Despite the increase of interest in photography, there has been no substantial progress in the institutional sphere of South-eastern and Eastern Europe. There are basically no specialized public institutions for photography and the education area is also inadequately covered as higher-education institutions, where interested youth could study photography, are incredibly rare. The Higher Education Institute for Photography, which will be opening next year in Slovenia (University of Nova Gorica) is thus a long awaited and warmly welcomed project for this region.

A great majority of countries in the mentioned region are struggling with the problem of a badly developed art market, which makes surviving on just selling contemporary creative photography incredibly difficult. In the last three years, the two already established non-profit galleries in Slovenia (Mala galerija, Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana and Stolp Gallery in Maribor) have been joined by two new galleries in Ljubljana (Fotografija Gallery and Photon Gallery) and two galleries with an occasional photographic programme in Novo Mesto (ATP Gallery and Simulaker Gallery). Nevertheless it would prove quite difficult to find a Slovenian artist working in the field of contemporary creative photography who is able to survive solely on the public funds support and the selling of his/her own work.

The situation does not look any brighter in the field of publishing either. The established publishing houses in individual countries very rarely decide on publishing photographic monographs due to the fact that they do not seem to be very profitable. The import of foreign literature has been mainly left to one’s own initiative as most of the interested parties purchase and order this kind of literature from abroad, from theso-called “West”. Truly rare are also the domestic specialized photo periodic magazines; in Slovenia we have the Fotografija Magazine, in Romania they have the Idea Magazine. Therefore we deemed it extremely important to hold a seminar event at this year’s Month of Photography, titled: Discussions (28. – 29. 10.), on the topics of “Publishing and Photography”.

The inadequacies and setbacks from the more developed regions thus encourage other, especially non-institutional forms of association. In this sense, PHOTONIC MOMENTS is a yearly project that presents selected authors from South-eastern and Eastern Europe who work in the field of contemporary authorial photography. The selection is based on an international approach where the selections for each country are made by that country’s selector chosen every year.