The festival extends over 7 kilometers, divided into a garden route and a city route, starting from the visitor center at Brusattiplatz. This year, around 1,500 photographs can be seen in public spaces, some of which are up to 200m² in size. It is the largest outdoor photography festival in Europe. In 2024, 320,491 visitors attended the La Gacilly-Baden Photo festival. Admission is free.
The La Gacilly-Baden Photo Festival will take place from 13 June to 12 October 2025.
Festival impressions from Baden bei Wien in Austria
The Future
The 2018 Festival was the start of an exclusive cooperation of La Gacilly and Baden. The photo festival will now be held every summer, first in La Gacilly and in the following year in Baden. What you see in Baden in 2025 was shown in France in 2024 and will continue in this sequence. This opens up an opportunity to admire the world’s best photographers, first in the west of our continent and then in the heart of Europe.
JACQUES ROCHER, ©Patrick Wallet
The Beginning
Once upon a time a capable young man in Brittany began to build up a small, exquisite cosmetics business. Yves Rocher succeeded in creating a global brand with his organic products and his intelligent distribution system. The company is still based near the village of La Gacilly. Jacques Rocher, one of Yves’ sons and long-term mayor of his birthplace, had a wonderful idea. In 2004 Jacques initiated a photo festival in La Gacilly dedicated to the theme of Man and the Environment. With a firm conviction that it boosts understanding if you break down global problems to the level of the village and the family. He began by providing an opportunity for people to engage with the future of the Earth and of humanity in a comprehensible manner. To this end he harnesses the possibilities of photography, the most powerful, topical, contemporary and expressive art form of the last one hundred years. And he caught the spirit of our times.
Lois Lammerhuber © Francis Giacobetti
The Connection
Contacts between Baden and La Gacilly evolved from a friendship between Jacques Rocher and Lois Lammerhuber, a major contemporary Austrian photographer. Lammerhuber has created well over 1000 photo reports, about 250 of them for GEO magazine. Add to that 79 books and hundreds of magazine covers. In 2009, jointly with his wife Silvia Lammerhuber, he founded publishing house Edition Lammerhuber, which has since received more than 200 awards and was voted best European photo book publisher in 2013, 2015 and 2017. Lammerhuber has been a member of the Art Directors Club New York since 1994. In 2014 he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class, followed in 2017 by the Golden Medal of Honour for Services to the City of Vienna and the Grand Medal of Honour for Services to the Province of Lower Austria.
Festival impressions from La Gacilly in France
