Triennial of Photography Festival Aims to Inspire Action and Invoke Change

With this year's theme 'Breaking Point: Searching for Change', the festival program is a humanistic statement on sustainability and change. Since 1999, Triennial of Photography has taken place every third year in Hamburg in collaboration with the city’s major museums, cultural institutions and galleries. We bring you our favorites from this year's 320 artists that are participating in the festival.

With a large number of exhibitions under a common theme, Triennial of Photographyhighlights current topics in photography and features a wide range of conversations with artists, lectures and portfolio viewings. What started as aan initiative of the photographer and collector F. C. Gundlach, the festival is now intended to engage audiences,inspire action and invoke change.

By Martin Errichiello & Filippo Menichetti

This year, eight exhibitions form the backbone of the Triennial, interpreting the overarching theme with titles inspired by the keyboard commands we use hundreds of times a day without thinking about their original meaning –Enter, Control, Space, Delete, Shift, Return, EscapeandHome.

The symbolic terminology of the keyboard is the overarching theme of the entire Triennial exhibition program. For example, [HOME] asks questions about the experience of home and homelessness in today’s global society, while [CONTROL] focusses on political power relationships. The approach to public spaces and the development of urban concepts is the theme of [SPACE], and [SHIFT]investigates how the individual adapts to altered conditions.

By Anton Corbijn

By Jorge Taboada

Polish curator Krzysztof Candrowicz will serve as artistic director of the upcoming Triennial of Photography for the second time. Heexplains that there are many ways of approaching change, and that indications of how to identify change can be taken from the mostmost everyday of objects, such as the computer keyboard.

“Keys are our means of using a computer, but we are mostly oblivious to the powerful concepts behind them.”

The political and environmentally conscious theme this year is inspired by a process of many different factors, he tellsBJP, including spending a year “away from structured, mechanized and commercial reality”, traveling around Latin America, Nepal and India.

By Janet Delaney

By Šarūnas Kvietkus

By Maciej Dakowicz

By Hanns-Jörg Anders

By Shirana Shahbazi

By Thomas Albdorf

By Sonja Hamad

By Mandy Barker

The Hamburg Triennial is open between June and September, and will include exhibitions, portfolio reviews, masterclasses led by Noor and World Press Photo,workshops and talks. Do you plan on visiting the festival? See more here.