- September 21, 2009
- 2:43 pm
- Jamason Chen
Who is the VII?
This morning when I walked in to the lobby, two students stood in front of the panel of the upcoming photographic exhibition “Our World at War: Photojournalism Beyond the Frontlines”. “Who are these photographers?” “I don’t know any of them.” I stopped and talked to them briefly about the VII and the photographers who contribute their talents to this project. I told the students what is VII and who are the photographers; the photojournalism and background information of photojournalists’ co-ops in the history, such as the Magnum Photos. The questions came to me after the conversation with the students are: when we play with all the cutting-edge media technologies and are excited in creating various visual contents, how much we know about the history of visual communication, especially photojournalism and documentary photography? What was the idealism after the WWII when a group of photographers (Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour) got together to organize a photographers’ co-op so every photographers would contribute and manage their photographs without any interferences from the media industry. Today, the consumerism and infomercialism/tabloitism have been swallowing the idealism the journalism used to hold up. What should we concern with more when we are teaching/learning all sorts of new technologies for career/professional development? Where is the idealism we used to stand for? —– Jamason Chen
Photo by Ron Haviv
