Fact/Fiction: The Square Print Sale
Presenting Fact/Fiction, the Square Print Sale, launching Monday, October 26 for one week only
Where is the line between documentation and storytelling? Fact/Fiction, the October Square Print Sale, offers over 70 images selected by Magnum photographers and estates, exploring the space between the truth and the imagination. Available as limited-edition, signed or estate-stamped 6×6 or 9×9 prints, these photographs have the power to make documentation feel dreamlike and unlikely moments seem believable. From surprising narratives to mysterious illusions and reflections, the selection blurs the boundaries between how things appear and how they really are.
Offering work by Martin Parr, Harry Gruyaert, Steve McCurry, Susan Meiselas, Eve Arnold, and many more, Fact/Fiction spans decades of photography, a medium that constantly asks us to question how we see the world and how we are seen.
The Sale opens on Monday, October 26. Browse the full selection of images here.
Fact/Fiction invites us to step inside cinematic narratives, as in Harry Gruyaert’s glossy night shot on the set of a Robert Altman film in Paris, or Dennis Stock’s image from the 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause, featuring a knife fight scene with James Dean, whom Stock befriended and photographed in the months before the actor’s tragic death.
“Fiction might simply be a mirror with better editing skills,” says Cristina De Middel, on the theme. “Reality, on the other hand, has become increasingly difficult to locate. Truth has lost its competitive advantage and identity is now built inside an infinite room of mirrors, through the eyes of others, through images, through the images of others looking at our images. At some point, knowing which reflection came first stops being that important. Maybe fiction is not the opposite of reality anymore. Maybe it is just a way of finding our way through it.”
Her enigmatic image taken in Bahia, Brazil questions reflections and identity in the modern world.
Other images offer a sense of devotion and togetherness, as in Larry Towell’s photograph of an adopted starling clinging to his son, from his book The World From My Front Porch, a chronicle of life on his farm in rural Ontario with his wife and four children in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Alessandra Sanguinetti’s image “El brindis,” or “The Toast”, features Guille and Belinda, two cousins growing up on a farm in Argentina, and the protagonists of Sanguinetti’s recently released feature documentary, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer.
“I was not allowed to take even one step on my own,” said Carl De Keyzer on his 60-day experience in North Korea in 2015. He documented 220 locations, including the April 25th House of Culture, which features in his book D.P.R. Korea Grand Tour.
An attention to bodies punctuates the selection, as Yael Martínez tosses his daughter in the air in Guerrero, Mexico in 2013, creating the illusion of “a hanging man” shadow on the wall. That year, he began working on Luciérnagas, his personal response to trauma and organized crime his own family experienced — as well as other grieving families — and the process of transformation.
“I had never thought that much about my body before. And now I’m not even sure it is really mine,” Olivia Arthur writes in the introduction to her 2024 book, Murmurings of the Skin.
Pregnant with her first child, Arthur became curious about the human body’s capacities and limits. Her image shows a hand affected by Dupuytren’s contracture wrapped in cobwebs.
For his book Small World, Martin Parr ventured around the world in the 1990s, exposing the myths and realities of global tourism with a satirical eye. Leisure seekers on an artificial beach in Japan capture what he calls “the yin and yang of tourism.”
Elsewhere in the selection, photographers investigate the truths and myths of the United States. “It’s a strange mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, of fact and of fiction,” Mark Power writes about the U.S. for his five-volume project, Good Morning America.
When he began photographing the country, he had in mind an imagined place, “one that had probably never existed at all.” His image of a sculpted Lincoln head speaks to the country’s breadth, enigmas, and contradictions.
After documenting the atrocities in apartheid South Africa, Ernest Cole sought refuge in New York City, turning his lens to Black life in the turbulent 1960s and 70s. In his image in Harlem, a car reads “I am the judge,” featured in his book The True America.
Jim Goldberg photographed a former fisherman who contemplated emigrating to Europe after his livelihood was ruined by European and Chinese overfishing, while decades earlier, Werner Bischof photographed fish and laundry drying side by side in Norway in 1948.
“Since Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photograph 200 years ago, the ways we use photography have morphed, evolved and shifted, and so too has the way we interpret photographs” says Michael Sargeant, Global Director, Digital Projects & eCommerce at Magnum.
“This sale’s theme, Fact/Fiction, explores the many ways photographers and artists use the medium today, whether documenting history in the making, or presenting life in heightened, cinematic ways. The images brought together in this sale touch on these approaches, and on the space that exists between them.”
These images, and many more, are all available to purchase as time-limited signed or estate-stamped 6×6″ or 9×9″ prints from Monday, October 26 to Sunday, November 1 at midnight EDT.
