Perpignan (AFP)

Visa pour l'image, the world's main photojournalism festival, opened its 32nd edition in Perpignan on Saturday, the first under Covid and after the election as mayor of RN Louis Aliot, to support "more than ever" a profession shaken by the pandemic.

"Last year, here, some tried to make believe that if I was elected my first objective would be to undermine the festival, or even to suppress it. But this is not the case, Visa is still there and I welcome it, "said the new far-right mayor at the inauguration.

The president of the Visa pour l'image association and ex-Minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, expressed the "pride" of the organizers "to have resisted" by maintaining the festival, even in a more intimate, despite the pandemic.

"To defend Visa pour l'Image is to defend freedom, independence of mind" in the face of "the violence of the current world where walls, barriers, sectarianism are being built", he stressed to next to Louis Aliot.

It was essential to show the photojournalists that "their annual meeting continues to support them, to present their work to the whole world", pleaded its historical director, Jean-François Leroy.

- "Very precarious situation" -

"They suffered the full force of the Covid crisis. Between the collapse of advertising revenue in the newspapers and the difficulties of getting around, they hardly received any orders for three months", he lamented, alerting to "the very precarious situation of many of them today".

But the epidemic is also for the sector a source of inspiration to the extent of its planetary shock wave: "this is the first time in the history of the festival that we are witnessing such an international event", noted Mr. Leroy.

"There were as many ways to capture the subject as there are photographers. We received a completely mind-blowing range of proposals."

Among the few exhibitors to have made the trip, the Franco-American photographer Peter Turnley has captured, in a series of black and white photos, the looks of New Yorkers under Covid.

Love, mourning, suffering and everyday life in times of pandemic are also presented in images from all over the world in another collective exhibition.

For Mr. Leroy however, the urgency is elsewhere and manifests itself in a program largely devoted to issues "even more serious" than the coronavirus: global warming and the consequences of human activity on the environment.

- "Save the planet"? -

"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 worries with AFP.

From India to Peru, via the Philippines, the American photographer James Whitlow Delano thus accounts for a "planet drowned in plastic", with terrifying images of villages, rivers and valleys drowned in waste.

Victoria Moriyama has focused her objective on deforestation of the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon, while Bryan Denton unfolds the "infernal" cycle of droughts and floods in India, due to climate change.

Water is also at the heart of Sanne Derks' Cuba exhibit. "Thinking of a tropical island, you don't imagine that it has a problem with the rain," the Dutch photojournalist told AFP.

For several months, she investigated this shortage, the way it is run by the Communist state, and the inventiveness of Cubans to cope.

This former anthropologist made a radical career change at 35, throwing herself headlong into photojournalism, "but I had no idea it was going to be that hard."

Now 40, she says she earns the equivalent "of what people living on the poverty line get" in the Netherlands.

In the four places in Perpignan where the twenty or so projects are exhibited, masked visitors wander without jostling, far from the crowds of previous years. And in the city's hotels, deprived of the usual influx of festival-goers, the atmosphere is rather gloomy.

© 2020 AFP