The World Photography Art Festival impressed José Ignacio

Organized by the Alfonso and Luz Castillo Foundation (Arte x Arte) and Fola, directed by Gastón Delo, an important international photography festival was held in José Ignacio, Uruguay. Exhibitions in the galleries, the rolling museum, urban installations, talks, portfolio review and photo book display were the protagonists of this meeting Relevant artists in this specialty were also invited.

The main idea of ​​the exhibition was to think about “inhabited areas” in an expansive way that expands the boundaries of our material, conceptual and disciplinary understanding of the act or reality of inhabitation and association.

The topics discussed are related to Human resilience, climate change, nature and landscapes, social inequalities and inequality, and the relationship with technologyto new ways of communicating, to mental health, to human interactions, to time and memory, all concerns that attentive and committed artists wish to express.

The guest of honor was Graciela Iturbide, who has produced works throughout her extensive and successful career. Born in Mexico City in 1942, she was a student of another great photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002), whom she accompanied on trips through Mexico. It was commissioned by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute to document the country's indigenous people. He photographed the Siri people, a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Sonoran Desert near the border with Arizona. He also worked with Francisco Toledo (1940-2019), an internationally known artist, visiting Juchitán, which is part of the Zapotec culture of Oaxaca.

In 2004, 50 years after Frida Kahlo's death, she was invited to leave testimony about the opening of two baths with objects and documents closed by Diego Rivera in 1954. The whole work led to the appearance of the series “Frida’s Bath” Published 2009. Iturbide's works have been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Museums of San Francisco and Philadelphia, the Getty in Los Angeles, the MAPFRE Foundation in Madrid, and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

Other artists

He was another of the guests Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Mexican photographer, writer and editor, born in 1952. In the 1980s, he edited important studies on Mexican photographers, for which he was awarded the Medal of Fine Arts from the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature. She also edited a book on Frida Kahlo and “Photographic Correspondence,” which she co-wrote with the Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky.

Roberto Huarcaya is a professional photographer from Peru Born in 1959, he worked as a professor at the Lima Image Center between 1999 and 2022. He participated in open photography meetings in Argentina on 4/6/8/2002. His “Amazograms” were included in a popular book on exploring the art of photography without a camera.

he Uruguayan photographer Federico Estol (1981) uses photography as a complement to his social work. He trained in popular education with Franciscan priests of the Third World Priests Movement in Montevideo, and worked for 16 years in rural communities in Uruguay. “Photography creates visual identities that were overlapping,” he points out.

under Curated by Colombian architect Santiago Escobar Jaramillo, Ayun Fotógrafas and Fotografas Unidas por Latinoamérica are presented: Among them is Fernanda Pineda, an audio-visual producer who has also reached out to indigenous and peasant communities telling stories of the Colombian conflict and post-conflict.

Nicholas Janowski (Argentina 1980)a curator and anthropologist with an international career, historical aspect, sound expression, and socio-cultural research are inherent in the framework of his works.

Fernando Montel Clint (Mexico, 1978) says that “his work refers to hyper-modernism, full of contradictions, and reflections on the transition to new forms of post-human behavior influenced by technology through surreal images.” He is interested in exploring “the connection between nature and us, trying to investigate between Science and the cosmogony of the ancestors.”

Argentines Pablo Capado, Grupo Infoco, and Rodrigo Abdel, recent winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, were surprised by the quality of their projects As well as the Argentine Esteban Pastorino, who worked on a stereoscopic photography project based on Gonzalez Venzano’s archive about the city of Montevideo and Punta del Este.

The Cellular Photography Department, sponsored by Motorola, a project that received more than 1,200 applicants, of whom 60 were selected, was on display in structures erected in the square. Ramon Reverte, founder and art director of RM Publishing in Madrid, was specially invited to the comic book department. Thanks to the institutional support provided by the Amoedo Foundation at Casa Neptunia, there has been an important portfolio review programme.