Photoville + SONYA Studio Stroll Connects Artists From Around The World

The Photoville experience was blessed with clear skies, great food trucks, friendly faces, and a broad line-up of over 40 exhibits, lectures and workshops housed in 30-plus repurposed shipping containers sitting along Brooklyn’s waterfront.

Sponsored by United Photo Industries, the 60,000 square-foot photo “village” at Pier 3’s uplands in Brooklyn Bridge Park served as a portal to other countries, peoples and worlds – while also highlighting the universality between each subject.

Hitting domestic and international notes, the Magnum Foundation presented Bruce Gilden’s somber yet warm series “No Place Like Home: Foreclosures In America,” as well as Beijing-based Sim Chi Yin’s claustrophobically illustrative series “China’s Rat Tribe.” Both exhibits examined the similarities and differences in the hardships of two struggling working populations.

The New York Times delved through a decade of war, from 9/11 to the present, examining the scope of the toll at home and abroad; Lomography covered entire walls with analog photos inspired by or taken in New York City; Brooklyn-based Russell Frederick used “Dying Breed: Photos of Bedford-Stuyvesant” to question the evolution and potential breakdown of traditional neighborhoods; and Noordelicht took viewers behind prison walls across the world and across time, in “Cruel and Unusual.”

Talks and workshops ranged from fashion portraiture and photos not taken to photojournalism in the digital age and “gum printing” with the Bushwick Community Darkroom. But it was Brazilian artist André Feliciano’s vibrant camera greenhouse that captured everyone’s attention with its bouquets of 3,000 plastic cameras.

Earlier in the month, a photo exhibition of a different kind took place in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill thanks to the SONYA Studio Stroll, which opened the doors to 43 artist studios to the public, and partnered with Myrtle Avenue Windows and the Fulton Avenue Business Alliance’s FAB Friday to bring even more hands-on art events to families.

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