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65 Photos from The Print Swap Are Coming to Photoville!

By Ellyn Kail on August 30, 2017

‘A Broken Pulsar’ © Fili Olsefski, Athens, Greece

‘Down by the Station’ © Steffen Tuck, Brisbane, Australia

‘Havana by Night’ © Eric Hsu, New York, NY

Last year, Feature Shoot launched The Print Swap, a way to connect photographers around the world. The rules are simple: anyone can submit by using the hashtag #theprintswap on Instagram. If your image is selected, it’s printed by the experts at Skink Ink in Brooklyn before being mailed across the world and landing on the doorstep of another winner. Every winning photographer gives a print, and every winning photographer receives a print too. Pieces are mailed out randomly, so it’s always a fun surprise to see who ends up with which print.

Since its inception, The Print Swap has received more than 45,000 submissions. Curators Alison Zavos and Julia Sabot have selected more than 2,500 winning images. Over the past two months, they’ve also considered all incoming submissions and handpicked 65 of them to show at the first ever Print Swap exhibition, opening in September at Photoville at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photoville, the largest annual photography event in New York City and, will include 70+ exhibitions this year, all installed in repurposed shipping containers-turned-galleries.

This is truly an international exhibition. Zavos and Sabot chose pictures from photographers working in twenty countries around the world. But more than that, this collection represents a wide range of practices, genres, and methods. There’s film; there’s digital. There’s classic black and white and vibrant, artificial color.

These photographers find reverence, dignity, and whimsy in humans and animals alike. Jake Green photographs Sonja Usher, an actor playing the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury in a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Kristen Bartley introduces us to Picasso, a dog whose name presumably comes from the slightly off-kilter structure of his face. Even uninhabited places, like Steffen Tuck’s Australian subway station or Bonita Chan’s reflected Hong Kong carousel, seem to thrum with life.

For all the beauty, there are also echoes of urgency and loss that color and illuminate corners of this exhibition. Aleksandra Dynas meets children living in the streets of Uganda, where over ten thousand young people go without food, shelter, education and medical care. Many work in demolition and do jobs on trucks, and the littlest ones collect metal and plastic. Yusni Aziz encounters a young resident of the Kampung Akuarium in Jakarta sitting in his “dream house,” a thoughtfully designed and decorated fisherman’s boat, after families in the area were evicted and their homes were razed to the ground.

Here, you’ll find all the participating photographers showing work at The Print Swap exhibition at Photoville. We hope you’ll visit in person between September 13-24, 2017. After all, these prints were meant to be seen in real life, hanging on a wall. As always, The Print Swap is open for submissions. Find more details on our website, and check in at @theprintswap on Instagram, where we regularly share winning images. Thank you to everyone to submitted work this time around. We love seeing your images.