My Highlights from the Unseen Photo Festival in Amsterdam
I spent three days in Amsterdam for the fourth annual Unseen Photo Festival, a fair and festival dedicated to premiering, promoting, and rewarding emerging photographers. It was awesome. The entire photography community in Amsterdam participated in the event, breaking the fair out of a single, contained space. Here are some of my favorites from the event.
Erwan Moreré
I fell in love with Moreré’s photographs of swimmers underwater. Bodies are abstractions floating in an abyss through a high-contrast, high-grain treatment reminiscent of incipient processes in photography. Work from a project where Moreré travelled from Malaysia to Estonia was also on view, and like his swimmers, it is hypnotizing in its minimalism and process.
Magazines: Off the Wall + Der Greif
OFF the Wall is a fantastic book run by Anna-Alix Koffi, who admits the name of the publication was inspired by Michael Jackson’s famous song. The magazine is beautifully printed three times a year and combines well- established vintage work with that of newcomers.
Unlike the tactile presentation of OFF the Wall, German publication Der Greif is a digital, crowd-sourced magazine that prints a single physical issue once a year. The publication calls on its community for imagery, receiving thousands of reader-submitted photos. They edit down submissions to select a small amount of images for the print edition with extended galleries focusing on specific artists available online.
Lara Gasparotto
I gravitated towards documentary photography at the festival, and rediscovered the work of Belgium photographer Lara Gasparotto. I found Gasparotto a few years back in David Alan Harvey’s burn magazine. Her vision of young adulthood is like a darker, quieter Ryan McGinley (see: The Kids are Alright). Unlike McGinley’s subjects, Gasparotto’s friends seem like they are having less fun — you want to take them home and wrap them in a blanket and tell them everything is going to be ok.
1000 Photos
I really enjoyed the events at the fair that combine amateur work with professional photography, stripping away the pretense of loving something based on byline. 1000 Photos was an exhibition/party/sale of contributed images benefiting charity. The doors opened at 8pm and attendees flooded in, hoping to snag prints for an affordable 10 euros. I spotted the surreal work by Joelle de Vries of a silhouetted woman in a burka swinging in an idyllic landscape, and soon thereafter the abstract, grainy still life of Nienke Steinitz-Renia and the beautiful high-contrast nude from Marcia Van Oers.
Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Weather Man
Arbugaeva’s series Weatherman captures a profoundly isolated man, Vyacheslav Korotki, a trained meteorologist studying temperatures and weather patterns in the arctic. His extreme isolation is emphasized by Arbugaeva’s photography — the light is surreal, alluding to to the lack of electricity and community. Her smiling portrait of Korotki breaks our assumptions about the scientist — he isn’t particularly lonely. As Arbugaeva so eloquently says in the New Yorker, “I came with the idea of a lonely hermit who ran away from the world because of some heavy drama, but it wasn’t true. He doesn’t get lonely at all. He kind of disappears into tundra, into the snowstorms. He doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.”
Pride Photo Award
The Pride Award is an international contest and exhibition for photography about sexual and gender diversity. The exhibition was held in a church. For an institution that has been traditionally intolerant of non-normative sexual and gender identities, it was bold to install a show in its heart. All the work in this collection breaks traditional stereotypes of the LGBT community and gender norms, showcasing men physically traumatized by breast cancer or a happy 11-year-old trans girl. Tom, the show attendant, mentioned visitors who were there specifically to see the church had varied reactions — some were horrified, some were compelled. “But really, you can’t say that a few of the inhabitants of the tombs below weren’t at one time oppressed for breaking sexual or gender rules. And honestly — walk outside.” Tom was right, the red light district is just outside the church.
Life In Stills
Life in Stills a touching documentary about 97-year-old Miriam and her grandson Ben painstakingly trying to save an Israeli institution from its demise. The family-owned PhotoHouse is an archive, store, and studio featuring negatives and prints from the ’30s till the ’60s, documenting Tel Aviv’s transformation. Due to construction and rezoning, the film documents the attempt to save the building from demise. It’s a touching story about family and the preservation of visual history.
Rocks? Rocks.
Unseen’s trend was all about rocks. Perhaps work was inspired by Regine Peterson’s look at communities affected by falling meteorites, but there was legitimately a lot of work focusing on these things. Regardless, the images were beautiful.
