Photoworks are partnering with Jerwood Visual Arts for a show of six emerging practitioners to launch alongside the first Photoworks Annual. Both the exhibition and the Annual take the theme 'Family Politics'.The exhibition will present new commissions and existing work by six early career photographers relating to ‘Family Politics’ – the curatorial theme of the first issue of Photoworks Annual.
Exhibiting artists include invited artists Claudia Sola and The Photocopy Club; and artists selected from an open call, Jonny Briggs, Robert Crosse, Nikolai Ishchuk and Joanna Piotrowska. The exhibition explores the different ways in which artists consider and use photographic practice, resulting in an expanded view of the medium.
As a subject, the family is both private and public: the site of intimate inter-personal relations and a social construct subject to public and political pressures. This relationship is mirrored in examples of family photography. The majority of family pictures serve essentially private functions, accruing meaning through their relationship to the memories, experiences and histories of individuals. However, the family is also the subject of public photographic representation and contestation. This involves a wide variety of practices including representations in the mass media, art, advertising and pictures circulating on social networking sites.
Family Politics features a variety of approaches to photography with each work drawing on photographic language as a reference point.
Photoworks Annual explores the Family Politics theme further with commissioned work from Jowhara Alsaud and Claudia Sola, Folios by Broomberg & Chanarin, David Moore and John Clang; conversations between: Marianne Hirsch and Lorrie Novak, Wendy Ewald and Anthony Luvera, Bettina von Zwehl and Kelley Wilder and writings from Michael Bonesteel, Susan Bright, Terry Dennett, Geoffrey Batchen, Blake Stimson, Sarah James, Stephanie Schwartz, and Jack Habelstram, Aaron Schuman, Blake Morrison, Andrew Kötting, Sue Hubbard and David Campany amongst others.