[Summer 2020]
Pat Kane, de la série Terre du peuple / from the series Land of the People
Yorladis and her partner live in a house in a temporary camp in Colinas. They met shortly before the peace process. He had just spent two years in prison which he described as being jointly run by the FARC and paramilitary groups, in other words, basically the same war as outside the walls. Yorladis et son compagnon vivent dans une maison du camp de Colinas. Ils se sont rencontrés peu de temps avant que la paix soit déclarée. Lui venait de passer deux ans en prison. Il raconte que la gestion interne entre détenus était partagée entre FARC et paramilitaires, la même guerre qu’à l’extérieur en somme.
Foot & Mouth crisis. Beasts burning on funeral pyre during the extermination of cattle and sheep. Millions of beasts were incinerated across the Cumbrian landscape. The rank odour of burning blows in the wind for miles around. Foot & Mouth crisis. Cumbria UK 2001 Foot & Mouth affects cloven hoofed animals. Its a type of viral flu, easily spread. Symptoms can be serious but animals can develop a resistance to it. The threat of Foot & Mouth, is that it can cost the meat industry an average 6 months more feeding to get a beast ready for sale at its prime weight. The meat industry is motivated by profits and cheaper production costs, rather than producing quality food in a humane caring environment.
03/01/2019, Nadi, Fiji— Dr. Shalvin Chand takes a blood sample to test the platelet levels of Prashant Kumar, 8, at the Nadi Hospital. He has dengue and spent the last four days with very high fever, not eating, not walking. According to his mother Renu, Prashant usually has so much energy he is constantly running around the house, but now, he lost weight. "He was going awful, I spent the all the time crying and not sleeping because I was worried he would be hurt" says his mother who spend the New Year by her son's bedside. "I had dengue before, but it was not as bad as this. It is very dangerous, all the body shakes around. In Fiji, we have it too much.”
Alex Amaya, 39 Dani Amaya Perdomo, 16 Atima, Santa Barbara, Honduras “We are poor people and sometimes we do not have enough to pay rent and provide food for the family... What we earn per day as farmers is like 100, 120 lempiras ($4.10- $4.92). That does not leave us anything,” said Alex Amaya, 39, with his son Dani Amaya Perdomo, 16, at the “migrant hotel” in Mexicali, Mexico. “In Honduras crime is so out of control that they will kill you for nothing. My dad's uncle was killed for 800 lempiras ($32). part of the migrant caravan, traveling from Central America, poses for a photo ‘Migrant Hotel, a makeshift migrant shelter, in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, November 17, 2018. This caravan was made up of thousands of people and one of the biggest caravans to date. Migrant caravans have been happening for years, people from Central America travel together for safety.
Drayden Sandy looks back at his mom Ashley Sandy as they head out to camp on the tundra for a weekend during Rankin Inlet's annual trout fishing derby.
ERDENE SANT, CENTRAL MONGOLIA, 21 MAY 2017: An endangered Saker falcon mother and chicks high on a cliff top above the Mongolian Steppe. These Saker falcons are highly endangered by poaching as well as a lack of protected nesting sites. Abu Dhabi sponsors 5000 artificial nesting sites in Mongolia to try and alleviate some of these problems. (Photo by Brent Stirton/Verbatim for National Geographic magazine.)
Pedro Rivera participates in the funeral of the 31 victims of the Xecax massacre, perpetrated by the Army in February 1982. Among them is his aunt, Magdalena Rivera (left). Nebaj. In the early eighties, the Ixil Community was one of the principal targets of a genocide operation, involving systematic rape, forced displacements and hunger during the Guatemalan civil war. According to a 1999 United Nations truth commission, between 70 and 90% of Ixil villages were razed and 60% of the population in the highland region were forced to flee to the mountains. By 1996, it was estimated that some 7,000 Maya Ixil had been killed. The violence was particularly heightened during the period 1979–1985 as successive Guatemalan administrations and the military pursued an indiscriminate scorched-earth. Non-fiction and non-posed picture. I took it while I followed the labor of forensic anthropologists.
By Sophie Bertrand
For the last ten years, the Zoom Photo Festival been a mid-autumn feature in Chicoutimi, in Quebec’s Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. La Pulperie de Chicoutimi, a national historic site and regular partner of the festival, serves as headquarters and hosts most of the exhibitions, with La Zone Portuaire, and other shows are scattered through Chicoutimi and Jonquière in spaces generously provided by colleges, cultural centres, and libraries. This year, no fewer than twenty-six photography exhibitions were presented: 1 eighteen solo shows and eight group shows, including those by the prestigious Agence VU (France), CECI (Centre d’étude et de coopération internationale, Canada), and the News Photographers Association of Canada, as well as collections of images by local photojournalists and from the celebrated World Press Photo, which, since 1955, has been giving international awards to outstanding images illustrating subjects related to contemporary issues in different categories. The WPP has presented works at every edition of Zoom. Although the winning prints were shown in a reduced format at the Saguenay festival, the show, which tours the world and is always supervised by a team from Amsterdam, was designed to offer an intimate environment with a stronger focus on the photographs than they received in the installation at Marché Bonsecours in Montreal in September.
Michel Tremblay, a press photographer born in the Saguenay region, founded this ambitious regional festival. Launching an international event far from a major city is a challenge in itself. Tremblay took it on because of his passion for documentary images, the stories that they tell, and the community of press photographers. Well before he created the festival, he and a small team of volunteers organized satellite projects around photography. From 2003 to 2006, in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean and Mauricie regions, he organized photographic missions for which he invited Quebec press photographers, including Jacques Nadeau, Marie-France Coallier, Normand Blouin, and Bernard Brault, to take on time-limited assignments to produce an exhibition or a publication, in collaboration with municipalities. Since then, the festival has become incontest-ably not only a showcase and meeting place for Quebec photog-raphers but also a springboard for young, emerging Quebec talents.
For the last ten years, the Zoom Photo Festival been a mid-autumn feature in Chicoutimi, in Quebec’s Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. La Pulperie de Chicoutimi, a national historic site and regular partner of the festival, serves as headquarters and hosts most of the exhibitions, with La Zone Portuaire, and other shows are scattered through Chicoutimi and Jonquière in spaces generously provided by colleges, cultural centres, and libraries. This year, no fewer than twenty-six photography exhibitions were presented: eighteen solo shows and eight group shows, including those by the prestigious Agence VU (France), CECI (Centre d’étude et de coopération internationale, Canada), and the News Photographers Association of Canada, as well as collections of images by local photojournalists and from the celebrated World Press Photo, which, since 1955, has been giving international awards to outstanding images illustrating subjects related to contemporary issues in different categories. The WPP has presented works at every edition of Zoom. Although the winning prints were shown in a reduced format at the Saguenay festival, the show, which tours the world and is always supervised by a team from Amsterdam, was designed to offer an intimate environment with a stronger focus on the photographs than they received in the installation at Marché Bonsecours in Montreal in September.
Michel Tremblay, a press photographer born in the Saguenay region, founded this ambitious regional festival. Launching an international event far from a major city is a challenge in itself. Tremblay took it on because of his passion for documentary images, the stories that they tell, and the community of press photographers. Well before he created the festival, he and a small team of volunteers organized satellite projects around photography. From 2003 to 2006, in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean and Mauricie regions, he organized photographic missions for which he invited Quebec press photographers, including Jacques Nadeau, Marie-France Coallier, Normand Blouin, and Bernard Brault, to take on time-limited assignments to produce an exhibition or a publication, in collaboration with municipalities. Since then, the festival has become incontestably not only a showcase and meeting place for Quebec photographers but also a springboard for young, emerging Quebec talents.
The program for the 2019 edition of Zoom broadened the focus to include documentary photography and different narrative lines in addition to classic press photography, on which earlier editions had concentrated. The themes covered addressed a series of current events that were, however, unsurprising: devastating climate change, human rights being trampled, Indigenous and migratory issues, and so on. Some subjects, such as British photographer Nigel Dickinson’s “shock” exhibition, Meat, pulled viewers into what has become the near future. Although most of Dickinson’s photographs were taken during the “mad cow disease” health crisis in the 2000s, that reality is still striking today. The frontal images of animal abuse encourage us to rethink our meat consumption.
To mark this anniversary, Tremblay featured some “guests of honour.” Leading the must-see exhibitions were those by two women, from two generations of photojournalists, both festival regulars. Produced in different countries affected by the dengue virus, Dengue, Epidemic Territories, by Quebec-born photographer Adrienne Surprenant (now based in Cameroon), is a photographic investigation of the consequences of the mosquito-borne disease and its spread, exacerbated by urban development and global warming. The subject doesn’t garner much media attention, and this project was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, a British foundation that specializes in medical research. Another guest from across the Atlantic who was very familiar to festival-goers was French-Spanish photographer Catalina Martin-Chico, whose project Colombia. Rebirth – which received a World Press Photo and other awards – was shown this year. This powerful work explores the life of FARC women soldiers after the 2016 peace accord, when a fifty-year ban on guerilleras becoming pregnant was lifted and many of them decided to have children.
The exhibition Falconry and the Arab Influence was another example of the uniqueness of certain programming choices. This work by South African photographer Brent Stirton, a regular contributor to National Geographic Magazine and the international press, offers a stylized gaze at falcon breeding from Scotland to the United Arab Emirates, where it is an important cultural symbol.
A number of documentary series by Canadian photographers, also on the program for this anniversary edition, offered an overview of certain problematic issues in Canada. Chris Donovan, Laurence Butet-Roch, Cody Punter, and Pat Kane highlighted inequalities and land exploitation faced by different First Nations communities in Ontario, Inuit communities, and communities in the Northwest Territories. In an extension of the Zoom Photo Festival, Kane, a member of the Timiskaming First Nation who is based in Yellowknife, recently launched the first edition of the Far North Photo Festival, creating a space for the community of Northern Canadian photographers by exhibiting documentary projects produced in that region.
This edition of Zoom also addresses areas in Latin America from different angles: migrants from Honduras photographed against a white background (Brett Gundlock, Stories from the Migrant Trail); the lithium revolution, as the element becomes an economic and ecological game-changer (Matjaz Krivic, Lithium: The Driving Force of the 21st Century); and the story of a Guatemalan population, the Maya Ixil, victims of state repression during the 1980s and of a genocide that killed almost seven thousand of them (Daniele Volpe, Ixil Genocide).
Zoom offers a showcase for the work of a new generation of documentary photographers. Two of them, Adil Boukind and Chemi Dorje Lama, have turned their lenses on Asia: Boukind explores Kalaripayattu, an Indian martial art, and its genesis; Lama documents the exodus of Chinese farmers from drought-ravaged, infertile land. There is also a space for projects by photography school graduates, including Kassandra Reynolds’s portrait of a Gaspé village imperilled during the 1970s and Andrej Ivanov’s intimate work on the daily life of a boy suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a progressive neuromuscular disease.
In future editions, the Zoom team plans not only to continue showing work by these new storytellers, but also to broaden the mission by offering training in documentary photography. This year, in fact, education is emphasized through the Start Up program for college students registered in photography programs in different Quebec schools. For Martin Tremblay, photojournalist at the La Presse newspaper and new co-director of the festival, the educational aspect is a response to the lack of training that he observed early in his career in Quebec in the 1990s. Ideally, Zoom’s directors would like to deploy a team to develop a year-round educational program and to tour the festival’s exhibitions to other regions of Quebec in order to spread the word about documentary photography.
Zoom should be congratulated for promoting a range of new writings on the documentary image to audiences that may not be familiar with the medium. The local photography community has always participated, from near or far, in the evolution of the festival, but new members have also joined the organization over the years: Laurence Butet-Roch (photographer and independent journalist), exhibition co-programmer; Valérian Mazataud (independent photographer and regular contributor to Le Devoir), head of development of conferences and workshops; and Fréderic Séguin (independent photographer), head of the education program – to name just a few.
Without renouncing the press-photography origins of Zoom, Michel Tremblay and his team intend to gradually change the mission of the festival by shifting away from “news” and the press canons of documentary photography. Aside from the sometimes uneven quality of the work shown, the festival tends to closely follow transformations in the photojournalism trade and bring all of its forms into view. Even though in this tenth edition, the classically hung shows were unsurprising, Zoom is planning, within the next few years, to open different storytelling options by including virtual reality, multimedia, installation, and other formats in its exhibitions, “as long as these approaches serve the intention.” For instance, outdoor installations could reach a new audience intimidated by the galleries and bring documentary photography into the public space. In fact, the festival took to the streets of Chicoutimi in previous years with the collective Dysturb (Paris, New York), whose mission is to make information accessible through wild posting.
Long categorized as the VISA pour l’image (Perpignan, France) of Quebec, Zoom Photo Festival Saguenay is now trying to distance itself from its model and mentor and preparing to take steps toward following the evolution of documentary photography practices while maintaining its emphasis on the press image. Translated by Käthe Roth