(article reposted from www.Foto8.com)

 

 

Home for Good: NY Photo Festival 2009

Opening at 10am on Thursday, May 14th in the DUMBO ARTS CENTER (DAC)

By Jon Levy

Home… the place where we feel safe yet the first place to be threatened in times of war or economic meltdown. Home is also the place where we take time to assimilate the demands of a constantly changing world. Every war photographer is in the business of finding a way to bring that war back home, not to domesticate it (though that will sometimes happen) but in an attempt to expose some truths of war. Storytelling begins at home.

For NYPH09, we have brought together different styles and approaches to photography to explore this theme:

The photos of 84-year-old Chicago grandmother Lorraine Grupe from the Second World War; Chris Killip’s set of stamps created for his native Isle of Man; two further British photographers, Simon Roberts and Venetia Dearden, provide a pastoral yet contemporary take on home, looking inwards to the land and the family rather than out to the wars that were – are – still waging; Adam Nadel has created a body of work that shows the experience of factory workers, who suddenly find themselves fighting for their survival; these are complemented by the series of portraits by Louie Palu of exhausted young US marines on duty; Tim Hetherington’s images of sleeping soldiers in Afghanistan (as well as the portraits, Hetherington has interspersed stills with filmed footage to bring home the taste of war); Belgian photojournalist Bruno Stevens’ most recent body of work from Gaza; Seba Kurtis, a young Argentinean photographer, with his work on immigration; and finally, David Gray, with a a fictional representation of a people and place.

So where does that leave us? We hope that this exhibition tackles some of the important issues that face the world and the individual in the spring of 2009 and that it valorizes the photograph in its many forms as a potent means of transmission. We hope we have been able to transport you for a little while by creating a space for contemplation, before you head back home, for good.