Visa 2010 – Perpignan

Another edition of VISA gone by; quite a decent year but not a vintage year. Whilst economies across the globe are gradually emerging from the crisis, photojournalism, at least as we knew it, is still struggling to recover, if it ever will. My personal impression was that this year’s festival saw fewer attendants both in the photographers’ and the media & agencies’ camps, hopefully not the beginning of a trend.

On the brighter side, young and outstanding talent keeps emerging:Stephanie Sinclair’s story on polygamy within the FLDS church was the exhibition I shall remember from this year’s edition. Other inspirational works were Andrea Star Reese’s “The Urban Cave” and Cedric Gerbehaye‘s story on the Congo River. Two media events of 2010, the Haiti earthquake and the violent clashes between the military and Red Shirts in Bangkok were to my taste excessively represented across both the exhibitions and the nightly projections. I am not questioning the quality of the work covering these two events  but in an era where even the most talented of photographers experience difficulties getting their work published, do we really need to have more than  one exhibition (plus evening projections) on the same story. The very catastrophic and spectacular nature of these events does guarantee them press coverage anyway. Should a festival like Visa – which for two years running deplores the death of photojournalism – not open more of their scarce exhibition space and projection airtime to those photoessays  which precisely stand in the frontline of the media machinery that mows down what is now considered ‘non-commercial’ documentary work. Just a personal thought.

And as usual, the festival offered lots of opportunities to form connections & make contacts and see old friends again from across the planet.

Last but not least, this year I was glad I could make a modest contribution to the Visa Off festival with my own exhibition; a series of images that were taken in Belgium in Dec 09 and that were meant to transmit the feeling of being “On the Road”. The exhibition is showing at Declic Cafe on the Place de la Republique, Perpignan and will be on until 14th September. Below are a few pics of the exhibition.

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