Martin Fuchs is a photojournalist and former intern at Magnum in New York. He freelanced for Magnum In Motion, the multimedia department, and other departments for two years. Fuchs also specializes in websites and blogs. He created the "Magnum Blog," his personal blog "Journal Of A Photographer" and a variety of other photography related websites. In July 2007 he started to take over the editorial responsibilities for the Magnum Blog.
In 1968 Josef Koudelka was thirty years old. He had committed himself to photography as a full-time career only recently, and had been chronicling the theater, and the lives of gypsies, but he had never photographed a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21 when the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia along with troops from four other Warsaw Pact countries in the morning hours. The occupation was the beginning of the end for the Czechoslovak reform movement known as the Prague Spring. That day, Koudelka was at the hub of the action, risking his life to capture the photographs now presented in a new book by Aperture. They have been rated among the most important in 21st-century photojournalism. A year after the invasion, Josef Koudelka’s negatives were smuggled out of Prague into the hands of Magnum, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P P – Prague Photographer.
Koudelka crouched on the roof of a building in Wenceslas Square, Prague, his camera lens trained on the street below. Thousands of Soviet troops rumbled past in tanks – the city was being invaded. Below him, houses and buses were ablaze, bullets were flying and the wounded cried out. Protesters chanted the name of their hero, the Czech president Alexander Dubcek. Some threw stones at the troops. Others pleaded with the soldiers, begging them to go home. One man simply stood before a tank, silently opened his jacket and defied the soldiers to shoot him in the chest.
Snapping away, Koudelka almost didn’t notice the people waving and pointing at him, or the Russian soldiers shouting, assuming he was a sniper. Suddenly a group of Soviet soldiers charged into the building he was perching on and gave chase. He fled, his Leica swinging round his neck, scrambling and ducking over rooftops, through a window and down into the throng on the street.
In 1969 the "anonymous Czech photographer" was presented with the Robert Capa gold medal for photographs requiring exceptional courage. It was feared that publishing Koudelka’s name could endanger his life. With Magnum to recommend him to the British authorities, he applied for a three-month working visa and fled to England in 1970, where he stayed for more than a decade. Since then he has traveled the world with his camera and little else.
Book Discount
There is a beautiful new book with this body of work out now. We are offering a 10% discount on the book's price from the Magnum Store for each and every reader of the blog who orders the book. With this discount you only pay $ 54 instead of $ 60 plus shipping. If you are in New York you could even pick up your copy of the book after ordering at the Magnum office and you'd save the shipping cost.
If you want to order and would like to take advantage of the discount please use KOUDELKA as the Redemption Code during the checkout process. If you do not use this code we can not give a discount anymore once the ordering process is completed!
"While Fashion Magazine has a single photographer-author, it's still a magazine, not a book. So it doesn't follow my usual mode of slow, solitary production. It's collaboration. The ideas for the collaboration were formulated very quickly. I was approached by the folks at the Paris office of Magnum to work on this issue late last year. I immediately said yes. I was a huge fan of the previous two editions (by Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) and was looking for an excuse to play with fashion . I often say that when I am making a portrait, I'm not "capturing" the other person. If the photograph documents anything, it is the space between the subject and myself. Something similar is at work with Fashion Magazine. I'm not really comfortable saying I know anything about Paris or its fashion world. And I suspect that most fashionable Parisians know just as little about Minnesota. What is interesting is the space between us. My favorite example of this involves Chanel. In Paris, I photographed Karl Lagerfeld at the Grand Palais. In Minnesota, I photographed a girl with a Chanel shopping bag in front of Sally's Beauty Shop. With this magazine, I'm trying to explore the distance between those two places." Alec Soth
Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world, with more than one quarter of its population infected. Some 130,000 children have been orphaned or made vulnerable by the death of one or both of their parents. With so many infected, AIDS is impacting every aspect of life in Swaziland.
A week ago, during the 61st Annual General Meeting of Magnum, two new nominees were welcomed into the circle of Magnum Photographers. Once a year, the photographers from Magnum travel to Paris, London or New York for their Annual General Meeting (AGM). The 2008 AGM took place at the end of June in Paris. One day of the AGM is reserved to look at submitted portfolios and to decide upon new nominees, associates and members.
English photographer Olivia Arthur (28) and American-Dutch photographer Peter van Agtmael (27) are the new nominees for 2008.
I briefly e-mailed with them to find out about their motivation to join Magnum and how it felt to be notified of their acceptance. Please post your comments or questions and we will try to find responses and answers to them by our nominees.
For the past two years I have been working on a long-term project about women and the east-west cultural divide. This has been mainly funded though scholarships and grants and I have done relatively little commissioned work.
The motivation for the project is very personal and because of the way I have been working on it, I have had very few guidelines and conditions to follow. This freedom has been amazing for me because it has meant that I have been able to get right into it and let the work unfold as it goes along. It also means that it doesn't necessarily fit into the regular format of photojournalistic stories, and it has not always been easy for me to get it seen.
I see Magnum as a place that thrives on the kind of personal approach and subtle story that I am trying to achieve. I felt that the agency has made a big move in recent years to encourage younger, lesser-known photographers, who have a strong idea of what they want to show, and that really appealed to me. I am still growing and finding my way with my photography and the idea that I can do that under the guidance of an agency like Magnum and its photographers is very special.
Of course I was also encouraged by the fact that I won the Inge Morath Award last year. That gave me the confidence that the photographers liked my work and I was keen to show them what I had done with the grant over the year since they gave it to me. It also meant that I had been in contact with a few of the photographers and was perhaps less intimidated by it than I would have been a few years ago.
The day that they had the meeting in Paris I was at home working. Thomas Dwozak sent me an sms to say congratulations and I was quite stunned, then Paolo Pellegrin called me and it eventually seemed more real. I called my boyfriend and my parents - all of whom knew what this really meant to me - and then I went out to celebrate.
I felt compelled to pick up a camera because of Magnum, and that discovery has brought great meaning and purpose to my life. I love a huge range of photography, but because of that early and continuing influence, I have always wanted to be a part of the agency. I studied history in college, and Magnum is a historical archive of incredible meaning. I feel honored to have the opportunity to begin contributing my own testimony of our troubled species. As for applying, I'm not really sure why I decided to submit at this particular moment. I felt a really strong impulse, and figured I had nothing to lose. It's hard to describe what I felt when I got the news, it was like a surge of hundreds of feelings at once, but my first articulate feeling was an understanding that my life was entering a really important new phase.
I was with my family at my aunt Marie-Louise's house in Holland when Thomas Dworzak messaged me with the news. She had died the previous week after a long battle with breast cancer, and her funeral had been the previous day. I got the news as I was photographing her son sleeping on her living room couch, while in the background my dad and uncle went through the details of her life, silhouetted by the sharp light of the setting sun. Marie-Louise was really important to me. She had been married to a very active war cameraman, and thus was intimately familiar with the toll that going to war can take on family and oneself.
She was there the day I first told my parents I was going to Iraq, a decision that has changed my life dramatically. A few hours after I broke the news, the two of us went grocery shopping. As we walked and talked, she listened to my reasons intensely, and offered short and loaded answers. She had always really understood me, and on a certain level knew that my mind was made up. Still, she stormed away a few times, condemning me for my selfishness and cursing at me in Dutch. Dutch cursing is always very impressive and intimidating. Ultimately, she supported me, and I often stay with her son Sander before or after I go to wars. The last time I saw her was after leaving Afghanistan last month. I showed her my pictures from the previous two years. She offered a stern critique, but was also very proud. She was a truly wonderful person, and it meant a lot to get the news in her house.
"What I witnessed in Mali is such a giant leap forward that only a few years ago it was just unthinkable. Working in this human landscape it’s a lot about feeling for these people and what they go through. These emotional aspects were even stronger in Kassi’s case because he was such a small and cute little kid. As it sometimes happens in life there is a strange immediate connection to somebody and in my case, of all the people in Mali that I met, it was with him and his mother. Despite the fact that we couldn’t really communicate that well - at least verbally - but I just had a great immediate sense of emotion and pathos for this young child, this young man." Paolo Pellegrin on his experience working with Kassi Keita and Mariam Dembele.
For 25 years, AIDS has ravaged the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Since the early 1980s, nearly 30 million people have died from AIDS. But over the past few years, a quiet global revolution has enabled millions of people infected by HIV to live healthy lives.
In the early 1990s, when antiretroviral drugs became available, AIDS was transformed from a certain death sentence to a manageable chronic disease–but only for some. The expense of the drugs and their distribution prevented 95 percent of those living with HIV from getting access to them. International outrage that millions were dying because of economic disparity helped reduce drug prices and to create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002. Doctors and healthcare workers around the world have adapted procedures to settings where people often could not access even the most basic care. Already, millions of lives which otherwise might have been lost are being saved.
In Access to Life, eight Magnum photographers portray people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Paolo Pellegrin in Mali, Alex Majoli in Russia, Larry Towell in Swaziland and South Africa, Jim Goldberg in India, Gilles Peress in Rwanda, Jonas Bendiksen in Haiti, Steve McCurry in Vietnam and Eli Reed in Peru. Here are faces, voices, and stories representing those millions of people who by now would be dead if not for access to free antiretroviral drugs–people who are living with HIV, working, caring for their children, and experiencing the joys and struggles of being alive. But there are also the stories of those for whom treatment came too late or where tuberculosis or other diseases brought their lives to an end – showing how the fight to bring access to AIDS treatment is a difficult one, often filled with setbacks as well as success.
Please visit the Access To Life website to view and listen to all stories. We very much hope you'll find this presentation interesting as well as insightful. Please help to spread the word by telling your friends about it, e-mailing them the link to the Access To Life website or by using one of our press images together with a link to the site on your website or blog.
And as always, your feedback and thoughts are very much appreciated!
Accomplished Magnum photographer Cornell Capa passed away early on the morning of May 23rd at home in New York.
Cornell Capa was born Cornell Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest. In 1936 he moved to Paris, where his brother Andre (Robert Capa) was working as a photojournalist. He worked as his brother's printer until 1937, then moved to New York to join the new Pix photo agency. In 1938 he began working in the Life darkroom. Soon his first photo-story - on the New York World's Fair - was published in Picture Post.
In 1946, after serving in the US Air Force, Cornell became a Life staff photographer. After his brother's death in 1954, he joined Magnum, and when David 'Chim' Seymour died in Suez in 1956 Capa took over as president of Magnum, a post he held until 1960.
Capa made an empathetic, pioneering study of mentally retarded children in 1954, and covered other social issues, such as old age in America. He also explored his own religious tradition. While working for Life, Capa made the first of several Latin American trips. These continued through the 1970s and culminated in three books, among them Farewell to Eden (1964), a study of the destruction of indigenous Amazon cultures.
Capa covered the electoral campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller, among others. His 1969 book, New Breed on Wall Street, was a landmark study of a generation of ruthless young entrepreneurs keen on making money and spending it fast.
In 1974 Capa founded New York City's influential International Center of Photography, to which for many years he dedicated much of his considerable energy as its director.
Larry Towell is a photojournalist who travels reluctantly and only when the subject really matters. But if he travels he does so to really follow his subjects around for a long time, he tells a story from a very humanistic point of view adding his own unique perspective. From 1993 to 2006 he photographed in Israel and Palestine, producing an immense body of work. Two amazing books, "Then Palestine" and "No Man's Land", arose out of this work.
Initially he wished to document the birth of a nation, following the Oslo-Agreement. Instead he ended up documenting what he would later refer to as "the World's largest open-air prison". In 2001 he was given a small video camera and began to maintain a video diary while working in Israel and Palestine. In his 40 minute documentary "Indecisive Moments" - which won the "Achievement in Filmmaking for a Documentary" award at the 2007 New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, also known as "the voice of indie film" - Larry Towell documents events and perspectives of those caught up in violence. The result is a highly personal documentary from the perspective of one of the world’s most acclaimed photojournalists. "Indecisive Moments" bridges the gap between artist and reporter bringing the viewer inside Towell's highly stylized world.
Ordering Discount
We are offering a 10% discount on the DVD's price from the Magnum Store for the first ten readers who order the DVD. With this discount you only pay $ 27 instead of $ 30 plus shipping. If you are in New York you could even pick up your copy of the DVD after ordering at the Magnum office and you'd save the shipping cost.
If you want to order and would like to take advantage of the discount please send me an e-mail. If you are one of the first ten you'll get a coupon code from us that you need to use in order to receive the discount. If you do not use this code we can not give a discount anymore once the ordering process is completed.
Beloved Magnum photographer, Burt Glinn, passed away early on the morning of April 9th.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Burt Glinn served in the United States Army between 1943 and 1946, before studying literature at Harvard University, where he edited and photographed for the Harvard Crimson college newspaper. From 1949 to 1950, Glinn worked for Life magazine before becoming a freelancer.
Glinn became an associate member of Magnum in 1951, along with Eve Arnold and Dennis Stock - the first Americans to join the young photo agency - and a full member in 1954. He made his mark with spectacular color series on the South Seas, Japan, Russia, Mexico and California. In 1959 he received the Mathew Brady Award for Magazine Photographer of the Year from the University of Missouri.
In collaboration with the writer Laurens van der Post, Glinn published A Portrait of All the Russias and A Portrait of Japan. His reportages have appeared in Esquire, Geo, Travel and Leisure, Fortune, Life and Paris-Match. He has covered the Sinai War, the US Marine invasion of Lebanon, and Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba. In the 1990s he completed an extensive photo essay on the topic of medical science.
Versatile and technically brilliant, Glinn was one of Magnum's great corporate and advertising photographers. He had received numerous awards for his editorial and commercial photography, including the Best Book of Photographic Reporting from Abroad from the Overseas Press Club and the Best Print Ad of the Year from the Art Directors Club of New York. Glinn has served as president of the American Society of Media Photographers. He was president of Magnum between 1972 and 1975, and was re-elected to the post in 1987.
On April 4th, 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot while he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Despite the fact that James Earl Ray had plead guilty to the murder, he spent the rest of his life trying to reverse his plea. Many theories exist which claim that Ray was not the shooter or that he was just one of many who were involved.
More than 300,000 people attended Dr. King's memorial service. Among them was Attorney General and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, a strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement who would also be assassinated two months later. Following King's death, riots broke out in more than one hundred US cities. The Vietnam War, the assassinations, US presidential elections and revolutions abroad would make 1968 one of the most painful years of the century.
After this tragic year the Civil Rights movement continued on though it had lost it's shining star. Though Dr. King was gone, the messages of this Nobel Prize winning humanitarian continues to be taught and practiced throughout the world.
Usually the Magnum Blog shouldn't be about shameless self promotion, it should offer an added value to our readers. Today however, I chose to use our blog for self promotion. Not shameless because I'd like to offer an added value or two.
First of all I'd like to introduce a book to you that was already published in 2001. Many books got lost in the deepness of a publishers warehouse and were recently found again. Secondly I'd like to offer a 25% discount on the books price in the Magnum Store to the first three blog readers who order a signed copy of it. But more on that later.
About two years ago I was lucky to be part of the process when an outstanding multimedia essay about Paul Fusco's body of work "Chernobyl Legacy" was produced at Magnum In Motion. In my humble opinion it's still one of the best, if not the best, Magnum In Motion essay that was produced. A powerful and subtle story, shown by mixing photographs, the photographers voice and diagrams and charts to transport factual information.
The essay was published right in time for the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster and was picked up by a huge number of websites and blogs. Within the first week about a million people saw the essay. Tons of e-mails started to come in expressing deep sympathy with the people shown in the story, e-mails of people who wanted to donate. One of the e-mails that haunt me until today came from a mother who offered to donate all her son's birthday presents to send them off to Belarus. Her son's birthday however was only to come up in about two weeks time...
Screenshot from the Magnum In Motion essay "Chernobyl Legacy" by Paul Fusco
If you haven't watched Paul Fusco's Chernobyl Legacy essay you should do so right away, and if you watched it already go ahead and watch it again. It's a moving and sensitive documentation of history. Certainly not suited for the fainthearted but therefore even more important to understand what happened and what's still happening.
The Book
"Chernobyl Legacy" is a 228 pages book published by the New York based multidisciplinary design firm de.Mo in 2001 and was designed by Giorgio Baravalle. The book is an amazing testimonial, a book showing extraordinary photography, incredibly well designed, it's a storytelling book.
Former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, wrote in the book's foreword "The most vulnerable victims of Chernobyl were, in fact, young children or unborn babies at the moment when the reactor exploded. Their adulthood - now fast approaching - is likely to be blighted by that moment, as their childhood has been. Many will die prematurely. Are we to let them live, and die, believing the world indifferent to their plight?
We must not, and that is why this book, which movingly illustrates the Chernobyl Legacy, is so important."
Actor Michael Douglas writes "Chernobyl Legacy gives voice. Its content moves, educates and shows us why we must all become responsible to insure that what happened to Chernobyl never happens again."
I couldn't agree more with both of them. This book is one of my most favourite photography books. It's definetly not a book that you'll have fun looking at, it's not a book to quickly flip through and it's not a book to amuse your friends with. But it's a book about an important event of history, it's a deeply human book and a book that will and should start discussions. A book by a photographer that I always experienced as an extremely generous, mindful, open and helpful man. Thank you Paul Fusco!
The Discount
And as promised in the beginning we are offering a 25% discount on the books price from the Magnum Store for the first three readers who order the book. With the discount you only pay $ 112,50 instead of $ 150 plus shipping for a signed copy of "Chernobyl Legacy" by Paul Fusco. If you want to order and hope for the discount please send me an e-mail. If you are one of the first three you'll get a coupon code from us that you need to use in order to receive the discount. If you do not use this code we can not give a discount anymore once the ordering process is completed.
If you are not one of the first three to order don't worry, we'll have similar special offers for signed books again in the future.
I have just updated our blog's links page once again. I added a couple of photography related blogs and a couple of journalism and photography related websites. As always, feel free to send your suggestions for inclusion in the list.
Other than that stay tuned for exciting new blog features and stories that we are currently working on and please let me know what you would really love to see here.
Pervez Musharraf came to power on October 12, 1999, ousting Nawaz Sharif, the elected Prime Minister, dismissed the national and provincial legislative assemblies, assumed the title of Chief Executive and became Pakistan's de facto head of government, thereby becoming the fourth Army chief of Pakistan to have assumed executive control. Since then, he has been actively supported by western countries including the United States and the United Kingdom. Later in 2001, Musharraf appointed himself to the office of President of Pakistan.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney yesterday announced the end of his campaign for president. Christopher Anderson followed him through the Michigan Primaries in January.
The Magnum Workshop Oslo is a five day event organized to provide maximum personal photographic growth through a combination of small, intensive, progressive shooting masterclasses with Magnum photographers, subject-specific seminars and lectures, and ample informal time allowing for cross-pollination and networking between students and instructors. All of our instructors are experienced teachers as well as masters of their craft, and are dedicated to sharing their knowledge and experiences. Students will select one of the following Magnum photographers as a workshop leader: David Alan Harvey, Paolo Pelegrin, Alex Majoli, Christopher Anderson, Jonas Bendiksen, Alessandra Sanguinetti, or Alex Webb (joined by Rebecca Norris Webb), and will also have access to all participating Workshop leaders through the week. The event is organized in collaboration with the Norwegian Press Photographer’s Association, Bilder Nordic Photography School, and the Oslo College of Photojournalism.
The Masterclasses:
Students will arrive prepared to work. Over the course of the workshop, participants will produce individual projects under the same constraints as a professional assignment, but with daily review and editing sessions within their groups. Focusing on story formation, visual literacy, and personal vision, these intimate, intensive masterclasses form the center of the Oslo Workshop. Instructors will be readily available throughout the entire process to address issues and questions that arise along the way, as well as for individual portfolio reviews. Resulting projects will be exhibited in a group show with high visibility at the end of the week at Litteraturhuset, one of Northern Europe’s most prominent cultural locales. Our on-site HP printing staff will work together with students to produce large format exhibition prints using HP’s state of the art z-3100 printers. A multimedia project about the Oslo Workshop featuring student work will be produced by Magnum in Motion and will appear on Magnum Photo’s Website.
The Festival:
Participants in the workshops also receive a festival pass for the weeklong photographic lecture series “Dok/08”, which is co-produced with the Norwegian Press Photographers Association each evening at Litteraturhuset’s auditorium in central Oslo. These evenings will bring roundtable discussions, presentations of the workshop leader’s personal work, and seminars addressing pressing issues facing photojournalism today. Speakers include our Workshop instructors, additional Magnum photographers and other luminaries from the international photographic community including leading international photo editors and innovators in multimedia. All Workshop and Festival events are held in close proximity and will spill over into intimate gatherings nightly.
Who is the Workshop aimed at?
The Oslo Workshop is aimed at photographers who are dedicated to pushing their own personal photographic boundaries. This includes both professional and amateur photographers, but requires participants to arrive ready to work and to take their photography to a new level.
More information regarding requirements, accomodation and how to register for the workshop can be found on our workshop site. Spaces are filling up quickly...
We'll end the first year of the Magnum Blog with some New Year's Eve impressions by Bruce Gilden. We wish you a healthy, peaceful and happy New Year! Thank's a lot for your support during 2007! And here is a link to our Happy New Year wishes from Magnum In Motion.
Any exciting New Year's wishes out there that you'd like to share?
In Access to Life, eight Magnum photographers portray people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Paolo Pellegrin in 
Usually the Magnum Blog shouldn't be about shameless self promotion, it should offer an added value to our readers. Today however, I chose to use our blog for self promotion. Not shameless because I'd like to offer an added value or two.
