Perpignan Now #6

Day Five: 3 September.10 a.m Perpignan, France

Yesterday afternoon was spent searching and then grilling the inhabitants of the Palais Des Congres. We mentioned earlier that, in terms of agencies, many friends and acquaintances are missing, or are, sadly, dead….
The last ten years have been tough for many of them, and we just hope, some day, this war is going to end…

But we stayed positive and happily met some old vets of the field, albeit that their role here, down in Perpignan, has somewhat changed…
A lady now working for L’agence Vu, told us that in previous years they were here to be told the stories, to see photographers work….
But now their presence is just for their clients, to sell the stories of their signed photographers, to meet new costumers and to meet the faces behind the emails….

Click here to see some footage we took along the way...

An Aside: When we headed south we were expecting change in Perpignan, but that change is proving hard to find. The Walls that surround us, enclose us even, in the numerous exhibition spaces look and feel exactly the same, the frames… Those endless frames…the same.
Back home there are ongoing discussions on where photojournalism meets documentary meets art photography, and these discussions take place on the pages of magazines, limited edition books, on blogs, on the walls of galleries and even in the decisions of photographers on how to show their work…
And all this because of the sad death of the extended photo story in newspapers…
Photographers back home have to re-invent what and whom their photographs are for…
And yet here, in Perpignan, the walls are unchanged. There are no conceptually crafted installations, there are no handmade fibre prints in beautifully constructed frames, varying in sizes to make ones gaze glide across a body of work…

There is just uniformity…but that is the point…
Visa Pour L’image do this on purpose, and in some ways it makes sense, maybe Visa isn’t trying to be part of that discussion, they do what they want to do…and what they have always done…
And lets not forget that uniformity brings equality and makes one look under the skin…to search beyond the frame…(and price)…
And that brings us back to that old, established friend Magnum. Maybe Magnum isn’t here in this Catalan town, deep down South, because Magnum is busy exploring the different avenues mentioned above and discussing and arguing where they now belong?
Maybe Magnums haunts are now the exclusive galleries of New York, Paris and London, and on the bookshelves of art collectors…. Maybe they just didn’t fit into their Visa Pour L’Image uniform anymore….
To be continued...