FORMAT is the UK’s leading international contemporary festival of photography and related media. It organises a year round programme of international commissions, open calls, residencies, conferences and collaborations in the UK and internationally and welcomes over 100,000 visitors from all over the world to its biennale. I was lucky enough to have an image selected to be a featured in the Festival, and in the Format Festival Publicationfor 2021.
The festival and off year programmes celebrate the wealth of contemporary photographic practice and feature everything from major conceptual works, participative projects, documentary photography, mobile phone imagery to the archive and all that falls between. We are concerned with what is happening now in the scene and beyond, whilst sharing and contributing to it.
FORMAT is the place to engage with an incredible range of work from new and emerging photographers alongside that of some of the best-known practitioners in the world. FORMAT is focused on developing opportunities for audiences to see, debate, develop, contribute and participate in the best of what photography is and can be, through our comprehensive professional practice programmes and a yearly international photography portfolio review.
Since its beginning FORMAT has strived to develop and respond to new ideas in photography and has given each festival a distinct and stimulating theme to reflect these ideas.
About Mass Isolation:
Just as it is all but impossible to recall major historic events like 9/11 or the Vietnam War without evoking photographs, the Covid-19 pandemic is producing images that will shape the memories of future generations, as well as being part of the ongoing process of under-standing and adjustment to its catastrophic impact.
3233The pandemic has produced a unique moment in the history of photography, never before has one theme been explored simultaneously by so many different image makers, from photojournalists to portraitists, artists to activists, documentarians to doctors. The power of photography in this emergency lies in its apparent capacity to capture and respond to collective trauma, and it is being used during this crisis in myriad ways to make sense of a previously unimaginable new world order. The pandemic is a global media event like no other, in the sense that it is not only being witnessed by audiences around the world simultaneously, but experienced in their own lives too. Equally, the effect on media professionals is highly unusual: usually reporting on the lives of others, their cameras now turn on their own lived emotional experiences of the pandemic.