Vintage Photo Festival
The foundation invites professional photographers as well as art school students and graduates, amateurs and freelancers to submit their works.
The jury is composed of the director of the festival Katarzyna Gębarowska, Adam Mazur,[11] Maria Teresa Salvati[12] and Paweł Żak.
The festival is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the City Council of Bydgoszcz and the Marshal's Office in Toruń.
Anna Grzelewska[15] held and exhibition entitled "Julia Wannabe"[16] which presented childhood, its hardships and the period of becoming a young adult.
In photography, she tries to reach deeper and more personally into the spirit of this place and create a universal story about people, landscape and objects.
[33] The exhibition titled "Baryty" presented photographs which constituted an overview of the artist's works from different years, from the late 1950s to the second half of the 1980s.
The starting point for Amy Friend's[34] exhibition entitled "Dare Alla Luce"[35] were anonymous vintage photographs.
[43] The artist wanted to capture the lost atmosphere of her youngest years, when her interests revolved around feeling harmony with nature, longing for a simple life devoid of worries.
In 1907 the Lumière brothers patented the autochrome technique, i.e. the first method of obtaining color photographs in the form of positive images on a glass plate.
[54] Yet another approach to color was presented by Pszemek Dzienis who, in his project entitled "Pureview",[55] recreated the definition of photography as light painting, which was promoted by one of its pioneers – Talbot.
The color of the landscape, obtained with his own technique, was also the main theme of Teresa Gierzyńska's exhibition "Nastroje" [Moods],[57] which was curated by Katarzyna Gębarowska.
[63] The theme of the fourth edition[64] of the festival was "A woman behind and in front of the camera" with reference to the Women's Year established by the Sejm of the Republic of Poland in 2018.
The aim of Eric Schuett's[70] project entitled "Wiejskie królowe" [ Village queens][71] was to depict portraits of elderly women in their traditional folk costumes, worn on a daily basis at home or on special occasions.
[81] His project "Entropia, inercja, pustka" ["Entropy, inertia, emptiness"] is a series of photographs presenting the author's aesthetic vision of the world made using the dyed cyanotype technique.
[82] The project "Czwarte Wybrzeże" ["Forth Coast"][83] shows the tragedy of thousands of Libyans deported in 1911, during the Italian-Turkish war, to the island of Tremiti.
The fifth edition of the Vintage Photo Festival[87] included exhibitions of international and local artists revolving around the theme of the photography archive.
As Marianna Otmianowska, contemporary director of the Polish National Digital Archives highlighted "The pursuit of the traces of the past is in progress".
In turn, Marcela Paniak[93] carried out workshops for everyone interested in archival family photography and such aspects as its history, memory and identity.
So are Tomasz Gudzowaty[94] series of photos entitled "Proof",[95] which consists of photographs originally considered to be by-products of the actual Polaroid Type 55.
The invited artists conducted numerous workshops and open-air photography events in the city space, which made it possible to show the landscape values of Bydgoszcz.
[99] The project "Poza czas" ["Out of time"][100] consists of portraits close to the artist made using a technique called "luxography".
The project consists of photographs taken on a 35 mm plate, which the artist developed with the addition of oil from the KhMAO spills to materialize the degradation of the natural environment in the region.
As Małgorzata Czyńska[109] writes in the festival program intro: "Instead of photos posed in an atelier, studied and static, there is naturalness, life itself.
(Source: paper festival program intro) Thanks to them we know what Bydgoszcz and its inhabitants looked like on the day on which Poland regained independence.
The works were based on photographs found in many issues of the Sovetskoe Foto magazine, the visual material of the Soviet government which was used by them to build their "ceremonial" image.
The artist creates photomontages by hand, deliberately giving up digital technologies, thus evoking the metaphor of the history fabric.
[118] Third place went to Paz Olivares Droguett, who created a daily record of the transformation of her grandparents' house into her own on a color plate, asking about the meaning of intimate space during the quarantine.
[119] Honorable mentions in this edition were awarded to: Iwona Germanek,[120] Ciro Battiloro,[121] Camila Alvarez[122] and Filippo Bardazzi[123]
