Perpignan photojournalism festival

Photojournalism festival brings the world in images to France

by Aidan O'Donnell

Article published on the 2009-09-01 Latest update 2009-09-07 06:52 TU

Those sensible people in Perpignan are holding the 21st Visa pour l’image just as the French rentrée - or back to school season - kicks in. So temperatures are graciously hovering around thirty degrees and the crowds have got out of the seaside town to return to Paris for work and school. This bestows an air of calm on the city’s photojournalism festival, which is reinforced by the contemplative origins of some of the exhibition spaces: chapels, convents and churches. (The only exception to this might be the professional area where budding photographers are hunting out photo-editors, while armed to the teeth with portfolios).

Visitors are mercilessly thrown out of the various exhibitions around eight in the evening and told to make their way to the Campo Santo, which backs onto the Cathédrale Saint Jean, for the evening open-air screenings.

Monday’s show was the first of the week and, as is the tradition, began with the day’s news in pictures. Japanese politics, Gabonese elections and fires on the west coast of the USA brought festival-goers back to the real world for a moment of two.

Then it was time to start reviewing the year’s news in photos. Monday night looked back at the first two months, and each evening will show another collection of photos until the year has been properly reviewed.

The organizers then moved onto the serious business of reminding us that we were in Perpignan, whose rugby team claimed the prestigious Bouclier de Brennus trophy last year when it won France’s big rugby competition, the Top 14. The trophy was hauled on stage to intimidate any visiting rugby fans that might be in the audience. A collection of images from the final (against Clermont Auvergne) brought home to the audience that this might well be the most important news story in Perpignan for the last 12 months.

The photoreports then stayed with sport for a stunning report on the Paralympic Games from last year and then Rick Rickman’s “The Wonder Years” on senior citizens in sport. This was essentially dozens of grannies hurtling around the track and was great fun.

It was seatbelt time then as various reportages then took us from life today in Kyrgyzstan (William Daniels) to the position of women in Yemen (Catalina Martin-Chico), via the Nuer of southern Sudan (Damien Guerchois) and young men working in dumps in Ghana to recycle computer parts (Nyaba Ouedraogo).

Small-scale gun-making in the Philippines (Patrick Aventurier), da Silva’s electricity programme in Brazil (Eric Garault), mummies in Papua (Ulla Lohmann) and rainforests in Borneo (Mattis Klum) all followed.

The evening concluded with a tribute to Pierre Jahan, who died in 2003, and whose work during WWII included reports on the melting down of Paris statues for metal and the return of art works to the Louvre after the war.

Kent Kobersteen used to be the Head of photography at National Geographic. He’s now retired but it hasn’t stopped him coming back for the 12th time. “The retrospective at the end I found especially moving - work that I’ve never seen before by a photographer who I regrettably do not know but it was wonderful to see the work”, he said. He thought it was an exceptionally strong opening to the nightly screenings, “a really great set of photographs, a lot of variety, incredible work by some photographers I know, and many photographers who I don’t know”.

Most of those I spoke to were impressed with Thomas Lekfeldt’s report on a very young girl called Vibe, who lost a fight against a brain tumour. This was part of a triptych of reports that included the Emergency Room in a Paris hospital (Jean-Louis Courtinat) and diabetic patients in Spain (Tino Soriano).

One member of the audience agreed that the whole evening was not exactly joyous in its choice of material, but felt that the main thing was that each photo deserved its place in the screening. “For me it was hard, every picture went into my heart,” she said.