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Set in Lille, a city in northeast France, Transphotographiques is a small but important festival that seeks to go beyond conventional limitations of photography. Approximately seventy exhibitions were held in galleries and institutions, including a former postal facility, around town and in nearby villages. The festival largely featured film-related photography. Its exhibitions ranged from paparazzi photos to the archives of the legendary Cahiers du Cinema. Major retrospectives included the work of Michel Ginies and Barry Harcourt, as well as late studio and press photographers including Leo Mirkine and Sem Presser. There were many works featuring stars like Brigitte Bardot and Yves Montand but few vintage prints. The selection of work appeared to influence the type of photographer coming to meet the international cast of reviewers, who hailed from ten countries as well as France. Most interesting were the bodies of work by Finnish artist Martine van Biervliet who lives in Paris and Lille. One of her works combined sophisticated surrealist-inflected word and image games with documentary-like images of her mother playing on the French phonemes occurring in the words for mother (maman) and moment (moment), as well as a similarly inflected series of small poems accompanying her images of aging flesh, rumpled beds, and clocks–an altogether interesting depiction of women and the detailing of lives and identities.

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Foto Festival 2007 in Lodz, Poland, which is perhaps the best small festival and is led by one of the sharpest young festival directors, Krzysztof Candrowicz, was marked by things both Finnish and Spanish. The Spanish contingent, curated by Moritz Neumuller of Photo Espana, featured examinations of the soul of Spanish contemporary reality, with special attention paid to issues of religion, identity, immigration politics, and metropolitanism. Spanish identity–including issues of marriage and immigration–was explored by ten young photographers. There was also an exhibition of new Finnish photography by women artists from the famous school of art and design, TaiK, that took on themes of identity and coming of age. Yet, the surprise of the festival, indeed the actual “discovery” of the festival, was Arja Hyytiaien, a young Finnish photographer who has nothing to do with TaiK. In “Distance Now,” Hyytiaien portrayed the story of an emotional break-up in an elegiac mix of black-and-white and color photographs. An interesting aspect was the mix of styles used in her visual storytelling that reflected past artists with whom she has studied. The influences of Swede Anders Petersen and Viktor Kolar of Prague’s legendary FAMU as well as the Parisian sensibilities of Christian Caujolle of Agence Vu (where Hyytiaien is now represented) were evident in “Distance Now,” a powerful work of self-discovery and expression of the formation of personal identity.

Arguably the best curated and best run large festival in Europe, Photo Espana this year celebrated its tenth anniversary with both a change of management and a sort of greatest hits series of shows. However, several things stood out and addressed the themes of identity. First, the bodies of work by the Spanish collective NOPHOTO documented the neighborhood of Matadero surrounding the former city slaughterhouse. Second, a show representing five Spanish photographers, many of whom participated in Lodz, looked at the Hispanic/Latino world at large. The show will travel with the Instituto Cervantes as part of a project representing Spanish art throughout the world. There was also a significant showing of Italian neorealism from 1932-60 that traced Italian identity in photographs and films from the Mussolini era through the postwar period of reconstruction. Any weakness in this year’s festival was offset by the amazing quality of the portfolios reviewed for this year’s “Discoveries of Photo Espana” and the unofficial review sessions that accompanied it. Whittled down beforehand from over eight hundred entrants to sixty and judged by a distinguished jury of curators, gallerists, publishers, and collectors, there was hardly a weak portfolio to be seen. This year’s winner was another Finn, Harri Palviranta, who explored the propensity toward alcohol-fuelled violence that marks weekend nights in Finland. His body of work, “Beaten People” (2006), is a remarkable, almost Weegee-esque documentation of bloodied heads and battered bodies.