Petit Palais Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris avenue Winston-Churchill 75008 Paris France
Mois de la photo 2010 Point information 5,7 rue de Fourcy 75004 Paris France
The Petit Palais, which has included photography and contemporary images in its exhibitions since 1998, supports Reporters Without Borders with an exhibition of its 25th anniversary album featuring photographs by Pierre and Alexandra Boulat.
The album, entitled “100 Photos by Pierre and Alexandra Boulat for Press Freedom”, pays tribute to two great names in French photoreportage, and the exhibition at the Petit Palais shows two complementary ways of looking at the world – both of them impassioned, disturbing, and deeply humanistic. Pierre's photographs of the slums of Nanterre in the 1950s or the daily life of American women have the same intensity as his daughter's work four decades later in Gaza, or depicting the suffering of Afghan women.
The Petit Palais, which is committed, alongside the Paris City Authority, to the struggle for freedom of expression and the defence of journalists, is the ideal venue for this exhibition celebrating politically committed photography.
At a time when a third of the world's population lives in countries where press freedom is non-existent, Reporters Without Borders strives daily to re-establish the right to information. Because imprisoning or killing a journalist means eliminating an essential witness and threatening everyone's right to information, Reporters Without Borders has been
relentlessly fighting for press freedom over the past 25 years. This quarte centuries has seen many changes in the world: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the democratisation of a large part of Africa have meant that press freedom has gained ground. But it remains severely threatened, and the struggle remains as urgent as ever.