Yangon Photo Festival is taking place at The Secretariat, Mahar Bandoola Park, and the River Gallery until March 4.
The French Institute held their 10th anniversary party on February 16 with the opening of three major exhibitions by photojournalists Paula Bronstein, Adam Dean, and Alessandro Penso, and the festival will end on February 24 with the Photo Night Awards.
Placing the Canon professional cameras and a trip to the World Press Photo Awards ceremony in Amsterdam as the winning prizes, Myanmar photographers will compete in front of a jury composed of international personalities just like every year.
Yangon Photo Festival saw a potential in media revolution despite the absence of press freedom about 11 years ago. Organizers sensed that the developing accesses to the Internet and the proliferation of digital tools signaled the start of a media revolution based on visual storytelling.
Since then, they started training photographers interested in using the power of images to change and educate their society. Their short documentaries are then published every week via Yangon Photo Festival’s Facebook magazine: Myanmar Stories.
Although having had only a few hundred attendees during the first Yangon Photo Festival in 2009, the audience grew during these years and last year about 100,000 people throughout Yangon enjoyed free admission to the exhibitions and screenings by 80 local and international photographers.
This year, an exhibition supported by the Goethe Institut and curated by Lukas Birk will present the history of Myanmar photographers at The Secretariat. They inaugurated the festival with two nights of screenings by YPF laureates at Maha Bandoola Park, together with the World Press Photo Awards exhibition, portraits of celebrities from the 80’s by U Sann Aung, “Swedish Dads”, series by Johan Bävman, and work about Myanmar by international artists like Garcia de Marina, Marylise Vigneau, Aun Raza et Beatrice Minda at the River Gallery.
