Zackary Drucker | Aperture Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst, Relationship, #12. 2008-2013.
“Before the prevalence of selfies, or the square files of Instagram, I photographed myself into existence to fill the void of feeling (...)
that gender outlaws had been erased or only rendered by outsiders. I don’t particularly like this self-portrait, but I acknowledge this past incarnation who exists within me, and honor them for delivering me here and now.”
- Zackary Drucker © Zackary Drucker
Todd Hido | Aperture Untitled, #2154-a. 1998.
“This particular photo has a special meaning to me, even though it hadn’t been published in my ‘House Hunting’ series, where I explored the bay area suburbs at night. Af (...)
ter the completion of a body of work, I will often find things that didn’t get published because there was certain hyper sense of uniformity that I was looking for when I was making my initial choices. However, once you are able to gain some space and time to reflect, gems like this emerge and you scratch your head and ask, why haven’t I used this one before?”
- Todd Hido © Todd Hido
Don McCullin | Aperture The Road to Somme. France. 2000
“I was visiting the World War I battlefield sites of the Somme. There’d been a heavy rainstorm, I was driving, and I suddenly saw this silver road, disappearing in (...)
to infinity. I felt immediately that the road was a voice, telling me something about history—a road along which millions of soldiers had marched into fear, pain, and death. I injected a lot of my own thoughts into that picture.
There’s a lot of darkness in this simple landscape. I see darkness as my voice. I’m speaking for the victims and casualties of war, because they’re not around to speak for themselves. In war, you see a lot of damaged human beings. They can’t talk because they’re in immense depths of shock and horror. I make my pictures dark, to speak what other people can’t speak.”
- Don McCullin © Don McCullin
Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos Sunset on Kent Avenue and South 3rd Street in Williamsburg. Barricades line the Domino Sugar factory construction site. Brooklyn, NY, USA. 2016.
“Great journeys are about experience and discove (...)
ry. For me, photography is simply another word for journey.”
- Christopher Anderson © Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos
Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos Henri Matisse in his studio. Nice, France. August, 1949.
“It does seem to me that Capa has proved beyond all doubt that the camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good (...)
as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.”
- John Steinbeck, “Robert Capa: A Memorial Portfolio,” Popular Photography (September, 1954) © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos
Cornell Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos John F. Kennedy and his sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford riding in a convertible on Lauren Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood, after his whistle-stop train tour through California. Los Angeles, USA (...)
. September 9, 1960.
“The greatest joy that the camera has given me is my gained capacity to see. The next gain is that I can ‘be there’ where things are going on and have the opportunity to partake. It also gives me a center seat, front (and more importantly a backstage vantage point as well) of the Greatest Spectaculars that man has created to impress others. It has given me rich opportunities to be one with fellow human beings of all varieties in their hours of trial and triumph. Thus I can live a thousand lives during my lifetime. Finally there is the satisfaction of showing others what experiences I have gone through.”
- Cornell Capa, Camera magazine (October, 1963) © Cornell Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos
Carolyn Drake | Magnum Photos Hotel Room. Zhetisay, Kazakhstan. 2009.
“When I see this image, I am reminded of what was going on behind the scenes: I was in Kazakhstan, by a reservoir where people hunt for birds in winter, sh (...)
ooting for my book Two Rivers. I had just returned to my hotel after searching for hunters to photograph, and there was the hotel receptionist, plucking the feathers of a duck on the tile floor. It was only after making pictures of the duck plucking that I turned and noticed the billowing curtain. When I look at the image of the curtain, I also see duck feathers, a woman’s fingernails, the reservoir and the rivers. I am fascinated by how images work on the imagination, and I think this curtain in a way puts a shape around those uncanny movements of the mind.”
- Caroyn Drake © Carolyn Drake | Magnum Photos
Thomas Dworzak | Magnum Photos Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. March, 2005.
“In the early 2000s, what became known as the Colour Revolution swept through the former Soviet Union overthrowing the more authoritarian regimes that had been (...)
in power since the early 1990s. Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ was followed by Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution.’ Many of the republics were on the edge. I was in Sri Lanka when I heard about demonstrations starting in Bishkek, the Kyrgyzstan capital. Travelling all the way from Colombo via Amman, Paris, Moscow, Chelyabinsk, I reached Bishkek after two sleepless days on the morning of March 24, 2005. I dumped my stuff at the hotel and went to a rather small demonstration of maybe a thousand people at the university, marching to the town center. The protesters were still deciding on the colors to use, pink or yellow. … I was getting ready for a long wait and stand-off, when suddenly a fight broke out under the Lenin statue in the main square. In less than half an hour, protesters were chasing the police away from the presidential palace and ‘storming’ it. President Akayev was on the run. The whole thing was over in less than two hours. In the lawless vacuum of the first night after this ‘Tulip Revolution,’ there was widespread looting of shops and businesses in town. Someone shot the lips on a beauty parlor.”
- Thomas Dworzak © Thomas Dworzak | Magnum Photos
Harry Gruyaert | Magnum Photos Niger River, Mali. 1988.
“For this edition of square prints, which pays tribute to the work of George Rodger, one of Magnum’s founding fathers, I have chosen a picture I shot in Mali in 1988. It w (...)
as my first visit there and, as I shoot in color, I found Africa to be a difficult place to work as the light is so harsh. But I was attracted to the unusual attitude of this boy and to the weird shape of the piece of fabric next to him. (What was hidden underneath it, to this day I still don’t know!)
It is a strange and quite surreal image, and in that sense, very different from the kind of pictures George Roger took while he was documenting ethnic tribes. Though they are very beautiful, I have always thought there was a lack of sensuality in them, a certain distance between the photographer and his subject. It is probably due to the fact that he was British and born at a time when Britain was still a colonial empire. Every photographer always gives away something of what he is and where he comes from in the images he produces. This is something I find really interesting.”
- Harry Gruyaert © Harry Gruyaert | Magnum Photos
Thomas Hoepker | Magnum Photos New Mexico, USA. 1990.
“In 1990, I was traveling to New Mexico for Stern magazine in Germany. The magazine wanted me to do a photo essay for their travel issue. The briefing was short: “Fly to Al (...)
buquerque airport, rent a car and crisscross through countryside. Come back in about four weeks.”
I slowly drove south through the fascinating, hot and colorful landscape. On the third evening, I was driving at sunset along the highway toward Santa Fe. I stopped the car, opened the window and took some pictures. The mountains reflected the last red color of the sinking sun and I saw that the moon was coming up on the horizon. I shot four images on my Leica and drove on toward Santa Fe.
Many years later I saw a stunning black-and-white photograph in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it was by the famous Ansel Adams and was titled, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.” I had not seen it before, and only years later it occurred to me that Adams must have taken this very famous picture from almost the same location where I had shot this color picture in 1990.”
- Thomas Hoepker © Thomas Hoepker | Magnum Photos
David Hurn | Magnum Photos A sign in the Arizona desert. It connotes that very shortly the entire area will be developed with housing and shopping malls. Arizona, USA. 1979.
"‘The use of traveling is to regulate imagination (...)
with reality, and instead of thinking of how things may be, see them as they are.’ Samuel Johnson.
I was given a fellowship to photograph in the U.S. for a year. I picked Arizona as my base, it being in many ways the direct opposite of my own country, Wales, in politics and in weather.
I loved the friendship of the people and the drive and ambition in the state. Plus, I was in total awe of the space. It was a case of ‘come see’–what would be there tomorrow?”
- David Hurn © David Hurn | Magnum Photos
Larry Towell | Magnum Photos "Water Protectors” on the frozen Cannonball River, after having been forced out of their camp by the police. North Dakota, USA. February 23, 2017.
“Although I’ve travelled extensively during my (...)
career, starting in Central America and ending up in the Middle East, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline stands out as one of my most pertinent journeys, perhaps, because it was so close to home.
At the time, protesters, known as ‘water protectors,’ were being arrested and charged with felonies. The day before this image was made, 10 journalists were detained while standing on a public highway by the camp entrance. I managed to outrun them. Next day, the protesters ran onto the frozen Cannonball River when police entered with Humvees and automatic assault rifles. One Native American held a prayer stick as she stood on the thin, melting ice.”
- Larry Towell © Larry Towell | Magnum Photos
Alex Webb | Magnum Photos "Istanbul, Turkey. 2001.
“Over the course of seven years—from 1998 to 2005—I wandered the streets of Istanbul, from Cihangir to Ayvansaray, from Üsküdar to Altinsehir, from Kadiköy to the ancien (...)
t Theodosian walls. Meandering its warren of winding streets and riding its ferries, I found that serendipity guided me—in its roundabout way. More often than not, I had to lose my way in order to find my most successful photographs.
In 2001, I remember crossing the Sea of Marmara after a frustrating series of missed ferries and lost opportunities—a typical afternoon for a street photographer. In the fading light, I thought I was done for the day, and was considering ordering a tea to help fend off the brisk sea air. Then something caught my eye: an older Turkish man, lost in thought, framed by the pink-purple glow of dusk. His reverie had a kind of mysterious weight to it—hard-to-define, yet almost palpable. In that moment, I slowly began to understand—at least visually—Orhan Pamuk’s notion of ‘hüzün,’ an untranslatable word that suggests a rich and complicated melancholy that’s unique to Istanbul, the writer’s birthplace and one of the most astonishingly beautiful cities in the world, a place that seems haunted by its past, and, these days, beleaguered by its present.”
- Alex Webb © Alex Webb | Magnum Photos