3 min read
By Way Up NorthUpdated 13 October 2026
Themes that brought us here
Cologne 2018
Inspiration Is For Amateurs
Stockholm 2019
Fuck It
Cannes 2019
The Obstacle Is The Way
Copenhagen 2021
Clean Slate
Rome 2022
La Dolce Vita
Vienna 2022
No Bad Days
Prague 2023
Here To There
Berlin 2023
Zag
You Thought You Knew You
Lisbon 2024
Where Dreams Go To Die
Berlin 2025
Good Enough
Stockholm 2025
Why Not
Vienna 2026
The Unsexy Stuff
How the theme found us
We were on the beach in València shooting clips for the video that would end Vienna and announce the next city. The blue had been everywhere all day. Sky, sea, tiles on the buildings we'd walked past. Then the model turned her back to us and faced the water. Wedding dress. Wind in the linen. Bowie blue. Blue, blue, electric blue.
That's the moment the theme found us.
WUN themes usually take months. A thread from one conversation, picked up again three weeks later, then a third version at an event. This one didn't take months. It walked in off a beach with a song from 1977 stuck in our head.
What we're asking
The wave breaking everywhere in this industry. The photographer who's been shooting weddings since 2008 and now isn't sure what their work means in a feed full of AI. The kid who started six months ago, charging twice what the veteran did at the same stage, fully booked through next year. The image you can't quite trust anymore. Was it shot. Was it generated. Does the answer change anything for the person looking at it.
The wave is bigger than AI.
It comes down to three questions. The world's getting more curated. More artificial. Photography keeps getting squeezed by everything photographers are now expected to be. Brands. Educators. Content machines. How do you keep moving forward without losing what made the work feel like yours. What stays human when photography moves this fast. How do you use AI without letting it eat the work.
The New Wave is all of it. The kid winging it and getting hired. The veteran adapting without a map. The aesthetic that didn't exist last summer. The business model nobody had figured out a year ago.
How WUN works
Every presenter takes the theme and runs at it from their own angle. A roster of takes on the same urgent question across two days. The wedding photographer with two decades in. The filmmaker on year three. The planner working with AI tools half their clients didn't know existed a year ago. The same question, different answers.
What you walk out with is a sharper read on where this industry is going. Not because someone hands you the answer. Because you spent two days at Teatre Talia with people living the question, watching them give their answer in their work.
That's what you're buying a ticket to.
Why València
Spain doesn't slow down. The country eats late, drinks slow, sits outside. València specifically: paella was invented here, the real one, with rabbit and chicken and bomba rice cooked outside on Sundays over orange wood. Horchata is tigernut milk dipped with fartons, served cold in tiled bars that haven't changed since the seventies. The Mercado Central holds three hundred stalls of fish that was in the sea twelve hours ago. Mid-October keeps the warmth without the crowds.
On the way back from the beach that day, the song was still playing. Sometimes a theme builds slowly. Sometimes it walks in off a beach with a song from 1977 stuck in your head.
This one's right.
October 13 + 14, in València
Get Your Ticket