Unpublished Photo is the photography competition founded in 2018 by the Milanese Gallery 29 Arts in Progress, for three editions promoted by the Fondazione culturale e musei and by the MUSEC, which selects and awards photographers under 36 from all over the world. This year, the international jury, chaired by the German photographer Hans Georg Berger, received 400 portfolios of photographers from 35 different countries, who created their projects in total freedom in terms of themes and techniques they chose; an opportunity to understand how the world is perceived and narrated by young people. The selected photographers are Quan Nguyen Ho (VN, 1986), Dipak Ray (IN, 1986), Tolojanahary Ranaivosoa (MG, 1987) e Olga Dmitrienko (RU, 1986). They are four self-taught photography enthusiasts working in other professions; their portfolios touch on themes such as the environmental degradation, the search for identity and the importance of traditions and crafts. The special prize from Artphilein Editions in Lugano, the publication of a monographic volume, was awarded to Tolojanahary Ranaivosoa.
The winner of the first prize is Quan Nguyen Ho (VN, 1986), a construction engineer living and working in Hanoi, a photographer by passion and sensitive to environmental issues. In his project “Life Garbage”, realised between 2021 and 2022, he documents the reality of open-air dumps in the suburbs of Hanoi: a place where toxic wastes accumulate, paradoxically providing sustenance for people and animals. An apocalyptic landscape where people and animals wander among toxic fires, without thinking that what they are looking for and recycling for their own survival could damage irreversibly. The second prize is awarded to Dipak Ray (IN, 1986), a teacher in a governmental school in Calcutta and an artist experimenting in the world of digital photography. He presents the portfolio “Frame within frame”, realised between 2019 and 2020 along the Kangsabati, a river in West Bengal, whose banks are shrouded in fog in winter. Dipak Ray places wood frames, asking his brother to walk around them: the frame, a symbol of order and stability, delimits the space and the visual field of the observers, but also leads them to look beyond the mental and physical schemes; the waves of the river, on the other hand, represent the instability of the frames themselves and the human nature, that continuous change that is the only constant thing in life.
The third prize-winner is Tolojanahary Ranaivosoa (MG, 1987), a geographer who documents with his photography moments of everyday life in his town, Antananarivo. Following a protest in the Madagascar’s capital against the state-owned water company due to an inadequate water supply, in 2019 Ranaivosoa began photographing various districts of the centre to denounce the degradation and witness the state of social poverty. The yellow jerry cans are the central theme, a sign both of water scarcity and the big gap among social classes: containers found in most African countries, which arrive from Europe or America, filled with oil and then used again to transport or store water. His project is intitled “The Yellow revolution”. Olga Dmitrienko (RU, 1986) became passionate about photography while studying journalism in Moscow, focusing on the human beings and their different expressions. After moving to Genoa, Olga Dmitrienko found a people-oriented town, capable of expressing kind gestures and a sense of time apparently forgotten by modern society. The “Artigiani e artisti genovesi” (“Genoese Artisans and Artists”) project, interrupted by the pandemic but soon to be resumed, features professionals portrayed in their Genoese workshops or houses. Through her images Olga Dmitrienko recounts a city that keeps a memory, fond of traditions and crafts handed down from one generation to generation.
Discover Unpublished Photo 2022 at MUSEC from 20.10.2022 until 16.04.2023.
More information: musec.ch
