We are pleased to announce, our international group exhibition, Beauty in Imperfection, will run until Friday 28 February at the Light House Media Centre. 

The aim of this year’s festival is to return to the essence of our Reclaim Photography manifesto, by reclaiming the best in art photography. Twenty three photographic artists from Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Croatia, Hungary, Japan, Russia, Slovenia, UK and the USA, set out to explore the aesthetic value of Wabi Sabi through unique anthotypes, chemigrams, cyanotypes, pinhole  images and tin types, along with fine art analogue and digital prints.

We are pleased to announce our photographic artists this year are: Anastasia Vovk, Atsushi Fujiwara, Attila Pasek, Chris Byrnes, Irena Jurca, Jo Stapleton, Josie Purcell, Ky Lewis, Lesia Maruschak, Liz Harrington, Maizhou Yuan, Mariia Ermolenko, Marko Umicevic, Megan Jill Daly, Mélanie Patris, Melanie Walker, M. Judit Horváth, Molly McCall, Nettie Edwards, Paul Biddle, Sandro Crisafi, Sayako Sugawara and Yasuhiro Ogawa.

To read more about each artist, over the coming months, please visit our What’s On page. To read more about the exhibition and to view individual images for sale, please visit our exhibition page. Click on the link to download our RPF2019 Beauty in Imperfection downloadable pamphlet and view our festival programme on issuu.

Beauty in imperfection: reclaiming our aesthetic sensibility

Light House Media Centre, WV1 1HT

6 January – 28 February, 2020

Mon-Fri 9am-6:30pm and Sat-Sun 45mins before first film until 8:30pm

Wabi Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.  Leonard Koren, ‘Wabi Sabi for artists, designers, poets and philosophers’, 2008.

In this year’s exhibition, the aesthetic value of Wabi Sabi, as described by Koren, proposes that there is beauty to be found in imperfection, impermanency and incompleteness, thus creating an aesthetic consciousness.

The intangible qualities of beauty and imperfection assumes a transcendental significance within photography, directing the sensibility of the viewer to look beyond the immediately apparent and to search deeper within oneself for meaning and essence.

Aesthetic consciousness is explored either through the use of photographic processes and techniques, the photographer’s artistic interpretation, from the subject matter, or by a combination of all three.

Participants were encouraged to respond to this theme through the use of analogue and cameraless photography (including historical and alternative processes) or digital photography (including photo painting, photo-montage and digital printing skills).

Key words:art, beauty, culture, decay, despondency, emotion, existence, fleeting, fragility, humility, Japan, life, loneliness, melancholy, memory, modesty, nature, object, silence, simplicity, solitude, transience, unconventional and Wabi Sabi.

Image copyright Molly McCall, Memento Vivere, Velvet Daydream, 2019. All rights reserved.