Le Festival photo du Guilvinec 2026
Alice Bouju
La mer en partage – Le Festival photo du Guilvinec on the Breton coast
The 2026 edition of Le Festival photo du Guilvinec. Titled this year as La mer en partage returns from May 29 to September 30, transforming the harbours of Le Guilvinec and Treffiagat-Léchiagat into an open-air exhibition space. Spread across a five-kilometre coastal path, photographs will be freely accessible to the public. Le Festival photo du Guilvinec continues its long-standing commitment to making maritime culture visible, shared, and experienced in public space. As a result, the event attracts around 70,000 visitors each year. Thus, it confirms its status as a major photographic and cultural event on the Breton coast.
Founded in 2013, the festival has grown into a key platform dedicated to the sea as both a territory and a collective experience. For this 16th edition, the title “La mer en partage” (“The sea as a shared space”) extends this vision further. It places emphasis on the ocean as a common heritage shaped by environmental, social, and human tensions.
A collective portrait
This years’s festival brings together seventeen photographers from France and abroad. They present around 300 photographs displayed across the harbours. Documentary photographers, photojournalists, and visual artists all converge around a shared theme: the sea as lived experience, memory, and territory. Their work not only moves between testimony and poetry but also captures realities that inform, question, and displace our gaze.
Mapping the world through the sea at Le Festival photo du Guilvinec
Across the exhibition, the sea appears as a shared but increasingly fragile space, traced through the lived realities of those who depend on it.
In the work of Pierre de Vallombreuse, long-term encounters with Indigenous communities reveal maritime worlds under pressure. This is most strikingly seen through his images of the Badjao sea nomads of Southeast Asia, whose way of life is slowly eroding under ecological collapse and forced sedentarisation.
This sense of a vanishing balance echoes in the anthropological perspective of Philippe Geslin, based in Le Guilvinec. He turns to Inuit communities in Greenland to document a deep-rooted relationship with the sea. Survival, spirituality, and knowledge systems remain tightly intertwined there. Yet, these bonds are increasingly vulnerable.
Further south, Jérémie Labbé‘s photography shifts the focus to the Bosphorus, where industrial fishing and urban demand reshape the maritime landscape. His images capture a territory where tradition and modern exploitation coexist uneasily, exposing the ecological tensions embedded in everyday practices.
Together, these perspectives form a continuous narrative rather than separate approaches. They come from different geographies, but share a question of how the sea is lived, used, and transformed.
Now, let IRK take you through its selection of standout favourites from this edition.
Axelle de Russé: fragile geographies of climate change
Among our editorial highlights of this year’s Festival photo du Guilvinec is French photographer Axelle de Russé, whose long-term documentary practice explores the world’s environmental frontiers. She is the winner of the Canon Female Photojournalist Award in 2007. Over time, she has developed a body of work spanning China, France, and extreme polar regions.
Her ongoing research between the Svalbard archipelago and Patagonia investigates firstly, the visible and invisible effects of climate change in some of the planet’s most vulnerable territories. Using techniques such as infrared photography, she reveals shifts in temperature and perception that remain imperceptible to the human eye. Rather than framing crisis in purely dramatic terms, her work insists on the coexistence of fragility and beauty. Indeed, it offers a subtle and intimate reading of environmental transformation.
Éric Laforgue: suspended moments at sea
Another favourite is photographer Éric Laforgue, a self-taught artist based in Ivry-sur-Seine, whose cinematic approach captures the poetry of everyday life. He is influenced by photographers such as Saul Leiter and Lucien Hervé. Therefore, he constructs visual narratives shaped by light, silence, and fleeting gestures.
His series Traversée focuses on ferry crossings as suspended in-between moments. Onboard, passengers leave behind familiar spaces to enter a drifting, liminal environment where time slows down. Through subtle compositions of reflections, light, and isolated figures, Laforgue transforms these ordinary journeys into quiet emotional landscapes, where movement becomes introspection.
A shared sea, many perspectives at Festival photo du Guilvinec
Together, these artists compose a fragmented yet cohesive vision of the sea today: a space of work and memory, exploitation and spirituality, transition and disappearance. From Indigenous knowledge systems to industrial coastlines, from Arctic landscapes to ferry decks, the Festival La mer en partage offers a polyphonic portrait of the ocean. Overall, this portrait is at once intimate, political, and deeply human.
Festival Website
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Alice is a Paris based photograper with a passion for fashion. Based in Paris, she develops an approach that brings together photography and writing, often mixing the two within her projects.
Her work is deeply rooted in reality. She is particularly drawn to documentary practices, using images and text as complementary tools to observe, question, and reinterpret the world around her. Whether through visual series or written pieces, she seeks to capture / she captures fragments of the everyday and give them a new narrative dimension.
She has developed a strong interest in research and editorial work. Writing articles, exploring contexts, and building stories from real-life subjects naturally extend her creative process. This intersection between documentation and storytelling reflects a field she has long been eager to explore.
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