Published by Verlhac Editions in 2011, Carnets de reportages du XXIème siècle brings together photographer Véronique de Viguerie and writer Manon Quérouil-Bruneel in a sustained account of contemporary reporting. Its roughly ten stories move through sites including Colombia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan and China, addressing subjects from Somali piracy and the Taliban to threatened Iraqi cultural heritage and labor in the high-technology economy.
The book does not present these assignments solely as finished dispatches. Reportage photographs and extended accounts are interwoven with anecdotes, drawings, field notes and personal pictures made while working. This hybrid structure places the circumstances of production beside the events being covered: access, delay, danger and the practical frustrations of freelance work become part of the narrative rather than disappearing behind an authoritative journalistic voice.
At the center are the people implicated in each situation. The book’s attention to individual lives and human stakes complicates categories that can otherwise remain abstract—war, organized violence, political extremism, endangered heritage and globalized labor. De Viguerie and Quérouil-Bruneel also write and photograph from the particular position of women working in conflict zones, directly countering the familiar mythology of the invulnerable, masculine foreign correspondent. Their approach is intimate without abandoning the explanatory scope of long-form reporting.
For collectors of documentary photography and photojournalism, the book is notable less as a survey of headline events than as a record of how such stories are constructed in the field. The collaboration between image-maker and writer, and the movement between public report and private notebook, preserve both the resulting work and its working conditions. The French-language hardcover comprises 221 pages; its breadth and layered editorial form make it a substantial document of international freelance reportage at the close of the twenty-first century’s first decade.
