – Encounters
Parks, squares, stations and streets where the paths of strangers overlap by chance. Separate movements that for a moment compose a single scene.
Why Trieste Airport
For the selected authors it is a valuable opportunity: to exhibit in an international showcase, in front of an audience that comes across their photographs without having looked for them. For the airport it is a way of making room for visual languages capable of telling the present, while showcasing both local and international artistic sensibilities.
An experience accessible to all
The exhibition is open to the public and free of charge, and can be visited during airport opening hours, in the exhibition area on the first floor. Passengers and visitors can enjoy this remarkable selection of images while waiting for their flight, turning waiting time into something enjoyable and stimulating.
An airport that keeps growing
The steady development of Trieste Airport, increasingly recognised as a reference hub for Friuli Venezia Giulia and for a wide cross-border catchment area, continues to widen the public passing through its spaces each day, turning the airport into a meeting point between mobility, culture and the region.
2025 closed with a traffic record of 1,651,702 passengers, up 25% on the previous year and a third consecutive year of growth; for 2026 the airport is aiming to pass the 1.7 million passenger mark.
In 2025 the network gained Lamezia Terme, Prague, Stockholm and Rotterdam. This year it has added the Ryanair flight to Tirana, along with the routes operated by Aeroitalia, the sixth scheduled airline to fly from Trieste, connecting the airport with Salerno, Milan Linate and, over the summer season, Alghero and Olbia.
The network will continue to develop in the 2026-2027 winter season, for which a new Ryanair route to Malaga, operating from November, and a Wizz Air connection to Naples, departing from December 2026, have already been announced.
Trieste Airport’s commitment to strengthening its role as a gateway to the region goes beyond the expansion of its connections: the airport continues to invest in service quality, in intermodality and in the promotion of Friuli Venezia Giulia, and in February 2027 it will host Connect, the leading international forum dedicated to air route development.
This steady increase in passenger flows represents an important opportunity to enhance the airport’s cultural offering as well. The photographic exhibitions hosted in its spaces allow hundreds of thousands of travellers to come into contact with the work of URBAN photographers and with an event of international scope such as Trieste Photo Days, strengthening the role of Trieste Airport not only as mobility infrastructure but also as a place of cultural, artistic and regional promotion.
