For the first time, the London International Documentary Festival will include this year (26 April-8 May) documentary photography in its program. Together with two 5-day intensive Documentary Photography workshops organized in collaboration with Magnum Photos, the Festival is organizing two photography exhibitions and a talk on new approaches to humanitarian visual communication in association with WaterAid
The two Documentary Photography workshops will be lead by internationally Magnum photographers Donovan Wylie and Olivia Arthur. Donovan’s workshop will concentrate on documenting urban spaces and their populations. Olivia’s women-only workshop “will give ten female photographers the chance to develop their individual visual language and really boost their portfolio in this heavily male dominated industry”.
As part of the festival, the photographer Toby Smith is exhibiting 44 photographs at the Barbican Mezzanine. Toby Smith has carried out a project to document illegal deforestation in Madagascar. He first identified the logging areas before documenting the activity deep within UNESCO protected rainforests. The project has now been published in GEO magazine (Germany) after being embargoed as evidence in international courts. Admission is free. You can see the full Madagascar series by T. Smith here.
- © Toby Smith/Reportage by Getty Images
Salt Water Tears, the second exhibition at the LIDF, presents the work of photographer Munem Wasif which shows the Satkhira region of south-east Bangladesh. As a result of climate change and unplanned shrimp farming this region experiences erratic rainfall and a steady increase in the salinity of the water table, making safe water increasingly scarce. Changes in the environment now mean that villagers are forced to venture deeper into the Sunderbans forest to make their living and search for water, resulting in an increase in people killed by Bengal tigers. These images were made for international NGO WaterAid and they are exhibited at the Free World Centre. Admission is free.
- © Munem Wasif, courtesy of Prix Pictet 2008
The festival will organize on the 26th April a talk, Developing the photographic: new approaches to humanitarian visual communication, which “will outline new approaches to communicating humanitarian issues using photography”. The speakers, Abbye Trailer-Smith (photographer), Emma Boyd (co-ordinator at Autograph ABP) and Jessica Crombie (picture- editor at Water Aid) “will outline three models that photographers and artists are using to communicate issues”.
Abbye will be showing her work ‘Still Human, Still Here’, made in collaboration with Amnesty International. With this multimedia piece Abbye “has used still imagery and testimony to create an extremely effective piece of communication for use by the NGO across different medias”.
Emma “will look at how visual artists are working with photography to make issue based artworks for gallery spaces”. Some of the artists Emma will be looking at include Alfredo Jaar, Omer Fast, and Marcelo Brodski. Jessica will be showing the work of Ursula Biermann and “will be discussing how NGOs can work with artists to create tools for more in-depth communication with supporters”. Admission is free but booking is required: bookings@freewordonline.com. Free World Centre, Monday 26th April 2010, 18:30 pm
Filed under: Photography, Training | Tagged: Asia, Bangladesh, conference, East Africa, environment, exhibition, Madagascar, photo agency, photographers, South Asia | Leave a Comment »
The Soul of the New Machine
