Reportage 1
Women in America struggle to shrink their bodies to Size 0 - surely the ultimate self-negation. In the Western world, and increasingly elsewhere, thinness is associated with desirability, wealth, success. We live in an eating-disordered culture where compulsive dieting is mainstream. At some time or other everyone weighs their worth on the bathroom scales.
Reportage 2
For dozens of thousands of people living along the Monzenskaya railway, in Russia, it’s always been the only link to the outside world. The line itself was continually extended throughout the Soviet period as exploration of new logging areas continued. With the end of government funding, the extension stalled in late 1980s as the Soviet Union was approaching its demise, and the tracks now end in the middle of nowhere.
Reportage 3
Jenna is an upper-middle class woman in her late thirties who has made her living for the past thirteen years doing sex work. She has her own interactive website and works independently, making over $100,000 a year. Sometimes she will spread out the cash from a few days and just look at it and touch it.
Reportage 4
The town centre of Bastia (Corsica), with its chic boutiques, fancy cars, and perfectly maintained beautiful people, resembles a caricatural commentary on our showcase society. Less than 15 minutes from here, in the south of the city, things are very different. The Lupino districts’ centre houses La Grande Barre (The Big Rectangle), with its colour faded, it is destined to be demolished, and its inhabitants will have to leave the place they call home. Meet the inhabitants of La Grande Barre before its destruction.
Interview
If in 7.7 we put a headline to this interview, here above would read: "I don’t like photojournalism". Bruce, besides being a master of street photography and one of the stars of the Magnum agency, has a particular vision of how to take pictures, why and for what. It’s very enlightening when you see him in action: walking down the street, he see´s a character, he stop´s at mid-meter, and shoot´s a single photo with flash. There is zero interaction, with great results and a lot of detractors and admirers of his method. Bruce is this: a man with a vocation for polemicist with a unique style making photojournalism, which is what he denies.
New Formats
Salt Lake City (Utah), exterior, night. A group of children pretends to play war. You can hear the screeching and chaos as they frantically ran around an abandoned church with toy guns. But these boys are serious. In each of their minds, they are at war.
7.7 is a Project of the colective of photographers RUIDO Photo, and it is developed independently and voluntarily, with the goal of creating a meeting point and a debate space about the role of documentary photography.
This is a bet for the creation, use and publication of a new channel that is meant to became a reference of an independent, social, critic and committed photojournalism, proposing a photography as a tool to generate reflection and social change.
The team of 7.7 is a group of professionals that works as a collective, sharing the work and the decisions, searching for and horizontality that helps creation and debate.
Idea: Roger Rossell
Graphic Concept: Roger P. Gironés || disseny@7punt7.net
Web Design: Marc Martínez de Foix || web@7punt7.net
Edition: Mireia Bordonada || edicion@7punt7.net
Text: Alejandra Cukar || redaccion@7punt7.net
Blog: Oriana Eliçabe || memoriallena@7punt7.net
Communication: Celeste Arroquy || comunicacion@7punt7.net
Coordination: Roger P. Gironés || coordinacion@7punt7.net
Colaborator: Toni Arnau
Translations: Paola Denari, Malena Saralegui and Alejandra Duschatzky (English), Laura Córdoba (Catalonian)
Proofreading: Aileen Corbett
Editorial Council: Silvia Omedes, Rafael Badía and Carles Costa
2009 Award Jury: Pepe Baeza, Leopoldo Blume (Blume Editors) and Alice Monteil (Photographic Social Visión)
Photographic Social Vision and Editorial Blume.
comunicacion@7punt7.net
Dr. Gine i Partagás 38, 08003, Barcelona, España
We don’t care about the photo. We care even less about a photographic project. We care about the stories. And the way of looking at things.
Many times we’ve thought about those stories that, as documentary photographers, we wanted to give refuge. And we knew that they were not going to be like the work which we’ve seen so many times and with which we’ve grown up: a map of icons in exotic places where only terrible things happen and where people are just unhappy. A world of black or white, distant and different from the world around us.
And this is how we came to understand the need for a photography of proximity and profundity, a photography where the stories that are told contain all the hues found in this world we live in. Stories told with photos that create a link, that provoke thinking; a thinking as complex as reality, without good guys or bad guys, without heroes or villains.
This is why we decided to open this window: as a place to display different ways of looking at things, visions committed to what surrounds us, and in a constant practice of understanding (ourselves and others), of explaining ourselves to ourselves. We want to start looking through the cracks, the holes, the keyholes, with an open and a flexible spirit, strengthened by the free formats of the digital era.
This is an open space for the most diverse forms of building visual discourse and its possibilities, an interactive space, critical, rebellious, open, participatory. Restless and disturbing. This is an invitation to think, to abandon common places and to start doubting.
Welcome to the digital magazine for documentary photography.
Welcome to 7.7
The spirit of 7.7 is to become a new way of diffusion of photographer’s work that escapes from the traditional market’s logic and its dominance over the media’s agenda.
In this search we organize a yearly photo contest, selected from the individual photographers works published in 7.7. This prize, of 2000€, is possible thanks to the support of Photographic Social Vision, Editorial Blume, El Centre de Fotografía Documental de Barcelona and RUIDO Photo.
Terms and conditions:
1) Participation:
All the photographic works made by individual photographers and published in each year of publication of 7.7 (4 editions) will be considered. Works made by members of the team of 7.7, RUIDO Photo, or any other collaborator that has participated in the editorial process of 7.7, will be excluded. The second edition of this competition is open and will include works published since issue 5 to 8 inclusive. The receipt of projects is continuous and does not close during the year, but will can not submit for this contest after 15 September 2010.
2) Submission
To submit material, please check the 7.7 technical requirements here.
3) Prize
A prize of 2000€ (two thousand euros) will be given to the work chosen as winner.
4) Selection
A special jury will be constituted to select the winner. The names of the members of this jury will be visible in the website, and they will meet before the 30 days after the publication of the 4th year’s edition of the magazine.
The decision will be communicated immediately .
The decision will be taken by simple majority of the members of the jury and can’t be appealed.
5) Jury
The jury will be constituted by members of Photographic Social Vision, Editorial Blume, Centre de Fotografia Documental de Barcelona, RUIDO Photo, 7.7 and members of the editorial council of 7.7
6) General Conditions
The authors of the presented works - accepting the conditions of the contest - authorize 7.7 to reproduce their work during the publicity that 7.7 will make of the results of the contest. All the images will be used including the name of the author. The license of use of the pictures will be Creative Commons. The author must to choose the type of CC license that consider for his/her work, by default will be Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs (by-nc-nd) (no commercial use is allowed in the original work and the generation of derivative works). The submission of the material to 7.7 supposes the acceptance of the conditions of the prize.
RUIDO Photo is an organization integrated by a multidisciplinary team who understand photography and documentary as a tool of reflection and social transformation. Since 2004, we conceptualize and develop projects which generate participation, debate and awareness on various contemporary issues.
RUIDO Photo operates in three interrelated areas: Research and documentation, formation and awareness, and practices for community revitalization. RUIDO Photo develop different framework projects related to its current strategic priorities:
·Global Migration Correspondent. Designed to try to identify the different locations and agents involved and to understand the multifaceted reality of migration from a cross-sectional approach.
·7.7 Documentary Photography Digital Magazine. Is a platform for creation, use and dissemination of a base that becomes a reference of an independent, social, critic and committed journalism.
·Photography school. Includes training practices of our organization and is meant as an open space for the initiation and specialization in the visual language as well as providing resources to professionals and promote the creation of new audiences.
