At the end of the final weekend of the Ballarat
International Foto Biennale Festival Director Jeff Moorfoot told Robert Keeley
visitor numbers were up substantially.
Ballarat International Foto Biennale Director Jeff
Moorfoot has declared the second staging of the photography festival in the
historic Victorian regional gold-mining city a success. The second BIFB
finished on the weekend. Although final figures on visitor numbers to the 21
core exhibits were still being calculated, BIFB’s Jeff Moorfoot said he was "pretty happy" with the overall result, and that visitor numbers were around 40
percent higher than the previous event.
As well as the key 21 local and
international exhibitors, the festival showed over 80 fringe presentations,
which included some by previous core program exhibitors. The exhibitions
included a wide range of photography styles, from high-end digital art right
through to hard-edged photojournalism.
The month-long festival faced two significant
controversies, with highly regarded Czech photographer Jan Saudek having one of
his images, Black Sheep & White Crow, withdrawn before the program launch
following a complaint to Victoria’s Child Safety Commissioner about it. The
image featured a woman with a young, partly clad girl, and it was arguable that
it was in fact one of the milder images displayed by the Czech, who has faced
censorship dilemmas before.
Toward the end of the event, the images of MAP
(Many Australian Photographers) Group shooter Meredith O’Shea, who photographed
the Ballarat neighhourhood of Wendouree West, drew the ire of some locals
(though notably not that of her subjects) for the presentation of people in
their suburb. The images accompanied a story about the area in Melbourne’s
Sunday Age newspaper, but Moorfoot defended the images, which he suggested were
in a similar genre to the work of well-known US photojournalist Mary Ellen
Mark.
On the running of the event, which Moorfoot said is now
the major photographic festival in the southern hemisphere, he commented, "There’s plenty of room to improve, especially in the area of presentation, but
we have always had a strong program."
Moorfoot said the ability to re-use stand
and promotional material had helped maintain costs, and organisers had been
assisted by both local and Melbourne based volunteers in running the many
exhibition sites. The next BIFB is scheduled for 2013. For a detailed wrap-up on the festival see Australian Photography's November issue.