Salvador Dalí said that the centre of the world was the Perpignan train station (an official sign bears witness to this) because it was the closest to Port Lligat and from there his paintings were sent to the whole world. This first fortnight of September, Perpignan is the centre of the world as far as photojournalism is concerned, with the Visa pour l’Image festival: 26 exhibitions, a hundred screenings in which evenings evenings, and dozens of conferences bring together press photographers and reporters from around the world.
A girl looks at a pile of destroyed, burned, abandoned cars in Irpin, Ukraine, after the Russian invasion in 2022
The first Visa pour l’Image events were reached by train via Portbou, Cerbère… in a journey of about four or five hours. Now, by TGV or AVE, in just an hour and a quarter. However, modernity or speed has not reached the festival, and that is fine: the immediacy of the daily press, the speed of light that is needed in today’s photojournalism, is fading away in Perpignan: long reports are exhibited, photos on paper on a mat, long captions, commented visits, books – on paper – signed, as in a Sant Jordi, by the admired photographers… a haven of peace in a very agitated, convulsive world.
Brazilian Gabriel Medina recovers from a big wave during the fifth heat of the men’s surfing at the Paris Olympics. Teahupo’o, Tahiti, French Polynesia, July 29, 2024.
The Gaza Strip has been in turmoil since October 7, 2023. The one who has best documented it, in the eyes of this year’s jury, is the Palestinian Loay Ayyoub, who covered for The Washington Post The photographer was awarded the Visa d’Or, the highest recognition of the festival, the Rémi Ochlik, in 1998. But controversy arose when the mayor of the city, Louis Aliot (of the far-right Le Pen party RN) refused to award the prize because the Gazan photographer described Hamas as “Palestinian resistance”, according to the ICC in The Hague. L ’ Independent. Jean-François Leroy, director of the festival since its inception in 1989, argued that the awards were independent and that the winner had been chosen by a jury.
Following an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Al-Sabra neighborhood in central Gaza City, wounded people are taken to Al-Shifa hospital, on October 11, 2023.
Eight days later, in his meeting with this newspaper, he refused to talk about the subject. He does value the strength of Visa pour l’Image, 36 years later, even though photojournalism is not at its best: “We continue because of the talent of the photographers, I receive more than a thousand proposals a year and the level is still very high” and he adds: “We need a common place once a year where we can meet, get together, evaluate, project…”
Two masked men protest against Covid vaccines at the Capitol in Washington
Last year, we saw a cascade of themes about the environment and climate change flood the competition. “This year, the main theme is the marginalised in society, in the first world,” says Leroy. Alejandro Cegarra’s immigrants to the USA between two walls, Pierre Faure’s peripheral France, Jérôme Gence’s young people abducted by screens, Brenda Ann Kenneally’s poor and working-class families abandoned by the American state, Hugh Kinsella Cunningham’s displaced people in the Congo, Gaël Turine’s Philadelphia portrait of tranq (xylazine) addicts in a country (the USA) where drug use kills one person every five minutes, or Mugur Varzariu’s persecution of the Roma people in Romania, among others.
Leroy dreams that public exposure of these situations of exclusion will lead to an alert and a change in whoever may cause them, but he is aware that “often this is a utopia.”
In the Bel-Air neighborhood, near the National Palace (former official residence of the president), police opened fire and gang members responded. Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 19, 2024.
Faced with so much visual and real tragedy, some people need to take a break. Outside the Convent des Minimes, passing through the gypsy quarter, one can see similarities with Varzariu’s report, all the way to the Arab, mainly Maghrebian, area, where visitors are quietly enjoying mint tea. The aesthetics and the faces seem to have come straight from the exhibitions of Ayyoub or Ponomarev. After the break, the exhibitions continue, the heat, the images that are difficult to digest but that help us to better understand the problems of the planet. There are people in the audience who, shocked by the photographs, ask questions and want to find out and understand why those problems occur.
Perhaps Perpignan is not the centre of the world, as Dali said… but, these days, you can see the whole world in it.
Mayotte, an African island and an overseas territory of France in the Indian Ocean. After two months of military training, the graduation parade is held on Ambato beach.
Franco-Catalan photographer Dewever-Plana discusses his exhibition “Mayotte” at the Convent des Minimes, Perpignan
