INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists reflect on what they learned during the pandemic, picking just one thing they would reimagine for the better in the future.
Social Justice
BANGLADESH: A humanitarian photographer who not only documents injustice and inequity in the world, but also explores his own imperfection with poignant honesty.
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.
THAILAND: Scathing satirical tableaux critiquing the country’s turbulent socio-political scene, created by one of Southeast Asia’s leading artists.
USA: One woman’s experience of the stifling control of a patriarchal religious fundamentalism and the processes of artmaking that helped her escape.
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.
AUSTRALIA: Challenging misconceptions around disability and making evident the violent abuse that can sometimes be its cause.
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.
MALAYSIA / SINGAPORE: Apparently whimsical images that critique community erasure in Malaysia and the re-wilding of a hyperreal city-state in lockdown.
SOUTH AFRICA: Capturing the spirit of a new creative generation, fighting for gender equality and exposing the continuing plight of the working poor.
IRAN / AUSTRALIA: Poetically perceptive imagery that engages the layers of displacement, difference and marginality that define what it means to be ‘other’.
COLOMBIA: In addressing the trauma resulting from the ongoing multilateral armed conflict in her country, Erika Diettes focuses not on violence but on bearing witness to the grief of survivors.
UNITED KINGDOM: Environmental portraiture exploring family ties across three generations in an area of high socio-economic deprivation.
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.
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.
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.
BRAZIL: a festival pioneering the use of screen-based technologies to reach out from the metropolitan art institutions to connect 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.
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.
ARGENTINA: Memories of the Dirty War starkly visualised by one of the survivors of the regime’s Clandestine Centres of Detention and Torture.