The 8th edition of the Festival Photo People & Nature of Gacilly presents from June 3 until September 2011 a program essentially dedicated to forests, with 10 exhibitions. The theme was very naturally chosen for 2011, proclaimed as the international year of forests.
• « Hach Winik », the people of Lacandons – MIQUEL DEWEVER-PLANA Miquel Dewever-Plana chose to dedicate himself to the fight for the rights of Indians. From 1995, traveling throughout Mexico and Guatemala, he decided to study the approximately thirty types of Mayan people. Since 1999, he is photographing his childhood dream : the Lacandon Indians, these Hach Winik where « veritable men » live in the forest of the Chiapas, in the south of Mexico. In the village of Naha, he is witness to the changes that this microcosm is undergoing, due to the pressure of peasants without land, sharecroppers, tourists and evangelical christians. His photographs show a millenary way of life in mutation. Closer to the idea of an invitation to travel then of a scientific or ethnological approach, his images bring us into the universe of a people with achored traditions, yet vulnerable by the effects of globalization.
• Images buissonnières – MARC RIBOUD Marc Riboud is a tireless traveler, unceasingly amazed by the world. A man that loves adventure, fantasy, hunting the unforeseen, and witness for the last 60 years to the jolts of History, by conserving a beautiful independance in regards to ideologies.
• Tales and realities… …the forests of Morbihan – COLLECTIVE ARGOS Each year, the General Counsel of Morbihan is bringing his support to the Festival by offering a photographic commission. For it’s 10 years, the Collective Argos has taken on the task of criss-crossing Brittany to recount the mysteries and the stakes of it’s forests. In Morbihan, the forest spreads out over approximately 114,000 hectacres, which is about 16.6% of this department’s land. It is a space that is primarly private (on average 1.2 hectacres per owner), composed of parts almost equal to the shapes of leaves and pinecones. Elves, contemporary artists, droids, and magic lights move around the recesses of Brocéliande, of Faouet and of Pontivy in order to keep the legends alive. But the forests are also a land of reinsertion, of commitment, a space where men working for nature and our society work everyday.
•Above the trees – FRANCIS LATREILLE
They are no longer but a few hundred that pace along the great Siberian North, they are nomads and live in an ancestral way, far from our consumerist societies. Past the line of the last trees, who are found well above the polar circle, the Dolganes, the Gnagassans or the Neneth, these ethnic people that Stalin called « the little people », living under a tree as the tundra grows only lichens, dwarf-sized birchs or small trees that flower for a few days during the short boreal summer. A monochromatic landscape, with no odor or no color. For years, Francis Latreille « hibernates » with these men and women who live from the economy of nothing. In a universe with no extras, the photographic witness of these ethnic tribes makes us question this burning world, in a few decades, the resources of our planet accumulated throughout the milleniums.
•Sanctuary – MICHAEL NICHOLS A shocking image that would become, the time of one summer, the totem of La Gacilly, the heart of the nerve center of the village. One image 12 meters high in homage to the biggest tree in the world, the sequoia. Frustrated to not have been able to produce an image that would pay homage to these giants, the American photographer Michael Nichols mobilized a team of scientists to put together a gyroscopic camera with three lenses in order to capture the entire tree in one single image.
•On the trail of Claude Lévi-Strauss – PIERRE DE VALLOMBREUSE Mayas, Dinkas, Papous, Himbas, Maoris, Bihls… So many ethnicities that Pierre de Vallombreuse has photographed for more then 20 years in the most secluded of places in the world. During his photographic features, a political assessment is imposed : more then 5,000 populations (more then 3 million people) are threatened of disappearing. It is the cultural patrimony of all of humanity that is in danger. This year, he chose to pay homage to the biggest French ethnologue, who passed in 2009, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
•The world of forests – JH EDITORIAL The trees are essential meshes of the chain of life, allowing the regulation of climates and the cycle of water. The forests are among the richest ecosystems and the most stable of the planet and hold, according to scientists, 50% of the earth’s biodiversity. Now the degradation is happening an alarming pace. Each week, there are 200,000 hectacres that disappear. And only 6% of forets are protected in the world ! The exhibition presented by the agency JH Editorial shows us the doors to the lungs of the earth, and presents the jewels of a forest, the source of beauty and of life.
And also : • Refuges – HOMMAGE AU PHOTOJOURNALISME • Cabanes – PATRICK AVENTURIER – THOMAS GOISQUE – NICOLAS HENRY – JEAN REVILLARD – SYLVAIN TESSON • Destruction ! FRANS KRAJCBERG • Méditations – MICHAEL KENNA • Discover another… – ECPAD • « Les Hôtes de ces bois » – Collectif Amateurs
Ericka Weidmann
