By SU MYAT MON | FRONTIER
YANGON — The organisers of this year’s Yangon Photo Festival have announced that this year’s instalment will include exhibitions in the heart of Yangon downtown for the first time.
Mr Christophe Loviny, director of the festival, said on Tuesday that a selection of the event’s best photographs will be put on display in Mahabandoola Park in downtown Yangon on March 4 and 5.
The exhibition will also include three exhibitions celebrating Myanmar’s diversity, including “Frontiers Photographs (1918-1935)” by James Henry Green, a series of photographs by Bellay Studio taken in 1979 and a series of portraits from the 1990s, taken by Günter Pfannmüller and Wilhelm Klein.
The World Press Photo Exhibition will also take place at Mahabandoola Park and will include screenings from celebrated photographers Steve McCurry and Hans Silvester.
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The Yangon Photo Festival, which is in its ninth year, was founded in the aftermath of the 2007 anti-government uprising known as the Saffron Revolution, which saw protestors using cameras to document what was happening, said Loviny.
“But they had no training, so we realised that we needed to train them to give them a more powerful voice from the pictures they take,” he said.
He added that the main aim of the training is to document important issues such as child labour, human trafficking and deforestation.
“Photo stories are one of the most important tools for the future and can be shared with whole communities,” he said.
About 80 professional photographers will take part in the festival, both from Myanmar and abroad.
The festival will end on March 11 at the French Institute with its Photo Night and the opening of Dominique Nahr’s exhibition “South Sudan: Fractured State.”
After the event, many of the photographs will be taken to be toured around the country.
