© Alizé Le Maoult

The president of our jury this year will be one of the most seasoned war photographers of our time. Gary Knight’s photos have been published by Newsweek, Time, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, Paris Match, Stern and National Geographic. His work has been exhibited all over the world and is included in the collections of several museums. Gary Knight is also co-founder and a director of the VII Agency.

 

Gary Knight began his photography career in the late 1980’s photographing the wars in Cambodia and Burma. He was a contract photographer for Newsweek in the 1990’s and 2000’s during which time he photographed the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Liberia, Congo and Israel Palestine.

Gary is co-founder and director of the VII Photo Agency. He is also the co-director of the VII Foundation and director and founder of the VII Academy. Gary is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Frontline Club, London; co-founder of The GroundTruth Project, Boston; founding director of the Program for Narrative & Documentary Practice at the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University; twice chair and president of the World Press Photo Award; was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2009; and a Logan Non Fiction Fellow at the Carey Institute in 2017.

« It is a great privilege to be invited to Chair the jury of the Bayeux Award for war correspondents this year and to honour the men and women who file dispatches and images from fields of conflict. It is especially poignant to do this at a time when our media are increasingly under attack by politicians and governments – even in countries where a free press is enshrined in the constitution. War reporting is a vital and essential function of journalism. It is critical to civil society, to our sense of justice and accountability and to basic human rights.
As the late Marie Colvin said in 2010, two years before she was killed in Homs: “The public have a right to know what our government, and our armed forces, are doing in our name. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians”. »

Gary Knight