Open Call 2011: Submissions now open.

Blurb & PhotoIreland Festival Open Call: Photo Book Submissions now open.

Blurb and PhotoIreland are looking for 20 great contemporary photography books to exhibit during the festival.
This is a great opportunity to showcase your outstanding Blurb photography book at PhotoIreland, that this year has a special focus on photo books, celebrating its first Book & Magazine Fair. The fair will start the 15th of July with the opening of ‘Martin Parr’s Best Books of the Decade’, an exhibition offering Parr’s personal selection of the 30 most important publications. Blurb will offer bookmaking seminars, and the popular Carousel Slide Slam in conjunction with Foto8 and Harry Hardie.

The 20 selected Blurb books will be available for all to see at the fair.
After PhotoIreland, they will travel to Belfast Photo Festival’s opening weekend in 5-7 August.

Interested? Read on to find out more.

Entry Guidelines
We’re looking for outstanding contemporary photography books that show a strong creative/photographic identity and high technical and conceptual standards. They should stand out and grab our judges attention!

The Jury
Moritz Neumüller, Curator of PhotoIreland
Angel Luis Gonzalez, Director of PhotoIreland
Rachel Stanley, Marketing, Blurb

The Deadline
Submit your book by June 10, 2011.

How To Enter Your Book
Please email a link to your Blurb book to: photoireland@blurb.com

Read more in Blurb

Your book must be set to public so we can see it and if your book is selected we will ask you to give us written permission to show it at the festivals. We have a form – so you won’t need to do any extra work!

Stag & Deer: Call for Submissions

Stag & Deer are looking for photographers whose work has an interest in the home/domestic setting. We are looking for work that is a meditation on home life and what that may be. The work will be included in a group show entitled “Home” which will be part of the PhotoIreland Festival happening in Dublin during July 2011.

The theme for “Home” is built around the domestic and the structure of life within a home; the physical nature of the interior and exterior, human interactions and relations, memories, possessions, etc. Home is many things, banal and everyday but always of the utmost importance. We all experience moments within our individual contexts of home or family, but do not necessarily share them beyond the physical construct of our own household setting.

There is an unspoken curiosity to see how others have these moments.  We are all guilty of taking glimspes through windows to see how others live.  What is this compulsion? Is this curiosity just plain nosiness or is it something more? Is it a desire to validate our own existence, to elicit self-reflection? What are we looking for when we glimpse through into another’s life?

If you are interested in submitting for “Home” then please send 6 examples of work (No larger than 450k), a brief description of the work and a small biography to staganddeer AT gmail.com

Please note that the deadline for submissions is Wednesday 20^th of April.

About Stag & Deer

Stag & Deer is an exhibition-making project giving contemporary art space to exhibit work. We deal chiefly with the medium of photography. Our goal is to showcase, bolster and support emerging contemporary art. For more info please visit our website at http://www.staganddeer.com

Stay informed: subscribe and follow us.

We have still a bit of work to do before we can release the full programme, so for the time being subscribe to our newsletter and posts, and follow us on Facebook and on Twitter, if you don’t do so already. Most importantly, pass on the word to your friends!

And if you can this year, volunteer and make the festival happen!

Thank you for your ongoing support!

The Festival Team

Summer Campus

PhotoIreland’s Summer Campus will consist of talks, presentations, projections, online and offline meetings, tutorials and discussions in the field of self-publishing, collaborative models, and image theory, but also hands-on-workshops and a children’s programme.

This year, the portfolio reviews will be pre-selected by submission. We will publish the names of the reviewers, and the opening and closing dates for the call by the end of April.

More detailed information will be offered in the coming weeks.

OFF Programme

The OFF Programme offers a unique opportunity to all wishing to exhibit during the festival. Without the need of fulfilling the festival theme, photographers, curators, galleries and studios are welcome to submit their projects.

While participating on the OFF programme means that you would cover your exhibition costs, we will be able to support you via our network of partners with printing, finding the right venue, and so on.

All exhibitions in the OFF Programme will be listed in the printed catalogue and on the festival web site. The deadline for proposals and for collection of information is the 29th of April 2011. If you wish to submit your project, email us at info(AT)photoirelnd.org and give as much information as possible. We will guide you through the process.

We are already in conversations with many participants, and it looks like it is going to be quite fun!

Collecting Photography

The special programme on collecting photography is centred on IMMA’s exhibition Out of the Dark Room: The David Kronn Collection, opening the 20th of July. Sean Kisanne, Head of exhibitions, will give a talk on this extensive collection which includes more than 450 photographs, ranging in content from 19th century Daguerreotypes to contemporary photographers such as Simon Norfolk. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by IMMA that includes texts by Susan Bright, Seán Kissane, David Kronn and Carol Squiers.

Theoretical and practical aspects of collecting photography, including archiving and conservation, legal matters and other considerations, will be addressed at talks by specialists in the field.

More detailed information will be offered in the coming weeks.

Photo Books

In July 2011, PhotoIreland will present Martin Parr’s Best photo books of the Decade, an exhibition of 30 publications from all over the globe, hand-picked by the world-famous photographer and photographic bibliophile. These photo books have not only fantastic images, but also have exceptional production value which, and become classics of their own time. Often quite radical, and sometimes taking a good amount of time to let their merits be appreciated, all of these books are bound to go down as important contributors to the ongoing photographic book culture.

Book Fair
As we have seen a clear appetite for it, we will host a Book and Magazine Fair where national and international publishers will showcase their latest publications.

Open Call 2011
In cooperation with Blurb, this year we will search for the best contemporary photo books within our audience, via our international call for submissions. The best books will be printed and they will be available for all to see at the Book Fair. The dates for the Open Call will be made public by the end of next week.

And to make sure we all learn from the experience, Blurb will run a bookmaking seminar – to which we will add some practical workshops.

Submit your books now!

PhotoIreland 2011: Collaborative Change

Collaborative efforts in the world of photography seem to respond to times of change. Magnum Photos, the classic example of a photographic co-operative, was founded in 1947.  It is now the most prestigious photographic agency in the world. Ostkreuz, its smaller German cousin, was founded in former East Berlin in 1990, just one year after the fall of Wall. The main purpose of these agencies was, and to a certain extent still is, to protect its members’ copyrights and to promote them in the magazine and publishing market.

Of late we have seen the rise of another collaborative form – Photography Collectives. These collectives concentrate on the collaborative process by organising workshops, group exhibitions, and collaborative projects. They see the collective approach as an alternative economic model, a sustainable principle of art production, where process, experience, authorship, responsibility and success are shared. And they are convinced that this model has serious advantages in the current context of local and global crisis.

Through our theme in 2011, ‘Collaborative Change’, we propose an exploration of a set of practices and modes of production where artists, curators and cultural organisations work in collaboration, or are focused on highlighting the efforts of those who do so. Promoting an idea of cultural entrepreneurship and cooperation, the festival intends to comment on current efforts by individuals and organisations addressing recent shifts, and also to search for unexplored paths towards new modes of collaboration.

We have programmed photographic exhibitions by European photo collectives, and site specific installations by two curatorial teams. A seminar will be held with international guests from diverse disciplines such as Economics, Art, Information Science, Sociology and Politics, to investigate the theme of the festival. There will be a selection of screenings that will run in parallel to the seminar.

More detailed information will be offered in the coming weeks.

Why is important to volunteer

As a volunteer led organisation, we need the help of everyone who shares the passion and can help make the festival happen. Last year we counted on the help of over 50 dedicated people, who represented PhotoIreland throughout the city, and facilitated visitors enjoyment of the many events. Wearing the legendary orange ‘Flaneur‘ t-shirts, the festival volunteers became an active part of the organisation, and had the opportunity to meet lots of interesting peers, get close to those they admire, and see everything happen behind the scenes.

In 2011, we need your help too, and a lot of it! The programme for this year is quite ambitious, and we are looking forward to making it another memorable experience.

Have a look at the volunteer opportunities and be part of it: make it yours!

Roseanne Lynch wins the 1st Alliance Française Photography Award

We wanted to start the day here at Photo Fest Ireland by sharing our delight on the news that Reseanne Lynch won the 1st Alliance Française Photography Award last Thursday. Roseanne Lynch receives a flight to Paris for a 2 week stay at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris a French course at the AF, a €600 grant courtesy of Ireland Fund of France and a one-to-one tutorial with Vermillon Design.

The finalists included Joby Hickey, Doreen Kennedy, and Jean-Luc Morales. The advisory committee of the gallery of the Alliance Francaise is composed of: Margaret Brown, Helen Carey, Tessa Giblin, Johnnie Gratton, Anthony Haughey, and Tanya Kiang.

It has to be said that Claire Bourgeois, Director of the Alliance Française Dublin, has been working hard in the last years to promote photography, making their Cafe-gallery a great addition to the cultural life in Dublin. And the creation of the Photography Award serves to prove it.

The exhibition will run until May the 11th at the Alliance.

See Roseanne Lynch’s work at http://www.roseannelynch.com

Congratulations Roseanne!