The Belfast Photo Festival runs until June 30. We have chosen to show you 2 exhibitions: Rebecca Najdowski and Guido Mocafico.
Under its theme The Verge, this year’s Belfast Photo Festival explores untold stories, underrepresented narratives and perspectives on the world that too often go unseen, examining photography’s ability to shine light on hidden subject matter while also presenting artists who turn their lens to the past and utilise the archive in their work.
The festival presents from 03-30 June compelling and immersive exhibitions in galleries and public spaces throughout the city.
Rebecca Najdowski : Ambient Pressure
“The Anthropocene casts a long shadow over this project. Ambient Pressure is a response to the need, brought on by the climate crisis, to conceptualise nature differently. By physically disrupting the pictorial conventions of landscape photography, this project aims to expose how photography projects the illusion that non-human nature can be both contained and known.
Ambient Pressure critiques the ways that photography has literally and conceptually ‘framed’ nature. Formed through analogue and digital interventions, photographic negatives are manipulated by acts that include marking, cutting, burning, the incorporation of visual obstructions during the film scanning process, or physical modifications to printed images. The previously straightforward landscape imagery is thus incised with physical intrusions, complicating the scene with an additive-erasure. This process, which changes the material surface of the photographs, reveals the photographic conditions which objectify and distance nature from our human experience.
My techniques of manipulation are experimental in nature: I use blades, lighters, markers, plastic, rocks, bleach, and other materials intuitively, choosing what sort of marks, ruptures, or overlays to produce based on the original landscape image. The images are composed twice: once during film capture, and then through manipulation of the negatives, scans, and prints, where I consider what abrasions or obstructions I can add to highlight the image’s material construction.”
Rebecca Najdowski
Rebecca Najdowski : Ambient Pressure
Belfast Photo Festival
Location: Tropical Ravine, Botanic Gardens
Dates: 3 – 30 June 2022
