A hearty thanks and farewell to our guest bloggers, Andrew Hetherington (www.whatsthe jackanory.com ) and Michael David Murphy (2point8.whileseated.org ) for their insightful and enthralling posts from the New York Festival over the past four days. We look forward to working together on similar projects in the future. In the meantime we encourage our readers to keep an eye on their sites for more insider photography news, exposés, and opinion.

A huge thanks also to the Foto8 staff who were on the ground in New York coordinating and generating coverage: Leo, Lally and Grace. I look forward to seeing more of the same again on Foto8.com throughout the year as we report from a wide mix of photography festivals from around the world, always with our eye on photojournalism and making sure we keep it real.

Next up Photo España from Madrid from 3rd June! Are you going? Get in touch with us and share your own reports via Foto8!

On Thursday we left the festival for a few hours for a meeting with Karen at ICP who showed us around their impressive facilities. We were pleased to hear that students often recommend 8 magazine to their teachers as their favourite source of information on photojournalism. Later, we were lucky to get a sneak preview of the new show in the ICP gallery:  Heavy Light - Recent Photography and Video from Japan . Also showing was an exhibition curated by Diane Keaton from her collection of images by a Texan studio photographer Bill Wood's Business and we even interviewed Diane herself. (listen here)

Also at the party was Martin Parr who a few questions of his own for us:

INTERVIEW WITH NEW YORK PHOTO FESTIVAL FOUNDERS
by Jon Levy

This month Daniel Power and Frank Evers launch the first inaugural New York Photo Festival. It’s a joint initiative between the owner of powerHouse books and the managing director of VII photo agency that includes participating galleries and venues creating a neighborhood of photography for four days in Brooklyn.

The festival is billed as “The Future of Contemporary Photography” but with such a weighty claim, I tried to find out what place photojournalism occupies in this new neighborhood of photography.

At 76 Front Street

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Curating a high-profile show for the New York Photo Festival has been a “nailbiting” experience for Lesley Martin, not least because of the huge scale of some of the work she has chosen to exhibit.

“I’m used to working to make things small and flat,” says Martin, book publisher at the Aperture Foundation, “so I was very excited by the space.”

And indeed Martin has made the most of 76 Front Street, creating a “gigantic” 44ft x 10ft installation of 6x4 prints of sunsets downloaded from Flickr by artist Penelope Umbrico, whose work with found photographs typifies a widespread fascination with this oeuvre that Martin wanted to draw attention to with this show.

At St. Ann’s Warehouse

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Kathy Ryan, the award-winning New York Times picture editor, has curated an exhibition of ten artists called Chisel for the New York Photo Festival, bringing together artists whose work evokes the painterly or the sculptural. The idea evolved from thinking about Roger Ballen’s ‘psychologically provocative’ latest studio-based work.

At Smack Mellon and Dumbo Arts Center (DAC)

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From the unlikely sounding Tarantino-meets-Disney venues Smack Mellon and Dumbo Arts Center, Magnum photographer and curator of New Typologies Martin Parr lays out his stall for the Future of Photography.

In employing the word ‘typology’, Parr is evoking a tradition in which the best-known exponents are Bernd and Hilda Becher. “Yes, it’s been around for a long time, but people are using it to great effect at the moment,” says Parr. “Photographing something over and over again can bring an extra level of rigour to certain subject matters. It’s not new, but no-one has isolated it as a specific trend.”