Format Festival
- jack576576
- May 29, 2017
- 2 min read
This was a wonderful opportunity to see a lot of work by many different photographers across the city of Derby. The theme of this years festival was habitat which I was able to respond and interact with greatly as a lot of my work is centred around habitats.
The work was spread across many different venues throughout the city, each being specifically themed to the type of imagery within. For example there was a venue dedicated to birds and photographs/books based on birds. This building was one of the more helpful things for myself as my first project was all about bird watching.
The photographers shown at the festival were of all skill levels from recent graduates to well know photographers.
One of my personal favourites was a piece by Sheng Wen Lo who’s work is centred around modern day human-animals relationships. The piece shown was of polar bears across many different zoos around the world. They all featured 1 or 2 polar bears in strange exhibits that were not natural at all. Some mimicked their natural environment but came nowhere close to it and others were so far from that they almost seemed like alien worlds.
At the exhibition there was a video and audio that played alongside it. The video showed a series of different bears pacing up and down their pens, acting monotonous, obviously bored and waiting for food. Some were banging their heads against walls, others banging on the glass. They would lash out at the glass when the visitors to the zoo would bang on it. The visitors saw the bears as pure entertainment and it was clear that they did not think anything else.
It was the audio that really got to me though. It was eerie and disturbing and the echoing droning sounds played along side the bears banging and pacing. Almost as if the audio was representing the stress that the bears felt, that they were uncomfortable.
This project was incredible in being research for my own project as my second of the two projects I did was about animals in zoos and in captivity. The images provided a lot of insight and changed the way that I was looking and photographing in.
Below are a selection of images that I took from format festival.
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