As part of our exploration of Innovators, Artists & Solutions, we had the opportunity to talk with a co-founder of FotoFest, an internationally renowned photography phenomenon. In Part 1 of our conversation, Wendy Watriss, co-founder of FotoFest with her late husband Frederick Baldwin, speaks at length, beginning with her early work as a photojournalist. We then discuss the founding of this remarkable institution in Houston, what inspired it, what made it flourish, and what made it an innovative, one-of-a-kind opportunity for photographers worldwide.

In Part 2, we discuss how FotoFest has evolved as an innovation over the decades, developing its outreach and its breadth of experience. Wendy then discusses how the fields of photography and photojournalism have been used as instruments of social change.

A quick note to listeners: At the bottom of each interview, we include a glossary of terms and names referenced in the interview. 

Elizabeth: Welcome to the Innovators, Artists, and Solutions series of Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.

Michael: And I’m Michael Oliver.

Elizabeth: And our guest today is internationally renowned photojournalist, Wendy Watriss, who, with her late husband and creative partner, Frederick Baldwin, and the late German art historian, Petra Benteler, founded the groundbreaking FotoFest in 1983 in Houston, Texas. A year-round contemporary arts organization, FotoFest is dedicated to advancing photography and visual culture through the presentation of exhibitions, public programs, and publications. This examination of social, cultural, and political histories and contemporary life through the lens of photography and related media is central to FotoFest’s mission. During its 37 years of history, FotoFest has established itself as one of the world’s most important photo events.

Indeed, Wendy Watriss herself is one of the most renowned representatives of engaged photojournalism in the USA. She has been widely published and received numerous awards and accolades, which are too numerous to list in detail, but include the Icon of Photography Award from the National Society of Photographic Education, as well as the World Press Award for Top Feature. Significantly, she was also the first female photojournalist to win the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnard award. Wendy Watriss grew up in Greece, Spain, France, and the US. She completed her studies at New York University with distinction, then worked as a newspaper reporter in Florida and later as a producer of documentary films. Her legacy as a freelance author and photographer began in 1970 and continues to this day. The archives of her and her late husband and creative partner Frederick Baldwin’s personal photography will go to the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin. Welcome, Wendy.

Wendy: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here and talk with you.

Michael: We like to start our interviews at the beginning, which means that we like to ask our interviewees about their earliest memories of their own creativity, either as a witness or as a participant. So what do you remember about your first creative experiences?

Wendy: For me, living creatively or having creative experiences is a lifetime process. And I probably the most significant things in my early life were living abroad and living in different cultures and being very curious about my place, our place as Americans in those cultures. I can’t say when I was very young that we went to a lot of museums, but we were surrounded by art and culture in the countries that we lived in. Particularly, of course, in Greece and Spain. And I was very attracted to the visual image. And looked a lot, particularly in the early days at the Prado. Which was so dark and so badly lit that you could barely see the paintings. And it was also a renowned pick-up place for foreign girls. So, I can’t isolate one creative experience. There are multiple and they have been building on each other and they continue to do so.

Michael: Sure. So it sounds like the experience of being an outsider seeing your relationship to these other cultures—

Wendy: Yes. I remember visually. a very lasting image from Greece. So we were there in ‘51 to ‘53 or ‘54 and that was right after the civil war in the northern part of Greece. I hope many people realize that there were many of these civil wars around the world between basically the leftist militia groups who had been mostly the most successful in fighting the Nazis and the old conservative military or royal class. And Greece had one of the most important and one of the most deadly such civil wars the three, four years in the late 1940s after World War II. So when we would go up north of Athens and north of Delphi into the villages, all you would see against the white walls were women in black.

Michael: So do you have any images of these ladies in black?

Wendy: I was 10 years old at the time, not yet taking pictures. They’ve just remained an indelible impression on my mind and probably were a leading influence in my interest in and fascination with political conflict and war for much of the rest of my life. The person who does have pictures probably nearly from that period, as a matter of fact, in the 1950s, is Constantine Manos, the famous Greek-American photographer. And also, John Demos, D-E-M-O-S, who is a Greek photographer living today in Athens.

Elizabeth: That leads actually, Wendy, right into our next question, which is about your childhood living around the world, as you mentioned, in Greece, Spain, France, and the USA and elsewhere. And subsequently, you became a photojournalist. Can you talk some more about how you got into photojournalism and fine art photography from your childhood around the world?

Wendy: So, living around the world did give me a very important perspective, large perspective on the world which I wouldn’t have had if I had lived only in one place all my life. And one of the things I was very acutely aware of were politics, international politics. My father worked in the State Department in intelligence and some of that kind of conversation used to seep into the rare times we actually, as a family, had a meal together. But I was acutely interested in those things.

And as time went on—see, there’s nearly 10, 15-year difference between the time I was in Greece and then went to Spain—I had become very interested in painting and in museums and in art. And my three years in Madrid, which I was also studying there at the time, I went constantly to museums. And also, those images particularly ones like Ribera and some of the early El Greco and Velazquez and so forth, very much connected my sense of the political aspect of imagery with fine art, that those weren’t necessarily two very separate kinds of things. And for many artists those considerations were a part of their work, even though they’re considered as fine art today. Most good artists are intimately connected with the world around them and in terms of social and political ideas, even though their work doesn’t always show it, obviously. But that was true with me as well.

Elizabeth: To follow up on that, you have spoken in depth about meeting your late husband and creative partner, Frederick Baldwin, who, like you, is known as an internationally esteemed photographer and journalist. And, speaking of the political and social connections, either individually or as a team, your respective early work documented poverty, the Civil Rights Movement, Black radio, conditions in South Texas and other rural communities, as well as communities in Cuba, Africa, and Germany. So, Wendy, can you tell us a bit more about these extraordinary endeavors and their impact?

Wendy: Fred began his career as a photographer and gradually going from extreme adventure stories in the Arctic with polar bears and Sami reindeer herders and so forth into increasingly more direct political issues such as the KKK and the SCLC Civil Rights Movement in Savannah and poverty in Georgia and South Carolina in Southeast United States.

In my case, as starting out as a reporter, I was able to go to one of the best regional papers, which became pathways into the major journals, like the New York Times, who tended at that point in time, and even in the mid ‘60s, not to hire a young woman as the general assignment or political reporter, but go to the women’s department, which I didn’t want to do. But the St. Petersburg Times in Florida was very open about allowing women to do general assignment reporting. And I did quite a lot of political reporting for them, a section on urban development and its impact on equity and poverty in cities and an extended series I did on a quite well-known garbage strike, which put White and Black people in the community on opposite sides of the issue. So that was—and when I went to the Public Broadcast Laboratory, which was the predecessor to PBS today, most of my work was involved with our US reaction, impact of our involvement in the Vietnam War and also in civil rights issues in the United States.

So, while we came from different parts of the journalism community, when Fred and I came together, we had very mutual kinds of interests, and we were also at a point in our lives, although he was 15 years older than I, where we were tired of doing work just on assignment, and we couldn’t do work in depth. And I had also come out of a very, which for me was a very important experience, in developing a series for PBS which then had—many people don’t know PBS anymore—but it was inspired by Fred Friendly, who was head of the photography department, journalism department at Columbia University, as a reaction to his experience in television. As you may remember, he was head of news for CBS for many years. And it was an experiment by the Ford Foundation with Fred Friendly of creating a primetime national hookup for public television, dealing both with direct political issues and conflict as well as cultural issues. And while I was there, I had begun to develop a series that was going to look at the evolution of socialism in three East Central European countries. And I spent a lot of the beginning time of that work in Prague during the Prague Spring of 1968.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Wendy: And that influenced my deeply my political thinking. So, it’s not so clearly, because of that experience, clearly left, it’s clearly not right, but it’s a, I would say, a more complicated attitude about certain kinds of political ideas—which in the United States we define as leftists, sometimes even progressive—than many other people in the United States.

And I was also deeply angered by our foreign policy decisions both in Asia and in the United States. And also, the failure, as we’re seeing to some extent, a parallel today of the so-called democratic societies, of helping when there is essentially a people’s uprising against repression. And that was the case certainly in Hungary, and it was the case in Czechoslovakia, and it became the case in Poland, until gradually it evolved into something that it could carry itself in a way.

I didn’t want to go into the State Department or even intelligence work, which at another point in time, I might easily have done. But journalism, and in particular the image part of journalism, seemed to me a very good pathway to countering what were the mainstream political ideas in the United States.

Michael: And then ultimately, that led to the establishment of FotoFest, which was founded in 1983.

Wendy: Yes, it did.

I should mention the almost 10-year body of work on the rural counties in Texas, or rural frontiers in Texas. That was the first work that we did together. And we wanted to live at a grassroots level and have a storytelling approach to history and political development and settlement as seen in the relationship between humans and land on the frontier. And in the early ‘70s in Texas, which, after all, was a mythological state in the United States, you could still see that it was still very visual. The relationship between the culture of settlement and the nature of land. And then the subsequent trajectory of political thinking and the nature of the society.

So, we lived along the old corn and cotton frontier in East Central Texas, then the German Hill Country, and then the whole border Spanish-Mexican culture along the southern border, east to west, in Texas. And in Grimes County, which was the first part of the southern frontier we were living in a county that had been predominantly Black, slaves from Tennessee, the old Tidewater South and then later Alabama. But when the Populist Movement and the Greenback Movement, which are very important movements in understanding US political history in the late 1800s, there was a moment, there was a shootout of the, that harmed the Greenback Populist White sheriff who hired Black deputies. And he was shot and so forth. And there was a probably a three-month reign of terror in the county that became very well-known, against Blacks in the county.

What we did was uncover that whole history and we did a number of exhibitions and magazine articles about that, and then went on to the other places. But we lived in the back pasture of a Black American farm. And a man whose family had very unusually been able to maintain title to its land. Many Blacks had land after the Civil War, but very few were able to maintain that ownership for all kinds of reasons. That’s a whole ‘nother story, of course.

In any case, so then it was the German Hill Country again. We lived on a German farm. And at that point in time well known, now well known for tourist reasons, Fredericksburg and so forth. People still spoke German at home and there was a very distinct economic and political culture in that part of the country. And there had been dissent against Texas being part of the Confederacy. And there had been a massacre of young German men who were trying to get across the border to Mexico to escape service in the Confederate army.

And then the whole border region from the east to west, the west part, the Big Bend area with the northern-most elements of the Chihuahua mountains was still very much a, really, a frontier land of cattle and sheep ranching. And big ranches because there was very little rainfall, so you had to have a huge number of acres to actually run a cattle ranch. To, and then in the east, where it became vegetable and citrus farming out of the old sort of Spanish land grants. And that is the culture. That is the farm workers culture that’s so well known in the United States.

Michael: Jumping forward to 1983, Houston, Texas.

Wendy: No.

Michael: That’s where you, that’s where FotoFest is founded. And then in 1986 is when the first citywide month of photography begins.

Wendy: That’s correct.

Michael: And now it’s an internationally known event that happens every other year. Can you walk us through the founding of that organization? Maybe the motivation, vision of it? But then also some of the challenges that you and Fred faced and your partner in terms of this, or having to overcome, in order to really getting it going.

Wendy: When we were working in 1980 on the first of what were, was going to be three Texas books, we decided are we going back to New York or are we going to stay in Texas? And we deeply knew Texas and were fascinated by its contradictions and its paradoxes. And we liked Houston the best, so we stayed in Houston. In the interim, I became aware of the herbicide problem of Agent Orange in Vietnam and also with US veterans of the Vietnam War. And I took almost a year off to do that story for Life. And in the process, it won a number of awards. And it took us to Arles, or it took me, and Fred and I went together, to the Rencontre d’Arles in the south of France, which is really the first photography gathering in the world. And that was in 1983. And in the process of seeing how Arles and this marvelously, slightly, anarchic, chaotic approach of the French to those things, what a wonderful kind of event it was, because there was not only an admixture of people, of artists, photographers from various parts of the world that came together in this very attractive sort of Proven ç al town, but there was an informal way of bridging the hierarchical gap between the photographer, the artist, and curators, and editors, and so forth. They had a kind of informal rencontre, encounter between the two. And at the same time, you would sit outside in the plaza in the evenings, and you would be talking to your cohorts from various parts of the world, all over Western Europe, Japan, and some United States. There were big parts of the world that were not there yet. Coming back on the plane to Houston, Fred and I literally looked at each other and said, “Well, why don’t we try something like this in the United States?”

The United States has a very parochial view of what is important in the arts and —at that point we didn’t use the word “media,” but—journalistic world in many ways. But particularly, so in anything that kind of interrelated journalism and art, it was very parochial. You didn’t see very much from many parts of the world. And we literally started over our dining room table in Houston with Petra Benteler, who was a German gallery dealer at the time. She lasted through the difficulties of the first years for three years and went back to Germany. But we carried on. The difficulties were that we weren’t longtime Houston residents, and while our work in Texas was known, we weren’t illustrious names in the city. So, it obviously was a search for funding. And also, convincing people that it was an interesting idea that would be good for the city.

And I give, and so does Fred, Houston a great deal of credit because it’s a city unlike many cities that I’ve lived in in the world and in the United States, that’s very open. It understands risk-taking because of all the holes they poked in the ground. Some come up, some don’t, with oil. And it’s not a city that’s based on class and caste, it’s a city that is based more on achievement—often monetary or financial achievement, but achievement.

And so Fred and I have, all our lives, if you are a freelance journalist, you have to figure out where the power is, where the authority is, who are the people that make the decisions, or are influential. And so that’s what we did in Houston is understand those layers that interacted with each other. And because, I think it’s because we had good manners, knew how to deal with many different kinds of people that we were convincing about, why not try this thing? Nobody had ever done anything quite like that as a nonprofit, really, in the United States. It had been tried one or two times, I found out later, in San Francisco. But none of it had been able to sustain itself.

Michael: And this is just the gathering of photographers.

Wendy: Yeah, having exhibits, having conversations and panels. And also, we formalized the portfolio review for artists. So, there was a curated part of FotoFest, which were the exhibitions that FotoFest organized. Then there were all the participating galleries, museums, and spaces in Houston. We went to probably 78 different spaces for the first FotoFest to convince them that this might bring an audience that normally Houston doesn’t have. And most were convinced, actually. And so, they participated on their own. At the beginning, we didn’t have a theme. Later, we’ve had themes, but we don’t impose that upon other spaces. That’s essentially a no-win situation.

And Houston is a city which has a lot of foundations. Early foundation law in Texas, it mandated really that Texas foundations fund in Texas and sometimes, if a city, if they’re located in a particular city, projects in that city. So, there was a rich financial base to draw upon. At the same time, there were many women on the boards of the private foundations who wanted to create out of cities like Houston in particular, but Dallas was not dissimilar, a city that was considered to be cultivated and sophisticated. And so how do you do that? One way you do that is to have a thriving and sophisticated art scene. And that was very important in terms of our early support.

Michael: So, the organization was founded in ‘83. The first Month of Photography is—

Wendy: 86, yes.

Michael: So it’s 3 years to pull together, because, that’s a huge number of galleries.

Wendy: Two years it took us. Because we incorporated in late ‘83. Then, because of Fred’s and my international connections, the first FotoFest had scads of international press. Japanese television came, BBC came, several French media outlets, and on. Plus, probably a hundred, sort of, leading curators and editors in Europe, in Japan. At that point not anybody from the Middle East or Africa, but that was—and Newsweek did a big story on it, talking about a Texas-sized festival. And we knew we had to start big in order to get the attention of Texas and—

Michael: Everything’s bigger in Texas.

Wendy: Exactly.

Michael: And so, do you remember approximately how many photographers exhibited at that first FotoFest?

Wendy: Oh, probably over 350.

Michael: And obviously they were from all over the world.

Wendy: Yeah. And at that point, the portfolio review, which was formalized somewhat from the French mode, but I always credit the French for being the inspiration for that, actually. And at that time when we began FotoFest, there were only four other festivals in the world, photography festivals. Paris had just started. Of course, there was Arles, and then Barcelona and a festival in Switzerland that didn’t last very long. And for many years, through the mid-90s really, there were only four kind of major festivals that had sustained themselves.

Michael: Now, for a Houston-based event, you would try to get some Texas photographers?

Wendy: One of the main purposes of FotoFest was to reach across the world. It was an international purpose. Another purpose was to discover photographers from around the world in places that had not been considered mainstream cultural places, to bring them to the fore. And to give priority to issue-based photography of all kinds of genre, not just photojournalism, but conceptual photography and so forth, that we’re dealing with issues that were important to the world and society that we lived in.

So as an organization, it wasn’t until after about five or six FotoFests that we began more seriously to look at Texas photographers. We counted on the participating galleries and non-profit artist spaces and museums in Houston to bring to the fore. We brought the audience, and we brought the press, and we hoped that they would bring the Texas involvement. Later on, we realized that we needed to pay more attention to Texas artists. And actually, FotoFest created a show that was not a biennial show, in between the biennials, that was called Creative Talent in Texas. It was only about Texas artists. And we changed and had revolving curators also. So it was a platform that would, give younger curators a chance to show what they would do and show what they would find and, obviously, for Texas photography.

Elizabeth: Interesting. Yeah, this must’ve been as you mentioned before, Wendy, this must have been transformative for the city of Houston, which as you say, is a city that takes risks. There’s the oil industry, which is all over the world in its own operations. And as a fellow Texan—or not a fellow, as a native Texan, I’m really in awe of something you said earlier about just surfacing and documenting and capturing both visually through photography and through the oral reportage of people who live through some of these chapters of Texas history that really don’t make it into the standard Texas history textbook. So, I’m super interested in just how FotoFest and Houston and this kind of alchemy of your international worlds and the global lens of, as you say, issue-oriented both journalistic photography and conceptual photography. So, can you give us a tiny snapshot of some of the reactions of both the Houston arts community and the critical community and the event goers? What was it like in those early days to have people who were local come and just understand their city in a new way?

Wendy: I think that much of the art community as well as the people who were thoughtful about the city and its development and where it was going in addition to its economic successes, and the university faculties at, particularly, Rice and also the University of Houston, and the whole consular core in Houston—Houston is one of the major hubs for consulates in the United States, for obvious reasons, it’s one of the biggest ports and it’s accessible to the Panama Canal and many trade routes—that combination of things, plus the press that we brought to Houston—which was predominantly somewhat awestruck that, my God, out of Houston, which was not considered a cultural center, even though it had wonderful exhibition museums and so forth, and very good ballet, very good opera, and a good symphony, as well, but it was not recognized that way, and in many cases, it’s still not, just simply because of the reputation of Texas itself—people didn’t realize that we pulled something off as big and immediately successful as it was.

So, there were a number of comments from both the consular corps of never having seen as international an event as this, that brought people from all over the world and interacted with the city in a very positive way. So I think there were many non-believers for many years, but by and large, we had positioned it in such a way so that it was as advantageous to the city as a whole as it was to individual artists. And we had a very good curator in the Museum of Fine Arts, the photography curator Anne Tucker, who is somewhat of a legendary curator today. She retired about three years ago and she was very supportive of it, and she participated with a film by Robert Frank that people had not seen before, as well as an exhibition. And it made a big difference to have the Museum of Fine Arts participating in a full-fledged way. And we have had a very strong connection and relationship to the Museum of Fine Arts. We’ve been able to deepen their collection over the years and also make it possible for the curatorial staff to travel.

One of the things that FotoFest has done in the photographic world as a whole is simply opened it up. Curators were not traveling in the eighties, in much of the nineties. They would come to FotoFest so they’d meet their peers from other parts of the world. And in fact, Art News in 1992 wrote that the place to see what is happening in photography is FotoFest. So that we brought both the intellectual apparatus, the curatorial apparatus, and the art producing apparatus all together. And that was because we had been freelance photographers and intelligent people and we looked around and obviously we understood all the different sectors that, in a sense, played upon each other, often unconsciously. And how those elements would impact the cultural environment as a whole.

Elizabeth: So coming at it as practitioners, as photographers and journalists who had been in the field, so you had been doing the work, you were not up in your lofty office handing out assignments to other people, you had walked the walk and done the work and really understood at the granular what the work is all about and who is part of that larger landscape and network.

Wendy: And we were both people who were fascinated about how things worked, how society works, what are the forces and influences that shape people’s lives and society’s lives and the lives of states and the lives of governments, and we were deeply interested in that. And the interesting thing was that those nearly 10 years—we taught at the University of Texas in between while we were doing the Texas work—but looking at history, the personal stories and the nature of lives in those different cultural frontiers in Texas gave us a sense of perspective and time and all the things that put the pressure on change or the absence of change in people’s lives. And we did it in three extremely different communities, extremely different cultures in Texas, which were communities that have their different parallels all over the world. And having been able, both Fred and I in different ways, to have had political experiences in other countries that were both large and small, gave us a viewpoint that was very unusual, I think.

Michael: I’m fascinated by experience, beyond the individual experience of an audience of a particular photograph, there’s this month-long, 72-gallery experience that have, where people are experiencing all these different cultures, the social issues. Can you describe, at least in some brief detail, what an experience would have been like? Because clearly it was successful, which means people return to this experience every two years. So there must have been something just about the experience and how that was organized that made it such a vivid emotional engagement.

Wendy: One of the things that we have both felt important for life in general is networking, and also network in such a way so that you can bring in different audiences. In the beginning, the expansion and development of photography—and of course, internationalism as seen through photography—but photography and opportunities for artists is extremely important. It’s one of the bedrocks of FotoFest. And the idea of the portfolio review, which was first come, first serve, and it was free for the first two portfolio reviews—and we brought top curators from museums in New York and in Paris and in London and editors and book publishers and so forth. And photographers would come to show them their work and it was life changing for many of the photographers. And it was breaking down the hierarchies within our field, which was the field that we knew and had could have some influence on.

So, the people connected with photography in one way or another, either as producers, editors, or as arbiters, or as publishers. That was one audience. That was one group of people and that was a very important piece of the puzzle. And then there was the public in Houston that was not necessarily in need of or interested in the same thing that the artists needed, but they were interested in the connection with artists, having a connection with artists, having it be something that was interesting and fun for the city. And then the third group were younger people, were students. From the beginning we devised public programs that were—everything at FotoFest, except for the portfolio review is free. And that’s true to today. The festival as a whole is free. Fred and I decided that our idea about the festival was more important than our own financial wherewithal, so actually, we never took any salary for 35 years. So, we created programs for the photographers. We created programs and events that would attract the general public. And then we had alliances with the universities. One, to provide apprenticeships and internships for students, but also artists to go to classrooms and either show their work or talk about an issue that was important in their work, to classrooms—and not just the universities, but high schools as well. Out of that last program, we have a program called Literacy—now Learning Through Photography in the high schools. It’s a written curriculum that is intended to develop analytic skills, strengthen analytic skills in the students by using the visual image and having them analyze and break down what are the elements that make up this image.

Michael: Oh, that’s so valuable. Visual literacy.

Wendy: Yes. And then there are four assignments they have. And the beginning, when we started it in 1990, we got cameras donated by Canon and Olympus and so forth, point and shoot cameras. Now, of course, they do it on their cell phones or whatever, but it’s first self-portrait, or however they want to depict themselves. Family, community, and dreams. And dreams can be literal dreams, or they can be goals or achievements or hopes or aspirations. And that, it is a functioning program, yearly, not a biennial, every year in the schools. And between a thousand and two thousand students a year do that.

So, we were very conscious of the core and multiple audiences that we had. So there’s usually a grand opening that has music and has a party atmosphere and several of the main FotoFest organized exhibitions open at the same time. So, it can mingle—and the portfolio review also opens. People that come to the opening not only have food and entertainment, but they meet artists and people from all over the world. That’s usually an open and big party.

Then there’s the portfolio review, which is, for creative people, it’s a fascinating process in itself, but that is mostly designed for photographers and artists. And it has been responsible for thousands of career changes and artists from the US and all over the place.

But then there’s a two-week period where exhibitions are opening all over the city. Some are FotoFest, but some are galleries and museums. And so that they’re, opening receptions and public things going on.

Then there are panels. Our panels are free, and all our spaces are free. We leave it up to the museums—the Museum of Fine Arts usually lowers its fee, or will have a no-fee for two of the six weeks of the biennial, but we leave it up to the spaces to decide what to do about it there.

And then there can be poetry readings that are related to the theme of the biennial that are open to the public. Or bicycle tours of the exhibitions. And a couple of years we had special restaurant openings and things. So that kind of thing goes on also.

And then we have an auction, that’s the other thing we have that does have a fee attached, an entry fee, and you can buy tables—it’s the classic fundraiser. But people enjoy it because it’s, again, work from all over the world that you wouldn’t see. And we, it’s a curated auction. We carefully do it, actually, and we worked we had the auctioneer from Sotheby’s for most of the last 12 years, or longer. There’s the catalog. Now we’re doing books. And then there is, like, a guide, a map to the whole city where all the exhibitions and where the events are and what to do and so forth and so on.

So it’s like a city that opened itself up for six weeks and it’s showing you, in a way, the best of itself. And there are all these different events going on and galleries have their own events, and the museums have their events. So there’s things happening almost every day for about six weeks.

Michael & Elizabeth: Wow.

Wendy: And then students, we do special tours for students. And we do a curriculum, not every biennial, but we do a curriculum for students so that the work that, the regular Learning Through Photography work, could be directed actually at the theme of the festival

Elizabeth: Nice connection.

Wendy: And then at the end of the biennial, we will do—first it was called FotoFence, now it is called FotoFinish, I think—an exhibition of the student work.

Elizabeth: Ah, nice.

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