BOP‘s website is a showroom of BOP members’ work. We consider the site as our home; each member owns a room and can use it as he pleases to hang his exhibitions. Like any other room it has a limited amount of walls and of wall space. It means that selection is key and that choices have to be made. Each member can show up to 5 exhibitions with a maximum of (around) 24 pictures. Coherency is one of the key concept in BOP exhibitions. If a new exhibition is put up on the virtual walls and that it exceeds the maximum one needs to be put down and goes into the archives. We keep one representative picture and the description of the past exhibitions, a little bit like a catalogue in a real gallery. When we published our first book, a retrospective for the first 5 years of BOP, all exhibitions (including guests) were showed with a selection of pictures for each. (You can have a look at this book here.)
Visitors of this website can browse all archived, guest and current exhibitions. They have been grouped in four themes which fits our view of the world:
- Humanistic views, dealing with the impact of the world on people and the way people try to make it, in the tradition of photographers such as Reza…
- Reportage, telling stories with the message as important as the images…
- Land portraits, when showing a place from a specific point of view…
- Experiments, when the technique (pinhole, macro photography, etc.) is the basis of the concept of the work…
These categories are artificial of course but they emerged naturally of our common body of work. It is worth mentioning that all exhibitions are commonly curated and a lot of discussions occur between members before one exhibition is judged ready to be presented publicly.
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Similarly when we invite people to propose work on the BOP website we stick to our rules and each guest exhibition is limited in time and number of pictures. It also needs to be coherent and most of the time original (i.e. unpublished anywhere else) and the exhibitions get archived after a while. We usually collaborate a lot before and during the curation process with the guest photographer and many became good friends, all over the world. We are particularly proud the be able to show quality work from people living in places such as Japan, the USA, Turkey, Russia, France, The Philippines, China, Germany (in no particular order).
We hope you will enjoy a little trip throughout the world of BOP! Feel free to give us feedback or contact us for any thing.