Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Logo. Image Credit: Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
The Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is an annual festival of photography, with over a thousand artists exhibiting work at 200 venues across the City of Toronto. The festival celebrates the art of photography with entries from all over the world. In its 16 years of existence, it has grown to attract over 1.8 million visitors and is the largest photography event not only in Canada, but around the world.
The festival promotes photographers of all skill levels and has been successful because of its inclusive process of open calls for exhibitions. This allows newer artists to showcase their work alongside skilled professions and as a result, photographers have gained a wider audience while the festival has flourished as well.
This year’s focus draws from an increasing interest in street photography. The theme of this year focuses on public images, which range for a series of exhibition, street installations and events at various venues around the city. These photographs and works are meant to provoke thinking about the private and public spheres and how the lines that differentiate them are increasingly blurred. CONTACT 2012 is focuses on how “photography shapes collective experience and makes things public.”
Nowadays, cell phone cameras, photographic manipulation software and the ease of posting images online allows for the proliferation of the profession. The exhibition, Public: Collective Identity/Occupied Spaces, show that these trends have also reflected social, political and economic climates.
The range of photographs exhibited at this year’s festival shows just how exciting and meaningful captured images can be. While photographs are captured in a split second, it can create images that represent the world as it is, the world as it should be or in multiple other ways.
The exhibit runs until May 30, 2012 and you can find exhibition and venue information on the official site.
