Out and About at the IHC

For the unfamiliar, here is a small view to our host venue for the festival – The India Habitat Center(IHC).

The India Habitat Center is a large complex of galleries, offices, theaters, restaurants and wide open spaces accessible to the public. It’s a venue to reckon with for the Arts and Culture in the city. In the 2011 edition of the festival we had 32 Print Exhibitions that used both indoor and outdoor spaces. The great thing about the IHC is its outdoors ~ the architecture along with its carefully nurtured greens makes for a grand space for Delhi-ites.

The crew was out and about today measuring new spaces, making plans and looking to innovate new display systems… Here are some images from my phone earlier today ;

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For more, you can look at notes and images from the last edition

Almost There

Big Fat Day at the Habitat

The day in pictures

Work in Progress

IHC – home of the festival

In search of sustenance

We’ve had a series of all day all night kind of meetings at Prashant’s house with the run up to the upcoming festival. There’s much to be done – The jury members are busy finalizing the work to showcase at the festival from over 2400 entries received! At the other end we are working at designing the spaces, sponsorships, media tie ups, vendors for fabricating stands etc. We will also start programming and scheduling events at the festival in the coming weeks – lots of exciting new features, talks and shows in the pipeline.

Coming back to yesterdays meeting – it was a long one! Lots of ideas and lots of back and forth over what is going to be done at the festival and at the end one bleary eyed crew having been in front of a large computer screen all day.

Prashant and Ragini, being the amazing hosts that they are, took us on a little post lunch shopping trip to the supermarket aka break time. Don’t worry, we aren’t procrastinators – In Prashant’s words he was seeing ‘daylight after days’ having been cooped up indoors with all the festival work. Adil was struck by the ‘buy one get two free’ offer on the Choco Pie and through it rediscovered a part of his childhood.

Tomorrow is another day… we are off to the India Habitat Center (IHC) to measure new spaces we are using this year and who can forget the horticulture department from last time? Yes, we still need written consent to move and rearrange plants…

more soon…

m

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photos : mansi midha

Downloading…

… and going through some serious sleeplessness!

While I’m not a part of the submission process I could feel the stress when I arrived at Prashant’s house last night. Navneet, Abhinav and Prashant were busy organizing, processing and sorting over 2000 entries received to the second edition of the photo festival. With the volume comes serious technical bugs that are being sorted in the process – as Abhinav says ’Navneet has a magnetic field around her – things are crashing!’. They are camping at Prashant’s to get the work done in time before presenting the work to the Jury. It’s going to be a long uphill task to finally come to the conclusion of a few selected works that will be presented at the festival. The work received and the sheer numbers have been overwhelming – we thank you all for your participation and are awaiting the results with bated breath!

P.S – Prashant makes a mean goat cheese salad

Extended Deadline!

From Mexico to Malaysia…

~ By Abhinav Sanghi

As we draw closer to the end of the submission deadline, we hope those who have been sitting on the fence take a plunge and submit their work. There has been an overwhelming response to the call for submissions, where we have received submissions from every continent barring Antarctica and have over 60 countries represented so far. It has been an arduous task collating over 700 submissions and have a few sleepless nights ahead after we close submissions, because then begins the part of going over each submission and presenting it to the jury for selection. The quality of work submitted so far has been extraordinary and we have a tough road ahead of us. We wish all participants all the very best! In the same breadth we hope those who shall not get selected for showcasing their work this year to not get disheartened or feel that non-selection is a statement on their work. We urge you to continue on this glorious path of photography and putting together your bodies of work.

 

There is good news tomorrow… stay tuned!

What is Grace?

The Delhi Photo Festival team caught off guard when I asked them the big question, ‘What is Grace’?

~ Mansi Midha

submission information

We are happy to announce that all bugs and technical problems on our submission’s page are now fixed. The site is up and running again and we look forward to receiving submissions from all those who have been waiting.

We like to apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused any of our submitters.

Over the last week we have been quite busy with handling all the incoming submissions from India and across the world.

It is exciting to see so much work and we appreciate the great response to the upcoming festival.

Given the response and by having a courtesy look at the submissions till date we felt that we could list out a few recommendations and opinions that may help the various photo practitioners who have and would be submitting their work for our festival.

Grace as the theme for DPF 2013

For all print exhibitions, the theme for this year’s festival is GRACE. Grace is open to interpretation.

As mentioned on our the website here

http://delhiphotofestival.com/delhi_photo_festival_2013/theme.html

Grace is open-ended and has associations with many other words that can be used while putting together a body of work.

 We encourage photo practitioners to explore their own interpretations and creative expressions of theme, “Grace”.

Its should be noted that photo essays on situations/ subjects that portray or explore an absence or lack of Grace fall under our festival’s theme as well and are equally acceptable as a body of work.

Additionally, Photo practitioners submitting bodies of work towards Digital exhibitions / audio slideshows/ multimedia projects and photo installations need not adhere to the theme of Grace.

What constitutes a “Body or work”?

A set or series of photographs or a photo essay (a minimum of 6 and maximum of 20, in this case) based on a topic / subject which adheres to our theme (GRACE) that all together tell a story.

We would also request that photo-practitioners avoid submitting 6 or more random images that do not adhere to our theme – these will not be considered.

No. of photos that constitute a body of work

We would like to point out that we expect a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 20 images to constitute a body of work.

Single images / less then 6 images/ more then 20 images will not be considered.

Curators, galleries and collaborative projects

We encourage all of the above to submit work for consideration.

We do require all relevant artist details, so even though you may have registered under your own name (or name of the gallery or the like) on our website, we request that when you fill in the submission form to kindly fill in the relevant artist information (e.g. – the name of the artist).

Submissions from foreign photo practitioners

DPF 2013 encourages submissions from individuals from any country, we would like to state that the body of work submitted need NOT be only shot in India or with an Indian context. 

We encourage you to submit work (as per our theme of Grace) based on our own communities / culture/ society/ region or situation etc.

At the last festival, we had a number of foreign photo practitioners who were exhibited – examples would include “Lowlands” by photographer Martin Bogren  and “Homework” by photographer Sean Lee. Both these photographers’ photographed subjects in their own community that had little do with India (as a subject).

A complete list of all print exhibitors from the last festival can be seen here:

http://delhiphotofestival.com/2011dpf/Exhibitions-Print

We hope we have answered most of the questions being asked of us, please do feel free to write in for any specific questions that you may need help with whilst submitting your work.

We look forward to receiving all your submissions

Best

KV