Festival summary

Thank you for the 22nd edition of Fotofestiwal. 10 festival days, 24 openings, 46 accompanying events in 23 locations are behind us. Lodz was visited by more than 700 people from the national and international industry and over 20,000 viewers.

Hope was the theme of this year’s curated exhibitions, but also the feeling that gave us – as every year – the motivation to organize the next edition of the festival. What did the audience like and what events inspired us to make further changes and activities?

Certainly it was the international curatorial and artistic cooperation. Lodz once again became a temporary home for Minsk Month of Photography and Odesa Photo Days, which could not take place in Belarus and Ukraine. The partner festivals prepared impressive, cross-sectional exhibitions in the OFF Piotrkowska space. The exhibition Transition State, curated by Kateryna Radchenko, was a summary of the social and political changes and protest activities that have taken place in Ukraine, Georgia, Iran, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan over the past 30 years and was one of the most discussed parts of the festival, with The Washington Post [>>read here] writing about the projects on display, bringing photography and the political situation of often marginalized countries to the attention of a wider audience.

A central part of the Hope Program, the projects selected by curator Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo, dedicated to communities changing reality in South America, were among the most popular with the audience, and the Oro Verde project, among others, was featured on the cover of the prestigious newspaper The British Journal of Photography. This section also included two group exhibitions, In Your Hands and On the Verge.

There was also the fifth edition of our democratic and inclusive Photo-Match: A Completely Different Portfolio Review, where 50 curators and artists from around the world met to exchange experiences and ideas. This year’s visiting experts included journalists from The Zeit or Camera Austria, as well as representatives from Copenhagen Photo Festival and Photo Espana or the prestigious Fotogalerie Wien.

As part of our tour of Lodz, we also invited you to new locations: the Biedermann Factory hosted a slide show of Talent Futures, including the Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? project by Marysia Myanovska, which was widely recognized on the international scene this year, PhotoNews magazine selected a photo from it for the cover of its June issue, and we selected it for this year’s Photo Festival key visuals.

We hope that once again we managed to create a multimedia event that became an excuse for meetings and creative conversations – not only about photography, but also about the modern world and ourselves.

See you next year!

photography from Film School’s materials