Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo 2024

WORLD.NATURE.HERITAGE – "Humanity has opened the gates to hell", warned Secretary- General António Guterres in an impassioned speech on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2023. UN General Assembly in September 2023 to politicians, entrepreneurs and activists, he warned of the terrible consequences of increasingly extreme weather events. "Our concern is that all climate action will be dwarfed by the scale of the challenge”, as humanity is heading for a temperature rise of 2.8°C.

An appeal to the world that has long been inscribed at the heart of our festival. It is our duty to preserve the poetry of creation for our children. On the fundamental issues of urbanisation, biodiversity, natural resources, environmental pollution and global warming, we will try to use images to provide, if not solutions, then at least food for thought. Therefore, in our seventh festival year, we will be showing the work of the great masters of environmental photography: Nazli Abbaspour, Evgenia Arbugaeva, Yasuhoshi Chiba, Joana Choumali, David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes, 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.

"We all need Eden as a horizon," writes Cyril Drouhet in his essay in the festival catalogue. "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 colour has turned grey. But life needs radiant colours 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 organised by the Morbihan schools in Brittany and Lower Austria is also dedicated to the theme of "Nature as Heritage" this year. We are giving young young people the opportunity to express their ideas on the challenges of today and especially of tomorrow: How can we shape social models to preserve our unique world for our children?