There’s no substitute for visiting an art exhibition, like Photoville, which appeared once more in Brooklyn Bridge Park these past two weeks. Created by United Photo Industries, the free event ran from Sept. 18-28 at Pier 5.
These photos are from the event’s very last night.
We brought you a dispatch from last year’s Photoville and we thought we might as well show you once more some of the more innovative and/or Brooklyn-related works we saw there. If you missed the exhibition this year, don’t miss it next year.
New Hampshire’s Ed Kimball brought his piece down in a trailer, rather than in a shipping container, which was how most of the work was presented. His piece defies photography and requires the 3D helmet shown above to really appreciate it. “Mimage Matic” took one piece of video, made on a Flip video camera, and rendered it through a variety of filters so that you saw one version in two dimensions and one in three — both at the same time.
“Broken Screen: Limits of Vision” challenged visitors to imagine what it might be like to have limited sight. First, you read a description of a photo, then you placed your hand on a tactile print of the photo (hidden by a felt curtain) and tried to picture what the words described added by the haptic indications on the print. Once you’d done the best you could, you lifted a felt curtain to see the actual photo.
One of Photoville’s sponsors, Smiletrain, a charity addressing cleft pallet, filled a container with short, looping videos of people smiling, while information in an adjoining chamber educated visitors about the issue.
Luceo brought “Dreams In Disguise,” a container installation you couldn’t actually get inside. You peered through tiny windows to see a large projection of short videos. The idea of the exhibition was to comment on this new form of videomaking, spawned by platforms like Vine and Instagram video.
Speaking of Instagram, the company had one of the biggest exhibitions at the event. It took place on two levels, with a giant, rotating scroll of Instagram images shown above. The company also gave away hundreds of books with print-outs of favored images.
The outside of the Instagram container provided visitors with great backdrops for selfies.
The New York Waterfront Alliance showed “Faces of the Ferry,” portraits and very quick stories from users of the city’s water taxis. Here’s one Brooklynite we found in the collection, Jillian, of Williamsburg.
Once again Photoville showed experimentation with old school forms of photography, in this case a tintype portrait studio.
This booth couldn’t really be captured with a camera at all. It was a bunch of small screens showing animated GIFs. We wrote down the names of several, but this was the only GIF from the New York Photo Festival’s selections that we could find online. Of course it was this one. We also really liked “Vernon in Wyckoff Gardens” and “Mireya and her Super Bubble.” Let us know if you find those anywhere.
Dumbo’s longform journalism purveyor, Narratively, was a big part of Photoville this year, as a sponsor, provider of programming and an exhibitor. Here are visitors checking out Narratively’s exhibition, where the company showed some of the images from its stories.
Smilebooth showed off its services, a social media-friendly photobooth that could also make printouts on the spot. It took four photos in a row and then turned them into a grid. Your correspondent came by on the second night and ended up taking this with some folks.
Red Hook Community Justice Center presented a collection by a variety of photographers from the neighborhood.
Getty Images launched a new program in May, Photos.com, a consumer-facing business. It allows people to get high-quality prints of celebrated images from the Getty archives at affordable prices. We saw a classic photo of Grand Central Station by Hai Murray (1930) and a portrait of Jane Mansfield in Central Park (1955).
Getty has also created its own free iOS app, Stream, for exploring its collection.
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