Reportage 1
The maras, as they are called, are groups of youths similar to the gangs of Los Angeles, and have spread terror throughout Central America. Here we see life in suburban districts of San Salvador, the daily routine for members of an invisible army, a scourge that is blindly destructive, attacking the principles of democracy and spelling death for youths with no future.
Reportage 2
“Gaye’s Journey” approaches the migratory phenomenon from a place common to all human beings: the act of eating. The opportunities are not generated at the end of the trip, but all along the way. The unequal conditions experienced on their journey from lack of nourishment or a balanced diet, makes their arrival in paradise an illusion where the lack of things is reflected in the new invisible frontiers where the newcomers will live. This is how a new lonely journey starts, the one of integration.
Reportage 3
It is assumed that 90% of the heroin which is consumed all over the world, comes from the fields in Afghanistan. During the Mulas regime, the consumption of opium was prohibited, although its export reached its highest level then. Now, opium is transformed into heroin inside Afghanistan, which is then sold outside via Iran or towards Russia. Inside the country young people started consuming this substance in a significant manner. The majority of the addicts in Kabul take refuge in the old Russian cultural centre, east of the capital. There, in addition of consuming heroin, they live in extreme conditions in the destroyed buildings under the passive eyes of the authorities.
Reportage 4
Reaching the flat roof is like being closer to heaven, dominating the city with a glare and feeling unique. The flat roof is the place where you share gossip, a cigarette, and dreams. It is the ideal stage for a love affair. This work explores a territory that is filled with childhood memories, but that also have different uses, some of them prosaic, some other oniric.
Interview
One day, the 21-year-old Philip Blenkinsop got tired of the occidental world and his dreadfully monotonous work at a newspaper in Sidney. He sold his car, bought a Leica and a one-way ticket to Thailand. This is how the young photographer got into a world that was forgotten by Western countries; the southeast of Asia. He devoted himself to portray complex, ancient and in many cases violent and sordid conflicts.
Interactive photography
This is a work of sequenced images that took place within the four walls of the Quatre Camins Penitentiary of Barcelona. It’s an intersection of theatrical and photographic language, in which the authors and main characters are the inmates. Universal topics such as love, hate, dignity or loneliness are expressed by the force of visual metaphors. These are experiences that are common to all people, with the peculiarity that they are deprived of liberty. The photography’s were taken within the platform of TeatroDentro-Bcn; a project of no-formal education carried out of the photo collectives TRANSformas and RuidoPhoto.
Collectives
During 4 years, 1680 persons in Sao Paolo occupied the former headquarter of the National Company for Textile, which had been abandoned 12 years earlier. They constructed the major “vertical favela” of Brazil. They organized a platform including schools, workshops, libraries… until they, by juridical order, were evacuated in 2007.
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.
