Book
The World in Pictures by the Photographers of VII
A child plays with his mother's coffin, while her body lies covered on the floor, at their home in northern Thailand, 1999. His father died one year earlier from AIDS; he is now being raised by his grandmother. 1998-2002 AIDS in Asia: Sex, Drugs & Death, John Stanmeyer.
Train station in the shopping district of Harajuku, Tokyo. 2004 Lost in Tokyo, Joachim Ladefoged.
The longest-serving prisoner has been incarcerated in this cell for five years. The old-timers sleep in hammocks up high, the newcomers on the floor. 2005 Cell Block Rio, Gary Knight.
Yves Saint Laurent having lunch at home in Paris, 21 January 2002, the day before his haute couture show at the Pompidou Centre. 2002 Yves Saint Laurent’s Last Show, Alexandra Boulat.
Women and men jostle to collect bread from a distribution centre in Nazlet el Samann in Giza, Egypt. Forty-five per cent of Egypt's population lives in poverty, which forced President Hosni Mubarak's government to subsidize bread for decades. In 2008, riots erupted over the rise in food costs. 2008 Food Crisis, John Stanmeyer.
Daughters of FLDS [The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints] leader Warren S. Jeffs, Susan Jeffs, 9, and Josephine Jeffs, 15, relax in their room after a day of playing. 2008-2009 Polygamy in America, Stephanie Sinclair.
Albanian school children, in 2000, look out of a window in which is reflected the Serbian part of Kosovska Mitrovica, a city in northern Kosovo badly damaged during the 1999 Kosovo War. 1997-2000 The Albanians, Joachim Ladefoged.
A civilian volunteer who rescued hundreds of people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, walks through a flooded neighbourhood at the end of his day, New Orleans, 6 September 2005. 2005 Hurricane Katrina, Ron Haviv (essay includes work by other VII photographers).
A child plays with his mother's coffin, while her body lies covered on the floor, at their home in northern Thailand, 1999. His father died one year earlier from AIDS; he is now being raised by his grandmother. 1998-2002 AIDS in Asia: Sex, Drugs & Death, John Stanmeyer.
The VII agency has a book coming out featuring a selection pictures of historic events of the last twenty years. This is photojournalism in its purest state, a reminder of the role played by talented photographer.
Photojournalism has only one rule: do not alter reality. Through 450 images in Questions Without Answers, taken by eleven of the agency’s photographers, we relive the major events that have marked the past two decades. We join Markus Bleasdale, Alexandra Boulat and Gary Knight on the ground in Kosovo, at the foot of the Twin Towers in 2001, and in the middle of the ongoing Arab Spring.
In photojournalism, the style, angle and distance of a photograph varies according to the event and the photographer documenting the event, but each image presented in this book is based on the moment—a critical moment in a war, a moment that would change political history, like the liberation of Nelson Mandela, a moment that conveys not only information, but poetry as well. Black and white, color, film, digital, wide-angle, off-camera, careful compositions, soft focus: Questions Without Answers is a concentration of the modern photojournalistic palette, including the art of portraiture. Whether they are portrait of celebrities or of the man in the street, they favor the natural, showing us the powerful emotions absent from the frivolous images that fill our screens today.
David Friend, a highly respected editor at Vanity Fair and the author of a book on the changing world of the image, outlines his views in the book’s preface: when the world changed, so did the pictures. There used to be a certain, shared way to watch the world change. Advances in photography and digital communication suddenly allowed a larger part of the world to witness the attacks of the World Trade Center in almost real-time. The photojournalist of the 21st century, a first-hand witness to human history, is no longer merely a masterful observer, but a swift and efficient machine. Beyond these considerations, this book celebrating the 10th anniversary of the agency is a compilation of indispensable photographs, like others of its kind, that should make people open their eyes and take notice.
« As the world changed, so the cliché goes, there was a corresponding change in the way we watched the world change. Advances in digital photography and digital news gathering…had suddenly made it possible in 2001, for much of the world to witness the 9/11 attacks in an approximation of ‘real time’. »
David Friend
Questions without answers : The World in Pictures by the Photographers of VII
Chez Phaidon
368 pages, 450 photographies
$ 75
ISBN : 978 0 7148 4840 2
Links
http://www.phaidon.com/
http://www.viiphoto.com/
Contributors
Jonas Cuénin