vrijdag, september 27, 2002
Een brief van Perpignan-festivaldirecteur Jean-François Leroy aan Holly Hughes, naar aanleiding van haar artikel in PDN (waarover ik maandag al het nodige schreef en door een aantal fotografen flink over de hekel werd gehaald vanwege heiligschennis).
September 27, 2002
My dear Holly,
I hope you will publish this letter, side by side, along with your piece...
Thank you; from the bottom of my heart, thank you. For me, journalism American-style has always been a reference, based on distinguishing fact from commentary. Until I read your article, that is. A caricature, an opinionated piece that is but a parody of neutral reporting. The first paragraph already speaks for itself -- I quote: "the usual debates over the state of photojournalism were drowned out by anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric."
Although the subject doesn’t appear clearly, the reader already knows what to think of the article! "A true lesson in journalism for us Europeans"…
A good third of your article is then devoted to your analysis of my problem with Nachtwey; here you become unabashedly biased. I have two witnesses to the incident (Ivan Lattay and Jean-Louis Fernandez) who saw the altercation between Laurent Langlois and James Nachtwey. When you quote Laurent, whose intention, by then, was to defuse the situation, or at the very least downplay it, as saying "no pushing happened," as if it amounted to no more than a verbal exchange, you are taking advantage of his poor command of the English language. Why did you not interview the two witnesses?
But I guess that just proves a very important point: Photo District News and The Washington Post just aren’t in the same league…
Your piece then goes on to discuss the way Visa treated "the most photographed news event in living memory," which one would suppose refers to the events of September 11th. I shall not be cruel and ask you how many (how few?) years you’ve been in photojournalism, but this year at the festival there were many photographers who could actually remember the fall of Saigon, the genocide by the Khmer Rouge, the genocide in Rwanda, the Balkans War, or even the end of World War II…
Coming back to 9/11" Neither I nor my team ever intended to omit the event altogether. After giving the topic much thought, we agreed that Visa pour L’Image-Perpignan’s role was not to show extensively-published pictures all over again, in particular in light of the fact that they would be printed again in newspapers around the world as part of the commemoration of the attacks" This is a choice I made 14 years ago, a decision I did not want to call into question, not even for the World Trade Center. At Perpignan, we show pictures that are never seen in the media; our purpose is not to bring out pictures that have been printed around the world!
Which brings me to your very subtle appreciation of the evening screening dedicated to terrorism, which you assert was "universally criticized," since the people you call as witnesses found it "boring"and "obscene." Not to mention that so many spectators risked their lives walking out in mid-show in order to escape this exercise in "journalistic pornography"…
Of course, we could have dealt with the issue of terrorism in the same way that we dealt with Afghanistan on September 8, 2001 -- i.e. treating the events in chronological order. The documentary would have culminated with 9/11, and the "self-indulgent American in you" would then most likely have praised us for our objectivity. But, in my opinion and that of my colleagues, a journalist’s job amounts to more than a simple tearful, mournful act of commemoration. A journalist has a duty to report on events and explain their context, even when that context raises innumerable questions, as an attack of the scope of 9/11 necessarily does. We strove to illustrate as many questions as possible in relation to terrorism. Perhaps the documentary was too packed with infos, was punctuated by too many events, raised too many questions…
You chose to give a caricatured description, seeing in these questions only "anti-American rhetoric." How could you have missed the three portraits of Abdel Rahman, the alleged mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing? How can you maintain that we made no room for Hamas or the Hezbollah? How could you have missed our comments on Carlos, Abu Nidal, and the Tehran hostage crisis? You undoubtedly have a very selective memory…
Had you properly done your homework, you would have compared this edition of Visa with the past years, and would have noted that we have consistently reported on all anti-American attacks, from 1983/84 up to present, from Beirut to Sanaa, going through the tragic American Embassy in Nairobi. As for Oklahama City, that story was extensively covered, at a time when your magazine did not yet deem it necessary to talk about us.
To sum up, the editorial part of your article -- apart from the right-hand column which lists Visa award-winners and mentions the "two dozen photo exhibitions," of which there were precisely 28 -- boils down to a problem between two people (Leroy vs. Nachtwey) and systematic anti-Americanism, while the rest of the "Perpignan experience" amounts to no more than a bit of routine small-talk around a glass of muscat.
Have you no consideration for the more than 400 photographers whose work has been exhibited over the past 14 years, the 180,000 visitors who attended in 2002, the 3,000 professionals and the organizers of a panel discussion so routine that this year was the first time anything like it had ever been organized in Perpignan? But I guess all these people all have the same flaw: they are not American (or Israeli). A flaw shared by a large part of humanity.
So, Holly, please accept apologies from me and my entire team, for being part of this overwhelming minority. However, I want to prove to you that, in spite of everything, I am interested in your country: I very much appreciate the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was published as a serial in the U.S. magazine Rolling Stone before it came out in book form. Hunter Thompson became famous for his Dr. Gonzo journalism, an extreme form based on drug-induced paranoia. I shudder to think that you were under the same influence as your mentor when you were reporting on the Visa festival! Blame it on the muscat…
More seriously, I would like to end this letter by talking about something that means a lot to me. Do you know just how many U.S. photojournalists and agencies found a place of freedom of expression in Perpignan? Americans that neither your magazine nor any other U.S. media had agreed to publish? I have the list for your personnal use…
I trust I’ll see you in Perpignan next year in September. I can see that, more than ever, it truly is the crucial event for our profession…
Jean-Francois Leroy
September 27, 2002
My dear Holly,
I hope you will publish this letter, side by side, along with your piece...
Thank you; from the bottom of my heart, thank you. For me, journalism American-style has always been a reference, based on distinguishing fact from commentary. Until I read your article, that is. A caricature, an opinionated piece that is but a parody of neutral reporting. The first paragraph already speaks for itself -- I quote: "the usual debates over the state of photojournalism were drowned out by anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric."
Although the subject doesn’t appear clearly, the reader already knows what to think of the article! "A true lesson in journalism for us Europeans"…
A good third of your article is then devoted to your analysis of my problem with Nachtwey; here you become unabashedly biased. I have two witnesses to the incident (Ivan Lattay and Jean-Louis Fernandez) who saw the altercation between Laurent Langlois and James Nachtwey. When you quote Laurent, whose intention, by then, was to defuse the situation, or at the very least downplay it, as saying "no pushing happened," as if it amounted to no more than a verbal exchange, you are taking advantage of his poor command of the English language. Why did you not interview the two witnesses?
But I guess that just proves a very important point: Photo District News and The Washington Post just aren’t in the same league…
Your piece then goes on to discuss the way Visa treated "the most photographed news event in living memory," which one would suppose refers to the events of September 11th. I shall not be cruel and ask you how many (how few?) years you’ve been in photojournalism, but this year at the festival there were many photographers who could actually remember the fall of Saigon, the genocide by the Khmer Rouge, the genocide in Rwanda, the Balkans War, or even the end of World War II…
Coming back to 9/11" Neither I nor my team ever intended to omit the event altogether. After giving the topic much thought, we agreed that Visa pour L’Image-Perpignan’s role was not to show extensively-published pictures all over again, in particular in light of the fact that they would be printed again in newspapers around the world as part of the commemoration of the attacks" This is a choice I made 14 years ago, a decision I did not want to call into question, not even for the World Trade Center. At Perpignan, we show pictures that are never seen in the media; our purpose is not to bring out pictures that have been printed around the world!
Which brings me to your very subtle appreciation of the evening screening dedicated to terrorism, which you assert was "universally criticized," since the people you call as witnesses found it "boring"and "obscene." Not to mention that so many spectators risked their lives walking out in mid-show in order to escape this exercise in "journalistic pornography"…
Of course, we could have dealt with the issue of terrorism in the same way that we dealt with Afghanistan on September 8, 2001 -- i.e. treating the events in chronological order. The documentary would have culminated with 9/11, and the "self-indulgent American in you" would then most likely have praised us for our objectivity. But, in my opinion and that of my colleagues, a journalist’s job amounts to more than a simple tearful, mournful act of commemoration. A journalist has a duty to report on events and explain their context, even when that context raises innumerable questions, as an attack of the scope of 9/11 necessarily does. We strove to illustrate as many questions as possible in relation to terrorism. Perhaps the documentary was too packed with infos, was punctuated by too many events, raised too many questions…
You chose to give a caricatured description, seeing in these questions only "anti-American rhetoric." How could you have missed the three portraits of Abdel Rahman, the alleged mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing? How can you maintain that we made no room for Hamas or the Hezbollah? How could you have missed our comments on Carlos, Abu Nidal, and the Tehran hostage crisis? You undoubtedly have a very selective memory…
Had you properly done your homework, you would have compared this edition of Visa with the past years, and would have noted that we have consistently reported on all anti-American attacks, from 1983/84 up to present, from Beirut to Sanaa, going through the tragic American Embassy in Nairobi. As for Oklahama City, that story was extensively covered, at a time when your magazine did not yet deem it necessary to talk about us.
To sum up, the editorial part of your article -- apart from the right-hand column which lists Visa award-winners and mentions the "two dozen photo exhibitions," of which there were precisely 28 -- boils down to a problem between two people (Leroy vs. Nachtwey) and systematic anti-Americanism, while the rest of the "Perpignan experience" amounts to no more than a bit of routine small-talk around a glass of muscat.
Have you no consideration for the more than 400 photographers whose work has been exhibited over the past 14 years, the 180,000 visitors who attended in 2002, the 3,000 professionals and the organizers of a panel discussion so routine that this year was the first time anything like it had ever been organized in Perpignan? But I guess all these people all have the same flaw: they are not American (or Israeli). A flaw shared by a large part of humanity.
So, Holly, please accept apologies from me and my entire team, for being part of this overwhelming minority. However, I want to prove to you that, in spite of everything, I am interested in your country: I very much appreciate the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was published as a serial in the U.S. magazine Rolling Stone before it came out in book form. Hunter Thompson became famous for his Dr. Gonzo journalism, an extreme form based on drug-induced paranoia. I shudder to think that you were under the same influence as your mentor when you were reporting on the Visa festival! Blame it on the muscat…
More seriously, I would like to end this letter by talking about something that means a lot to me. Do you know just how many U.S. photojournalists and agencies found a place of freedom of expression in Perpignan? Americans that neither your magazine nor any other U.S. media had agreed to publish? I have the list for your personnal use…
I trust I’ll see you in Perpignan next year in September. I can see that, more than ever, it truly is the crucial event for our profession…
Jean-Francois Leroy
# posted by Jan-Edward : 20:26
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