VII Photo Agency: Origins
Gary Knight, Co-Founder, VII Photo Agency
VII’s name comes from the number of founding photojournalists who, in September 2001, formed this collectively owned photo agency.
Bucking the trend of convergence prompted by the involvement of large corporations acquiring smaller agencies to create anonymous super agencies, VII was designed from the outset to be an efficient, technologically enabled distribution hub owned and controlled by its members creating and relaying to the world images that helped shape our understanding of the turbulent opening years of the 21st century.
On September 9th, 2001, at a photography festival in the south of France, and capitalized by a fistful of euros drawn from local ATM machines, VII announced its formation. On the following night, covering for the missed return flight of a colleague, James Nachtwey arrived at his Manhattan apartment close to the World Trade Center. The next morning, he photographed some of the most haunting pictures of the collapse of the twin towers. Christopher Morris, Ron Haviv, and Antonin Kratochvil joined him over the following days while Alexandra Boulat, Gary Knight, and John Stanmeyer departed for Pakistan and Afghanistan to begin documenting the successive wars that defined the beginning of the 21st century and crushed the hope of a peaceful start to a new millenium.
Boulat, Haviv, Knight, Kratochvil, Morris, Nachtwey and Stanmeyer were joined in later years by Joachim Ladefoged, Marcus Bleasdale, Franco Pagetti, and Stephanie Sinclair. Two years ago, the agency launched the VII Network to collaborate with a larger group of accomplished photographers and expand its coverage of the important issues of our time. At the same time, it launched the VII Mentor Programme which enables the members to work with some of the most promising emerging photographers a generation or two younger.
While the stark realities of the battlefield loom large, VII turns its gaze with equal intensity to more subtle forms of conflict and to documenting the changes and development of society and culture worldwide. But this is not merely artfully captured, neutral observation; nor is it the doctrinaire elaboration of a political or social position. Each photographer is inspired by an array of often very different motivations, and it is from this breadth of reference that the agency draws its originality and strength. What unites VII’s work is a sense that, in the act of communication at the very least, all is not lost; the seeds of hope and resolution inform even the darkest records of inhumanity; reparation is always possible and despair is never absolute.