The VII Foundation’s mission is to transform visual journalism by empowering new voices and creating stories that advocate change. In a world where beliefs and actions are increasingly out-of-sync with facts and realities, transforming visual journalism is an urgent task.

Dear friends,

In his beguiling and foreboding memoir A Time of Gifts, recounting his epic journey on foot across Europe in 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor bore witness to Germany’s fervent embrace of Nazism. That embrace took twelve years, a global war, genocide, and the death of 85 million people to break, and it changed the course of human history. When the war was over, two simple words that newly liberated survivors of Buchenwald wrote on handmade signs entered the universal lexicon: “Never Again.”

And yet, as the terrifying photographs in our latest exhibition, "Imagine: Reflections on Peace," which opens on April 22nd in the National Museum of Bosnia in Sarajevo, reveal, Hitler’s playbook of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, authoritarianism, mechanized warfare deployed against civilians, the destruction of cities, rape, extermination, and the displacement of millions of people are still in use in our time, in Syria and Ukraine.

Imagine retracing Fermor’s journey through Europe’s most populist country today, but in total silence, save for the sound of birds and wind in the trees. Imagine silent playgrounds, empty churches, shuttered hospitals, fallow fields, no cars on the roads, and nobody at home. Imagine Germany vacant, the entire population uprooted. At the end of 2020, 82 million people from across the world - equivalent to today’s population of Germany - have been forcibly displaced because of civil war, invasion, occupation, and autocracy. Imagine that for a moment.

Samantha Power writes in her Afterword to Imagine: Reflections on Peace, “Conflicts produce devastating effects that go beyond the large-scale loss of human life and livelihoods. They often give rise to massive population movements, which are inherently destabilizing and which have incited a rise in xenophobia and nationalism across the globe. The movement of more than one million people, half of them Syrian, across Europe in 2014 and 2015 helped bring about a surge in support for right-wing populism, a repudiation of previous international norms providing for compassionate care and fair processing of those in flight; and a loss of faith in the European Union, which helped fuel support for the narrow Brexit vote in June of 2016.”

Wars in faraway places seem easy to ignore, but they creep up on all of us, wherever we live. In France, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the USA, we see a rise in populism and nationalism, but none of these countries have wars at home. As the war in Ukraine drags on, migration increases, as does inflation and the price of anything made using petrochemicals - which is almost everything. This faraway war further destabilizes our fragile societies and makes us all vulnerable to populist authoritarianism and a vicious cycle of violence in which we all lose. The imperative for peace has not been greater since Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe, observing Nazism grow in German parlors and beer halls.

Gary Knight
CEO
The VII Foundation