• Elle round table
• Symposium
• Other meetings
• Fnac book signing

Symposium

Pictures - News - Knowledge

Visa pour l'Image-Perpignan is now twenty years old, but our symposium has only been part of the program for six years. Yet these six years have been opportunities for presenting so many different points of view, for making stances (sometimes radically different from "Festival ideas"), for conducting analyses and offering suggestions. This was the goal when we decided to organize meetings with panelists whose only point in common was their interest in news and pictures. Contributions have been made by philosophers, academics, researchers, historians, editors, photographers and journalists, both French and international.

The seminar for the 20th Festival will be held on Thursday, September 4 and Friday, September 5, 2008.

The subject will be a further exploration of the question we began investigating last year.

"A Crisis for Photojournalism, a Crisis for Journalism
or a Crisis for News?
Pictures and the way they are used.
Do they still convey news? Can they convey knowledge?"

Thousands of photos are sent to Visa pour l'Image-Perpignan as proposals for exhibitions and evening programs, and over the last two or three years, these pictures have been increasingly "neat and tidy", increasingly standardized and, to put it bluntly, tedious, with the same old stories, seen from the same old angles; and this tendency is getting even stronger. Looking at the way visual expression has deteriorated, we would like our annual symposium to attempt to find an explanation, or even suggest solutions. Are we going through a period of crisis, a crisis in communication, or in the value of the symbols we produce, or a broader crisis affecting ideas, discussion and meaning as they become commoditized?

Photojournalism is inevitably exposed, right there on the front line when the written press is under threat and when news is seen as worthless with newspapers being given away for free. Should we consider that the development of modern technology and the unprecedented expansion of modern media are the culprits?

The press seems to be developing in such a way that any innovations, risk-taking, collective ventures, solidarity and aspirations to question the world and the way it is moving are destined to fail. Can this trend be reversed? How could it be done? What price would have to be paid? With the art of spin and so many techniques used every day to manipulate news and information, right there for us all to see, we can observe these tactics targeting the entire news chain – words and pictures, both still and moving.
For more than thirty years, Noam Chomsky has been warning us about the mass media and standardized news produced by a select group of journalists accepted in the right circles. In France, Serge Halimi has spoken out against the new generation watchdogs – a small group of journalists who are omnipresent, imposing their definition of commoditized news on the professionals in the news business whose position is getting weaker by the day. In France, a book recently published, titled Notre métier a mal tourné by two journalists (P. Cohen & E. Lévy), laments the same decline. In response to this, Normand Baillargeon has produced a "Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense" including a chapter on the media giving an excellent summary of the situation. And there are any number of similar examples.

Does a photo reporter who wants to work these days have to agree to be "embedded", as seen in Kuwait and Iraq? This has also been seen in France, with the latest presidential campaign, and, this year, a raid in a rough district outside Paris with police accompanied by a news team. Does "embedded photography" mean "socially formatted news"? Does it mean "getting into bed" with the powers behind the news?

What then happens to reports by photojournalists who do not get into bed with the media moguls, who work relentlessly, conducting their own investigations, out in the field, taking photos to report on what they have actually seen. They may be lucky enough to present these pictures at Visa pour l'Image, but that is obviously not the ultimate goal!

Jean Lelièvre (organizer symposium)

Panelists:

Thursday, September 4
Patrick Champagne	Sociologist (INRA & European Sociology Center – University of PARIS 1)
Françoise Denoyelle	Historian, teacher at Ecole Louis Lumière
Pierre Haski	Journalist, President of RUE89.com
David Griffin	Director of Photography, National Geographic Magazine (USA)
Christian Salmon	Writer, member of the Research Center on the Arts & Language (CNRS)

Friday, September 5
Christian Salmon	Writer, member of the Research Center on the Arts and Language (CNRS)
Robert Ménard	Secretary General, Reporters sans Frontières
Gary Knight	Photojournalist, VII agency
Olivier Royant	Editor, Paris Match
Patrick Champagne	Sociologist (INRA & European Sociology Center – University of (PARIS 1)

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