This year Lianzhou Foto Festival entitled Your Selfie Stick (and you) will take place between 2 December 2017 and 2 January 2018 focusing on new developments in the medium of photography.

“Your Selfie Stick” is a continuation of the theme of Lianzhou Foto 2008, “My Camera”, during a time at which pursuit of new and different photographic expressions became excessive. In that year, the curatrial team of the festival proposed to return to the root of photography as an authentic way of viewing.

In September 2000, Sharp announced the J-SH04, the world’s first camera phone. With only 110,000 pixels, it did not attract much attention at the time, but no one knew how thoroughly mobile phones would change the way people took photographs just a few years later. The rise of the smart phone, represented by the release of the iPhone in 2007, gave the mobile phone the functions of a camera and a mobile internet device. Particularly after people began to use social media apps more widely, it marked a huge development in human communication.

“The selfie stick is a new photography accessory for this era; on the surface, its facilitates mobile phone photography and serves as an extension of our limbs; it frees us from certain photographic limitations”, so the curatorial statement. Many photographers have taken advantage of the opportunity to experiment with these new tools in order to explore and extend the boundary of the medium of photography. New angles and ways of seeing have been invented, but they do not necessarily act as subversions of traditions, only a more personalized perspective.

Perhaps, no single methodology can any longer be completely overturned or reversed, as each one of them is constantly being transformed and modernized in the hands of the artists: a connection that is both more distant and nearer, an artistic mean that is both professional and amateur, a collective labor that is explored by an individual, and a mutual imitation of human beings and machines. Images of us and the surrounding world captured by this mean have escaped the prison of methodologies to become much more complex and conceptualized.

Artist List

THEMATIC EXHIBITION
Carlos París (Venezuela), Heba Khalifa (Egypt), Óscar Monzón (Spain), Jacob Burge (UK), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Mark Page (UK), Nación Rotonda (Spain), Yuki Naito (Japan), Bayeté Ross Smith (USA), Wendell White (USA), Amalia Ulman (Argentina), Ye Funa (China), Lei Benben (China), Huang Guaier + Wang Runzhong (China), #Everyday Africa (Africa)

GROUP EXHIBITION (From Conceptualism to Documentation – Six Contemporary Latin American Artists)
Fabio del Re (Brazil), Pablo Piovani (Argentina), René Pena (Cuba), Lisdertus aka Luis Delgado (Mexico/USA), Sebastián Szyd (Argentina), Eustaquio Neves (Brazil)

SPECIAL EXHIBITION
Issei Suda (Japan), Masato Seto (Japan), Enari Tsuneo (Japan)

SOLO EXHIBITION
Reagan Louie (USA), Suzy Lake (Canada), Shinya Arimoto (Japan), Jojakim Cortis & Adrian Sonderegger (Switzerland), Kurt Tong (Hongkong), Sara Angelucci (Canada), Daniel Traub (USA), Adam Panczuk (Poland), Masamich Kagaya (Japan), Akihito Yoshida (Japan), Yan Ming (China), Murong Tuoxie (China), Ao Guoxing (China), Xu Peiwu (China), Jiang Zhenqing (China), Yang Tiejun (China), Teng Fei, Li Lin (China), Li Ming (China), Wu Dengcai (China), Bo Shang (China), Cai Xiaochuan (China), Du Zi (China), Ni Weihua (China), Tang Haowu (China), Dragon Zheng (China), Liu Yujia (China), Chen Min (China), Zhou Mengting (China)

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