NEW YORK — Shipping containers aren't so unusual a sight on the still partly industrial Brooklyn waterfront, but the 30 or so steel canisters recently delivered to Brooklyn Bridge Park cut a strange silhouette against its pristinely landscaped hills. The hamlet of containers housing United Photo Industries's inaugural Photoville exhibition, which opened this weekend, has an appropriately village-like atmosphere, and many participating institutions have emphasized this aspect of the setting by turning their containers into home-like installations.
At the exhibition's far end, Beijing-based photographer Sim Chi Yin's exhibition "China's Rat Tribe" centers on his photographs of that city's migrant workers in their cramped, windowless, subterranean apartments. To further exaggerate the effect, the container itself has been transformed into one such living space, complete with rice cooker, mattress, and foam floor tiles. Inevitably, a visitor on Saturday noted the room's relative spaciousness compared to her New York apartment, quipping: "This makes me feel even worse about what I'm paying for my tiny room."
The exhibition of American photographer Wyatt Gallery (yes, his name is "Wyatt Gallery") is called "Tent Life: Haiti" and uses the container space to similarly evocative ends, suggesting the cramped, makeshift urbanism endured by dwellers of Port-au-Prince's tent camps, which he photographed following the 2010 earthquake. The tarp-covered, cardboard-reinforced shelters in his bright, light-filled photographs seem all the more fragile and inadequate against the canister's thick steel walls.
The playful group show "Phoot Camp 2012" takes the inverse approach, creating a lighthearted faux-campsite complete with astroturf inside its container. The collective's images, taken during a recent lakeside retreat, tend towards the Ryan McGinley school of photography — beautiful young people in beautiful natural settings — marking a sharp contrast to the predominantly photojournalism-driven festival. Right next to it, the New York Times's container of war photographers' shots from Afghanistan and Iraq — and yes, you read that right, the New York Times has a container here — are all the more harrowing and arresting in their often-uncomfortable beauty.
Perhaps the two most affecting exhibitions, however, eschew theatrical installations while nonetheless evoking, in their dark, cramped quarters, the conditions endured by their subjects. Amsterdam-based Noorderlicht Photography's exhibition "Cruel and Unusual" — curated by Hester Keijser and Pete Brook — features 11 photographers' series on prisoners in various parts of the world. Some focus on inmates' coping mechanisms within their respective systems, like Lori Waselchuk's remarkable series on a prisoner-run hospice service at a maximum security prison in Louisiana, while others highlight brutal conditions, like Nathalie Mohadjer's images of the dungeon-like cells where men and boys in Burundi are held for months and years at a time.
Meanwhile Josh Lehrer's large-scale platinum and paladium photographs of homeless transgender teenagers employ the tropes of classical portraiture rather than conventional photojournalism. Arranged inside a shipping container and lining its exterior walls, his striking and beautiful images of these marginalized and abused teens make it impossible to ignore the hurdles they face, and the many power structures penning them in.
The incredible range of perceptive and conscientious exhibitions housed at Photoville makes up for a few less satifsying booths — and a decidedly unpopular "Photo Dog Run," an actual dog run featuring a canine-accessible camera obscura and pictures of Kickstarter supporters' pups (don't ask) — for a festival that on the whole resembles something like a literal global village.
Photoville continues at Brooklyn Bridge Park until July 1. Click the slide show to see more views from the exhibition.