This April, Photo-Forum are back in theprintspace Gallery hosting talks from Neil Massey and Julio Etchart! Both photographers have recently returned to London after extended periods living and working abroad, in Vietnam and Singapore respectively.
They will be sharing their experiences and work from this time, showing personal projects, NGO collaborations and work from participatory projects.
The event takes place Tuesday 12 April, join the Facebook group here!
Photographer Neil Massey was born in England in 1970. At the age of 20, Neil travelled to the southern islands of Thailand, where he documented the full-moon rave scene. On returning, he studied photography at Bournemouth and Poole Art School. After college he moved to London where he started his editorial career shooting for style magazines The Face and Sleazenation.
He spent the next 15 years photographing musicians and documenting youth culture – a recurring theme, which he continues to revisit. In 2014 and 2016 he won the PDN Ultimate Music Award with photographs of music fans from Vietnam and Togo respectively.
In 2009 Neil and his wife moved from London to Vietnam – a communist country undergoing rapid economic and cultural development. Whilst there, he worked on a series of long-term photographic projects which provides a unique insight into this time of change. Neil recently returned from Vietnam and will be sharing three bodies of work shot during his time there; ‘Bloody Chunks’, ‘Monobloc’ and his ‘Untitled’ series.
Julio Etchart grew up in Uruguay and later moved to the UK where he studied Documentary Photography at Newport Art College in Wales.
He has since traveled round the world for the international media and to make images for several NGOs and international agencies like War on Want, Save The Children, OXFAM, CAFOD, VSO, UNESCO, UNICEF, the British Council and the European Union.
He is a recipient of a World Press Photo first prize in the Environment category and has been documenting environmental and development projects in the majority world for the last two decades.
Julio has recently come back from a stint of two years working at the Communications and New Media department at the National University of Singapore, running photo-voice workshops with migrant workers and other marginalized communities as well as recording their plight.
He will be showing some of the work he helped to produce over there, ranging from participatory image-making with foreign domestic workers and transgender communities, to a multimedia project involving the survivors and relatives of the massacres of 1965 in Indonesia.
