Bristol Photo Festival

Dreamlines: Picturing Bristol High Streets

Posted on July 14, 2024October 8, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

For this year’s event, Bristol Photo Festival has invited a group of photographers, all with strong ties to the city, to develop new projects across Bristol’s historic high streets and neighbourhoods. They have collaborated with groups both young and old, including a local church brass band; a stitching group; a men’s social club; a food bank; and an elders acting club. In collaboration with Bristol City Council and Historic England – who co-produced the original project – the outcomes of this project will be exhibited, bringing together work by photographers including: Khali Ackford; Michael Alberry; Kelly O’Brien; Sebastian Bruno; Esther May Campbell; Jade Carr-Daley; Jessie Edwards Thomas; Yuko Edwards; Mohamed Hassan; Chris Hoare; Kirsty Mackay; Lua Ribeira; Clementine Schneidermann; and Mikael Techane.

More info: highstreets.bristolphotofestival.org

In collaboration with:

Bristol Photo Festival Announces its 2024 Autumn Programme

Posted on July 17, 2024July 17, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

‘The World A Wave’ is the theme for the second edition of Bristol Photo Festival, the international biennial of contemporary photography, which will open in autumn 2024 (the opening week is 16 – 20 October 2024). The Festival programme focuses upon a world in constant motion; where the social, political and environmental conditions of shared life are always changing and becoming otherwise. Drawing on the success of its first edition in 2021 which drew over 200,000 visitors, the dynamic festival, internationally focused but locally grounded, delivers long-term engagement and education programmes engaging with culturally underserved communities and places. Exhibitions are held in the city’s major visual arts institutions alongside independent and unconventional spaces, all accompanied by a wide events programme engaging with multiple aspects of the city of Bristol. All exhibitions are free with donations welcome.

DOWNLOAD FULL PRESS RELEASE

For 2024, Bristol Photo Festival will exhibit works by photographers including Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (German-Ghanaian, based in Switzerland); Ariella Azoulay (Israel); Andrew Jackson (British- Canadian); Rinko Kawauchi (Japan); Billy H.C Kwok (Hong Kong); Jay Lau (Hong Kong); Kirsty Mackay (Scotland, based in Bristol); Amak Mahmoodian (Iran, based in Bristol); Trent Parke (Australia); Nigel Poor (USA); Sarker Protick (Bangladesh); Bandia Ribeira (Spain); Hashem Shakeri (Iran); Herbert Shergold (Bristol); Inuuteq Storch (Greenland); Lau Wai (Hong Kong); the shared artistic practice Ritual Inhabitual (comprising Tito Gonzalez Garcia (France) and Florencia Grisanti (Chile)) and the group exhibition Dreamlines: Picturing Bristol’s High Streets.

Bristol Photo Festival also produces a long term education and engagement programme alongside the exhibitions. For this year the Festival is developing a project with local residents and port workers from Avonmouth to create a community archive, alongside a programme of creative activities, including talks, walks, screenings and an exhibition. With Prison Education, the festival will present The Prison Mobile Library, an educational photography project across three sites in the South West of England. The opening week of the festival (16-20 October 2024) includes artists’ talks, a book fair, tours, and parties. Additionally, the festival collaborates with the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England to co-produce two symposiums exploring ideas related to this year’s theme, ‘The World A Wave’.

“Photography is a unique creative medium to experience the world anew. In a time of multiple crises, we need to think of images more than ever. I want the festival to be a space full of nuanced and unexpected stories that foster greater understanding of our shared world. Bristol Photo Festival’s quality and ambition is possible thanks to the great collaboration we have established with the main cultural institutions in the city and the support of funders and sponsors.” Alejandro Acin, Bristol Photo Festival director.

The second edition of Bristol Photo Festival —The World A Wave—will open in autumn 2024. Exhibitions will be held in the city’s major visual arts institutions alongside independent and unconventional spaces accompanied by a wide events programme.

The exhibition programme focuses on the personal stories of those confronting societal changes whilst navigating daily life. Confirmed artists include Akosua Viktoria Adu Sanyah, Kirsty Mackay, Amak Mahmoodian, Trent Parke, Sarker Protick and Hashem Shakeri. Each artist addresses a world in constant motion where social, political and environmental conditions are ever-evolving.

Describing the programme, festival director Alejandro Acin added: “I believe in photography as a tool to experience the world anew. In a time of multiple crises, we need photography more than ever. I want the festival to be a space full of nuanced and unexpected stories that foster greater understanding of our shared world.”

The festival has an international focus but is grounded in the city of Bristol. For this edition, alongside the exhibition programme, the festival is collaborating with local residents and port workers from Avonmouth to create a community archive, accompanied by a programme of creative activities. The festival, in collaboration with Prison Education, will present The Prison Mobile Library, an educational photography project across three sites in the South West of England.

The festival opening week will take place between Wednesday 16th – Sunday 20th October. The opening week will include reception events and artist talks across the city. Following this, all exhibitions will remain open for a duration of 1-3 months. The full lineup of exhibiting artists will be released in July 2024.

Participating artists

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah

Georgian House Museum residency

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanya— known for her work examining the relationship between photography and memory, particularly in relation to her own family history— will be in residence at the Georgian House Museum, creating a new body of work relating to the building’s colonial history.

Kirsty Mackay

The Magic Money Tree

Bristol-based photographer Kirsty Mackay has worked collaboratively with groups and individuals from across England to explore the impact of the cost-of-living crisis and what poverty looks like in the world’s 6th richest economy.

Amak Mahmoodian

120 minutes

17 Midland Road

Premiering as part of the festival — in collaboration with Multistory — Bristol-based artist Amak Mahmoodian’s new project uses images, poems, archives and video to explore the dreams experienced by those in exile. The work was produced collaboratively with communities of refugees and asylum seekers across the UK.

Trent Parke

Monument

Martin Parr Foundation

This dystopian project, to be exhibited outside Australia for the first time, extends the metaphor of the moth drawn to a flame to city life and beyond. Photographs taken throughout Parke’s career are edited to create a vision of humanity engrossed by and drawn to an inescapable light.

Sarker Protick

Bangladeshi artist Sarkar Protick has been commissioned by the festival to produce his first solo exhibition in the UK. Bringing together multiple bodies of his work incorporating photography, video and sound, the exhibition will draw upon the history of and contemplate the ever-evolving story of Bangladesh.

Hashem Shakeri

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

Iranian visual artist Shakeri has been documenting daily life in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of British and American military forces and the consequent arrival to power of the Taliban. This work will be shown in the UK for the first time as part of the festival and accompanied by an engagement programme in collaboration with the Afghan community in Bristol.

Notes for Editors

Bristol Photo Festival is an international biennial of contemporary photography. The first edition in 2021 drew 200,000 visitors, with 18 exhibitions staged across the city’s museums, galleries and independent spaces.

As an organisation, we believe in the power of photography as a tool to experience the world anew. Our mission is to present nuanced and unexpected stories that foster greater understanding of shared pasts, presents and futures. Our work is internationally-focussed yet locally grounded, built from the urgencies of our city and its inhabitants. As a platform, we support artists to experiment, creating work that breaks with convention, exploring the possibilities of photography as a political tool today.

Second Edition Announcement

Posted on April 11, 2024April 15, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

Bristol Photo Festival 2nd edition – The World A Wave – first press release

Participating artists

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah

Georgian House Museum residency

Kirsty Mackay

The Magic Money Tree

Amak Mahmoodian

120 minutes

17 Midland Road

Trent Parke

Monument

Martin Parr Foundation

Sarker Protick

Hashem Shakeri

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

Notes for Editors

BOP Bookfair

Posted on September 9, 2024September 20, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

BOP – Books on Photography – is the annual photobook festival from Martin Parr Foundation and The Royal Photographic Society, this year in collaboration with Bristol Photo Festival. The festival brings together a wide-ranging group of photobook publishers, artist talks, exhibitions, book signings, events, street food, coffee and beer.

Entry to the festival is FREE, artist talks will be ticketed at £6 each or £4 for members and students. Booking for the BOP 24 programme of artist talks is now live.

And link to tickets here – https://bopbristol.org/talks

The bookfair is produced in collaboration with:

Monument by Trent Parke

Posted on April 17, 2024June 7, 2025 by BPFTest_Admin

In Monument, Trent Parke brings together images produced over a 25 year period on the streets of Sydney and Adelaide, Australia. Upon moving to Sydney from a small Australian country town, Parke’s first impression was of the sheer volume of people. At rush hour he would watch as the city’s workers moved in mass, walking the great conveyor belt of life. The more Parke photographed the rush hour, the more he was drawn to the light, following the sun as it shifted from one street corner to another, all the while trying to make sense of the endless procession in front of him. Monument stands as an elegy to time, to the late light of city streets and to the movement of people, as well as to the circling of moths as night falls.

“At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small space-ships caught in a tractor beam. An electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small space craft colliding with the blazing sun.” – Trent Parke

About Trent Parke:

Trent Parke was born in 1971 and raised in Newcastle, New South Wales. He began taking pictures as a child, using his mother’s Pentax Spotmatic camera and the family laundry room as a darkroom. He started his career in Photojournalism, becoming the first Australian member of Magnum Photos in 2007. Today Parke is known for his impressionistic, long-form projects that offer a portrait of contemporary Australia; from southern outback to crowded beaches and city streets. While rooted in the documentary tradition, Parke bridges the gaps between reality and fiction, exploring themes of identity, place, community and family life.

Parke’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in major institutional collections, including: the National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Art Gallery of South Australia. He has published seven books, including: Dream/Life (1999), The Seventh Wave (with Narelle Autio, 2000), Minutes to Midnight (2013), The Christmas Tree Bucket (2014), Crimson Line (2020), Cue the Sun (2022) and Monument (2023). He is the recipient of 3 World Press Photo Awards alongside the W. Eugene Smith grant for humanistic photography.

In collaboration:

The Magic Money Tree by Kirsty Mackay

Posted on April 9, 2024June 7, 2025 by BPFTest_Admin

Kirsty Mackay has been working collaboratively with communities across England, documenting the impact of the cost-of-living crisis and the realities of poverty in the world’s 6th largest economy. The resulting project looks at how systematic inequality is manifested via government policy, access to resources, geographies of exclusion, and multigenerational experiences of trauma.

The Magic Money Tree is produced in collaboration with New Art Gallery Walsall (2024). A publication of the work is forthcoming with Bluecoat Press.

About Kirsty Mackay

Born in Glasgow and based in Bristol, Kirsty Mackay is a photographic artist, educator, activist and filmmaker. Her research-led documentary practice examines issues of gender, class and discrimination. Her last book, The Fish That Never Swam (2021) was an elegy to her hometown of Glasgow, and the fallout of 1970s housing developments that led to the fragmentation of working-class communities and neighbourhoods.

Her work has been exhibited both nationally & internationally, including in the recent survey exhibition Facing Britain (2022, international touring) alongside works by Martin Parr, Anna Fox & David Hurn.

In collaboration with:

Supported by:

The Prison Mobile Library

Posted on September 4, 2024September 4, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

Supporting incarcerated people to develop and publish first-person stories, using photography and creative writing.

While every prison contains a library, how many of the books have been written by authors with direct experience of incarceration? What would it mean to create a library of books created by those imprisoned, speaking directly to those facing the same challenges?

The Prison Mobile Library is a collaboration between IC Visual Lab, Bristol Photo Festival and Weston College. Through a series of workshops, we are inviting imprisoned individuals across three prisons (HMP Bristol, Dartmoor & Exeter) to create new stories, using photography and creative writing. The results will be published, available from participating prison libraries, and displayed as part of the festival (details to be announced Summer 2024).

This project is supported by:

All That Flows Comes To Rest

Posted on September 4, 2024September 9, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

Exploring the past, present and future of Avonmouth, Bristol’s industrial port community.

The village of Avonmouth lies where the river Avon meets the Severn Estuary. It has thus served as a historic entrance to the city of Bristol, a place through which all ships passed on their way to the centre of the city. The port of Avonmouth grew rapidly in the early 20th century, a place where larger ships could unload, avoiding the sometimes treacherous journey up the river Avon to central Bristol. At its height, the port of Avonmouth supported approximately 5000 jobs, however the invention of container ships led to a rapid decline in the number of dockworkers required.

Today, the port is a successful operation, receiving goods from across the world. However, few residents of Bristol travel to Avonmouth, seeing it solely as a site of industrial work. This belies the fact that Avonmouth is a place that many call home; an intergenerational and multicultural community that contains myriad stories that speak to the changing nature of place, labour and globalisation.

In collaboration with Avonmouth Community Centre and the Bristol Port Company, we are building a resident-led community archive, collecting materials that speak to the contemporary history of Avonmouth. We will also be organising a series of micro-commissions, supporting artists to work with local residents, telling the story of Avonmouth today.

For the festival, we will organise a weekend of events, sharing the outcomes of our work in Avonmouth. Details will be announced Summer 2024.

The title All That Flows Comes To Rest is inspired by the work of artist Allan Sekula, creator of The Dockers’ Museum, a vast collection of artefacts that form an image of the world from the perspective of maritime labourer; the one who is always standing on the threshold between land and sea.

This project is supported by:

Project in collaboration with:

Project supported by:

School of Movements

Posted on April 9, 2024September 4, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

Collaborative storytelling with newly arrived communities.

The School of Movements is a pilot project led by Bristol Photo Festival & IC Visual Lab in collaboration with Bridges for Communities, a local organisation connecting people of different cultures and faiths, with a focus on those who are newly arrived in the city. Together we will establish a participatory photography programme that explores themes of movement, place and belonging. This will include workshops led by both artists and festival staff, alongside trips across the city. This programme will take place throughout the festival, with outcomes made visible as and when it feels right to begin sharing the work.

Project in collaboration with:

Project supported by:

Weaving Narratives

Posted on April 9, 2024August 27, 2024 by BPFTest_Admin

Stitching as a form of storytelling, with artists Nilupa Yasmin & Jessa Fairbrother.

Co-stitch is a city-wide research project led by the Brigstow Institute (University of Bristol). The project brings researchers and community groups together, exploring communal stitching (embroidery, quilting, mending) as a form of storytelling.

In collaboration with Brigstow Institute, we will commission two photographic artists, Nilupa Yasmin and Jessa Fairbrother, who both have a long-standing relationship to textile making. The artists will each create a new collaborative project, working with community groups across the city, with a particular focus on diasporic communities who have arrived in Bristol seeking refuge. The outcomes of these commissions will be displayed as part of the festival.

The Artists:

Nilupa Yasmin is an award-winning artist and educator, who often produces work collaboratively with others. Her work explores ideals and traditions that are close to home, often drawing upon her own British-Bangladeshi culture and heritage. Her work is included in many public collections including: the Government Art Collection, The New Art Gallery Walsall and Birmingham Museums Collection. She is a Lecturer in Photography at Coventry University and a studio holder at Grand Union, Birmingham.

Jessa Fairbrother is a British artist based in Bristol, UK. Often starting with the theme of the body, her work encompasses photography, performance and stitch. The artist book of her work ‘Conversations with my mother’ is held in collections at Tate Britain, the V&A, London and The Museum of Fine Art, Houston. Her work is also held in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.

These commissions are produced in collaboration with: