Until September 11, the 34th edition of this major photojournalism event offers exhibitions, screenings and debates highlighting and explaining the work of press photographers.

"Unfortunately, the world continues outside Ukraine (...) Things are happening all over the planet that, because of Ukraine, we no longer talk about. And we are committed to showing the news of the world as a whole," Jean-François Leroy, founder of Visa in 1989 and always attached to not limiting the festival to a single subject, "as important as it may be," told AFP.

From the endless Afghan war seen by Andrew Quilty of the VU agency, to the Burmese rebels in the lens of Siegfried Modola, and from the environmental apocalypse documented by Alain Ernoult to the impact of industrial fishing shown by George Steinmetz, 25 exhibitions are on the program.

Like the Covid-19 pandemic last year, the current war in Ukraine - which has made headlines since last February with the attack on Russia, but "rumbles for eight years at the gates of Europe" , recalls Jean-François Leroy - obviously could not be absent from Visa.

Ukraine and its context

Thus, the exhibition of photos by Sergei Supinsky, from Agence France-Presse (AFP), who documented the Soviet republic, then independence, the Maidan revolution in 2014, the Orange revolution, etc., makes it possible to recontextualize today's conflict.

In addition, the festival will count among its guests Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka, the last journalists to have covered the blockade of Mariupol for the Associated Press (AP), and exfiltrated in March by the doctors of the hospital of this city devastated by the Russian bombings.

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"As every year, there are plenty of favorites: photographers who come back because when they do interesting things, we receive them with pleasure (...) and discoveries", added the director of Visa .

"Without respite", Lebanese photographer Tamara Saade denounces with her images "the negligence and corruption", at the origin of the chemical explosion which ravaged part of Beirut in August 2020, and of the economic depression in which s bogged down his country.

Françoise Huguier puts herself "all in the background" to reveal the intimacy of a fashion show, Korean back shops or the last community apartments in Saint Petersburg.

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Human complexity and fragility are also at the heart of Valerio Bispuri's "Chambers of the Mind" on the invisible world of mental illness, or the misery of Americans "On the Margins" by Eugene Richards.

Screenings and debates

Six evening screenings, which are Visa's signature, retrace the most significant events of the last twelve months.

The images of Ukraine, but also of the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan, of the conflicts in Syria, in Yemen, in Sudan will thus be discovered, or seen again, on a giant screen at Campo Santo, an emblematic medieval site in Perpignan.

Debates, conferences, tributes and meetings with photographers also punctuate the days of the festival.

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The work of the media to "disarm fake news" will be one of the themes of the exchanges, Jean-François Leroy inviting us not to see it as "one more nail in the coffin of +classic+ photojournalism, but rather an additional tool in the information ecosystem, to enrich the message conveyed by the image".

The various prizes, which reward the best reports of the past year, will be awarded from August 31, culminating in the Visa d'or News during the evening of September 3, which will close the professional week.

After two years impacted by the Covid, Jean-François Leroy and his team hope to "find a truly normal festival", open to the world and imbued with discoveries, conviviality, before Visa also exhibits at La Villette, in Paris from September 16 to 30.

© 2022 AFP