In Brittany, 300 Images and the West Wind — Blind Journal

It has to begin there. With what doesn’t cling on the partitions. The pageant La mer en partage runs on a finances of 70,000 euros and nearly nothing however public cash: from the city’s, the Finistère division’s and the Brittany area’s. No headline patron, no model wedged between two pictures. Seventy members and volunteers, lots of them retired, who cling the prints, take them down, lead the excursions, put up the company. René-Claude Daniel, the pageant’s president, places it plainly: “There are more than seventy thousand visitors every year. We know festivals better funded that show less.”

The line-up, in the meantime, is something however beginner. Pierre de Vallombreuse, a member of the French Society of Explorers, has proven on the Rencontres d’Arles, at Visa pour l’Image, on the Musée de l’Homme. Marc Chaumeil, whose work on the 1995 presidential election entered the gathering of the Frac Île-de-France. Manon Lanjouère, held within the collections of the BNF, the CNAP, the New York Public Library. Axelle de Russé, winner of the Canon Female Photojournalist Award. All of them collect for 4 months on quays battered by the west wind. That is the small Bigouden miracle.

This 12 months’s theme is sharing. Of sources, of routes, of data. And to begin with, the oldest sharing of all of them: between males and fish. Jérémie Labbé captured it within the Bosphorus strait, the place seine fishermen — bolincheurs, as they’d say within the Bigouden nation — forged 1,500-meter nets to feed a megacity of 16 million inhabitants. Labbé got here to images late. “I became a photographer two years ago, after twenty years in humanitarian work,” he says. He left the Red Cross, the damage of the battle zones, to “turn toward lighter things, but still with people at the heart.” For a 12 months and a half he has adopted the fishermen of a village on the northern Bosphorus, who cross down their fishing rights “from generation to generation, for five or six generations, since the Ottoman Empire.” His conclusion is something however gentle: “It’s a hard trade, it doesn’t pay well. Fish stocks are falling. It’s a struggle.”

The similar unease runs, on the different finish of Europe, by the photographs of Gaëlle de Trescadec. Ten years of immersion, from 2014 to 2024, between the Chaussée and the Raz de Sein, among the many line fishermen. Her collection “La ligne du vivant” (The Line of the Living) follows particular person paths: the era of the Jean-Marcs, the Denises, the Oliviers handing their data right down to youthful arms — Anatole, Victor. The commerce modifications, however the chain holds. The sea, because the artist places it, stays “a space of freedom, of work, of transmission and of future.”

To transmit, sure. But additionally to rescue. Thibaut Vergoz boarded the Juan de la Cosa within the Bay of Biscay, a 75-metre Spanish hospital ship that sails 290 days a 12 months tending to a thousand boats and 10,000 fishermen. “Care is given without any distinction whatsoever,” the photographer says. Further north nonetheless, Philippe Geslin — an ethnologist, and a Guilvinec resident — shares a season with an Inuit group in north-western Greenland, past Melville Bay. Here, individuals take solely what they want. “For every catch taken, they thank Sedna, the goddess of the sea,” he notes. For him, sharing shouldn’t be solely human: it extends to the spirits, to the souls of the ancestors. “This sharing was built over millennia. Its balance is more fragile than ever.”

Fragile, all of them are. Pierre de Vallombreuse has spent his life amongst Indigenous peoples; he photographed the final Bajau, sea nomads of the Sulu and Celebes seas, now stateless, decimated by the salinisation of the waters and by industrial fishing. “Their culture, in decline, could disappear.” Isabelle Serro, for her half, paperwork in Panama the odyssey of the Guna, a string of 375 islands that the rising sea condemns. “Exile begins before departure: it is already written into the landscape,” she says.

What stays is to call what threatens. Marc Chaumeil photographed, in black and white, the ghosts on the seashores of Lima, after the oil spill of January 2022 — 12,000 barrels of crude, 140 kilometres of fouled shoreline. Manon Lanjouère, in the meantime, chooses metaphor: aboard the schooner Tara, she invented cyanotypes from plastic waste, a true-false scientific classification by which “everything looks like life, but is only a soulless, inert object.” The cotton-bud blooms are magical.

Amid these reckonings, Axelle de Russé holds a singular course. In Svalbard, 1,000 kilometres from the pole, she diverted infrared to make warming seen: the most well liked factors flip magenta. Beauty, for her, excuses nothing — it sounds the alarm in a different way. “This project is not a plea, but a declaration of love.”

Let us finish with one picture: the pageant poster, by Éric Laforgue. Magnificent. A ferry passenger, seen from behind, earlier than a horizon framed by a gangway door. His collection “Traversée” (Crossing) captures that suspended second “when you no longer quite know whether you are leaving or coming back.” On the quays of Le Guilvinec, admission is free. And the wind, freed from cost.

The images pageant La mer en partage might be seen freed from cost and open-air by September 30, 2026 in Le Guilvinec, Brittany (France).