A look back at the social struggles covered by Krasnyi over the past four years: 144 pages, a dozen photographers, 11 chapters, 2 languages, 29 translators, proofreaders, editors… and 200 people who believed in the project enough to make it financially possible. Founded in January 2011, Krasnyi is a collective of photographers with a shared interest in social movements.
Krasnyi is active in Belgium, France, Spain. How did the collective come about? Where did the initiative come from?
The collective was born from the ambition, to return to social reportage with people on the ground, and from the sad observation that there was little of this in Belgium. The goal of the founding members was to ask questions about the growing distance between the oppressed and the media. We wanted to develop a tool that would allow us to bear witness to, and document, current social struggles.
You’re trying to build an instrument to give voice to those who lack one, outside of the traditional media. Which media are these?
What we mean by traditional media is mainstream media, regardless of the medium. We saw that there was very little coverage given to the concrete experience of life for the majority of the population. Often in the news, a subject is discussed by an “expert” with a right-thinking stance on the situation. But it’s rare to hear from a person who is directly concerned. So we’ve decided to do just that by sharing what the people on the ground are experiencing. Today, the subjects we cover receive so little coverage from commercial agencies. Our position allows us to preserve our independence, our freedom and our critical eye.
With the exhibition of your photos and the publication of the magazine Tensions, you’ve resorted to more traditional broadcast media. Is this necessary to have greater visibility, or is it more about reaching a wider public?
In addition to the magazine Tensions, we’ve worked from the beginning with various alternative broadcast media: print, television, video, radio. We like these types of collaboration. Our photographs are made to be used and broadcast, and there’s nothing incompatible about it as long as our goals aren’t hijacked for other purposes. We’re not targeting one audience in particular, although the limits on our distribution inevitably mean that we’ll reach a small audience. For us, the publication of our magazine and the photo exhibition we’ve organized are the natural conclusion to our first three years of work. We’ll be delighted if our magazine puts our pictures in the hands of someone who might not have seen it online. But more than anything we hope that this work will serve as a record of the resistance that we’ve observed in recent years.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
EXHIBITION
TENSIONS by Krasnyi
On 14th et 15th March 2015
« LESKIV »
57 rue Groeselenberg
1180 Brussels
Belgium
BOOK
TENSIONS
140 pages
500 copies
Available on www.krasnyicollective.com
