AS THIS YEAR'S Noorderlicht Photofestival in the Netherlands turns its eyes on South and Southeast Asia, the view is one of bewildering diversity: from musings of a young Filipino coming of age while being shackled by parental domination, to a documentary on the Catholic faith in Indonesia, and photoweavings of the Vietnam war using images from the press and Hollywood movies.
'What I see are photographers who are concerned with the world they live in and are trying to find new ways of telling us that,' says Wim Melis, the curator of Another Asia.'There's a certain freshness in their approach that's not so easy to find in the west any more, where everything has already been done, where everyone has his or her mind already filled with a billion previous images.'
Since its inception in 1990, Noorderlicht has grown to become one of the most progressive photofestivals in the world, particularly with its focus on non-western artists in alternate years. Its past editions have featured emerging and established photographers from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
As with Noorderlicht's previous edition on Arabic photography in 2004, Another Asia, which opened yesterday, forms a triptych, offering a sketch of a region on the rise through viewfinders of local and western photographers, and from historic images of South and Southeast Asia. In all, 64 photographers from 21 countries are featured.
The major curatorial decision in this year's festival was leaving out China, whose photographers have already been well-exposed in recent years. Therein lies the philosophy behind Noorderlicht's non-western editions, says Melis, which is to 'give photographers a new platform, surprise the audience with something they didn't know existed, and provide them with a new way of looking at these societies. We always try to find work that's on the border between art and documentary, and work that tells the stories behind the headlines.'
Anay Mann's Generation in Transition, which is showing at the Friesian capital of Leeuwarden, certainly fits the mould. Whereas many young photojournalists are drawn to issues such as poverty and war, Mann decided to work on a less spectacular project: to document the lives of young, middle-class Indians amid great changes in their society.