Jérôme Sessini as Juror for URBAN 2023 Projects & Portfolios
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As we have already mentioned in a previous article, this year URBAN Photo Awards will have the prestige , like every year, of having great celebrities in the world of photography as guests and jurors, among these we are pleased to announce Jérôme Sessini as a special juror for the Projects & Portfolios section .
Jérôme Sessini is one of the most acclaimed photographers of our time and has won numerous awards for his work. He gained immediate international recognition , his images having been published in international magazines and newspapers , including Newsweek , Stern , Paris-Match , Le Monde and the Wall Street Journal . He is renowned for his captivating portraits , beautiful landscapes and powerful documentary photographs .
A member of the famous Magnum Photos agency , Jérôme Sessini developed his passion for documentary photography through the books of a photographer friend. He began his practice by photographing people, landscapes and daily life in his native eastern France (with Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Mark Cohen in mind).
In 1998, even though he had never foreseen that he would turn to journalism , Sessini arrived in Paris. The Gamma photo agency offered him the opportunity to follow the ongoing conflict in Kosovo .
Since then Sessini has followed most of the current international events : Palestine , Iraq (from 2003 to 2008), the fall of Aristide in Haiti (2004), the conquest of Mogadishu by Islamic militias and the war in Lebanon (2006).
His photography also leads to individual exhibitions at the Visa Photo Festival in Perpignan, the Rencontres d’Arles , the Bibliothèque Nationale François-Mitterrand and the French Ministry of Culture .
In 2008, Jérôme Sessini initiated the Mexican project, So far from God, too close from the US , a deep dive into the drug cartel war in Mexico . This ongoing project has already been awarded twice with the F-Award and a Getty Grant .
From this direct confrontation with violence, Sessini recognized a state of affairs that is at the heart of his work: “Ordinary people are always the ones who lose, whether they are in Iraq, Mexico or France.”
Evolving within an uncertain balance between cynical realism and disturbance , Sessini is very attentive to the “ correctness ” of his photographic work. He rejects idealism and the otherworldly , which do not take into account some pieces of reality.
