Fund "The Moonshore" Picnic's annual photofestival

We are raising funds for next year's photofestival with a goal of expanding on our free programme of workshops, talks and exhibitions and extending our "long weekend" of photography into a whole week packed full of photographic events.

As with our 2023 event our goal is to support young photographers by providing opportunities locally like our reference library, workshops and exhibition opportunities. A key part of our ethos is nurturing local talent through our creative programs that provide options outside of London to the formal education system.

The funds raised from this will go towards funding workshops, talks, production, a bookfair, and other events at next year's festival. Some of the money will go towards expanding our library.

A bit about us:

Based in St. Leonards-on-sea, Picnic, a non-profit, aims to support young photographers by providing opportunities locally through our reference library, workshops, exhibition opportunities, socials and now a free long weekend of events. Most of what we try to do is nurture local talent and hope to give options outside of London to the formal education system.

A bit about The Moonshore 2023:

The Moonshore is a long weekend of photography events presented by Picnic. It gets its name after a local part of a beach which reveals a hidden submarine forest from time to time, The Moonshore will be an annual events programme and thought this was a nice metaphor for it.

On our programme are workshops from industry-established photographers, talks, exhibitions, a photo-book meet-up that gives a platform to photographers to talk about their book(s) and a social event to celebrate the exhibitions and the event as a whole with the aim to provide a vessel for discussion!

The Moonshore will take on a new theme every year, guiding the workshops and loosely the exhibitions. This year's theme, most aptly for our first of many and looking through an ecological lens, is the sea/coastline and our relationship to it. We wanted to keep the theme relevant to Hastings, or more broadly coastal towns and east sussex so this one was a no-brainer. The workshop attendees will be early-career photographers, young adults and teenagers and most will be run outside. The work created by the participants in this workshop will then be run as an exhibition along the upper promenade on the seafront.

We will be holding a total of 3 exhibitions, two that run throughout the festival and one that runs after as a retrospective sharing the workshop participants' work. Our first will be a seafront exhibition, sharing the work of industry-established photographers Simon Roberts and Nick Waplington alongside locals Ben Osborne and Maya Brasington. Laura Pannack will be taking over our window with four photographs from her project “Dübener Heide forest”.

As part of this year's talks programme Ben Smith of “A Small Voice Podcast” will be sitting down and talking to Robin Friend & Eva Voutsaki on Friday 4th for a discussion about each of their practices, this will not be one to miss! Following this on the Saturday, Photographer/Lecturer Rachel Poulton will be giving a talk on 'Psychogeography' in the photographical context.