34th FIAP CONGRESS Book

centers. The hope is that these centers will keep multiplying in the country members to help the various Federations develop their activity and FIAP visibility everywhere in the world.

The “FIAP audio-visual series”: last June, the first FIAP audio-visual “Women lifecycle” realised by the Audio-visual Service with the collaboration of the Collection Service, has been made available to all the Centers with the double intent to benefit the development of their activity as well as to make known the vast FIAP photographic patrimony. The audio-visuals will be inserted after 6 months from their release on FIAP YouTube channel and made available to all photographers.

Beside these audio-visuals by theme, will be added soon a series of institutional videos (FIAP, Biennials FIAP, World Cup FIAP per Club, FIAP Congress, FIAP Photomeeting, FIAP exhibition centers…), aimed at making our Federation known through videos and interviews and of course photographic documentation. A heartfelt thank you to the Director of the Audio-visual Service Lorenzo de Francesco.

Always with the objective of giving a major visibility to FIAP and its activities, we organized the decentralized meetings of the Directory Board. These meetings have already been organized in: Buenos Aires (Argentina) in December 2013; Montevarchi (Italy) in April 2014; Ripollet (Spain) in February 2015; Vienna (Austria) November 2015, Athens (Greece) in February 2016, Cyprus December 2016, Birmingham (UK) in April 2017, Moscow (Russia) in October 2017 and finally in Antequera (Spain) April 2018 and have allowed to put in contact for the first time authors and federations, facilitating a mutual knowledge. Given their success, they will be always more structured and scheduled with the Operational members.

The new projects and their positive results have confirmed for the whole Directory Board the importance of these meetings and the necessity to always better structure and schedule them with the collaboration of the different liaison Officers. I would like to emphasize the enormous success of the Moscow meeting, last October, where, thanks to the splendid work of our Liaison Officer, Sergey Mojorov, we were put in contact with photographers from all over Russia, and after a long and in-depth conversation, we were able to answer all their questions about FIAP and its manifestations. The result of this meeting is under the eyes of all of us: the Russian photographers’ participation during last year has increased notably and to top it all, the Russian federation, for the first time in its history, was awarded our most prestigious trophies, the trophy Van de Wijer and the trophy Odette Bretcher.

Mutual knowledge is at the basis of FIAP strength and therefore every occasion of encounter and any event that can facilitate it must be supported and publicised in order to ensure its widest diffusion. It is with this in mind that in 2007, then General Secretary, I decided to create the first FIAP Photomeeting. Since then, much has been accomplished and this biennial event has become always more important; as evidenced, during the 5th Photomeeting in China, in the Shandong region, we had the participation of no less than 500 authors from 48 different countries, thanks to the incredible work of our friends Prof. Zeng Yi and Ren Shugao, a record that is difficult to surpass, but which is at the same time a beautiful challenge for the two candidates to the organisation of the next photomeeting: Bulgaria and Morocco whom I thank already for their availability and enthusiasm.

The increase of our meetings should not only serve to better know each other and initiate durable friendships, it should also favour the diffusion of the understanding of FIAP regulations and the motivations behind them. This year for instance, as promised, we reintroduced the FIAP Red List, in a new version which required an incredible amount of work from the Director of the Ethics Service, Pierluigi Rizzato, the Director of the Patronage Service Romain Nero and the various lawyers involved in the revision of the final regulation. I will not hide that until the very last, we hoped we could publish a common rule together with our friends from the Photographic Society of 38