To coincide with Portrait of Britain 2021, photographer and curator Liz Hingley discusses Side Gallery’s latest exhibition: Youth Rising in the UK, 1981-2021
Tag: Liz Hingley
Born in 1993 in the Philippines, Ezra Acayan has won the 2018 Ian Parry Scholarship Award for Achievement for his series Duterte’s War On Drugs Is Not Over, which records the fall out from the war on drugs which President Rodrigo Duterte announced in 2016.
Threatening those connected to drug consumption and sales with the death penalty, Duterte urged members of the public to kill suspected criminals and drug addicts, and allowed the police to act with brutality. In the two years since, an estimated 20,000 people have been murdered and a state of emergency has been declared. The United Nations has appealed to the Philippine government to investigate extrajudicial killings and to prosecute the perpetrators, while the International Criminal Court has announced preliminary examinations into killings linked to the campaign.
Tough and hard-hitting, Acayan’s images aim to “illuminate the violent acts carried out in the Philippines as well as the questionable methods of Duterte and the police”.
“Our ambition is that Landskrona becomes the capital of photography in Scandinavia,” says photographer and festival curator Jenny Nordquist. “We want photography to manifest itself in public spaces, from shop windows to parks and old buildings, and become a perceptible part of experiencing the city. This is both an open invite for the visitor to discover the city and a practical consideration about what public spaces – so often privatised by advertising or market economics – can and must be.” The fifth edition of the Lanskrona Foto Festival opens from 08-17 September, co-curated by Nordquist and the legendary VU’ founder Christian Caujolle.
“Taking someone’s portrait is always a disruptive and often very awkward event. Everyone has their default portrait pose. The role of the photographer is to push beyond, to find that mysterious intimate moment that only a camera can freeze.”
Curated by Louise Clements, Derby’s FORMAT17 draws on cutting edge photography to consider the man-made world and our place in it