“Because the world is even less balanced than usual, it has never needed Visa pour l’Image so much”
This is how Jean-François Leroy, director of the Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan (France), reminds us how much “the world is doing badly” and how much “journalism is a profession on the front line against all the bad news on the planet.”
As it has done for the past 37 years, the international photojournalism festival in Perpignan shows global crises through images, not with objectivity—“the first word we should ban from our journalistic folklore,” as the director points out—but always striving for “honesty.” Each year, Visa pour l’Image selects the best of photojournalism, “from the field and not from social media; images made by humans and not by social networks.”
The eyes of Gaza
They are the eyes of Gaza. On September 3, photojournalist Saher Alghorra received the CICR Humanitarian Visa d’Or, awarded each year to a professional photojournalist who has covered a humanitarian issue linked to armed conflict, for his work in the Gaza Strip.
“I will continue to document the trials, the resilience, and the strength of Palestinian families trapped in this conflict, until, hopefully, their ordeal comes to an end.”
Still on the field today, he sent a video message from the smoke of the rubble. “My work focuses on the suffering of civilians during the conflict. We have been working for 700 days in difficult and exceptional conditions […] this war is unprecedented, we have never seen anything like it anywhere else, a war so violent and brutal,” he said. His images testify to the human tragedy unfolding there and to the extreme commitment of photographers who manage to document it under bombs, evacuations, and famine. “I will continue to document the trials, the resilience, and the strength of Palestinian families trapped in this conflict, until, hopefully, their ordeal comes to an end,” he wrote.
Fatima Hassouna also documented daily life in Gaza since October 2023. It was her home. She was killed six months ago, on April 16, 2025, along with ten members of her family, during an Israeli bombing. She was 25 years old. The festival pays tribute to her by exhibiting her photographs. Franco-Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi dedicated a documentary to her, Put your soul on your hand and walk, screened at the Cannes Festival this year, compiling phone calls and videos between the director and the young journalist.
Shadows and ruins
“30% of Ukrainian territory has been devastated and mined.”
Surviving amid ruins is also the daily reality of the Ukrainian people. French photographer Gaëlle Girbes went to meet residents who decided to remain in the midst of war. In the village of Kam’yanka, in the Kharkiv region, there were 863 inhabitants before the Russian invasion. Today, only 47 remain. The city of Vuhledar had more than 18,000 inhabitants. Today only 139 are recorded.
The photojournalist reminds us that “30% of Ukrainian territory has been devastated and mined” and that a total of 4.6 million Ukrainians are believed to have lost their homes. Gaëlle Girbes shows these men and women among the ruins, rebuilding their homes with salvaged materials, cultivating a garden to feed themselves despite the risk of mines. “The war has sent them back from a modern and comfortable era to a medieval era,” she reports.
Other ruins dot the globe. Visa is there to show them to us. Irishman Ivor Prickett, a correspondent for the New York Times, was awarded the Visa d’Or for his work on the war in Sudan. He was one of the few journalists able to access the country to cover the battle of Khartoum, which pitted the Sudanese army against the paramilitary RSF (Rapid Support Forces) militia between 2023 and 2025 for control of the capital.
The Earth is crying
The festival also focuses on the climate crisis and global overconsumption. For more than a decade, George Steinmetz has traveled through forty countries to show us how the food that ends up on our plates is produced.
“With the world population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and rising living standards in rapidly developing countries, it is estimated that global food production will need to double over the next thirty years,” he reminds us through striking images, sometimes taken from the sky with a drone or motorized paraglider, of intensive agriculture or livestock farming. A long-term project rewarded this year with the Figaro Magazine Honorary Visa d’Or.
Some are trying to preserve treasures of biodiversity. Virunga National Park is the oldest and largest park in Africa. Located in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it is threatened by armed groups. Photographer Brent Stirton followed those who are trying to protect this area. His report won the Visa d’Or Magazine. Today, more than half of this park is controlled by M23 rebels, supported by Rwanda. Controlling the cities of Goma and Bukavu, the March 23 Movement is also at the heart of the work of photojournalist Paloma Laudet, who met with the population living in fear under this new authority.
Rocky Fire (2015), Camp Fire (2018), Bear Fire (2020), Dixie Fire (2021)… Since 2015, Josh Edelson has been covering wildfires in the American West and testifying to the growing intensity of these infernos. The Eaton Fire, which devastated the Los Angeles area last January, killing more than 20 people, destroying 12,000 buildings, and forcing 150,000 residents to evacuate, was described by President Biden as “the most devastating in California’s history.” In the midst of the blaze, Josh Edelson captures the struggle of firefighters but also the distress and anger of residents who have lost everything.
The forgotten people of the world
Some give back some dignity to the forgotten ones. A figure of social photography, Jean-Louis Courtinat presents 40 years of a career devoted to the most fragile, the forgotten, the homeless, the disabled, the elderly. Assistant to Robert Doisneau, Courtinat is a humanist. “He doesn’t try to give lessons, he just tries to be fair,” says Heloise Conesa, Chief Heritage Curator in charge of the contemporary photography collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). For forty years, the photographer traveled across France and turned his lens toward the excluded and the invisible.
“I have always tried to photograph not only poverty and hardship, but also to show the dignity of people.”
One cannot help but associate him with the work of Eugene Richards, Stephen Shames, and Jean-Pierre Laffont, who also devoted themselves to showing history’s forgotten. “The United States remains a great country. But there is also the other side. There is the ideal, and what really happens,” says Stephen Shames (read the article dedicated to him by Blind Magazine here).
The Massachusetts-born photographer, who was close to the Black Panthers, has also dedicated 60 years of photography to showing the reality of “millions of children in the street” and to giving a face to social distress in the United States and around the world. “I have always tried to photograph not only poverty and drama, but also to show people’s dignity.”
Jean-Pierre Laffont, now 90, is honored at Visa with a formidable retrospective (read his interview in Blind Magazine here) of his years covering the world, particularly the United States, where he first set foot in 1965. For him, “the American dream has changed” and “has another face today,” but he continues to love this country that gave him his chance. “I continue to love it tenderly, with much affection and respect.”
From the 1960s to the 1990s, he was at the front row of American history: anti-Vietnam War protests, Richard Nixon’s resignation, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the rise of the Black Power movement, the Ku Klux Klan, the launch of Apollo XI. His photos appear in history textbooks. Photographer of celebrities (Brigitte Bardot, Charles Aznavour, Alfred Hitchcock, André Malraux…), he also went to meet young people in the Bronx, prisoners, farmers, and poor families in Arkansas or Georgia to understand this country he adopted.
“Being photographed is a way to come out of the shadows and not be forgotten,” adds Eugene Richards. At 81, the former Magnum member also shows the silent faces of America. Taken from his book Do I know you?, his exhibition spans decades of photographs, animated by curiosity, the desire to open the doors of the most destitute, to listen to them “without asking any questions,” and to keep a record.
From abandoned Iraq war veterans to the shadows of slavery, his deeply sensitive images evoke love and hope in an America we often forget to see. “Even if the numbers are dropping, we are still talking about 30 million poor people (for a population of more than 340 million). That is the reality. Many issues, such as race or gender, are coming back to the forefront.” So Eugene Richards decided to set out again this year on the roads of America, “to try, myself, to understand where we are and where we are going.”
37th International Festival of Photojournalism Visa pour l’Image, in Perpignan, France until September 14, every day from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., free admission. A selection of visual reports will be screened on November 28 and 29 at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers (Hauts-de-Seine), free with reservation.
