In 2024, Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo will once again be dedicated to the relationship between humans and the environment. 30 exhibitions will be dedicated to various aspects of the relationship between people and their environment. Starting from the visitor center on Brusattiplatz, the festival, divided into a garden route and a city route, stretches over 7 kilometers. Embedded in the public space, around 1,500 large-format photographs by the world's best photographers are on display. Admission is free.
WORLD.NATURE.HERITAGE - "Humanity has opened the gates to hell," warned Secretary-General António Guterres in an impassioned speech to politicians, business leaders and activists on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2023, warning of the dire consequences of increasingly extreme weather events. "Our concern is that all climate action will be dwarfed by the scale of the challenge" as humanity heads towards a 2.8°C temperature rise.
Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo 2023: Richard and Sky, Zimbabwe, 2020 © Nick Brandt
An appeal to the world that has long been inscribed in the heart of our festival. It is our duty to preserve the poetry of creation for our children. On the fundamental issues of urbanization, biodiversity, natural resources, pollution or global warming, we will try to use images to provide, if not solutions, at least food for thought. That is why, in our seventh festival year, we are showing the work of the great masters of environmental photography: Nazli Abbaspour, Evgenia Arbugaeva, Yasuhoshi Chiba, Joana Choumali, David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes, Hans Hass, Nadia Ferroukhi, Sacha Goldberger, Richard Ladkani, Lucas Lenci, Luca Locatelli, Pascal Maitre, Beth Moon, Maxime Riché, Sebastião Salgado, Alain Schroeder, Vee Speers, Brent Stirton, Lorraine Turci, David Turnley, Peter Turnley and Cássio Vasconcellos.
Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo 2018 © Lois Lammerhuber
"We all need Eden as a horizon," writes Cyril Drouhet in his essay in the festival catalog. "There was a time when we had a rainbow in our heads: We believed in the future, in progress, our dreams were full of utopias. In the third millennium, this color has turned gray. But life needs radiant shades of color like in photography to enchant the world again. That is the challenge of the coming years and the challenge of our festival."
The bilateral photography project of the Morbihan schools in Brittany and Lower Austria is also dedicated to the theme of "Nature as heritage" this year. We are giving young people the opportunity to express their ideas on the challenges of today and, above all, of tomorrow: How can we shape social models to preserve our unique world for our children?
"We have the choice to use the gift of our lives to make the world a better place," Jane Goodall is convinced. Martin Parr, whom the festival will honor with the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award, is certainly part of this spirit of preserving rays of hope for humanity. And Luigi Caputo's pictures tell of a magical world, a world of magical transformations full of graceful beauty and fairytale elegance. Fascinating glimpses of the mysterious places backstage and a tribute to the artists of the Salzburg Festival. Norbert Span shows us in his pictures why snow crystals are the "jewels of the sky".
Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo 2017 © Lois Lammerhuber
The exhibition of photographs by professional photographers from Lower Austria and the "Director's Cut" exhibition by jury president Michel Comte from CEWE's "Our World is Beautiful", the world's largest photo competition with over 500,000 images from 170 countries, will round off the festival, as will the look back at 2023 in the images of artist in residence Ina Künne, whose pictures will be accompanied by texts by 2022 Thomas Jorda Award winner Raphaela Edelbauer. A very special visual highlight is the exhibition "The Human Footprint", images from orbit, prepared by Gerald Mansberger and Markus Eisl.
The collaboration with festival partners Garten Tulln, Celje in Slovenia and Month of Photography Bratislava will continue in 2024 under the guiding principle of Culture of Solidarity.
June 13 to October 13, 2024
https://festival-lagacilly-baden.photo
