GENEVA.- Europ扐RT a fair for the 16th year round and the 10th anniversary of the Visual Arts Foundation. Patrick Barrer, founder of Europ扐RT, was raising the question last year during a long interview: 揑s everything favoured by the market acceptable? Is everything rejected by it necessarily bad?� The patron of the Geneva art fair, often going against the trend set by the Establishment, makes art available in all freedom and through all its related crafts.

And among these crafts, photography will be given an important place at the 2007 fair, to be held from 2nd to 6th May of this year, alongside the International Book and Press Fair. The Mus閑 de l'Elys閑 from Lausanne will be one of its guests and will give a foretaste, in Geneva, of the exceptional exhibition which Lausanne will devote, this summer, to the American photographer Leonard Freed, deceased last November. A sort of Cartier-Bresson the American way? Yes and no. Yes, because of the reference offered to a European and especially French-speaking audience, who knows the French photographer better. No, because Leonard Freed developed an even more 'concerned' work, as English speakers would say, that is to say a work involved in the most varied aspects of current affairs. That beautiful black and white snapshot of two hilarious seminarians having a snowball fight on St Peter's Square in Rome? Yes, that's Freed! Let us note that Paris-Match received some contributions from the American photographer via the Magnum agency, to which he belonged.

The Galerie Focale in Nyon, between Geneva and Lausanne, the oldest of Swiss galleries entirely devoted to photography, is coming forward with a project between the photographer Dodo Shunji and the film maker Naomi Kawase. The Japanese artist is now famous for her documentary work inspired by her daily life. It was when giving birth to her first child that she asked Dodo Shunji to record a testimony of the event. Together, they chose the photographs to be later published and displayed.

More photography with Iseult Labote, invited by Jean-Philippe Domecq, together with some painters - Laurent Chabot, Catherine Hekking, Alexandra Vassilikian - the latter being particularly sensitive to the union between painting and photography. Domecq, famous for his polemical points of view on contemporary art work at the beginning of the nineties, is now desirous to get over that stage and to opt for a more serene aggiornamento. When making his presentation of the four above-mentioned artists he says that 揂ny image is possible�. 揂ny image is possible� could indeed be a nice generic attribute for the whole of the fair, as it was conceived by its creator.

Photography yet again, in the exhibition organised by Olivier Delhoume whose title and poster evoke purity: JAPAN, THE ORIGIN. But paintings and engravings also form part of this presentation.