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.
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?
LIFE Magazine, created by TIME founder Henry Luce, published its first issue on November 23, 1936. That was exactly 71 years ago.
LIFE always set standards in photojournalism, until 1972 it was published weekly when it was unfortunately shut down. Six years later, in 1978 LIFE was published again. This time as a monthly magazine and according to Dirck Halstead, who wrote a very interesting article entitled The Last of LIFE, "it was a pale imitation of its former self". The monthly magazine was discontinued in 2000 only to be published again as a weekly newspaper supplement from 2004 to April 2007.
I did miss the glory days of LIFE magazine but its spirit and the work of some of the greatest photographers in the world who photographed for LIFE shall not be forgotten. This one goes out to the old LIFE magazine.
Nikos Economopoulos is a Magnum photographers who's work I really, really dig. Frankly, I am under the impression that his work doesn't get the attention it deserves by the photo community out there. Well, it's a bit hard to find more information on Nikos Economopoulos and his work outside of the Magnum website. I found an interesting article by Frank Viviano called "The Balkan Tribe" in which he also talks about him. And I found out that Nikos has his own workshop series "On The Road" which I didn't know about until recently.
So far I never had the chance to meet him but I truly hope that I'll soon be able to have a little conversation with him for the Magnum Blog. Until then you should really look at his books "Economopoulos, Photographer" or "The Balkans". This is exactly the kind of black and white photography that drew me into photography in the first place.
There are blogs about family vacations, cooking, knitting, little dog puppies, cats, hidden sexual fantasies, about photography, art and so much more. Despite the fact that nobody could ever possibly read all the blogs out there due to the sheer tremendous number of thousands and thousands of blogs, most of the time it wouldn't be worth it anyway. Frankly but at the same time nicely put: Most blogs are not very interesting at all. At least not if you are not the author or a close friend of the author.
But of course there are many, many exceptions to this as well. There are a whole bunch of blogs that are worth reading, that you can learn from, that can inspire you and broaden your horizon.
In an effort to bring some more inspiration to all of us I have collected 83 links to blogs about photography, art, multimedia and journalism, that I hope might be a source of good information for you. You might know a lot of them, or even all, but maybe you can find a couple of blogs that you did not yet know.
At the same time I updated the Magnum Blog's link page to include these blogs for future reference. The collection of various articles concerning photography on that page will of course still be available and updated from time to time.
Comments on the selection are appreciated and if you know a blog, or find one in the future, that should be added please let me know. Blogs that we link to usually do not only contain photographs but also some sort of textual information and thoughts. We will check every suggestion and if the submitted link could be of interest and value to our readers we will add it.
Thomas Alva Edison, who held approximately 1.500 patents, is often refered to as the inventor of the light bulb. He is not, but he was able to bring an old idea to life. On this day in 1879 he managed to test a light bulb that lasted for 13,5 hours. 356 of his patents dealt with electric lighting and the generation and distribution of electricity. Thank you Thomas Edison.
When I started to work at Magnum in New York it took quite some time before I had my first "real" conversation with David Alan Harvey. Before that I only knew him from saying "Hello" when our paths crossed from time to time in the office. And frankly… I never really knew what to think about this man as a person. He often seemed to be one of the "untouchables" to me, a photographer who seemed to be very self-confident, a man who seemed to be very self-confident.
And because of my prejudices I made up my mind and looked at David as the "cool guy", as somebody who is a bit superficial.
But as I said already, these have been my prejudices and maybe my enviousness. One day David told me about the Hip-Hop story he has been working on for quite some time. He took me out for lunch and continued to tell me about the story. He was very open minded, generous with advice and simply a friendly guy that was good to hang out with.
And my new opinion about David Alan Harvey being a generous, inspiring, great and normal man to talk to continued to rise even more with time.
David has been a blogger since the beginning of 2007. Very, very quickly his blog - or better his four blogs (1, 2, 3, 4) - became some of the most popular photography blogs out there. Through his blogs he shares his thoughts, advice and his own insecurities with those of us who do not have the chance to hang out with him or attend one of the many workshops he teaches. To me, reading his blog on a regular basis, sitting on another continent, is almost like talking to him or like reading in a book about photography. But it's more than just reading on the web, his blog became a real communication platform, something I would like the Magnum Blog to become too.
In a post entitled "in flight magazines" from May 2007 David wrote in reference to the community building power of the net, "...those of you who are still reading now know exactly what i mean...look at us right here...pretty cool right??? how else could we be doing this?? nice for me because it helps me keep my thoughts "organized" and is becoming the same kind of "diary" of life i did as a 14 yr. old photographer....and hopefully, this is nice for you because i try to put myself "in here" only to the extent that it will be useful information for you...mostly to let you know that i have the same problems as you or have had the same problems as you or certainly will in the future have the same problems as you ....the only thing i really have to "offer" is my current experience in the publishing world... both magazines and books.... and my long term friendships with so so many people in this biz....and mostly with the shared experiences i live every time i teach a workshop....i believe my students will tell you...
if i can keep this audience, we can do some really amazing things....here i am dreaming again, but sometimes my dreams happen...actually, they usually happen!!! once i focus, i am on the case!!"
And he continues "...we use the net to "community build" and then take that to reality...to print..."
This was the first time David wrote about his idea to get his readers directly involved and to eventually lead this to "real life".
Your Assignment
Over the next months David concreted his idea and gave his readers an assignment to work on. An assignment where you are allowed to work on a project that you always wanted to work on. He challenged his readers to produce a body of work that will stand out, that he would want to randomly select and present it to his audience that consists of known and unknown photographers alike, of photo editors, industry professionals and so on.
I would suggest reading his posts "in flight magazines", "collaboration", "your work", "timing", "psyched", "your assignment", "flood gates" and last but not least "bold steps" to get a better understanding of what David Alan Harvey is asking and looking for.
Finally, on September 18th he made yet another big step. He writes: "i announce now, to the readers of this forum, the offering of a $5,000. (u.s. dollars) stipend/grant for one exceptional photographer to help support their personal work.....this will be based on the photographs being sent to me now....
the deadline for sending work will now be extended to november 15, 2007....this will be based entirely on work produced between july 15, 2007 and the closing date.....the stipend will be awarded by december 15, 2007...Merry Christmas!!"
The "David Alan Harvey Blog Grant" aside, reading his posts, taking part in the very active communication with him, working on "your assignment" and trying to give your best in this collaboration effort provides a great chance for you that you shouldn't miss.
David was selected by his Magnum colleagues to help and initiate a Magnum educational program that is in the working. Even if his blog activities are not directly related to the Magnum educational program, it shows that he was the right person to be selected for this. His effort in helping and supporting young photographers is a unselfish and noble thing. This one goes out to you David!
It's been six years since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Our thoughts go out to the victims of the attacks in New York as well as to the victims of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Please watch the September 11 Magnum In Motion Essay with photographs from 18 Magnum photographers.
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.
