Photograph Courtesy of United Photo Industries / Alan Winslow
If you have been to Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO or the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston this summer, you must have noticed The FENCE installations by PHOTOVILLE, which lined the large fences surrounding these parks. The FENCE is a collaboration with United Photo Industries, Photo District News, Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Flash Forward Festival, meant to showcase emerging and mid-career photographers from around the world. This summer The FENCE entered its second year, expanding from just their DUMBO location to include one in Downtown Boston, meant as a photographic response to the question, “What makes up a community”? We covered the “photo village” curated by PHOTOVILLE last year, which is a pop-up photo exhibition made up of freight containers repurposed as private galleries, and it’s coming back to Brooklyn from September 19-29.
The photos used in the installations were submissions from global photographers and curated by a jury of highly respected photography professionals and meant to share with the NYC and Boston communities a myriad of communities around the world, familiar and far away, large and small, rich and poor. During its 10-week run in 2012, the Brooklyn 1000-foot installation drew over 1 million visitors. This year the Flash Forward Festival in Boston joined in to help bring a sister fence to the greenway in Downtown Boston.
The PHOTOVILLE pop-up village was a success in 2012, as well. It brought together a mix of exhibitions, lectures, hands-on workshops, night-time projections, a photo dog-run, a camera-flower greenhouse, and a summer beer-garden with food trucks to create an artistic ambiance at the Brooklyn waterfront. United Photo Industries crowdsourced the $30,000 it needed to get the project started at the 60,000 square foot location at Pier 3. PHOTOVILLE returns this September and the lineup will be available this week, so stay tuned to their site for the update!
