On 24th March I hitched a lift to Derby (only a 3 hour drive away from where we’re based in County Durham) with Lostness Club / Wideyed colleagues Richard Glynn and Louise Taylor for the launch weekend of FORMAT International Photography Festival.
FORMAT is a biennial festival, and this year’s edition is the 6th since it began in 2005. With Wideyed, I’ve exhibited in three – 2011, 2013 and 2015 – so this was the first time I’d been to the festival without having to do any work there, and it was nice to just be a punter for a change. Bumped into lots of friends, met some lovely new people, and saw some interesting work here and there.
The point of this post is not to write a detailed review of the festival as a whole, but to mention the bits of it that are relevant to the project I’ve been awarded an a-n bursary for. One reason for being at the launch weekend (rather than any other) was the Photobook Market, which had some well known publishers in attendance (e.g. MACK, Dewi Lewis and so on), and a set of last year’s Kassel Photobook Dummy Award shortlisted entries on show. Scattered on a couple of (post-ironic?) coffee tables, there were 50 dummies to look at, and I think I managed to examine most of them – an incredible variety of content (subject matter, photographic approaches and sequencing) and book-making techniques, with some books easier to handle and more seductive than others. Without realising it, the only one I ended up sitting down to really read cover to cover (though the cover was not the most appealing at first glance) was the Kassel Award winner: Monsanto, a photographic investigation, by Mathieu Asselin.
Another part of the launch weekend I found particularly interesting and enlightening was the Portfolio Walk. I haven’t been able to afford a portfolio review at FORMAT since 2011, but wandering around during the public viewing afterwards and looking at the work – and the variety of ways peers are presenting it, including lots of photobooks, self-published and otherwise – can be really instructive. Plus it makes it easier to meet photographers and speak to them about their projects, the stories behind some of their photos…
Apart from discovering that I might intuitively know a bit more about photobooks than I thought, the thing that I brought away from FORMAT – from the Photobook Market experience, the festival exhibitions generally, and from conversations with many of the people met over the weekend – is the importance of storytelling. And when I begin work on my dummy, this is something I really must remember to bear in mind.
