15 May—31 May 2015
Liverpool International Photography Festival
LOOK/15: Exchange is a festival that celebrates the dialogue between three subjects often overlooked in photography: women, migration and memory.
LOOK is a dynamic festival, delivered biennially, celebrating every facet of photographic practice, from its early rise to tomorrow’s technologies, local and international. Celebrating the rich democracy of the form through to its high art and scientific capabilities, audiences are invited to engage, view and take part in exhibitions and activities designed to improve access to the arts, develop skills and encourage cultural understanding, in environments that allow people to view and create work in one of the world’s most photogenic, international cities.
LOOK/15 is the north’s premier Photographic Festival, which in 2013 delivered engaging events and mass-participation to over 325,000 people. Liverpool’s history has been - and continues to be - much associated with exchange; whether physical, cultural, economic or educational. Thus “EXCHANGE” will explore these interchanges through a series of diverse exhibitions and events that examine migrations, trade, travel and transport. The theme couldn’t be timelier; underpinning the festival is Cunard’s 175th anniversary, attracting Three Queens of the sea to the Mersey, creating a visual spectacular that links the river to the ocean, the city with its transatlantic neighbours and ultimately, Liverpudlians with the world.
FESTIVAL OVERVIEW
LOOK are pleased to welcome you to the Liverpool International Photography Festival’s third edition, LOOK/15: Exchange. This festival sees LOOK working in close partnership with the cultural venues of the city to develop an exhibition led programme, enhanced by a diverse array of activities, which add depth to the subjects investigated and encourage your engagement. In curating an events series to compliment the exhibitions chosen by these world class venues, LOOK have approached this year’s festival with the express intention of augmenting the ideas explored in the exhibits with conversation, illustrated talks and practical sessions, allowing audiences – new and experienced – to engage, learn and create.
In developing a bespoke events series, LOOK has unveiled a set of commonalities that cross-cut the exhibitions on offer, including stories of migrations and diversity; the expressive competencies and varied interests of females who use photography and the impact of archive on memory, memory development and the retelling of history. We hope you will explore these stories with us and enjoy the way they intermingle across the exhibitions and histories within.
As with previous festivals, LOOK/15 draws from pools of emerging, mid-career and established artists and practitioners; from our doorstep and from far further afield. LOOK/15 will showcase work in new lights, deliver new commissions and display work not previously seen in the city - or sometimes - anywhere else before.
There are works and events from, about or by Xavier Ribas and Ignacio Acosta (Chile), Jona Frank (USA), Tony Mallon, Bryn Davies, Steward Ellett (all Liverpool, UK), B3 Media (UK), Tricia Porter (UK), Ian Wiblin and Anthea Kennedy (UK), Marco Iuliano (Italy)… and many other people, of the city and beyond.
Liverpool’s status as an international city – following its recognition as a Capital of Culture – is indisputable, but the juxtaposition of local and global is always at play. Considering the individual dock workers who helped to construct the Three Queens (who will once again dominate the city’s shoreline) and the monumental buildings found here, reminds us of stark contrast, whilst the paradox of small and large, male and female, individual and mass or domestic and migrant all vie for recognition.
Likewise, our venues range from the oldest building in the city to some of the newest, displaying history shows alongside contemporary practice. They are vital to the success of LOOK/15 and essential to the city’s cultural brilliance. Collectively, they represent Liverpool as an independent and forward thinking city, of the UK, but subtly independent. They simultaneously remind us that we are standing in a global port full of international exchanges that link us to the rest of the world. We hope you will enjoy visiting them and sharing in experiences that will help to build LOOK/15 in to one of the UK’s premier photographic festivals.
NOTE ON THE WORKING TITLE
“EXCHANGE” is the working title for LOOK/15. We will continue to work on this title, alongside the vision outlined above, but it is subject to change according to the thematic depths and artistic motivations of the supporting programme.
EXHIBITION & THEMATIC OVERVIEW
LOOK/15 is the north’s premier photographic festival and one of only a handful in the UK, delivering exhibitions, engaging events and mass-participation activities to hundreds of thousands of people. Now in its fourth biennial season, LOOK/15 is delivered in partnership with Liverpool’s world-class cultural venues and teams. It showcases local and international artists, platforming talent from around the world, in a way that is resonant for a global city.
Liverpool’s history has been - and continues to be - much associated with exchange; whether materials-based, physical, cultural, sociological, trending, economic or political. Thus EXCHANGE will explore these interchanges via a series of diverse exhibitions and events that examine point vs counter-point; local vs international; trade, travel and tourism; internal vs external and domestic vs alien. The theme couldn’t be more timely…
Coinciding with LOOK/15 is Cunard’s 175th anniversary. To celebrate, we will be visited by three famous and well-travelled women. The Queens - Mary, Elizabeth and Victoria - will gather in a spectacle that links the Mersey to the ocean; the city with her transatlantic neighbours and, ultimately, Liverpudlians with the world.
These grande dames of the sea represent not only distances crossed in time and space, but the movement of thoughts, peoples, materials and histories. They represent ideological structures and powerful, boundary-crossing endeavour. Between them they have moved dignitaries and paupers; treasures and luggage; materials and lives around the world, in a set of exchanges that represent contemporary life’s flux.
EXCHANGE will explore three key topics and the regular confluences between them:
1. MIGRATION
Migration regularly refers to people, but LOOK/15 explores the migration of communities, culture, materials, philosophies and stories, told through portraits and the impact of individuals and groups on environments and landscapes.
2. WOMEN & PHOTOGRAPHY
Often the subject of the lens and historically belittled as the domestic maintainer of family ‘keepsake’ images, women are still under-represented in the photographic industry. LOOK/15 platforms female photography from today and yesteryear, offering glimpses in to the artistic pursuits and political passions of women.
3. MEMORY
Photography is often an aide-mémoire by which people reflect on their history. It can also become the subject of ridicule post-factum and can take on new meaning in changing times. LOOK/15 platforms new tellings of old stories, wishes and passages and interrogates the ethics of (re)construction and archival exposition.
These themes interweave, correspond and discuss themselves simultaneously across the programme. As visitors travel through the exhibitions, they bring their histories with them, reflecting on their personal stories; photographers will explore collective memories and materials will be exchanged for and used to make photos. LOOK/15 asks individuals to consider their journey and what each looks like within it. How many exchanges will you make or encounter and where in the world – or time - will you take them?
*Based on LOOK/13’s figures
FURTHER READING
Under the umbrella of EXCHANGE, LOOK/15 explores three concurrent themes: migration, women and memory, often cross cutting the three.
EXCHANGE refers to the migration of people, ideas, culture, materials and philosophies, all of which play out in our global city. Using migration as the starting point, we see exhibits that explore the import, export and transportation of materials (Nitrates), people and culture (the Gypsy Lore Society, L8 Untold and Only in England) and challenging and changing philosophies (Brutal Exposure: The Congo; If Only it could Speak). Collectively, these exhibitions explore global topics that have affected our shores, our lives and our perceptions.
In spite of an 80:20 female:male ratio in photographic education, all too often it is reversed in industry practice. Through the exhibitions presented from Jona Frank (The Modern Kids), Helen Sear (I love you Daucus Carota), Tricia Porter (Liverpool Kids) and others, we take a look through the lenses used by women to see the world. We also engage contemporary artists working the field to showcase their work.
Memory often plays a strong role in photography as it reflects on our past and retells us our history. Storytelling has become a part of photography’s ouvre – however misrepresentative this may be of ‘fact’. In our exhibitions, we look at storytelling as a means of finding truth and various ways in which these can be read. Tricia Porter’s 1972-1974 shows Liverpool before the Thatcher years and well before Capital of Culture took hold of the city, although focussing on people, the collections helps to build a portrait of part of the city, which is picked up again by L8 Untold. Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin’s A View from our House draws on another city, but by doing so, offers an interpretation for all cities and the way we remember them.
LOOK/13
LOOK/13, the second edition of Liverpool’s international photography biennial, was launched on 17 May 2013. Our event-packed opening weekend kicked off a four-week programme of exhibitions, talks and tours, workshops, competitions and screenings. Most of the festival’s key exhibitions continued throughout the summer, while LOOK/13’s Parallel Programme, listed in full on the festival’s website, rounded up an impressive array of independent and fringe activities.
LOOK/13 presented work by emerging and established artists from Liverpool, the UK and beyond. It combined historical exhibitions with contemporary solo and group shows. Every exhibition in the core programme was produced specifically for the festival; the majority of work on display was new or was being show for the first time in the UK.
Liverpool offers the strongest collection of visual arts spaces of any regional city in the country. LOOK/13’s key sites included the Bluecoat (a visitor information hub for the festival), the Walker Art Gallery, Open Eye Gallery,Victoria Gallery & Museum and the Art & Design Academy. All are in the city centre, within easy walking distance of each other. The festival’s Parallel Programme could be found in a host of established and informal spaces, with a small number of sites outside Liverpool city centre in Everton, Runcorn and Chester.
LOOK/13: Who do you think you are?
The theme of LOOK/13 was summed up in the question ‘who do you think you are?’. The festival’s programme looked at what happens when we turn the camera on ourselves and others to create images of identity, subjectivity and the self.
The question is a vital one for photography, which is deployed in a multitude of ways to construct, explore and project such images. Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century the medium has expanded and evolved to assume a presence in every part of our lives, in ways that point to wider philosophical debates about human autonomy and the nature of the self. In recent years photographs have become enmeshed in our daily lives in ways that we are only beginning to understand.
The theme has a special resonance in Liverpool, which has long asserted for itself an identity that is proudly independent of its national context. Liverpudlians see themselves as different, and they see their home as a kind of city state. Perceived from the outside, the image of Liverpool has shifted in recent years but continues to provoke, fascinate and otherwise command the attention of those outside the city.
The programme of LOOK/13 offered a series of glimpses into current and historic photographic practice. Each venue produced a unique response to the central theme which was firmly rooted in its own circumstances and concerns. Our ambition was nonetheless to bind each individual element into a greater whole.
At the Bluecoat, Sander/Weegee: Selections from the Side Photographic Collection brought together two of the most celebrated and influential figures of twentieth century photography. August Sander attempted to produce a sociological portrait of pre-war German society in all its complexity; Weegee, a prolific newspaper photographer in New York projected a dark, phantasmagoric visage of the city that spanned more than three decades.
I exist (in some way), the Bluecoat’s second exhibition, featured the work of eleven photographers who explore constructions of personal and collective identity in the contemporary Arab world. Last but not least at the Bluecoat,Identity Documents was a smaller exhibition by Liverpool-based photographer Adam Lee, looking at what our bookshelves reveal and conceal about us.
The Walker also presented three exhibitions for LOOK/13. Double Take: Portraits from The Keith Medley Archive presented the work of a press and commercial photographer who worked on Merseyside from 1950 until the late 1980s. The exhibition focused on studio portraits made by exposing two halves of a single glass plate in close succession, an unusual technique maintained by Medley long after it was obsolete. The double portraits offer a fascinating glimpse of how each sitter performed for the camera; with the passage of time they have also acquired a distinctly uncanny quality.
Also at the Walker was an exhibition of early work by two of Merseyside’s most compelling chroniclers, Martin Parr and Tom Wood. Every Man and Woman is a Star focused on rarely-seen work from the late 1970s and 1980s, most of it made in Merseyside as both photographers were developing their highly distinctive and influential signature styles.
The Walker’s third exhibition for LOOK/13 was based on a new commission by Rankin. Alive: in the Face of Death presented portraits of people with terminal illnesses. The project was a major departure for Rankin, who is best known for his celebrity portraits and fashion work. To make this series, he collaborated with his subjects, enabling each of them to take control and create a unique image.
Themes of mortality also echoed through BLACKOUT, an international group exhibition at the Art & Design Academy’s Exhibition Research Centre. BLACKOUT examined the inner and outer boundaries of human subjectivity through the work of four contemporary artists, focusing on the unstable relationship between the viewer and (photographic) subject.
At the Victoria Gallery & Museum, Kurt Tong presented the first full realisation of his autobiographical project The Queen, the Chairman and I. Presenting his own photographs and writing alongside objects from the personal archives of his extended family, Tong tracks an extraordinary century of migrations and habitations. The artist was himself born in Hong Kong, but grew up in the UK and studied in Liverpool. The project grew out of his desire to talk to his young daughters about who they are and where they come from.
Two exhibitions at Open Eye Gallery reflected on identity as it is constructed and performed, and on the tensions that exist between the self and its representation. Charles Fréger’s The Wild and the Wise considers group identity, examining the codes of self-presentation that are woven into everyday life as well as those that are self-consciously performed. Eva Stenram, in her series Drape, presented subtly manipulated erotic photographs from the 1960s and 1970s, pointedly intervening between subject and viewer.
Wolstenholme Creative Space (in temporary residence at Drop the Dumbells gallery) presented Rob Bremner’s Liverpool, Unfinished, a previously unseen body of work that returned us to the surprisingly colourful streets of Liverpool in the second half of the 1980s. Picking up the thread a generation later, The Caravan Gallery documented the reality and surreality of life on the streets of present-day Merseyside in their exhibition Merseystyle at the Museum of Liverpool.
Who’s behind LOOK/13?
The festival’s delivery team was led by Director Patrick Henry and Festival Manager Harjeet Kaur.
LOOK/13’s programme was created in partnership with the city’s leading museums and galleries, alongside a range of national and international partners. The festival drew its strength primarily from its partners’ creativity, generosity, hard work and capacity for collaboration.
LOOK/13 would like to thank its contributing curators: Imogen Stidworthy (Art & Design Academy, Liverpool John Moores University), Mark Durden and Ken Grant (University of Wales, Newport), Moira Lindsay (Victoria Gallery & Museum), Sara-Jayne Parsons (the Bluecoat), Graeme Rigby (Side Gallery, Newcastle), Jim Stephenson (Miniclick), Simon Bainbridge (British Journal of Photography), Lorenzo Fusi (Open Eye Gallery), Caroline Smith and Priya Sharma (Wolstenholme Creative Space), Sandra Penketh, Pauline Rushton, Myra Brown and Charlotte Keenan (Walker Art Gallery), Sharon Brown (Museum of Liverpool),
Annie Lord (National Museums Liverpool).
LOOK has its roots in LOOK07, a season of events initiated by Redeye in Manchester in spring 2007. Later that year a group of North West-based photographers – all active members of Redeye – began work on plans for an international photography biennial in Liverpool.
LOOK/13 would like to extend special thanks to the following people:
Ceri Hand, Hannah Pierce, Rachel Goodsall, Laura Parker, Katie Lucas, Karen Newman, Thomas Dukes, Eleanor Suggett, Julia Garcia, Joanna Rowlands, Rhiannon Butlin, Rachael Bampton-Smith, Antony Hudek, Rachel Carr, Juan Cruz, Sandra Penketh, Dickie Felton, Paul Lowe, Mark Sealy, Fiona Rogers, Francesco Manacorda, Duke Street Espresso, Bold Street Coffee, Omar Kholief, Sophie Jung, Melody Beard, Daniel Cutmore, Jane Beardsworth, Stephen Snoddy, Andrew Thomas, Matt Biagetti, Benji Holroyd, Rachel Veniard, Emma Pettit and Stephanie Knox.
LOOK/13 would also like to thank festival interns Gemma Sands, Stephen Fallows, Alistair Blake, Sarah Brothers, and all the fantastic volunteers for their dedication and support.
