VII is a storied photo agency, founded a few days before 9/11 to challenge the convergence in the photography business, when the trend for giant companies swallowing smaller independent agencies started. VII went small and photographer-owned, believing in the power and energy of collective effort, when everyone else seemed to be going big and corporate.
VII remains a disruptive and innovative business, unafraid to swim against the prevailing currents. VII has turned its gaze far from the frontline of its foundation. It has earned a reputation for uncompromising photography immersed in the great issues of today. VII photographers and filmmakers are as likely to be found focusing on race, gender, and identity, as they are on migration or conflict.
Amplifying local voices and addressing the complex political, environmental, and social questions facing families everywhere, VII places great value in the power of images to tell important stories. The members of VII are motivated by issues, and are proud to elevate those issues above the cult of the image, or the cult of the photographer.
With a higher proportion of the Dutch population finding co-living as a solution to the rising cost of living, providing elder-care, living sustainably, and coping with loneliness, these alternative options have become more available, and diverse.
In 1994, twenty five years ago, Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president and his nation was a free country. The children born around that time are now young adults: the born-free generation for whom racial segregation is a thing of the past. But how free are they now?
The VII Foundation presents projects.
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“Her Take: (Re)Thinking Masculinity” is a continuation of the conversation begun by the seven women photographers of VII when they first met nearly a year ago, as the agency voted in six new female members. The exhibition is a reflection of their commitment, with the agency’s support, to help forward inclusive conversations about gender, power, and representation.
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In 2015, the nations of the world agreed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and move humankind toward prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Can United Nations goals actually make a difference? The evidence is powerful and encouraging.
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Recognizing Newark as a bellwether for the demographic future of the entire country, this project generates fresh narratives about our emerging majority-minority population and the nation it is transforming.
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These bedrooms once belonged to men and women who died fighting in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These fallen men and women were blown up by IEDs, RPGs, hand grenades and suicide bombers. They were shot down in ambushes and by snipers. They died in helicopters, in humvees, and in tanks. It all took place thousands of miles away from home, and the country they fought to defend.
Interrogations is about a place where justice, mercy, hope, and despair are manufactured, bought, bartered, and sold; a sound-proofed factory where truth is both the final product and the one thing that never leaves the room.
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“Newest Americans” reaches across media formats: documentary film, photography, fiction and nonfiction essays, podcasting and interactive storytelling.
Learn MoreFollowing an exploratory trip to Chernobyl in 2005, Donald Weber soon returned to the abandoned site of the nuclear disaster and spent the next six years in Russia and Ukraine photographing the ruins of the unstoppable storm we call history. Traveling and living with ordinary people who had survived much, had survived everything, Weber began to see the modern State as a primitive and bloody sacrificial rite of unnamed Power.
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