Archived website 2011
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CONCEPT

The 4th edition of the Fotofestival Mannheim_Ludwigshafen_Heidelberg will take place from September 10 to November 6, 2011, and bears the title THE EYE IS A LONELY HUNTER: IMAGES OF HUMANKIND. The festival takes as its point of departure a humanist perspective in the tradition of documentary photography. It will showcase a variety of practices that are situated at the intersection between documentary and artistic photography, practices that are characterised by a strong sense of visuality but also a keen sense of sociopolitical awareness.

What are some of the key issues and challenges facing humanity today and how are they represented? How does contemporary photography transport ethnographic and anthropological knowledge with the hindsight of postcolonial discourse? And how would a portrait of humankind look like in the year 2011?
The 4th Fotofestival will focus on the new and critical ways photography transports anthropological knowledge and aims to be a photographic survey of the human condition as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, seen from a plurality of geographic angles. While acknowledging the post-modern discourse of the camera’s capacity to lie and the ‘demise of photographic truth’, the 4th edition of the Fotofestival argues for photography’s capacity to bear witness to the human condition and to human experience within real social and political conditions.