The World Photography Festival is coming to London with a raft of exclusive lectures, seminars and exhibitions, and the Sony World Photography Awards.

BJP is this year’s World Photography Festival’s official media partner, and as such, we will provide exclusive coverage of the events, as well as exclusive interviews with the industry experts participating in the Festival - with the videos published on the WPO website and BJP Online daily throughout the World Photography Festival.

BJP will also be offering the chance to win one of ten Festival passes in a competition inspired by the content of the Festival programme. We will be announcing the details of this competition on our Facebook page in the coming days. Visit http://www.facebook.com/BJPhoto for more information.

Headlining the festival will be From Chaos to Order, an exhibition curated by photography expert Francis Hodgson and independent curator Yasmina Reggad. The show is built around the winning and shortlisted images of the 2011 Sony World Photography Awards, and mirrors “the process by which we make sense of photographs in the world”, says Hodgson. “Editing and sequencing, picking fewer telling photographs from the mass – that is the process by which all photography comes to its audience.”

The exhibition also considers how judges filtered the stream of entries, arriving first at the shortlists then at the winning photographers, says Hodgson. “The competition is open to everyone, which is a huge strength and a real benefit to photographers worldwide. But exhibitions, by their nature, give order to things. So in choosing the theme From Chaos into Order we’ve made some attempt to reflect these processes. For visitors, the experience of seeing the exhibition will present a movement from the noisy plethora of images through to an orderly conclusion by which they make coherent sense.”

“It’s challenging to curate a show from award-winning photographs and series chosen by others, but I really enjoyed this process and hope we have succeeded in achieving order which will allow the audience to experience photography beyond genres,” Reggad tells BJP.

The World Photography Festival, which will take over London’s Somerset House from 26 April to 22 May is organised by the World Photography Organisation. Culminating with the Sony World Photography Awards ceremony, the festival will also host a series of lectures and seminars, including the In the Photographer’s Studio talks featuring the world’s best photographers.

The organisation is also offering three-day workshops in portraiture and documentary, inviting participants to learn from established photographers such as David Graham and Jocelyn Bain Hogg.

Another festival highlight will be a new retrospective of Bruce Davidson’s work, curated by Simon Baker of Tate. Davidson will be presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award at the Sony World Photography Awards gala ceremony on 27 April.

The World Photography Organisation is offering BJP readers a 15 percent discount on the price of a festival pass. When booking, enter the “BJP15” promotional code in the gift voucher box.


Visit www.worldphoto.org.