The 33rd Visa pour l'image photojournalism festival is taking place this year in Perpignan in the south of France despite notable absences linked to the Covid crisis and world conflicts.
The organisers of the international festival which opens on Saturday 28 August and will run until 26 September, are announcing a total of 25 photo exhibitions spread around the city centre of Perpignan, as well as screenings.
A Covid health pass will be required to see the exhibitions and the screenings will be held every evening at the Campo Santo and the municipal theatre with a limited capacity, but also on the Internet.
The 2021 edition is however marked by a number of absences.
Danish Siddiqui, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Photography, will not be able to attend the presentation in Perpignan of his exhibition on Covid-19 in New Delhi.
The Reuters news agency photojournalist died on 16 July, killed in Afghanistan while covering the fights between Afghan security forces and the Taliban.
There will be no American or British exhibitors at this 2021 edition.
"Brian Skerry, who has done work on whales, cannot come because he has a commission a week after the festival and has to spend 15 days in quarantine on his way back to the United States," festival director Jean-François Leroy explained in a press conference.
However, this 2021 edition is promising with, in particular, the retrospective of forty years (1981-2021) of reports by Eric Bouvet, a French photographer who spent his life documenting humanity. "Inside the photographer's mind there is always the best picture which is yet to be taken, the picture as a quest to be pursued," he writes.
Two photojournalists respectively from France and Italy will also show their work. Jerome Gence's report entitled Allo bureau dodo, documenting remote working from Bali in Indonesia to Europe, before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gabriele Galimberti with The Ameriguns, presents his work as follows: "A few years ago, I read that there are more privately owned guns than people in the US. I immediately thought of my American friends who, to my knowledge, do not own guns. And like them, many other Americans do not own any guns. So I asked myself, 'Then who owns all these guns?'."
The work of 16 Syrian photographers who covered 10 years of war in their country will also be on display as well as that of Abir Abdullah with climate migrants in Bangladesh.
And many others.
► Visa pour l'image runs from 28 August to 26 September 2021.
