Jurors Choices

Once a month, one of this year’s Flash Forward juror will reveal the reasons behind their choices.

Featured Photo: ©Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart, 2019 winner Female Identifying Special Interest category.

The team at Flash Forward Flash Back would love to congratulate all the winners of this year's Flash Forward Competition, and especially commend Akea Brown, Lukas Kreibig, Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart and Liam Mackenzie, winners of the Special Interest categories, respectively Race, Climate, Female Identifying and LGBTQ. As always the works submitted were impressive and inspiring, offering diverse perspectives on our world and on the uses of the photographic medium.

Read more »

Conversations

Every month, we’ll be catching up with a past Flash Forward winner to see what they’re up to today.

Q&A with Amanda Annand

Words by Laurence Butet-Roch, Flash Forward Flash Back Editor
Photos by Amanda Annand, 2018 Flash Forward Winner
Published May 1, 2019

In her work, Canadian photographer Amanda Annand examines how mining companies impact local communities. She moved to Mexico to highlight how her home country is shaping the lives of people abroad. She shares her observations on the Magenta foundation Instagram this week.

Read more »

Roundtable

Each month, we’ll be hosting a roundtable with photographers in hopes of engaging discussion on questions of representation, ethics, responsibility, aesthetics and/or process.

Photographing Power: Exploring the Structures that Perpetuate Injustice

With Tony Fouhse, Janet Jarman, Glenna Gordon, Yvonne Venegas, Luca Zanier, Paolo Woods
Published April 29, 2019

Hierarchies breed inequalities. Hence, photographers such as Tony Fouhse, Glenna Gordon, Janet Jarman, Yvonne Venegas, Paolo Woods and Luca Zanier amongst others, have focused their attention on the people and places of privilege in a bid to render those systems more visible and intelligible. "If we don’t know our enemy, we can’t fight them," says Gordon. Here they discuss the impetus behind their projects, aesthetic and logistical challenges and the responsibilities of storytellers to cover issues from multiple angles.

Read more »

On Our Radar

The following photo projects, publications, exhibitions, discussions, and events inspired and amazed us, since we feel they help move the field forward.

San Francisco photographer Laura Morton (winner 2016) has received the 2018 Canon Female Photojournalist Award. After documenting the budding tech industry and startup culture in California, a project entitled Wild West Tech and made possible by the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, she plans on focusing her lens on the economic divide in the Bay Area that can be observed between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto. “One street, University Avenue, runs through the heart of both communities,” she explains “I will be using the street as a microcosm, documenting the stories of the individuals who live and work along it, to illustrate the stark economic divide between these two communities.”

Alongside the exhibition of Roger Ballen’s work There Is No Light Outside, curated by Jonathan Hobin (winner 2012) now the Creative and Executive Director of the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa,  a panel with art historian and curator, Patrick Lynn Rivers, social scientist, Charles Reeve, and, artist, Jennifer Dickson, moderated by scholar, curator and activist Dr. Monica Patterson will be taking place on September 14th. The four critical thinkers will discuss the “issues and concepts” brought forward by the South African photographer’s controversial “exploration of the shadowy depths of human consciousness.”

Jess T. Dugan (winner 2015) spent the past 5 years making portraits of older transgender people. The resulting book To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Adults is out now. In FF/FB inaugural roundtable, A Rainbow of Nuances: Reporting LGBTQ+ Stories, she explains “One of the reasons I wanted to start photographing older trans folks was that I heard from a young trans man who had found one of my images of an older man whom he assumed was trans, but he wasn’t, which in some ways is irrelevant to the story. He wrote this very moving paragraph about how he had never seen an older trans man and had no road map for what he would look like as he got older.”