BADEN.- Since its inception, our Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo has been committed to placing nature, which gives us life, at the centre of the exhibitions. Photographic narratives describe the beauty of our planet Earth as well as its environmental problems.

In 2025, the Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo is dedicated to the theme of AUSTRALIA & THE NEW WORLD. A gigantic open-air gallery 7 kilometres long, with around 1,500 large-format images in the parks and gardens and the old town of Baden, transforms the city into a city of images for four months for the eighth time. With free admission, over 30 exhibitions, 7 days a week, from midnight to midnight, invite you to linger.

Australia, almost a hundred times the size of Austria, has a population of barely 26 million. Australian photographers are ambassadors for the beauty of a unique continent that needs to be preserved. They love their country so much that they even use poetry to criticise its failings, and use a visual medium that overflows with creativity.

Their works explore the themes of identity and environment, moving between drama, black humour, fiction and reality: 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 encounter the works of Louise Johns and Joel Meyerowitz in the USA, which we juxtapose with the perspectives of Austrian Alfred Seiland. Mitch Dobrowner's photographs bear witness to the apocalypse of extreme weather phenomena.

George Steinmetz's magnum opus “Feed The Planet” answers the question of whether the world will be able to feed 10 billion people. We also juxtapose his work with that of Dieter Bornemann – an Austrian work entitled ‘Aufgegessen’. It is intended to raise awareness of the major issue of food waste.

Alessandro Cinque presents his long-term work on the consequences of mining in the Andean countries. Ulla Lohmann takes us to the volcano people of Papua New Guinea. Gaël Turine leads us into the sacred forests of Benin, where voodoo masters are considered true guardians of biodiversity.

Alice Pallot deals with the problem of algal blooms on the Atlantic coasts, while Sophie Zenon invites us to discover the Breton moors. And Bernard Plossu shows large-format Fresson prints that give his landscapes an unreal look.

The bilateral photo project ‘The Spirit of Sport’ challenges schools in Morbihan and Lower Austria to photographically question whether the Olympic motto ‘faster, higher, stronger’ still applies in our time.

Brent Stirton will make the almost invisible visible and brings the suffering of the approximately 80,000 ME/CFS patients in Austria into the light of public perception.

For his work ‘An Tagen wie diesen’ (On Days Like These), Hans-Jürgen Burkard made a musical and photographic journey, in which an image of Germany emerged that was enchanting.

The exhibition of photographs by Lower Austrian professional photographers and the exhibition ‘Director's Cut’ by jury president Christie Goodwin of the world's largest photo competition with over 500,000 pictures from 170 countries, CEWEs ‘Our World is Beautiful’, will round off the festival, as will the retrospective of 2024 in the images of the Artist in Residence Reiner Riedler, whose images will be accompanied by texts of the Thomas Jorda Prize winner 2023 Irmie Vesselsky.

The underwater photographs of ‘freshwater pope’ Herbert Frei are dedicated to the UNESCO’s Global Water Summit 2025.

With the four-week special exhibition Code of the Universe, the festival reflects on the feasibility of humanity's largest research project at CERN in Geneva.

There are two additional special exhibitions. One is dedicated to Austria's forests and is called 100 Years of Federal Forests, and the other honors the history of the railway: 200 Years of Railways, an exhibition developed jointly with the Austrian Federal Railways.

Under the guiding theme Culture of Solidarity, the collaboration with the festival partners Garten Tulln – where we are showing The Human Footprint by Gerald Mansberger and Markus Eisl – and the Month of Photography Bratislava, will continue in 2025. A new development is our partnership with the city of Budapest, where we will present the Global Peace Photo Award from 21 September 2025 on.

The opening weekend from 13 to 15 June 2025 is dedicated to the photographers of the 8th festival with a special programme of events. It includes exhibition tours with the photographers, matinées and lectures and, as a special highlight, the opening concert at the Stadttheater Baden, which is musically dedicated to the theme of the festival ‘AUSTRALIA & THE NEW WORLD’. Large-scale projections of the artists' photographs will accompany the musical piece Appalachian Spring by US composer Aaron Copland. The Beethoven Spring Orchestra will perform under the baton of Dorothy Khadem Missagh. Visitors can expect a rousing and surprising visualisation of a very special sound experience. Free admission.