Once again this year, I am truly honored to assist Helsinki Photo Festival together with the other jurors. It took me a lot of time to look through all the entries. I am very interested to see the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 on artists and their work. I have also held solo exhibitions and published a book of photographs over the past three years or so, and they have had a great impact on me. This year, the artists’ eyes on issues of ethnicity, poverty, religion, gender, etc., pierced my eyes and heart through their work. However, an even more significant matter is the issue of war and aggression. There were several portfolios that used these issues as themes and subjects. In addition, despite the interesting themes and concepts of the works, some of the works seemed to me to have a weak narrative and purpose of expression by the artists due to the lack of workload. The number of works was large enough, but the content of some of the works was unfortunately lacking. I believe that the power of a photograph is proportional to the amount of work that has gone into it. I gave high marks mainly to those works that were well edited in terms of the number of points and composition, and low marks to those that were not. However, this is not the end of your work. I hope that your work will evolve into even better work in the coming year and beyond. I wish you all the best of luck. Naoya Yoshikawa (JP)
Once again, photographers have shown endless creativity in tackling the topic of Courage. Obviously, there are subject matters that lend themselves naturally to cover this theme, like war zones, social injustice, or people overcoming a severe illness. However, this edition prompted photographers from all over the world to hand in documentary and personal projects that depicted societies overcoming patriarchal structures, fishermen trying to survive on their traditional business in the face of global change, indigenous people seeking an official apology, etc. Seeing images that were created by using hair, fabric, staged photography, the self, and surrealistic elements truly moved our souls. And this is where real change starts. Alexa Becker (DE)