© © Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos

Long Term Mentorship with Gilles Peress and Alex Majoli

Develop your personal or editorial projects with Gilles Peress and Alex Majoli, along with your peers, over the course of nine months.

Are you looking for mentorship on a long-term personal project? Would you benefit from regular feedback or critique from two world-renowned photographers? Do you want to understand more about book publishing or publishing your work journalistically? And are you missing support from a creative community?

Find all of this and more via Magnum’s Long Term Mentorship program. Develop your personal or editorial projects with Gilles Peress and Alex Majoli, special guests from across the industry, along with your peers, over the course of nine months.

Take the next step in your career development by preparing for an industry review panel at the end of the mentorship, where you will have an opportunity to present your work to a group of industry experts and receive live feedback. This is a mentorship geared toward emerging and professional photographers looking to complete a body of work and prepare it for a variety of distribution outlets. Over the nine months of mentorship, you will have a chance to receive feedback from Magnum photographers and guest experts, receive guidance on your theoretical and aesthetic interests, hear advice on editing and sequencing and participate in networking and marketing opportunities.

This workshop offers:

  • The opportunity to complete a body of work and prepare it for a variety of distribution outlets.
  • Receive guidance on your theoretical and aesthetic interests by Magnum photographers Gilles Peress and Alex Majoli, other Magnum photographers and industry experts.
  • Regular feedback and critique from two world-renowned photographers
  • Present your work to a group of industry experts and receive live feedback.
  • Build a relationship over time with your teachers. Alex and Gilles will come to understand your challenges, ambitions and motivations, as they will have the time to guide your work, as well as make suggestions for the presentation and output.
  • Participate in a Zine making workshop.
  • Receive free membership to Center.
  • Gain an all access pass to the Magnum Video On-Demand courses.
  • Receive free access to Magnum Learn seminars.
  • Create a supportive peer network that is often lacking when working solo as a photographer. On previous Magnum Learn events we have been thrilled to see that these peer networks continue to support each other long after the event has finished.
  • Become a part of the wider Magnum Learn network, and stay in the loop on upcoming talks and free opportunities.
  • Have your finished project posted on the Magnum Learn Instagram account and showcased on Magnum’s website.

Schedule a Call 

If you have any questions or queries or would just like to discuss the programme in greater detail, please schedule a call with Magnum's Education Director, Amber Terranova, here.

 

What can I do to help you? This is what I will ask repeatedly until no questions are left unanswered. Then the participants will be ready to embark on their personal photographic journeys.

Alex Majoli

One has to work from the inside out, and not from the outside in.

Gilles Peress
Alex Majoli

Schedule:

Gilles and Alex are committed to delivering exceptional learning experiences and building relationships with students. As a result, we are now looking into holding the first workshop in person, in Europe, starting early May 2022. We will update all current applicants with more details towards the end of February 2022, and hope that you will still consider joining us for this incredible nine month program.

The updated timeline with new offerings:
March 13, 2022 - Application Deadline
May 24 - May 28: Workshop #1 with Gilles and Alex will take place in person in Modica, Sicily (Location to be announced by the Open Day Feb 25)
May 2022 & June 2022 - Each mentee meets with Gilles & Alex for one hour
July 2022 & August 2022 - Each mentee meets with Amber for one hour
One group critique class, led by Amber with a special guest lecture
September 2022 Each mentee meets with Gilles & Alex for one hour
October 2022 Each mentee meets with Gilles & Alex for one hour
November 2022 Each mentee meets with Gilles & Alex for one hour
December 2022 OR January/February 2023 In-person final workshop and pitching panel

In the meantime, the Magnum Education team is available to set up time to discuss the program, answer any questions and learn more about your practice. Please email education@magnumphotos.com


Deadline to apply:

23.59 PM Eastern Time, March 13, 2022

Gilles and Alex will review applications on a rolling basis.

Apply here.

Open day:

This was a free event designed for anyone considering starting one of our educational programmes. There was the opportunity to ask questions of the team, Gilles Peress and Alex Majoli.

Scholarship:

One scholarship will be awarded, based on financial need and strength of the work submitted.

Scholarship deadline 

23.59 PM Eastern Time, March 13, 2022

Apply here

 

Alex Majoli

If your application is accepted, you will participate in a brief interview to determine eligibility and will be notified shortly thereafter. The price of this mentorship is $9,500 (taxes included).

Full fees must be paid on application. Magnum Photos reserves the right to cancel groups with less than 9 participants. Students will be given a full refund. In the event of cancellation, students will be given at least 3 weeks advance notice. Magnum Photos reserves the right to change or alter the program advertised. Cancellations: Magnum will reimburse the totality of the ticket price if cancellation is made at least 15 days before the start of the workshop, minus a $60 administrative fee. We will charge 50% of the ticket price if cancellation is made between 15 and 10 days before the workshop and 100% of the ticket price if cancellation is made less than 10 days before the start of the workshop. Schedule for workshop days and monthly review sessions is subject to change at anytime. Magnum Photos reserves the right to change the line-up
Magnum is committed to fostering a respectful and dignified environment that adheres to the highest level of professional standards. We strive to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone who works with or for Magnum and Magnum photographers, creating an environment in which each person’s rights, dignity and individual worth are respected. You can read Magnum Photos Code of Conduct here: https://www.magnumphotos.com/magnum-code-of-conduct/
If your application is accepted, you will participate in a brief interview to determine eligibility and will be notified shortly thereafter.

Biographies:

Alex Majoli (Ravenna, Italy, 1971) is an Italian photographer. He attended the Art Institute in Ravenna. Alex majoli’s main work focuses on the human condition and the theater within our daily lives.

Majoli’s career started to develop after he photographed the closing of the notorious insane asylum on the island of Leros in Greece, which resulted in his first monograph titled “Leros”. This was mainly because of his interest in the theories of Franco Basaglia, a pioneer of the modern concept of mental health, famous for having abolished the psychiatric hospitals in Italy.

Majoli’s early interest in psychiatric care led him to go to Brazil which marked the beginning of his 20 year long, ongoing project called “Tudo Bom”, a compelling body of work about the multi layered, complex country and specifically the extremes found in the darker side of its society.

Throughout the years Majoli has worked as a photojournalist. His many years of experience photographing people in all kinds of circumstances have made Majoli explore the idea of being actors in our own lives. Through the development of this idea he started the ongoing project ‘Scene’.  He understands that his role as a photographer can make people perform in their own natural setting and therefore he tries to exaggerate this by using artificial light to dramatize an otherwise daily routine. His pictures become scenes from films where people, through their performance, express their own selves in what then becomes a film set or a theater stage. When one looks at these photographs can only wonder if this is fact or fiction. The thin line between reality and theater, documentary and art, human behavior and acting is the kind of friction that keeps fascinating him and keeps making him return to the streets and places where the human condition is called into question. Even in the most tragic of miseries he finds the theater, the pride, and above all the magnificence of the human spirit.

His work is in various selected public collections: The Museum of fine Art of Huston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ICP, Marguilles Wareehouse, Snite Museum of Art, MUFOCO, Mucem.

Among many others honors and grants Majoli has received: Eugene Smith grant, Guggenheim fellowship, Infinity Award, Getty, Photographer of the year NPPA, Feature Photography Award OPC.

Books published:  Leros, West zone (1999), Trolley books (2002), One vote, Filigrane Edition (2004), Libera me, Trolley Books (2010) , Congo, Aperture (2015), Andante, Cesura Publish (2018) and Scene, Mack books (2019).

Majoli lives in New York and Sicily. He is a Magnum photo’s photographer since 1996 and he is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery NY.

Gilles Peress started using photography to create museum installations and books in 1971, having previously studied political science and philosophy in Paris. Peress’s experiences during the Iranian Revolution produced the seminal photobook Telex Iran.  In the 1990s, extended explorations of the conflicts and genocides in Rwanda (The Silence) and the Balkans (Farewell to Bosnia; The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar) evolved into Hate Thy Brother, a cycle of interlocking narratives in books and on walls.  In recent years, Peress has continued Hate Thy Brother by revisiting both archival work and the sites where it was made. He is currently at work on De Bello Balcanico, a multivolume rethinking of his earlier books on the Balkans.

In 2021 Peress published Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, his two volume, 1000 page book on the Troubles in the North of Ireland, which Peter Galassi of the Museum of Modern Art described as having “the gripping immediacy and epic sweep of a novel by Tolstoy." A work of “documentary fiction” that organizes a decade of photographs from the 1980s into 22 semi-fictional days, the book articulates the helicoidal structure time assumed during the conflict, where today is not only today but all the days like today; days of violence, days of marching, of riots, of unemployment, of prison, of mourning, and also days of “craic” where you try to forget your condition.

Each of Peress’s projects has been widely exhibited.  Peress is included in major public and private collections throughout the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C; the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Fotomuseum Winterthur and Musée de l'Élysée, Switzerland, amongst others.

Peress has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Erich Solomon Prize, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and multiple National Endowment for the Arts grants, the New York State Council of the Arts Fellowship and multiple International Center for Photography Infinity Awards.

Peress is Professor of Human Rights and Photography at Bard College, NY and Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley. Peress joined Magnum Photos in 1971 and served three times as vice-president and twice as president of the co-operative.

Noelle Flores Théard has been the senior digital photo editor at The New Yorker since 2021. She was the program officer at Magnum Foundation from 2016 to 2021, and is a co-founder of FotoKonbit, a nonprofit organization created in 2010 to engage and support Haitians telling their own stories through photography.

    Paul Moakley is an award-winning visuals producer, director and journalist with almost 20 years of experience in news and documentary storytelling. Currently Paul is an Editor at Large for Special Projects at TIME. Previously he served as the Deputy director of Photography and Visual Enterprise from 2010-2018. Over the years his role at TIME has evolved from photo production to co-creating some of the magazine’s most ambitious impact projects including the Emmy award-winning Beyond 9/11 multimedia project with HBO, TIME's 100 Most Influential Photos and The Opioid Diaries. For almost a decade Paul has managed TIME’s visual coverage of breaking news, presidential elections and key franchises such as TIME’s Person of the Year, TIME 100 and the award-winning visual storytelling platform LightBox. Previously he was senior photo editor at Newsweek and photo editor of PDN (Photo District News). Moakley has also held roles as an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a mentor to students and US Veterans and remains an sintegral member of the visual arts community through production of independent projects as a photographer and filmmaker. He lives at the Alice Austen House Museum, home of one of America’s earliest photographers, as caretaker and curator of the museum.      
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