Two Teenage Girls

Our aim has always been to select a theme that is broader, so that everyone can relate to it and artists from all over the world can adapt to it," says Matthieu Foss, festival director at the Focus photography Festival, the theme of which this year is memory. Other co-founders include Elise Foster Vander Elst (also Festival Director) and Nicola Antaki (Design Director). Those of us who are obsessed with chronicling our lives in minute detail on social networking sites like Instagram, are well aware of the relationship between memory and a photograph. "That is a factor in settling on the theme. But the point is also to make people look at pictures longer, so that they can reflect and edit. This will make them realise what is actually important and what isn’t," says Foss.