Reaching its seventh edition, Fotofestival Lenzburg interrogates happiness in its endless permutations and contradictions. Often discounted as a critical category because of its seeming superficiality, happiness appears as a driving force in our lives nowadays. We all look for happiness in different places: how can images help us understand what happiness is and what its limits are?

Amidst posts on social media presenting quick-fix infographics for a happier life and a wealth of consumer items promising happier selves and healthier bodies, the quest for a happy life seems under the contemporary pressures both a naïve dream and constant medical and shopping cart imperatives. Who gets (or should we say, afford?) to be happy is an increasingly debated question which unravels in both positive emotions and positions of oppression.

And yet, happiness is a feeling immediately understood, instinctively so, if conceptually elusive. It is as culturally constructed, as socioeconomically contingent, as it is felt and expressed with and inside the body.

For this reason, happiness lends itself to meander within multiple categories of feeling, spanning pleasure, well-being, and satisfaction, if only for a moment: happiness is ephemeral, but must be constantly repeated. What excites us about the search for happiness in ourselves, in objects, in other people?

It is perhaps its fleetingness that moves and forces us to research happiness and capture it, to snap it in a flash like a photograph and make it last forever. And photographs of happiness are abundant, from smiles beaming in the vernacular photography of family albums to the images of advertisement: photography offers incisive and immediate languages to represent and deconstruct our understandings of happiness.

Mind-numbing and euphoric like a Black Friday flash sale; we must be FOREVER HAPPY, whatever that might mean.

Under the title we have now chosen, FOREVER HAPPY, we are pleased to invite you all to think with us about possible themes and images for the next edition of the Lenzburg Fotofestival. We look forward to your contributions and your participation.