NOOR. Go and look Automatic translate

The international festival of contemporary photography PHOTOBOOKFEST 2018 presents the project “NOOR. Go and see, ”the first exhibition of the NOOR photo agency in Russia, which has stirred up photojournalism in the last 10 years. Honest and independent statements about the modern world, the pressing problems of the last decade in photographs, multimedia projects and journalistic materials of the world’s leading photojournalists, which make up the unique NOOR cooperative.

In 2007, when the professional community started talking seriously about the crisis of photojournalism, at the international festival in Perpignan Visa pour L’Image it was announced the creation of a fundamentally new NOOR agency with headquarters in Amsterdam. 9 recognized photographers, including Pep Bonet, Stanley Green, Francesco Zizola, Yuri Kozyrev, Kadir van Lohuisen and first managing director Claudia Hinterzer, have joined forces and connections to shed light on the phenomena that “just need to be seen”. So, from the moment of its appearance, NOOR - which means “light” in Arabic - has been striving to tell about the surrounding reality through independent and comprehensive reports and thereby contribute to changes in society and people’s minds. Realizing the fundamental power of photographic images as evidence of peace, Eugene Smith said: “Photography can be that small light that helps us, as far as we can, to change the world for the better.”

NOOR focuses on in-depth photographic research and long-term documentary projects on civil and political unrest, social upheavals, wars, natural disasters and private stories of people affecting social injustice and human rights violations. “Our photographs are a form of resistance. We create them from a unifying sense of respect for courage and humanity for those who defend their right to a free and fair life elsewhere ”(Clement Saccomani, Managing Director of NOOR). Along with individual projects awarded with World Press Photo, Visa d’or Awards, W. Eugene Smith Awards, Bayeux-Calvados Awards, POYi Awads, Prix Pictet, etc. large-scale group projects of NOOR photographers will be presented at the exhibition.

NOOR allows photographers to maintain their independence; choose themes for filming; to conduct long-term projects for which print media are not resolved; as well as telling stories that lack photo evidence. “I am only interested in those who see the meaning of life in photography. Those people with whom I now work in the agency are just such. ” (Yuri Kozyrev)

Today the agency brings together 16 photographers from 13 countries: Nina Berman, Andrea Bruce, Stanley Green and John Lowestein (USA), Pep Bonet and Sebastian Liste (Spain), Benedict Curzen (France), Yuri Kozyrev (Russia), Francesco Zizola (Italy), Alyxandra Fajina (Great Britain), Kadir van Lohuisen (Holland), Tanya Habjuk (Jordan), Robin Hammond (New Zealand), Arco Datto (India), Sanne de Wilde and Leonard Pongo (Belgium).

On April 12, 2018, Kadir van Lohuisen won first place at the World Press Photo, the most prestigious photojournalism contest, in the Environment category, Photo History nomination, for the Wasteland project (Garbage Desert) on the issue of garbage on Earth. For the first time after the victory, the project will be shown as part of the exhibition at the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography.

The exhibition will also include an educational program with the participation of NOOR agency members and photography experts from the Netherlands. Clément Saccomani, Managing Director of NOOR, will present NOOR at the opening of the exhibition (May 15, 19:00), give a master class on working in the photo agency and the photo industry as a whole (May 16 and 17, 12:00 - 17: 00), and will also conduct a special tour of the exhibition (May 17, 19:30).