PIONEERING photographers and visual artists will share and discuss their work at a festival in Colwyn Bay later this year.

The Northern Eye Photography Festival, a collaboration between the Oriel Colwyn photography gallery and Aberystwyth’s The Eye Festival, will build on its huge success in previous years with a new set of outstanding speakers in October.

The biennial festival is hosted on the ‘odd’ years and does like to be a little different and non-exclusive, with an overarching desire to widen the reach of photography.

Speakers include but are not limited to Charlie ‘Smokey’ Phillips, an unsung hero of urban photography who has sold pictures of Muhammad Ali and Jimi Hendrix around the world; Emma Case, visual artist and creative producer collaboratively working with communities, focusing on themes around nostalgia, archives and the everyday, and who founded the RED Archive project in Liverpool; Brian Griffin, one of Britain’s most influential portrait photographers who created the style now referred to as capitalist realism in the 1970s and ‘80s; Alys Tomlinson, who explores Christian pilgrimage sites such as Lourdes (France), Ballyvourney (Ireland) and Grabarka (Poland); and Jack Lowe, a documentarist using photography, audio recordings and film in his eight-year Lifeboat Station Project to visit all 238 RNLI lifeboat stations in the UK and Ireland.

The show takes place at Theatr Colwyn on Saturday, October 9 and Sunday, October 10.

Tickets cost £40.

Book at theatrcolwyn.co.uk