VII Website and Photographers

I found myself struggling to not compare VII to Magnum while exploring their website. I have been familiar with Magnum for a long time, but my first knowledge of VII came from this course. I was initially impressed with how interested VII is in concrete change and solutions. Though I think documentary photographers can easily have a hand in change, simply from bringing eyes and attention to social issues, VII gives the impression that they are concerned with taking this to a deeper level and playing a role in solution making. This comes across through their Association and Partnerships.

In my overview of VII’s different photographers and projects I was surprised to see how much personal work was exhibited on the site. I was expecting mostly editorial work, but I came across many personal projects as well. I think this shows an interest in their photographers as artists that work beyond the realm of photojournalism. I was also impressed by how many multi-media projects VII has and supports. There is a large selection of films on their website, many of which contain both still and moving images within them. I get the impression that while a passion for photography is of course a huge part of VII, at the heart of the agency there is a more general and fundamental core desire to understand and better the lives of people around the world in whatever means possible.

One photographer I was drawn to is Sarker Potrick. Potrick is a member of VII based in Bangladesh. He became interested in photography during his graduate studies and is both a full time photographer and teacher. When I was looking at the “Photographers” page on the site his featured photograph caught my eye. The photograph was from his project What Remains which is a collection if photographs of his grandparents. I really like his introduction to the project in which he writes “I was sitting on my grandpa’s couch. The door was slightly open and I saw light coming through, washed out between the white door and white walls. All of a sudden it all started making sense. I could relate what I was seeing with what I felt.” I appreciated this last sentence because over the past year I have been struggling to take photographs that feel like an internal reflection. It is clear that this is the aesthetic motivation for Potrick’s What Remains. The images of his grandparents are very white-washed; they have a light blue hue and feel very minimal.

What Remains – Sarker Potrick

This image for example, taken of one of his grandparents in the bathroom, feels very bare and quiet. He frames the image so that the frame is mostly made up of white walls. This is very similar to the other photographs in the project—they have minimal and bare compositions that make the space a sort of unspecific transitional location, reminiscent of a doctor’s waiting room. The palette of the images translates a very quiet, simple life isolated from the outside world, in a sort of limbo. Along with the title of the project, this relays a feeling of time passing and comes across as a very genuine attempt to visually capture the sentiments of being so entwined with old age, and as Potrick writes himself, a life occupied by waiting.

What draws me to Potrick’s images is his use of color. I normally tend towards liking black and white images more than color ones because I often either find color images to have too harsh of an aesthetic for my taste or they feel very digitalized and filter-y. However, I like the very soft and faded feeling of Potrick’s color. In his project Of River of Lost Lands, there is a similar aesthetic to What Remains in that many of the images seem slightly overexposed, making them appear gentle on the eyes. In Of River of Lost Lands Potrick photographed villages around the Padma river in Bangladesh and explored the people’s relationship to the river that both gives and takes away life.

Of River and Lost Lands – Sarker Potrick

That idea is seen in his photograph of a river scene in which a fallen building, mostly submerged in the water, rests in front of a moving boat. The fog makes the river and air one texture and color. This gives the whole image a very calm and quiet feeling. The image expresses the duality of the river—in it exists both destruction and activity. The soft tones of the images takes away any sense of violence from the destruction caused by the river. The color also highlights the murkiness of the water, emphasizing the mystifying quality of the river.

Another photographer who interests me from VII is Ed Kashi. I was drawn to his portfolio because I recognized a few of his editorial stories. Kashi is based in New York and focuses his work on social and political issues. A project of his that I am interested in is It’ll Be Better Next Year. For this project Kashi spent almost two weeks in Cimarron County in Oklahoma photographing a community of farmers whose lives have been severely effected by drought. The area was “the epicenter of the 1930s Dust Bowl” and his photographs are reminiscent of images taken by FSA photographers during the Great Depression.

Scott Murdock walks in a dust storm on drought stricken lands on his farm near Felt, Oklahoma. – Ed Kashi

Arthur Rothstein – Fleeing a Dust Storm, Cimarron Country Oklahoma, 1936

For example, this image reminds me, and I’m sure must  be in reference to, Arthur Rothstein’s image Fleeing a Dust Storm. Its pretty incredible to compare the two and how drastically similar the landscape appears. This project interests me because I think farming like this is often thought of as something of the past. I found the images in which Kashi allowed modernity to be seen more powerful than the ones that felt timeless, such as the one above.

Casey Murdock, 43, drives alongside his horse to his farm in Felt, Oklahoma. – Ed Kashi

For example I was really struck by this image of Casey Murdock driving along side his horse. The blur at the bottom of the image paired with the frozen movement of the horse and car immediately caught my eye and attention. The truck brings the image into the present and allows the struggles the farmers are currently facing to be understood as present struggles—not ones we only think of in the past. It made me wonder about what these images would be like if they were in color. Perhaps color would increase the sense of modernity and give them a life separate from FSA images. This is of course all based on my bias of being very familiar with FSA images and also having grown up in cities making farming and ranching seem like either an abstract concept, or something of the past. While, as I expressed earlier, I am normally drawn to black and white images, I think this project could possibly benefit from color.