ROOM 08

East Meets West is a FORMAT Festival, QUAD and GRAIN Projects collaboration made up of a series of masterclasses for emerging photographers from across the UK. The professional development programme offers photographers a unique opportunity to take part in presentations, portfolio reviews and advice sessions with leading professionals. The experience is immersive and provides an opportunity for practitioners to take the next step in their careers. Fourteen participants from the 2019/2020 cohort are showcased here at FORMAT 2021. Throughout the masterclass they have developed a body or bodies of work and refined existing works and series. It has been an enjoyable experience to see how each participant's work and criticality has developed over this time, and to see how the group have come together to form a supportive network. Due to Covid-19 and the inability to have a physical exhibition the group ambitiously created a publication, an online platform www.eastmeetswestphoto.co.uk and conducted a series of Instagram Live conversations about their practice, all archived on their website, in addition to sharing their work at GRAIN PhotoCafe. We would like to thank the reviewers and presenters: Abbas Zahedi, Clare Strand, Colin Pantall, Mahtab Hussain, Max Barnett, Monica Allende, Natasha Caruana, and Tom Seymour, who have pushed the boundaries of each participant’s personal development through portfolio reviews and by offering magnificent advice. For FORMAT21 the participants' work is exhibited as a digital showcase. We would like to thank this year’s exhibiting photographers for sharing their work with us and for being part of this year’s festival: Andy Pilsbury, Emily Jones, Fraser Mcgee, Jacqui Booth, Joseph Allen Keys, Laura Dicken, Lucy Turner, Mark Hobbs, Marley Starskey Butler, Maryam Wahid, Mitchell Moreno, Sammie Masters Hopkins, Nicola Morley, and Tamsin Green. East Meets West is a professional development programme open to practitioners based nationally. It is supported by Arts Council England, Birmingham City University and the University of Derby

I want to tell you a story. It may be a horror and horror story. It may be a love story or a story about a person's life. It has no voice, it does not move, it hangs there quietly to tell you its story. I want to use photography to write a novel by imaginary writers, to put together the chapters and the contents of the story with different scenes. When we look at the literary works, we will have a sense of the content in our mind. If photography is the artistic form that catches the moment, the picture is our mind. When we face the noisy environment around us, I hope this photographer's novel can bring you some pressure to relax. It will bring you some belongings and satisfaction like your pillow book or a tired day's evening film, and sit down and open a chapter to read it because it tells you a story.

George Selley (born 1993) is a London based photographer, filmmaker and Parallel Photo Platform 3rd Cycle Artist. George currently teaches photography at Fine Arts College, in Camden. He is a recent graduate of MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication. Having begun his further education in Anthropology, (Bsc Social & Biological Anthropology, Oxford Brookes, 2015), George's work continues to be heavily researched based, but with conceptual elements often present. His work has been published in Dazed, Huck, The British Journal of Photography, Art Press and Fisheye Magazine. George received the Paris Photo Carte Blanche Student Award in 2017. He was also nominated for the HSBC Prix de la Photographie 2019, and was a finalist in the Fujifilm Young Talent Award as well as the Felix Schoeller Best Emerging Photographer Award 2017. He has been exhibited at the Felix Nussbaum Museum of Cultural History, Germany; The Grand Palais at Paris Photo 2017; the Fondazione Marangoni Gallery in Florence, Italy, the Ostrołęka Festival of Photography, in Poland, Odesa Photo Festival, Ukraine and the Green Rooms Gallery in London. His 2015 documentary Study Drugs was selected and screened at the 2015 American Public Health Association Film Festival, in Chicago. George is a co-founder of the Carte Blanche Collective, and a member of Inpro Photography Collective In 1996, the US Department of Defence released declassified excerpts of a manual entitled, The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, which had been a standard textbook for students at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA); an American military training academy set up in Panama in 1946. More than 60,000 Latin American soldiers have been trained at the School, and in all, 11 dictators have attended its courses – among them, some of the region's most notorious human rights abusers. Despite a shocking list of human rights abusing alumni, US army officials identify these men as “a few bad apples”. In response to this, George Selley has deconstructed and edited the manual, using images from the University of Milwaukee Photography Archive - of two early to mid 20th century American geographers: Isaiah Bowman, and Eugene Vernon Harris, who were using photography to chart, map and document Latin America on behalf of the American Geographical Society, and the US Foreign Service respectively. Bowman and Harris’ images are presented in edited form, paired with extracts of text from the Human Exploitation manual – in short, an attempt to deconstruct the language of imperialism and question contemporary historical narratives.

In our current era, inferences based on hearsay, stories and social media are ill-equipped to deal with more complex geopolitical, economic and heavily mined systems. Using performative and constructed scenes, landscape and studio photography, each image references the interdependent relationship between nature and technology, past and future and how this permeates contemporary lifestyles.

Michael Darough received his BFA in photography from Arizona State University and his MFA in photography from the University of Memphis. He is a nationally exhibiting artist whose work deals with personal, cultural and self-projected identity. Currently Darough is a working artist and educator. These images were created in response to the Black Lives Matter Movement. The faceless men represent individuals affected by this systemic issue. Those void of the figure symbolize the stories that struggle to be told; they ones that do not receive news coverage. Incarceration rates, racial profiling and fatalities from law enforcement disproportionately affect individuals of color. Police officers have the difficult task of protecting and serving our communities. They are people we depend on in common and extreme situations. I have nothing but respect for these women and men who risk their lives daily, but every black family still has to have “the talk” with their children; especially their sons. Every few months a high profile story emerges about another individual who is a victim of the criminal justice system. These situations have become all too common. Social media and the digital age have given us access to see how excessive force has been used in several situations with individual’s of color. These problems are not new. As a country we transitioned from slavery and Jim Crow laws to segregation to civil rights. These issues went from overt to covert. Although these matters regarding race are better than they have been in decades, we still have problems within our society that have yet to be properly addressed and fixed.

Tianxi Wang was born and raised in China. He studied in Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States. Tianxi was influenced by a wide range of artists such as Yamamato Masao, Masahisa Fukase, Gregory Halpern and Todd Hido. He is interested in imagery and metaphors found in ordinary space. Currently Tianxi lives and works in China. He established a small artist community, The Miscellaneous LAB, in Tianjin on purpose to offer residence as well as share studios and equipment. The project is titled after the fourth book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book series. I moved back to China without any preparation. Life was suddenly cut off and almost everything was lost. Then I settled down at Tianjin, which is a city close to Beijing but not busy at all. I tried to restart my life and took the habit of walking along the river because I found it soothing: I walk by the river everyday to seek healing and rest. The water ran slowly, the ripples looked soft and smooth, and there’s some strange light reflecting on the surface. Somehow it helps me relax. Some Buddhists pray before they release fish. Soon those fish get caught and sold to fishmongers. Then fishmongers sell these fish back to Buddhists. A perfect circle. It's a series of images shot during my walks along the river, which runs through the city. I captured the people swimming in the river and catching fish, often with just a fishing net; however, the motivation behind the project was not so much to document the local fishing culture, but to pursue the sense of calm and relaxation that I find along the river.

Satyadeep Singh's passion for photography, art and people drives their work. Working as a photographer and visual thinker with the background in communication design. Satyadeep Singh believes in expressing societal and cultural issues with a different medium of contemporary art practices. The people of the small village Busapedha, located in the remote parts of Northern Himalayas in Nepal breathes-in the air of a tender, fragile and a complex social system. Having around 20 families of mountain dwellers, the village comprises of Dalits and Tamangs inhabiting their respective territories demarcated by altitude and geography. With generations of caste-based discrimination, segregation and subsequent conversion to Christianity – voluntary or through evangelisation, life in Busapedha is marginalised and freedom seems to be a distant dream. Existing between documentary and staged narrative. ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ is an ongoing work exploring the subject of identity through dynamics of religion and caste based discrimination. Flipping through New Chapters of an old bounded scripture, the images reflect the mood of silence in their own isolated rooms. The story attempts to reflect our staged identities on the backdrops of politics. Only a single colour visible behind our portraits, rooted deep from within cultures, bluntly speaking to us but spreading our wings out wide in search of more dignified life. Facts: After 2018, the government officially banned religious conversions from the country for the next two centuries, but the numbers suggest many consider it a risk worth taking as the “untouchables” are among the most oppressed by this social system, which leaves no sphere untouched. Testament to how legions of Dalit’s are prepared to gamble on breaking the law in search of a more dignified life, Nepal now harbours one of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world.

Chase Barnes is an artist and designer currently based in Philadelphia, PA. He makes books, photographs, and videos that examine our place in the contemporary cybernetic landscape. He received a BFA from the University of Missouri in 2016, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. Wilderness of Mirrors is a photographic survey of an emergent cybernetic landscape. The series visualizes contemporary mechanisms of control that employ technology, anxiety, and images as a means to destabilize and restructure belief. These discrete social and technological systems are embedded into the fabric of everyday life, and serve to reinforce and advance dominant structures of capital and power. The series presents these conditions as a veritable wilderness– a landscape of images and devices that infinitely deflects, replicates, and distorts any information within its borders. These devices fuel a hyper-partisan fever and virulent strains of misinformation, all against a backdrop of psychographic advertising and domestic mass-surveillance. By guiding the viewer through these absurd surfaces and circumstances, the images allude to the ways our perception is quietly directed and managed via algorithm to the benefit of corporate interests and intelligence organizations. Ultimately, Wilderness of Mirrors aspires to locate the intersections of simulation, power, and concealment in order to disentangle the mesh of our personal, political and digital selves; it describes an urgent need to reclaim the agency we have lost to convenience and abstraction. The work seeks to question default realities and reframe our relationship to this digital landscape, before it is completely determined for us.

Chase Barnes is an artist and designer currently based in Philadelphia, PA. He makes books, photographs, and videos that examine our place in the contemporary cybernetic landscape. He received a BFA from the University of Missouri in 2016, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. Wilderness of Mirrors is a photographic survey of an emergent cybernetic landscape. The series visualizes contemporary mechanisms of control that employ technology, anxiety, and images as a means to destabilize and restructure belief. These discrete social and technological systems are embedded into the fabric of everyday life, and serve to reinforce and advance dominant structures of capital and power. The series presents these conditions as a veritable wilderness– a landscape of images and devices that infinitely deflects, replicates, and distorts any information within its borders. These devices fuel a hyper-partisan fever and virulent strains of misinformation, all against a backdrop of psychographic advertising and domestic mass-surveillance. By guiding the viewer through these absurd surfaces and circumstances, the images allude to the ways our perception is quietly directed and managed via algorithm to the benefit of corporate interests and intelligence organizations. Ultimately, Wilderness of Mirrors aspires to locate the intersections of simulation, power, and concealment in order to disentangle the mesh of our personal, political and digital selves; it describes an urgent need to reclaim the agency we have lost to convenience and abstraction. The work seeks to question default realities and reframe our relationship to this digital landscape, before it is completely determined for us.

I want to tell you a story. It may be a horror and horror story. It may be a love story or a story about a person's life. It has no voice, it does not move, it hangs there quietly to tell you its story. I want to use photography to write a novel by imaginary writers, to put together the chapters and the contents of the story with different scenes. When we look at the literary works, we will have a sense of the content in our mind. If photography is the artistic form that catches the moment, the picture is our mind. When we face the noisy environment around us, I hope this photographer's novel can bring you some pressure to relax. It will bring you some belongings and satisfaction like your pillow book or a tired day's evening film, and sit down and open a chapter to read it because it tells you a story.