Hereford Photography Festival

Hereford Photography Festival (HPF) is the longest running annual festival of its kind in the UK and the only one based rurally. Since 1989, HPF has exhibited and commissioned photographic work from a variety of local, national and international practitioners. For us the biggest challenge is at the same time the most exciting consideration; how do we continue to engage with local, rural audiences while programming exciting and internationally relevant work?

The festival runs each year with exhibitions at the two established arts venues in Hereford, but also at many other publically-accessed spaces across Herefordshire and its border counties, including swimming pools, hospitals, shops, schools, cafes and sites of special interest. By being flexible year-on-year with our chosen venues we can continue to make accessible, free, quality art exhibitions for people across the region – and not just to those who live in the city.

While physical access is one challenge, HPF considers engagement with local populations paramount to our commissioning process. We do this not only by selecting photographers with relevant experience of rural contexts, but - significantly – by offering opportunities for photographers who may not have worked rurally before and supporting them through this process. By sharing skills and insight into working rurally with the best practitioners our aims are threefold: to encourage artists to consider rural contexts for working, to attract the best photographers to work and exhibit with HPF, and to build and sustain our local audiences.

HPF commissioned Tessa Bunney to work with local Hereford cattle breeders. Bunney is a renowned photographer whose work deals with the changing nature of rural landscape and industry. She has photographed in the Yorkshire Dales, Romania, China and Vietnam, and, as the daughter of a farmer herself, is comfortable working rurally. With the support of the Hereford Cattle Association, Bunney was able to access farms and farmers across the county, staying with many throughout her commission.

‘OPEN HERE’, HPF’s open-submission exhibition, attracts around 300 applicants annually, from which around 20 are selected for exhibition. OPEN HERE is the only open-submission exhibition in the UK that offers a socially-engaged, rurally-based commission as its main prize. The 2010 OPEN HERE Commission was awarded to Jason Larkin, who proposed a project on the changing nature of Herefordshire’s rural economy. Larkin is currently meeting with workers throughout the county who have changed jobs either by choice or have been forced to, to better understand and record each individual’s transition from one job to another. He is also looking at business premises in the region that have made a transition in purpose, e.g. the ice-cream van that is now a carpenter’s shop, or the phone box that is now a public library. The work will be shown at Hereford Cathedral during the 2011 festival.

HPF’s Common Land programme is a series of projects, commissions and research events that investigate the nature of socially-engaged and rural arts practice, and supports artists to work within these contexts. It also provides a mechanism for HPF to evaluate and feedback into our ways of working. Each Common Land project seeks to engage particular sectors of the community. Each project becomes drawn out of and framed by this critical process. How do they go about bringing sectors of the community on a journey that seeks to dissolve the gap between artist and audience and become more about active participation?