In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, British photojournalist Gary Knight talks about four decades spent inside conflict and about what he now thinks that work was worth. A co-founder of VII Photo Agency and Executive Director of The VII Foundation, he has worked in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, and has chaired the World Press Photo jury twice. Cambodia gave him the sentence he still repeats: trust what you see, but not too much. He applies it to himself without softening, calling the work he made in Bosnia superficial and saying plainly that other photographers got it right and that he was not among them. He speaks about proximity as a debt rather than a virtue, since you have no right to be in those places and whoever lets you photograph their life is handing you a gift. He speaks about why a group of photographers founded a collective in 2001, why the collapse of the old editorial economy was not a net gain, and why the people who should be telling those stories now do not look like him. And he is unsparing about the pictures the industry keeps reaching for, the ones that are easy to read precisely because we already know the reference.
Photographs © Gary Knight / VII, courtesy of The VII Foundation. Interview © Eyeshot.
ABOUT EYESHOT 50MM
An Eyeshot conversation series
Eyeshot 50mm is a long-form conversation series with photographers working across street and documentary photography. Each episode is recorded in dialogue with a guest, expanding on the questions that move their practice. The series is part of the editorial work of the Eyeshot team in Italy.
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