Gary is an award-winning photographer and a co-founder and director of the VII Photo Agency. He is also the co-director of the VII Foundation and director and founder of the VII Academy. Gary is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Frontline Club, London; co-founder of The GroundTruth Project, Boston; founding director of the Program for Narrative & Documentary Practice at the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University; twice chair and president of the World Press Photo Award; was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2009; and a Logan Non Fiction Fellow at the Carey Institute in 2017.
Gary has worked as a photographer all over the world since the late 1980’s, early in his career in conflict photography, and more recently with an increased focus on anthropology and socioeconomics.
In January 1993, he moved to the former Yugoslavia where he became involved in documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity during the civil war. During this period, he covered conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans and worked widely in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Far East (including North Korea) concentrating on human rights, poverty-based issues, and current affairs stories for US and European media.
From 1999 to 2009 he was a contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine. He has worked on assignments for Time, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, Paris Match, and Stern and his work has been published by magazines and newspapers worldwide. His work has also been exhibited worldwide and is in the collections of several museums and private collectors.
In 2000 with John Stanmeyer he conceived the VII Photo Agency which launched in 2001. VII was named as the third most influential entity in photography[ by American Photo Magazine in 2003. In the same year he founded with Ron Haviv, a Convisero mentor, The VII Foundation.
In 2005 Knight conceived the idea for the Angkor Photo Festival and Angkor Photo Workshops to support emerging photographers from Asia while he was teaching a workshop with other VII photographers, James Nachtwey, Alexandra Boulat and Antonin Kratochvil in Siem Reap. In 2008 he founded with Simba Gill and Convisero mentor Mort Rosenblum, the print periodical Dispatches.
In 2010 he founded and was the Director of the Program for Narrative & Documentary Practice at the Institute for Global Leadership until he resigned in 2018 to create and develop the VII Academy. The VII Academy is a non-profit institution which provides tuition-free education in media practice to the majority world and underrepresented communities in G20 countries from its campuses in Arles, France and Sarajevo, Bosnia. He was named a Logan Non-Fiction Fellow at the Carey Institute in 2017.
Knight was twice chairman of the World Press Photo contest in 2008 and 2014. He was vice president of the Pierre and Alexandra Boulat Foundation; was Chairman of the WHO/Stop TB Photography Advisory Board between 2009 and 2011, a board member of the Crimes of War Foundation and a trustee of the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation.
He is a member of the board of the Frontline Club, London, is a co-founder and was a member of the board of the GroundTruth Foundation.
Among his awards;
1996: The Amnesty International Photojournalism Award 1996/7 : Civil War In Zaire
2002: Amnesty International UK Media Award, photojournalism category, for his work on War crimes in Kosovo for Newsweek International.[5]
2003: Honorable Mention Robert Capa Award: The War in Iraq.
2003: Fuji France Photographer of the Year 2003/4: The War in Iraq
I first met Gary in 2010 when he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. I invited him to lecture and exhibit for the Institute on his powerful work, Evidence. Together we created this exhibition, Questions Without Answers.
Gary immediately struck me as a caring, superb instructor. I recruited him as an advisor for our new Exposure photojournalism program (my first effort at supporting a photojournalism program at Tufts, which previously did not have a formal journalism program), and named him as an INSPIRE Scholar at the Institute.
He joined forces with another Convisero mentor, Mort Rosenblum to prepare and accompany our Exposure students on narrative documentary immersions in Argentina, Cambodia, India, Kashmir, Uganda, and the US.
Gary understood and appreciated the foundation and passion of our students who had created with Exposure, an initiative strongly endorsed and supported by his colleague James Nachtwey. Exposure was proud to host the inaugural VII gathering of all its photographers.
At my invitation, Gary developed and taught Exposure’s successor program, the Institute’s Program on Narrative and Documentary Practice. Gary’s impact as a dedicated mentor was immediate. His students admired his intellect, his directness, and professionalism. They appreciated his great sensitivity and cultural awareness.
Significant beloved alumni of these programs include Sarah Arkin, Jessica Bidgood, Rachel Boillot, Matt Edmundson, Christina Goldblum, Hadley Green, Elizabeth Herman, Sam James, Austin Siadek, and Nichole Sobecki.
At Gary’s invitation I have joined VII Photo Foundation and its Academy. Our first collective effort yielded Imagine:Reflections on Peace. (2020)
I have had the distinct pleasure of working with Gary for decades.Details on our close collaboration over the years can be found here.
Now, in 2023, we are creating a proposal for Sai University in Chennai, for a collaboration with Convisero’s Shahidul Alam and his DRIK studio and for a South Asian workshop. It is based on our experience with PDNP and hope it will lay the foundation for a larger regional program based in India.