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.
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
PERU: Art and Nature entangle the body in images that speak of the camouflage adopted by an outsider.
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
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.
USA: Emerging from person crisis, these images unfold a domestic conversation around the paradox of family ties and the quest for redemption.
AUSTRALIA: Raucous, irreverently grandiose images that bring to mind the diverse traditions of William Hogarth’s 18th-century satirical etchings, 19th-century history painting and 20th-century cinema.
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.
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
AUSTRALIA: An artist who uses generative computer software to autonomously breed art-works while he is sleeping.
Industry without art is brutality.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
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?
Story telling reveals meaning without the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
CHINA: Reflections on the meanings and value of family photo archives in traditional homes in Shanxi Province.
A photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
John Berger
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.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
African Proverb
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.
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 connect 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
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
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There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
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