Gritty news photos show great convulsions of the world

0 Comments | AFP, August, 2005

PERPIGNAN, France (AFP) — A major exhibition in southern France of images by press photographers is a heart-rending catalog of the world's miseries, and a reminder of the hazards of trying to capture them on film.

That danger was underlined on Sunday in Baghdad, where a Reuters television soundman was shot dead by a US soldier, bringing to 53 the number of journalists killed in Iraq since the US invasion in March 2003.

The pictures in the international Visa exhibition in the Mediterannean town of Perpignan cover the great convulsions that made headlines in the last year -- the conflict in Iraq, the devastation wreaked by Asia's tsunami, the ethnic cleansing in Sudan.

"Yes, our festival shows all the misery. But the people who reproach the depiction of...