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.