SOUTH AFRICA: a remarkable synthesis of structure, texture, and authenticity exploring the triangular relationship between history, memory, and community storytelling.
Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Arundhati Roy
CHINA: Youthful Asian women and men engage in the conscious but unselfconscious presentation of self within a milieu of open intimacy.
INDIA: Exploring radically different ways to think about museums, books, and photography, Dayanita Singh emphasises curiosity over cognition.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Land art seeking a fresh perspective on Nature freed from notions of territory and property.
INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists reflect on what they learned during the pandemic, picking just one thing they would reimagine for the better in the future.
POLAND: Atmospheric images of a social, political, and economic landscape that has changed radically over the past sixty years.
UKRAINE: Visualising the journey towards self-realisation that dances between empathic attunement and the artist’s own interior sensibility.
ESTONIA / AFRICA: Images of love and loss delicately exploring the essential mystery of human interconnection.
AFRICA / AMERICAS: poignant imagery on a grand scale evoking the existential threat of human exploitation to both animals and people.
AUSTRALIA: Distinctive ways of being and knowing, experienced through a queer perspective on expanded photography.
BANGLADESH: A humanitarian photographer who not only documents injustice and inequity in the world, but also explores his own imperfection with poignant honesty.
VIDEO: marking 150 interviews published on Talking Pictures.
KOREA: Park Jongwoo – the first person to photograph the interior of the so-called ‘Demilitarised Zone’ that divides Korea – speaks about what he found in this, the world’s most contested strip of land.
UNITED KINGDOM: an insider’s sensitive depiction of a group of south London fighters who find self-discipline, confidence, and connectedness through martial arts.
MEXICO: Harnessing artificial intelligence to create photo-based images that may well come closer to the true nature human visual perception than will ever be possible with a camera.
PERU: A bird’s-eye view of Lima’s Pacific coast and inland desert revealing the delicately balanced, intimately entangled ecology below.
USA: Exploring the interplay of context and desire, and the evolving ways in which desire might be reconciled with an initially hostile environment.
RUSSIA / SPAIN: Alisa Sibirskaya creates photographic tableaux echoing themes from the Dutch Baroque and Siberian folktales that capture the luminous glow of a bygone age.
Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
Mae West
CANADA: Personal and historical trauma inspire a creative practice unafraid of the twilight world of the unconscious that lies beneath the veneer of rational civilisation.
USA: Spanning two decades, a mother and daughter explore the deep connection between people and their animal companions.
SAUDI ARABIA: Fascinated by harmony and dissonance, and the cycles of return, Saleh AlDaghari’s picture-making sits on the cusp between surrealism and allegory.
USA: Pulitzer-prize-winner Renée C Byer reveals how photography and journalism used together can catalyse action in the face of escalating inequality at home and abroad.
CANADA: a satirical retelling of familiar stories as Disney princesses, deities, and US presidents tumble into the real world like Alice in reverse.
ARGENTINA: delicate, hybrid works that speak to the fragility of life and the vulnerability we share with the planet we call home.
I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.
Imogen Cunningham
FINLAND / USA: After five decades re-imagining his body as something malleable and re-interpretable, Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s images remain as vital as those of his youth, and as refreshingly original.
CANADA: Delicate still-life images that capture a sense of tranquillity while celebrating the small and fleeting things in life.
THAILAND: Scathing satirical tableaux critiquing the country’s turbulent socio-political scene, created by one of Southeast Asia’s leading artists.
TAIWAN / USA: Haunting images inspired by the migrant’s ongoing negotiation of memory, perception, and identity.
USA: One woman’s experience of the stifling control of a patriarchal religious fundamentalism and the processes of artmaking that helped her escape.
AUSTRALIA: Luminous yet elusive images that navigate the gulf between the world of the senses and the interior realm of the self.
The one who plants trees, knowing that they will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Rabindranath Tagore
CHINA / USA: Delicately ambiguous self-portraits exploring the tension between freedom and boundaries, self-reflection and self-discovery.
AUSTRALIA / ICELAND: Haunting images of natural, urban, and industrial landscapes that rekindle a mythical past or spark ethical speculation about the future.
MEXICO: Named one of the top twenty talents worldwide by FOAM magazine, Diego Moreno’s monsters have much to show us about familial love and about domestic abuse.
USA: A mother’s delicate reflections on masculinity within the everyday intimacy of family life as boys become men and men become middle-aged.
ARGENTINA: La sensibilidad de la pintura y las técnicas de la fotografía se conjugan para crear un realismo mágico irónico pero extrañamente familiar.
ARGENTINA: The sensibilities of painting and the techniques of photography blend to create an ironic but strangely familiar magic realism.
BRAZIL: Turning a compassionate eye on rural and remote medicine to capture the kindness, dedication, and empathy of healthcare workers as they transcend the most challenging circumstances.
Seeing is not as simple as looking.
Joseph Kosuth
AUSTRALIA: Fables that are at once personal and universal, familial and public, recounting childhood perspicacity and adult frailty far the here and now.
RUSSIA / USA: One man’s quest for a more nuanced way of being, teasing apart notions of morality from those of dogma, of identity from those of normality.
CANADA: With well over 100,000 images and millions of possible interconnections, Luminous-Lint offers a near-infinite range of ways to pursue the study of photographic history.
USA: Patty Carroll’s ‘Anonymous Women’ parody and personify the frenetic consumerism and suffocating domesticity of ‘idealised’ notions of femininity promoted in the post-war era.
UNITED KINGDOM: Going beyond the clichés and prejudices about homelessness by facilitating each participant to create their own self-portrait.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Satirical imagery that critiques the impact of colonialism in Korea and its enduring legacy of historical trauma.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein
ISRAEL: An exploration of the equivocal transition from child to adult in portraits of adolescents in Ukraine, Russia and Spain.
LEBANON / AUSTRALIA: Dreamlike psychodramas that envision the émigré’s feelings of separation, longing and isolation.
USA: Past and present converse in an archive of American life shot from a refreshingly tangential perspective.
UNITED KINGDOM: Conjuring the familial past and a satirical future through the evocative power of photographic masks.
AUSTRALIA: Challenging misconceptions around disability and making evident the violent abuse that can sometimes be its cause.
CANADA / USA: Temporary sculptures created by balancing stones with nothing more than gravity to hold them together.
Without deviations from the norm, progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
GERMANY: The uncanny and the documentary synergise as temporal and dimensional shifts reveal a prescient vision in the context of current events.
USA: With an emphasis on the dignity of all living things, these lo-fi collage works seek to emphasise harmony and our shared human nature, free from judgement.
CHINA: Documentary images highlighting communities that, while they may seem outside of the mainstream in China, are in fact simply some of its constituents.
FINLAND: Landscapes, ice, and flea-market clothing and fabrics come together in an unusual aesthetic and conceptual marriage – part myth, part speculation.
BOSNIA / AUSTRALIA: Darkly beautiful images that use alternative photographic processes to convey the ultimate ambiguity of life as experience.
MEXICO: The fluidity of domestic intimacy explored through the lens of childhood imagination and transformational community ritual.
If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for a hundred years, educate children.
Confucius
AUSTRALIA: From the arid heat of central Australia to the windswept ice sheet of Greenland, powerful and austere images that push the very notion of landscape to its extreme.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
AUSTRALIA: Figures from history and legend elegantly reconceived with the technology and sensibility of the present.
UKRAINE: The artistic trope of the male nude re-imagined as emblem of a new generation of young Eastern European men.
UNITED KINGDOM: A photographer who looks beyond the momentary click of the shutter to understand the wider social, historical, economic, and environmental context of our globalised world.
AUSTRALIA: Fantastical photographs suggesting a domestic magic brought into being by longing, obsession or childlike exuberance.
I don't want art for a few,
any more than education for a few,
or freedom for a few.William Morris
NEW ZEALAND: Images of ephemeral land-art projects that symbolise the interdependence of natural systems that connect us all in the web of life.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: For the Korean artist Atta Kim, the process of making art has been an ongoing philosophical journey of discovery.
URUGUAY: Delicately poetic images printed sustainably without inks or chemicals, using naturally occurring plant materials.
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
AUSTRALIA: A contemporary story-teller who combines photography and words to synthesis rich and complex narratives of family, community and sexuality.
USA / CANADA: A visual ethnographer, Dona Schwartz photographs expectant parents and empty-nesters marking those moments when each couple stands outside the gates of family life.
NEW ZEALAND / AUSTRALIA: A visual storyteller exploring the interior world of the mind through the shared imagination of the community.
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.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
Gloria Steinem
PAISES BAJOS: Retratos que hablan de la complejidad de la identidad individual, interpersonal y colectiva, de la mutabilidad del ser humano y de la fluidez interior.
NETHERLANDS: Portraits that speak to the entanglement of individual, interpersonal and collective identity, the mutability of the body, and the fluidity of being.
MEXICO: Obscure rituals that blend the contemporary with the timeless, the personal with the collective, to suggest imaginary states and real-world paradoxes.
USA: Timeless portraits made in collaboration with the inmates of three penitentiaries in the northeast of Louisiana, the US state with the largest per capita prison population.
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’.
RUSSIA: Gently observed portraits of the people of Bryansk that touch on the mystery of everyday life.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo Picasso
BELGIUM: Contemporary images that evoke the past while looking to the future.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Exploring the liminal space at the threshold of realty and simulation, original and replica, fact and fake.
PERU: Art and Nature entangle the body in images that speak of the camouflage adopted by an outsider.
MALAYSIA / SINGAPORE: Apparently whimsical images that critique community erasure in Malaysia and the re-wilding of a hyperreal city-state in lockdown.
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
GERMANY: Reworking the traditional contact sheet on a grand scale, Thomas Kellner makes architecture dance.
ICELAND: Picturing the resilient lives and enduring landscapes of a small farming community in the East of Iceland caught between harsh reality and timeless myth.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
UNITED KINGDOM: Four friends of the late Tim Hetherington discuss the work of this compassionate war photographer who sought to depict Big History through the lens of small history.
COLOMBIA: An artist using clay figures to tell the stories of real people – stories of homelessness and social invisibility.
SOUTH AFRICA: Capturing the spirit of a new creative generation, fighting for gender equality and exposing the continuing plight of the working poor.
BRAZIL: Evocative images of the rural and indigenous peoples of this vast country, captured by one of its most distinguished visual poets.