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Big names in international photojournalism are currently on display in Perpignan, in the south of France, for the Visa pour l'image festival. Among them: Frédéric Noy and Brent Stirton, who have extensively investigated the environment in Africa. RFI offers to cross their eyes.
of our special correspondent in Perpignan, in collaboration with Media Workshop
Many photojournalists have probably started their career with a taste for adventure and discovery. They want to travel the world of men, capture its beauty, and report on its fragility. Brent Stirton and Frédéric Noy are exhibiting this year in Perpignan two series of clichés that have one thing in common, since they focus on environmental issues in Africa.
Brent Stirton is a South African crowned with 11 World Press Photo. He lives in the United States. To his great surprise, because of his age, only 50 years old, Visa asked him this year to present a retrospective of his reports on poaching in Africa in the last decade, since this famous photo he took in 2007, of a gorilla shot in the Virunga Park, DRC.
Frédéric Noy is French and built part of his life in Tanzania, Chad, Sudan, Nigeria or Uganda. He said he was marked last year by the words of Professor Nyong'o, governor of Kisumu County, on Lake Victoria on the Kenyan side. He said that in 50 years, if nothing was done, the lake would die because of us. He decided to go around the question, on 3,500 km.
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The realities portrayed by these two witnesses of our time are as different as can be the wooded Congo-Kinshasa and the perimeter of the largest stretch of closed water in Africa. But their discourses regularly resonate: both are basically the conclusion of existential dangers induced by overpopulation, human activities and overexploitation of resources.
" I can not imagine a world without visual memory, where history would unfold without being recorded, where we would not share our intelligences," says Brent Stirton. Humanity is a collective story, we need to provide reliable and verifiable information, otherwise there can be no decision-making process. Journalism has never been so important. "
" Above ground ecology "
Frédéric Noy's series is called "The slow agony of Lake Victoria" . " In the 1930s, he says, 4.6 million people lived around the lake. Today, they are 50 million. These people come from need to live, to find an activity. The slow agony of the lake, it is for them out of the understanding, it is not part of their scheme of thought, which is based on survival. "
A photo illustrates it crucially in the series, that of a man washing plastic bags - to sell them - in a dump at the water's edge, in the wet zones essential for filtering the rains, which feed 80% of the lake . Areas already ravaged by habitat and agriculture. This is wild selective sorting of Entebbe garbage and some of those of Kampala, which land here.
" The dump is on a slightly downhill slope in the wetlands. Around this man, there are white bags that he has washed and that he will sell again. And nearby, there is water, which is a very dark green. It's the dye of the bags. This water will then slowly pass into the wet zone and end up in the lake, "says Frédéric Noy, in a perfectly clear and poised tone.
This man he photographed is part of what he calls " the trimmers of the Ugandan economy ". It symbolizes a " tension ", explains Frédéric Noy: " People come to Kampala to find a job, any one, even at the bottom of the ladder. He is there because he has a family to raise and feed. Except that it causes an ecological scratch on the lake. One among thousands.
" A fisherman, he sees his fishing; a farmer, his field. The lake is 68 000 km2, the size of Ireland. It seems eternal. If I tell you that you are endangering a country like Ireland because you throw your cigarette butt on the ground, it may seem out of place. You can not build an ecology without ground without thinking of the socio-economic aspects. "
" Fundamentalism "
" I've been working on environmental preservation for over ten years now . I think there is an illustration of overpopulation, climate change, all the threats to our world. We live in times where what makes things tick is commerce. But we are approaching a crisis, "says Brent Stirton in the conversation.
In the South African's eyes, the dramas are cyclical, and the man does not know how to anticipate them. He may react too late. Is the photographer a "collapsologist", a term used to describe those who announce the imminent fall of industrial civilization, and explore avenues for the future? He added: " I think there are reasons for this theory to exist. "
Polka magazine writes about Stirton that he wants to " change the world " by " using beauty to challenge ". Its red thread and a bit the same as Noy, " stories located at the intersection between the human being and the environment ". This does not jump in the eyes on all these shots of men and women in fatigues, armed to the teeth, progressing in the bush.
These particularly photogenic people, magnified by the sense of lighting of the South African, are "rangers" . They lead the war to poachers, often made up of paramilitary groups, who get rich on the trafficking of trophies of ivory, rhinoceros horns, pangolin scales, among others, at the risk of these protected species, and often to Asia.
" It's a complex subject," he says. Sometimes, my images do not tell something as obvious as a snapshot in Syria or elsewhere. Africa itself is an increasingly complex continent. Right now, I'm also working on the rise of fundamentalism there, and how it's going to impact environmental protection issues. And it's complicated, you know . "
" It's democracy "
The game is worth the candle, could ask these two photographers. When you have the taste of life, why put on the balance its own health, its balance, to offer the public sometimes so overwhelming realities, and use disturbing words, which can make them look like the eyes of some birds of evil augur? A poignant question for a journalist today.
" If you go to one of the three countries I covered, say that you have learned in Perpignan that Lake Victoria is dying of water hyacinths, overfishing or pollution, we will laugh at you , tell you that it is still a vision of European, who knows better than everyone , "says Frédéric Noy. The only sensitized people he met? Kenyan scientists.
When these scientists try to explain the problems, " they come up against the harsh political reality of people who do not see, in front of their eyes, where the danger is. It's not like the fires in the Amazon, which are obvious. The important word in the phrase "slow agony" is "slow". It is a process so slow that it becomes imperceptible, even invisible. "
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Stirton had the gratification to see his photos weigh concretely in the debate. " In 2007," he recalls, " when I went to photograph these rangers, who had received specialized military training in South Africa and were sent back to the DRC to fight against 17 paramilitary groups, and when we found these gorillas dead mountains, there was very little left. "
But since his report, which has met the empathy of the public, funds have been raised and the number of gorillas has gone up again. This is, says the photographer, the best feeling he could feel. " At least once in my life as a photojournalist," he says, " I felt useful. That's all you can expect from a career like mine. What to believe in the shock of the photo.
" My photos, I put them on the table and they are addressed to all who want to see them, says Noy. I trust people's intelligence, their curiosity, their common sense. I do not think objectivity exists. But my responsibility is to offer something honest and unassailable about the content. We can lose interest, do not agree or dislike. It's democracy. "
In the age of social networks, infox, doubts about the future of democracy, notions that Brent Stirton insists on, and as we ask the Earth 2.5 times what it can offer, " everything what we know, he considers, is that ecology is our greatest opportunity to unite. A struggle of every moment against skepticism and fatalism.
On the Visa site for the image: projections & exhibitions 2019