From June 16th to June 20th 2010 the second Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism took place in the city of Hannover. In his work “The Terrible City – Gaza 2009” German photographer Heinrich Völkel focuses on the urban structure of a city that has been the centre of violent confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians since the 1970s. It is a city of ruins and debris, in which people are attempting to regain a state of normality. Showing a life in improvised circumstances, Heinrich Völkel also has an eye for the special aesthetics of the ruins.

Selected by Sophia Greiff on August 20, 2010

It hasn’t been so long since Kabul was considered an open-minded metropolis. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Afghan capital was a popular stop on the hippie trail to southern Asia. Now, after thirty years of occupation and war, Afghanistan is struggling to reestablish its identity. Residents are pessimistic about the future. Rebuilding the city drags on, and the constant fear of new attacks has shaken people’s trust in NATO forces. “Crossing Kabul” is a portrait of today’s Kabul where, far from the fighting, normality is slow to return. German photographer Daniel Pilar focuses on everyday situations caught between tradition, Western influence and social progress.

Selected by Sophia Greiff on August 11, 2010

This series of images accompanied by text is part of a larger installation called “Je suis la frontière” (I am the border) which encompasses a growing archive of audio and visual documents that explore the complexity of living in the US – Mexico borderland. The whole archive constitutes a personal cartography of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, two cities that are at the same contiguous but divided by four international bridges. In her work, Vera seeks to challenge the limited and biased information that the media gives us about certain places in the world. She believes in approaching those places by listening to individuals, following their steps, and walking on the streets. She thus hopes to create a personal cartography of a place and to give presence to the voices and life stories behind the sometimes overwhelming statistics.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 27, 2010

Aleix Plademunt Perez: My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape. I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 19, 2010

Acapulco is a place where you can’t say no. Elvis Presley said it this way in a song dating back to 1963 that had become popular a year earlier after the release of the movie Fun in Acapulco. In this installation project, the Mexican artist Pablo López Luz not only sheds light upon the topographic vision of different architectural structures and urban landscape but also to the classical imagery of a place full of glamour that has been vividly immortalized by the cinema and advertising industries.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 15, 2010

“My son, there will be a post petrodollar economy in Arabia and it will be up to you create it.” That is what Sheikh Maktoum’s father said in 1990, shortly before his death, says Swiss photographer Florian Joye. “I chose the United Arab Emirates to work on, and especially Dubai, for a variety of reasons. After googling Dubai on the net, my curiosity and interest were drawn to the confusing mass of Dubai images that can be found there. The vast juxtaposition of virtual images, scale models and augmented reality of which there were many more than real pictures of Dubai is confusing. The idea of the city preceded its reality. My fascination for this new city caught between utopia and excessiveness, pride and seduction is the palpable reality of the purpose o f Sheikh Maktoum.”

Selected by Nathalie Herschdorfer on June 9, 2010

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud’s photographs evoke more than they represent, exploring the ability of photography to throw doubt on reality. Digitally constructed, her images are similar to our thoughts or dreams. They look real but are unreal. Pitteloud: “These images present themselves as snapshots but are in fact staged scenes constituted of hundreds of photographs. The images chosen for Bite! hover between the notions of banality and catastrophe.”

Selected by Nathalie Herschdorfer on June 7, 2010

The series Love Story presents images that are a result of years of research on the impermanence and the affective relationships. A transitory instantaneous diary, using elements from nature and situations of daily life to talk about the several facets of love relationships. Eternal loves, disposable loves, finite and infinite, conflicts, separations and mismatches are part of this panel represented in a simple, metaphoric and poetic manner.

Selected by Patricia Gouvea on May 29, 2010

In her series “Transformer,” Sevim Sancaktar takes close-ups of the wall illusions painted on electrical transformers throughout Istanbul and some surrounding cities. A representation of their time as well as a deformed reflection of urban history, architectural element as much as artistic expression, these images form a social and cultural portrait of the town; A city, eclectic as much as electric, that merges the occidental with the oriental, the classical with the contemporary, thus creating a utopical anachronism. Playing on the deceptive and aesthetic function of her subject, the photographer creates a new illusion by taking away from reality its three-dimensional essence.

Selected by Sinem Yoruk on April 27, 2010

Selected by Marc Feustel on March 30, 2010