Published by Éditions de La Martinière in 2015, *Profession reporters. Deux baroudeuses en terrain miné* examines frontline reporting through the working partnership of writer Manon Quérouil-Bruneel and photographer Véronique de Viguerie. Independent journalists who had covered sensitive international events together for roughly a decade, they divide the task with apparent clarity—one writes, the other photographs—while showing how inseparable those activities become under pressure.
The book is organized around eight assignments. Its subjects include the Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram and Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State in Iraq, but the finished reports are only one layer of the account. Preparations, logistical negotiations, restricted movement, limited time and tight budgets are brought into view alongside reporters’ practical methods. Portfolios, close readings of individual photographs and the articles as published connect events in the field to their eventual editorial form.
This structure gives the photographs an unusually explicit context. De Viguerie’s images are not presented as isolated icons of conflict; they are situated within decisions about access, personal risk, timing and interpretation. Quérouil-Bruneel’s writing, in turn, reveals the labor surrounding an image before it enters public circulation. Humor and self-mockery temper the severity of the material without obscuring the dangers or ethical demands of the profession.
Across 224 pages, the volume operates simultaneously as documentary record, professional notebook and portrait of a sustained collaboration between a writer and a photographer. Its value for a serious photobook collection lies less in a claim to comprehensiveness than in this layered editorial architecture: image, field account, analysis and published article remain in dialogue. It offers a concrete case study of how contemporary conflict reportage is made—and of how the photobook can preserve not only what journalists witnessed, but the conditions under which witnessing became possible.
