The 2025 edition of Festival Photo in the bucolic village of La Gacilly is gloriously titled SO BRITISH! – a sideways celebration of British photography, featuring some of the genre’s most iconic names. Peter Dench, whose work was also exhibited, reports from the event
Established in 2004, the La Gacilly Photo Festival is Europe’s largest open-air photography event. From 1 June to 5 October, the festival transforms the village’s streets, gardens, and alleys into expansive galleries showcasing large-format photographs. I have 39 of my best of British images in a section adjacent to Ray-Jones and Parr. In addition to the SO BRITISH element there’s a focus on environmental and social themes, and it features works from both renowned and emerging photographers worldwide.
As a photographer and long-time admirer of both Parr’s eye for the absurd and McCullin’s unflinching reportage, sharing wall space (or rather, garden hedge and granite façade space) with them is in equal parts exhilarating and surreal. They say never meet your heroes… what about exhibit alongside them? As only a Brit abroad can – armed with a suitcase full of humour and sprinkling of humility, I grab my alcohol-free, vegan wife Michelle and head to the country famed for its fine wines and cheeses.
I first observed Parr when he was shooting for his book Common Sense (1999). I watched in awe as he stuck his lens at a punter at the horse races wearing a top hat speaking on a mobile phone standing next to a red telephone box. Classic Parr. I introduced myself and he invited me to visit at his home in Bristol. A few months later I sat on the floor as he kindly looked through my fledgling portfolio. A decade later I went back to interview him for my book The Dench Dozen: Great Britons of Photography Volume I and was upgraded to a beanbag.
Dining with Don
In 2012 Don McCullin swung by my book launch at Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. He looked through and said, ‘Good. You get close.’ Over dinner I suggested we should do a book together on England – ‘Dench and Don do England’. He didn’t dismiss it, leaned over and said, ‘Of course it would have to be Don and Dench do England,’ and of course he was right. More recently I visited Don’s home in Somerset to film a segment for The Sunday Times’ documentary film: 200 Years in the Making.
Attracting over 300,000 visitors annually, Festival Photo La Gacilly offers free access to its exhibitions, emphasising art’s role in raising awareness about pressing global issues. In 2018 the festival expanded its reach through a partnership with Baden, Austria, where the previous year’s exhibitions are displayed, furthering its mission of combining art, nature, and community engagement.
There are myriad routes from the UK to La Gacilly – ferries depart from Plymouth and Portsmouth, planes fly into Rennes. I opted for the Eurostar via Paris. Nibbling breakfast at the Gare Montparnasse awaiting a train to Redon (pronounced in your most outrageous French accent) I look up at the information boards and cough a flock of croissant flakes. My photograph of Lorraine Churchill waving her Union flag at a street party celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee looks proudly down.
As I disembark, the sky is the colour of wet slate. We’re issued umbrellas and bundled onto the bus with members of the French press for the 15-minute ride to La Gacilly which has a population around the same as the waiting list for my north London tennis club. Parr can’t make it due to a commitment in Italy. Don is rumoured to be arriving soon.
There must be 800+ pictures across 20+ Exhibitions. Surprisingly during the 22 editions, only one photo has been stolen – mysteriously returned a year later to the same spot. I once had some photos exhibited outside in a northern UK city. By the end of the short run you could hardly see the print beneath graffiti. I’m relieved to be pulled aside from the press tour to give an interview with French Radio and baffled when the translator just repeats what I’m saying in English with a French accent.
‘There’s no better way to start the day than with children,’ I said – possibly not the ideal opening line to a school group. Some are bouncy, lively and wide-eyed. Others surly and more self-conscious. The questions are surprisingly engaged; do you ask people permission to photograph them? Do you have another job alongside being a photographer? Do you use manual or automatic? Is the man lying on the grass in your photograph dead?
I visited Don’s exhibition in an abandoned garage and sat with his 50+ pictures of wars and famines from around the world and his social documentary work in Britain. ‘Shell-shocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue 1968’; ‘Near Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1961’; ‘Snowy, Cambridge, early 1970s’; ‘Early Morning, West Hartlepool 1963’; ‘The Guvnors in their Sunday suits, Finsbury Park, London 1958’; Tormented, Homeless Irishman, Spitalfields, London 1969’, they’re all here. To the sound of chaffinches and the hum of an electricity cable I reflect on my photos exhibited across town: Patriotic Woman’s Bottom, King Charles III Coronation 2023; Sunburnt Couple, Bournemouth 2020, Man with Carrot Motif on Tie, 2019.
Approaching the official festival opening at Artemisia cultural and congress centre, amongst the British Embassy staff and local politicians, I spot The Don. We head inside and sit patiently throughout lengthy speeches I find hard to follow, even through a translating device. At one point I’m sure the speaker is referencing Irish poet Oscar Wilde walking a lobster on a lead. Perhaps it was the same translator I had for the French radio interview.
Don’s wife, the journalist Catherine Fairweather, advised me not to bring Don one of my photo books. Not because he was abhorred by my work – he’d actually pointed out one of my images as his favourite in the festival brochure – but because he didn’t like to have to carry them home. She revealed he’s also been known to slide the odd accolade overboard. If you’re ever diving in the Arabian Sea, you may discover a Don McCullin achievement award. To be fair, he has a few.
Shenanigans
Don has so many people wanting to meet him, coming from all directions, it helps if he can contextualise you quickly. To Don I’m the guy who lives near where he grew up in Finsbury Park. Each time we meet at the festival he tells another tale of his boyhood shenanigans more delicious than the last – scrapes, brawls and sore faces, bringing back jackdaws and grass snakes from the countryside, ransacking bombed-out houses, friends cutting a shop window with a diamond to loot suits.
Jacques Rocher, the practically dressed, perpetually twinkling festival founder (and wealthy mayor-cum-environmentalist), is ever-present – posing for photos, handing out macaroons, and planting trees with photographers. Each exhibitor gets to plant a tree and Don throws his back into shovelling dirt. I selected an alder (Alnus glutinosa) swamp-dweller, water-lover – the wood doesn’t rot when waterlogged, instead turning stronger and harder
– and deploy a gardener to do the grunt work. My tree plaque is curiously inscribed – shame on him who thinks evil of it.
At an hour-long book and catalogue signing session, I get so much black marker pen over me I’m terrified I’ve given myself a German dictator’s moustache. I sit alongside Don on a panel discussion on ‘UK, Photography Free and Unvarnished,’ and give a plein air presentation to around 65 members of the public.
During my time hanging with Don, now 89, it often gets Darko – his demons never far away. He’s acutely aware of his mortality and questions his choices, achievements and value of a 70-year career. He feels over-celebrated and bristles at compliments. Karma is pummelling him with a lifetime of guilts and ghosts. ‘I’m at the end of my life, not only life, almost, but by my time in photography. I’ve had a wonderful life behind it all. I feel as if I didn’t deserve it, really, because I’m still alive,’ he says.
Twenty-five years ago he embarked on a journey to create a cultural and architectural survey of the remains of the Roman Empire. The photographs published in his book, The Roman Conceit (GOST Books) focus on the marble sculptures of the heroes of antiquity preserved in museums in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Turkey, the UK and the USA. Perhaps the book is an attempt at mental restoration.
In the book’s introduction he says, ’It is never as an academic, nor as a scholar, that I respond to these stone gods and goddesses, but as a respectful admirer. I hope to pay tribute, through my photography, to their iconic beauty, their marble perfection and their very existence, exhumed lovingly by archaeologists and brought to life after 2,000 years of burial. We must not allow ourselves to forget that such beauty came at a price; this, after all was stone quarried by enslaved people and the statuary itself became the spoils of war, looted across the centuries, from country to country, to this day.’
On the final morning I interrupt Don being interviewed by Polka magazine to say goodbye and shake his hand cheerio. I’m dressed as a 1982 football Casual, Don more country Squire. ‘You need a new camera bag, it looks older than me,’ he says before turning back, and with that I turn towards the exit. I went to the festival channeling Mr Bean to a soundtrack of Benny Hill and returned more in tune with the classics. It’s taken the French to bring me closer to understanding my place in photography. They say never meet your heroes. I say meet them, photograph them, exhibit alongside them, and carry their macaroons. They’re heroes for a reason.
Peter will be joining AP’s very own Festival of Photography – Documentary edition on 9 August at the Royal Geographical Society in London, where world-class experts in Documentary photography let you in on their secrets, with insight into their work, how they captured some of the world’s best known documentary images and how you can too. Confirmed speakers include: Zed Nelson, Laura Pannack, Jillian Edelstein, Jon Nicholson and more!
WIN tickets to the AP Festival of Photography – DOCUMENTARY! | Amateur Photographer
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