MEXICO: conceptual and performative images that capture the physical nature and metaphysical possibility of deserts around the world.
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
Alasdair Gray
UNITED KINGDOM: Environmental portraiture exploring family ties across three generations in an area of high socio-economic deprivation.
AUSTRALIA: Photographic tableaux that bring new life to the artefacts of historical and natural-history museums nationally and internationally.
SOUTH AFRICA: With a unique visual signature, Roger Ballen’s existential psychodramas have maintained their uncompromising independence, vividly capturing the imagination of generations over five decades.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.
GHANA: With few resources and no connections into the wider art-world, Nana Frimpong Oduro has developed a distinctive photo-art practice gaining recognition internationally.
AUSTRALIA: a remarkable synthesis of timeless Aboriginal wisdom and radically innovative printmaking that creates pictures of intense poetic beauty.
A picture is a poem without words.
Horace
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
BRAZIL: Spectacular images that extend the concepts of time, space and perspective to explore the complex and multifarious nature of our contemporary world.
UNITED KINGDOM: Portraits exploring the transition from child to adult as it is expressed through modes of dress, social behaviour and body image.
AUSTRALIA: An artist who uses generative computer software to autonomously breed art-works while he is sleeping.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Bohnchang Koo finds in the simplest of objects and surfaces a nuanced expression of traditional Korean values of humility, practicality and acceptance of the imperfect nature of being.
ITALY: Elena Givone uses photography and storytelling to help young refugees imagine a better future – images to inspire hope in the child and compassion in the viewer.
Industry without art is brutality.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
AUSTRALIA: Alasdair Foster, a curator, researcher, and writer who draws on an array of experiences from around the world, offers his perspective on photography – and where it’s going next. Interview by Alexander Strecker.
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.
NETHERLANDS: Knighted by the Dutch Government, Erwin Olaf has earned a world-wide reputation for his immaculately choreographed tableaux that subtly suggest the ultimate uncertainty of being.
UNITED KINGDOM: A forensic examination of plants, zoological specimens, snail trails or nylon stockings that finds poetry in precision and unexpected grandeur in the mundane.
LATIN AMERICA: Three Latino artists of Japanese heritage spend a month photographing in the Land of the Rising Sun. What will their images tell us about their identity?
LATINOAMÉRICA: Tres artistas latinoamericanos de origen japonés pasan un mes fotografiando la Tierra del Sol Naciente. ¿Qué nos dirán sus imágenes acerca de su identidad?
AUSTRALIA: A successful celebrity photographer discovers real inspiration nearer to home when he emigrates from London to make a new life in rural Western Australia.
Story telling reveals meaning without the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
UNITED KINGDOM: Throwing the paradoxes of the domestic environment into sharp relief, Sian Bonnell uses absurdity to critique the socially constructed role of women in the home.
NEW ZEALAND: Ilan Wittenberg’s extensive catalogue of Auckland men captures the uniqueness and imperfection that lays bare the inhumanity of commercially idealised masculinity.
USA: Employing the symbolic and physical qualities of water, Wendy Sacks makes photographs that speak of the complex nature of human relationships, both light and dark.
ARGENTINA: A nocturnal explorer who seeks to communicate the richness of everyday lives and the profound histories of ordinary people.
AUSTRALIA: With a subtle insistence, Marian Drew’s still-life and light-painting images question how we might inhabit and share the natural world in a sustainable and equitable way.
CHINA: Reflections on the meanings and value of family photo archives in traditional homes in Shanxi Province.
Art is not a thing;
it is a way.Elbert Hubbard
UNITED KINGDOM: A collaboration between identical twins drawing on the traditions of European folklore, Gothic Romance and Hollywood cinema, blending British whimsy with a darker psychological ambiguity that lends depth and complexity.
SWITZERLAND: Playing with the nature of visual perception, Dominique Teufen discovers the creative possibilities of the photocopier, photoflash, glossy photographic paper and grey paint.
AUSTRALIA: Rather than illustrating an idea, Christophe Canato’s images propose a paradox that animates questions around gender, sexuality and the transition from child to adult.
AUSTRALIA: The only Australian in the celebrated Magnum collective, Trent Parke’s work is acclaimed around the world for its innovation and originality.
BELGIUM: Visual poetry, nature photography and digital design come together in Catherine Nelson’s transcendent landscapes to evoke the complexity of ecological equilibrium.
ITALY: Spending extended periods with poor and itinerant families, Ciro Battiloro discovers, beneath the domestic discomfort and social neglect, a tenacious humanity and a love that turns “despair into delicate sweetness”.
A photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
John Berger
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
USA: Kirk Crippens explores the tension between the American Dream of home and increasing precarity – gentrification, downsizing and foreclosure – but also the haven of the unorthodox.
AUSTRALIA: Pat Brassington exploits the legacies of Surrealism while subtly subverting those (primarily masculine) traditions with a clearly feminine and feminist inflection.
VENEZUELA: Images evoking the powerful mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the southern Americas that emphasise the interdependence of humankind and Nature.
USA: Ellen Jantzen uses digital imaging processes to synthesise a visual language through which to evoke the existential conundrums of our place in Nature and the impermanence of life.
GERMANY: Images that speak with quiet compassion of the impermanence that marks us out as human, and the dignity to be afforded to all, regardless of situation, apparent difference, or stage of life.
CANADA: Combining humour with cultural critique; history with psychology, Diana Thorneycroft constructs visual stories of the anxiety and contradiction embedded in the dark subsoil of Canadian national mythology.
The eye sees all, but the mind shows us what we want to see.
William Shakespeare
ARGENTINA: An artist and inventor who builds cameras to capture both space and time: from brooding art deco architecture to mind-bending aerial imagery and the world’s longest continuous photographic negative.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Creating a fluid and ambiguous aesthetic space between painting, sculpture and photography, Hyunmi Yoo challenges our understanding of the relationship between visual representation, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’.
AUSTRALIA: David Stephenson’s photographs are about very big ideas: the endless Antarctic icecap; the vastness of the heavens; the great domes of European architecture, and the luminous excesses of the modern metropolis.
USA: Few recent cultural initiatives have had more impact in the world of photography than Houston FotoFest, with its multi-layered approach to the medium as a means to an end and not just an end in itself.
AUSTRALIA: An artist painting with light to create richly coloured and emotionally intensified images of the natural and human worlds.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
African Proverb
PORTUGAL: The long-running annual festival of photography in Braga takes a lively approach to integrating imagery and architecture, concept and conviviality that has sustained the engaging freshness that is the hallmark of event.
GUATEMALA: Luis González Palma’s grew up during thirty years of civil war, but while his images evoke sadness, they neither sentimentalise nor do they counsel despair. Rather they affirm the transcendent nature of the human spirit.
BANGLADESH: Asia’s longest-running photo festival, founded on a powerful vision of social justice and driven by a tenacious dynamism, it forms one arm of a tripartite structure including a news picture agency and a media school.
RUSSIA: A festival that engages the viewer in a rich visual dialogue made vibrant by its openhearted warmth, aesthetic vigour, and intelligent enthusiasm for the medium.
VIETNAM: Focusing on people at the margins of society, these relaxed domestic moments explore, without sensationalism, the intimate companionship that is a foundation of our shared human experience.
BRAZIL: a festival pioneering the use of screen-based technologies to reach out from the metropolitan art institutions to engage with communities in the poorest districts of the urban margins: to engage, to educate and to empower.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
AUSTRALIA: Photography, digital montage and embroidery combine in images that draw the viewer into the often-disquieting aesthetic of dreams.
CAMBODIA: With a focus on discovery, education and sharing, this festival and workshop program provides a generous and egalitarian environment in which to learn new skills, exchange ideas and establish new friendships.
UNITED KINGDOM: Quintessentially British in their rigorous formality, these allegorical tableaux grow from the personal experience of an intergenerational life partnership condemned to the margins of ‘otherness’.
NEW ZEALAND: Located on the rim of the Pacific, this is a festival of and by the people: stimulating creativity, encouraging participation and celebrating the many and diverse expressions of human imagination.
INDIA: Described as “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”, Pushpamala N’s pioneering and influential feminist–conceptual photographic performance works seek to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse in India.
AUSTRALIA: In a world that all too often seeks to segregate professionals from amateurs, celebrities from ordinary people, Head On provides an alternative based on mutual respect and a passion for photographic creativity.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Alfred North Whitehead
SWEDEN: A simple pinhole camera used to create images that evoke the primordial and the post-apocalyptic; a tension between humankind and the rest of nature.
THAILAND: With a focus on Asian documentary practice, this festival maintained its independence by building not only the event but also a new photography centre through the work and solidarity of photographers themselves.
UNITED KINGDOM: Whimsical, poignant, fantastical, dark… these family photos restage the complex nature of parenting and the domestic dynamic, from ageing and the shift in mutual dependence, to ultimate departure.
ARGENTINA: One of the world’s longest running photographic festivals, Festival de la Luz it is both a celebration of photography as a means of enlightenment and an egalitarian meeting of diverse people and cultures.
USA: Repurposing their household possession to create a mandala or build a spaceship, Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen use photography, video, performance and installation to explore the paradoxes of the American Dream.
Creativity is contagious, pass it on.
Albert Einstein
UNITED KINGDOM: A festival that celebrates its sense of place and community while engaging the leading edge of technological possibility and international innovation.
BANGLADESH: A photographer with a strong social conscience and a deep concern for the welfare of the marginalised members of her society.
LITHUANIA: Set in the historical centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life, KAUNAS PHOTO is a festival that sits at the intersection of tradition and innovation, all laced with a dash of humour.
AUSTRALIA: An unconventional approach to portraiture that subverts clichés and stereotypes to emphasise the value of real human relationships over fantasy or caricature.
ROMANIA: a community of homeless people come together to find companionship, shelter and a degree of mutual sustainability in a network of tunnels under the city of Bucharest.
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
Chinese proverb
AUSTRALIA: the stark reality of global warming given particular poignancy by an artist who identifies with the melting icebergs.
ARGENTINA: Memories of the Dirty War starkly visualised by one of the survivors of the regime’s Clandestine Centres of Detention and Torture.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture and installation.
USA: Emerging from person crisis, these images unfold a domestic conversation around the paradox of family ties and the quest for redemption.
SOUTH AFRICA: Capturing the spirit of a new creative generation, fighting for gender equality and exposing the continuing plight of the working poor.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Cesar A. Cruz
URUGUAY: An artist, chemist, craftsman, essayist, poet, and teacher, who imbues photography with a newfound physical and philosophical dimension.
AUSTRALIA: Documenting the dysfunctional, the dispossessed, and the dogged hope that lingers amid the ashes of failure.
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
PERU: Art and Nature entangle the body in images that speak of the camouflage adopted by an outsider.
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
Goethe
MEXICO: Stories of an irrepressible archaeology and exhausted modernism; of rampant urban expansion and sublime natural grandeur.
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.
BRAZIL: Evocative images of the rural and indigenous peoples of this vast country, captured by one of its most distinguished visual poets.
NEW ZEALAND: Images of ephemeral land-art projects that symbolise the interdependence of natural systems that connect us all in the web of life.
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
AUSTRALIA: In a career spanning six decades, this celebrated aerial photographer has captured the magnificence of the Great Southern Continent.
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE: Talking Pictures features in-depth interviews with photographers and photo-festival directors around the world.
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