AI challenges belief in images as Visa pour l’Image competition opens

Issued on: 29/08/2026 – 15:26

2 min Reading time

Visa pour l’Image, now in its thirty eighth yr, says its mission is to indicate and doc “the real world”.

But that world is more and more affected by synthetic intelligence.

For the primary time, the competition is organising a “journalism convention” to “reflect on and defend the future of press photography” at a time when “generative artificial intelligence technologies are challenging the very notion of visual evidence”.

Threat to belief

A sequence of workshops will discover the adjustments and challenges AI is bringing to the trade, together with the menace it poses to the way in which information images are made and shared and to the belief the general public locations in them.

“2026 began with a fake image” writes competition director Jean-François Leroy in his editorial, referring to {a photograph} of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, apparently bloodied and handcuffed and surrounded by US troopers.

The picture was picked up by established media organisations and skilled journalists and extensively circulated on social media.

Its circulation illustrates a wider drawback – AI instruments can now create pictures of occasions that by no means occurred, whereas many individuals, significantly the younger, depend on social media as their sole supply of data.

Yet Leroy doesn’t see AI solely as a menace. He describes the know-how as “perhaps the greatest opportunity journalism has to save itself”, arguing that AI fashions want dependable, latest and verified data to work correctly.

That offers skilled journalists and established information organisations an necessary position as a result of they produce images below guidelines designed to make sure accuracy.

The digital camera by no means lied… till AI advised it to

Conflict and alter

This yr’s competition continues its conventional concentrate on main conflicts and crises, with the theme of “society in transition”.

The 27 free exhibitions embody work on Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine and Lebanon, in addition to local weather change, migration and the state of affairs of Afghan ladies.

Two exhibitions are dedicated to Lebanon. Local photographer Mohammad Yassine captures the nation’s most up-to-date disaster since March, whereas images by Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times doc the interval from 2015 to 2026.

Philémon Barbier, winner of the Perpignan-Rémi Ochlik Visa d’Or for his work, has an exhibition on Syria, whereas photojournalist Yoray Liberman paperwork Israel in his War Diary.

Khames Alrefi has turned his lens on Gaza with an exhibition on the “first victims” – civilians – which obtained the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Humanitarian Visa d’Or award.

‘Smoking to survive’: How Sierra Leone’s youth bought hooked on kush

Forgotten conflicts 

Other exhibitions cowl warfare zones making fewer headlines, together with the Donbass, Cambodia and Sudan. French-Syrian photographer Abdulmonam Eassa, who paperwork Sudan, received this yr’s World Press Photo within the Stories class.

Danish photographer Mads Nissen explores “the geography of cocaine”, whereas Gaël Turine paperwork the ravages of the artificial drug kush in Africa.

The competition additionally showcases extra intimate tales, together with Jérome Gence’s Virtual Weddings in Japan and Jérémy Lempin’s long-term undertaking on illiteracy.

Laurent Ballesta, winner of the Ecologie 360 – Reporters d’Espoir prize for his exhibition Far from the Sky, traces 25 years of underwater expeditions.

The competition can be marking 200 years because the invention of images.

► Visa pour l’Image runs from 29 August to 13 September, 2026.