Turkey’s pioneering international photography event 212 Photography Istanbul returns for its fourth edition from October 1 to 11 at various special venues around the city.  Aiming to discover and showcase new talents, applications for this year’s International 212 Photography Competition are now open to both professional and amateur photographers worldwide and will be accepted until 6 September 2021.  

MEET THE JURY OF THE INTERNATIONAL 212 PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION  

The jury line-up of the 4th edition includes Photo London Director Michael Benson, Cultural Director for Magnum Photos New York Pauline Vermare, FOAM Head of Exhibitions Claartje van Dijk, diChroma Photography Director Anne Morin, Lecturer and Director of London College of Fashion and Photographer Paul Bevan and The Art Newspaper Editor Tom Seymour.   

212 PHOTOGRAPHY ISTANBUL (1-11 OCTOBER 2021)

The ten-day long festival expands across Istanbul, including venues both on the Asian and European sides and offers a unique opportunity to foster interdisciplinary dialogue through  photography.   

Centering around the exhibitions of national and international artists, 212 Photography Istanbul also offers a multi-layered programme of onsite events, performances, film screenings and an international photography competition to create a multidisciplinary cultural platform in Istanbul and an opportunity to rediscover the city.   

THE 4TH INTERNATIONAL 212 PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION JURY:  

ANNE MORIN 

Anne Morin (Rouen, France, 1973) is a graduate of the École Nationale de Photographie d’Arles  and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier. She worked for the PHotoEspaña Festival  between 2001 and 2004, before becoming the head of diChroma Photography (Madrid), a company specialized in international travelling photographic exhibitions, as well as in the development and production of cultural project. diChroma works for renowned museums and institutions such as Fundación Canal (Madrid), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow),  Musée du Luxembourg, Jeu de Paume Paris (Paris), or Palazzo Ducale (Genova), etc. Passionate and enthusiastic, Anne Morin works for the revaluation and greater visibility of artists and photographers. From time to time she also reinvents herself as a publisher of photography books, and edited books such as Antonio Lopez, Visionary Writing, Margaret Watkins Black Light, or Paul Alexandre Slowness . She has curated many exhibitions of prestigious photographers and artists such as Berenice Abbott, Antonio Lopez, Vivian Maier, Robert Doisneau, Jessica Lange, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Sandro Miller, Pentti Sammallahti, and Margaret Watkins, among others. She will be the director of the new International Photography Festival which will take place in Palencia (Spain) in spring 2021.   

CLAARTJE VAN DIJK

Claartje van Dijk is head of exhibitions at Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam. She curated various exhibitions including Vivian Maier: Works in Color, Susanne Khalil Yusef: Lalalala and Laia Abril - On Rape: A History of Misogyny, Chapter Two, among others. Previously, Claartje worked at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York as Assistant Curator, Collections. At ICP she managed the museum’s collection and was a curator on numerous exhibitions, including Winning the White House: From Press Prints to Selfies (2016), Perpetual Revolutions: The Image and Social Change (2017), Elliott Erwitt: Pittsburgh (2018) and Your Mirror: Portraits from the ICP Collection (2019). Over the years Claartje juried a range of awards, including PDN: The Curator Award, Critical Mass and the Lucie Scholarship Program for The Lucie Foundation. 

MICHAEL BENSON

For ten years Michael Benson worked at the London Institute, now the University of the Arts, where he developed the London Institute Gallery and its exhibition program showcasing the work of students alongside leading contemporary artists, designers and photographers including Julian Opie, Richard Deacon, Nicola Hicks, Mike Leigh and Tom Hunter. He led the campaign to secure a new home for Chelsea School of Arts alongside the Tate Gallery at Millbank. He worked with twelve of Europe’s leading contemporary artists to develop Signatures of the Invisible, a major touring exhibition in collaboration with CERN, Geneva. The tour ended with a major exhibition at PS1 MoMA in 2002. With Fariba Farshad he founded the cultural consultancy Candlestar in 2003. Since then, Candlestar has created projects for many leading organisations in the arts and education. In 2015, with the support of the Financial Times and Maja Hoffman’s Luma Foundation, Candlestar inaugurated the first edition of Photo London and in five years, the Fair has established itself as a key event in the international art world calendar. He is Director of the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize founded by Pictet Group in 2008, for which Candlestar have curated over 90 exhibitions worldwide. Between 2011 to 2014 he also curated the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition. He is a member of the board of the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  

PAUL BEVAN

Paul Bevan is a lecturer and artist working with photography.  Bevan has exhibited internationally, presenting and discussing his work that explores photography as a lived experience and as a performed event at sites of production and dissemination.  This approach engages with ideas of entanglement and the notion of Superposition, as quantum-based phenomena that offer up a new paradigm for photography as an event in observation, and its technical relationship to the human condition.  Bevan has taught photography at University level for many years, leading photography across art, fashion and media academic contexts. He is a Subject Director and Course Leader, MA Fashion Photography at London College of Fashion (LCF), University of the Arts London (UAL). 

PAULINE VERMARE

Pauline Vermare is a French photography curator, and the cultural director of Magnum Photos in New York. Before joining Magnum in 2017, she was a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). From 2002 to 2009 she worked at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. She sits on the board of the Saul Leiter Foundation and of the Catherine Leroy Fund. 

TOM SEYMOUR

Tom Seymour is a Correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a Lecturer in photography at London College of Communication. He has published photography features for The Guardian and The Observer, The New York Times, The Telegraph and The Financial Times. He won the PPA Writer of the Year Award 2020 for his work with the Royal Photographic Society and is a Senior Writer for British Journal of Photography. He is currently curating an exhibition of Turkish resistance photography, titled Istanbul Nightworks, for Peckham 24, London.

SUBMISSIONS CLOSE ON 6 SEPTEMBER 2021  

Top ten finalists of the 4th International 212 Photography Competition will be announced on 22 September 2021 and the winner will be announced on 1 October 2021. Registration fee is 30 TL for the national applicants and 10 EUR for the international applicants. To read the competition terms and conditions and apply please visit 212photographyistanbul.com