Clemens Kneringer
336,288 visitors | 57 artist talks, workshops and portfolio reviews | 81 art education tours | €8.4 million in economic value added | 728 reports on TV, radio, print media and social media
AUSTRALIA & NEW WORLD
On Sunday, 12 October 2025, at midnight, the eighth edition of the La Gacilly-Baden Photo 2025 festival came to an end. The visual narratives of the world’s best photographers once again brought the festival a record number of visitors: 336,288 visitors enjoyed photographic art and garden art in the World Heritage city of Baden near Vienna. This makes the festival not only the largest Franco-Austrian cultural event, but also, in cooperation with exhibition partners La Gacilly in Brittany, the Tulln Garden and the Month of Photography in Bratislava, by far the largest photo exhibition in Europe: 1,576 photographs were on display in 38 exhibitions.
‘With the photo festival, Baden has created a unique selling point for itself: as the leading medium of our time, top-class photography inspires both the local population and many tourists who visit the region and its extensive cultural offerings beyond the festival. Thank you for this initiative,’ says Provincial Governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner.
Since its inception, the Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo has been committed to placing nature, which gives us life, at the centre of its exhibitions. In this way, the festival represents people’s desire for peace. This theme has shaped the festival into an event whose social relevance is unique in bringing together artistic photography and photojournalism.
„For four months, the festival has shaped our city and presented Baden as an inspiring stage for international photographic art. This festival breathes even more life into our city, brings people together and is an inexhaustible source of inspiration. The successful 2025 season underlines that Baden has established itself as a centre for contemporary photography that inspires people far beyond Baden’s borders,“ says Carmen Jeitler-Cincelli, Mayor of the City of Baden, summarising her impressions.
WHAT OTHERS SAY
‘I am delighted that these wonderful exhibitions, which I visit several times a year, are back again,’ adds city chaplain Clemens Abrahamowicz.
And Gero Anger, solicitor and artist, says: ‘It’s just wonderful to have something so magnificent in your own hometown.’
‘We particularly liked the focus on ME/CFS. The photo concert was also a highlight, of course. It’s great for our city,’ Astrid and Manfred Matzinger-Leopold, Board of Directors, Austrian Mint.
„We have been enthusiastic fans of the exhibition for many years and invite friends to visit the festival with us every year. The impact of the festival on Baden is priceless… inspiring, moving – and above all hopeful. A strong sign that art and culture continue to make essential contributions to shaping a humane and sustainable future,“ Udo Lackner, LKNR advertising agency.
Hubert Hochwarter, artist: ‘Great photos with many opportunities to marvel and reflect!’
Hannah Miriam Lessing, Secretary General of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria: ‘Summer must – Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo.’
Peter Filzmaier, Political scientist: ‘I’m at the fantastic (open-air) exhibition in Baden. There are 31 great stations covering everything from the South Seas to the 1950s along a seven-kilometre city and park trail.’
Renate Danler, Club Tirol: ‘Hats off! This is where Baden’s image is being creatively and innovatively enhanced!’
Martin Traxl, ORF Culture: ‘This is a tremendous movement that has been set in motion in Baden. I am delighted about your success!’
Nathalie Iwanowytsch, Parliamentary Administration: Thanks to the festival, the whole world comes together in Baden!
Freddy Langer, FAZ, Frankfurt: ‘The days at the festival in Baden were simply wonderful.’
Ben Lorenz, Imaging Media House, Berlin: ‘Some days remind us why we love photography so much – and my visit to the Baden Photo Festival 2025 was just such a day. Hosts Silvia and Lois have created a festival that touches and inspires with great heart and curatorial sensitivity.’
Heiner Henninges, Freelance Press Redaktionsbüro, München: These exhibitions are eye-opening, inspiring and thought-provoking experiences.
Katharina Niu, Stern, Hamburg: ‘What a celebration the opening weekend was again – full of inspiring conversations, impressive photographic works and warm encounters! It is truly a special gift that you give to the international photography community year after year. Nowhere else is the organisation so perfect, the exchange so open and the proximity to the photographers so palpable.’
Christoph Künne, Cultural scientist and founder of Docma, Lüneburg: Under the theme ‘Australia & The New World,’ the spa town of Baden near Vienna is once again transforming itself into a sprawling gallery for excellent photographic art. For professional image creators and those who are intensively engaged with the nuances of photography and digital image enhancement, the festival promises not only a wealth of visual inspiration, but also profound insights into contemporary photographic discourse and its social relevance.“
Milica Mrvic, Fotografin, Belgrad: “I am still under the impression of the Paradise feeling of the setting and the impact in that surrounding. Keep up the great.”
Gianmarco Maraviglia, Washington Post, CNN, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Mailand: “It was one of the most inspiring photographic experiences I’ve ever had. The quality of the exhibitions was outstanding, as was the hospitality and the opportunity to engage with so many top-level international professionals. Thank you! It will definitely become a regular yearly event for me.”
THE ARTISTS
‘All these comments naturally warm my heart and at the same time place a considerable responsibility on us,’ says festival director Lois Lammerhuber, commenting on the magnitude of the task at hand. ‘We have tried to use photo documentation to provide, if not solutions, then at least food for thought on the fundamental issues of biodiversity, natural resources, environmental pollution and global warming. In our eighth festival year, we have clearly succeeded in doing so with the works of outstanding artists.’
From Australia, we featured Matthew Abbot, Narelle Autio, Tamara Dean, Adam Ferguson, Bobby Lockyer, Trent Parke, Anne Zahalka, Viviane Dalles and Agence France-Presse. In the New World, we encountered the work of Louise Johns and Joel Meyerowitz in the USA, which we contrasted with the perspectives of Austrian photographer Alfred Seiland. Mitch Dobrowner’s photographs are testimonies to the apocalypse of extreme weather phenomena. With his magnum opus ‘Feed The Planet’, George Steinmetz answers the question of whether the world will be able to feed 10 billion people. We also contrasted his work with ‘Aufgegessen!’ (Eaten Up!) by Dieter Bornemann, an Austrian work. It aims to raise awareness of the major issue of food waste. Alessandro Cinque presented his long-term work on the consequences of mining in the Andean countries. And with Ulla Lohmann, we travelled to volcanic peoples in Papua New Guinea. Gaël Turine took us to the sacred forests of Benin, where voodoo gods are considered the true guardians of biodiversity.
Alice Pallot addressed the problem of green algae blooms on the Atlantic coast, Sophie Zenon invited us on a journey of discovery through the Breton heath, and Bernard Plossu showed large-format Fresson prints that lend his landscapes an unreal appearance.
The bilateral photography project ‘The Spirit of Sport’ challenged schools in Morbihan and Lower Austria to use photography to question whether the Olympic motto ‘Faster, higher, stronger’ still applies in our time.
Brent Stirton has a talent for making the almost invisible visible and bringing the hidden suffering of the approximately 80,000 ME/CFS patients in Austria into the public eye.
For his work ‘An Tagen wie diesen’ (On Days Like These), Hans-Jürgen Burkard embarked on a musical and photographic journey that resulted in an enchanting image of Germany.
‘Photography undoubtedly remains the most powerful tool for changing public opinion and preserving rays of hope for humanity,’ says Christian Schörg, guild master of the Lower Austrian Photographers‘ Guild. The exhibition by professional photographers from Lower Austria and the exhibition of the world’s largest photo competition, CEWE’s ‘Our World is Beautiful’, with 656,738 photos submitted from 153 countries, also follow this tradition. They rounded off the festival, as did the retrospective of 2024 in the pictures of artist in residence Reiner Riedler.
The UNESCO Global Water Summit 2025 was dedicated to the underwater photographs of Herbert Frei, known as the ‘freshwater pope’. Together with him and Harald Hordosch, founder and mastermind of SEACAM, a manufacturer of excellent underwater housings, three-day courses in underwater photography were held at the Baden lido for secondary school pupils in Baden.
BEYOND THAT
With the four-week special exhibition ‘Code of the Universe’, the festival reflected on the feasibility of humanity’s largest research project at CERN in Geneva – the planned Future Circular Collider.
There were also two additional special exhibitions. One was dedicated to Austria’s forests and was entitled ‘100 Years of Federal Forests: The Forest is the Greatest Artist’ as a tribute to the biodiversity of the forest – conceived by Pia Scharler and Greg Dillon. The other celebrated the history of railways: ‘Railways through the ages’, an exhibition developed in collaboration with Austrian Federal Railways.
Under the guiding principle of Culture of Solidarity, the collaboration with festival partners Garten Tulln – where Gerald Mansberger and Markus Eisl’s ‘The Human Footprint’ was shown – and the Month of Photography Bratislava continued in 2025. New this year was the festival’s appearance in Budapest, where the Global Peace Photo Award was exhibited for three weeks starting on 21 September 2025.
‘Our festival inspires visitors to look, think and perhaps even act. We see photography as a responsibility. The power of images and their stories opens up spaces for dialogue on ecological and social issues – and that goes beyond the boundaries of the festival,’ reflects Silvia Lammerhuber, the festival’s commercial director.
Klaus Lorenz, Baden’s Director of Tourism, adds with reference to the festival’s media days: ‘As always, it was magnificent. This outstanding festival is invaluable for changing the image of our city.’
62 photographers and 84 journalists from Stern to Le Figaro Magazine and GEO, from ORF television to derStandard and Ö1 Morgenjournal represented the who’s who of the European media landscape. They were joined by museum directors such as Vaclav Macek from Bratislava, Felix Hoffmann from Foto Arsenal Vienna, Luca Venturi, director of the Siena International Photo Awards, and Andréa Holzherr, representing Magnum in Paris, the world’s most important photo agency.
Finally, let’s take a look back: a very special highlight of the festival was the opening concert. Dorothy Khadem-Missagh conducted Aaron Copeland’s ‘Appalachian Spring Suite’ at the Stadttheater Baden. Accompanying the rhythms of the Beethoven Spring Orchestra, images from the festival’s exhibitions were projected onto a giant screen. It was a magnificent moment in which the music and the intense photographs merged into a total work of art. Enthusiastic applause.