Photo 2020 calls for outdoor exhibits

Photo 2020 is seeking expressions of interest from local and international photographers to exhibit in the festival’s outdoor program.

Running from April 23 to May 10 next year, Photo 2020 is hyped as Melbourne’s ‘world-leading’ photography festival.

The outdoor program will feature a series of large-scale commissions – billboards, paste-ups and free standing artworks – that transform the city’s streets and laneways.

City of Melbourne and Metro Tunnel Creative Program are sponsors of the outdoor program.

Cuttting and pasting the spiel from the Photo 202o website, director Elias Redstone opined that: ‘Melbourne is Australia’s capital of photography. It is the perfect setting to celebrate both the art of photography and photography’s ability to address the major issues of our time.

‘As new phenomena such as artificial intelligence, social media and fake news are shifting our sense of reality, Photo 2020 will present a timely investigation into the critical relationship between photography and truth.’

Photographers must fill in an application by May 31.

The festival’s curatorial theme explores ‘the truth’, and successful applicants need to ‘respond to this theme to interrogate the complexities of truth in the post-internet age’.

‘Photo 2020 will navigate the contemporary era of social media, fake news, artificial intelligence and augmented reality to explore how photography is both implicit in, and critical of, shifting notions of truth,’ the website says.

Photographers can only submit one application, and have to pay a $45 fee. The application will include a PDF with a one-page CV including up to 10 portfolio images.

Applications can be for a single image or a series, and it must be the first time the work has been shown in Australia.

All applications are reviewed by Photo 2020 advisors, and successful applicants will then negotiate fees, site, and production of work.

All costs associated with printing and installation is covered by Photo 2020.