Rovinj Photodays - a national photography festival
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EUROPEAN PREMIERES DOMINATE PHOTODAYS
The fourth-in-a-row Croatian photography festival, the Rovinj Photodays, gathered about 350 participants from the whole region and announced as many as fifteen photographic exhibitions t
Rovinj Photodays - a national photography festival including a national competition for the best photographs from the preceding year, bringing together the best photographers from Croatia and Europe. What makes the event special is the photo route and photo exhibition on the main town square.
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The exhibition of photographs “Naked and Hidden” by Erwin Blumenfeld (1897 - 1969) is shown for the first time in the territory of south-east Europe, encompassing part of the author’s rich opus. The exhibition shows artist’s renowned nudes and portraits, two montages of Hitler, and several fashion photographs for which Blumenfeld became famous in the US.
In cooperation with the Italian Centre for Research and Archiving of Photographs (CRAF), the exhibition of the two of the greatest 20th century Italian photographers was staged: Franco Fontana and Mario Giacomelli. The author of the exhibition, Walter Lima, said regarding their work that Fontana found his place in the international scene as one of the inventors of colour photography, using light Renaissance hues, while pointing out for the case of Giacomelli that he completely turned the foundations of neo-realism upside-down, by introducing new tonal poetry into the photograph. Thanks to the Italian festival of contemporary photography, “SI Fest”, the visitors to Photodays discovered another attractive exhibition – “True Stories”, presenting younger but highly appreciated European photographers such as Amy Stein, Lydija Panas, Zoltàn Jòkaja and others.
In the church of St Thomas, the retrospective exhibition of Franko Horvat was staged as well. The author was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Prize by the Photodays jury. Regarding the awarded photographer, born in Opatija, who left his native region with his family in 1939 and moved to Swiss Lugano, the exhibition author Cesare Columbo said his photographs describe the everyday in detail, regardless whether they deal with the confrontation with paintings of old, or have fun with digital photography. With his photographs, Horvat enriched some of the finest pages of the Elle, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, while together with his colleagues he ingeniously interpreted high Italian fashion, from Nine Ricci to Ungaro, as well as creations by great French couturiers, from Chanel to Givenchy.
Visitors to Rovinj and the Croatian photography festival – Photodays were able to enjoy a photographic treat, which was its European premiere at the same time – the exhibition entitled “50 Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll: the Women Who Created Rock”, which was staged in the Adris Gallery. The authors of the exhibition are all women, eleven of them – Roberta Bayley, Janett Beckman, Jini Dellacio, Jill Furmanovsky, Laura Levine, Janet Macoska, Catherina McGann, Ebet Roberts, Amalia R. Rothschild, Sue Rynski and Kate Simon, who photographed musicians during five decades and who were gathered under a single exhibition by the author Gail Buckland, a known writer, art historian and curator from New York. The New York curator reminded those present that rock ‘n’ roll is a very “macho thing”, which made the very taking of photographs of scenes from “man’s world” increasingly hard for women. Therefore, in order to prove themselves, they had to work twice as hard in order to become equal and recognised in ranks with their male photographer colleagues.
- Rock ‘n’ Roll is fantastic and can be serious. It speaks using an international language that all can understand. It can change and it does change the world for the better, Buckland said at the opening.
Along with photographs of famous musicians, the Centre for Visual Art “Batana” also featured the exhibition by the Rovinj photography club entitled “ROFOTO”, under which members of the Centre “Batana” got involved in the Photodays 2011 project. Among six hundred received works coming from twenty-six authors, the selector and the international master of photography Virgilio Giuricin chose several from each of them, so the visitor can see, all in all, seventy-six photographs from different genres. All Photodays exhibitions can be seen until end of June, while the photographs placed on billboards along the Sea and Underwater quay will, after Rovinj, be placed in all major towns along the Adriatic coast. The quay also features exhibitions by the agencies of Pixell, Cropix, photography associations Fotogard and Ptičica, and the Belgrade ReFoto magazine.
The Rovinj Photodays were organised by the Rijeka “Astoria” College and the Association of LivingStone, while the general sponsors are Maistra and the Rovinj Tourist Board.
