FOBISIA Photography Festival

Students have recently been working on their entries for the FOBISIA Photography Festival, an online competition in which students have been asked to respond to the theme "Building Bridges'.

Conceptualised around Internationalism, Building Bridges is an online Art festival using Photography and digital manipulation media for students from Key Stage 2-5 to visually express their creative interpretation of crossing borders and boundaries, metaphorically and physically. The images can be singular or combined as a photo-collage to create a symbolic bridge to cross over to a land without borders.

A land that belongs to all

The images represent ideas of unity, understanding, empathy, peace and friendship and the students have been encouraged to explore and interpret the theme in their own way.

Here Sonia outlines her approach; "We live in a time where the world of performance and arts is fading into the depths of darkness. I wanted to bring light to this subject during this difficult time for the performers of the world who still try to come together to bring the vibrancy of performances that we can feel from the comfort of our own homes. These photos were taken from performances of my mother's musical theatre company and they depict the last performances before the pandemic. I wanted to bring to life these photos once again. The black and white photos originally used to help support the bridge and now symbolise the fading of the world of the arts. The coloured photos represent the glimmer of hope for performers throughout the world. With the said theatre company's main emphasis being 'cross-culturalism', the collage illustrates the number of cultures we should acknowledge, and start to absorb the beauty each culture brings during this time. The structure of 'the bridge' was specifically done to show a story - the distorted photos represent the frazzle state of mind of performers but the bridge unites all the cultures and performers together that creates an energy that hopefully will be able to be used in the near future."

Soo Jeong says of her image, "What do I first think of when I see the theme ‘building bridges’? Through my photographic interpretation, I wanted to convey the meaning of social connections and bring out the meaning of what a land of hope, a land that belongs to all, is all about. This photograph was taken near my home in Seoul, and it shows a statue of a man commuting. With the heaven-like background, optimistic expression and upward perspective, I always imagined this man was crossing over to another land, a land of hope and prosperity, across an invisible, but not nonexistent, bridge. I edited the brilliance and contrast to show the optimism of the man crossing the bridge to success. Through this photograph I want to communicate my message that we can continue building these bridges of hope, whether through small acts of kindness or through gestures of motivation and integrity. With this, we will all be able to cross the bridge of hope to success."

You can view all our students submissions on our KLASS_Photograhpy instagram page or watch the slide show below. The full festival exhibit will be available on the FOBISIA website from 20 November 2020- 31 December 2020.