It was my birthday and Henri asked me what I would like as a present and I told him that I would be so happy if he would make an autoportrait of himself in drawing. He went straight to work. He sat on our bed with a mirror posed in front of himself, I was literally lying back watching him when all of a sudden I saw the triple image that ensued. I slipped away to grab my Leica M3 with a 35mm lens, he was so concentrated and focused on what he was doing that I don't think he even realised that I had photographed him.
I did not publish the photograph until his 90th birthday when Ferdinando Scianna persuaded him to allow me to publish a selection of "snapshots" I had made of him over the years.
Even I was wary of photographing Henri as I knew he did not really like it. Then one day he asked me to make a passport photograph of himself and from then on it was a joke between us: "Just a passport photo."
My first direct experience of Magnum was on June 24 1982, when I turned up in Paris for my first photographer's meeting, (once a year all the members get together, alternating between New York, Paris and London to decide policy for the year ahead, and look at new portfolios presented to the group). I had been voted as a Nominee, the summer before, on the first rung of the Magnum membership ladder.
Round the table were some most well known photojournalists of the twentieth century, but on the table was basically a carpet of Leicas and other assorted cameras, and as the meeting went on people began photographing each other.
I felt more than uneasy when I finally had the nerve to join in, but it is something that I have done ever since at subsequent meetings over the years. Rene Burri has traditionally been the one to shoot a group portrait each year, an event that is always full of fun as Rene tries to dash into the shot as the delayed action setting ticks away.
I was always rather frustrated by the lighting conditions, which are normally difficult, and in my first meeting as President in London 1991, I set up two large film lights across the large table determined that this was going to be the best-lit Magnum meeting ever. It all went well until on the third day Philip Jones Griffiths started fiddling with one of the lighting stands and it came crashing down fusing the whole system.
The pictures here were all taken this year in June 2007, at Milk Studios in New York, and were my way of passing some of the time during four days of intensive and sometimes difficult discussions. They are all shot on real film, using a 6x6 Mamiya camera, and with the occasional help of a chair for the camera to rest on for long exposures.
The above image was taken at the Parthenon in Greece in 1991 and was part of my project about global tourism.
Up until last week I had always thought that the tour group was Japanese. However, when I was recently in Seoul and this image was used as a poster, one reason cited was the fact that the party of tourists was Korean.
So I feel it only correct that I apologise for this misrepresentation. All those times I have given talks and mentioned how the Japanese travel the world in groups… Canadian readers will understand the gravity of this, when you are accused of being American.
I spent a good few days in Korea shooting tourist activities. These days, people photograph one another so prolifically and with such enthusiasm that I often wonder whether they actually look at any of the things they are visiting.
Nearly 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, evidence of their brutal rule is still being discovered. On May 5, villagers of Koh Sla, while digging the soil, stumbled upon a burial site dating from the regime. Some people started exploring the site, looking for jewelry which would have been left in the graves. About 120 corpses were unearthed.
On a small hilltop nearby, the remains of a separate body were found, wrapped in olive coloured plastic sheeting, which indicates this was not a civilian victim but more probably a Vietnamese soldier who died during the 1979 campaign by the Vietnamese army to push back the Khmer Rouge to the strongholds from where they would remain active until 1998. The bones were recovered by the Vietnamese on May 10th and repatriated.
Central African Republic. February 2007. Anti-government rebels living in the bush. Same area as makeshift camps for displaced civilians, suspected of harboring or sympathizing with the rebels, who fled after their villages were torched by government forces. Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos
In the 1983 movie "Under Fire," an American weekly news magazine publishes a photo of an African conflict with the headline "The Forgotten War." In response, the writer jokes to the photographer that the headline is a way for the editors back home to feel less guilty about not knowing about the war themselves.
With neighbors such as Chad, Sudan and the DRC, the tiny Central African Republic has not received intense media coverage, as Thomas Dworzak commented on his return from the country.
While working on a new book about Iraq, I came across this image, taken by a family, only a few months ago in Baghdad. This is, let's call him 'Samir', in his bedroom. His niece told me that Samir loves to listen to Western music. Shakira is his number one favourite.
Posters of Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears and Shakira are tacked to Samir's bedroom wall in Baghdad, Iraq in this family photograph.
Samir never leaves his parents’ house; he always stays in, most of the time in his room. No one leaves their house in Iraq, unless it is really necessary. Abduction, roadside- or suicide bombs, car accidents, robbery, torture and murder are daily occurrences. The kidnapping business is booming. A year ago, a ransom of between $8,000 and $180,000 was good enough to get your son or father back alive. Today, people pay that amount of money just to collect the body. Areas, villages and regions are ethnically cleansed, a term politicians do not like to use. Showing sympathy for Shakira will not be appreciated by any radical sectarian militia, the mujahedeen or al-Qaeda. Anyone who shows sympathy for America is a target of their rage.
On a tightly restricted press tour around the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Magnum’s Paolo Pellegrin photographed, as best he could, the detention center for terrorism suspects. Here he talks of how the limitations affected his work.
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2006. Terrorism suspects. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
Immediately as you set your foot on the ground, you start going through the bureaucracy of the place. This military person welcomes you, you go through the X-ray machines, there’s a press person that is assigned to a particular journalist or a team, as we were, [Pellegrin was on a New York Times Magazine assignment with writer Tim Golden] that’s there to greet us. So you’re immediately in the machine.
It’s not particularly difficult to go to Guantanamo, very many journalists do, the problem is that the tour, the press tour as it’s called, is extremely controlled, obviously, by the military. So you go through the motions of this staged mechanism which normally lasts 2-3 days and basically you are shown what they want to show you.
There’s pretty strict instructions especially in a situation or place where you’re close to detainees. You’re absolutely not allowed to talk to them and obviously not hand over anything. There has to be a complete distance….
