Photobook Week Aarhus 2022: 9th Edition: Off Balance

Photobook Week Aarhus (PWA) celebrated its ninth edition from 27 to 30 October 2022. The festival has existed since 2014 as a collaboration between Aarhus School of Architecture and Galleri Image. It reflects a continuous study of the discourse of photobooks.

PWA’s main venues are Aarhus School of Architecture; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and Galleri Image. Other venues include HEART Herning Museum Of Contemporary Art and Godsbanen. The festival programme is dedicated to exhibitions and talks about publishing, researching, distributing, buying, trading, and collecting photobooks. You can also purchase new as well as vintage photobooks at the festival. Participation in the festival is free of charge and everyone is welcome.

The theme for PWA 2022 was "Off Balance". With this theme, the festival wanted to contribute to the current debate in society on sustainability, climate change and the Anthropocene. More specifically PWA wished to bring forward perspectives on people's understanding of the constructed relationship between nature and culture.
A significant part of PWA revolved around the relationship between architecture, photography and photobooks.

As Anne Elisabeth Toft, Associate Professor at Aarhus School of Architecture and one of the curators of PWA, explained:

“PWA will look at codes and conventions within photography and the history of photography, and it will shed light on matters surrounding cultural heritage, canon, and how society's understanding of nature and landscape is constructed and represented through different visual media. Seen from this perspective, the part of the festival that relates to architecture, the part I am responsible for, will specifically discuss the transformation of the Alpine landscape as expressed in photobooks from the twentieth and twenty-first century. The Alps is one of the places on Earth where global warming has most clearly shown itself, and in these books you can “visit” places that once were, but no longer exist.”

The alpine theme was contextualized by the exhibition: Endangered Landscape.
Another related exhibition focused on the famous Italian photographer Walter Niedermayr’s photobooks. Since the late 1980s, Niedermayr has photographed alpine landscapes and architecture documenting the commercialization of the mountains.

A third exhibition presented works by the Danish visual artist Nanna Debois Buhl, showcasing how climate change, sustainability and the constructed relationship between nature and culture are central to her artist’s books and photobooks.

The larger festival programme included exhibitions on Fluxus books, books on photobooks, photobooks from Ukraine, Canadian photobooks, books and films by Edward Burtynsky and Danish photobooks exhibited at Hong Kong Photobook
Festival 2022.

Presentations and discussions by international and Danish photobook experts put the themes of the exhibitions into perspective.

You can read more about Photobook Week Aarhus and see the full programme at: http://photobookweek.org/