An encounter in focus.

• Author: Snow, K. Mitchell
• Position: Fifth Inter-American Encounter of Photographers

Europe has its long-established international photography festivals, like the famous Mai de la Foto in Arles, France, and Scotland's Fotofeis. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States hosts its annual FotoFest in Houston, Texas. One of the newest entries on the international photography calendar, Mexico's Latin American FotoSeptember also promises to be one of the most exciting.

As part of FotoSeptember this year, hundreds of photographers, art historians, and curators from throughout the Americas will converge on Mexico City for the Fifth Inter-American Encounter of Photographers. The Encounter, scheduled for September 24-27, will take place at Mexico's new Centro Nacional de las Artes.

"The Encounter's objective is to strike a balance between the trajectory of Latin American photography in the last decades before the multiplicity of the contemporary era," says organizer Patricia Mendoza of the Centro de la Imagen, part of Mexico's Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. As if to outline just how ambitious this project is, she adds that the Encounter will cover "photo-historical and -analytical themes, aesthetics, problems of museums and galleries and their relationship with collectors, the photographer's means of making a living, photography for publications, and the relation of photography to other areas such as science, technology, and publicity."

To add to the Encounter's appeal, some of the world's best known and most controversial photographers, including Brazil's Sebastiao Salgado and Mexico's Pedro Meyer, will participate in its seminars.

If the conference schedule weren't ambitious enough, Mendoza is also organizing a juried exhibition representing the best in contemporary Latin American...