Saturday, October 8th, 9.30pm, the Place Gauquelin–Despallières à Bayeux resounded with a background music exceptional in its intensity. On the occasion of the 23rd edition of the Prix Bayeux-Calvados des Correspondents de Guerre a swell of applause swept literally from the top of the marquee towards the stage where, each year, the presentation of the awards is hosted.
His hand on his heart, lips trembling, Yannis Behrakis came up to receive his second award of the evening: the “Prix Photo AFD Grand Public”. Known as a good-hearted man as well as for his talent as a committed photographer, with his trophy in his hand, he announced, out of respect for the people of Bayeux, that he had donated his award money (3,000€) to Médecins sans Frontières.
In 2016, Yannis Behrakis has already received “the awards”: the Pulitzer Prize in New York, the Guardian Photographer of the Year in London and The Days Japan international Photojournalism Award in Tokyo.
He usually has his emotions under control but for the first time he could not hold back is tears, trying to hide them with his hand. The audience was with him, and rose spontaneously to applaud wildly amidst the bravos and the whistles of congratulation. The Bayeux audience, while it has known many other winners, has always given great recognition to the Greek photographer since his first award on Afghanistan in 2002. The ovation lasted for several minutes.
“My heart was beating fast”, said Yannis Behrakis, who had seen war arrive at his home in Greece. “It came knocking on my door and I had to take the hands of all these ‘survivors’,” as Yannis calls them, ”fleeing the horrors of war, in a catastrophic situation”. “Nothing but fear in their empty bellies” as recalled by Jean-Léonce Dupon, co-founder of the Prix and Vice-president of the Senate, in his opening speech.
Far from all the clichés and proud of the hospitality of all his fellow citizens, the winner, overwhelmed but humbly anxious, told how he saw among all the young girls embarked on these makeshift rafts, these Zodiacs of despair, hints of the picture of his grandmother fleeing the Great Fire of Izmir in 1922. A grandmother rescued by the French navy and brought to Marseille to work there to earn enough to pay for her journey back to Greece.
Imbued with humanist values as part of his upbringing, for Yannis Behrakis times of crisis are the occasion to “know who you are”. Son of an army general, shaken up by his father’s constant moves, “I felt that reporting on the world was an extension of my 9 schools in 12 countries” as he explained how the young high-school students in Bayeux had the opportunity to keep their eyes wide open to the international news all the time.
To denounce, with Jean-Léonce Dupon, an “unwelcoming” Europe, and to hope to put in place the humanistic steps that will open real windows of hope in the support and reconstruction, With the wish of gaining the support of the press, Patrick Gomont, Mayor of Bayeux: “Each year, the public is here,… close to 30,000 people last year. And it’s without doubt Bayeux’s main proof, the mark of our fellow citizens’ interest in the work of journalists and their expressed expectations for more background, the keys of understanding, of standing back and analyzing in a complex and tense, national and international context.”
The violence done to migrants erupts from time to time across our screens, virtual theatres of media depravity or narrow politics bound up their indecent haste. In Bayeux the business of fear doesn’t beat its drum and isn’t full of a populism which is just as threatening. It had to be Yannis Behrakis’ photographs that pricked our conscience. Near Idomeni in Macedonia, in the driving rain, a father grasps in his protective arms a young child, the better to give her a tender, comforting kiss to stop the rain.
A vigilance against becoming desensitised by these images imposes itself “a defiled childhood” according to the clear terms from Jean-Claude Guillebaud, President of the Jury. The list would be very long.
With great political courage Jean-Léonce Dupon expressed the most pertinent question in the urgency of the moment: “Mustn’t the media community in particular question itself about its way of working that transforms a tool for understanding into an echo chamber or even an amplifier of fear and anguish.” The best questions are made to resonate with us for a long time, wrote Norman Mailer, expert in “the darkness of the human soul”.
With impatience to relive in Bayeux in 2017 this war of images and these images of war, Yannis Behrakis, Olivier Jobard, Aris Messinis, like some many others, honour the art and Homer’s contemporaries on these permanent Odysseys, wandering towards Europe on the brink of humanitarian disaster.
Alain Mingam, Président du Prix Photo AFD
