2012 Guernsey Photography Festival channelling good photography

2012 Guernsey Photography Festival channelling good photography Held from 24 May - 22 June this year, the Guernsey Photography Festival is now in its third year and remains a promising presence on the European photography festival circuit. "What I see, what I encounter, is completely open," he says. The colour and black-and-white images looked great in the space, and the mosaic-like grid of colour images on the far wall was a particular highlight for me. With few dedicated exhibition spaces on the island the challenge for the organisers is to find and transform suitable spaces, with the festival exhibiting work both indoors in disused shops and outside in the gardens of Priaulx Library and Market Square. Another successful exhibition was by Agence VU's Bruno Boudjelal, collecting images from 1993 on documenting his journeys to his father's native Algeria. I want to produce a festival that is as honest as possible and of the highest quality. In many of the images people are photographed uncomfortably close, often in motion with blurred faces, creating a highly charged and moving body of work. The Shipping Forecast is more traditional, comprising around 25 black-and-white images that were beautifully framed and presented at Guernsey Museum and Art Gallery complete with Radio 4 soundbites. "There are no boundaries. There were seven big name photographers this year including Mark Power, whose two exhibitions The Shipping Forecast and The Sound of Two Songs were exhibited together for the first time and, for me, the standouts of the festival. The Sound of Two Songs was shot in Poland over a five-year period, and is a poetic and personal response to the landscapes and people Power encountered. By contrast Ricardo Cases' project Paloma Al Air, which depicts the Spanish practice of pigeon racing, was a riot of colour. Dewi Lewis published the book last year, and he was also on hand to give an insightful talk about the photography publishing industry. The exhibition was topped off by another great sea view across Candie Gardens on leaving the museum and there was a nod to the Queen's Jubilee with a sequence of prints along a nearby footpath showing the Queen on various visits to Guernsey through the years. " The brooding black-and-white images commanded attention and the central location meant many people were able to stop and take a look; on the downside they seemed a little out of place in the colourful market place. "My aim is to show different styles of photography presented in interesting ways. French-Slovenian photographer Klavdij Sluban's work was shown in centre of the Market Square. Cases was also in Guernsey to talk about his work, showing images from another series on hunting in Spain alongside presentations by Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Ivor Prickett at the Princess Royal Centre for Performing Arts on 26 May. Ivor Prickett, who is exhibiting Days of Anger, a series of images taken during the last days of President Mubarak, also gave an interesting presentation. Anastasia Taylor-Lind showed a brilliant slideshow the same evening, produced by Panos' Anna Stevens, helped place her Siberian Supermodels series in context, something I felt was missing from her exhibition at Liberation Monument in St Peter Port. What is important is to create your own path. 2012 Guernsey Photography Festival channelling good photography Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 10/06/2012