Day One of the New York Photo Festival kicked off yesterday with welcome sunshine flooding its waterfront location in DUMBO. The first 'official' event at St. Ann's Warehouse was packed with visitors who came to see Kathy Ryan, photo director of The New York Times magazine, in conversation with British photographer Richard Learoyd (top row, below), whose work is included in the exhibition Object Lesson. Learoyd's larger-than-life-size portraits, made with a room-size camera obscura, were the subject of the talk and were projected at a massive scale.

Scenes from the New York Photo Festival, photos: Peggy Roalf.

Having made the press tour of the four main exhibitions Wednesday evening (middle row, above), I then headed for the satellite shows across the road at Tobacco Warehouse. One of the most compelling was Red Land, a group of photos by Chinese photographer Liu Yuan, who surreptitiously photographed the North Korean agricultural landscape during a rail trip he made in 2008. Never before has a Western audience been offered a view of the closed society of collective farming that constitutes daily life for millions of people there. It doesn't take long to break through the seeming banality of the pictures to grasp the collective weight of these images, which underscore the harshness of life in what amounts to a police state.

On the way back to the train I popped in to see Object Lesson, minus the crowds, and took a close look at curator Vince Aletti's pin-up wall (bottom row, above), which invites viewers to ask themselves, "what is a still life photograph?".

The New York Photo Festival continues through Sunday, May 16, with dozens of talks and presentations at St. Ann's Warehouse in addition to the exhibitions and book events scheduled. Please visit the website for information and advance tickets.

DART: Design Arts Daily is a media sponsor of the New York Photo Festival, the first international festival of photography in the U.S. Founded by Daniel Power and Frank Evers, the festival is an initiative of powerHouse Books, located in DUMBO, and is now in its third year.

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