An Italian city at the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Italian photographer Fabio Bucciarelli won the most prestigious award at the Visa pour l'image festival on Saturday 5 September.

In Bergamo, in northern Italy, he photographed the suffering of the sick in their beds, surrounded by caregivers in white overalls, burials and crowded hospitals during the first weeks of the epidemic.

"I did not want to photograph empty places, people with masks, I wanted to enter the privacy of the sick, go to their house," the photojournalist told AFP, "honored" to receive the distinction of a festival he went to every year.

He worked in immersion, in a Red Cross team, wearing the same hooded jumpsuit as the nurses and doctors.

"It is also a work of memory, he says, on this chapter of our history. I kept in touch with some of the sick. They were courageous".

For the first time, "war reporters, used to covering conflicts far from home, were able to work in their own country".

"Drought and flood in India"

The main photojournalism festival in the world, also dedicated the American Bryan Denton, winner of the Visa d'or Magazine: for six months, he seized in India the disruption of the water cycle by global warming, between droughts and floods.

Awarded for "Drought and flood in India", the latter was "surprised" that a subject on global warming is honored in this year of pandemic.

"I am affected. Climate change is a subject that I have wanted to photograph for a long time, but so far my missions have taken me more to the Middle East," the 37-year-old Californian told AFP. wounded in Iraq in 2016 during the Mosul offensive.

Like Fabio Bucciarelli's, this report was published by the New York Times.

In the queen category of the Visa d'or News, the photos of Nicolas Asfouri (AFP) of the protests in Hong Kong and those of Peter Turnley on "The human face of Covid-19 in New York", were also in the running.

"Special edition"

The festival director wanted this subject "more serious" than the Covid, to be brought to light.

"I think we will come to the end of this epidemic, I am not sure that it is not already too late to save the planet", he worried to AFP.

The Daily Press Visa d'Or recognizes Rosem Morton, an American nurse who took up photography after being raped, a kind of photo-therapy, "to survive".

His photos, published by CNN.com, fix in black and white images of a daily depressed, self-portraits.

Formerly resistant to photography, the newspaper Le Monde was awarded, in Perpignan, the Golden Visa for digital information, for a long-term investigation, "Feminicides: mechanics of an announced crime", punctuated by photos by Camille Gharbi.

The Rémi Ochlik Prize recognized the work of AFP photographer Anthony Wallace on the popular uprising in Hong Kong.

Covid obliges, the festival, if it has been maintained, has not experienced the effervescence of the 31 previous editions, in the absence of a number of professionals and without the traditional award ceremony.

"It is a particular edition which had the merit of existing. We had made the bet to hold, we held the bet", entrusted Mr. Leroy to AFP.

The edition, which continues until September 27, also puts the spotlight on the Turkish Sabiha Cimen, awarded in Perpignan by the Canon Women Photojournalist Grant, to complete her documentary "Hafizas, the guardians of the Koran".

With AFP

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