Our mission is to support and defend the work of committed photographers using the power of images to bear witness to the state of our planet.
Defending photography that pulls back the curtain, urging us to understand and take action. It is for this reason that we’ve been supporting the Visa pour l’Image – Perpignan International Photojournalism Festival since 2015.
This festival has been welcoming over 3,000 professionals for more than 20 years and is widely considered to be the world’s biggest photojournalism festival.
Once a year, we present a professional photographer with The Yves Rocher Foundation Photo Award. The €8,000 prize money is a way for us to encourage, support and pay tribute to a professional photographer working on themes related to the environment, the relationship between mankind and the planet, and key sustainable development issues.
The participating photographers tell the tale of the environment and human existence.Their photographs illustrate the planet’s innate fragility – and our own
Jacques Rocher
The forest spirits
Gaël Turine, winner of the 2023 Yves Rocher Foundation Photo Award, is a Belgian photographer. His dive into the sacred forests of Benin, areas of the world still protected from human activity, opens our eyes to the unexplainable in a place where our presence on this earth is shared with the plant and animal worlds, but also with the spirits of an invisible world.
Saving the orangs-outans
2022 winner, Alain Schroeder portrays the challenges facing a majestic species: the Sumatran orangutan. Threatened for numerous reasons, these great apes have been forced to leave their natural habitat. Alain joined those fighting for the species’ survival, visiting clinics, quarantine centres, and the ultimate goal of these conservation efforts: the rainforest.
The Wretched and the Earth
Winner of the 2021 Yves Rocher Foundation Photo Award, Gabriele Cecconi is an Italian photojournalist. His documentary approach is based on the bonds between man and the environment. Through “The Wretched and the Earth”, he offered a completely new perspective on the Rohingya refugee crisis.
Gold Rivers - The Land In Between
Born in Nice, France, in 1980, Mathias Depardon takes an immersive documentary approach to themes that reveal important political and socio-economic issues in territories under stress. Through portraits and landscapes, he explores a Turkey torn between modernization and tradition.
Honey from the gods
Winner 2019, Nadia Shira Cohen portrays two completely different and opposed communities in the Yucatan: Mayan beekeepers and Mennonite farmers.
The inhabitants of the former colony are migrating to greener pastures as far away as Colombia following tensions with local Mayan beekeepers against a backdrop of widespread deforestation and the use of genetically modified soya.
Tourism and climate change
Awarded a prize in 2018, Marco Zorzanello, a young Italian photographer, takes a fair and sharp look at the excesses of mass tourism in the age of climate change. His tragic-comic account takes us to Italy, Antarctica and the Dead Sea in a different way, and prompts us to question the limits of our lifestyles in the face of predicted catastrophe.
Omo Valley, the dam of discord
Italian-born Fausto Podavini, our winner for 2107, is a committed and humanist photographer. He was rewarded for his work on the environmental and social consequences of infrastructure construction in the Omo Valley.
Kazakhstan, the nuclear underbelly
English photographer Phil Hatcher-Moore was our 2016 winner. This passionate, proactive photographer travelled to the far-flung reaches of Kazakhstan in and around Semey, where nearly a quarter of the world’s nuclear tests have been inflicted on local communities since 1949. Through his photography, Phil Hatcher-Moore decries the devastating effects of radiation on the environment and human health.
The Sertao, drought and desolation
In 2015, Brazil-based American photographer Lianne Milton inaugurated the very first edition of our Photo Award at the Visa pour l’Image – Perpignan International Photojournalism Festival, when Jacques Rocher presented her with her prize to support her work on farmers in north-eastern Brazil. In the semi-arid Sertão region, these men and women are struggling to survive amidst droughts that continue to worsen as the years pass. Armed with her trusty camera, the young woman captured the despair of these poor rural families, who are forced to slaughter their cattle and watch helplessly as the desert creeps ever further across their land.
