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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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