Sunday, September 2, 2012

The north wind is still blowing and vacationers and photo amateurs are looking for shelter in exhibitions halls. Conclusion: take advantage of this Sunday lunch to visit the Couvent des Minimes.

12h00: The flagship exhibition and a personal favorite of Jean-Francçois Leroy: Ces petites filles que l’on marie (‘Child Brides’) by Stéphanie Sinclair from the VII Agency, for National Geographic.

The AFP has pride of place at this year’s festival, with three exhibitions. The Chilean photographer Pedro Ugarte and his British colleague Ed Jones, stationed in Hong Kong and Beijing, respectively, exhibit their work from North Korea. They benefited greatly from the opening of borders to foreign journalists on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Kim Il-Sung. They discovered a country they describe as a “time machine”. Indeed, the images take us back to the Cold War. Finally, the Pulitzer prize winner Afghan photographer Massoud Hossaini show us his war-torn country.

19h00: It’s time for the annual “welcome drink” at the Hotel Pams that brings together members of the organization, the first photographers and professionals to arrive in Perpignan. The atmosphere is friendly. I tell Caroline Laurent-Simon from Elle, who leads the morning conferences at the Palais de Congrès, that I knew her husband Marc Simon, picture editor at VSD, before she did. We laugh together.

Monday, September 3

8h00: Coffee and the local paper. Julien Goldstein on Kurdistan, “the country that doesn’t exist.”

10h00: I’m at the Palais de Congrès for the first conference. Caroline Laurent-Simon is welcoming the stage photographer Jean-Louis Fernandez, who has immortalized so many directors, actors and dancers.

11h00: Doug Menuez and his “digital revolution”, something he’s studied on for fifteen years. He says that at one point, he felt like “work had burned [him] to the ground.”

12h00: At the Divil restaurant on Rue Fabriques Nabot, named after a 17th century drapers atelier. I want to taste their steak tartare and homemade Catalan cream. Surprise—Jean-François Leroy is at a nearby table with his deputy director and two young women. And I’ll be damned if that isn’t Nichole Desrosiers, the new vice-president of Getty Images with a tree tattoo on her back!

21h00: The first night of screening. I hear it’s not going to be a typical Monday.

Read the full text of Michel Puech’s journal in the French version of the Journal.

Michel Puech