The third edition of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Gaspé, Quebec, has come to an end. The idea of this festival, which occupies an area 1000 km2 a 12-hour drive from Montreal, was born… at Arles! We present to you a meeting with the festival’s founder.
Between the shadows of the high seas, the sea-polished stones and the blue sky, the Gaspé is an immense peninsula in Quebec where, for the past three years, during the brief hot summer, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie is held. The master of this singular event, Claude Goulet, travels for weeks along these winding coastal roads in order to oversee the various exhibitions and conferences featuring the major photographers invited for the occasion, including stars like Edward Burtynsky and Magnum’s Larry Towell.
The idea for this festival took root in Arles. “It was Arles where I met Jean-Daniel Berclas, from the Musée du Point de Vue,” says Goulet. “Since 1997, Berclaz has organized a photography events built around the landscape. Photographers present their work in the same place they produced it.” In this itinerant museum that adapts to each new space, Berclaz questions the spaces themselves as much as photography.
Goulet wanted to adapt this approach to the vast territory opening onto the sea where, for more than a century, artists have met to enjoy its isolation, which “on the Gaspé coast, today, is as unexpected and as grand as it could be,” as André Breton recorded in Arcanes 17 after his visit to the peninsula. Whether it’s inside, in galleries or abandoned industrial sites, or outside, before the vastness of the sea or along buildings, Goulet took up the challenge to make Gaspé the New World for photography.
Jean-François Nadeau is the editor of the art section of Le Devoir, the daily newspaper of Montreal.
