The second annual New York Photo Festival, held over the weekend in DUMBO, was a sprawling think-tank of contemporary photographers, curators, and lecturers spread out among five Brooklyn blocks, all pondering one question: “What is the future of contemporary photography?” With work shooting in every direction, intermarrying with other art forms, and experimenting with new technologies, the answer seemed to lie in the medium's bottomless capacity for reinvention. Here are a few of the festival's more notable pieces.

Fresh from the success of her solo show during Art Basel Miami, Kimiko Yoshida displayed a series of lushly realized self-portraits based on paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Matisse, and other masters. Deconstructing notions of iconography, classicism, and objectification, her work proved both visually captivating and compellingly critical.

Paris-based photography duo Rene and Radka shined brightly in “I Don’t Really Know What Kind of Girl I Am” a festival exhibition at Saint Ann’s Warehouse curated by Jody Quon (with a title borrowed from Juno). In a series of highly stylized underwater portraits, young girls are submerged in liquid incubators of feminization, silently gestating.

The Latin American Pavilion show's "Tu/Mi Placer," curated by Adriana Teresa, spotlighted the collaborative work of Luis González Palma and Graciela de Oliveira, who powerfully combine photography and text to explore the emotional and physical scars caused by gender violence.
Less voyeuristic then the others, photographer Philipp Schaerer used digital image editing in his series Bildbauten to create stunningly seamless works of "fictitious architecture." As much collage as photography, the pieces suggest the medium's power to invent as well as capture.

Watch a video about the festival's mission: