This year, Chicoutimi (a borough on the western end of the Saguenay Fjord, just a few hours’ drive north of Quebec City) hosted the 10th edition of the Zoom Photo Festival, the largest photojournalism festival in Canada. Sports photographer Michel Tremblay came up with this idea after falling in love with Perpignan, a little town in southern France which, every single summer, gets invaded by all kinds of photographers and photo editors: “When we created Zoom, we actually took inspiration from the French festival in Perpignan. This year, another festival took place in Yellowknife, and this time founders took inspiration from us: in 10 years we have become a point of reference, even though we started from scratch. We want to offer something different and accessible to everyone”.
This year Zoom Photo Festival presents 23 exhibitions all over Saguenay, including, as always, La Pulperie di Chicoutimi – hosting the World Press Photo exhibition – and the hangar in the port area. The festival lasts until November 10th and offers many activities: seminars, lessons and training courses. Among the subjects covered, is the environment, the problem of violence against women, and the issues affecting indigenous peoples – a very heart-felt topic here, since the United Nations proclaimed 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. Many of Zoom’s photographers focus on the dramatic realities of the Far North and Native Americans.
For example, Laurence Butet-Roch, a photographer from Montreal, documented Ontario’s densest concentration of petrochemical plants; Chris Donovan photographed the residents of the Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario; Pat Kane is a member himself of the Timiskaming First Nation in northern Quebec; Cody Punter from Toronto, who’s been working for many newspapers in Nunavut for the past three years, hopes to give a different vision of the Inuit territory.
Slovenian photographer Matjaz Krivic stood out for his powerful and hypnotic reportage on lithium, which led him to Bolivian mines and Chinese battery factories; the eccentric English photographer Nigel Dickinson focused on the global consequences of industrial meat processing, while Daniele Volpe from Italy shed light on the tragic genocide of the Ixil community in the early 1980s, during the Guatemalan Civil War; Franco-Spanish photographer Catalina Martin-Chico won the World Press Photo context for showing us how it is to raise a child in the middle of the Colombian jungle; And again, Nicolò Filippo Rosso and Antonio Faccilongo have been capturing for years poetic and powerful fragments of life in Colombia and Palestine.
- Event:
- Zoom Photo Festival
- Location:
- Chicoutimi, Canada
- Opening dates:
- October 16-November 10 2019
- Winners:
- Antonio Faccilongo, Daniele Volpe and Nicolò Filipporosso