Photomed Photography Festival From 28th May To 19th June

The 1st Mediterranean Photography Festival takes place in Sanary-sur-Mer from the 27th of May to the 19th of June 2011. Here’s the introduction from guest of Honor Martin Parr:

Martin PARR présente le festival Photomed from FALCUCCI françois on Vimeo.

A couple of highlights from the festival from the website introduction:

‘Thus, to open the festival with photography from Turkey, as a continuation of the year of Turkey in France, was an obvious choice. As curated by Laurence Cornet, two exhibitions illustrate these themes. The first exhibition, called “In the Steps of Michel Pasha”, collects, in a fertile dialogue the old photographs from the collection of Pierre de Gigord and the recent work of Ali Taptik. The other one points us in the direction of a few, young Turkish photographers who haven’t yet been discovered. Then there is the celebrated photographer, Ara Guler – the so-called “eye of Istanbul” – who composed, just as Bruno Barbey did, a hymn to the city on seven hills. But Sanary is also, thanks to Jacques Cousteau, a pioneering center for diving, and was the setting for the first film shot under the sea called “Par 18 mètres de fond”. It’s with a sly wink, through the work of Philippe Ramette and his work “Rational exploration of the Undersea”, that this diving adventure is evoked. The exhibition from Nicolas Henry, will also establish Sanary on the Mediterranean photography scene.

On the other hand, in the works of Anna Cabrera and Angel Albarran, Barcelona is not a Mediterranean city. Because of the rampant development undertaken to accommodate widespread tourism, people from Barcelona feel more and more depossessed of their city. Mass tourism is the subject of ridicule through the caustic humor of Martin Parr, the guest of honor for the festival, who aims his critical eye on the practices and rituals of our civilization of leisure. His photographs, shot in 2006 and 2007 in Benidorm, the main center for tourism on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, will be one of the highlights of the festival. As a counterpoint, Claude Nori offers us a more romantic, even sentimental vision of the Italian beaches, and invites us on a new journey to Stromboli of his “Voyage Amoureux” a work that was published in 1990 as a homage to Roberto Rossellini. Reinterpreting or discovering for the first time the photography of some emerging countries, such as Albania, Slovenia, and Montenegro, lends more wealth to the program.

More information on the program on the website