CRITICAL MASS: POINTS OF ENTRY

In 2004, the vibrant photographic community centered around Portland Oregon’s Blue Sky Gallery and Photolucida’s festival expanded its reach with the start of Critical Mass, an international competition involving hundreds of artists and hundreds of jurors. Today, it is recognized as one of the most important ways that photographers can get their work in front of curators, gallerists, publishers and the general public. Its exhibition and publication awards have brought serious recognition to many international careers.

Since 2013, travelling exhibitions of the year’s Top 50 winners have been mounted in Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston, and Antigua, Guatemala. This year’s exhibition in Lodz will be the competition’s first showing in Europe. Fotofestiwal Lodz is honored to host „Critical Mass: Points of Entry”, an exhibition curated by Fotofestiwal Artistic Director, Alison Nordström, drawn from images submitted to the competition by the 50 photographers granted the highest score by the jurors. Each image can be seen as an entry point to a winning series, while the new context of this exhibition offers entry into the diverse world of contemporary photographic practice, offering portraiture, landscape, documentary and manipulated imagery of all kinds. Organized by genre and type, we see patterns emerge that affirm that while the number of technical and aesthetic options available to us is greater than ever, the human need to photograph what matters remains unchanged.

Exhibition: HIT THE ROAD: CRITICAL MASS
Place: OFF Piotrkowska, ul. Piotrkowska 138/140