Local photographers have raised over £10,000 for Oxfam through four exhibitions at the Clifton Village Oxfam Bookshop since the first BFOP.  Now Sylvain, the shop’s manager, is looking for a photographer or group to do a benefit exhibition during BFOP 2012.

This is a great opportunity for photographers to showcase their work in a shop window on a busy street in Clifton Village and to have the rewarding experience of selling large numbers of photos to an appreciative public!

Gary Newman’s first show for the bookshop looked like this: http://www.gnewman.co.uk/blogdetails.aspx?p=3&c=2

For the 2012 exhibition, Sylvain needs 12 to 15 images of a good standard, including some local Bristol and Clifton Village views, preferably including the Suspension Bridge, which sells about 10 to 20 times as well as other subjects!

The images will need to be all of one format (square, 4:3, 3:2, anything, but just one format, with no margins). They will be mounted but not framed and displayed on the board in the right-hand window as shown in Gary’s photo in the link.

The photographer needs only supply images for Oxfam to print according to demand during the exhibition and will retain copyright. Oxfam will pay all costs (printing, mounting, and the BFOP registration fee) and do all the work, including printing and mounting. A copyright sticker for each photographer will be on each picture.

All proceeds will go to Oxfam. The prints will be approx. 6″x4″ (depending on format) in mounts approx. 8″x10″ (depending on format) and will be sold for £10 each.

Photographers are welcome to have their contact details, websites and business cards prominently displayed to encourage private sales.

If you are interested, please contact Sylvain at  oxfamshopf2929@Oxfam.org.uk or on 0117 946 7926 as soon as possible (remembering that we’d have to make the festival entry by Sunday, 4 March) with thumbnails or links to some of the photos that you’d like to exhibit.

To kick things off we will be holding a BFOP Launch Party on Thursday 3 May, and we have several exciting exhibitions lined up already, along with talks from some excellent photographers, great workshops, and the return of Second Look’s famed PhotoMarathon.

RGB Awards

The results of the first annual RGB Awards will be exhibited at the Grant Bradley Gallery in Bedminster for the duration of the festival – this is an excellent way to get your work on show if you are not organising an exhibition of your own.

From the RGB website: “Providing an amazing opportunity for experienced and new photographers alike, the RGB Awards are set to become a prestigious annual event. With exhibition opportunities, magazine articles and substantial cash prizes, the awards offer an exciting chance to reach an international audience. The RGB Awards recognise excellence in photography and the selection panel includes award winning photographers and industry figures who have a mass of experience at recognising talent.”

Submissions close March 15th, please visit www.rgbawards.com for further details on how to enter.

Talks, events and workshops

If you are organising a talk, event, workshop or anything else you wouldn’t class as an exhibition then please contact us directly to discuss it further – we would like to avoid timing clashes, and to ensure an even spread of activities over the festival period – email events@bfop.org with details of your planned event, including times and dates.

Discount for exhibitors

Photographique are kindly offering 15% discount on printing, frames and framing for all BFOP exhibitors. Photographique have been working closely with local and national printing and framing providers to offer an ever-expanding range of services – check out their website for prices and more information on the services they can provide.

Volunteers needed

We have a huge list of volunteers already which is brilliant. We are currently hoping to have a Festival Hub on Clare Street – this would need to be manned daily for the duration of the festival. We would also like to have a festival volunteer on hand at the RGB Awards show so if you think you might be able to spare a few hours or days in May then please let us know by emailing contact@bfop.org so we can add you to our contact list.

Connect and share with us

Did you know we have both a Facebook page and a Twitter? It’s the easiest way to get all the most up-to-date information about the festival, and any opportunities on offer, and a great forum for artists to connect with each other, and with potential exhibition venues.

We also publish Bristol Photo News so check the BFOP website regularly for information on photographic events and opportunities all year round (not just during festival time) – if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to our news feed here. If you have anything newsworthy to share please email the details through to news@bfop.org.

Stapleton Road Tavern are currently accepting proposals for the following, please visit their website for further details. Please note that the deadline for submissions is this Sunday 12 February.

• Stapleton Road Tavern Window Commission
• Stapleton Road Tavern Residency
• Use of space for your creative activity, free of charge!
• Volunteering

Stapleton Road Working Group

“12 months – 12 events, all seasons. Could you excite, entertain or engage people? Could you help us bring the streets alive with people of all ages and happy faces?

The Stapleton Road Working Group wants to work with artists, creative people and local people/organisations of the area  to bring ‘an event’ to Stapleton Road every month of the year. We want to plan 12 events which welcome people of all ages and backgrounds to Stapleton Road. It could be street theatre, a ‘speakers corner’, community learning, a market, a  ti chi class  -  we want to hear your ideas. The events will reflect the diversity of the area and involve the people who live and work street on and around the road.  The group has some funding to make this happen but we are also keen to here from people who may be willing to pool resources or locate an event you already have planned on Stapleton Road. We look forward to working with positive people who want to make a difference. If you have an idea we would like to hear from you.

Please send us a  brief outline about your idea (we are not expecting a worked up proposal just the idea)  how it would engage the people on the street, who you are/what experience you have,  how much you think it would cost and your contact details. Please email: penny@eastonandlawrencehill.org.uk“

Submission deadline 12th December 2011. Midnight GMT

The sixth edition of Instant Coffees will feature a special selection encapsulating the theme of CELEBRATION. The evening will celebrate a year of Instant Coffees, with festivities, drink, food and other surprises.

We are looking for slideshows, photo-films or multimedia that show celebration in all its forms. This could be a series of images surrounding religious or pagan rites, personal or public events, festivals, or simply a series of images that celebrate the diversity of a community. We would like to give photographers the chance to express their own unique view of this theme and in particular work that re-interprets the idea of celebration.

Submission deadline is 12th December 2011 and you can find submission details here.

Daniel Meadows, photographer and lecturer at Newport’s School of Art and Design and at Cardiff University, will be giving a talk about digital storytelling and his work as a documentarist.

www.instantcoffees.wordpress.com

TalkPhoto showcases two invited speakers and provides an opportunity for people in the audience to share & talk about their work own work or that of photographers that inspire or interest them. November’s featured speakers are Michael Reeves and Alexander Beckett.

Award-winning fine art photographer Michael Reeves uses the Holga camera’s characteristic soft-focus and vignetting to emphasise elements of sadness, beauty or nostalgia in the scenes he photographs. A recurring theme in his Holga work is the ‘found’ still life, most notably in his series ‘Fragments’. He also searches out places we often associate with childhood, such as the seaside and funfairs. In other Holga work, he explores the more extreme possibilities of the camera, experimenting, for instance, with hand-held long exposures. Michael will also be discussing the background to the ‘toy camera’ phenomenon and will be giving advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of using a Holga camera. More of his work can be seen at www.michaelreevesphotography.com

Only 20kg of baggage allowance? Pish! Alex Beckett loves to travel and doesn’t let silly things like rules get in his way. Using everything from huge softboxes to tiny torches, in locations ranging from Mongolia to Maidenhead, Alex pushes the boundaries of what’s considered the norm and comes back with the photos to prove it. Examining work ranging from weddings to advertising and travel, Alex will explore the way light can be used to transform a photograph from the ordinary into the extra-ordinary. To find out more about Alex’s work and also the lighting workshops he runs visit www.alexanderbeckett.com or www.alexbeckett.co.uk/blog

For details on how to participate see www.secondlook.org.uk

A look at the history and development of photography from it’s inception to the present day. This course explores the different questions posed by the medium of photography over the years and the ways different photographers have attempted to answer them. Looking at documentary, art, portraiture and landscape, this course will celebrate some of the most interesting and creative photographers of all time as well as asking the fundamental question: what is photography?

Taught by Bristol-based freelance photographer Lisa Furness, the 5 week course is held 7pm-9pm on Mondays at Backwell school, starting from Monday 7th November. For more information or to book a place on the course visit http://www.backwellschool.net/eveningclasses.

Preliminary planning for BFOP 2012 has been coming along nicely, and we are almost ready to go public. The highlight of the festival will be the open submission RGB Awards, a month-long curated exhibition with a cash prize for the overall winner. We’ll be launching a new website on December 1 – registration for both the festival and the RGB Awards will open then, so it’s time to start thinking about how you’d like to get involved.

Talks, events and workshops

We will be separating the programming of talks and events from exhibitions, in order to avoid timing clashes, and to ensure an even spread of activities over the festival period. If you want to hold a talk, event, workshop or anything else you wouldn’t class as an exhibition then please contact us directly to discuss it further, either by emailing events@bfop.org with an outline of your plan or coming to one of our informal drop-in sessions (details below).

Volunteers needed

We have already had several offers of assistance which is amazing! There is plenty to do though, so we are still looking for volunteers to help with a whole range of things. We are holding a couple of informal drop-in sessions for those of you wishing to get involved – please come along for a chat about how you can help the festival run smoothly. Both of these sessions will be held at Photographique, 31 Baldwin St, Bristol BS1 1RG.

5.00 – 7.30pm on Wednesday 9 November 2011
5.00 – 7.30pm on Tuesday 15 November 2011

Redesign the BFOP logo

We’re thinking a new logo for the 2012 festival would be great – want to design one for us? We’d like something simple (preferably utilising the BFOP acronym), yet versatile, as it will be used on a wide range of promotional material, including both print and web, and the festival programmes in May. You’ll be credited where possible, with web links to your portfolio where appropriate. Please submit your designs to logo@bfop.org by Monday 21 November.

In August 2010, Tom travelled around the American Midwest for three weeks with his band My Two Toms playing as many inappropriate venues as possible. During the tour he attempted to photograph everyone he met, as well as the places he passed through.

Looking for odd details in the landscape, his colour photographs tell the story of the small towns of Montana, Minnesota, North & South Dakota, Colorado and Wyoming, while his black & white portraits tell us about the people that live there.

To accompany the exhibition, Betty & Dupree will be publishing a collection of these photographs, also called “MIDWEST”, with a foreword by acclaimed Minnesotan blues musician Charlie Parr and watercolour chapter pages by Jerwood Drawing Prize nominated artist Aaron Sewards.

The exhibition opens Thursday 27th October, 7-9pm, with live music from My Two Toms, and continues until Tuesday 22nd November at the Here Gallery, 108 Stokes Croft, Bristol.

This also coincides with a two night residency from Charlie Parr at the Cube Microplex:
CHARLIE PARR with support from My Two Toms
Cube Microplex, Dove Street, Bristol
Sat 5th + Sun 6th November 2011
8pm, advance tickets £9.00 (+booking fee) per night

Along with hosting events like this, TMS are now offering a wide range of workshops, including Experimental Photography and Drawing, Medium Format Colour Film Photography and Physical Alternative Photography along with a whole heap of other interesting things.

The Motorcycle Showroom is at 15-19 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS13PY