Theme

the average city dweller is photographed over 300 times per day…*

Trans/form,
The theme for FORMAT06 is concerned with our rapidly changing world both locally in Derby and globally as portrayed through the lens of photographic practice.  Artists included in the FORMAT06 programme will be selected and curated into exhibitions that explore the theme in broad terms looking at non prescriptive interpretations of transformation and change ranging from urban/rural space, climate, migration, technological to more personal and intimate perspectives.  The theme will be examined in a diversity of ways all with a stem of ideas coming from the notion of change and conversion via physical, visual, material, conceptual, virtual or philosophical concerns.  Photography is an ideal medium to document and communicate change, everyone has a family album that charts generations and place.  Cameras are more readily available, most people in the west have a camera/digital/phone. As technological, environmental and societal change is happening at speed there is an increasing need to record events, to root experience in material documentary form and to evidence existence via the photograph as social document, staged narrative or chance encounter. Art has the power to affect subtle shifts in perception; artists transform the ordinary into the extraordinary or vice versa, imbuing everyday objects/ places/ spaces with new or heightened, meanings and associations.

From frontlines to touchlines, political downfalls to personal triumphs, a photographer can enduringly define a moment, burning their vision onto the international consciousness. FORMAT06 will host a compelling collection of images from some of the art world’s leading photographers that document a world in constant change. Across battlefields and red carpets, front rooms and global summits, packed stadiums and ruined homes, transform, translate, mutate chronicles the pinnacles of success and achievement, as well as the depths of human suffering and struggle. Uncompromising and extraordinarily moving, FORMAT06 is a unique month of visual culture through the eyes of the finest photographic image-makers of the today, tomorrow and the past.

FORMAT is a themed season of photography that embraces a broad range of visual culture represented through - photography.  The theme will be explored via a diversity of approaches by the exhibition of work by high profile internationally significant artists, archive works, participatory projects, emerging artists and public interventions, commissions, mobile phone exhibition with international residencies in Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe, open submissions, conference ‘photography and painting’, workshops, talks, CPD, interaction and interpretation.  FORMAT programmes with a view to facilitating a democracy of image production and dissemination whilst forming a strong, coherent and curated body of representation referring to and demonstrating the FORMAT themes’ and core concepts.

*Radio 4 08/11/05

Louise Clements 2006