FotoFest Biennial 2022 Announces ‘If I Had a Hammer’ Theme
America's leading photography festival will explore the ways images can be used both to build and set back social movements.
Chow and Lin, Untitled from the series I want to bring you around the world. I can't (2020–2022). Courtesy of the artists.
Houston photography festival FotoFest has announced the concept for its 19th edition, entitled If I Had a Hammer, which takes place from 24 September to 6 November.
The FotoFest Biennial 2022 will showcase the ways photographers attempt to distill the politics, thoughts, and feelings that motivate social and cultural movements.
FotoFest 2022 is being co-curated by FotoFest's associate curator and director of publishing Max Fields and executive director Steven Evans, with guest curator Amy Sadao, former director of ICA Philadelphia.
Fields and Evans offer the social media response to the murder of George Floyd as an example of the ways images can both support and derail social movements. Many supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement changed their profile pictures to a solid black square in solidarity, they say, but the gesture 'made accessing news and information quite difficult for those who were looking to find information pertaining to mobilisation and protest efforts happening in their city.'
In support of their announcement of the upcoming biennial's theme, FotoFest shared Chow and Lin's photograph of the scaled down World Trade Center at the Beijing World Park, pictured top.
Fields and Evans said the photo is 'a reminder that more and more we are traveling and experiencing the world through circulated or recirculated images', a trend that only accelerated due to travel restrictions imposed to combat the pandemic. The destruction of the real Twin Towers on 9/11 was experienced worldwide via images broadcast on TV and published on the front pages of newspapers, leading to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The biennial will also include the presentation of African Cosmologies: Redux, an adaptation of FotoFest's postponed 2020 exhibition, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other. The section is curated by Mark Sealy, director of British photographic arts agency Autography ABP, previously known as the Association of Black Photographers.
'The exhibition will feature many of the artists that were featured in the previous iteration of the exhibition, with the exception of some works that were committed to exhibitions taking place this year,' said Fields and Evans. 'In some instances, this exhibition will feature new or different works that were on view in 2020.'
Speaking to Ocula Magazine in 2020, Sealy said, 'Africa is everywhere, and what we need to do is recognise its influence and its complexities across the globe, from China and the U.S.A., to the Caribbean and Europe, along with the multiplicities of African-ness across the continent itself.'
'The idea was to put a sign in the ground in the photographic landscape, not through geography but through the contemporary meaning of Africa, encompassing liberation struggles, music, cultural rhythms, diaspora, and writing,' he said.
Another component of FotoFest 2022 is the exhibition Ten by Ten: Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2020–21, which features artists nominated on the strength of the work they presented during the 2020–21 FotoFest International Meeting Place Portfolio Review programmes. Meeting Place 2020 saw 152 photographers gather in Houston, while 87 participated via Zoom in March 2021.
This year's biennial is the first since co-founder Frederick C. Baldwin died on 15 December 2021 aged 92. Baldwin, an esteemed photographer of the Civil Rights movement, founded FotoFest with his wife Wendy Watriss, a fellow photojournalist, in 1986.
FotoFest will take place at Houston's Sawyer Yards and sites across the city. —[O]
