Even though the program of this year's Bratislava festival did not feature any mega-exhibitions like the large Slovak Photography, 1925-2000 or any retrospective like those of Salgado, Klein, Leibovitz, Witkin, Cartier-Bresson and Martinček in past years, the organisers, led by Václav Macek, were again able to put together an attractive exhibition programme last November, even if a little uneven in quality. The traditional focus again was on photographic work from Central and Eastern Europe. The accompanying events also drew considerable interest, among them creative workshops and well-organised portfolio assessments in which a number of renowned photographers, theoreticians and curators took part. These included Andreas Müller- Pohle, Wendy Watriss, Fred Baldwin, Jevgenij Berezner, Irina Tchmyreva and Elźbieta Lubowicz. For the first time ever, the festival hosted a professional gathering of photography magazine editors from the new member states of the European Union, organised in cooperation with the Goethe Institut Bratislava and focused primarily on online magazines. The current situation, in which most non-commercial photography periodicals cannot survive without subsidies, tends to favour the emergence of online magazines dedicated to contemporary and historical photographic art, criticism and theory which bring up-to- date information about developments in photography. While there are many such magazines in Western Europe and the United States, there are only a few such magazines in the former communist countries that are independent from the promotion of photography products. Among these are Poland's http://fototapeta.art.pl, Russia's www.photographer.ru, and the Czech Republic's www.photorevue.com. The two-day conference featured lectures on photography in Africa, Greece, Russia, the Czech Republic and other countries. In the contest for the best photography publication from Central and Eastern Europe, an international jury headed by Ernestina Ruben from the United States awarded prizes to four books. Winners in the history of photography category were the monograph Jaroslav Rössler - Photographs, Collages, Drawings from Prague's KANT publisher and the publication Treasures from the Hungarian Museum of Photography. KANT scored another prize in the contemporary photography category with its monograph Ivan Pinkava: Heroes; the other award in this category went to the Russian book Zatonuvšeje vremja: Rossija, XX vek, 1962-1992 by Michael Dashevsky. Visitors to the main festival days, however, only had a brief chance to see the exhibit of the more than eighty books in competition. Two books published by Fotofo had their release party during the festival: Aurel
Hrabušický's monograph of a pioneer of modern Slovak photography, Miloš Dohnány, and a book of essays on photography by Josef Moucha, Experience of the Arena.(full article is available after purchasing a subscription - not available now)