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IntroductIon: A FIre In the LensBy dAvId FrIend

Introduction

Three days before 9/11, the photo agency VII (‘Seven’) was born. That week, many of the world’s top photographers and members of the professional photography community descended on Perpignan, France, for the annual Visa pour l’Image festival, the international conclave for photojournalists. Many arrived with a sense of malaise. The late 1990s had seen unprecedented consolidation in the news-and-feature side of editorial photo-graphy and a certain gloom had enveloped the rank and file. Photojournalism seemed to be on the wane; celebrity coverage was ascendant. Many publications seemed to be sacrificing experience for expedience. Titans such as Getty Images and Corbis continued to snap up photo archives and agencies – grandly rewarding certain photographers while marginalizing others – as they created agencies of enormous power with vast digital archives. And many attendees at Perpignan that week felt threatened, alienated from the industry to which they had devoted their careers.

Yet there was reason for hope. On Saturday, 8 September 2001, a group of seven marquee-name photojournalists sat on stage at a ragtag press conference. The photographers were there to announce the formation of a small, independent photo coll-ective – part traditional agency, part global network reliant on the Web – to be based not in Paris or New York or Seattle but on their seven separate laptops and computer desktops in their seven home offices, from Tampa to Provence and Bali.

‘We were inventing [VII] up as we went along,’ explains the agency’s initial strategist, Gary Knight, ‘everyone cleaning out their ATMs. We paid the lawyer in [photographic] prints. We paid the accountant and the Web master and the guy who designed the logo that way. That week [in Perpignan] was … the first time we had all met in the same room and had the opportunity to go through the business model together, face to face.’ Those in the press-conference audience, long starved for good news and a fresh approach, seemed to warm to their concept. ‘What we were doing was not a new idea,’ Knight admits, ‘but an old one in a new age.’

The notion behind VII was simple yet counterintuitive. As picture agencies became more unwieldy and impersonal, why couldn’t a septet of friends form their own cooperative – maintaining their ethical standards, photographic quality, camaraderie – and share their profits, all the while using the World Wide Web to transmit their images digitally from their own corners of the globe? (VII, as described in some of its earliest literature, was ‘designed from

the outset to be an efficient, technologically enabled distribution hub for some of the world’s finest journalism.’) And why couldn’t more subtle, nuanced pictures – images created not merely in response to the immediacy of world events but evolving out of each photographer’s unique editorial and artistic perspective – make it into the journalistic pipeline? Somehow, Knight and his confrères would try to elevate socially engaged documentary photography – a silent, meditative, anachronistic medium in the light-speed realm of 24/7 news.

Knight was spurred on, he says, by the legendary Magnum photographer Gilles Peress, whom Knight insists had been urging him to set out on his own and create something new. Knight felt something click one night, at 3:00 a.m. He happened to be visiting photographer John Stanmeyer on a trip to Hong Kong. ‘We were down in my studio,’ recalls Stanmeyer, ‘standing over an old [Apple] G-3. We were doing Web stuff, talking about how to market an archive. And Gary said, “What about doing this together?”

In the intervening six to nine months, via late-night rap sessions and countless emails, they joined forces with other adventurous photographer friends – Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Alexandra Boulat and Christopher Morris – veterans of conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the West Bank. (Boulat would perish in 2007 after suffering a ruptured brain aneurysm in Gaza.) One by one, emboldened by a collegial bond, they came on board, in search of a new business paradigm and a chance for ownership and opportunity. At the turn of the millennium, the photo business, explains Haviv, had become ‘dehumanizing. I found out about my agency being sold [during a conversation on my cell phone] from a friend who called while I was on a motorbike in East Timor.’ Here was a vote not for mainline but for streamline, not for corporate but for esprit de corps.

And then Photographer number seven came along for the ride: James Nachtwey. Known for an almost mystical invincibility under fire, he is his generation’s most celebrated working photographer of conflict, a modern-day heir to the great combat chroniclers of the century past, such as Robert Capa, Larry Burrows and Don McCullin. On too many occasions Nachtwey had stood or crouched next to colleagues or subjects who themselves had been wounded or killed. He had been attacked by mobs and had felt the hot breath of bullets in Bosnia, Haiti, Indonesia, and South Africa. He once tore both Achilles tendons while sprinting away from snipers in the former Yugoslavia. He survived one nighttime attack in Iraq in 2003 – sustaining shrapnel wounds that plague him to this day – when a grenade, tossed by insur-gents hiding along the roadside, landed in the open compartment of the Jeep he was riding in.

"A group oF peopLe who ALL hAve worked wIth eAch other ALL Around the worLd In AdversIty, In the kInd oF sItuAtIon where strong FrIendshIps Are mAde very quIckLy"James Nachtwey

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1991—1995BLood And honeyron hAvIvAmid the numerous photographs of the conflict in Yugoslavia, Ron Haviv's work stands out as a unique record of the hostilities, from its beginnings in 1991 to its brutal end in 1995. From the front-line trenches to the refugees behind them, his images of poignant immediacy capture both the urgency and tragedy of war. A historical and powerful testimony to the suffering of the Balkan people.

After surviving the Serb attack on Srebrenica, grievers in Tuzla, Bosnia, learn of the fall of the United Nations safe haven on 15 July 1995. More than 7,000 Bosnian men were killed and tens of thousands were forced to flee during the attack.

Serbian Tiger leader Zeljko Raznatovic or 'Arkan' poses with his paramilitary unit, waving the Serbian flag and a baby tiger that he liberated from a Croatian zoo. Overleaf. Vanishing by Antonin Kratochvil, 1994–2005. Workers cleaning up an oil spill in Oriente, Ecuador, 1994.

After the Cold War Ron Haviv – Blood and Honey

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Above. Yves Saint Laurent has lunch at his home in Paris, the day before his last haute couture show at the Georges Pompidou Centre on 22 January 2002. Below. Yves Saint Laurent in his Parisian studio at 5 Avenue Marceau on 17 January 2002, judging one of the canvases he designed for his last haute couture show.

Previous page. The Bridge by Gary Knight, 7–9 April 2003. A sequence of photographs taken during three days, when the 3rd battalion 4th Marines of the USMC attacked and captured the Diwanya Bridge, prior to arriving in Baghdad and pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein outside the Palestine Hotel.

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Above. Yves Saint Laurent and his dog Moujik III in the designer’s Parisian studio the day before his last haute couture show.

Alexandra Boulat – Yves Saint Laurent's Last Show

127Lives in the Balance Joachim Ladefoged – A Vanishing Way of Life

For generations, families in fishing communities have survived of the bounties of the ocean. The family trade was passed from father to son. Now it is a way of life that has all but vanished. With the government ban there are no jobs, and only a few fishing communi-ties remain. In June 2003, Joachim Ladefoged visited one such community in La Poile, Newfoundland, Canada.

2003A vAnIshIng wAy oF LIFe JoAchIm LAdeFoged

A view of the bay at LaPoile, Newfoundland, home to 128 people. Fishermen at work in LaPoile. The life of a fisherman is tough and physical, few days go by without hard labour.

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Above. Residents emerge from a pedestrian underpass on Changwang Street in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, October 2005.

Left. Government drivers wait outside the Koryo Hotel on Changwang Street in Pyongyang, October 2005. Right. A policewoman guides traffic in Pyongyang, October 2005.

Above. While aboard the US warship Pueblo, in the North Korean capital Pyongyang, a government minder keeps a watchful eye as a party of Westerners tour the ship, October 2005. The warship was captured in North Korean waters in January 1968.

Left. North Koreans fish at a lake on the outskirts of Pyongyang, October 2005. Right. Students study English at the elite Kumsung Educational Institute in Pyongyang, October 2005. The students use downloaded material from the country's main computer research centre; they have no direct access to the Internet.

Landscapes in Turmoil Christopher Morris – The Hermit Nation, North Korea

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2008poLygAmy In AmerIcAstephAnIe sIncLAIr

Stephanie Sinclair – Polygamy in America

Joe S. Jessop, a highly respected member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, poses with his five wives, 46 children, and 239 grandchildren, the day after his 89th birthday, 28 December 2008.

Known for their practice of polygamy, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) is the United States' largest practitioner of plural marriage – and one of the country's most secretive Mormon sects. The FLDS church emerged in the early 1900s when its founding members left the mainstream Mormon church, largely due to the issue of plural marriage. They gained international notoriety with the arrest of their leader Warren S. Jeffs, who in May 2006 was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. The Utah state charges related to his alleged arrangement of unlawful marriages between his adult male followers and underage girls. In April 2008, Texas Rangers raided their ranch in Eldorado, Texas after receiving what was later deter-mined to be a hoax call, although authorities eventually removed 440 children from the ranch, alleged to have been sexually, physi-cally and emotionally abused. The children are now back at home. This is an intimate look at how the community continues to survive amidst, what they consider, a battle over faith and the authorities' desire to end their unconventional way of living.

Changing of the Guard

Below. Helaman Jeffs, 16, son of Warren Jeffs, leader of the FLDS, yawns while preparing to sing hymns at their home in New Braunfels, Texas, 12 July 2008.

Above. Leanne Jeffs, 17, holds her one-year-old daughter Sally, while relatives make breakfast inside their San Antonio home, Texas, 11 July 2008.

Above. A selection of spreads from the book featuring the following stories, from top left to right: Ageing in America by Ed Kashi, 1997–2001; Lost Lives: Mental Health Crisis in Asia by John Stanmeyer, 2003; My America by Christopher Morris, 2004; Crossing America by Antonin Kratochvil, 2008; Somalia by Franco Pagetti, 2008; China: I Have No Enemies by Marcus Bleasdale, 2010.

Specification. Hardback, 300 x 225 mm (11 7/8 x 8 7/8 inches), 352 pages, c.450 colour and black and white images ISBN 978 0 7148 4840 2Phaidon Press Limited, Regent's Wharf, All Saints Street, London N1 9PA© 2011 Phaidon Press Limited www.phaidon.com

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