Europa, europa.

PHOTO LONDON

LONDON

MAY 18-21, 2006

PHOTOESPANA

MADRID

JUNE 1-JULY 23, 2006

COORDINATION OF EUROPEAN PICTURE AGENCIES (CEPIC CONGRESS)

BIARRITZ, FRANCE 

JUNE 6-10, 2006

DOKUMENT 06

AARHUS, DENMARK

JUNE 15-17, 2006

RENCONTRES D'ARLES

ARLES, FRANCE

JULY 4-SEPTEMBER 17, 2006

Travel broadens, they say, even as it depletes the wallet. The trade-off has always been whether the benefits outweigh the costs. In the cultural realm, this can be tricky. Yet for those interested in photography--as producers, consumers, or analysts--there is always something interesting to see in Europe. According to Francois Hebel, director of the Rencontres d'Arles in Arles, France, there are approximately eighty photography (or photography related) festivals in France alone each year. There are at least four in the Netherlands, three in Poland, and so on. The following is a sample of the spectrum of photography festivals across western Europe.

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OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND IN THE SPRING

England has several photography festivals, as befits the land of William Henry Fox-Talbot. Events take place in Birmingham, Brighton, Hereford, and London, among other locales. Yet the example of Photo London (a dealers' festival not unlike AIPAD's Photography Show or Paris Photo) points to the difficult position of photography in the English art world. Crudely put, until very recently there has been no real photography gallery scene in London, despite major photography collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum; the presence of the now thirty-five-year-old Photographers Gallery and the more recent Autograph Gallery; and a thriving interest in fashion photography centered around magazines like Face, ID, and Tank. In spite of all the hype a few years back around the "Young British Artists" of the "Cool Britannia" era of the 1980s and 1990s, the scene was effectively dead until 2003 when the Tate Modern put on "Cruel and Tender" a modern documentary photography show. Ironically, "Cruel and Tender" was curated by German Thomas Weski, then chief curator of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; it marked the beginning of a slowly growing interest in photography in Britain as an attractive and commercially viable artistic medium.

Photo London, now in its third year, is the inspiration of Daniel Newburg, photographer, gallerist, and creator of Photography London UK (PLUK), a gallery guide similar to Bill Mindlin's Photograph, itself formerly known as Photography in New York. Scheduled to take place exactly between its established predecessors and simultaneous with the spring auctions of Christies, Phillips, and Sothebey's, Photo London is held in a rabbit warren within the Royal Academy of the Arts in the heart of London's gallery district. In theory, there is no reason why a dealers' show in London should not work. There is plenty of money in London. Yet as Brett Rogers, the new director of the Photographers Gallery, points out, until the Tate Modern's show, London had no tradition of supporting and collecting photography. Beautifully timed, though with few co-coordinated events presented by other galleries and museums, Photo London remains a poor orphan of photography fairs. Only Magnum Photo's London office and Riflemaker Gallery had openings during the event. Despite a walk-through of 18,000 customers and sales of [pounds sterling]3.2 million in 2005, the fair is marked by extraordinarily poor marketing and a lack of representation by high-end international and American galleries and collectors. With some fifty galleries attending, Photo London drew a smattering of international names with the gamut of fine vintage works but included too many local artists' spaces or project rooms masquerading as would-be galleries featuring their own works and new, splashy color photography. The fair continues to be the great what-might-have-been and what-might-yet-be of dealers' fairs.

THE COMMERCIAL SCENE

Obviously, the true drivers of photography are the family snapshooters and the professional editorial and stock photographers who supply imagery for magazines, newspapers, and advertisements online and in print. Coordination of European Picture Agencies (CEPIC) is the umbrella organization in Europe for photography agencies, and each year the organization holds an event where industry trends are discussed and deals are made. As the photo agency world has consolidated in the digital age, two diverse trends have appeared. First, the smaller agencies have chosen to seek safety in numbers by sharing cross-promotion of their wares and distribution channels. Second, a variety of niche players have emerged with specialty stock--whether nature images, food, or sports shots--or to exploit a regional specialty such as is the practice of the On Asia and Drik agencies from Singapore and Dhaka, Bangladesh, respectively. Beyond dealmaking in a fashionable watering hole, CEPIC also served up an impressive seminar on European and international press and image rights. The European community is in the process of harmonizing the European Union and national laws regarding personal privacy and image rights. In an age where paparazzi images can take on political significance, the use of the courts to suppress unflattering images will be an extremely hard-fought battleground in the years to come. Until the laws are standardized, editors and publishers remain at the mercy of celebrities and politicians who manipulate their images in public discourse for financial or political gain. Conversely, until the public taste for scandal and images of prominent people dissipates, the tabloid and gossip industry will continue to abuse individual privacy. This is an issue that also affects the use of "street photography" and "art photography" as Philip-Lorca diCorcia recently discovered.

LOOKING NORTH

The annual get-together of the Scandinavian photojournalism schools, Dokument 06, took place on the grounds of the legendary Danish School of Journalism (DSJ) in Aarhus, Denmark. Students from photography schools in Norway and Sweden joined their Danish colleagues for a week of workshops with photojournalists Marcus Bleadsdale and Tom Stoddard. Grouped under the heading of "The British are Coming," there were panels featuring photographers Polly Braden, Peter Dench, and Anna Kari, as well as photographer-educator David Campany. Most importantly, Dokument, founded in 2003 by Pelle Kronestedt of Mid-Sweden University in Sundsvall, provides a venue for international exchange and networking among photographers in Scandinavia. The strength of the DSJ is well known. Perhaps no other school has produced so many international award winners. It owes much to the program led by Soren Pragter and its close cooperation with Danish newspapers such as Politiken, which encourages long-term photography projects.

THE NATURE OF SPAIN

If you ever wished to attend a superbly run photography festival with myriad exhibits all over a transportation-friendly megalopolis, get to PhotoEspana, held every June for the past ten years in Madrid. Carefully curated by Horacio Fernandez and under the directorship of Pablo Berastegui, this year's edition took up nature as its theme as it does every three years. By examining "nature" as a cultural, ideological, and psychological construct, the festival pored over the various ways artists represent nature. Nature becomes an open field to be plowed in various ways, whether through the eyes of Lars Tunbjork, confronting transformations through actual displacement of earth for housing development on the outskirts of Madrid, or through historical change as seen in the work of Ed Burtynsky or John Davies. Of course, nature was not always made up of housing developments and factories. Mireya Maso's work on southernmost Argentina, Nobuo Asada's generic seascapes, and Thomas Joshua Cooper's imagery from Finisterre, Spain, continental Europe's most western point, took up aspects of the sea and its interaction with the man-made environment.

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There were two very different historical bodies of work that addressed nature and man's historical interaction with it. Karl Blossfeldt's pioneering series, "Urformen der Kunst" Archetypes of Art (1928), was presented with original prints from his archives. His work became instrumental in the development of the New Objectivity school of art in the early twentieth century, yet the alternative takes and full-frame images have seldom been seen in public. At the other end of the spectrum, away from the iconic purity of Blossfeldt's imagery, the retrospective of Spanish photographer Cristobal Hara was a surprise. Hara, born in 1946, has been the chronicler of rural Spain's traditions and developments over the past thirty years. His work combines a documentary aesthetic with a conservative, modernist perspective. His images of farm workers, machinery, horses, and fire festivals in tiny villages in the countryside combine typologies and traditional photo essays on rural life. His work has been immensely popular in Spain, but, like much of Spanish art and culture during the Franco years, largely unknown outside his country.

The diversity of PhotoEspana was accompanied by an integrated Festival Off, consisting of slide shows in the various plazas, and a variety of meet-the-artist events designed to engage the general populace. The beauty of the event is that its venues, spread all over the city, are generally accessible through the extensive public transportation system. Additionally, there is a curated "Discoveries of Photo Espana" section where photographers are invited to submit work for review and exhibition. A panel of some twenty judges representing an international group of publishers, curators, institutions, critics, and gallerists selected approximately eighty photographers from a pool of more than 400 submissions. The winner was granted a solo exhibition of a new body of work. This year's winner was the Spanish photojournalist Stanislas Guigui for his work from the Colombian civil war.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Now thirty-six years old, the Rencontres d'Arles, formerly the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, is the mother of all photography festivals. This year's festival offered an homage to noted French documentary photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon. This year's festival, ironically titled in English "So French" as a tweak to his American editors, invoked a spirit of nostalgia that nonetheless looked to the future. First, under the heading of "Influences," Depardon cited his mentors among classic American photojournalists Cornell Capa, Elliott Erwitt, and Walker Evans, and singled them out for retrospectives. At the same time, he mentioned Daniel Angeli, Gilles Caron, Donald McCullum, Susan Meiselas, and Guy Le Querrec, who shared his view of journalism and his time on the road as a photojournalist. Particular attention was paid to Africa, one of Depardon's greatest concerns and the scene of his most extended photo documentary and film projects. Beyond championing a series of young African photographers, Depardon presented portfolios and slideshows from the Francophone regions of Africa. Not only did he explore France's colonial history in North Africa, but, with works by Julien Chaspal and Olivier Jobard, its post-colonial history and the routes of migration from Africa to Europe. Other bodies of work by Malik Nejmi and Gilles Coulon explored the continent from indigenous and Franco African perspectives. As ever, the festival is also known for the major international prizes announced, including the Oskar Barnack Award sponsored by Leica and the European Publishers Award for best book project. (1)

The Rencontres were marked this year by a change to the portfolio review scene. Previous various informal opportunities to share portfolios--around tables, at spaces sponsored by Leica, Photo Service, and Festival Off--were replaced this year by a formal, pay-to-play system, similar to that used by Houston's FotoFest; PhotoLucida in Portland, Oregon; and Rhubarb-Rhubarb in Birmingham, England. This did not negate the value of informal networking, but it changed the equation somewhat. That said, Arles seems to have grown out of the mid-life crisis that so clearly marked its recent years. It remains to be seen what next year will bring, but Hebel and Depardon have re-emplaced Arles on the map of important photography festivals.

This peek into the European photography festivals is by no means fully exposed. Those planning to look at images or to show their work would do well to examine their wallets as well as visit Web sites covering a variety of photography festivals ranging from dealers' fairs to uncurated extravaganzas to hard-core review opportunities. As Napoleon said, "time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted." There are still several months before the next round of spring and summer photography festivals and with more on which to test one's mettle, the possibilities in Europe--and elsewhere--are endless.

BILL KOUWENHOVEN is a writer and photographer currently living and working in Berlin and New York City.

NOTE 1. The Discovery Award for a photographer whose work has recently been discovered, or deserves to be, was won by Alessandra Sanguinetti for her series "The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams," metaphorically depicting two Argentine cousins' path to adulthood. The No Limit Award for work that goes beyond currently acknowledged boundaries was awarded to Randa Mirza for his images of the destruction of Lebanon. The Outreach Award was presented to Wang Qingsong for his satirical examination of contemporary China in radical flux, "Glorious Life." The Project Assistance Award was won by Walid Raad for his work with the Atlas Project documenting Lebanon in the wake of the Lebanese civil war. The Book Award 2006 went to Artist, Anarchist, a retrospective of work by Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898-1983), newly published by Steidl. Each artist was awarded 10,000 Euros by the Fondation LUMA, a major sponsor of the festival. The Oskar Barnack Prize of 5000 Euros in cash or Leica equipment was won by Tomas Munita, a young Chilean photographer for his photo report "Kabul--Leaving the Shadows." Formerly known as the European Publishers Award, the Leica Publishers Award was won by the Frenchman Ambroise Tezenas for his book project Beijing: Theatre of the People, documenting the radical changes in the Chinese capital's landscape as the ancient Hutong dwellings are swept aside for the construction of modern buildings.

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