Foreign Perspectives

The world as seen by photojournalists is a very depressing place. Going by going by the photographs on show for Visa pour L’Image you’d think that half the world was at war, the other half was in the midst of revolutions and all children were malnourised.

Of course, that’s only natural. There’s not nearly so much interest in peaceful places and well-fed children from the point of view of photojournalism.

As usual, the evening show was fantastic. Over the first six days of the festival they go through two months of the year in photos, have several awards, and run a sequence of portfolios on a theme. Last night’s theme was revolution which covered the past revolutions from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Columbia and gave an excellent account of each in pictures (by and large the photos are allowed to stand on their own with no commentary). Separately from those they run about half a dozen separate portfolios on various themes from a review of the work of Joe Rosenthal (who took the famous photo of the marines putting up a flag on a hill in the Pacific) to one on the plight of child rape victims in South Africa (who are as young as THREE).

That’s the world as seen through the lenses of the photojournalists who were exhibiting their work over the past week in Perpignan.

Usually, we’re fairly full with journalists and photographers at this time of year but only had a few this year. Those that have attended before have commented about the lower numbers of people around the festival and even a cursory look at the numbers in the streets shows that there are a good deal fewer people around this year. On the whole, that’s not so much an indication that the festival is standing to wind down into obscurity but rather that there’s quite simply too much going on elsewhere in the world at the moment.

So if you want to see fantastic photographs, come to Perpignan before September 17th but be warned that, whilst brilliant, the vast majority of the images present a very depressing view of the world that we live in.