Our intrepid blogger reflects on international photojournalism festival Visa Pour l'Image from a Finnair flight somewhere over Europe, en route to New York City via Helsinki.
The 21st Visa Pour l’Image is now behind me.
Before I provide some explanations and reflections on the festival, I thought I might share some of my favourite headlines from my free copy of the English language Helsinki Times:
- “Rabbits on the rampage”
- “Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms”
- “Toilets are not rubbish bins”
- “Winnins not essential as long as Sweden loses” (a typo, not a reference to an athlete named Winnins)
- “Italy thrown against Germany”
- “Fungal Cornucopia”
Now that’s out of the way, I might as well explain how Visa Pour l’Image functions, from the perspective of a freelance photojournalist.
Upon arrival in Perpignan everyone heads to pick up their accreditation at Hotel Pams, a now defunct 18th century hotel that houses the Visa pour l?image management and press offices during the festival. Everyone, including Charby the press office dog, is issued with a credit card sized name tag that states whether the owner is a photographer, a member of the press, an agency, a sponsor, an institution or staff.
In previous years, the different occupations were distinguished by a coloured strip - red for photographers, burgundy for agencies, blue for press and so on. Although the strip has been replaced by text this year, freelancers such as myself, who are relatively new to the scene, spend an inordinate amount of time peering at name tags to see whether the owner might be from an high profile publication such as National Geographic, Stern, Paris Match or The New York Times. To add to the difficulty, the tags are one-sided and tend flip over to their blanks side when they swing about on their lanyards.
Usually though, photo editors are best found in the courtyard at Hotel Pams or on the balcony of the seventh floor of Palais des congres. You can often spot them by all of the freelancers milling around with laptops, boxes of prints or portfolio books. Some editors such as Harold Menk from the German pictorial Stern are booked out for the whole week, with appointments made as early as March.
The impression that I gained from meetings this week was that things are grim for the majority of publications and agencies. Many magazines will tell you immediately that, unlike previous years, they are not looking to buy stories and cannot afford to do so. Agencies lamented that the floor space was emptier than ever before. The industry looks in bad shape.
On the other hand, the exhibitions tell a different story. Work of high quality is still being produced and judging by number of viewers at the exhibitions, people (and not just photographers) want to see the work. Tellingly though, 85% of the images exhibited at Visa are unpublished.
Dave Tacon is a freelance photojournalist who kindly blogged his experiences at Visa Pour l’Image for the Walkleys. See more of Dave’s work
