EUGENE RICHARDS, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English and journalism, he studied photography with Minor White at M.I.T. In 1968 he joined VISTA and was assigned as a health care advocate to eastern Arkansas. Two years later he helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices, that reported on black political action and the Ku Klux Klan. After publication of his first two books, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973) and his self-published Dorchester Days (1978), Richards was invited to become a member at Magnum.

Richards is best known for his books - he has authored thirteen - and photo essays on such diverse topics as breast cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, pediatric HIV and AIDS, the meat packing industry, the plight of the world's mentally disabled, aging and death in America. His work has appeared in countless publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Esquire, TIME, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Fortune, Mother Jones and LIFE. Among numerous honors, he has won the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the Olivier Rebbot Award twice, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award for coverage of the disadvantaged.

JOHN STANMEYER, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

John Stanmeyer is a co-founding member of VII, is a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1998, and works regularly on assignment with National Geographic magazine. Born in the United States and presently living in Indonesia, the 43-year-old has spent more than 10 years focusing on Asian issues. For seven years, he has been working on a book about the AIDS epidemic throughout Asia, as well as continuing his photographic documentation on the radical changes in Indonesia since 1997. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Capa, Magazine Photographer of the Year, as well as World Press and Picture of the Year awards.

Recognitions:_Robert Capa- 2000, NPPA First Place Feature Story, Mental Health in Asia/2004, World Press- 1999, POY-Magazine Photographer of the Year/1st place 1999, POY-Magazine Photographer of the Year/2nd place 2001, POY-Magazine Photographer of the Year/3rd place 2002, POY-Issues Reporting 1st place: Indonesia 2002, POY-Issues Reporting 1st place: Afghanistan and China 2001, POY-News Feature Story: Fall of Indonesian President 2001, POY-Issues Reporting: Afghanistan and China 2001, POY-News Picture Story 1999, POY-Picture Story 1999, POY-Global News 1998, POY-Portrait/Sudan 1993, NPPA -News Feature Story 2001, FCC-News Feature Story 2001 & 2002, SOPA (Society of Publishers in Asia)-Best News Photography: 2000, 2001, 2003, PDN (Photo district News)-First Place, Features: Vietnam 2000. SAJA, First Place, Pakistan/India 2003, SAJA Award, Pakistan, Karachi & Mental Health in Asia, 2004.

LAUREN GREENFIELD, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

Acclaimed photographer Lauren Greenfield is considered a preeminent chronicler of youth culture as a result of her groundbreaking projects Girl Culture and Fast Forward. Now she turns her lens on eating disorders, experienced by a shocking one out of seven American women. THIN is Greenfield's first feature length documentary film and aired on HBO November 14, 2006. THIN has been seen by millions of Americans and is now considered one of HBO's most highly rated documentary feature films. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and has won Best Feature Documentary at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the Newport International Film Festival, the Jackson Hole Film Festival and recently been awarded the Times BFI London Film Festival Grierson Award.

In this unflinching and incisive study, Greenfield embarks on an emotional journey through the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Florida, a residential facility dedicated to the treatment of eating disorders. American Photo named Greenfield one of the 25 most influential photographers working today. She graduated from Harvard in 1987 and started her career as an intern for National Geographic. Since then, her photographs have won numerous awards and been regularly published in magazines including the New York Times Magazine, TIME, The New Yorker, Harper's, ELLE, Harper's Bazaar, Stern, American Photo, French Photo, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. She is a member of the VII Photo Agency, an international photographic cooperative.

Her work is in several major collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Harvard University Archive, the Clinton Library, and the French Ministry of Culture. She lives in Venice, California with her husband, Frank Evers, and their two sons.

GARY KNIGHT, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

Born 1964, England, Gary Knight began working as a photographer in the late 1980s in South East Asia and Indochina embarking on a portrayal of the internecine warfare in a region coming to terms with the end of the Cold War. In January 1993 he moved to the former Yugoslavia where he became involved in documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity during the civil war.

In recent years Knight has covered the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the civil war in Kashmir and the Asian Tsunami but central to his work is a commitment to address the issues that determine the survival of the world’s poor. His work has been widely published by magazines all over the world, exhibited worldwide and is in the collections of several museums and private collectors. Knight has initiated a broad programme of education with Universities and NGO’s worldwide and is the author of several essays on journalism and photography.

Co founder of VII Photo Agency and the Chairman of the board Knight is also co-founder of a quarterly publication called Dispatches with Mort Rosenblum and Simba Gill to be launched in Spring 2008, founder of the Angkor Photo Festival, board member of the Crimes of War Foundation, trustee of the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, Treasurer of the New York Photo Festival, Chairman of the World Press Photo Award Jury 2008 and a contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine.

CHRISTOPHER MORRIS, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

Christopher Morris was born in California in 1958. Over the past 20 years he has concentrated the greater part of his work on war, having documented more than 18 foreign conflicts, including the U.S. invasion of Panama, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Persian Gulf War, the drug war in Columbia and the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia and Yugoslavia. In the last five years he has documented the Presidency of George W. Bush for Time magazine.

Morris has received a multitude of awards for his work, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal and Olivier Rebbot awards from the Overseas Press Club; the Magazine Photographer of the Year award from the University of Missouri School of Journalism; the Infinity Photojournalist award from the International Center of Photography, New York; the Visa d'Or award; and numerous World Press Photo Awards.

RON HAVIV, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

Award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv has produced some of the most important images of conflict and other humanitarian crises that have made headlines from around the world since the end of the Cold War.

A co-founder of VII, whose work is published by top magazines worldwide, including: Fortune, The NY Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, Paris Match and Stern. He has published two critically acclaimed collections of his photography -- Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, and Afghanistan: On the Road to Kabul – and has contributed his wide-ranging body of work to several other books.

With a special focus on exposing human rights violations, he has covered conflict and humanitarian crises in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and the Balkans. Most recently, he has documented wars in Darfur and the DR Congo. His often-searing photographs have earned Haviv some of the highest accolades in photography, including awards from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year, Overseas Press Club, and the Leica Medal of Excellence. He regularly lectures at universities and seminars, and numerous museums and galleries have featured his work, including the United Nations, The Louvre and The Council on Foreign Relations.

Haviv has been the central character in three films. National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk explores the hazards inherent in combat photography. The Serbian-made documentary Vivisect explores Serbian reaction to the Blood and Honey exhibit. Eyes of the World, which has featured in film festival worldwide, examines Haviv as a witness to war. In addition, Haviv has spoken about his work on The Charlie Rose Show, NPR, Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, CNN, MSNBC and The Best Damn Sports Show Ever.

JOACHIM LADEFOGED, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

Joachim Ladefoged is the newest member of the international photo-collective VII. In 1987, at the age of 16, Joachim’s dream of becoming a soccer player was shattered when he was almost crippled by rheumatism. A year later he got his first camera, with the hope that photography could bring him closer to the activities his illness prevented him from. Soon he joined a small regional newspaper in Denmark shooting up to six assignments a day. In 1995 he moved on to become a staff photographer at the national newspaper, Politiken.

In 2000, he published his book ‘Albanians’ about the turbulent life of the Albanians in the period from 1997-1999. He has worked in more than 30 countries, winning international recognition for covering war, conflict and ordinary life around the world. Through the years, Visa D’Or, World Press, Life Magazine, and Denmark’s Picture of the Year’, are among the organizations that have seen fit to award Joachim for his work. He was the first Dane to win first place in a photo-story category at World Press and he is credited with being one of the driving forces behind the new wave of Danish photojournalism. Joachim lives in Denmark, with his wife and their two boys.

ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL, VII PHOTO AGENCY PHOTOGRAPHER

As photojournalists go, Antonin Kratochvil has sunk his teeth into his fair share of upheaval and human catastrophes whilst going about his documentation of the time in which he lives. As people go, Kratochvil's own refugee life has been much in the way the same as what he has rendered on film. Kratochvil's unique style of photography is the product of personal experience, intimate conditioning and not privileged voyeurism.

Over the years his fluid and unconventional work has been sought by numerous publications stretching across widely differing interests. From shooting Mongolia's street children for the magazine published by the Museum of Natural History to a portrait session with David Bowie for Detour, from covering the war in Iraq for Fortune Magazine to shooting Deborah Harry for a national advertising campaign for the American Civil Liberties Union, Kratochvil's ability to see through and into his subjects and show immutable truth has made his pictures not facsimiles but uncensored visions.

And yet, what set his kind apart from the many is his consistency and struggle to carry on. For Kratochvil this fact comes in the form of his numerous awards, grants and honorable mentions dating back to 1975. The latest of these are his two, first place prizes at the 2002 World Press Photo Awards in the categories of general news and nature and the environment. The next is the 2004 grant from Aperture publishing for Kratochvil's study on the fractious relationship between American civil liberties and the newly formed Homeland Security since the World Trade Center bombings. In addition, Kratochvil's fifth book Vanishing will be unwrapped in 2005 and marks another significant milestone for the craft to which he belongs. Vanishing represents a collection of natural and human phenomena that on the verge of extinction. What makes this book so innovative is the twenty years it has taken to produce, making it not only historical from the onset, but a labor of love and a commitment to one man's conscience.