Photoville Festival Highlights

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For the 15th installment of the annual Photoville festival, which sees more than 90 exhibits of photographic portfolios from all around the world, festival co-founder Sam Barzilay is thinking about apples – specifically the bizarre and at times cosmic-looking ones in the exhibit Old Apples.

“I was so delighted it got selected,” he enthusiastically told me. “It’s the most whimsical thing we have, it’s about apples and how there are no two apples in nature that are the same.”

With exhibitions celebrating everything from cumbia music to the many ways people play soccer globally and even a fox sanctuary, Photoville may be more whimsical than ever, but the show also delivers a satisfying range of the hard-hitting reportage and documentation that have made prior years so vital. Collections this year run the gamut from turbocharged wildfires in the western US to how racial inequalities affect water access to the ways in which ICE has brought chaos to many American communities.

In light of efforts by the Trump administration to erase the reality of trans people, Photoville offers two exhibits that attest to the enduring nature of trans lives. Special Girls, which draws from the mammoth archive of photographer Remsen Wolff, shows off 1990s-era photos of trans women, as well as gender nonconforming individuals such as crossdressers and drag queens.

“The world has changed dramatically from then to today,” said Barzilay, “this is a celebration of the fact that this is not a new idea.”

The photos themselves are a feast for the eyes, with their beautifully captured range of colors, textures, and posings of the human body. Archivist Jochem Brouwer, who was an associate of Wolff’s during his lifetime made a promise to the photographer that he would make his body of work known to the world. With showings of Wolff’s photos in Amsterdam and now New York, he is doing just that. “He really looked at people as individuals, it was always the individual he wanted to photograph,” Brouwer said. “To carry that legacy is a tough one, and it’s very gratifying that now there’s interest.”

Special Girls is joined by Point of View, which pairs self-portraits made by Dutch college students as a means of exploring their gender with art pieces from the Rijksmuseum’s archives. The hope, as Barzilay put it, is for visitors to feel more free to explore their own gender, as well as to help them normalize the existence of trans people. “For this museum to acquire these images felt like a statement, to show how being trans has existed in Dutch society for decades,” he said. “We’re still litigating a thing that people have already resolved.”

Lexi Parra’s portfolio of work The Avillas documents what happens after the titular family’s matriarch self-deports amid terrifying threats directed toward immigrants in the United States by the Trump administration. The photos make for an extremely difficult reminder of what happens when a beloved member of a family is torn away from it. “It’s looking at their lives today as they try to figure out what to do next,” said Barzilay.

The extremely moving collection Puppies Behind Bars is the fruit of the nearly two years that photographers Ashley Gilbertson and Ava Pellor spent in the men’s maximum security Green Haven, documenting the titular program wherein those incarcerated raise puppies to become service dogs. Organization founder Gloria Gilbert Stoga shared that she instinctively knew that she wanted a war photographer to document what happened behind bars, because of the extreme nature of prisons.

“I wanted a war photographer, because going into prison isn’t something you can articulate to people who aren’t in prison,” Stoga said. “My assumption is that you also can’t articulate war. I needed people who could stay emotionally removed from the subject.”

Gilbertson, who is renowned for his photos of the Iraq war, fit that description, and was joined by Pellor, who has captured extreme experiences such as wildfires and illegal border crossings in the Balkans. Their photos take viewers into terrain that is both brutal and hidden, revealing how the act of raising a dog can transform this horrifying reality.

The dogs humanize an environment that’s devoid of all humanity,” said Gilbertson. “It gives men who have committed grave crimes against society a chance to do something, it gives men a chance to show weakness and vulnerability to be emotionally open and playful, it gives them a sense of responsibility. For the first time in their lives these men are sticking with something when it becomes tough.”

Pellor recalled in particular a photo she made of one of the men in the program when he received his puppy to raise, the act of receiving the dog bringing tears. “I think it was their first time taking them out for a walk in the yard, and he just put his head up to the puppy’s head and started crying,” said Pellor. “After that, he wouldn’t let him go that entire day.”

The Women’s Grass by Blackfeet Nation photographer Whitney Snow documents that intricate web of cultural knowledge and practice that has grown around sweetgrass. Long used by the Blackfeet in both religious ceremonies and as medicine, the plant is the province of the tribe’s women, who have passed down knowledge of sweetgrass from generation to generation. “Women are held to a very high regard in our society,” Snow said. “To have plant knowledge like that is considered very prestigious.”

As she made the photos in The Women’s Grass, Snow was quite careful about what she revealed to outsiders, consulting the tribe’s elders to make sure she was staying within the proper bounds. “I think about how to document this in a photo without being exploitative,” she said, “without being stereotypical. To do it in a way that’s honorable and also informative to the general public.”

Her beautiful, meditative images convey a sense of how sacred the sweetgrass is, while also hinting at the emotions to be had while caring for and harvesting the sweetgrass, feeling at one with the natural world. “I wanted someone to feel something, and to feel good about it when they look at the photos,” Snow said. “I really wanted calm, like if you’re out in nature.”

Looking at Snow’s photos is to feel a sense of connection, and also rejuvenation and humanity. It is a theme that comes up again and again throughout all of the work in Photoville. In the words of Barzilay, “So many of the project proposals here were like happy, like moments of joy. You look at it and you think, ‘wow!’ you just feel better.”