Jean-François Leroy, who founded Visa pour l'Image in 1989 and turned the Catalan city of Perpignan into photojournalism's annual capital, has died at 71.

Leroy's death, reported on 14 September, removes the last of the great European festival impresarios who built their institutions through sheer personal conviction. For 36 editions, every September, he decided which photographers, which wars, which forgotten crises the profession would look at together.

He was a director of provable loyalties. He programmed the work of James Nachtwey, Stanley Greene, Christine Spengler and Alexandra Boulat, and he kept returning to photographers the news cycle had abandoned. He defended photojournalism's economics as fiercely as its aesthetics, pressing agencies and newspapers to pay day rates that made assignments possible.

Leroy also ran the Visa pour l'Image foundation, which supports photographers in the field, and the nightly screenings in the former convent of the Couvent des Minimes, where thousands of photojournalists watched each other's work in silence.

His death raises the question every founder-dominated festival eventually faces: whether an institution built around one man's taste and temper can survive him. Visa pour l'Image's 2025 edition closed days before his death was announced. The 2026 edition will be the first test of whether the festival Leroy built can outlive the man who built it.