The photographers | The Press

What is the point of going to see an exhibition of photographs that have already been published and that can be easily found on the web? However, every year I do not miss the World Press Photo Expo at the Bonsecours Market, which rewards the best of photojournalism. I always go with my brother, himself an amateur photographer, his great passion.

In the hushed atmosphere of a gallery, we discover what is stirring the planet, more deeply than by glancing over the subjects during the stressed morning coffee; the photographs are enlarged, like large canvases, we take our time to scrutinize the details. We sometimes discover striking reports that have passed under our noses, complex issues that take shape in the eye-witness of the photographers, those who illustrate the journalists’ texts and tie them to a kind of proof: we were there.

See.

With the advent of artificial intelligence and retouched or out-of-context images to manipulate us, this profession is even more important than before, even if it always has been. We don’t want the sawoir, we want the woirsaid Yvon Deschamps. Yes, there is voyeurism and sensationalism in this at times, because not only is a picture worth a thousand words, but reality also sometimes surpasses fiction. You often have to see it to believe it.

HAS The Pressthe rules are very strict regarding photographs: any modification is forbidden. This has long been part of the professional code of ethics, explains my colleague Martin Tremblay, whom I obviously met at the exhibition, like many other photographers.

If a newspaper like The Press publishes a doctored photo, his entire credibility would be tarnished. In a context of media crisis, several photographers have lost their jobs all over the world in recent years. Their departure increases the risks, such as not being able to verify the origin of the images, or disembodying the information with photo banks.

The reports of my colleague Isabelle Hachey in Ukraine reached out to me more deeply with the photographs of Martin Tremblay, who captured exactly what Isabelle was writing about.

Isabelle could have been told to take pictures with her iPhone, but that’s not her job. The journalist-photographer duo is always a winner in this profession.

I’m talking to you here about reports on devastated or dangerous lands, because being a photographer also means taking pictures of yogurt pots, writers terrified by cameras, or bandits leaving the courthouse, to feed an entire newspaper.

Among the winners of the World Press Photo this year is Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, the first Quebec photographer to be recognized in this competition in 25 years, for a report on SOPFEU employees who fought the forest fires that engulfed all of North America in 2023. He even trained as a forestry assistant, which allowed him to be immersed in his subject. His photos, all in black and white, are reminiscent of those of combatants in the two great world wars, when we see these men exhausted by the task and smeared with ashes, in difficult territories. He explains to me that the methods have changed, that we now practically collaborate with the fires to contain them. “We must coexist with nature and stop trying to dominate it,” he told me. When the fires rage, the animals flee, and apparently we know that the danger is over when we hear the birds singing again.

Among the best memories I will keep from my professional life in The Pressthere was this joy of digging through the newspaper’s photo archives, which were temporarily stored in what seemed to me like fire nests. I lost many hours rummaging through them, completely fascinated by what I found.

Fortunately, all of this was donated to a BAnQ fund, because it is a real gold mine, and disasters can happen so quickly – recently, we were worried about the Passe-Partout costumes, with the flooding downtown that affected the basement of Télé-Québec.

A section of World Press Photo is devoted to Stock, a Quebec agency founded by photographers in the late 1980s. My brother and I were excited to see images of the scene rave Montreal in the 1990s. Suddenly we recognize friends?

Photos and film are precious records of the world before the internet.

After a few films that recently highlighted the profession of journalist – let’s think of Spotlight Or She Said –, photojournalists are in the spotlight these days. In the film Civil War by Alex Garland released last April, a dystopia set in an America that has sunk into civil war, the main heroine is a photojournalist, played by Kirsten Dunst, and named Lee in homage to Lee Miller.

I discovered the work and incredible destiny of this woman a long time ago in a documentary, Lee Miller or Through the Looking Glasswhich tells how this American woman, first a model, muse of Man Ray, chose to go behind the lens by becoming a photojournalist, one of the rare women in this profession having covered the Second World War. The first images of the concentration camps of this correspondent for Vogue were debated in the newsroom, no one could believe such horror.

This fall, a film about his life will be released, Lee, directed by Ellen Kuras, starring Kate Winslet in the lead role.

It is not for nothing that the profession of photographer still fascinates today, at a worrying turning point where misinformation makes us now distrust the images we see circulating. Fewer and fewer people are able to tell the difference between an image generated by AI and a real photo taken by a professional. It is also no coincidence that in Civil War And Leeit is women who hold the camera, when we increasingly question what we call the “male gaze”, the domination of the male gaze. Photojournalism has long been a man’s world, while we need all the looks.

At World Press Photo, we are fortunate to see that more and more of them are filling the ranks of an essential profession, which documents the present, for memory and the future.

The World Press Photo Expo, until October 14 at the Bonsecours Market