The Paraty Festival in Focus is back to its origins. This year marks the return of its founder, Giancarlo Mecarelli, to the direction of the event.

It will be dedicated to the appreciation of photography made with excellence and focused on essential issues, a photograph that sensitizes by quality and also by content, a photograph engaged in the expression of a plural and complex world.

There is no doubt that the popularization of photography has brought invaluable advances in social practices and practices. The cell phone has the advantage of facilitating and democratizing the construction of own and diversified photographic looks on the world. But it is not for this reason that one must give up visual trouble and conceptual reflection about photography.

To photograph is to tell a story through images, whose strength derives from its visual conception, which needs to be carefully thought out and pondered, without falling into the impromptu empire, recurrent temptation in an era invaded by torrents of disposable information.

Moments of crisis are conducive to reflection. This is how the event stands in the face of national circumstances. The proposal is to do more with less, give up pyrotechnic devices in the name of a more intimate relationship with the city, expose quality photography in symbiosis with the discreet charm of Paraty, a colonial village immersed in incomparable natural scenery.

The interviews with big names of the photography return to the space of the House of Culture and will be broadcast in the historical center and via internet for the whole world. Instead of a grandiloquent (and sometimes invasive) central tent, projections will take several points of the city.

The curatorial conception, led by Giancarlo Mecarelli in partnership with Paulo Marcos de Mendonça Lima, has as its proposal the construction of "

A Festival for All Eyes". It will focus on the search for an interaction between topics of broader interest and issues that concern the local community. In addition to exposing works engaged in social and ecological causes, will expand the activities next to the residents of Paraty, case of the photographic workshops of the project young photographers.

Among the novelties of the 12th International Paraty Photography Festival in Foco was the partnership with Carlos Nascimento, of the Fine Art Portal, the creation of the Paraty Room in Focus in Rio de Janeiro, where the Festival's production was coordinated, and the formation of a

The new Curatorial Council, composed of Agnaldo Farias, Joaquim Paiva, Milton Guran, Rogério Reis, Sérgio Branco, João de Bragança and Orleans and Érico Elias.

See the link the full site of the 12th Paraty in Focus https://paratyemfoco.wixsite.com/paratyemfoco