First Annual VII Seminar

The May/June edition of American Photo Magazine ranked the 100 most important people in photography in 2005. VII Photo Agency is number three... View a Photo Gallery of the event VII Photo Agency: John Stanmeyer, Lauren Greenfield, Alexandra Boulat, James Nachtwey, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Ron Haviv, Christopher Morris, and Joachim Ladefoged It was fortuitous, in a terrible sense, that the VII photo agency came into being on September 9, 2001, two days before New York City’s World Trade Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Created by seven of the world’s best photojournalists and documentary photographers, VII was a reaction to the consolidation of smaller photo agencies. The agency immediately empowered its founding-member photographers, who included London-based Knight, Paris-based Boulat, Moscow-based Haviv, Hong Kong-based Stanmeyer, and New York City-based Kratochvil, Morris, and Nachtwey. On a larger scale, the VII agency empowered other photographers by showing that serious photojournalism was not only relevant in the post-9/11 world, but also highly marketable. With photographs marketed solely through its Website, viiphoto.com, the agency now represents nine photographers, including Denmark-based Ladefoged and Los Angeles-based Greenfield. The tie that binds them? The VII Website says it well: “What unites VII’s work is a sense that, in the act of communication ... the seeds of hope and resolution inform even the darkest records of inhumanity; reparation is always possible; despair is never absolute.” -- Russell Hart In collaboration with EXPOSURE: Center for Photojournalism, Documentary Studies, and Human Rights, Institute for Global Leadership, Tufts University Sponsored by Canon