Putting the focus on art at Photography Oxford festival

You don’t take photographs, you receive them,” says Pentii Sammallahti, one of the exhibiting photographers participating in Oxford’s first festival of photography, which launches in venues across the city this Sunday.

Poised to become a biennial event, Photography Oxford is Oxford’s first international festival of photography, and will be launched by Ed Vaizey, the Minister of Culture, tomorrow.

This ambitious event will feature exhibitions in 20 venues across the city, and the exhibitions will be complemented by what sounds like a riveting programme of talks, debates, workshops, films and competitions. This exciting new festival is the brainchild of Oxford-based photojournalist Robin Laurance, whose aim is for Oxford to become a beacon on the world map of photography.

As photographs zap around cyberspace and are shared online, becoming viral faster than journalists can type or read their accompanying stories, the festival launches at a time when photography is playing an increasingly larger part in our everyday lives.

Boasting a programme packed with world-class photography and critical debate Photography Oxford will be Europe’s newest photography festival, and aims to make photography available to the widest possible audience in the regions.

Appropriate to the city it is set in, the festival aims to stimulate debate and discussion about the many vital issues that surround photography at the beginning of the 21st century, and also aspires to raise awareness and appreciation of the photographic arts to the level enjoyed by painting, sculpture and the other visual arts.

All very interesting, but why Oxford, I wondered. Mr Laurance said: “Henry Fox Talbot, Britain’s pioneer of the photographic process, made some important early images in Oxford during the 19th century. It’s time to celebrate the city’s links with the beginnings of an art form that has become ever present in all our lives.

“It’s a beautiful, walk-able city with exhibition spaces in lovely historic buildings. We intend Oxford to be the place where photography is not only celebrated but where it is debated, examined and challenged. We want to open people’s minds as well as their eyes to photography.”

Away from Modern Art Oxford, the city’s contemporary art scene always appears a little nervous about seeming too parochial, too ‘not London’. Despite the lack of affordable studio spaces in the city, Oxford is awash with creative practitioners, many of them photographers.

I have always been a firm believer that it’s important to put the early talent that exists on one’s doorstep on a platform alongside established internationally renowned talent. As such, I was disappointed not to spot the Laura Hill-Lines, Gareth Prices or Kazem Hakimis of Oxford listed among the participating artists.

That said, there has clearly been an exceptionally careful selection process at play judging by the standard of the participating photographers from the United States, Germany, New Zealand, France, Finland, Egypt, Italy and elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

As an art student interested in socio-political work I recall leafing through copies of the World Press Photo Exhibition books that documented, through visual storytelling, an eyewitness record of the world events from the previous year.

Consequently, I am very much looking forward to seeing the World Press Photo 2014 exhibition make its UK debut in Oxford Brookes University’s new exhibition space, Glass Tank, on Gipsy Lane.

The festival seems to lean towards photojournalism, and appears to include some particularly hard-hitting work, which is no bad thing. However, I did anticipate more of a balance between that and fine art photography. In the same breath, I shall add that I am very much looking forward to seeing the work of the tremendously talented, Oxford-based award-winning photographer Rory Carnegie, whose painterly series of photographic images, Port Meadow Dogs, will be on display at the Sarah Wiseman gallery in Summertown.

Equally, I cannot wait to see Maisie Maud Broadhead’s work at Art Jericho. Causing the viewer to question what it is they are looking at, Broadhead draws inspiration from Old Masters, specifically Johannes Vermeer, adding a contemporary twist to the image with her intelligent rethinking of props, characters, clothing and environment. In doing so she injects wit and humour into ‘classic’ portraits that are actually intimate portraits of her immediate female family members lost in quiet moments within their domestic contexts.

I’ve highlighted several other exhibitions in my festival programme, but those that shine the brightest include that of David Rhys Jones who fuses sculpture, photography and installation to reflect the experience of the journey. Rhys Jones’ work explores a form of social documentary that records the mix of cultures and architecture found in the modern day metropolis… like a stroll down the Cowley Road perhaps!?

Other exhibitions include a celebration of Finnish photography with work by Pentti Sammallahti, Arno Minkkinen. Susanna Majuri and Veli Grano, and also that of another Oxford-based photographer, Paddy Summerfield. Summerfield’s exhibition, entitled Mother and Father, is a moving photo-novel of the final years of his parents’ 60-year marriage, and will be on show at 337 Banbury Road, the home in which the images were shot.

While 20 exhibitions doesn’t sound like a great many for a festival, I get the impression that there will be more than enough to digest and that this festival is very much about quality over quantity.

CHECK IT OUT
The festival, supported by Arts Council England, opens to the public on Sunday and continues until October 5. photographyoxford.co.uk 

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