The Alice Austen House partnership with The Photoville Festival returns with online community storytelling events and photo exhibitions in public spaces throughout New York City.
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! For the first time in 10 years, the Photoville Festival will be celebrating visual storytelling in the summer.
This year the Alice Austen House will present six exhibitions showcasing Staten Island photographers, curated by Victoria Munro:
What's It Like
Jahtiek Long
Over the last few years, I’ve made it a priority to capture the beauty, charm, and story of a city — parts of which can be overlooked. Staten Island itself can be seen through a polarizing lens, by both Staten Islanders themselves and the rest of New York City. This body of work aims to provide another perspective, one with a more nuanced approach — showcasing the places and experiences that may at times be overlooked, but deserving of representation and the opportunity to be a part of the narrative of Staten Island, New York.
David Lê
Maiden Name
These images are from the Maiden Name Spring-Summer 2022 lookbook. The idea for this shoot was to collage glossy fashion imagery into the urban fabric of Staten Island. This is a New York brand, and we wanted to show a side of New York that’s rarely if ever seen.
Front Porch Project
Christine Kenworthy
During the beginning of the pandemic, a photography project across the country was born called the Front Porch Project. In early April 2020, I launched my own Front Porch Project in Staten Island. In exchange for photographing families in front of their home from 8 feet away, I collected a donation to help those on the front lines. Each participating family received five edited digital images and donated at least $20. We were able to feed emergency room staff at both island hospitals, contributed to purchasing hospital supplies, and donated to Maker Space to help fund the making of face shields.
Etiolai
Samual Partal
“I view my practice as operating within a tradition of landscape photography — making photographs in the bits of wildness that bleed through the margins of the built environment — spaces in varying degrees of preservation and abandonment, ruin and remediation. I am interested in encountering the many transfigurations of the natural at play, in the uncanny landscapes of the anthropocene, or current geological age. In the studio, I set my film negatives on mounts and paint them with solutions of earth’s metals and mineral salts, sometimes letting them steep in the brine for days or weeks. These materials were central to the earliest photographic processes. They are also substances entangled in the diverse metabolisms of soil and sea, as well as agriculture and heavy industry. The commingling of these chemistries, the accretions and erosions that form their own miniature landscapes on and under the surface of the image, speak to the material and ecological history of photographs, and of the worlds they inhabit.” – Partal, 2022
Thomas Giarraffa
Dynamic Relationships
“My work is focused on isolation and how that affects a being — both the good and the bad. Mental, physical, and emotional abuse are elements within many people’s lives that we don’t seem to talk about enough. Even when the people behind such pain come from a good place, or hold good intentions, it can still result in pain nonetheless.” – Giarraffa, 2022
Island Lens
Lauren Fread, Mai’yah Kau, Elvia Gezlev, Jessica L. Gianna, John Kilcullen, Laura Pannone, Len Rachlin, Gillian Ricci
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 North Shore by Gareth Smit (2019 exhibitor)
from Migrant Stories by Irma Bohorquez-Geisler (2021 exhibitor)
Nature of Light by Gale Wisdom (2021 Exhibitor)
Photoville Festival 2022 kicks off with an Opening Day Community Celebration in glorious Brooklyn Bridge Park on Saturday June 4, 2022 and will feature public art exhibitions in all 5 boroughs for the month of June, in collaboration with local cultural institutions and NYC Parks. Photoville will once again host artist-led walking tours, workshops, and opportunities for educators and students to connect with the Festival’s featured visual storytellers.
Learn more about Photoville 2022 here.
