WORDS FROM THE DIRECTOR

We are living in uncertain times: a period of personal and public anxiety with unemployment on the increase and severe cuts across public services. The political landscape today has a new construct: a coalition government that reaches its first anniversary during the opening week of Look11, the first international photography festival to be staged in Liverpool.

It is against this backdrop that the central theme of Look11 will be photography as a ‘call to action.’ Set within the context of the City of Radicals celebration and in keeping with Liverpool’s history of oppositional discourse and radical politics, it will feature challenging photography that reflects many of the vital issues that shape our lives today.

The photography presented at Look11 will be shown in pairs or in close dialogue between different series of images in order to ask the viewer to create links and connections in conceptual, aesthetic, political or humanistic terms. This approach will, I hope, allow the viewer to deliberate on the images on show and examine the motives and meaning behind the work.

Look11 will launch with a weekend of exhibition openings, artists’ talks, workshops and the third National Photography Symposium, which will be staged at the festival’s creative hub, the Bluecoat. The ‘call to action’ will invite both professional 
and amateur photographers to engage with the festival by participating in debate and discussion around contemporary photographic practice 
and issues and getting involved in projects such 
as Capture Liverpool, a mass portrait of the city using photography.

If we believe that photography is a report/account then we must prove that it aspires to make better 
the social reality it represents. If photography teaches us about the world, and is a tool for learning and intervention, then by its very activity it is a ‘call to action’.

It is my belief that photography has the power to frame and represent debate, to capture events in a way the written word cannot and throughout Look11 we invite the viewer to stop, think, examine and debate.

Stephen Snoddy

Artistic Director, Look11