Yangon Photo Festival: A Platform for Advocacy
Yangon Photo Festival is organised annually by the PhotoDoc Association, which works in Myanmar to build the capacity of journalists, civil society organisations and vulnerable groups to investigate, document and report on social justice and environmental issues.
Crowds at Mahabandoola, the public park facing Yangon City Hall. (Photograph by Stéphane Ferrer Yulianti. Yangon, 2020. Image courtesy of Yangon Photo Festival.)
The YPF acts as a platform for advocacy, showcasing photo stories from Myanmar and around the world—including the Word Press Photo exhibitions—to generate awareness around various humanitarian issues.
Installation View of Ye Naing and Yan Moe Naing's work. An eight-year-old boy carries more than a ton of mud a day in a brickyard, 12th Annual Yangon Photo Festival, 2020. (Image courtesy of Yangon Photo Festival.)
Every year, PhotoDoc Association conducts intensive training workshops on visual storytelling across Myanmar, often working with marginalised communities like people with disabilities and in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps. More than 240,000 displaced people remain in IDP camps around Myanmar, after fleeing fighting between the military and armed ethnic organisations in the Kachin, Shan and Rakhine States.
Over the course of ten days of intensive sessions, the students produce their own short photo stories documenting their lived situations. As Facebook is synonymous with the internet in Myanmar (being the only popular social media channel translating to Burmese), these are also shared through the Facebook page Myanmar Stories and eventually exhibited at the festival. Through these workshops, the PhotoDoc Association has trained a generation of over 1400 concerned visual story-tellers from diverse ethnicities, religions and backgrounds. Myanmar Stories now generates on average over 350,000 views per video. Over the years, this festival has grown to become one of the most prominent public events in the city. The last edition—held in February 2020—received over 800,000 visitors.
Fourteen-year-old Mizumi, who was born with Down Syndrome and lives in an IDP camp was awarded second prize in the “Emerging Photographers” category at 12th YPF by a jury of international photographers and curators. (Photograph by Aung Naing Tun. Yangon, 2020. Image courtesy of Yangon Photo Festival.)
Christophe Loviny, the artistic director of the festival, stresses the importance of giving a voice to vulnerable and marginalised peoples. In a telephonic conversation, he shared the story of Bawk Seng, a thirteen-year-old disabled girl who made a short documentary showing her life and friends in the IDP camp in Myitkyina, in the northern part of the country. While the story generates further discourse around the ethnic conflict and IDP camps in Myanmar; Loviny tells me that the camera has also helped an introverted girl like Bawk Seng open up and express herself.
The 13th Annual Yangon Photo Festival was scheduled to take place in public venues in the month of February but has been postponed due to the tenuous political circumstances in Myanmar. It will now take place over several months at Institut Français de Birmanie, the place of its birth. The event will start with an exhibition by National Geographic and the young women of Generation Z from Myanmar on 8 March for International Women’s Day.
Installation View of The Man Who Walks Underwater by Franck Seguin at Yangon Central Railway Station, Yangon Photo Festival 2020. (Image courtesy of Yangon Photo Festival.)
