ABSTRACT
PhotoIreland today is a resource organization that supports photography internationally from Dublin with a multitude of projects that extend throughout the calendar year. The organization was launched in 2010, initially as an annual festival alone, but it quickly expanded to become a repository of projects created to address specific needs in the sector. It demonstrates the exceptional potential of festivals as risk-tolerant laboratories where radical cultural production models can be incubated and grown, and around which new and diverse communities coalesce. The organization faced many challenges in developing a thriving ecosystem and this chapter identifies ideas, processes, models, and structures that may inform and excite similar advances in other cultural contexts. Reflecting on personal experience in my role as a cultural producer, after defining the specificity of the context of Ireland, I look at three aspects that have facilitated structuring change and that have been of substantial importance for our organization in the development of communities and exchange channels locally and internationally: portfolio reviews, transcontinental programmes, and more specifically institutional supports.
