The Visa pour Image festival in Perpignan is amazing experience. For two weeks every September Perpignan opens up lots of its historical buildings to display the world”s best photo journalism. This year the festival was from the 1st September finishing this Sunday the 16th.
It is hard hitting stuff, Syria, Palestine/Israel, Rhoginyas, Yemen, Bangladesh sweat shops, the Red Ants in South Africa, Bolivian silver miners. It is hard hitting stuff, I usually can manage about three hours of it and then you get misery overload.
We don’t go every year, you have to be in the right mood. but it is always good to be reminded of the women and men who go into these intense situations and take a record, often under great pressure to stay away by the actors who would rather their deeds did not see the light of day. the media comes in for some heavy stick these days, for the Left it is right wing bias, for the right it is staffed by a load of pinkos. For climate change deniers it is in the hands of tree hugging hippies, for environmentalist it is dominated by the vested interests of big business. While all this flak is going on the a small band of journalists, film crews and photographers are risking their lives to get the stories from the world’s war zones, from the refugee camps, from inside the factories and farms.
This year the exhibition that stood out for me was Big Food by George Stienmetz and the Bobby Sands and H block protests by Yan Morvan.
Stienmetz’s Big Food opens with a mug shot of Stienmetz and his colleague taken by the police after they were arrested flying over one of America’s biggest ranch, 36,000 head of steer. It then goes on to show images of the world’s largest industrial agricultural business the world over, from the Brazilian chicken farm that has 4 million birds and produces 2.9 million eggs a day, to the vast cereal monoculture of the American Mid West,the destroyed mangrove swamps of Madagascar transformed into shrimp farms, the rice paddies of China, the Norwegian fjords netted off for salmon farms and the giant factory ships used to process fish. It is a truly awe inspiring take on industrial agriculture, a business that as the world expands and the developing world gets richer, and the demand for protein rises way beyond the population increase. Makes you realise that all our banging on about small scale organic production is really just a complete irrelevant side show in the serious and profitable business of feeding the world as cheaply as possible.
Morvan’s Bobby Sands and the H block protests was a different cup of tea altogether. I have memories of the protest from my childhood. British Troops, burning cars, children throwing Molotov cocktails on the Falls Road.
Both left moving images that will remain with me until next year’s exhibition.
As well as the official Visa pour Image exhibitions there has sprung up a large Visa Off festival with bars, hair dressers, restaurants, the local newspaper all opening their walls to photographers, a lot local. they make a break from the doom and gloom of the years news and some are well worth a visit.
See the website for Visa pour Images for more information
