Summary
They watch the world for us. All across the planet, every day, cameras are clicking, bringing back images from troubled spots, conflicts and earth-shattering events. At the Visa Pour L'Image festival in Perpignan, director Jean-Francois Leroy has brought together some of the best recent photographs. Vicky Allan talks to a few of the bold photojournalists about their work, passions and motivations
"PHOTOJOURNALISTS are my eyes, " says JeanFrancois Leroy. "They are my witness. They are watching the world for me and I want to see what they are watching." The director of Visa Pour L'Image, a French festival of photojournalism in Perpignan, believes photographers allow us to do our own personal duty of "seeing and watching" the world. They are our envoys, the witnesses we need to function as responsible, political global citizens. But all too often their work, once published, is left languishing in portfolios, "You know to highlight them in a festival like this is to give them the place they deserve, " Leroy says. "In a newspaper or a magazine the writer will get their name in big letters, but the photographer, no one knows his or her name. It's written very small or misspelled."See the full content of this document
Extract
Warning Shots
Leroy has selected all kinds of eyes.
There are eyes, like Jerome Sessini's, which have observed the conflict in Iraq from many angles: the streets of Baghdad, a US soldier's day-to-day life or conflict photographs taken while embedded with US military. His most famous series of photographs was of a DHL plane being targeted by resistance fighter missiles. The plane landed safely, despite being hit by one of the missiles, but Sessini was accused of having been a te...See the full content of this document
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