A Swiss Lakeside Biennale of Photography, as the Guardian's Picture Desk Sees It

The Guardian has published a picture essay from Images Vevey, the photography biennale held in the Swiss lakeside town of Vevey, now in its tenth edition. The paper's global head of photography, Fiona Shields, made the selection, drawing on the fifty artworks on display. The essay is presented under the title 'We Are Family'.

Vevey is a small town on Lake Geneva, and the biennale is built around work installed in the town rather than in a single hall. That model — exhibitions distributed through streets, gardens and public buildings — is the one the Guardian's photographs describe, and it is the model that has made the event a fixture in the international photography calendar.

The Guardian's framing of the edition is thematic rather than national. The paper introduces the selection as photographs about family, and its picture desk, rather than a critic, chose what to show. The essay is published in the paper's art and design section.

For readers of Italian photography the interest lies in the format as much as the works. Italy has its own biennales and its own photography festivals, and the question of how a small town stages an international exhibition without a purpose-built museum is one that recurs across the Alps. Images Vevey's answer — to use the town itself — is the subject of the Guardian's photographs, which show work placed in the open rather than hung in galleries.

The essay is also a reminder of how photography reaches foreign readers. A picture desk's selection is an editorial act: fifty works are on display, and the Guardian presents a subset chosen by its global head of photography. What an international audience sees of a biennale is therefore not the biennale but an argument about it, made by the paper that covers it.

The timing places the Swiss event in the same fortnight as the close of the Venice film festival, the two ends of the autumn cultural calendar that foreign desks cover from Italy and its neighbours. Neither is a competition in the sporting sense, and both are read abroad through the selections that foreign critics and picture editors make. The Guardian's Vevey essay, like its Venice coverage, is that selection.