“An artist is one who produces things that people don’t need, but that he – for some reason – thinks it’s a good idea to give them,” he said. Andy Warhol. Not wrongly: painting, sculpture, graffiti stimulate the senses, intelligence and sensitivity. Photography is no exception, eighth art capable of carving out its own space for some time with festivals that invade towns and cities, often deconsecrated churches and noble palaces. We have selected the unmissable of this summer.
Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles
Forty exhibitions throughout the city of Arles, in the South of France, and many satellite exhibitions in associated museums in Provence. This year Les Rencontres especially celebrates women, especially with A Feminist Avant-Garde, two hundred works representing the feminist movement in art. There is no shortage of emerging talents, including Julia Gat with the project Khamsa khamsa khamsa, five in Arabic, which “like a protective spell, protects from the evil eye”, says the author, Israeli, born in 1997: an autobiographical work, a family album.
www.rencontres-arles.com (until 25 September)
PHotoESPAÑA
For its 25th anniversary, Spain’s leading photography festival features 118 exhibitions and 268 artists. Between them, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Henri Cartier-Bressoneach a symbol of that Sculpting Reality which is also the theme chosen for this edition. There is also Carlos Pérez Siquiera myth of the Spanish photographic avant-garde, known for his black and white reportages in the slums of Almería, in Andalusia: he is present at PHotoESPAÑA, at the Mapfre Foundationwith its beach scenes, shots in bright and ironic colors.
www.phe.es (until 28 August)
Photoireland
Ireland presents Ireland. Not just historical photographs in Are All We Have, the main exhibition at Printworks Castle in Dublin, but also young talents. How Enda Burke with Homebound: home sets and parents who improvise actors, a project shot during the first confinement, when the artist, unable to devote himself to street photography (its genre), turned the lens towards his family: the result is very colorful shots , nostalgic and humorous.
www.festival.photoireland.org/ (until August 28)
Cortona On The Move
Produced, shared and consumed: this is photography! Here is the starting point of the 2022 edition of the Tuscan festival. The main theme: Me, Myself and Eye, to discuss and deepen the legitimacy of the medium. Even in weddings, the focus of the exhibition I do (yes I do), a collective of photographers from all over the world, each with their own eye, but all with the lens focused on the celebrations. Let the dances begin!
www.cortonaonthemove.com (from 14 July to 2 October)
Ragusa Photo Festival
«The project was born from a job assigned by Le Monde in 2014, when they offered me to follow a journalist to Svalbard to document the activity of researchers and scientists on a scientific basis ». With these words the photographer Paolo Verzone presents Arctic Zero, seven years exhibited at the Ragusa Foto Festival. It is one of the many exhibitions of the event that for the tenth anniversary chooses the theme of “harmony”.
www.ragusafotofestival.com/ (from 21 July to 28 August)
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Wiesbaden Photo Days
Turbolent Times is the theme of the 12th edition of the triennial of German photography. Among the projects on display: the work on weapons in the United States of Gabriele GalimbertiNiewybuch’s military life in Poland Natalia Kepesz and The Garden’s Crossroads by Pang Hai. The latter is a tribute to the suicidal photographer Lu Daose, with a surreal and melancholy flavor.
www.wifo2022.de (from 13 to 28 August)
Visa Pour L’Images
With its 34th edition, the Perpignan festival never tires of remembering the fundamental role of photojournalists, who denounce wars and crimes against humanity and defend free information. Self Selene Magnolia exhibits a project dedicated to the Roma community in Bulgaria, Valerio Bispuri instead it highlights the violence suffered by the mentally ill in Africa; Sabiha Çimenthen, it documents the daily life of young women in a Turkish Koranic school. These are just some of the exhibits of the most notable photojournalism festival.
www.visapourlimage.com/ (from 27 August to 11 September)
Kranj Photo Fest
Home: a State of Transitionthis is the theme chosen for the 2022 edition of the Slovenian festival.
Due to displacement caused by climate change, natural disasters, wars and inaccessible rents, housing is increasingly transitory. As in the project Before It’s Gone by M’hammed Kilitowinner of the open call, which recounts the degradation of Morocco which today forces many, including young people, to go elsewhere due to the water crisis, the lack of job opportunities and isolation.
www.kranjfotofest.org/ (from 24 August to 25 September)
Source: Vanity Fair
