Explore and capture the city
Urban Photo Hunts is a cultural association that uses photography and urban spaces as creative means to get together and roam places in an unusual manner. Its aim is to re-discover the city by looking out for and unveiling its details, hidden stories, unusual forms and unexplored sceneries.
It was born in London in 2015, in 2016 it moved to Barcelona and in 2017 it reached Rome, where it found a home. The activities of Urban Photo Hunts are open to all, amateur photographers and pros alike, and even to those who are not into photography, but simply into wandering. Meetings are held regularly, every month or so, and they give the chance to those who partake in them to experiment with what their eyes see and their minds draw.
In each encounter a team of local organisers proposes themes, which vary from social, to historical, to aesthetic and to philosophical, and invites people to play with these themes using photography and the surrounding urban context. Each wander is held in a different neighbourhood of the city and it is attended by about fifteen hunters, who after having interpreted the theme they picked, share their snaps and experiences in a group presentation while enjoying an apertitivo.
Through its activities, Urban Photo Hunts has now mapped about 20 of Rome’s neighbourhoods, gathering numerous portraits of the city, created collectively but also through personal perspectives and sensations. On top of these explorations, Urban Photo Hunts organises yearly exhibitions in order to share some of its huge archive. What is exciting about these exhibitions, for both those who are new to the city and those who are not, is that the photos in them are very different from the post-card type of pictures of Rome that we are used to seeing. Rather, they are unforeseen snippets of thoughts and feelings of everyday “roamers”.
