What is SCAN?

In 2007, the Department of Culture and Communication of the Government of Catalonia decides to mount a new photographic festival. The project is headed by Mariona Fernández with the consultation of an artistic commission made up of professionals from different sectors. SCAN is the result of this team effort.

From this point on, Tarragona Council plays an equal part in the organisation of the festival, and the city is confirmed as its venue. An initial gesture inspired by the government, and its later decentralisation promotes efficiency and proves the ideal nature of the urban, social and cultural nature of the city.  Tarragona's unique characteristics encourage a warm and informal encounter between the different photographic agents that SCAN hopes to promote.

SCAN is organised into two components. On the one hand, Talent Latent, on the other, the Symposium and the Dialogue. These two cores, in the current edition, have gained an extra, more pedagogical dimension which includes a workshop, conference, activities for children, a research grant and guided visits.

SCAN aims to become a platform of discovery and promoter of new creativity, resonating with the freshest and most daring ideas from those artists who as of yet aren’t fully acknowledged in photographic circles. Many contemporary festivals include sections dedicated to young unknown photographers, but these categories usually remain nothing more than a footnote to more general programmes. SCAN, however, wants this to be its philosophy and principal aim. Talent Latent aspires to act as an observatory of the creative process in its most incipient state. Through its networking activity it hopes to create a valuable database which will help to detect and promote the work of emerging artists.

SCAN has a second strand: that of reflection, study, criticism, debate - a more academic dimension. For this reason it will maintain and consolidate two activities born in 2008. The Dialogue, first virtually and then presentially, will explore a given theme with the contributions of three experts with very different viewpoints. This year's focus is dedicated to images of conflict.

We also have the Symposium, in which the university will welcome more than twenty theorists, artists and teachers for three days. Their knowledge and experience will examine a particular theme, this year, the theory of photography.

SCAN defines itself as a festival both in the service of the public and the photographic community: ambitious in its horizons, rigorous in its questioning, open to all aspects of photography, integrating all of its sensibilities. A festival that wants to offer a cultural criticism of photography. A living festival capable of renovating and adapting itself to the unknown quantities of the future.