EXPOSURE 2025

Emerging Photographer of the Year: Lana Collins

Lana Collins is a Canadian analogue film photographer specializing in 35mm. She is self-taught in the medium and also develops and digitizes her film at home. Her practice focuses on intentionality throughout the process by utilizing analogue photography’s materiality. This informs slow, intimate sessions that she treats as anthropology through art practice, trying to find what is already present, rather than forcing a specific image. Through this practice, she explores personal narratives surrounding pressures to “perform existence” within the communities of queerness, femininity, and sisterhood. She strives to capture timeless photographs that are intentionally disconnected from specific time periods and instead focus on enduring emotionality. Over the course of her artistic career, Lana has continued to develop her technical skills and artistry by working closely with those in her local community. She has been commissioned for her work and has had her photography featured in group exhibitions. The upcoming stages of her practice will delve into image manipulation and large scale community projects.

All My Sisters


All My Sisters is a love letter to sisterhood in all its forms, the chosen, the inherited, the accidental, and the fleeting. It honours the bonds that grow between friends, collaborators, strangers, and everyone who quietly participates in communal care. I wanted to explore how sisterhood exists both as a relationship and as a moment, appearing in shared rituals, in whispered encouragement, and in unspoken understandings. This project seeks to reveal the emotional labour, tenderness, humour, and chosen connection that define how we show up for one another. I am interested in the small gestures that often go unnoticed: a hand adjusting another’s hair, a stranger offering safety and softness when it is most needed, and the space for total and complete honesty. I also wanted to highlight the Calgary creative community and the sisterhood present in that, by creating a space for the women in this community to shine, and connect. Sisterhood is getting a chance to say, “you feel like me” and “I trust you with myself”. Each frame becomes a record of connection and is a display of the forms sisterhood can take, how it sustains us, and who we become when we are witnessed with care.

SAVE THE DATE

Exhibition & Festival Opening: Thursday, February 5, 2025

Hosted in partnership with Contemporary Calgary as part of their Free First Thursdays event series.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that the Exposure Photography Festival is situated on land adjacent to where the Bow River meets the Elbow River. The traditional Blackfoot name of this place is “Moh’kins’tsis”, which we now call the City of Calgary. This is the traditional Treaty 7 territory of the Blackfoot confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani as well as the Îyâxe Nakoda and Tsuut’ina nations. It is home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3 within the historical Northwest Métis homeland. We honour and acknowledge all Nations, who live, work and play in Moh’kins’tsis, help steward this land, and honour and celebrate this territory.