More than 300,000 visitors are expected to take part in Asia’s largest photo and advocacy festival. Opening on February 19 th until March 21rst, the 12th Yangon Photo Festival features a series of free exhibitions, screenings and parties across eight locations: Mahabandoola Park, Goethe Villa, French Institute, Yangon Central Railway Station, Rosewood Hotel, Dala ferries, Junction City, Myanmar Deitta and Ala Thit Art Gallery.
The festival will bring together over 200 photo documentaries raising awareness on some of the world’s most pressing issues: environmental threats, peace building and social justice.
For Christophe Loviny, Founder and Artistic Director of Yangon Photo Festival, this year’s theme “We Humans” is a call to shed light on actions which can inspire us to “save ourselves from self-destruction…”
Multi award winning photographers Franck Seguin and Pascal Maître are coming to this 12th edition with images that are an ode to our planet and a plea to protect it. Lucie Awards founder Hossein Farmani has also curated a collective exhibition by some of world’s most renowned “concerned” photographers, including Tom Jacobi, Steve McCurry, Paul Souders and Sebastian Copeland. Fausto Podavini returns to the festival with a five year long project about the construction of a megadam in the Omo valley of Ethiopia, a reflection on the deep contradictions of so-called ‘development’ investments.
Aside from international photographers, the YPF is also renowned for showcasing Burmese photography. Some of Myanmar’s most celebrated photographers, Hkun Lat, Hkun Li and Ko Myo will be exhibited alongside the projects of up-and-coming talents from the ethnic States and regions where YPF organises intensive visual story-telling trainings through its PhotoDoc association.
Created in the aftermath of the 2007 Saffron revolution, the original objective of PhotoDoc was to build the capacity of citizen journalists to investigate, document and report on the human rights, social justice and environmental issues under the military regime.
The democratic transition which started in 2011 and the exponential opening of the country to information and communications technologies have created the conditions for the organization’s mandate to expand to a national forum for freedom of expression and advocacy.
“In the last 12 years, we have trained more than a thousand young men and women from all backgrounds, religions, and ethnicities to produce short documentaries about the most important social and environmental issues affecting their lives”, explains Christophe Loviny
For Loviny, promoting media literacy is critical in societies threatened by the impact of hate speech and fake news. “The most efficient counter-attacks against the propagators of hate speech and fake news are real stories strong enough to reach an audience as large as the haters,” he added. “Visit our e-magazine Myanmar Stories on Facebook. In two years, it has become one of the most popular in the country, with an average of 140,000 viewers per video, sometimes even more than 1 million!”
For its 12th edition, the festival opened at Goethe Villa on 19th February with a photobook exhibit, a series of shows and an opening party. A Photo Village is set up in Mahabandoola Park on the week- end of 22-23 February, with documentaries showing on a giant LED screen, exhibitions including the World Press Photo and a photo studio. It will culminate on 23th at French Institute with the competition for best Photo-story of the Year in front of a jury of national and international personalities.
“Every year, YPF is a unique experience to meet photographers from all over Myanmar and the whole world, make new friends and exchange about important issues in a party atmosphere,” Loviny said.
