Every year since 1989, we have been endeavoring to show you a selection of the best reporting, the best photojournalism, and to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Visa pour l’Image, we wanted to offer you something unusual.

Visitors, photographers, picture editors, journalists and other interested parties are always asking us how we produce our program of exhibitions and evening shows. Invariably our answer to their question is: “It’s our own lousy taste.” This is obviously an inept or flippant way of describing the way we see our work, but it does come close to it: the choices made when devising and developing the program are quite simply based on our own firm opinions and our concept of photography. After working this way, we can express satisfaction that we have been able to see the great names in photojournalism, and new talents (some of whom we have discovered and supported), featured here on the walls of the Couvent des Minimes, and on the screen at Campo Santo.

Logically therefore, it was difficult, or even incompatible with our approach, to attempt to have a presentation of the “great” photos of these past thirty years. Instead, we wanted to present a selection of “our” great photos. These pictures here are excerpts from the past, from the history of the festival, and also, and more importantly, from the history of the photographers who have made the festival. Each picture, in its own way, has marked us, has told us a story which, as we come to celebrate this 30th anniversary, strikes us as still being relevant. Here are messages that deserve to be echoed everywhere around this city. Here are tales, here are people met and stories told that have all contributed to the drafting of the history of Visa pour l’Image, and which we would like to share with you. This may be the anniversary of the festival, but it is also in part your anniversary too.
Enjoy the exhibition!

Jean-François Leroy & Delphine Lelu