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.
Cross-Cultural
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.
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?
ARGENTINA: A nocturnal explorer who seeks to communicate the richness of everyday lives and the profound histories of ordinary people.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: A festival that celebrates its sense of place and community while engaging the leading edge of technological possibility and international innovation.
SOUTH AFRICA: Capturing the spirit of a new creative generation, fighting for gender equality and exposing the continuing plight of the working poor.
