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Announcing the Winners of The Print Swap Exhibition at Photoville!

By Ellyn Kail on August 3, 2018

Yuka’s Begin © Andreas R. Kremer (@andreaskremer.photography), Cologne, Germany

Madison © Ian Wallace (@ianwallace), Brooklyn, NY

Diana the Animal Healer, Topanga, California, 2017 © Kat Bawden (@bawdenka), Los Angeles, CA

The Print Swap is coming to Photoville! We received an overwhelming number of submissions from around the world, and Alison Zavos, the Founder of Feature Shoot, and I have selected 30 images to be part of the show. These photographs, taken throughout the US, South America, the UK, Scandinavia, Australia, Nepal, India, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and beyond will travel to Brooklyn Bridge Park from September 13-23. New York City photographer Henry Hargreaves will design and install the exhibition in one of Photoville’s iconic repurposed shipping containers.

While this show has no fixed theme, the photographs do share a similarly magical, preternatural sensibility. Kat Bawden documents an intimate moment shared between an animal communicator named Diana and a pig who is about to be euthanized. Both of her subjects are mortals, and still, the connection between the two of them hints at something beyond what we can see and understand–and that same theme emerges time and again throughout the exhibition.

Figures with backs turned, facing the unknown, become a recurring motif in the works of Vivek Prabhakar, Marco Sacco, Andreas Kremer, and Anthony Bellemare. We plunge deeper into the unknown with the mystery-laden photographs of Kevin Wo, Samuel Hicks, Lawrence Manning, Ian Wallace, and Sebastian Dijkstra Nilander.

Sorrow and hope are two sides of the same coin. Alfonso De Gregorio tells a story about semi-feral horses grieving the loss of a foal, while Thibaut Goarant, who suffers from depression, credits photography with saving his life. Matthias Rufibach, a self-described agnostic, discovers traces of the divine in nature. Laura Restrepo Ortega finds a shipwrecked sailboat; behind it, the sky opens.

We rely on photographs for information, but in some ways, these thirty images withhold more than they reveal. Like slices from a dream, they seem both familiar and faraway. For that reason, we returned to them many times, and often, we found something we hadn’t seen before. If you’re in New York in September, be sure to check out the show in person!

As always, The Print Swap is open for submissions. Tag #theprintswap on Instagram to submit. Our next exhibition will be curated by Caroline Hunter, the Picture Editor at The Guardian Weekend Magazine, and it will open in London this October as part of The Other Art Fair. Follow along at @theprintswap on Instagram for updates.