Helsinki Photo Festival's Portfolio Reviews 2020
Portfolio Reviews are open to photographers of all levels to showcase their work and to get back professional feedback as well as networking with people who may be able to help you with your career development or lead to exhibitions, publications and much more. Opportunities for critique, guidance, and professional connection are available within a wide range of photographic markets, such as portrait, product, fine art, travel or fashion photography, among many others.⁣

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What Winners Receive
The first prize winner of this year's Portfolio Review will be exhibited solo at Helsinki Photo Festival 2021. The winner and up to five runners up will be also featured in the festival's online gallery. The winning portfolio and a few selected images of up to five runners up will be promoted on Helsinki Photo Festival's social media channels, Facebook and Instagram, which can reach up to 5000 virtual followers alone. The highest voted portfolios may be also offered the opportunity to participate in the Helsinki Photo Festival limited edition print program in 2021. 

The Competition Criteria
When examining entries, the jury of reviewers will consider the following criteria:

Impact
The lighting
The story it tells
Consistency of the portfolio's theme
Its technical quality
Creativity
Composition & style
Use of colour
Presentation
Innovative or unique approach to the subject matter

Helsinki Photo Festival's Portfolio Reviews  were held August 28-29, 2020 at the Ateljee room of The National Museum of Finland.

43 artists from 3 continents applied to get review sessions with leading experts in the field of photography. Each review held was 20-30 minutes long. Experts were available for face-to-face meetings. COVID-19 travel restrictions prevented some of the jurors and participants from attending in person and many portfolio reviews were held online.

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The winners of the portfolio reviews of Helsinki Photo Festival 2020
Helsinki Photo Festival's international jury is pleased to announce the winners of the festival’s portfolio reviews. The jury congratulates all winners and thanks all artists who participated in this year’s contest.  

1. 
Absolute winner for best portfolio submission and highest votes given by all experts!
David Barreiro (Spain) - A Breach of Margins
https://www.davidbarreiro.com/

2.
Sandro Livio Straube (Switzerland) - Berge bleichen
https://www.sandroliviostraube.com/

3.
Oskar Alvarado (Spain) - Where Fireflies Unfold
https://oskaralvarado.com/

4.
Laura Pannack (United Kingdom) - Baruch
https://laurapannack.com/

5.
Sonja Trabandt (Germany) - Uebermorgen Schnee (Tomorrow's Snow)
http://sonjatrabandt.com/

6. Lotta Lemetti (Finland) - Kekta
http://www.lottalemetti.com/

The jury judging all portfolios included the following experts:

Elina Anttila (Director of the National Museum of Finland)
Maria Faarinen  (Chief Curator at The Finnish Museum of Photography)
Emanuela Mirabelli  (Photo Editor, Marie Claire Italy)
Rafael Rybczynski  (Artistic Director of Helsinki Photo Festival)
Stig Marlon Weston (Photographer and Director of the CYAN studio collective)
Nita Vera  (Photographer & PhD student of Photography at Aalto University)
Marianne Ager (Curator of Photography & Film, Brandts Museum of Art and Visual Culture, Denmark)
Karin Aringer (Head of Contemporary Art & Design Bukowskis, Sweden)
Alexa Becker (Acquisitions Editor for photography and art books for Kehrer Verlag)
Nela Eggenberger (Chief Editor at EIKON – International Magazine for Photography & Media Art)
Moritz Neumüller (Barcelona based Curator, Educator and Writer in the field of Photography and New Media)
Naoya Yoshikawa (Artists of Photography and Professor at Osaka University of Arts)

 

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Image left © Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Among the Water Lilies, Pachuag, Connecticut, 1972. Image right © Sophia Ehrnrooth, Big Smile, 2018.

 

Helsinki Photo Festival pedagogy events 2020

 

On September 10, two of the most experienced and celebrated photographers, a Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen (b. 1945) and a Finnish photographic artist Stefan Bremer (b. 1953) will talk about their 3 decades of artist career and photographic education.

The seminar (12:00-15:00) will take place in the Auditorium of the National Museum of Finland (Kansallismuseo).

In order to follow the new government recommendations regarding COVID-19, please bring a mask.  

Language: English

 

Biographies:
Arno Rafael Minkkinen (b. 1945, Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish American photographer, essayist, educator and curator with over 100 solo shows and 200 group exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design, studying there with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. His teaching career began in Finland in 1974 at Helsinki’s Taideteolinen Korkeakoulu where among his star students was Stefan Bremer. His teaching career has been extensive and international in scope. Assistant Professor at MIT in the early 1980s, visiting professor at Vevey’s École d’Arts Appliqués in Switzerland for ten years at the turn of the millennium, he is currently Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and docent at Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture in Helsinki.

Major monographs include: Frostbite (Morgan & Morgan, 1978), Waterline (Marval, Aperture, and Otava, 1995 – Grand Prix du Livre, 25th Rencontres d'Arles), Body Land (Motta, Nathan, and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Thirty-Five Years of Photographs (Chronicle Books, 2005), Homework: The Finnish Photographs, 1973 to 2008; Balanced Equation (Lodima Press, 2010), and Minkkinen (Kehrer Verlag) which won the German Photobook Prize for Monograph of the Year 2019 | 2020.

Minkkinen’s works are held in over 75 prominent museum and institutional collections worldwide, such as the Musée d’art moderne and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the High Art Museum in Atlanta, the National Art Gallery in Ottawa, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma in Helsinki. Fotografiska in Stockholm is currently presenting Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s 50-year retrospective Two Hundred Seasons through January 21, 2020.

Minkkinen is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1991, the Order of the Lion First Class medal from Finland in 1992, the 2006 Finnish State Art Prize in Photography, the 2013 Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art, a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Pro Finlandia medal conferred on the Centennial of Finnish Independence in 2017, and the 2019 Honored Educator Award from the Society for Photographic Education.

Minkkinen wrote the essay Finland’s Dark Poet of Velocity for Mr. Bremer’s latest monograph from Teos, Velocity: Keskeltä ja täysillä.

 

Stefan Bremer (b. 1953, Helsinki, Finland) is a photographer, a visual artist and teacher from Helsinki. He studied at the Aalto University in the 1970s. From then on he has taught in art schools around Finland as well as at the Stockholm School of Photography and the Gothenburg University. Quite a large number of young, and semi-young, photographers in Finland are former students of Stefan Bremer. He has lead intensive photography workshops in Europe as well as in Africa and Asia. He has been shown around the world in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his photographs are part of many public and private collections. At the heart of his artistic production, Stefan Bremer works with people. He has studied the difficulties of being human. ”I wanted to broaden the soul scape of Finnish men and women. I dove into the world of youth and with affinity brought different individuals to light, and studied trends and tendencies of that time. I wanted to study indecisiveness and the collapse of ideals with as much interest as the contagious enthusiasm of life. In my work, I also strived to comment and participate in the political discussion of moralism and ideals. I want to polemicise, to use photography as a tool for propaganda and to be an interpreter of the bitter laugh.”

Stefan Bremer’s new works address many of the basic properties of photography, studying the elements of time, scale and light. The camera can record a thousandth of a second in an image, a slice of time beyond the grasp of the human eye. The scale ranges from minute particles and studies of ink to a high bird’s eye perspective. Bremer was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Photography in 1988, the title of Artist Professor in 1999 and the Culture Prize of the City of Helsinki in 2011.

 

Tickets are price 50 € and can be purchased here  (https://bit.ly/35FjiCH)

 

The seminar will be recorded and filmed and we will announce the video stream broadcast when it will be available. 

 

 

Helsinki Photo Festival pedagogy events 2020

Accomplished Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus (b.1972) meets with celebrated talent Svante Gullichsen (b.1994) on September 4 and the two will talk about their works and approaches in photography. 

The seminar will take place in the Auditorium of the National Museum of Finland (Kansallismuseo).

In order to follow the new government recommendations regarding COVID-19, please bring a mask.  

Language: English

 

Biographies:
Elina Brotherus (b. Helsinki, Finland) works in photography and moving image. Her work has been alternating between autobiographical and art-historical approaches. Photographs dealing with the human figure and the landscape, the relation of the artist and the model, gave way to images on subjective experiences in her recent bodies of work. In her current work she is revisiting Fluxus event scores and other written instructions for performance-oriented art of the 1950s-70s. Another ongoing interest is photographing in private houses by architects like Alvar Aalto, Friedensreich Hundertwasser or Michel Polak, where Brotherus takes roles of various imagined characters and brings a tranquil human presence to these iconic spaces. Elina Brotherus started exhibiting internationally in 1997. The artist’s works are in 66 different public collections and she has published nine monographs.

Elina Brotherus lives and works in Helsinki, Finland and Avallon, France. She has an MA degree in Photography (2000) from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) and an MSc in Chemistry (1997) from the University of Helsinki.

Svante Gullichsen b.1994 is a Helsinki-based photographer whose work varies from strong Nordic and mystical atmospheres to warm and insightful commissions. At the very core of Gullichsen's work is the relation between human and nature as well as the fundamental relation between darkness and light. Gullichsen's works have been shown in Generation 2017 exhibition series in 2017-2018 and can be found in private collections.

He is an open-call winner at the 2019 Helsinki Photo Festival on the theme “Anarchy”, and won best image that year 

Tickets are price 25 € and can be purchased here (https://bitly/3gKfYd8)  

 

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Perjantaina 4.9. suomalaiset huippukuvaajat Elina Brotherus (s. 1972) ja Svante Gullichsen (s. 1994) vierailevat Kansallismuseon Auditoriossa ja kertovat teoksistaan ja lähestymistavoistaan valokuvataiteeseen.

Elina Brotherus (s. Helsinki) on Suomessa ja Ranskassa asuva kansainvälisesti tunnettu valokuva- ja videotaiteilija. Hänet on palkittu uransa aikana lukuisilla suomalaisilla ja kansainvälisillä valokuvapalkinnoilla, kuten Fotofinlandialla (2000), Carnegie Art Awardin nuoren taiteilijan palkinnolla (2003) ja valokuvataiteen valtionpalkinnolla (2008). Brotheruksen töitä on ollut esillä monissa yksityis- ja yhteisnäyttelyissä Euroopassa, Pohjois-Amerikassa ja Aasiassa. Hän on tehnyt muun muassa valokuvateokset Decisive Days (2002) ja The New Painting (2005), sekä Helsingin kaupungin tilaamaan apulaiskaupunginjohtaja Pekka Saurin valokuvamuotokuvan.

Svante Gullichsen on helsinkiläinen valokuvaaja, jonka työn ytimessä on ihmisen ja luonnon sekä pimeyden ja valon välinen suhde. Gullichsenin teoksia on ollut esillä muun muassa Generation 2017 -näyttelysarjassa vuosina 2017-2018. Gullichsen on vuoden 2019 Helsinki Photo -festivaalin open call -kilpasarjan voittaja teemalla "anarkia". Hän voitti samana vuonna myös festivaalin parhaan kuvan palkinnon.

Seminaarin kieli on englanti. Lipun hinta on 25 euroa ja sen voi ostaa täältä: https://bitly/3gKfYd8

 

 

Finalists at Helsinki Photo Festival 2020

Helsinki Photo Festival's international jury is pleased to announce the winners of the festival’s theme Trust. All the submissions who made into the shortlist were so extraordinary brilliant that the jury was struggling to identify the finalists of this year’s edition. The jury congratulates all winners from 5 continents and thanks all artists who participated in this year’s contest. In the coming days we will reach out to all winners and inform them about the next steps. 

List of open call winners I Trust I #helphoto20

Cocoa Laney, US

Nuno Serrão, PT

Oskar Alvarado, ES

Lauren Forster, GB

Anton Ivanov, RU

Ciro Battiloro, IT

Christian Bobst, CH

Robin Alysha Clemens, NL

Ana María Arévalo Gosen, VE

Marlena Waldthausen, DE

Qingjun Huang, CN

Elizabeth M Sanders, US

Shinwook Kim, KR

Alex McBride, GB

Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir, IS

Kamil Matziol, PL

Yolanda del Amo, US

Alain Schroeder, BE

Mary Gelman, RU

Dorota Stolarska, PL

Sasha Maslov, US

Tom Atwood, US

Teodelina Detry, AR

Elena Kollatou and Leonidas Toumpanos, GR

Carrie and Eric Tomberlin, US

Margeaux Walter, US

Arnold Grojean, BE

Gordon Spooner, FR

Anna Ellen Hamlet, SE

Laura Liverani, IT

Melissa Ianniello, IT

Gloria Oyarzabal, ES

M'hammed Kilito, MA

Noel Bowler, IE

Shirin Abedi, DE

Reiko Ishida, NO

Fotografiepolak, BE

Elise Corten, BE

Eric Hanson, US

Laura Bisgaard Krogh and Andreas Haubjerg, DK

Heikki Humberg, FI

Alexis Vasilikos, GR

Dilla Djalil Daniel, ID

Cop Shiva, IN

Chimera Singer, US

Silke Koch, DE

Mogens Kjoeller, DK

Maria Lax, FI

Nadja Hallström, SE

Ami Vitale, US

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Nordic Village at Helsinki Photo Festival 2020

The Nordic Village is an exhibition format supporting emerging and groundbreaking Nordic photographers. Since 2018 this project has selected and showcased format has showcased and nominated +20 artists from all five Nordic countries and arranged artist-talks, nordic exhibitions and seminars with support of Nordic embassies. The artists were selected through a jury of curators responsible for the festival’s open call contest. In 2020, the Nordic Village exhibition will be set up in the outdoor premises of the National Museum of Finland. 

List of Nordic Village winners I Trust I #helphoto20

Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir, IS
Magnus Cederlund, SE
Carl-Mikael Ström, SE
Anna Ellen Hamlet, SE
Renja Nurmi, FI
Reiko Ishida, NO
Hans Jørgen Ro, NO
Geir Moseid, NO
Mogens Kjoeller, DK
Tomas Olsen, FI
Maria Lax, FI
Nadja Hallström, SE

Helsinki Photo Festival theme in 2020 is Trust! Call for artists is open now!

Helsinki Photo Festival is pleased to announce their third open call! Everyone from all over the world is invited to submit their work(s) in the festival theme Trust. 

We challenge photographers and artists of all ages to share with us the connections you see with our theme, in imaginative, creative expressive interpretation. Artists will need to write as part of their submission an explanation of how their work fits with the theme.

Trust is essential to life, it opens up new and unimagined possibilities. Trust is one of the most prevalent topics in our society.

What is Trust? How can Trust be perceived in visual language? How can we consciously feel Trust? What do we consider trust to be and can it be regained? Can Trust change our life and how would such a transition affect our existence? How can communities acknowledge differences while building unity? As prejudices continue to divide us, how can Trust encourage accountability and solidarity? As institutions lose credibility, the environment is changing critically, what do people do to ensure that their wishes and desires are taken seriously and delivered? What role does truth play to Trust in friendship, family or love? What happens if you lose Trust in society or humanity? In fact, there are many examples, how to interpret and associate with Trust.

We aim to select +40 artists works to exhibit in solo- and group exhibitions during the festival period, July 7th-September 9th 2020. Entries are handled by photography professionals and curators enhancing the programming, aesthetics, artistic and cultural expressions as well as the quality of the overall production. The deadline for the call for artists is, 16 April 2020! As a selected artist of the Trust theme, your work will be exhibited at Helsinki Photo Festival 2020. The exhibitions will take place in historic landmarks, warehouses, libraries, art centres, galleries, parks and waterfront areas in Helsinki.The other highlight of the festival is the Nordic Village, an exhibition format supporting emerging and groundbreaking Nordic photographers. Since 2018, this project has selected and showcased over 20 artists from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland. In 2020, the Nordic Village expo will be set up in the outdoor premises of the National Museum of Finland / Kansallismuseo. All selected photographers have the great opportunity for being promoted to a broad, dedicated audience, critics, photo editors, curators, gallerists, art buyers and publishers: Apply through Picter: https://contests.picter.com/helsinki-photo-festival-trust-2020

Helsinki Photo Festival ry is a Finnish non-profit association and a photography platform advancing interest and disseminate information on photography. The main initiative is to increase visibility for contemporary photography through events and learning activities that allow the participants the opportunity to develop their project and their artistic independence. Photo enthusiasts and artists are invited to join a community to meet and interact with gallery owners, photo editors, curators, publishers and world-renowned photographers.