The Alice Austen House partnership with The Photoville Festival returns with community storytelling events and photo exhibitions in public spaces throughout New York City.
New York City’s free premier photography destination is back! Returning for our 12th consecutive year, the annual Photoville Festival is excited to feature the return of our Photoville Village in Brooklyn Bridge Park with some of our classic shipping containers!
The Photoville Festival provides an accessible venue for photographers and audiences from every walk of life to engage with each other, and experience thought-provoking photography from across the globe — with free access for all!
This year the Alice Austen House will present six exhibitions showcasing Staten Island photographers, curated by Victoria Munro:
Jade Doskow
Freshkills
New York-based architectural and landscape photographer Jade Doskow is known for her rigorously composed and eerily poetic images that examine the intersection of people, architecture, nature, and time. Doskow is best-known for her work Lost Utopias, Freshkills, and Red Hook. Doskow holds a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is the subject of the 2021 documentary Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias. Doskow is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography and the City University of New York / College of Staten Island. Jade Doskow is the Photographer-in-Residence of Freshkills Park, New York City.
During this time of climate catastrophe, Freshkills Park offers a compelling (albeit complicated and imperfect), ultimately optimistic view of how visionary urban planners can take a landscape that has been completely destroyed and resurrect it, literally transforming the garbage of the U.S.ʼs most populous city and creating grasslands replete with rare species of flora and fauna, rolling hills dotted with flowers, and waterways once again attracting marine life. Doskowʼs work asks us as such: if 2,200 acres of New York Cityʼs household waste can be transformed into glorious meadowlands and woodlands, what else is possible?
Gerard Franciosa
Sound of Shadows
Gerard Franciosa (b.Queens, NY 1967) has been photographing for over 30 years. He studied photography and art at Pratt Institute where he developed a love for photographic printing. As the owner of My Own Color Lab, a custom darkroom facility, he works hand in hand with artists, museums, and galleries printing work for exhibition, allowing him to continue to pursue his quest for the perfect print. He lives on Staten Island.
I find myself drawn to particular places, landscapes that reveal a personality and emit a force that excites me, scares me or gives me solace. These locations, not necessarily beautiful, often visually banal, become energized by a streak of light, a dense shadow, a path with no exit, or a view through a spray of branches. My photographs index disturbances, both visual and perceived, caused by light, form and the geometry of chaos and stillness.
Nathan Kensinger
Hidden Staten Island
Nathan Kensinger is a Brooklyn based artist whose work explores hidden urban landscapes, forgotten waterways, environmental disasters, and coastal communities endangered by sea level rise. His work encompasses photography, film, installation and journalism.
“My work seeks to make visible hidden aspects of the urban landscape, sharing stories of communities and ecologies that have been impacted by environmental pollution, industrial waste, and sea level rise. I have photographed and written about Staten Island’s unique wild spaces, engineered wetlands, and post-industrial landscapes for the past 15 years, as part of my larger body of work exploring New York City’s entire waterfront. These photographs bring viewers to the island’s forgotten waterways and woodlands, to consider the complicated relationship between humans and non-human species, in places that are endangered by development and climate change.”
Jean Marques
Relections on Harbour
Jean Marques (b. 1995) is a Cuban-American visual artist and photographer based in Staten Island, NY. Since 2014, Jean has been creating photographs, prints, and collages from the source material of their lived experience. In 2019 they graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with an MFA in Photography and Related Media. Their work has been featured in group exhibitions in New York, Florida, and Oregon, as well as in online publications and self-published zines.
This work was created between 2020–2023 and consists of images of my partner Zoe. Depicted in this series are intimate moments drawn from our everyday life, with all its gifts and struggles. Interior scenes from the onset of the coronavirus pandemic are interlaced with images of celebrations, travel, and home-building. Zoe’s gaze, at times despondent and at others tenderly hopeful, offers reflections of my own state of mind. The camera, by freezing a moment in time, allows me to build a personal history. The result is a constellation of longing, hope, and desire through the memorialization of small details and gestures. In doing so over the course of several years, a poetic visual map is revealed with which to understand the twists and turns of life. Reflections on Harbour, is named so because of the work’s connection to Staten Island, where Zoe was raised and where we were able to find home. Historically, the functional purpose of a harbor is to provide a space of exchange. The word harbour in terms of this project (with UK English spelling to emphasize the word our within harbour), is intended to imply a metaphorical place of dialogue in a relationship: a place of refuge.
Nguan
All The Dreamers
Nguan was born and raised in Singapore. His photographs contemplate big city yearning, ordinary fantasies and emotional globalization. Nguan has published three photo books: Shibuya (2010), How Loneliness Goes (2013) and Singapore (2017). Singapore was named as one of the ten best photo books of the year by The New York Times Magazine. Nguan’s images have been widely seen and disseminated on social media, where his work has been featured by the Instagram accounts of CNN, The New Yorker, and Instagram. He is a graduate of Northwestern University.
All the Dreamers is a collection of candid portraits made on board the Staten Island Ferry between 2014 to 2022. Its images depict ferry riders in moments of repose and respite during an anxious time for the city, nation, and world. The series reimagines the familiar ferry journey as an enchanted setting where everyday peculiarities and the individuality and resilience of New Yorkers can be observed.
Zahra Pars
We Are Too Dull-Eyed To See
Zahara Pars was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in the United States. Pars has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied photography under Lewis Watts and painting under John Zurier, Katherine Sherwood, and Mary Lovelace O’Neal. I also pursued graduate studies in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
“My artistic practice examines the ephemerality of beauty. The imagery I document in photography – solitary landscapes, discarded objects, and lost balloons chronicle the momentariness of joy, and our presence in a world with an undefined future. Photographs are inherently precise moments in time, but through my photography, I strive to capture images that are more uncertain. Perhaps because I approach photography with a background in abstract painting, I see the imagery that I capture as a metaphor for language, and how it can both convey and conceal meaning.”
Location
The Staten Island Photoville sites are located on the South Beach boardwalk and the Alice Austen Park. More information and exact locations will be provided closer to the date.
from Sandy by Thomas Giarraffa (2022 exhibitor)
from Migrant Stories by Irma Bohorquez-Geisler (2021 exhibitor)
Nature of Light by Gale Wisdom (2021 Exhibitor)
Photoville – New York’s favorite photo festival – will kick off with an Opening Weekend Community Celebration in Brooklyn Bridge Park on Saturday, June 3rd and Sunday, June 4th, 2023 and will feature over 80 public art exhibitions across all 5 boroughs in NYC for the month of June. The Festival will also feature artist-led walking tours, workshops, and opportunities for educators and students to connect with the Festival’s featured visual storytellers.
Learn more about Photoville 2023 here.
