They’re not gunslingers, and they don’t do their shooting on movie sets.  But like Hollywood’s Magnificent Seven, the small band of photojournalists in the VII Photo Agency are consummate professionals who willingly risk their necks to help downtrodden people confronting dire circumstances in remote locales.  Among fellow photojournalists, the members of VII are also respected as fighters for independence and integrity in an industry that is being turned upside down by corporate takeovers, the decline of print media and the rise of the Internet.

VII Photographers © Clay Enos

VII’s photojournalists cover man-made and natural disasters that include war, oppression, pestilence, famine, flood and earthquakes.  Too often, they witness suffering that is biblical in scale but overlooked by mainstream media.  They render assistance by getting on the ground in time to document conditions, facilitate communication and inspire relief efforts.  They also believe in capturing the cultural realities behind the conflicts, and stay on the story long after the dust has settled and the ‘drive-by’ photojournalists have disappeared. 

VII was formed by seven ace photojournalists and announced on September 9th, 2001.  Two days later, the agency achieved instant prominence in a way none of its founders would have wanted.  James Nachtwey, a charter member and celebrated war photographer who is in more or less perpetual circulation around the world, jetted into Manhattan the night before the twin towers went down.  The next day, he was at ground-zero, with his cameras and war-trained reflexes, to record searing and widely published images of New York’s response to the terror attack.  VII is now known as ‘the first post-9/11 photo agency.’ 

The original members were John Stanmeyer, Gary Knight, Alexandra Boulat, James Nachtwey, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil and Christopher Morris, all of whom made their bones as photographers of war and social conflicts.  All of them also all happened to be friends, to have strong personalities, to share strong feelings about justice and humanity, and to dislike working for large photo agencies.   

Over the years, VII has taken in three new members, Joachim Ladefoged, Lauren Greenfield and Eugene Richards, who have broadened the agency’s focus.  Greenfield is considered the photographic poet laureate of American girl culture, and Richards has racked up a long and distinguished record of focusing on health and environmental  issues.  But even with the new members on board, VII remains a tight community of friends that feels as much like a family as a business. 

An American soldier on the streets of New York on the opening day of the Stock Exchange on Wall Street, New York Sept. 17, 2001. Security remained tight around the exchange, which closed for six days following the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. © Christopher Morris / VII

When it comes to business, however, VII has achieved notable success by pioneering a digital, internet-empowered agency structure that enables enterprising independents to prosper while defying the trend towards ever-larger media conglomerates.  According to the Columbia Review of Journalism (John Dorfman, 2002), VII was formed at a time when there was, “an industry-wide sense that the business of photojournalism (was) changing rapidly for the worse… Who is to blame?  …Photographers focus on Corbis and Getty, two corporate titans…bringing about a seismic shift in the way photojournalism is conducted.  Could VII represent a new movement of photographers retaking control of their own work in an atmosphere of renewed interest in photojournalism?”

Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, waterfront and apartments. © John Stanmeyer / VII

The unwelcome changes in photojournalism involved not only the size and financial clout of the new mega-agencies (Corbis is funded by Bill Gates, Getty by oil magnate Mark Getty) but also the working conditions they wanted to impose on photographers.  “In the old way of doing business,” writes Dorfman, ‘the agency got assignments for the photographers, arranged the logistics for their reporting trips and advanced them money when necessary; in return it got a cut of royalties.”  Corbis, however, did not want to spend money on supporting photographers in the field.  It wanted them to work as freelancers, paying their own way and giving the agency a risk-free percentage for distributing their work.

The founders of VII were in an ideal position to buck the trend because they were all well-known and much sought after by photo editors at top outlets such as TIME, National Geographic, Fortune and Newsweek.  Each member could work independently and command attention from the media because of the uniqueness, timeliness and power of his or her images.   Their breakthrough was to achieve a force-multiplier effect by combining their independent energies and talents on the basis of shared commitments.  VII has also been extremely savvy in using the Internet to connect members with clients while reducing agency overhead.

“Our photographers are creating incredibly compelling content, and we’re very aggressive in connecting that work with clients,” said VII’s Managing Director, Frank Evers.  “We’re trying to find all the cracks in the system.  That means being on our toes, working with online media companies, not allowing the shifting foundation of media to retard out ability to get the work out there.”

Evers says that VII also cooperates with non-profits and non-governmental agencies to raise awareness of humanitarian crises that don’t grab headlines.  “We did an amazing project for Doctors without Borders.  Five of our photographers went to the Congo and collaborated on a book called The Forgotten War.  The material was on websites, published in magazines, exhibited on several different continents and probably seen by close to half a million people.  What VII brought to Doctors without Borders was our ability to use multiple platforms to get the story out.”
 
TGP recently managed to catch up with four of the agency’s globe-trotting photographers.  These articulate, talented, tireless and gutsy people have seen humanity at its most desperate yet retain their optimism and love of life.  Talking to them has been an exhilarating and humbling experience for this stay-at-home writer.  “What unites VII’s work,” says the agency website, “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; despair is never absolute.” 

The photographers we reached are Antonin Kratochvil, Gary Knight, Lauren Greenfield and John Stanmeyer.   Brief profiles of each, with links to the interviews, are below.  For anyone interested in the work or issues discussed, VII’s magazine-style website is a must-see destination.  ( www.viiphoto.com )

John Stanmeyer: ‘We all live in on a shaking planet so the reflection in that broken mirror could be me or you or any of us.”

John Stanmeyer was one of the prime movers behind VII.  He has lived in Asia for a decade and contributed many cover images for TIME and National Geographic features about the region.  His long-term projects include books on the radical changes in Indonesia and the spread of AIDS in Asia.  Stanmeyer has earned numerous World Press and Picture of the Year awards, and was honored as the Robert Capa Magazine Photographer of the Year. 

Gary Knight: “I want to look at things one can change rather than things that are so horrendously bad they’re impossible to change.”

Gary Knight was Stanmeyer’s principal co-conspirator in the creation of VII.  Born in Britain, he currently lives in idyllic circumstances in the south of France when he is not out photographing horrific conditions of war, poverty, injustice and disaster.  He has an unquenchable optimism and a dry British wit, which comes out in this self-description on his website: ‘His work has been published by many auspicious publications all over the world; he has contributed work to several books, exhibited in many museums and is the recipient of numerous awards but as far as he can see none of them have made a significant impact on the conditions in which the people he photographs live.’

Antonin Kratochvil: “Being born in Eastern Europe has made me more in tune with the situation we’re beginning to see in this country with surveillance and police state tactics being employed against the citizens here.”

 The only photographer in VII who was born behind the Iron Curtain, Antonin Kratochvil had a close encounter with totalitarian politics in his youth and a difficult escape from Czechoslovakia to the west at the age of 18.  These experiences and the survival skills he acquired early in life continue to influence his photography, which is “the product of personal experience, intimate conditioning and not privileged voyeurism.”  Kratochvil has published five books.  The latest was Vanishing, an elegy to endangered species and places.  He spent 20 years on the project, which won the Golden Light Award for Best Documentary Book of 2005.  Kratochvil is a two-time winner of the first prize in the World Press Competition. 

Lauren Greenfield: “The thing that brings us together is people’s commitment to long-term personally and socially committed documentary projects.  We’re all engaged photographers.  There are no jobbers among us.”

Lauren Greenfield is considered the pre-eminent chronicler of American youth and the excesses of affluence, particularly as they affect girls and young women.  Her project Girl Culture has become ‘the definitive photographic documentation of American girls in the 21st century,’ and is now in development as a feature film, as is her earlier work Fast Forward.  She has just finished directing and producing her first feature-length documentary THIN, a study of eating disorders, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.  Her work has earned international publication, exhibition and many top awards.  Greenfield was the first newcomer invited to VII but she half-jokingly refers to herself as ‘the odd man out, or the odd woman out, in an agency of war photographers.’