Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography 2024

The Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography organizes the only annual festival of photography in Switzerland. Every year in May works of about 20 national and international photographers are exposed in the city of Biel.

Overview

The Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography has been celebrating contemporary photography for more than 25 years. As the only annual festival of new photography in Switzerland, it has been able to position itself on the national cultural scene, while also building its international presence and networks. Each year during the month of May, venues both familiar and new in the city of Biel/Bienne are taken over by works and projects by some twenty Swiss and international photographers, which can be experienced in the form of a photographic walking tour. As well, thanks to their many partners, the exhibitions are complemented by a rich programme of events, including professional meetings, guided tours, talks and performances. Held in a bilingual city in the centre of Switzerland, the festival also develops each year projects that go out across Switzerland and abroad.

In an era when images are more and more mobile, immersive, multiplied and fragmented and the gaze is determined by screens and online platforms, the 27th edition of the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography examines the banal and the familiar as a form of resistance to the proliferation of sensationalist images that constantly impose themselves in our lives. The festival presents a generation of emerging photographers who subtly shed light on phenomena affecting and even transforming our environment and our daily life. Phenomena that we can miss now that so many demands are made on our gaze that it is almost blinded.

An image of something banal runs counter to the sensational. It encourages us to observe what we perceive as normal and ordinary. A photograph of the banal may be grounded in our daily life and tied to a world that seems recognizable, comprehensible and rational, yet it also invites doubt. It invites us to think about reality through its frame. Against “loud” images that impose themselves by their immediacy and emotional power, the photos exhibited this year are constructed in a slowed down way. And there is in them a kind of delicacy of subject and meaning. Discreetly and poetically, they reveal a world in continuous transition. In a society in which the paradigm of contemporary vision is the digital screen, this year’s edition aims to lead our gaze to take a second look at the world around us and to listen to what it whispers.