Format Festival ~ Derby

Format Festival is a photo festival which is held in Derby, and held a series of exhibitions which were free to roam and explore. This experience allowed me to gain inspiration for my final graduate exhibition and for potential publication, especially for the exhibition catalogue which I have to design collaboratively with the exhibition committee.

Throughout this visit I learnt that exhibition prints do not have to be evenly space perfectly straight prints, as seen in a lot of exhibitions. In the exhibitions visited some had large framed prints that made you want to sit and inspect the image, like shown below.

Dr Yan Wang Preston exhibition print (right hand side).

However others were much more creatively inclined. For example, some practitioners decided to overlap their images. This was interesting as just like the large prints they made me stand and observe the images more and this is something I had not seen done before. I believe this is successful as it gives the work a unique edge and makes people want to view it for longer which is something I would like to incorporate into my own work.

Although the images were not under the genre of photography that I personally like, the layout of these images made me stand and observe them. I think this layout really strengthens these images. This is something I would like to experiment with for my own exhibition, as my work is predominantly product, something that it not that interesting when exhibiting. Therefore, I would like to make my images more interesting to the audience with using unique layouts like the ones above.

Looking at publications

Alongside numerous exhibitions, format festival also holds and presents a lot of publication and books.

Seeing these book publications and being able to look at them and touch them was useful for the likes of deciding on stocks for the exhibition prints and for the exhibition catalogues. These spark lots of inspiration for both of these two publications and gave me a lot of ideas of what stocks to experiment with for this module and in the future.

One interesting thin about this book exhibition, is that the binding methods and types of papers that were used were included in the description of the book which was really useful.

Overall this experience was useful in helping to understand and think of ways of creating a successful exhibition. This also made me determined to start planning my exhibition and what I would like to include within it and how.