Gary Knight, the Director and a founding member of VII Photo Agency, will be president of the jury this year at the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award in October.

“It is a great privilege to be invited to Chair the jury of the Bayeux Award for war correspondents this year and to honor the men and women who file dispatches and images from fields of conflict. It is especially poignant to do this at a time when our media are increasingly under attack by politicians and governments – even in countries where a free press is enshrined in the constitution. War reporting is a vital and essential function of journalism. It is critical to civil society, to our sense of justice and accountability and to basic human rights.

As the late Marie Colvin said in 2010, two years before she was killed in Homs: “The public have a right to know what our government, and our armed forces, are doing in our name. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.”