Alexandra Boulat
Alexandra Boulat was born in Paris, France, May 2nd, 1962 and died in Paris on the 5th of October, 2007.
She was originally trained in graphic art and art history at the Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1989, she followed in the steps of her father, Photographer Pierre Boulat, who worked for 25 years for LIFE magazine, and became a photojournalist as well. She was represented by Sipa Press for ten years until 2000. In 2001, she co-founded the VII.
Her news and feature stories were published in many international magazines, above all National Geographic Magazine, TIME, and Paris-Match. She has received many of the most prestigious international photography awards for her work, including Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France; Best Woman Photographer, Bevento Oscars, Italy 2006; Infinity Award, International Center of Photography, New York, 1999; USA Photo Magazine’s photographer of the year, 1998; and the Paris-Match Award 1998.
Boulat covered news, conflicts and social issues as well as making extensive reportages on countries and people. Among her many varied assignments, she reported on the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 until 1999, including Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; the fall of the Taliban, the Iraqi people living under the embargo in the 90s, and the invasion of Baghdad by the coalition in 2003. During the last few years, she was working on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. She also photographed Yasser Arafat’s family life and Yves Saint Laurent’s last show in 2001. Other large assignments include country stories on Indonesia and Albania and a people story on the Berbers of Morocco. Her latest work was on Muslim women in the Middle East and Gaza.
Alexandra Boulat was the architect of one of the most deliberate, focused and militant bodies of work on the victims -- particularly women -- of conflict and injustice of our time.
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Antonin Kratochvil
As photojournalists go, Antonin Kratochvil has sunk his teeth into his fair share of upheaval and human catastrophes whilst going about his documentation of the time in which he lives.
As people go, Kratochvil’s own refugee life has been much in the way the same as what he has rendered on film. Kratochvil’s unique style of photography is the product of personal experience, intimate conditioning and not privileged voyeurism.
Over the years, his fluid and unconventional work has been sought by numerous publications stretching across widely differing interests. From shooting Mongolia’s street children for the magazine published by the Museum of Natural History to a portrait session with David Bowie for Detour, from covering the war in Iraq for Fortune Magazine to shooting Deborah Harry for a national advertising campaign for the American Civil Liberties Union, Kratochvil’s ability to see through and into his subjects and show immutable truth has made his pictures not facsimiles but uncensored visions.
And yet, what sets his kind apart from the many is his consistency and struggle to carry on. For Kratochvil, this fact comes in the form of his numerous awards, grants and honorable mentions dating back to 1975. The latest of these are his two first place prizes at the 2002 World Press Photo Awards in the categories of general news and nature and the environment. The next is the 2004 grant from Aperture for Kratochvil’s study on the fractious relationship between American civil liberties and the newly formed Department of Homeland Security since the World Trade Center bombings.
In addition, Kratochvil’s fifth book, Vanishing, was unwrapped in 2005 and marks another significant milestone for the craft to which he belongs. Vanishing represents a collection of natural and human phenomena that are on the verge of extinction. What makes this book so innovative is the twenty years it has taken to produce, making it not only historical from the onset, but a labor of love and a commitment to one man’s conscience.
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Balazs Gardi
Balazs Gardi is a Hungarian freelance photographer who focuses on documenting the everyday life of marginalized communities facing humanitarian crises.
His current long-term project aims to capture how water-related social tensions and geopolitical conflicts shape the future of people worldwide.
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Benjamin Lowy
Benjamin Lowy, born 1979, received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and began his photographic career covering the Iraq War in 2003.
Since then, he has covered major stories in Afghanistan, Darfur, Haiti, Indonesia, and many others.
In 2004, Lowy attended the World Press Joop Swart Masterclass and was nominated for the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. He was named in Photo District News 30 as well as the PDN Photo Annual. Lowy’s images from Iraq were chosen by PDN as some of the most iconic of the 21st century.
He has also received awards from Communication Arts, American Photography, and the Society for Publication Design. His work from Iraq and Darfur have been collected into several gallery and museum shows, and his work from Darfur appeared in the media campaigns of SAVE DARFUR, Human Rights Watch, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Christopher Morris
Christopher Morris was born in California in 1958.
Over the past 20 years, he has concentrated the greater part of his work on war, having documented more than 18 foreign conflicts, including the U.S. invasion of Panama, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Persian Gulf War, the drug war in Colombia, and the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, and Yugoslavia.
He also documented the last five years of the Presidency of George W. Bush for TIME magazine.
Morris has received a multitude of awards for his work, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal and Olivier Rebbot awards from the Overseas Press Club; the Magazine Photographer of the Year award from the University of Missouri School of Journalism; the Infinity Photojournalist award from the International Center of Photography, New York; the Visa d’Or award; and numerous World Press Photo Awards.
Morris is a founding member of VII.
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Eric Bouvet
Eric Bouvet, born in 1961, began his photographic career in 1981 after studying art and graphic industries in Paris.
His interest in photography was sparked when, at the age of 8, he watched the first live television images of the Apollo 11 mission landing on the moon. It was then that he realized the importance of news and historic moments, not to mention capturing them on film.
Bouvet worked as a staff photographer at the French photo agency Gamma during the 1980s, and he launched his freelance career in 1990. He first won international recognition with his 1986 pictures of the rescue efforts in the aftermath of a volcano eruption in Omeyra, Colombia. Since then, Bouvet has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Chechnya, Sudan, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Israel, Northern Ireland, Kurdistan, Suriname and Burundi.
He has covered major international events including the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague’s Velvet Revolution, the U.S. attack on Libya, the release of Nelson Mandela, and various Olympic Games.
He has also worked on many ‘society’ stories including life in Russian jails, young sailors on aircraft carriers, French police working in the Paris suburbs, France’s last coal miners, and life at a pediatric clinic for children with cancer.
His work has been published in many international magazines including TIME, Life, Newsweek, Paris-Match, Stern, and The Sunday Times Magazine. He has also led photographic campaigns for various NGOs and charities including Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), International Red Cross, Medecins du Monde (MDM), and Action Against Hunger (ACF).
Along the way, Bouvet has received five World Press Awards, as well as the Visa d’Or, the Prix Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents, and the Prix Paris-Match 2000 Award.
Since 1990, Bouvet has been working as an independent photojournalist.
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Franco Pagetti
Franco Pagetti has covered the conflict in Iraq since January 2003, three months before the start of the war. Since then, he has almost constantly been based in Baghdad, mainly on assignment for TIME Magazine. His images have captured the horrors of war, the brief flowering of hope after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, the rise of insurgent and terrorist groups, and more recently, the inexorable descent into a bloody sectarian civil war.
Pagetti has been a news photographer since 1994, and most of his recent work has involved conflict situations: Afghanistan (1997, 1998, 2001), Kosovo (1999), East Timor (1999), Kashmir (1998, 2000, 2001), Palestine (2002), Sierrra Leone (2001) and South Sudan (1997).
Conflict situations attract Pagetti because they afford the opportunity to observe people and societies in extremis – under tremendous duress. This brings out the best and worst in people, and Pagetti’s lens has captured both incredible heroism as well as grisly brutality in war zones on three continents. Regardless of the geographic setting, Pagetti says, war and its aftermath seem to affect vastly different societies in almost exactly the same way.
His non-conflict news photography has included assignments in India, the Vatican City, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and his native Italy.
In addition to TIME Magazine, he has worked on assignment for Newsweek, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Stern. His work has been published in Le Figaro, Paris Match, The Times of London, The Independent, and DAYS Japan magazine.
In his “former life,” he was a fashion photographer for Italian VOGUE and taught chemistry at Milano’s University.
He occasionally lectures.
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Gary Knight
Gary Knight’s entry into photojournalism began as a bid to fulfill his idealistic and romantic impulses and escape what he saw as the monotony of life in middle-class England during the Thatcher years.
In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, he made Southeast Asia his home and embarked on a portrayal of the internecine warfare within a region coming to terms with the end of the Cold War. By 1993 he had moved to the former Yugoslavia and became immersed in the subject that would come to dominate his photography during that period -- documenting the effects of war on civilian populations.
After pioneering the launch of the VII Photo Agency in September 2001, Knight followed the development of events in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He was one of only a few non-embedded photographers covering the invasion of Iraq alongside the U.S. Marines.
His work has been widely published by magazines all over the world and exhibited globally; it is in the collections of several museums and private collectors and has been the recipient of numerous high profile awards. Knight has initiated a broad education programme with universities and NGOs worldwide, principally focused on educating young people from developing economies.
In June 2008, Knight launched a new quarterly magazine, dispatches, a cutting edge, single-issue journal which examines the greatest global challenges of our time. In each edition, dispatches focuses 25,000 words and up to 100 pages of photography on one crucial issue (http://www.rethink-dispatches.com).
Knight is also a founder of the Angkor Photo Festival, a board member of the Crimes of War Foundation, a trustee of the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, Juror and past Chairman of the World Press Photo Award, Chairman of the StopTB Partnership Advisory Board, permanent member of the Frontline Club Award jury, and a contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine.
Gary Knight is on sabbatical with a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University for 2009-10.
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James Nachtwey
James Nachtwey grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science (1966-70). Images from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement had a powerful effect on him and were instrumental in his decision to become a photographer. He has worked aboard ships in the Merchant Marine, and while teaching himself photography, he was an apprentice news film editor and a truck driver.
In 1976, he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil, Iraq, and the United States.
Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with TIME Magazine since 1984. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII. He was associated with Black Star from 1980-85 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. He has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the Palazzo Esposizione in Rome, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Culturgest in Lisbon, El Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, the Canon Gallery and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, the Carolinum in Prague, and the Hasselblad Center in Sweden, among others. Nachtwey was also the subject of the 2002 Oscar Nominated Documentary “The War Photographer” by Swiss filmaker Christian Frei.
He has received numerous honors such as the Commonwealth Award, the Martin Luther King Award, the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, the Henry Luce Award, the Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), the World Press Photo Award (twice), Magazine Photographer of the Year (eight times), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (three times), the Leica Award (twice), the Bayeaux Award for War Correspondents (twice), the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, the Canon Photo essayist Award, the Leipzig Award for Freedom of the Press, the Daniel Pearl Award, the Dan David Prize, and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Grant in Humanistic Photography. He is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and has an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Arts.
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Joachim Ladefoged
Joachim Ladefoged, born in 1970, joined the VII Photo Agency in 2004.
In 1987, at the age of 16, Ladefoged’s dream of becoming a soccer player was shattered when he was almost crippled by rheumatism. A year later he got his first camera, with the hope that photography could bring him closer to the activities his illness denied him. Three years later he joined a small regional newspaper in Denmark, shooting up to six assignments a day. From 1995-1998, he was a staff photographer at the national newspaper, Politiken.
He has worked in more than 50 countries for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Mare, TIME, and Newsweek.
He has won international recognition for covering war, conflict, and ordinary life. Visa d’Or, World Press Photo, Life Magazine, AGFA and Denmark’s Picture of the Year competitions are among the organizations that have seen fit to award Ladefoged for his work. He has been named one of Photo District News Magazine’s “30 under 30,” and has participated in the Joop Swart Masterclass at World Press Photo.
In 2000, he published his first book, Albanians, about the turbulent life of the Albanians between 1997-1999, from the pyramid scheme collapse to the war, exodus, and subsequent homecoming to Kosovo.
At VII, he has contributed to two major book projects, Tsunami and the Congo: Forgotten War. He has had several solo and group exhibitions and is represented at the collection of the Danish Royal Library.
He is credited with being one of the driving forces behind the new wave of Danish photojournalism.
In February 2008, he released his second book, Mirror, about the obsessive world of bodybuilding.
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John Stanmeyer
John Stanmeyer is a co-founding member of VII and a contract photographer with TIME Magazine since 1998. He also works regularly on assignment with National Geographic magazine.
Born in the United States and living in Indonesia, Stanmeyer has spent more than ten years focusing on Asian issues. For seven years, he has been working on a book about the AIDS epidemic throughout Asia, as well as continuing his photographic documentation on the radical changes in Indonesia since 1997. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Capa Award, Magazine Photographer of the Year, as well as multiple World Press and Picture of the Year awards.
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Marcus Bleasdale
Marcus Bleasdale has spent more than seven years covering the brutal conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The work was published in his book, One Hundred Years of Darkness, which is recognized in the best photojournalism books of the year (2002) by Photo District News (PDN) in the USA.
He is widely published in the UK, Europe, and the USA in publications such as The Sunday Times Magazine, The Telegraph Magazine, Geo, Stern, The New Yorker, TIME, Newsweek, and National Geographic Magazine.
Bleasdale has received acclaim for his work over the years, including several first prizes in Picture of the Year and NPPA awards. In 2004, he was awarded the UNICEF Photographer of the Year Award, the 3P Photographer Award, and the Alexia Foundation Grant. He exhibited in New York at Moving Walls 2005 and was awarded the Open Society Institute Distribution Grant 2005 for his work with Human Rights Watch. Bleasdale’s images have also been chosen by PDN as one of the most iconic of the 21st century.
In 2005, Bleasdale was named Magazine Photographer of the Year by POYi. In 2006, he was awarded the prestigious Olivier Rebbot Award for best foreign reporting in the USA, and he won a World Press Award for his work on street children in Congo.
In 2007, he was awarded, together with Human Rights Watch, a grant by the Open Society Institute to continue his work on justice and accountability in the DRC. Also in 2007 he was awarded $50,000 by the Freedom of Expression Institute in Norway to continue his work on the effects of oil exploration on populations around the world.
Bleasdale continues to cover those issues underreported and forgotten by today’s media.
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Ron Haviv
Award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv has produced images of conflict and humanitarian crises that have made headlines from around the world since the end of the Cold War.
Numerous museums and galleries have featured his work, including The Louvre, United Nations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. A co-founder of VII, his work is published by magazines worldwide. He has published two critically acclaimed collections of his photography – Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal and Afghanistan: On the Road to Kabul.
Haviv has been the central character in three films including National Geographic Explorer’s “Freelance in a World of Risk” that explores the hazards inherent in combat photography. In addition, Haviv has spoken about his work on NPR, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, The Charlie Rose Show, Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, and CNN.
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Seamus Murphy
Seamus Murphy began photographing Afghanistan in 1994, and his new book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, is a classic on the rise of the Taliban and the impact of the U.S. invasion.
For two decades, he has worked extensively in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and most recently America on an ongoing project during what he calls “a nervous and auspicious time.”
His accolades include six World Press Photo Awards.
Murphy blends humor and irony with deep insight. “Photography,” he says,“is part history, part magic.”
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Stephanie Sinclair
Stephanie Sinclair, born in 1973, is an American photojournalist known for gaining unique access to the most sensitive gender and human rights issues around the world. Sinclair graduated from the University of Florida with a BS in Journalism and an outside concentration in Fine Art Photography.
After college, she went to work for the Chicago Tribune, which sent her to cover the start of the war in Iraq. She later moved to Iraq and then to Beirut, Lebanon, covering the region for six years as a freelance photographer. Sinclair joined VII Network when it was formed in 2008 and became a full member of VII in 2009. She contributes regularly to National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, Newsweek, Stern, German Geo, and Marie Claire among others, and is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Sinclair was recently awarded the Alexia Foundation Professional Grant, UNICEF’s Photo of the Year, and the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism Freelens Award for her extensive work on the issue of child marriage. She also earned the 2008 CARE International Award for Humanitarian Reportage and the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award in 2009 for her essay, “A Cutting Tradition: Inside An Indonesian Female Circumcision Celebration.” Sinclair’s other honors include the Visa D’Or from the 2004 Visa Pour L’Image photography festival in France, as well as a first place in World Press Photo and the FiftyCrows International Fund for Documentary Photography’s 2004 Central Asia and Caucasus Grant for her work on women’s issues in Afghanistan. Sinclair earned another World Press Photo award for her coverage of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and was invited to be part of the prestigious 13th Joop Swart Masterclass organized by World Press Photo.
The Chicago Bar Association’s Herman Kogan Meritorious Achievement Award 2000 was presented to Sinclair for her involvement in a Chicago Tribune series on the failure of the death penalty in Illinois. The series resulted in the govenor placing a moratorium on capital punishment in the state. Sinclair was also part of the paper’s team that won the Pulitzer Prize for its documentation of problems within the airline industry in 2000.
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