D-3 before the launch of the 36th Visa Pour l’Image. The final preparations are underway. A behind-the-scenes visit to the world’s largest photojournalism festival.
The hanging of the photos is finished. The final checks are made with the festival director.
“It is a precision job because everything has to be aligned, the gaps between the photos have to be similar”, explains Jean-François Leroy, director of Visa pour l’Image.
Visa pour l’Image exhibits between 800 and 900 photos every year. Each one must be perfectly lit.
“What’s nice here is when the light is off and there are just the frames lit up.” he continues meticulously.
More than 50 employees of the Perpignan town hall have been working for a month on the assembly of the 26 exhibitions. An assembly that requires technique and precision.
This goldsmith’s work begins here in a room of the technical center of the town hall. This young team is responsible for framing the photos.
“You have to make sure that the window is very clean because on certain colours, you can see the imperfections a lot, and you also have to make sure that there is not the slightest bit of dust because depending on the lighting and the location, this tends to be visible,” explains Camille Espa, a seasonal worker at Visa for three years.
“The most complicated step is the legends. The entire work chain depends on the legends. Upstream, we prepare the labels and stick them on the other side, to the nearest millimeter“, concludes Bruno Gilles, head of Creation at Perpignan town hall.
The preparation of Visa pour l’image took 4,000 hours of work by around sixty people.
With the program, this year, a summary of the photos that allow you to to delve back into the significant events experienced in recent months. Wars, crises, climate change… and even the Paris Olympic Games will be on the program.
Above all, the 25 carefully chosen exhibitions are the stories of lives shattered by armed conflict, poverty or climate crises.es. This year, 11 of the 25 exhibitions will be devoted to ongoing armed conflicts around the world.
Visa pour l’Image offers free exhibitions throughout the city by photojournalists from around the world including:
- “Venice, Californie”, Karen Ballard
- “A World in Turmoil,” Paula Bronstein / Getty Images
- “Women’s bodies as battlefields”, Cinzia Canneri
- “The Two Walls,” Alejandro Cegarra / The New York Times / Bloomberg
- “Mayotte: under the flag, the journey of the second chance”, Miquel Dewever-Plana for Le Figaro magazine
- “Peripheral France”, Pierre Faure / Hans Lucas
- “Comedy – French: theater stories”, Jean-Louis Fernandez
- “Haiti: the power of gangs”, Corentin Fohlen / Divergence for Paris Match
- “Growing up in the playground of screens”, Jérôme Gence
- “Life under the Taliban 2.0”, Afshin Ismaeli / Aftenposten
- “Grown Upstate: The Legacy of Love in the Collar City, 2013-2023,” Brenda Ann Kenneally
- “The Invisible City”, Paolo Manzo
- “Ecuador: Internal Armed Conflict”, John Moore / Getty Images
- “A photographer’s journey through everyday life, conflict and personal loss,” Emilio Morenatti / AP
- “Cisjordanie”, Sergey Ponomarev / The New York Times / Getty Images
- “Blood Minerals”, Francisco Proner / Agence VU’
- “5 km from the front”, Anastasia Taylor-Lind
- “The ravages of tranquility”, Gaël Turine for Le Figaro magazine
- “On the road”, Ad van Denderen / Agence VU’
- “Voices are raised behind the wall”, Mugur Varzariu
- “Alfred’s Journey”, Alfred Yaghobzadeh.
Moreover, this year An exhibition will allow you to rediscover the events of the Paris Olympic Games in photos by a collective of AFP photographers. Photos changed every day and printed in large format in the courtyard of the Dominican Convent. The Paralympic Games will be followed during the evening screenings at the Campo Santo.
Written with Céline LLambrich.