Now

While studying photography in Denmark in 2014, Italian Giulia Mangione had to work on a final project. Most of her classmates went to far away countries. Giulia decided to stay to understand what made Denmark the happiest country in the world.

Julius G. Neubronner, born 1851 in Kronberg im Taunus as the son of a pharmacist, cultivated a curious passion for photography. I​n 1907 he patented the design of a camera which could be attached to pigeons and would automatically take pictures during their flight in order to track their journey.

“On a tiny star in a galaxy, even tinier creatures continue to carry out their own roles. All under the light of the sun; All maintaining a fragile balance, like walking over thin ice; All while searching for beauty, as if in prayer; All protected, with each of their realms continuing to endlessly overlap with one another.” – Rinko Kawauchi

Lisetta was born in 1924 in Genoa and she has much in common with that city: its level-headedness, for example, as well as a dry humour, a free spirit, and the marginal position that she continues to adopt although long since an illustrious figure on the contemporary scene. For the exhibition at foto-forum Bozen, five themes were selected that happen by chance to pertain to Carmi’s native city; and they happen also to reveal to us that this photographer left little to chance, when observing reality; rather, her work is the outcome of an exacting and conscious intent.

Today, safe and efficient means of abortion exist, yet 47,000 women die due to botched abortions, every year. Laia Abril’s project On Abortion documents and conceptualizes these dangers and damages caused by women’s lack of legal, safe and free access to abortion. As she weaves her net of questions around ethics and morality, Abril also creates a series of meditative visual and textual manifestations of the social triggers, stigmas, and taboos around abortion that have remained invisible until now.

For this third edition, we are dealing with the topic of control and surveillance, as well as with the critical observation of problematic social processes. In so doing, we are taking a critical look at to how great an extent we are monitored by surveillance cameras, via Internet, Google, etc. as we go about our day-to-day lives. Socially engaged photography can also make processes visible that significantly affect our social, economic and ecological actions, exposing injustices, mismanagement and secret machinations.

Photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist Arnold van Bruggen have been collaborating since 2009 to explore and document the turbulent region of Sochi, Russia. Over the course of five years and eleven visits, they practiced a form of “slow journalism” in order to delve deeply into the complexities of the area, and its remarkable transition in preparation to host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

Dr. Jakob August Lorent (Charleston, SC, USA 1813-1884 Merano) was one of the earliest travel and architecture photographers. He was one of the first ever to travel with a camera to many Mediterranean countries. Lorent took his journeys in a time when even just getting around and finding accommodation in these countries was an adventure, making it all the more significant that he also brought highly interesting photographs home from these arduous journeys.

Observe with a Soft Voice – Philosopher Gaston Bachelard once called himself a „dreamer of words, a dreamer of written words.“ Amira Fritz, on the contrary, is a dreamer of images, floating atmospheres, harmonic landscapes, gentle flowers, faces and people who investigate the observer as if they emerged from an unreachable, enchanted otherworld. Her photographs (just like Bachelard’s words) detach themselves from the heavy burden that binds them to time and reality and instead open up to the dream, to emotions, to a poetic geography where travelling is the ability of encountering without revealing.