The first Visa d'Or has been awarded yesterday evening in Perpignan, France.

The US newspaper Dallas Morning News received the Visa d'Or of the international daily press at the 20th Visa Pour l'Image festival.

The Dallas Morning News received the award, as well as €8000 from the French railway company SNCF, for its report The Bottom Line written by Mona Reeder.

In The Bottom Line, Reeder explored, using images, Texas' poverty and other poor rankings in a series of subjects such as environmental protection and immigration. Earlier this year, the reportage won other prestigious awards such as the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism prize for domestic photography or the Community Service Photojournalism Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Check back later today and over the week-end for more news from Visa Pour l'Image.

BJP has finally arrived in Perpignan for the 20th Visa Pour l'Image photojournalism festival. Deputy editor Diane Smyth and news editor Olivier Laurent will be reporting from the event all week-end, with extra features such as video interviews and reports coming over the next few days.

We just finished talking with photographer Yuri Kozyrev, who has been in Iraq for the past six years, reporting for Time magazine. He talked to us about the meaning of Visa Pour l'Image, why Iraq is, for him, the most important news story of the moment and how he works in a country plagued by violence. We will be posting, later today, the full interview.

In the meantime, Visa Pour l'Image has announced that Canon renewed its sponsorship of the event for the next five years. Canon has been the festival's principal sponsor for the past 19 years.Spokespersons at Visa are saying that 'this is the first time such a major and long-term sponsorship arrangement has been signed'.

'Visa pour l’Image pays tribute to the talent and courage of the best photographers in the business, and Canon is proud to reinforce this sentiment,' says Mogens Jensen, head of Canon Consumer Imaging Europe.

Getty Images photographer Brent Stirton has received the Visa d'Or Features last night in Perpignan at the Visa Pour l'Image photojournalism festival.

Stirton won for his reportage, commissionned by Newsweek and National Geographic, in Virunga National Park, Africa's first National Park, which is home to the endangered mountain gorilla. The park is also the only source of hardwood in the war-ravaged region from which to make good quality charcoal. The charcoal manufacturers use the rebel occupation to conceal their business activities. Complicating things further is the fact that two major rebel armies occupy the park: the CNDP under rebel Congolese General Laurent Nkunda, and their sworn enemies, the FDLR Interhamwe, who have lived in the forests since they were chased there after the Rwandan genocide.

For the same reportage, Stirton won the first prize singles in the Contemporary Issues category at this year's World Press Photo.

Image © Brent Stirton/Getty Images, courtesy of Visa Pour l'Image.

Philip Blenkinsop has won the Visa d'Or News awards at Perpignan's photojournalism festival for his reportage of the China earthquake.

The emotional announcement was made on a Perpignan street after the official award ceremony was rained off. Jean-François Leroy, Visa Pour l'Image's director, went directly to Blenkinsop at the Le Divine restaurant where the Noor photographer was dining.

Jean-François Leroy with Visa d'Or News winner Philip Blenkinsop

'I feel like Paris Hilton,' Blenkinsop said as he received the award surrounded by dozens of photographers. 'I'll need to punch one of you out.'

Blenkinsop won €8000 donated by French magazine Paris Match. 'It's not about the money,' Blenkinsop said. 'It's the most incredible honour. It means more to me than any other prize. I have so much respect for Visa. It gives you courage to keep going.'

He added that over the past 12 years he had missed the Visa festival only once. 'I come back because I support this man [Leroy] and this crew. If I were ever stuck in a nasty little jail, I know they would do all they can to get me out. I know you would fight for us,' he told Leroy.

Blenkinsop thanked his family - the Noor photo agency. Finally, he praised Perpignan's mayor for supporting the event. 'That's the longest Jean-François has ever let me speak,' he concluded.

Jean-François Leroy hugs an emotional Philip Blenkinsop

Jean-François Leroy launched his Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival 20 years ago. The leading force behind all the operations, Leroy has a reputation for his strong opinions – which he says is misinterpreted as being bad temper. BJP’s Olivier Laurent talks to him in Perpignan.

Jean-François Leroy in Perpignan. Image by Olivier Laurent.

BJP: Véronique de Viguerie [the Paris Match photographer who took pictures of Talibans responsible for the death of 10 French soldiers] has been criticised for her work. Care to weigh in?
Jean-François Leroy: There is no controversy. Veronique does her job, she reports. It doesn’t mean that I support the Talibans. It seems that it’s only today that France realises it has been at war for the past six years. When a newspaper published images of Iraqis fighting the weapons of American soldiers they killed, no one minded. It’s not an apology of violence. What do these images show? They show that the Talibans are organised and that we are not winning it. It’s not propaganda. If the media had shown the video of the attack the Talibans posted on the Internet, then yes, that would be propaganda. Last year, Véronique was at Visa. Her exhibition was about the Talibans. So it’s not a media coup, it’s the result of years of work. The work of a journalist.

BJP: Back to the festival, it seems that such event is only possible in France, a country that continues to publish photo reportages in its magazines while others, including the UK, seem to favour the written text over photos. Why is that?
Jean-François Leroy: France is the cradle of photography. It gave photography to the world. This festival would not be possible anywhere else. I see photography attracting people in the US or in Italy, but it’s true that France is a bit of an exception.

BJP: Is photojournalism in crisis for the lack of exposure photographers get in the press?
Jean-François Leroy: For the past twenty years we have been saying that the print media doesn’t do its job, but this year I had 12 magazines ordering me photo reportages from 12 photographers. I show them that when one magazine invests time and resources in a photographer, they get something amazing. So, yes I am happy, but I’m still worried. I would prefer if this would happen all the time and not just for Visa’s 20th anniversary. But, I tell you, next year, I will have 20.

BJP: Some newspapers have started using larger images on their websites (see out article in the next issue of BJP). Is this encouraging?
Jean-François Leroy: If only they paid for these. Everywhere I hear that the advertising market online is going through the roof, but no one spends money on the photos. This year, I must have had offers from more than 20 magazines offering to publish Visa online. They wanted to promote the festival online but they didn’t want to pay for any of the pictures. I said no. I get two images per exhibition I can use however I want (still with limitations of course) that’s it. If you want more images, you have to pay for them, and that’s normal!

BJP: This year saw Getty Images becoming an official sponsor for the first time.
Jean-François Leroy: Getty is a very nice partner, as long as they don’t ask anything I cannot in good conscience do. They do have excellent photographers. Getty is a great marketer by showing that they can make money, but they still do have a pretty damn good editorial division.

BJP: And Canon just announced it would support the festival for a further five years. Was this surprising?
Jean-François Leroy: Five years was the best news. I spent so many difficult winters when I lost sponsors. Canon’s contract was coming to an end this year, so it was excellent to get them to sign for five more years. I’m luck to have smart partners – they are not sponsors, they are partners. Two years ago, Kristen Ashburn of Contact Press Images won the Canon Female Photojournalist Prize with her 6x6 black-and-white analogue photos. I was worried they might not be happy about it, but they just told me “It’s the jury’s choice, we cannot and don’t want to intervene.” Signing for five years shows the confidence they have in us.

BJP: Some critics think that the festival shows too much of the same photographers. After 20 years, do you still have a fresh eye? How do you choose the photographers and photos that will make Visa?
Jean-François Leroy: How do I choose the images? It’s my bad taste. I had someone tell me yesterday: “It’s not your fault if all your friends are the best photographers in the world.” Take Paolo [Pellegrin] for example, he grew up with us. He came to me 19 years ago with his work. Now, he is a superstar, he is fully booked for the next year, but he still comes to Visa. Do I still have a fresh eye? Ask the different collectives, look at Guillaume Herbaut and others. I look at everything I’m sent. If you send me a CD of your work, I will look at it and answer you. I receive a lot of crap projects, but I still answer them all. The day it will bother me to look at someone’s work, I’ll be done. I had the chance to create the festival I wanted. If you don’t like it, just create yours. Good luck.

Visa Pour l’Image will go on for another two weeks. The third week, which is not advertised, will see Leroy and five photographers visit Perpignan’s schools to inform pupils about the photojournalism’s values. This year, to celebrate Visa’s 20th anniversary, the commemorative slide show will be shown in Paris on November 03 and 04. The next day, Leroy will go on holiday.

Diane Smyth talks to Philip Blenkinsop (middle) and Stanley Greene (right) Image © Olivier Laurent

‘When photographers have an agenda, when they put their heart and soul into it, when they breathe and sleep and bleed with the people they’re photographing, that’s when they get the best work,’ Philip Blenkinsop told me, just hours before he was presented with the Visa d’Or for his reportage on China’s earthquake. ‘Photographers who expect to be paid for it are in the wrong business. You should be doing it because you’re passionate about issues and injustices and want to shine a light on them and give people a voice. If you don’t get paid for it that’s tough, but you keep going and keep trying. The greatest payment you can have is to know that you’ve done that in a responsible way.’

Blenkinsop gave his interview for the BJP alongside Stanley Greene, a friend and fellow member of Noor – the photo agency launched at last year’s Visa Pour l’Image. ‘Philip is a true journalist,’ said Greene. ‘He risks everything to go and do stories nobody knows about.’

But although both men have devoted their lives to photojournalism and passionately believe in the power of photography to advocate for change, they also added that sometimes the photographer’s greatest responsibility is to simply stop taking pictures. Blenkinsop critised the 24-hour media culture encouraging photographers to generate instant news, explaining ‘I never feel that pressure [to take the quick picture]. You have to keep your integrity. You see it and you leave it because you know the shallow nature of those images.’

On the face of it, Brent Stirton’s portfolio is riven with contradictions. Having started out as a war photographer, he’s since shot Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s first child and more recently found fame with a set of images of African gorillas. But, says this year’s Visa d’Or Features winner, to him there’s no contrast. There’s just the 21st century world as the best way to get his message across in it. Diane Smyth found out more.

BJP: Do you ever feel there’s a contrast between your environmental projects and the type of photojournalism more usually seen at Visa Pour l’Image, which depicts human issues and suffering?
Brent Stirton: No – all these things are connected. The plight of the gorillas in the Virunga National Park is directly linked to Congo’s ongoing conflict and the battle for scarce resources. The war in the Congo is the worst in the world – 5.4 million people have died there since 1996. But the problems are a result of pure corruption, greed and power plays and the same can be said of pretty much any war. We spend too much time isolating incidents and not enough thinking about the connections between them.

BJP: How does the celebrity portraiture you’ve done with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie fit into this work? [Stirton’s photographs of Pitt and Jolie’s first baby, Shiloh, was sold to people magazine for $7m in 2006]
Brent Stirton: The whole mission of photojournalism is to bring about positive change and education, that’s really about it. I could shoot for 20 years and not raise the kind of finance those images raised, all of which was put directly into hospitals and programmes which will directly change peoples’ lives. It’s all one and the same to me. It’s frustrating that there is more money for celerity photographs than photojournalism but I don’t lose any sleep over it. It’s the world we’re in. People work very hard and come home to their distractions. Humans haven’t been out of the cave very long, we’re not very bright. What Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have done is to take that celebrity equation and turn it on its head. When you consider it’s something originally set up by a 26 year old woman it’s really remarkable. I think people should spend more time applauding that and stop looking for the holes in it.

BJP: How has the internet changed photojournalism?
Brent Stirton: We’ve created a 24-hour news cycle to feed an advertising machine. We’ve allowed our economic motivations to outweigh where we are as a civilisation in terms of documenting that civilisation. We’re not thinking about how long it takes to really think about issues. I don’t want to think about sensational pictures, I’m thinking about meaningful, intelligent images.
But I also think that the internet is an opportunity for photojournalists. Look at MediaStorm – Brian Storm turned Paul Fusco’s photographs of Chernobyl into a multimedia presentation and 18m people saw it in the first week. How much money could you make if you charged each person $1, or even 20 cents? [As a photographic community] we’re mishandling this thing. We’re doing a poor job at telling people how much difference they could make if they donated just a small amount of money. We need to get better at attaching value to our images. We need to think of them as commodities with emotional resonance and attach financial value to that.

BJP: It’s interesting to hear you refer to a photograph as a commodity and using the language of business. Have photojournalists been too squeamish about the economics?
Brent Stirton: Photographers have been too precious – it’s ridiculous. This isn’t about us, it’s about the message. We’re reactionary by nature but we need to take that reaction and think about it, to look at the potential.
We’ve made the mistake of resenting business people. Government response to HIV has been nothing less than shameful, genocidal in some countries. The business community has stepped in, providing research, providing retroviral drugs because they can see that if they don’t do something their labour force is history. They’re making a practical business decision which has lead to an improved understanding of humanistic values. I believe HIV infection rates would have been 30 per cent worse without the business community. I want to work with that community, so I’ve been working with the Global Business Coalition, an organisation that includes the 400 most powerful companies in the world. I also work with government thinktanks. In a sense I’m not interested in editorial, I’m interested in influencing business and political decisions. If you’re not doing that, what you’re ultimately doing is indulging yourself at the expense of others.

Visa Pour l'Image's professional week is over. But the exhibitions will still be open to the public for the next week. Here are a few pictures of the world's largest and most prestigious photojournalism festival held in Perpignan.

Hotel Pams is Visa Pour l'Image's hub. Photographers, journalists, photo editors and others meet to discuss their latest work or just to chat over a drink.

Check after the jump for more pictures.

Nina Berman has been coming to the Visa Pour l’Image photofestival for the past 16 years. The quiet little ‘odd ball’ as she calls herself had her first exhibition in Perpignan in1997. This year, her work, she tells BJP’s news editor Olivier Laurent, is in contrast to anything else exposed.

Nina Berman exposes her 'Homeland, USA' series at the Couvent des Minimes. Picture © Olivier Laurent

Berman worked for seven years on her ‘Homeland, USA’ series. The pictures explore the meaning of militarism, security and identity in the US. ‘Some of the issues that were always interesting to me are how people create these small worlds with tight world views,’ she says. ‘This now has broader implications with the introduction of all these weapons.’

After the 9/11 attacks, there has been an impulse in the US to contribute to the defence of the country, Berman says. ‘There is this pure feeling for people to work towards a community purpose. But, then, it gets distorted.’

Berman’s photos show senior citizens in uniforms searching tennis courts for bombs or weapons. ‘I can understand them, but up to a point. Then, they seem insane. I was trying to find where this fantastical world and reality met up. People are quite happy to participate [in these security exercises], they feel they contribute to the security of their country.’

One of the iconic images in Berman’s show is that of an old woman wearing a surgical mask. She is taking part in a bio-terror drill. However, what was striking for Berman was how the woman looked. ‘She had put her hair up, she had make-up on. You pick up on that. The contrast between her looks and the mask creates the humour in the picture.’

‘Homeland, USA’ started right after 9/11. However, Berman took time off this project to work on another body of work that has received international recognition. She photographed the consequences of war with the disfigured bodies of injured US soldiers. ‘When I would photograph them, I would ask them what they thought war would be like before they went to Iraq. They thought it would be fun.’ That’s when Berman decided to go back to her original project. ‘I wanted to go back to why, we as a nation, find war fun.’

Far from being an isolated phenomenon, Berman says that all across the country she found people engaging in this collective homeland security hysteria. From New York to Chicago to rural Indiana and the middle of Texas, she says. ‘There are plenty more I could have photographed, but I feel like I’m finished.’

‘I don’t know what I will do next,’ she says. ‘I’m usually motivated by some sort of confusion or outrage. I’m never really motivated by beauty. Maybe I could discover how to do it. It would be nicer.’

In the meantime, Berman is enjoying the festival. ‘I love Visa Pour l’Image,’ she says. ‘Any time a photographer can exhibit his work is a great thing. It’s very important for a photographer to see how his work looks. Seeing it in a magazine or online is not enough. You can’t know how your images work. It’s important to see non-photo people walk through it. I spend a lot of hours there watching people’s reactions. I don’t say anything and they don’t know I’m the photographer.’

In fact, Berman says that judging from the reactions of people visiting her exhibition in Perpignan, she had her publisher, Trolley, add a few images she had not included in her upcoming ‘Homeland, USA’ book, which will be published in October.

Young photojournalist Munem Wasif’s quietly powerful images draw dignified attention to the injustices suffered by his Bangladeshi homeland, finds Diane Smyth

Munem Wasif received the City of Perpignan Young Reporter's Award for his work exposed at the Couvent Sainte Claire. Picture © Olivier Laurent

Munem Wasif is an extraordinary young man. Aged just 28 he’s already staged an exhibition at Visa Pour l’Image (having won the City of Perpignan Young Reporter’s Award), reached the final of the Prix Pictet (alongside world-famous photographers such as Edward Burtynsky) and join the prestigious Vu agency (he was taken on in April last year). But what makes his achievements all the more extraordinary is that he’s done so from Bangladesh.

He could be forgiven for letting it go to his head, but that’s not quite his style. ‘I’m happy and at the same time a bit afraid,’ he says, when I ask him how he feels about all the attention. ‘These situations are very tricky because you can get loose from your route. When people get accomplished they also get onto the route of success, and that can be a trap. If you get these things [prizes and awards] you can start to want them again and again, and so you start to produce the same story again and again. For me it’s crucial to calm down and just take photographs.’

Wasif’s exhibition includes images from three different projects – one on the effects of climate change in rural Bangladesh, another on the oppressed Rohingya Muslims of Bangladesh and Burma, and a third on traditional life and customs in Duran (“old”) Dhaka. The images are shot in striking, yet elegant, black-and-white inspired, he says, by the classic photojournalism of Josef Koudelka and Sebastiao Salgado. He’s drawn from their tradition of concerned journalism too, but he’s mixed it with a humility and strength of character that are all his own.

‘If I make something in my country for my people I will be more than happy,’ he says. ‘Maybe I will not be acknowledged by the whole Western media – that’s ok. Sometimes you have to find balance. I shoot in black-and-white; half the market is out. I do slow stories, I don’t go to the hotspots; half the Western market is gone.

‘But the story I’m doing on climate change refugees is one of the most critical issues in Bangladesh now. If the sea level rises, 50 per cent of the country will be under water. The people who are living in these regions they’re really very simple. They don’t have air conditionning, they’ve never driven a car. They constitute, I don’t know, maybe zero per cent of carbon emissions and global warming. But they’re in the front line of climate change. So although I’m shooting in Bangladesh, actually I think it’s a global story.’