This site uses technical (necessary) and analytics cookies.
By continuing to browse, you agree to the use of cookies.

Head On Photo Festival 2023

HEAD ON banner

International Photography Festival

2023 marks the nineteenth year of existence of the International Photography Festival called Head On Photo Festival, which takes place in Sydney and features emerging and established photographic artists. Founded in 2004 by Moshe Rosenzveig with the first Head On Portrait Award, the Festival is run by the non-profit organization Head On Foundation and shows across multiple venues, including public and commercial galleries and outdoor public spaces.

The Italian Cultural Institute has been collaborating with the Festival for over a decade, promoting the participation of Italian artists. This relationship goes on also in 2023 and never in the past has the Italian presence been as numerous as in this edition of the Festival. There are five Italian photographers who will participate with their works: Antonio Denti, Flavio Brancaleone, Mauro Curti and Pierpaolo Mittica. Two of the artists, Fedele and Brancaleone, have consolidated their artistic reputation in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney, respectively).

The Festival will take place in various venues, including Bondi seaside promenade, Paddington Town Hall and other galleries, from 11 November to 3 December. The collaboration with the Institute will also include a special Italian night at the Bondi Pavillon, on 12 November, which we report elsewhere on this website, and a collective exhibition of the five Italian artists at the IIC’s premises on York Street starting from November 23rd.

   

Antonio Denti is a cameraman in love with photography. Video journalist at Reuters for over 20 years, he has covered conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon. He also covered of the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and the epic human migration to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. He often travels with Popes on their trips and has filmed the aftermath of the deaths of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican and Queen Elizabeth II in London. He covered the 2004 tsunami in Banda Aceh and the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake in the Turkish province of Hatay which he presents at the Festival with the title The human fire. An award-winning cameraman and photographer, he won the Royal Television Society (RTS) Journalism Award for Cameraman of the Year in 2018 and the IPPAWARDS for Photographer of the Year in 2022.

Flavio Brancaleone is an Italian photojournalist living in Sydney. After studying at the Roman School of Photography, Brancaleone (aka Branca) began working in the photojournalism and real estate photography sectors. In 2016 he founded “SYDRealEstatePhoto”, his own photography company dedicated to the growing estate market in Australia. In 2021 he became a freelance photographer for GETTY Images. He has won recognition for his captivating images that capture the essence of current events and the human experience. With over a decade of experience, he has become a regular contributor to several major media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, Australian Associate Press and NewsCorp. In 2021 he joined Long Story Short Film Productions, an independent production company specializing in film, video and photography. At Head On Festival he will present Ukrainians displaced by war.

Mauro Curti was born in 1980 and raised in a small town in the province of Cuneo, near the Alps in northern Italy. After several jobs in different sectors, he attended a photography course before leaving Italy for a research trip focused on the practice of the photographic medium, traveling around Central and South America for several years. He settled in Buenos Aires in 2015 where he deepened his photographic studies, approaching analogue photography. At the end of 2019 he returned to his hometown and began working on the long-running project Riturné, which he will present at Head On and for which he won a scholarship for a Master in Documentary Photography at TAI University (URJC), in Madrid, where he currently resides.

Pierpaolo Mittica is an internationally known humanist photographer and has received numerous international awards. In 1990 he obtained a diploma in conservation, technique and history of photography awarded by CRAF. He studied with Charles–Henri Favrod, Naomi Rosenblum and Walter Rosenblum, his spiritual father of photography. His photos have been exhibited in Europe, the United States and China, and the exhibition “Chernobyl the hidden legacy” was chosen in 2006 by the Chernobyl National Museum in Kiev, Ukraine as the official exhibition for the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. He is a speaker at numerous conferences in Italy, Europe, the United States and Japan, and his photos have been published in Italian and foreign newspapers and magazines, including l’Espresso,  Manifesto, Vogue Italia, Repubblica, Panorama, Il Sole 24 Ore, Today, Science, Photomagazine, Daylight Magazine, Days Japan International, Asahi Shinbum, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Wired, Asian Geo. His project for Head On is titled And then the winter came.

For the full programme: https://headon.org.au/festival