BJP Instagram Takeover: Lisa Barnard gets the inside track at Lianzhou Foto Festival

Documentary photographer Lisa Barnard will be taking over the BJP Instagram (@bjp1854) over the next few days to report from the Chinese festival. The photographic artist and Senior Lecturer in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales is exhibiting her project, Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden and will be sharing her experience at the festival. She’ll be posting images from in and around Guangzhou, her journey to Lianzhou and from the set up and events at the festival.

As Barnard explains, her project is “a study into the ‘unholy alliance’ between the military, the entertainment industry and technology, and their coalescence around modern-day warfare.”

From Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden © Lisa Barnard
From Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden © Lisa Barnard

 

From Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden © Lisa Barnard
From Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden © Lisa Barnard

 

In recent years China has become an increasingly vital source of excellent contemporary photography, with photographers like Chen Xiaoyi, Jiehao Su and Chen Wei documenting how their country copes with global power shifting eastwards. As Wei told us in April, “I respond to what I see in China around me on a daily basis, both the good and the bad.”

Lianzhou Foto Festival is a chief beneficiary of the Chinese photography boom; in its 11th year the Guangdong festival has become a showcase for the best of the country’s photographers. This year’s theme is ‘Expanded Geographies’; as chief curator International Center of Photography’s Christopher Phillips writes:

“This [new] global dynamic is to bring people from many different cultures into direct contact for the first time… The creative vision of photographers around the world is helping to focus a new awareness of the parallel experiences that today link widely separated countries, regions, and local communities. This sense of expanded geographies is the central theme of the Lianzhou Foto Festival 2015, as it explores the emerging connections between different parts of the globe.”

The festival director is Duan Yuting, one of the original organisers of the festival; previously she has been the columnist for Photographer Interview, editor of the theory edition of People’s Photography and photo editor and photo chief director for New Express.

This year’s curatorial panel is particularly exceptional: British photographer Martin Parr; French curator and museum director François Cheval; Director and Curator of the Swiss Foundation for Photography Peter Pfrunder; founder of independent photography journal Journal of Photographic Essay Mao Weidong; SDX Life Weekly Magazine deputy editor Shu Kewen; American writer and editor Joanna Lehan; Dutch artistic duo WassinkLundgren; Beijing-based French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin and French independent photography consultant Michel Philippot.