FINLAND: One of the country’s most celebrated photographers discusses his deep connection with the northern landscape and the Sámi people who live there.
Category Archive: Europe
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.
Walter Benjamin
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.
LATVIA: Personal evocations of the impact of social and ideological change while living through the turbulent post-war and post-Soviet eras.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
GERMANY: What are the implications of an AI generated image winning the world’s largest photography competition? For photography, for society, and for the arts?
RUSSIA: An artistic partnership with experimentation at the heart of a creative process that blends the sensual and the conceptual.
SPAIN: an artist who is also a scientist, harnessing scientific technologies to visualise the invisible.
The only true voyage of discovery… would be not to visit strange lands but to behold the universe through the eyes of another…
Marcel Proust
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.
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.
VIDEO: marking 150 interviews published on Talking Pictures.
UNITED KINGDOM: an insider’s sensitive depiction of a group of south London fighters who find self-discipline, confidence, and connectedness through martial arts.
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.
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.
AUSTRALIA / ICELAND: Haunting images of natural, urban, and industrial landscapes that rekindle a mythical past or spark ethical speculation about the future.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: Going beyond the clichés and prejudices about homelessness by facilitating each participant to create their own self-portrait.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein
UNITED KINGDOM: Conjuring the familial past and a satirical future through the evocative power of photographic masks.
GERMANY: The uncanny and the documentary synergise as temporal and dimensional shifts reveal a prescient vision in the context of current events.
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.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
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.
I don't want art for a few,
any more than education for a few,
or freedom for a few.William Morris
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FRANCE: For Denis Darzacq, the body is an instrument of social critique with which to explore the constraints and barriers suffered by people marginalised by materialist society.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.Marcus Aurelius
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.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.
A picture is a poem without words.
Horace
UNITED KINGDOM: Portraits exploring the transition from child to adult as it is expressed through modes of dress, social behaviour and body image.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The eye sees all, but the mind shows us what we want to see.
William Shakespeare
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 the event.
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.
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’.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture and installation.
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
Goethe
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.
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