Never Look Away

For more than forty years, Jean-François Leroy has been poring over millions of pictures from across the entire world. Scenes of war, revolution and disaster, images of ordinary everyday life, of people opposing injustice and expressing solidarity.

There is no other person anywhere who has looked so closely at so many photos. As founder-director of the International Festival of Photojournalism Visa pour l’Image-Perpignan, he has been in the privileged position of directly experiencing all the changes in photojournalism, moving from the days of conventional photography, with negatives and prints, to instantaneous digital photography. Jean-François Leroy’s conversations with journalist and writer Isabelle Fougère are an opportunity for him to have a free-ranging discussion of his life in the heart of photojournalism, letting him cite the men and women who have been major figures in his life, and express his convictions and commitments—as well as his doubts. He describes his editorial approach, how he decides which pictures to show, and which not to show. As Jean-François Leroy makes clear, when looking, neutrality does not exist.

In our world now, billions of photos are taken every day. Social media and artificial intelligence have warped the relationship between humans and reality. We must not surrender our duty to the truth. We must never look away!