Each year, Foam organises a Talent Call, an international search for exceptionally talented photographers under the age of 35. Foam is delighted to announce the names of the 20 young artists, whose work will feature in the upcoming Foam Magazine #48: Talent. This year – for the first time – the parallel Foam Talent exhibition will be launched at the museum in Amsterdam before travelling internationally. Comprising an exciting range of works drawn from the pages of the Talent Issue, the exhibition will open on 31 August 2017 at Foam.
The selected photographers fro foam magazine #48: Sushant Chhabria (India), David De Beyter (France), Mark Dorf (USA), Alinka Echeverría (Mexico/UK), Weronika Gęsicka (Poland), Wang Juyan (China), Thomas Kuijpers (The Netherlands), Quentin Lacombe (France), Clément Lambelet (Switzerland), Namsa Leuba (Switzerland/Guinea), Erik Madigan Heck (USA), Alix Marie (France), Martin Errichiello & Filippo Menichetti (Italy), Wang Nan (China), Kai Oh (South Korea), Viacheslav Poliakov (Ukraine), Ben Schonberger (USA), Sadegh Souri (Iran), Harit Srikhao (Thailand) and Vasantha Yogananthan (France).
The 11th Talent Call was the largest to date, with an impressive 1790 submissions from 75 different countries. Again, the jury was delighted by the wide variety and high quality of all submissions. The Foam Talent programme is a career building platform, helping to launch aspiring image-makers into the international photography industry, giving them global acclaim and recognition.
For the editors of Foam Magazine, the annual Talent Call is an intriguing barometer of the state of contemporary photography. The submissions – as well as the final selection – function as a cross section of an ever-evolving medium, revealing a series of growing trends and tendencies. At a time of global uncertainty, it is fitting that many of the featured artists express varied socio-political concerns in their work. Questions of identity and representation, particularly at the group level, also appear to have remained important themes for a new generation of photographic talent. As well as portfolios with a powerful aesthetic signature, a striking number of long term projects are included, each one having acquired new layers and greater depth of meaning through time. Equally striking is that today’s emerging photographers are clearly embracing a wide range of media in their practice, and are rarely confined to the camera alone.