FORMAT International Photography Festival
Office reflections selected to exhibit at FORMAT International Photography Festival.
FORMAT International Photography Festival was established in 2004. It is the UK’s leading international contemporary festival of photography and related media. The festival’s theme for 2013 was FACTORY: Mass Production. It focused on several aspects of the factory and working life, such as automation, live to work/work to live.
Nine photographs from my Office Reflections series were selected to exhibit at Format 13. The show was curated by Louise Fedotov-Clements and Brian Griffin, one of the UK’s most influential and creative portrait photographers, was one of the jurors. The festival attracts over 100,000 visitors to Derby biannually. It was a wonderful experience to be part of this prodigious exhibition, and it gave me the confidence to continue working creatively.
Joanne Betty Conlon’s photographs of British (Irish) office workers alludes to what is left once production has shifted to the Far East: meaningless and mind-numbing jobs in the service industry. Conlon emphasizes the banality of her subjects’ condition by photographing them as reflections in the office window. The result is a visually and conceptually loaded double image of an outside and an inside world. The workers appear trapped, longing to be elsewhere, outside.
Read the full review from Photomonitor here
