23rd Photo Festival La Gacilly

Two hundred years ago, photography was born in France.

In 2026, the La Gacilly Photo Festival is part of a quite particular year: that of the bicentenary of photography. Two hundred years have passed since the first images by Nicéphore Niépce, and yet photography has never been so present in our lives.

Certainly, we are living today in a time when the image has literally invaded our daily life, with all the excesses that new technologies or artificial intelligence can cause. Every individual equipped with a smartphone has become a photographer and more than 2,100 billion photographs were taken worldwide in 2025. Around 14 billion snapshots are shared every day on social networks, including 6.9 billion via WhatsApp, 3.8 billion via Snapchat and 1.3 billion on Instagram. But there is a deep gap between these snapshots that we take through our impulses and the works that you can discover every year in the alleys, in the gardens, on the walls of our village in Morbihan. Because these are the result of a creation, a reflection, an artistic or documentary look, an emotional vision of our world.

Cyril Drouhet, Curator of the exhibitions at the La Gacilly Photo Festival

1826-2026: Photography, a French adventure

The art of portraiture
Nadar/ The art of portraiture
Jean-Marie Périer / My pop years
Pierre & Gilles / In the heart

The memory of the world
Jane Evelyn Atwood / Visions de France
Raymond Depardon/ A world full of colors
Pierre Le Gall / Human, very human
Willy Ronis / Paris takes on colors
Sebastião Salgado / Hunter of light

To the glory of the living
Lys Arango / In Guatemala, one day the fields will bloom again
Julie Bourges/ Tales of the small sea and the large land
Claudine Doury / Solstice
Eric Garault/ The guardians of life
Sophie Hatier / Far from the gardens
Vincent Munier / The song of the forests
Ingmar Björn Nolting / Climate paradoxes
Serge Sibert / A rural chronicle

The image in all its states
Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat / Photographic illusions
Jérôme Gence/ Beyond the real, virtual worlds
Lee Shulman/ Horizons