News

The VII Photo agency has expanded its editorial offering with the launch of VII Network, a new arm dedicated to re-sale only. It holds exclusive editorial re-sale rights, on all known platforms, to the photographic works of the following seven photographers (non-members of VII):

• Eric Bouvet
• Jessica Dimmock
• Tivadar Domaniczky
• Balazs Gardi
• Ben Lowy
• Stephanie Sinclair
• Donald Weber

The agency said that VII Network is a way for the membership to “expand the ideals and journalistic mission of VII to include important photographic work by non- members”. This new collection of photographers “permits the agency to continue to support its partners and clients throughout the world, in meeting their demand for high-quality, in-depth reportage, contemporary issue-based stories, which provide a critical photographic perspective of the world around us”.

The concept of the VII Network was originally conceived by the founders of the agency before it was launched in 2001 to expand the vision and reach of VII, and its commitment to documentary photography and photojournalism.”

© Balazs Gardi/VII Network

An Afghan man holds a wounded young boy in front of a house in Yaka China village, Kunar province, East Afghanistan. October 2007.

The VII Network seven:

Eric Bouvet began his photographic career in 1981 after studying art in Paris. He worked as a staff photographer at the French photo agency Gamma during the 1980s, and 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. 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. 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, including the Visa d’Or, as well as the Prix Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents and the Prix Paris-Match 2000 Award.

Jessica Dimmock, a New York City Native, began he career as a teacher before pursuing her passion for photography. She graduated from the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) program in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism, where she earned The New York Times Scholarship for Photojournalism. Jessica has won numerous international awards including the F Award for Concerned Photography, Magnum’s Inge Morath Award for Female Photojournalism, the Juror’s Choice Award from The Santa Fe Center of Photography and The Marty Forscher Fellowship from Photo District News. In late 2007 Dimmock’s book, The Ninth Floor, was published in Italy and the USA. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Newsweek, Time, New York Magazine, The British Journal of Photography and Photoicon. Her work most often focuses on social isolation, inequality, labor, and the human condition.

Tivadar Domaniczky was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1978. After studying science and arts, his attention was driven to current affairs. He worked for Hungary's most influential political daily, Nepszabadsag, for five years, and in 2007 he started to follow the happenings of the global policy shaping issues in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

© Tivadar Domaniczky/VII Network

Palestinian boys reflected in a broken mirror in a market in Gaza City. June 2007.

Balazs Gardi is a Hungarian freelance photographer, who focuses on documenting the everyday life of marginalised 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.

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 other places. In 2004 Lowy attended the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and was nominated for the ICP 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.

Stephanie Sinclair graduated from the University of Florida, where she studied journalism and Fine Art Photography. The Chicago Tribune hired her out of college, but after covering the war in Iraq, she quit her job and moved to Iraq and then Beirut, Lebanon where she is now based. Her regular clients include The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Stern, German Geo and Marie Claire. In her short career, she has earned numerous awards including the Visa D’Or at the 2004 Visa Pour l’Image photography festival in France, a first place at 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 won a third place in World Press Photo for her coverage of the 2006 war in Lebanon and was a participant in World Press Photo’s 13th Joop Swart Masterclass. Most recently she won the 2007 UNICEF Photo of the Year (above, top) for her image of a wedding couple taken in Afghanistan. The groom was 40 years old, while the bride just 11. She is also publisher of the award-winning independent online magazine for women photographers called Photobetty.com

Donald Weber born in 1973 in Toronto, Canada, is currently living in Russia. He worked as an architect with Rem Koolhas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, before becoming a photographer. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a World Press Photo Award and the Lange-Taylor Documentary Prize with Larry Frolick, among other citations. He has exhibited widely and worked for international publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and Stern. Part of his Chernobyl work was included in a traveling exhibit on Capitol Hill in Washington and the United Nations in New York.
He has been documenting daily life in post-Soviet countries since 2005, from the perspective of a skytalets, a traditional Russian wanderer.