Do you remember? Last Friday, February 22, 2013, at the initiative of the association A Day Without News, photojournalists around the world paid tribute to Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik, killed one year ago in Syria. This same Friday, a year after their deaths, in a hospital on the Turkish border with Syria, a first-aid worker called out to documentary photographer Chris Huby: “A French photographer’s been wounded!”

Chris Huby and Edouard Alias had no trouble identifying their friend, Olivier Voisin, with whom they had secretly entered Syria two weeks before. “He had lost consciousness,” said Elias on Saturday night upon landing in Paris, expecting to find Olivier Voisin safely evacuated to his home country. “One arm was torn to shreds, and he had an awful shrapnel wound on the back of his head.”

On Saturday, Reporters Without Borders announced that Voisin could not be moved in his condition, and on Sunday, that he had died from his injuries.
Olivier Voisin was not well known in the profession, although he had been a reporter for fifteen years, working for various newspapers and magazines. Paris Match had published one of his reportage on Syria in january.

How many young people, or not so young—Voisin was 39—are waiting at the Syrian border, ready to risk everything once inside? “More than you can count,” says AFP photo manager Patrick Baz, pensively. 
Another victim of violence, Peruvian photojournalist Luis Choy, was shot dead outside his home in Lima last week. The investigation is ongoing.

Michel Puech