| Tales from Photography |
“The true face of war would inevitably be anti-war” : James Nachtwey at VII Photo Agency's first European Seminar. Photos and text : Graham Harrison
VII on multimedia and commitment
In April 2007 members of the influential VII Photo Agency gathered in London for their first European seminar. In Multimedia leaves still standing as ten into VII adds up in London written for EPUK, Graham Harrison asked for their thoughts on how multimedia is changing photography.
“The true face of war would inevitably be anti-war,” said James Nachtwey in almost a whisper to a packed audience at the Royal Geographic Society in London last week.
Nachtwey was speaking at the the VII Photo Agency’s first European seminar, a two day event featuring talks and multimedia and video presentations from all ten of the agency’s members, plus panel discussions, question times, and for a select few a third day of portfolio reviews at the Frontline Club in Paddington.
Opening the event Gary Knight spoke of VII as a continuous experiment that the members wanted to share with the photographic community, and how the agency was founded (on the eve of 9/11) because of a growing dissatisfaction with the way the industry was changing.
Media savvy and committed to the cause of reporting and communicating the injustices of the world, VII has harnessed the virtual world in its mission.
“You were moving, moving, moving and seeing people’s faces and making a picture and then moving,” said Eugene Richards recalling the time he barged into a psychiatric hospital without permission accompanied by a team from Mental Disability Rights International.
‘A Procession of Them’ Richards jagged, close-up scrutiny of his contact sheets reflecting the fractured lives of the inmates of a Mexican mental hospital is one of his recent departures into multimedia. Yet, Richards admitted to EPUK, “It’s not a choice you want to make necessarily, but this is how younger people are learning today and part of being a photojournalist is to provide historical material and to be an educator. If in a short production you can grab people for five minutes on a web site then your work does have value.”
John G Morris, key note speaker whose canny eye picture edited many of the most powerful images of the 20th century sees the moving image eroding the power of the still image, and worries about what he calls the disturbing tendency of newspapers to take stills from video. A veteran of Life, The New York Times and The Washington Post, Morris added that the survival of all newspapers is now dependent on the web.
After seven decades in the business John Morris is stunned by the ease of modern communications and does see it as a powerful tool for democracy around the world.
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