Alexandre Solacolu, Director of the festival Photoreporter en baie de Saint-Brieuc
Brittany is a land of images. The idea of this young festival was to test the possibilities of access to new resources for photojournalism, which is experiencing a structural problem of financing, raising questions about access to information. The purpose was also to mobilize financial players who are sensitive to the issue of the economic environment for the completion of projects by targeting SMEs, which are the economic fabric of the land, and which have the means and the will to get involved, as they have done with boat racing.
Financing the production and printing is covered by an endowment funded by 46 contributors, each of whom gave 2,000 to 30,000€, with Saint-Brieuc supporting the festival itself. This set-up, which mobilizes people who might originally have had little interest in photography, allows for local parties to get involved in ambitious reporting projects that have more global concerns. The festival itself is an opportunity for everyone involved to come together. This mode of “participatory” financing serves as a veritable laboratory for new forms of photographic production.
Didier Quilain and Frank Portelance, in an interview with Yves Le Goff, highlight how many new means of communication there are today that make photography an immediate means of communicating, and the resulting proliferation of images has not decreased the public’s interest in creation. On the contrary. The most recent Salon de la Photographie had record attendance, and three million cameras were sold last year in France, a million more than in the heyday of analogue photography. The various smartphones are like entry-level products, the first steps towards more elaborate equipment , a growing interest in the works shown at exhibitions and festivals. Disposable cameras didn’t destroy the market for more expensive cameras, the camcorder didn’t kill photography, and today cameras can also shoot video.
