PhotoEast: Hashtag I Belong 2018
“All over the world the idea of globalisation is being rejected. Closest to home, the votes for Trump and Brexit, and the rise of far-right parties across Europe on a populist tide of nativism and isolationism, are indications that our world is changing radically. The apparently unquestionable virtues of a globalised economy are faltering while the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening.”
- Emma Bowkett & Josh Lustig via www.photoeast.co.uk
We supported the PhotoEast Festival in Suffolk, UK this year by sharing with our own community the opportunity to enter PhotoEast's unique Instagram based photography competition. Emerging photographers gain the chance to have their work displayed at the PhotoEast photography festival alongside prestigious established photographers like Sian Davey, Mark Power, Cian Oba-Smith, Matt Eich, Seba Kurtis and many others.
The criteria for entry was imagery created around the concept of belonging as proposed by curators Emma Bowkett and Josh Lustig, Director and Deputy Director of Photography, Financial Times Magazine.
We've selected our favourite nine submissions from our own collective featuring our own #semizine and #semimagazine within the #ibelong18 Instagram based photography competition. Below we feature creative work from Maude Girard, Alex Djordjevic, Ko Dewantoro, Miet Van Hee, Alessandra Sampalean, Daniel Harvey Gonzalez, Lea Fernandes, Jean Luc Feixa and Mattias Stolzenfels. Congratulations to the winners of the competition overall, download the programme brochure for the PhotoEast Festival here.
The feeling that we belong is one of the better things in life: belonging brings stability, safety, strength, purpose. It can insure us against calamity. It lifts us up.
But is it enough to belong? Is belonging essential to life? Are our ideas of identity and community inextricably linked? And if they are, what does it mean to have our sense of belonging threatened?
After all, we are more interconnected than ever. We can, at any time, interact with people from every corner of the world – and we see it as a good thing, because in many ways it is good. Yet the groups we form often isolate us. Sometimes they serve to fracture our relationships. In a world connected by social media, it sometimes appears that we exist in discrete, self-sustaining groups that only express the kind of things we want to hear, while beyond the scope of those echo-chambers, it is only the most extreme voices that command our attention.
- Emma Bowkett & Josh Lustig via www.photoeast.co.uk
Lovers in Belfast by Mattias Stolzenfels
By Ko Dewantoro
Belonging is Something That We Inherit by Maude Girard
Belonging is Infinite in Time and Space by Allesandra Sampalean
Belonging is Being Aware of One's Roots by Jean-Luc Feixa
Belonging is a Grey Area, an Ill-Defined Situation or Field Not Readily Conforming to a Category Or to An Existing Set of Rules by Alex Djordjevic
Belonging Is Being An Actor Of Many Movements, Events And Generations by Lea Fernandes
By Daniel Harvey Gonzalez
By Miet Van Hee
Text by Pagy Wicks. Images by the respective artists copyrighted.
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