"For me it (photography) is all about communication, communicating something that is important to me. In that process, whether it is black-and-white or color, whether it's film or digital, whatever, I don't care," Stanmeyer said. He embraces the advantages of digital photography for situations like night photography, where he said the use of digital camera makes shooting "more feasible and less constraining." But he also cautioned that the digital revolution has loaded photographers with a much heavier responsibility for managing their photography.
"On the negative side, it requires a massive amount of management. It put a 5,000-tonne gorilla on my back ... of learning things that I didn't want to learn and going into conflicts or disaster areas and no longer being just a photographer, but also being a satellite engineer for the satellite Internet connection and a digital manager and an editor, ... this thing became so big on me that it started to take me away from being a photographer and being a human," he said. "One of the reasons I'm here is to help photographers get this 5,000-tonne gorilla off their backs. ... Digital photography up until a year ago meant you didn't have a life."
Photojournalists have also found the need to protect their work more carefully than before. This was one of the reasons behind the formation of the VII photo agency in 2001, which is described on its Web site as "designed from the outset to be an efficient, technologically enabled distribution hub for some of the world's finest photojournalism."
"We started VII because we were seven very independent photographers coming from different agencies ... We wanted to control our photography ... we wanted to make sure we could follow the entire process from our camera all the way to the client and nothing being altered or changed. ... In 2001, the Internet was becoming real, and we started talking about empowering ourselves. The Internet allowed us to empower ourselves," Stanmeyer said.
For your information: The photography of John Stanmeyer and the other members of the VII photo agency can be found on the agency's Web site at www.viiphoto.com
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