Half Day Symposium
Photomonth is running a half-day symposium around the theme of “Longing “.
The symposium will take place at The Mile End Arts Pavillion on the 18th October 2025. The programme will feature visual theorists and artists talks to accompany Photomonth’s Open Call exhibition. The event will be curated by Fiona Yaron Field (visual artist and psychotherapist),
…”connection and security, from the beginning longing is one of our earliest and deepest experiences of need and desire. This is not a fleeting wish but a lasting moment, sometimes felt for years and can shape how a person sees the world. Longing speaks to something that is absent or unattainable. This innate longing for connections and security can move us towards idealised collective unity or more dangerously exclusionary movements that alienate those that are ‘other’, those that our different from us.”
Join us for an afternoon of talks on 18th October, at Mile End Arts Pavilion, that will explore the powerful emotions of longing – how it shapes our sense of homeland and speaks to deeper questions of identity, memory and belonging.
Ready to join us?
Secure your place at the Symposium — tickets available now:
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Speakers include
Fiona Yaron-Field is a London based photographer and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her photographic practice combines image and text, her subjects are intimate and familiar, her approach is collaborative. Through deeply personal material she aims to comment and reflect on wider social and cultural issues.
Melanie Issaka, is a visual artist living and working in London, UK. Melanie’s work aims to address issues of representation, history, and language with regard to the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Her work combines digital and analogue processes to explore the materiality of print and lens-based media.
Oliver Woods is a photographer and visual artist who uses different forms of lens-based image making within his recent practise. His work is grounded in a sense of place, and how it connects to memory and family stories. In this talk ‘You Are My One And Only’ he will explain how his work explores ideas around trauma, loss, love and self identity.
James Morris is a photographer of landscape and built environments. Over the last two decades he has looked more broadly at landscape issues from urbanism to human conflict and settlement. His work documents the impact of man’s intervention in the landscape and the layers of history evident there. James will be presenting his work ‘Time and Remains of Palestine’.
Aindreas Scholz is a photographer working with cameraless, analogue, and sustainable photographic processes. His presentation reflects on humanity’s longing for origins in a time of ecological fragility. Using found materials such as polluted seawater, disturbed soil, and vulnerable plant matter, his work explores how alternative printing practices can embody both our desire to connect with nature and the urgent need to face its transformation. For Scholz, longing is also deeply personal, part of his own vulnerability and a search for healing, care, and resilience through creative practice.
Avijit Datta is a Contemporary Photographer, Neuroscientist and Zen Buddhist. His photographic practice explores philosophical constructs.
He is a Governor of York St John University and a member of the Curatorial Advisory Board of PhotoMonth EastLondon.
In this talk “Zen and the art of Longing” Avijit explores the subject of Longing from a Zen perspective illustrated by the work of two notable Zen Abbots who were also widely published photographers and an enlightened Zen art historian and expert on the art of Katsushika Hokusai whose own work explored Longing. Further in his last days, Hokusai longed for Time, saying “If heaven will extend my life by ten more years… or five more years… I’ll manage to become a true artist”
Tickets available now:
➤ Book on Eventbrite
