Siena's Art Photo Travel Festival Returns for its Second Edition

The core of the event will be eleven exhibitions held in corners of the city of Siena by travel photographers like Melissa Farlow, Pulitzer award and National Geographic photo-reporter,  Timothy Allen, the man responsible for the BBC TV series Human Planet, and Majid Saeedi, Iranian documentarist who spent many years of his career telling the history of the Afghan people.
During the Festival, Randy Olson, Francesco Cito, Stefano Unterthiner, Luca Bracali and Marco Urso will also be present.
On Saturday, October 29th, the Siena International Photography Awards (SIPAContest) ceremony will officially kick off the Festival.
Throughout its second edition, the award received more than 45 thousands images by photographers from 127 countries worldwide.
The winner of each category will be chosen by a jury composed by 26 experts: Melissa Farlow, Beth Wald, Tomasz Tomaszewski – jury members of the 2015’s edition, too – will work alongside Ami Vitale, Karen Kasmauski, Dave Black, Richard Olsenius, Stefano Unterthiner, for example.
Under the title “Beyond the Lens”, the exhibition collects all the awarded pictures of the contest, where they’ll be exhibited at the city’s Magazzini del Sale inside the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, which hosts masterpieces like Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government.
The first selection will be located into the brick-made grottos of Enoteca Italiana, inside the Fortezza Medicea, while the second will be held inside the Arciconfraternita di Misericordia.
The Intronati Library will host End of the Road, a set of images taken by Timothy Allen in the most remote places of the world, while the Accademia dei Rozzi will be the frame of Duality, a tribute to Melissa Farlow and Randy Olson, presenting combined photographies coming from more than 50 works for National Geographic realized in 48 countries worldwide.
Luca Venturi, founder and art director of the Festival, said: “We are proud to present to the world a second edition of a grown, mixed and full of events Siena Art Photo Travel. In two years time we have created an event that oversteps Siena’s borders and brings to Italy hundreds of people with the common love for photography.
“I believe this success, witnessed by the numbers and by the professional photographers who chose to be our partners by betting on this young project, will put us at the same level of many other international photography festivals.”
The Siena Art Photo Travel Festival takes places from from October 29th to November 30th 2016. For more information see here.

Tom Seymour

Tom Seymour is an Associate Editor at The Art Newspaper and an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication. His words have been published in The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wallpaper* and The Telegraph. He has won Writer of the Year and Specialist Writer of the year on three separate occassions at the PPA Awards for his work with The Royal Photographic Society.