Visa pour l’Image, the world’s premier international photojournalism festival, returns to the southern French city of Perpignan this summer.
Since 1989, Visa pour l’Image has celebrated the finest in reportage, spotlighting the world’s most important stories and the photographers dedicated to telling them.
Founded by Jean-Francois Leroy with the aim of promoting photojournalism, the festival has evolved from a small regional event attracting just over 100 people into a world-renowned gathering. It now draws thousands of industry professionals and enthusiasts from around the globe.
In a recent message, Leroy emphasized that the festival was initiated to recognize professional photojournalism and is now contributing to its defense. In an era of fake news, with the risks posed by artificial intelligence lacking effective regulation, and the chronic underfunding of news media worldwide, photojournalism is undoubtedly under threat. Yet it remains more important than ever.
Visual reportage is fundamental to understanding the world, capturing the complexities and humanity behind the major stories of our time. Visa pour l’image 2024 aims to demonstrate how photojournalism can expose injustices, pollution, and violence, while offering hope by showcasing ‘shared happiness and inspiring initiatives’.
This year’s festival will once again bring together professionals from across the industry to the south of France, for an extensive program of talks, meetings, workshops, and a diverse array of exhibitions held at various sites across the medieval town.
Exhibition highlights include ‘The Tragedy of Gaza,’ Loay Ayyoub’s harrowing reportage for The Washington Post captured during the five months following Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel. Covering one of the most devastating conflicts of the 21st century, this reportage captures a tragedy that has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, the largest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948 and has left more than half the population of Gaza facing starvation.
‘A World in Turmoil’ features the work of American photojournalist Paula Bronstein, who has spent her four-decade-long career covering some of the biggest conflicts, wars, and natural disasters of recent times. Now aged 70, she maintains the same unwavering commitment to telling the human stories behind these global events, lending her perceptive and sensitive gaze to the war in Ukraine, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
‘A Photographer’s Journey Through Daily Life, Conflict, and Personal Loss’ features the work of Emilio Morenatti. The Spanish photojournalist has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize on two occasions: once for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic in his homeland, and the second for documenting the devastation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where he worked with a team of Associated Press photographers. Throughout his extraordinary career with the AP, Morenatti has braved extreme danger, even after losing a leg while on assignment in Afghanistan in 2009, an injury which he says makes him “empathize even more and feel closer to the victims”.
Meanwhile, Karen Ballard’s series ‘Venice’ presents an insider’s view of Los Angeles’ eccentric coastal neighborhood, capturing the complexities of a place where beauty, surf, wealth, and the harsh realities of 21st-century America exist side by side.
In addition to the exhibitions, the festival will include a diverse program of meetings, conferences, round tables, portfolio readings, and screenings, covering the main events of the past year, from September 2023 to August 2024.
Each day of the week screenings begin with a chronological review of the year’s main news stories, two months at a time. This is followed by reports and features on society, conflicts, stories that have made the news and others that have had less coverage, plus reports on the state of the world today, whilst retrospectives of major events and figures will also be shown.
Visa pour l’Image: Festival International du Photojournalisme 2024, begins on August 31 and runs until September 15.
Admission to all exhibitions is free every day from 10 am to 8 pm. More information here.
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