KIM V WALKER

Experimental – Insightful – Playful – Diverse

“We are an informal group of photographers with a common sense of curiosity and joyful interest in photographic processes and expressions. We love to challenge ourselves through this larger conversation that has evolved into the VI Photography Collective.”
~ Excerpt from the VI website

There are only four of us but calling ourselves a collective is significant.

We could each have joined a local photography club. Or we could have continued on our own, taking photographs as a solo activity and occasionally meet for coffee with photography friends. But something felt different with this group. Something drew each of us to attend Susan Burnstine’s Visual Narratives workshop in 2011. And that something turned into an ongoing interest in challenging and supporting each other.

Fellow VI member Mike Zastre observed three “ingredients” or requirements for working together in a meaningful way:

1. Long-term trust – which, by definition, takes time to build, and even showing up to a gathering is part of building that trust.
2. Explicit permission to speak freely – easy to request, surprisingly challenging to honour.
3. And lastly — a joint project where (1) and (2) can be practiced. There is that old artistic nostrum to “trust the process”, and part of the trust here is that something surprising yet integrated and whole will result from time mixed with trust.”

We meet monthly and we have begun to collaborate on photography projects. And I often have to remind my self to just “trust the process”. In my experience, there is a synergy that comes from working together; not just creative energy and enthusiasm. This synergy produces something that is much more than any of us could have created on our own. And that is what makes VI a collective.

This year, VI published our first zine. The open “call” for this first issue was simply to bring 10 photographs each to the table. Then, we worked together to curate and sequence the images. After that, one of the members volunteered to design the front cover and put it all together. We asked a founding member (on sabbatical) to write the Forward piece. We’ll probably get more creative with our calls later. But for now it’s a start; and it feels fantastic to have a tangible product in hand created through a collective process.

We call it VI Zine: Call & Response (Issue #1). A full preview is available online with on-demand prints ordered directly from MagCloud at cost.

“These four photographers feel the world around them very deeply, and it is this very characteristic that unites them in this collective. They choose to articulate their experiences of life by giving us images that tell us who they are and what moves them. Possibly some of their own deepest questions are held within.”
~ Excerpt from the Forward of Issue#1 by Tom Kerr