News from Magnum
Print this pageKeep up to date with Magnum events, exhibitions, features, books and news. Read Magnum’s monthly newsletters from our global offices in London, New York and Paris. Click here to sign up.
2008 Membership decisions
Magnum Photos comprises 60 photographers who take collective decisions to determine the future directions of the group. The Magnum Photos selection process for new members is legendary for its toughness. Becoming a full Member of Magnum Photos is a process that takes place over at least four years, with candidates evolving from the status of Nominee, to Associate, to Member, each evolution in status requiring a vote by the Magnum Photos Members.
After viewing over 200 candidate portfolios, organised under the Presidency of Stuart Franklin, Magnum Photos is pleased to announce the following decisions :
MEMBER status was voted for: Antoine d’AGATA, Jonas BENDIKSEN and Alec SOTH
Their portfolios can be consulted on www.magnumphotos.com/photographers.
The following new NOMINEES were announced :
Peter VAN AGTMAEL, 27 years old, American-Dutch: www.petervanagtmael.com
Olivia ARTHUR, 28 years old, English: www.oliviaarthur.com
The W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund is open for submissions for the 2008 Grant in Humanistic Photography
The W. Eugene Smith Grant is presented annually to a photographer whose past work and proposed project, as judged by a panel of experts, follows the tradition of W. Eugene Smith's compassionate dedication exhibited during his 45-year career as a photographic essayist.
For 2008, the Smith Grant will be $30,000, with an additional $5,000 in fellowship money also to be given at the discretion of the jury. The Grant recognizes photographers who have demonstrated a commitment to documenting the human condition. The grant program is independently administered by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and is funded in part with contributions from Digital Railroad, Getty Images, The Mona Fund, and Open Society Institute. Winners receive their awards in a ceremony held in New York City in October One of the most prestigious honors in photojournalism, the Smith Grant was established in 1978 following the death of Smith, the legendary photo essayist, by his friends Howard Chapnick, Jim Hughes and John Morris to perpetuate his work and spirit. The grant program provides photographers with the financial freedom to envision and carry out major photographic studies.
Applicants must include a written proposal, which should be, concise, journalistically realizable, visually translatable and humanistically driven.
Applicants are also asked to provide a resumé of educational and professional qualifications along with evidence of photographic ability in the form of photographic workprints (8"x10" prints preferred, and no more than 40), and/or photocopies, duplicate transparencies, contact sheets and clippings of published stories. Digital images will be considered only if delivered as low-resolution jpegs on a CD or DVD (no RAW files, TIFF files, or on-line applications).
The Smith Fund's executive committee appoints a three-person jury each year to review the applications and proposals. The jury meets twice, first to select finalists. The finalists are then asked to submit a comprehensive photographic portfolio, to write a more details and focused proposal and to answer questions about the project.
At their second meeting, the jury reviews the new material and selects the grant recipient and the recipient of the additional fellowship. The recipient must warrant that the project in progress is ongoing, and agree to provide the Fund with a set of photographs when the project is completed. The photographs will be housed as part of the permanent W. Eugene Smith Legacy Collection at the ICP.
There is no entry fee. The application advises that preliminary material will be returned only when accompanied by appropriate packaging and sufficient U.S. postage or its equivalent in U.S. dollars or prepaid return Delivery Form by courier. The Fund is not responsible for loss or damage.
Please send all submissions to:
W. Eugene Smith Fund c/o ICP
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036 USA
For any and all questions please email:
Board of Trustees: Robert Pledge, President; Marcel Saba, Vice-President; Sue Brisk, Secretary; Robert Stevens, Treasurer; Jim Balog; Phillip S. Block; Rich Clarkson; Frank Evers; Donna Ferrato; David Friend; W.M. Hunt; Yukiko Launois; Helen Marcus, President Emerita; John G. Morris; Marcel Saba; Aaron Schindler; Robert Stevens; and David Wolf, counsel.
Past grant recipients: Marc Asnin, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Letizia Battaglia, Ernesto Bazan, Ellen Binder, Pep Bonet, Chien-Chi Chang, Stephen Dupont, Carl DeKeyzer, Donna Ferrato, Maya Goded, Paul Graham, Stanley Greene, Graciela Iturbide, Alain Keler, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Gideon Mendel, Dario Mitidieri, James Nachtwey, Trent Parke, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Eli Reed, Eugene Richards, Cristina Garcia Rodero, Milton Rogovin, Sebastião Salgado, Vladimir Syomin, John Vink and Kai Wiedenhöfer.
Application deadline for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography is July 15, 2008. Photographers interested in applying may download an application at: www.smithfund.org
Martin Parr wins prestigious PhotoEspana prize
British photographer, Martin Parr, has won the top prize at PhotoEspana, Spain’s largest international photography festival.
He was awarded the Baumer and Mercier Award in recognition of his professional career in, and aesthetic influence on, contemporary photography. Unabashed satire of modern consumerist society is a key element of Parr's work commented Claude Bussac, the director of the festival, adding that this images, plus his contribution to numerous film and publishing projects, make him one of the most important photographers of the latter half of the 20th Century. PhotoEspana has committed to buying €12,000 of Parr’s works.
PhotoEspana has developed into one of the largest photography festivals in the world since its inauguration in 1998. Visit www.phedigital.com, for more details.
Access to Life Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
Magnum Photos and The Global Fund have teamed up in a historic partnership to chronicle the revolutionary effect free antiretroviral treatment is having on AIDS patients across the world. The exhibition, Access to Life, was photographed by Jonas Bendiksen, Jim Goldberg, Alex Majoli, Steve McCurry, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Eli Reed, and Larry Towell. Visit the website
Read Press Release below:
British Royal Mail commissions Peter Marlow to produce 6 stamps
Inspired by the 300th anniversary of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the British Royal Mail has issued a set of stamps featuring photographs by Peter Marlow. It is the second time in three years that Peter Marlow has been allotted the prestigious role of producing images for stamps available across Great Britain.
Six stamps are being issued in this set, featuring the interiors of six cathedrals from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This will be the first time that cathedral interiors have been featured on stamps issued in the four countries.
Jacob Aue Sobol has been awarded the 2008 Leica European Publishers Award
The Jury for the 2008 LEICA EUROPEAN PUBLISHERS AWARD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY met May 1st to 4th in Manchester to decide this year's winner.
The winner of this year’s award is Jacob Aue Sobol (Denmark) for his project on Tokyo. The formal presentation will be made at the Rencontres d’Arles during the opening week in July and the book will be published this autumn.
The Leica European Publishers Award for Photography is a major initiative to encourage the publication of contemporary photography.
Open to photographers world-wide, the competition is a unique collaboration between seven European Publishers – Actes Sud (France), Apeiron (Greece), Dewi Lewis Publishing (Great Britain), Edition Braus (Germany), Lunwerg Editores (Spain), Mets & Schilt (The Netherlands) and Peliti Associati (Italy).
The competition requires the submission of a substantial, completed and unpublished photographic book project. The winning project is then published in book form simultaneously by each of the publishers in their own country resulting in perhaps the most extensive cultural collaboration currently existing in Europe.
Mikhael Subotsky awarded ICP Young Photographer Infinity Award
A native of Cape Town, South Africa, Mikhael Subotzky received widespread acclaim for his 2004 project Die Vier Hoeke (“The Four Corners”), an in-depth study of the South African prison system. Subotzky has extended his work on crime and incarceration to include photographic workshops with prisoners and a new series on ex-prisoners entitled Umjiegwana (“The Outside”). He was the winner of the Special Jurors Award at the 2005 Les Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, the 2006 F25 Award for Concerned Photography, the 2007 KLM Paul Huff Award, and most recently, the 2007 City of Perpignan Young Reporter Award.
ICP’s ongoing mission is to present and champion the rich diversity of the photographic experience. The Infinity Awards were created to reflect a commitment to celebrating the contributions of influential photographers and emerging young talent, and have become widely respected and recognized around the world as this country’s leading honor for excellence in photography. Recipients are decided by a jury of selectors from the submissions compiled by an international nominating committee, both of whose members change each year.
New film by Raymond Dépardon at the Cannes Festival 2008
The new film by Raymond Dépardon 'Modern Life' will be presented on May 18 at the Cannes Festival 2008, official selection Un Certain Regard.
Through a series of portraits, Raymond Depardon becomes a witness to farmers' lives, values, and family stories: all that binds them to the land, and its legacy. He questions what will become of these 'people of the land.'
Modern Life
La vie moderne
A film by Raymond Depardon
2008 - France - Documentary
Cannes 2008 - Official Selection - Un Certain Regard
Jonas Bendiksen wins National Geographic Grant.
The second annual National Geographic magazine photography grant has been awarded to Jonas Bendiksen, a Magnum photographer who is working to document urban population growth.
The grant offers a documentary photographer $50,000 to work on a long-term project. Bendiksen proposed to document the population explosion in Chongqing, a city in western China that is considered the fastest growing metropolis in the world.
Magnum Founders and Paolo Pellegrin winners of the Sixty-Fifth Annual Pictures of the Year International Competition.
A special honor was created this year for a remarkable and unique submission to POYi. The judges and director conferred the first "Distinguished Leadership in Photojournalism Award" in recognition of "Magnum Founders: In Celebration of 60 Years" and the member photographers who have guided the development of photojournalism since the founding of Magnum. The distinction honors the publishing house of Verso Limited Editions, the photo agency of Magnum Photos, and the preeminent photojournalists Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David Seymour.
View the Magnum Founders Platinum Portfolio.
David Alan Harvey announces the Emerging Photographer’s Award.
The first recipient of this annual award is Sean Gallagher, a Beijing-based British photographer, born in Scotland in 1979 and graduated in Zoology BSc.) from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2002. He moved to China in 2006 to begin working as a photographer. His subsequent work on environmental and social issues have appeared in publications including Die Zeit, The Globe and Mail and The British Journal of Photography. His long-term projects aim to focus on the environmental and social issues created by China's recent rapid growth.
See more at David Alan Harvey's Website
Lost Robert Capa, David Seymour and Gerda Taro negatives discovered.
The International Center of Photography announced the discovery of a cache of over 3,500 negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Magnum Photographers and Founders, Robert Capa, David Seymour and Capa’s former partner Gerda Taro, three of the most significant war photographers of the twentieth century.
World Press Photo Awards to Christopher Anderson and Cristina Garcia Rodero.
Christopher Anderson has won third place in the daily life stories section for a story on Israel/Palestine for National Geographic. View the World Press Photo site for more information.
Cristina Garcia Rodero has been awarded 3rd prize in the arts + entertainment stories section, with her work on Maria Lionza. View the World Press Photo site for more information.
View Cristina Garcia Rodero's award winning work (PDF format)
Earthlings by Richard Kalvar wins Best Photo Books of 2007.
"Funny photographs are rarely great photographs. Their visual punch line kills the qualities we associate with a deeply meaningful or provocative image. Engaging as they are, the funniest pictures made by Elliott Erwitt or Garry Winogrand are almost never the photographer's best images. Neither has created more than a few pictures that make you laugh but still say something important, or interesting, about human experience.
"Richard Kalvar seems constitutionally able to do so. A member of Magnum since 1977, he has somehow flown below the radar. But Kalvar's first-ever monograph, Earthlings, makes abundantly clear that his best pictures are his funniest ones. These pictures are not one-liners, instead veering comfortably into surrealism. They bring to mind the Surrealists' favorite sentence from their favorite novel, Les Chants de Maldoror, in which a character is called "as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Or a popsicle and a harmonica.
"Of course the chance meetings depicted in Kalvar's photographs, which were exhibited in a spring retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (Kalvar's main base), are methodically sought out. Like subatomic particles, they don't exist until observed. And they are often unsettling in their humor. Here, two orally fixated Greenwich Villagers seem oblivious to what might be a Brobdingnabian corpse laid out on a gurney. The leg's owner is apparently napping on the roof rack of a car, perhaps his home -- like his fellow Earthlings, just doing what it takes to be human."[via PopPhoto]
Cristina Garcia Rodera awarded the inaugural prize of the Asociacion Periodistas Graficos Europeos.
At a ceremony held last Wednesday evening in Madrid, Cristina Garcia Rodera was awarded the inaugural prize of the Asociacion Periodistas Graficos Europeos (APGE, or European Visual Journalists’ Association).
The event was presided over by Spanish Vice-President Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega who gave a particularly elogious speech about Cristina’s work and her status as the first Spanish woman to enter Magnum Photos.
Read the press release (in Spanish)
Inge Morath, The Road to Reno book has been awarded the most beautiful book in Germany 2007
The Inge Morath, The Road to Reno book has been awarded the Stiftung Buchkunst as Die schönsten deutschen Bücher 2007 (the most beautiful book in Germany in 2007).
Please take a look at their website for more details Stiftung-Buchkunst (in German)
Inauguration of the Magnum Gallery, Paris
On Saturday 17th November, Magnum Photos in Paris opened its first gallery, MAGNUM GALLERY, a light-filled space of 200 m2 on the ground floor of Magnum Photos’ Parisian bureau in the city's 18th arrondissement. Over 300 buyers, photographers and VIPs braved transport strikes, chaotic traffic conditions and sub-zero temperatures to discover the new space and its inaugural exhibition.The Magnum Gallery will regularly organise private viewings of a selection of vintages from the photographers’ archives, as well as contemporary prints of more recent work.
The inaugural exhibition is a double bill that both pays tribute to Leonard Freed, deceased last year aged 77, and presents the work of the young American photographer Alec Soth, author of the recent, prestigious ‘Fashion Magazine’, published in May this year.
« Tribute to Leonard Freed » : a selection of rare vintages, that cover the most important periods in the photographers’ body of work : the Jewish community in New York in the fifties, « Black in America », and Harlem of the sixties ; « Police Work » in the seventies…
« Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth » : following the success of the Fashion magazine by Martin Parr in 2005, and by Bruce Gilden in 2006, the 2007 opus was realised by the well-known American photographer Alec Soth. The collector’s edition was first presented at a one-night evening at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, in June this year. Entitled ‘Paris-Minnesota’, Alec’s work confronts two different approaches to beauty : that of Parisien haute couture, and that of the photographer himself, with his portraits of Minnesota teenagers in their local temples ; malls, churches, sports centres… The exhibition is composed of a selection of large-format prints chosen by the photographer himself.
MAGNUM GALLERY
19 rue Hégésippe Moreau
75018 Paris
Inaugural exhibition from 14 November to 23 December 2007
Visit by appointment only
Contact : Anna Planas
planas@magnumphotos.fr
Paolo Pellegrin receives German Fotobook Award 2008
Paolo Pellegrin's new book, 'As I Was Dying', winner of the 2007 Leica European Publishers' Award and currently being launched in 7 European countries, has just received the German photobook award, the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis.
For more information visit Deutscher Fotobuchpries (in German)
Jacob Aue Sobol receives Fogtdals Fotopriser Award
Jacob Aue Sobol has been awarded the Fogtdals Fotopriser by the Danish publishing, Fogtdal. Each year they give $50,000 for lifetime achievement in photography along with several awards of $10,000 to young photographers to support further development of their talent. Jacob Aue Sobol not only challenges himself and his own view on life, he also challenges the opinion of the viewer and the way we look at photography. It takes great skills to unfold the private universe without causing embarrassment. Sobol has the ability to make the intimate common, to involve us in other people's inner and private universe For more information read the Press Release (in Danish)
Paolo Pellegrin receives Antonio Russo National Award
Paolo Pellegrin has won the photography section of the 6th edition of the ‘Antonio Russo’ national award for war reporting, one of the most prestigious journalistic awards in Italy. The event was organized by the Antonio Russo Foudation. Russo, a journalist of the Italian radio "Radio Radicale", was killed in Georgia in October 2000 whilst covering the war in Chechnya.
For more information visit RadioRadicale.it (in Italian)
Larry Towell receives Achievement in Filmmaking Award
The New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (NYIIFVF) known as "the voice of indie film" announced the winners from their successful summer film extravaganza that took place in New York. Larry Towell’s short film “Indecisive Moments” has won an Achievement in Filmmaking for a Documentary (Short). “Indecisive Moments” was filmed while completing the book project for “No Man’s Land” and features Larry’s original songwriting and poetry.
Magnum awarded prestigious Clarion Award
Magnum Photos has been awarded a Clarion Award for Exposed! Climate Change in Britain’s Back Yard, a National Trust assignment with photography by Stuart Franklin, Mark Power, Chris Steele-Perkins and Ian Berry, and curated by Maggie Gowan. The Clarion Awards, now in their 5th year, are awarded by the prestigious IVCA (International Visual Communication Association) for “recognizing excellence in the communication of Social Inclusion, CRS, Sustainable Development and Ethical debate. According to the International Visual Communications Association, "Beauty, sophistication, innovation and impact are what make this well conceived and implemented initiative a worthy winner. By applying the fine art of photography to illustrate how a global challenge is having a damaging local impact, the National Trust not only brings climate change to life for its own visitors and members but also to a wider arts community."
Mikhael Subotzky awarded The City of Perpignan Young Reporter Award
Picture editors from international magazines chose Mikhael Subotzky as the best young reporter for the City of Perpignan. The award was presented at the evening show on Friday, September 7. The award winning images, Mikhael Subotzky's photographs on crime and prisons in South Africa, are on exhibit at Visa pour l’Image. The award is being presented for the second time. The members of the jury select the young photographer who, in their opinion, has produced the best report in 2006/2007, either published or unpublished. The prize is given in recognition of talent and is designed to help young photographers complete projects. The City of Perpignan sponsors the 8000 euros prize. View Subotzky's images from Beaufort West