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Arts & Culture

Witches & Bitches: Decades of Women’s Defiance Through the Magnum Archive

In celebration of Women’s History Month 2026, Global Cultural Director Andréa Holzherr sets out to highlight decades of defiant women in the Magnum archive

A female protester being arrested and led away by the police. Birmingham, Alabama. USA. 1963. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos “Birmingham was heating up and I made two trips there, a week apart, to (...)

In Bruce Davidson’s 1963 photograph of a female protester being led by the wrists from a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, the marquee at the cinema behind her promotes a war film that takes on a new meaning: “Damn the Defiant.”

For Women’s History Month 2026, Global Cultural Director Andréa Holzherr explores female defiance over the decades in the Magnum archive, bringing together a selection that reappropriates the derogatory terms branded on outspoken women throughout history — witches and bitches. Turning the shame away from the free-spirited women portrayed in the images, this curation celebrates female autonomy and independence.

Holzherr writes:

“For centuries, women who refused obedience have been given names meant to offend: Witch. Bitch. Words thrown at women who speak too loudly, desire too freely, live too independently, or simply step outside the narrow frame of what is considered acceptable.

Witches & Bitches are daughters, mothers, artists, lovers, fighters, leaders….they choose their own paths, define their own bodies, and invent their own rules.

Witches & Bitches want the same power as their fellow men, they will no longer be just pretty, polite, silent, or pleasing. Their freedom unsettles. Their independence provokes. Their refusal to conform is read as a threat.

Witches & Bitches are simply women who refuse to disappear.”

The March on Washington. Washington, D.C. August 28, 1963. © Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos

Rosa Parks. Georgia, Atlanta, USA. 1995. © Eli Reed / Magnum Photos.

Detail of a pro-choice cap. Florida, USA. September 8, 2024. © Cristina De Middel/Magnum Photos

Pro-choice protest in Washington Square Park. On June 24th, 2022 the US Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old Row vs Wade decision which had provided abortion rights across the country. New York (...)

Following the politicized Constitutional Court's declaration of a bill that bans nearly all abortions, people took to the streets all over Poland. Almost 100 days passed between the declaration and (...)

The fourth day of protests against the abortion ban. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, people spontaneously took to the streets and blocked the traffic to protest against the Constitutional Court's (c (...)

Model Charlotte Stribling aka 'Fabulous' waits backstage for the entrance cue to model clothes designed and made in the Harlem community. The venue is the Abyssinian Church. Harlem, New York. 1950. (...)