19th Visa pour l’Image – Perpignan

At Visa pour l’Image, we were always anti-celebrity. Well, sorry, we were wrong! It is time to admit we were mistaken. At least photographers who do portraits of celebrities have some talent.
Over the last year, a trend has emerged in photojournalism, and that is the tendency to “celebritize” news. Photographers these days seem to have forgotten how to take photos of the homeless, of activists, fighters, soldiers, victims of rape or child abuse, relatives of victims, rural communities, boxers, prostitutes, transsexuals, orphans, migrants, drug addicts, or any other category – social, professional, cultural, religious or political. So what do they do? They do portraits.
And we are tired of it. We are tired of having to look at these pictures, of having to display the appropriate reaction – sympathy and/or enthusiasm – as we sift through these unlikely collections that look as if they came out of an old ID photobooth. Tell the story starting from the footnote. Posed photos, or even worse, imitation passport- style photos that are utterly meaningless. No thought goes into them at all. No imagination.
Photographers often complain about the press. But when more than 150 photographers send us the same portraits of homeless people in Paris, what are they hoping for? OK, there may be more demand for portraits from newspapers, but by toeing the editorial line, the photographers end up giving us a standardized, sterilized, stultifying view. How boring it is!
In Perpignan therefore, we shall endeavor to find a way out of this, we shall try to get a response; most importantly because we wish to show that photographers are still around, and that they are not all portrait photographers.

Jean-François Leroy
April 16, 2007

EXHIBITIONS
Jane Evelyn Atwood – Haïti
Raed Bawayah – Living in Palestine
Jonas Bendiksen – Dharavi Dreams. Mumbai’s Shadow City
Ian Berry – Ghana’s Disposable Children
Samuel Bollendorff – Forced March. China: Left by the wayside in the rush to growth
CARE International Award for Humanitarian Reportage : Jean Chung – Maternal Mortality in Afghanistan: where women die of giving birth
Carolyn Cole – They have seen too much : children in crisis around the World
Véronique de Viguerie – Afghanistan, Inch’Allah?
Agnès Dherbeys – Timor Leste : Dreams of Independence Shattered
Dimitar Dilkoff  – Reports from Eastern Europe
David Guttenfelder – The hidden side
Eric Hadj – 20 Kilometers from the Eiffel Tower
Dirck Halstead – Moments in Time
Tyler Hicks – Afghanistan
Yannis Kontos – Red Utopia, North Korea
Stéphane Lagoutte – Presidential Election in Mauritania
Ahmad Masood – Afghan Steps
Sergey Maximishin – The Last Empire – 20 Years Later
Paul Nicklen – Ends of the Earth: Exploring the Remote and Fragile Polar Ecosystems
Per-Anders Pettersson – Soweto
Lizzie Sadin – Juvenile Suffering
Benoît Schaeffer – Mogadishu – the Final Days of the Union of Islamic Courts
John Stanmeyer – Bedlam in the Blood – Malaria
Dennis Stock – The Articulate Image
Mikhael Subotzky – Die Vier Hoeke and Umjiegwana
Hady Sy – Not for sale
Gaël Turine – Eritrea between war and peace
International Daily Press
World Press Photo

Visa d’or
Visa d’or News Award: Kadir van Lohuizen
Visa d’or Feature Award: Lizzie Sadin
Visa d’or Daily Press Award: Reforma (Mexique)

Awards
Canon Female Photojournalist Award: Axelle de Russé
City of Perpignan Young Reporter Award: Mikhael Subotz
CARE International Award for Humanitarian Reportage: Jean Chung