But with the revamped International Photo Festival, there’s now a very good reason for the rest of us to get to Knokke. Suffering from a lack of direction since its first edition in 1979, the city-wide event seems to have finally made its mind up: it’s an arts festival. And a good one at that.

Among the numerous exhibitions and competitions are three main attractions: the largely-unknown photography of poet and journalist Marcel Broodthaers, an exhibition that examines the history and current relevance of the slide and the return of the World Press Photo tour.

For the last few years the Photo Festival, first held exactly 30 years ago, has had to fight off a persistent image as corny, rigid and increasingly at odds with the spirit of the age. No freshness, no eye for the artistic, no openness to a changing world.

The emphasis was on technically perfect pictures, which mainly drew the attention of photo clubs. This year, new curator Christophe De Jaeger and his team went for a clean break, resolutely determined to inject all of the above into a new arts festival.

The World Press Photo 2009, an annual world tour of last year’s winners of the prestigious journalism photo award, is a mainstay of the festival, and still takes place in the familiar cultural centre. Knokke’s own photo contest, also a tradition, is still on – but the focus has clearly shifted to more contemporary visual art.

The Photo Festival has opened up its curatorship to several international guest curators, which is responsible in no small part for its renewed energy and sense of credibility.

The festival has spread itself around the Knokke-Heist area, diversifying its offerings while unifying the region’s institutions. Four large exhibitions, smaller shows and other activities fall under one general theme: the relationship between still and moving images. The exhibition Still/Moving/Still in the Lagunahal is the centrepiece. Curated by Berlin professor and art critic Marc Gloede, the nostalgically rattling slide projectors remind viewers (of a certain age) of family slideshows in the living room and explore the role of projected images in museums.

Text and Photos, meanwhile, charts the photography of Marcel Broodthaers, up until his death in 1976. Born in 1920s Brussels, he nearly starved to death as a poet before turning, with greater success, to the visual arts and journalism. He began submitting his own creative and often drolly amusing photos to illustrate his articles, much of which you’ll find here.

“Dramatic reactions”

Results of the 30th anniversary re-launch of the Photo Festival are already starting to show: art students and young photographers from all over the country and abroad are showing up in much greater numbers. Buyers, too, are being attracted by the opportunities international curators are offering.

“We’ve had really dramatic reactions,” says De Jaeger, an art historian who is the visual arts coordinator for the region of Knokke-Heist. Before that, he worked for the Ghent non-profit X=10c, a platform for young artists and curators, and for BAM, the Flemish institute for visual and media art.

Interestingly, not all of those dramatic reactions have been good. “Photo clubs are interested in technically perfect pictures; they miss the traditional attention to nature photography,” he explains. “They often find art photography too conceptual and are not interested in a documentary exhibition on the photographic oeuvre of an artist like Broodthaers. In short, they wanted things to remain the same.”

Some of it has remained, such as the World Press Photo exhibition, which, he notes, “is snubbed by people interested in art photography.”

De Jaeger is no iconoclast and is rather enjoying the whole experience. “I find this difficult cohabitation of two worlds very interesting,” he says. “There certainly is controversy, but that is normal when anything traditional changes. And, thankfully, the local population is satisfied."

That the average Knokkenaar takes the restructured Photo Festival to heart certainly helps to ensure continuity. And a new crowd coming to explore the coastal towns is, of course, always welcome.

The festival’s parcourse takes them from Still/Moving/Still in Duinbergen’s Lagunahal to the Broodthaers exhibition and World Press Photo in Knokke-Heist Cultural Centre. In between, are a number of smaller exhibitions in galleries and site-specific locations, like the area’s water tower for Veronica’s. A beautiful group show, Veronica’s is, according to De Jaegher, “the absolute treasure of this festival.” It has been well received, he says, “by the most incurable ‘art nerds’ and the absolutely uninitiated.”

Put together by Erik Eelbode, a Flemish photography critic, and presented in a side building of the Duinbergen water tower, Veronica’s asked contributing artists to illustrate “the primal image", using as a reference the story of Saint Veronica, who wiped the face of Jesus during his march to Calvary and forever held his image in her cloth – thus making the first photographic print in history. Here, artists explore the concept of the “real” or “true” image.

Finally, the Photo Festival provides an ideal alibi for a day or weekend trip to the coast. Combine it with the outdoor exhibition Beaufort, which runs along the entire Flemish coast, and take in Knokke-Heist’s many public artworks – like the Flemish architects Robbrecht & Daem's Albertplein, and you’ll discover that, maybe to your surprise, Knokke, with its many public works of art is a sort of coastal Middelheim.

International Photo Festival

Until 7 June

Across Knokke-Heist

www.fotofestival.be