Sat 5/1-Wed 6/30
The Cleveland Photo fest, which opens its second edition this week, was an idea that sparked a full-blown event in a matter of seven months.
When Cleveland photographer Laura D’Alessandro was living in New Orleans, she volunteered for PhotoNOLA, the city’s annual festival of photography. Returning home, she was thinking Cleveland should do a similar event. She ran the idea by noted local photographer Herb Ascherman, who had long been a catalyst for photography-related activities in Cleveland, and by early 2019, they had enlisted another local photographer Jim Szudy as the third co-director.
In September 2019, the first annual Cleveland Photo Fest opened, taking place over two months at numerous venues around northeast Ohio. It featured ten exhibitions in 15 venues and helped promote a total of 21 photography exhibitions, featuring 250 artists, mostly from Cleveland, but with contributors from as far away as Belgium, the United Arab Emirates and India.
Shortly after that event was over, they were pulling together their volunteer team to plan for fall 2020. PHOTOTHON 2020 was scheduled to take place, once again in September and October, at the Bostwick Art Design Initiative gallery on Prospect (known to art aficionados as the former Busta Gallery). It was to feature five simultaneous exhibitions in that expansive space, involving more than 200 local, regional, national and international photographers.
Well, we all know what happened to that!
Once again, the organizers’ agility came into play. PHOTOTHON 2020 was re-imagined as a spring event called PHOTOTHON 2021, with the bulk of the action still centered on the Bostwick Art Design Initiative, a large space with multiple rooms that can accommodate simultaneous exhibits. There will again be auxiliary events at other galleries and spaces, including BAYarts, Prama Art Gallery in Parma, the LGBT Center, Bonfoey Gallery and Mac’s Backs on Coventry.
May 1 will be the grand opening (all day, from 10am-8pm, for social distancing purposes) of PHOTOTHON 2021 at the Bostwick, with four shows that will be up for the run of the festival and three shorter-run shows.
“Our showcase exhibition for PHOTOTHON 2021 is (and will be) extremely timely, given the social upheaval sweeping the country,” they tell us. “For the first time in Cleveland history, a community of diverse photographers will join in a single portrait project. The exhibition, titled I Identify As, consists solely of local participants. Aware of the prevalent issues surrounding diversity in the arts, the CPF has initiated a portrait project to include Black, White and diverse local photographers. Randomly assigned a collaborator from a different background, each photographer is committed to initiate and explore his/her subject, creating an introspective and reflective portrait for the exhibition.”
Three other shows solicited submissions from artists all over the world — Furtography: Another Show for the Dogs; Deja Nude: Not Another Nude Show!; and For Women Only: Dear Diary, Show Us Your Secrets.
There will also be Thursday night special programming at Bostwick throughout the festival, include a modern dance interpretation of exhibited photographs accompanied by experimental noiseicians, a presentation by an African-American woman photojournalist who worked in the Middle East for 10 years, a Magic Lantern show, a program presented by a husband-wife pair of travel writer/photographers, and a photo-based discussion of homelessness in Cleveland.
The Bostwick Art Design Initiative will be open Thursday and Friday @ noon-8pm and Saturday and Sunday @ 11am-5pm.
Get all the information here.
One Response to “Cleveland Photo Fest PHOTOTHON Opens After Pandemic Delay”
Fran Morino
Good Luck to all participants!!