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Post-industrial Czechia 

At the start of his career, Rafal Milach documented Poland’s Upper Silesia, later returning over 20 years on the Czech side to explore the region’s evolving identity after major political and economic shifts. As part of Magnum and Fujifilm’s “A World in Color” series, he photographed Ostrava in response to archival images capturing Czechoslovakia’s liberation and the fall of communism. Finding little visual record of the region’s industrial legacy, Milach focused on post-industrial Czech Silesia, where the effects of the Velvet Revolution are still deeply felt.

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At the very beginning of his photographic career, Rafal Milach began to document the area of Polish Upper Silesia where he grew up. Stretching from southern Poland into areas of Czechia, the region is predominantly known for its heavy industry. More than twenty years later, he returned, this time on the Czech side of the border, to reflect on the search of identity of an area that has undergone radical political and economic transformation. This documentation is the first commission of the “A World in Color” series in collaboration with Fujifilm, in which a Magnum photographer responds to a selection of unseen color images found in the Magnum color library archive in Paris. Rafal Milach shoot a series of images in Ostrava, Czechia, in response to images taken by Magnum photographers documenting Czechoslovakia's liberation from the Soviet Union, the fall of communism, and the accompanying euphoria. "More than 35 years have passed since The Velvet Revolution, but the consequences are still felt in many places today," Milach said, reffering to Upper Silesia. While digging through the archives, Milach discovered a lack of documentation on the industrial character of the region, except from Eliott Erwitt's picture from Brno. This prompted the photographer to focus on post-industrial Czech Silesia, an area greatly affected by economic transformation.

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Post-industrial Czechia 

Migrant workers in Lebanon live in precarious conditions. Under the kafala system, also known as "sponsorship," each of them must have a Lebanese sponsor in order to be allowed to work in the country. Their fate hinges on the ethical compass of the latter, who usually controls their lives. Often, sponsors overwork and underpay migrant workers, isolating them from the outside world, and denying them access to healthcare. An estimated 176,500 migrants live in Lebanon as of 2025, about 70 per cent of whom are women. 50% are domestic workers, meaning they live with their employees, usually under harsh conditions. Stories of racism and discrimination are common among migrant workers in Lebanon, and their mistreatment and exploitation has become so normalised that even the most shocking stories no longer raise eyebrows. The recent Israeli war in Lebanon exacerbated their socio-economic situation, with many being abandoned by their employers and left on their own in the streets or locked in their houses in war-affected areas. Photographer Myriam Boulos was assigned by Médecins Sans Frontières to portray some of the female migrant workers living in shelters provided by the organisation, as well as the daily activities of MSF's workers at their clinic in the northern Beirut suburb of Burj Hammoud. There, MSF teams respond to migrants’ medical needs by offering basic consultations, sexual and reproductive health services, and mental health services including psychiatric consultations. During the intensive wartime period, migrant community leaders helped MSF teams reach migrants in the greatest need of assistance in overcrowded shelters and apartments. There, essential relief items were donated and medical care was delivered through a mobile clinic.

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Migrant Workers in Lebanon 

2025 commission photographed in Paris.

Portfolio 

Olivia Arthur Cover Story for CAP... 

In May 2025, Nanna Heitmann traveled with New York Times reporters to document the reaction of Syrians to the increase in sectarian tensions and violence in their country. Since the fall of Assad's dictatorship, violence against religious minorities is rising, coinciding with the country's reform process under a Sunni Muslim majority government. Starting with the massacre of Alawites — a religious minority to which Bashar al-Assad belonged — in March of this year, attacks on the Druze community followed. A religious minority belonging to a branch of Shi'ite Islam, the Druze primarily reside in Lebanon, Israel, and Syria's southern Sweida province, as well as in some suburbs of Damascus. Heitmann, Bureau Chief Vivian Yee and journalist Reham Mourshed traveled to the southern Damascus suburbs of Jamarana and Ashrafieh Sahnaya to attend the funeral of seven men killed in an attack suspected to have been carried out by Islamic extremists on April 29, after an audio clip that was attributed to a Druze cleric who was criticizing the Prophet Muhammad circulated on social networks. As internal clashes destabilize the country, the latest surge in violence against the Shiite minority has also prompted the Netanyahu government in Israel — which has close ties to the Israeli Druze community — to launch airstrikes against Syrian government targets in retaliation. The photographer documented the ensuing protests.

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Sectarian Violence in Syria 

In 2023, the Biden administration made the CBP One app mandatory for asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border, leaving many stranded in Mexican cities without access to basic services while waiting for appointments. In January 2025, the Trump administration disabled the app’s scheduling feature, effectively shutting down the only official asylum pathway and further limiting options for those already at risk. On assignment with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Yael Martinez documented migrant camps in Mexico City, where many people from Venezuela and Central America have settled in search of safety, stability, and a chance to rebuild their lives.

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Migrant Camps in Mexico City 

When he was 21, Lyon’s father passed on to him a 1953 Oldsmobile. He discovered the ecstasy of speeding along Georgia highways during the civil rights movement, with red dirt fields of peanuts and cotton flying by. In the excitement of driving, he realized his own mortality. Lyon’s ‘Junk: America in Ruins’ is a book of pictures of 86 American cars, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, made in the junkyards of the western United States. The pictures were taken in Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma. This is a work of pure visual photography. The premise behind the work is that many things—sculptures, monuments, buildings—take on a new and added beauty as they deteriorate and become ruins: a certain pathos is added to their original beauty. This is true of the automobiles in this series: once the beloved machines of people and families who owned and drove them, they now evoke a terrible beauty and sadness. Damiani, Spring 2025 Hardbound 120 pages, 86 illustrations ISBN: 9788862088329

Book 

Junk: America in Ruins. 

Biography 

Richard Kalvar 

April 30th 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, and of the end of the Vietnam War.

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50 Years Since the End of Vietnam... 

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Catholic Church, known globally for his humility and deep compassion for the poor, has passed away at the age of 88, according to an announcement by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the Vatican camerlengo.

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Pope Francis: 1936 - 2025 

Sabiha Çimen has been photographically documenting the USA since 2019, capturing images of the country and its people through the lens of a Turkish immigrant. Sabiha Çimen’s “Blueberries in Turkey” is a visual love letter and a gentle provocation—an unfolding photographic meditation on displacement, perception, and the delicate friction of cultural encounter. Over six years, Çimen has journeyed through the vast and fractured landscapes of the United States, photographing not just places, but the echoes, textures, and temperatures of belonging and otherness. As a Turkish Muslim woman newly woven into the American fabric through marriage, Çimen does not simply document what she sees—she listens with her lens. Her medium-format color photographs are intimate and cinematic, saturated with curiosity and restraint. They move like quiet poems across interiors and highways, grocery aisles and kitchens, desert plains and suburban thresholds. Through her eyes, America is both strange and achingly familiar: full of contradictions, tenderness, excess, silence. The project is deeply personal. Çimen photographs her own process of becoming—learning the rituals of a new life, contending with a slow-burning culture shock that resides not in grand gestures, but in the mundane: the way onion and fruit is pre-sliced in supermarkets “to save time”, also a recurring theme in her encounters is the projection of exoticism and ignorance onto her Turkish identity. Innocent yet telling questions—“Do you have blueberries in Turkey?” “Donuts?” “Washing machines?”—reflect a deeper narrative of cultural misrecognition and geopolitical distance. These encounters are not simply humorous or absurd—they are profound. They reveal the quiet violence of assumption, and the distance between imagination and reality. But this is not just a story of how the immigrant sees America. It is also about how America sees the immigrant—how a woman wrapped in unfamiliar vowels and gestures is received, categorized, misunderstood, or celebrated. Çimen turns this gaze inside out, offering an inversion of the ethnographic eye. Her work collapses the traditional divide between documentarian and subject, replacing it with a fluid, reciprocal gaze—one that is deeply felt, politically aware, and rich with artistic intuition. From portraits to still lifes, from fleeting roadside moments to the layered intimacy of domestic space, “Blueberries in Turkey” composes a dreamlike atlas of Çimen’s American experience. It is both tender and sharp—a lyrical exploration of hybridity, alienation, and the surreal beauty of everyday life seen through the eyes of an outsider who is slowly becoming, yet never quite belonging. This ongoing body of work, tentatively titled “Blueberries in Turkey”, is envisioned as a photographic book. Far from a traditional travelogue, the project is an anthropological and phenomenological meditation on displacement, perception, and the aesthetics of difference. Çimen’s medium-format color photographs, marked by their quiet intensity and attention to detail, move fluidly between portraiture, landscape, interior, and still life—offering a polyphonic and richly textured account of contemporary America. Rather than seek definitive answers, Çimen’s project asks vital questions: What does it mean to belong? How does space transform identity? How does one navigate the beauty, absurdity, and violence of cultural translation? In documenting the subtle and the surreal, she creates a cartography of emotional and existential encounters—a visual essay on the meaning of home, hospitality, and the unseen labor of adaptation.

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“Blueberries in Turkey”. Viewing... 

The Volksbund organization's mission is to find the graves of every German who died in the country's wars, and to give each one a decent burial. The organization works to determine the identity of the people whose remains are found through objects: dog tags, letters from relatives, etc. Every year, they uncover war graves of 8000 to 12,000 former soldiers or victims. But in a Germany driven by the duty of remembering the atrocities committed by the Nazis during WWII, the group has been the subject of much controversy, stemming from its commitment to giving every body uncover a decent burial, making no distinction between victims and perpetrators. In 2020, anti-fascist leaders filed a complaint when they heard that some German politicians had attended a funeral ceremony with the organization, honoring the remains of prominent Nazis such as Julius Dettman, who had imprisoned Ann Frank, among others. Founded in 1919 as the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the private group used to receive donations from relatives of the dead, but with fewer living today, there is also some suspicion about where the funding comes from, especially at a time when the Afd is gaining strength. On assignment for the NYT Magazine, Antoine d'Agata traveled with journalist Nick Casey to follow the organization's activities. Starting from a house in the garden of the Van Beuningen family, which turned out to be a mass grave with more than 300 skeletons, the duo followed the search for the dead and delved into the cogs of the organization. They visited the headquarters, where they met Dirck Backen, the director of the Volksbund, and where they saw the methods used to uncover the identities of the bodies found. They also met Réveil, a 98-year-old man who decided to reveal a war crime he'd committed with his Maquis brigade at the end of the war: the killing of 47 Nazi soldiers. With his guerrilla group, they made the soldiers dig their own graves, then killed them all and left them there, and nobody knew about it until now. Casey and d'Agata also went to Hungary to witness the exhumation of the bones of many Hungarian and German soldiers who, according to Casey's report, died of typhus.

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Unearthing the Third Reich 

Martin Parr photographed tourists and the cherry blossom in Kyoto in April, before exhibiting his work Small World at Kyotographie, an international photography festival held over four weeks each year in Kyoto, Japan. "Everyone goes cherry blossom mad," Parr writes. "They just cannot get enough photographs of themselves, their kids, their pets and babies, getting as close as possible." Kyoto, known for its rich culture and well-preserved historic sites, is a top year-round tourist destination, with peak crowds during cherry blossom season (March–April) and autumn foliage (October–November). From 2013 to 2019, a weak yen led to a 300% rise in foreign tourism, mostly from Asia. Post-COVID, Japan saw record-breaking numbers—37 million visitors in 2024, up from 31 million in 2019. While this surge has boosted tourism revenue, it’s also sparked concerns over over-tourism. Crowding, environmental strain, and rising costs have made some locals feel excluded from their own attractions. In response, Japan is considering two-tiered pricing, charging foreigners more to help keep access affordable for residents.

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Cherry Blossom Crowds in Kyoto 

Forty-six hours before Rüdiger Koch officially seized the Guinness World Record for the longest time spent living in an underwater fixed habitat, New York Times Magazine reporter Mark Yarm took a 15-minute motorboat ride from Linton Bay Marina, in north-central Panama, to visit him. It was a warm afternoon in January, and Koch was approaching a full 120 days spent working, eating, sleeping, drinking and smoking cigars in a room 36 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. His 304-square-foot habitat was inside the underwater buoyancy chamber that helps stabilize a floating home called SeaPod Alpha Deep. An armed security guard was in the above-water part of the structure, monitoring Koch and ensuring that the pod did not have “any visitors that we don’t want.” When Yarm's boat arrived, Koch threw down a cable and winched Yarm up. Koch arrived here, in small part, via a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Seasteading Institute, which promotes “living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.” The vision, as the Institute’s president, the “seavangelist” Joe Quirk, once told Guernica, is “startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted” — a libertarian-inflected world where, it is said, you could “vote with your boat,” relocating to a community in line with your views. The concept captured people’s imaginations long before it had a name. In 1895, Jules Verne published “Propeller Island,” a novel about a moving man-made island inhabited by millionaires. By the 1960s, real attempts were being made: Ernest Hemingway’s brother, Leicester, founded the Republic of New Atlantis, a bamboo raft anchored about six miles off the coast of Jamaica. (It washed away.) Still extant is the Principality of Sealand, founded in 1967 on a disused antiaircraft platform seven miles off the shore of Britain. The inventor R. Buckminster Fuller helped design a floating metropolis called Tetrahedron City; the project’s financier died, and plans to build it were abandoned. Koch spent his career in aerospace engineering; he is also a “long-term” believer and investor in Bitcoin. Now his time is occupied by Ocean Builders, the company that has set up three solar-powered SeaPods, of differing designs, near Linton Bay Marina. It is a partnership between Koch and two other independently wealthy men: Chad Elwartowski, an American Bitcoin enthusiast; and Grant Romundt, a Canadian tech entrepreneur on an “anti-aging health-span journey.” Alec Soth photographed Koch and his business partners for The New York Times Magazine.

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The Techno-Utopians Who Want to... 

Peruvian writer and politician Mario Vargas Llosa has died at the age of 89. Achieving international recognition in 1960s, Vargas Llosa is considered to be one of the most important Spanish language authors of his generation. Vargas Llosa was engaged in politics for much of his career. Originally drawn to liberal causes, he eventually shifted toward the center-right and in 1990, unsuccessfully ran against Alberto Fujimori for the Peruvian presidency.

Archive 

Mario Vargas Llosa: 1936 - 2025... 

On March 5th at least 1,300 "Hands Off!" demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of participants were staged across all 50 states in largest show of opposition to the current administration since President Trump began his second term of office in January. Alessandra Sanguinetti and Jim Goldberg photographed in San Francisco, while Alex Webb covered the march in NYC.

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"Hands Off" Protests Across the... 

Since 2023, Thomas Dworzak has been traveling along the Russian border, from Finland to eastern Kazakhstan, to assess the impact of the war in Ukraine on neighboring countries: their perceptions of and relations with Russia, the influence of the United States, and the evolution of their own national security policies after the invasion. Since Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, the term has come to define the separation between Russia and the West, a way to examine the shifting ideological and geopolitical boundary between Russia and its influence on Eastern Europe, and these longstanding tensions with the West. Covering military training, landscapes, museums, and ordinary moments of life, Dworzak explores each place with a specific geographical angle, linking each to its historical significance. Each of these countries has its specific complex history with Russia, and the war in Ukraine has moved people with a particular sentiment, whether it be independence or aggressivity towards Russia, like in the Baltics where volunteer military training is expanding, or a more tempered sentiment and assimilation of Russian culture such as in Kazakhstan.The photographer explores the tensions linked to a painful past, stretching back to Imperial Russia, and awakened again by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

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The New Iron Curtain - Ongoing... 

Countries worldwide are feeling the impact of the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid, which eliminated over 90% of contracts and reduced funding by around $60 billion. Many programs in vulnerable nations rely on USAID for health systems and nutrition, while efforts to combat terrorism and trafficking, including fentanyl, will also be affected, according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric. Magnum Photographers have traveled to many of the countries benefiting from or relying on foreign aid, many now shuttered and leaving millions of people without access to life-saving care.

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USAID: The Human Cost of Trump's... 

On assignment for the New Yorker, Moises Saman documented the search for relatives by Syrian families in the Sednaya prison in December 2024, two days after the fall of the Assad regime. Over the past twenty years, New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson and Moises Saman have covered a range of conflicts together. After the fall of the dictatorships in Iraq and Libya, they uncovered significant evidence of their brutality. However, Assad's actions appear to have been particularly brutal. In 2012, as Syria descended into violence, Moises and Jon traveled to Aleppo with a group of insurgent rebels and witnessed an early glimpse of the war’s horrors. Twelve years later, the death toll is estimated to be as high as six hundred and twenty thousand, while another fourteen million people—more than half the country’s population—have been forced to flee their homes. During the decades of Assad rule, any form of resistance was ruthlessly suppressed, with those involved being arrested and tortured in a network of facilities scattered across the country. Sednaya became the most notorious of these. Established in the late 1980s on a desolate limestone hilltop just forty minutes from downtown Damascus, it earned a terrifying reputation of torture and atrocity.

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Sednaya Prison 

On Saturday, October 7th, Israel was taken by surprise in an unexpected and severe cross-border assault by Hamas from Gaza, resulting in the initial deaths of 900 people. The BBC reported that included in this number were 260 individuals attending a music festival. With many still missing or abducted by Hamas in Israel, families are left desperately seeking information as the conflict unfolds. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared war on Hamas, vowing to use “enormous force” by launching strikes in Gaza and imposing a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, freezing the flow of essential supplies. According to the BBC, as of October 9th approximately 690 people in Gaza had lost their lives and more than 120,000 had been displaced from their homes. The result of this has triggered the latest outbreak of fighting in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing in outside powers and echoing across the broader Arab region.

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Israel and Palestine from the Archives... 

The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014, triggered by Ukraine's Maidan Revolution. Over the following eight years, the conflict escalated with naval skirmishes, cyberattacks, Russia's annexation of Crimea and support to pro-Russian separatists fighting against Ukraine’s military in the ongoing Donbas War. In February 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine, deepening its occupation and igniting the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. The war has caused a massive refugee crisis and led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Magnum Photographers have been documenting the Russo-Ukrainian War since 2014, capturing scenes from the front lines and inside both countries, illustrating the impact of the war on people's daily lives. The selection below showcases our ongoing coverage in the region, which has spanned over a decade.

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Russo-Ukrainian War