Mar 28 at 7 PM
UK Stari grad
Kapetan Mišina 6a, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
It is our pleasure to welcome you to Belgrade Photo Month 2019, the 4th edition of the Festival, our child that keeps growing.
As we like to say, this festival belongs to us and to you; it is a festival for people from Belgrade and Serbia, but also a festival for photography enthusiasts from every corner of the world who want to enjoy it, in person or online.
Many things have changed since we started the festival in 2016, from the team members to the very vision of the festival, from its visibility in the media to the different kinds of support we have received from both volunteers and institutions.
From one year to the next, we feel an increasing obligation to continue improving the quality of the festival, as well as our outreach, and this is not an easy task. We are aware that with last year’s festival we raised the bar high in terms of the quality of work exhibited, and despite the extremely challenging situation in
Serbia concerning financial support for cultural manifestations and culture in general, we will persevere in our endeavours to make the festival even more special. Through our imagination and creativity, we will transform these challenges into concrete objectives to continue promoting photography in Serbia and Serbian photographers to international audiences. For us, 2019 will be a year of important transition.
Thank you all on behalf of the entire Belgrade Photo Month team. I would also like to thank all participants and visitors; all partners who offered exhibition or presentation spaces; all our volunteers, sponsors and organisations who have helped us to make this dream possible.
We look forward to welcoming you back to Belgrade in 2020.
David Pujado
•NEW TALENTS 2019•
THE CHANGE IS INFORMATIVE, THE USUAL IS USELESS.
VILÉM FLUSSER, TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Nowadays, photographic media is available everywhere and enables its users to use it in many different ways – with artistic aspirations or without them. Regardless of the authors’ tendencies and aspirations, in photographic results, one can find quality that highlights a specific photo or a group of photos compared to all of the others that fit into the matrix of producing photographs. Production matrix make photos redundant, matrix makes
instruments out of photos and help build clichés that structure our vision of reality, condition our interactions and control our boundaries. What is that specific mean we could name artistic in the domain of modern photographic practice? I would say that it would be recognising a matrix that is embodied in the media, the power of art to skin the context in which, conspiratively, photographic media takes part and show us roles of all of the actors in a clear light and constellation relations within our broader social framework. This
is why the winners of this year’s competition New Talents 2019 contribute to understanding specific topics that are globally and generally important: ecological, political, private and public relations, themes of sexuality. It is noticeable that young generations understand the power of photography to critically indicate problems of our modern age, with a precise knowledge about genre potentials and forms of photographic expressions in showing the attitude and analysing social phenomena. However, a large number of applications give testimony to a kind of limitation of media usage to the sentiment of recording disappearing worlds, adding more to the scales that incline more towards death and less towards life, they incline towards death, yet at the same time wrapped in beauty and innocence. The world today is far from being innocent and it is more
in the situation of having no way out as such. This world is shown through photography in order to annihilate the power of individuals and entire collectives, citizens and entire social systems, in distribution of images through media, through dissemination of fluid media through social networks, where art should actually
represent a needle permanently piercing that virtual balloon. No matter that the balloon is renewed at an incredible speed, the blade of art is renewed with the same progression.
Maida Gruden
This is the 4th edition of our New Talents Contest, supported once again by Nikon Serbia, who have been with us since the 1st edition of the festival.
As with previous years, we have endeavoured to select a very eclectic jury team with 4 members: Marina Paulenka – Founder and Artistic Director at Organ Vida – International Photography Festival, Miroslav Karić – Art Historian, Maida Gruden – Visual Arts Programme Editor at Student’s City Cultural Center, Belgrade and Evita Goze – Writer, Curator, Project Manager at ISSP Gallery.
They had the very difficult task of selecting the best 3 projects from the 94 proposals that met the conditions to be part of the contest.
There was almost an equal amount of women and men submitting
proposals, with applications arriving from 40 different countries. The
countries with the highest amount of proposals were Serbia (20%), Spain (7%), Brasil, USA and India (5 %).
GRAIN will prepare a special issue featuring the work of the 10
finalists.
Thank you to Embassy of the Netherlands in Serbia and in Montenegro for their support.
The exhibition will include the projects:
Debbie Schoone – How to farm fish
Julian M Johnson – Marfan Syndrome
Svertilov Nikita – Custom pleasure
Sebastian Welles – Utopia
Instagram was created almost nine years ago, by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and was developed for use with Apple devices. Within the first two months of launching, Instagram had attracted two million users and that figure reached ten million by the end of the 1st year. Seven years ago in the month of April, Instagram became available on Android phones and was downloaded one million times in the first 24 hours. By September 2017 it had 800 million registered users.
Instagram started out as a homage to Kodak Instant and Polaroid with its particular square format 1:1 and a selection of filters that could be applied to the images. In 2015 Instagram allowed photographs to also be uploaded in rectangular form.
The photo with the most likes ever on Instagram is a photo of an egg posted by @world_record_egg in January, 2019 and has received over 53.2 million likes!
Three years ago the Belgrade Photo Month team decided to do an open call competition for Instagram users. The applications for this open call have increased enormously year by year, with the 2019 call receiving 1,100 entries.
The Belgrade Photo Month team and some BPM contributors did a blind selection of all the entries and the best entries form the BPM Instagram exhibition 2019.
