Noorderlicht 16 PhotoFestival – quick report

Noorderlicht 16 exhibition at Aa-kerk

Another than the train from Oss to Groningen being a little late, everything went well for my one day at the Noorderlicht 16 PhotoFestival. Well, the other issue was that there was just too much to see, although there were four of the six exhibition areas were relative close, the PhotoFestival was spread over the entire city. I did have a map, so not a bad start, eh? What also helped was meeting up with Martin Doonan, a fellow photo-blogger, from the Hauge, a might fine Englishman who has also spent 10 years in the Netherlands and can speak and read Dutch, which was a great help to me.

Since the exhibitions did not open until noon, we had a chance to walk to a couple of the book stores, one of which had a small exhibition of Rob Hornstra, including photographs from his photobook 101 Billionaires, which I was able to acquire a copy of, one of my many photobook acquisitions during the day. Yep, some more book reviews coming soon.

Probably the largest exhibition venue was as the Aa-kerk, which was central off the Visamarkt. The general theme for this photofestival was titled Human Conditions and the mutiple curated exhibits in Aa-kerch were a broad selection of work about that theme. It included the dreadful impact of the 22 day Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip, titled Point of No Return; Foto8 editor Lauren Heinz about the gangs in London titled Closing In; Simon Njami’s Ordinary Pain that focuses on the pain and suffering on the wings of the world in Cuba, Africa, Tibet and Soweto to name but a few of the powerful exhibits that develed into the human condition.

I also had an opportunity to see the photobooks being published by Noorderlicht, which I posted a brief post over on The PhotoBook.

Overall, my take away was that this PhotoFestival is more than a one day to be able to take in all that Noorderlicht has to offer. I was very impressed with the details, as an example,  the exhibition at Aa-kerk was hung mostly on a framework of rusted re-bar or bare plywood walls that reinforced the images of exposed re-bar and terrible conditions found in the content of the hanging photographs.

Best regards, Doug