Long Term Mentorship with Matt Black and Susan Meiselas

Develop your personal or editorial projects with Matt Black and Susan Meiselas, along with your peers, over the course of seven 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 Matt Black and Susan Meiselas, special guests from across the industry, along with your peers, over the course of seven months.

Take the next step in your career development by preparing for an industry review panel at the end of the mentorship in March, 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 7 months of the long-term 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.

Matt Black will be the lead instructor for the duration of the seven months, participating in all workshop and monthly reviews. Susan Meiselas will be a key instructor in all of the group classes, however not in the monthly individual review sessions.

Matt Black
Matt Black

Open day:

This was a free event designed for anyone considering starting one of our educational programmes. It was delivered as a Zoom webinar between 18:00 – 20:00 PM UK Time Thursday, August 12th 2021.

You will be able to ask questions of the team, Matt Black and Susan Meiselas, as well as have the chance to hear from the previous mentees from Long Term mentorship with Alessandra Sanguinetti and Gregory Halpern. Fourteen mentees will share their bodies of work which were produced over the last seven months.

Watch recording here.

Schedule:

The mentorship will take place for seven months between October 2021 to April 2022. The first workshop with Matt Black, Susan Meiselas and special guests will be held on these dates:  Oct 6, 13, 20, 27, Nov 1 from 11:30 EDT - 5:45 EDT on Zoom.

Dates for the two group critique classes midway in the mentorship and March/April dates for the second workshop will be announced shortly, all of which will be led by Matt Black and Susan Meiselas.

The one hour monthly review sessions in December, January, February and March will be led by Matt Black. Each month Matt will invite a special guest to join in your feedback sessions. These guests will be announced as they are confirmed. Susan Meiselas will not be participating in the monthly reviews.

Deadline:

Wednesday, September 1st

Apply here.

Scholarship:

One scholarship will be awarded, based on financial need and strength of the work submitted.  Deadline for application: Sunday, August 22nd 2021.

Apply here

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 $8,950 (taxes included).

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 Matt Black and Susan Meiselas, other Magnum photographers and industry experts.
  • Build a relationship over time with your teachers, for them to understand your challenges, ambitions and motivations and have time for them to guide your work and make suggestions for the presentation and output.
  • The creation of 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.
  • Plug into the wider Magnum Learn network, and stay in the loop on upcoming talks and free opportunities regular feedback or critique from two world-renowned photographers
  • Present your work to a group of industry experts and receive live feedback.
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.

Photography becomes meaningful when it is in dialogue with something larger than oneself. I’ll be happy to encourage and support you in walking this path.

Matt Black

What form do you imagine a project taking and who is it for? Context is crucial, and I’m curious how it informs and inspires your projects.

Susan Meiselas

Biographies:

Susan Meiselas received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She photographed the carnivals during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in the New York public schools. Carnival Strippers was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1976. A selection was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000. The original book was revised and reprinted by the Whitney Museum and Steidl Verlag in 2003. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has worked as a freelance photographer since then. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, which were published widely throughout the world. In 1981, Pantheon published her second monograph, Nicaragua: June 1978 – July 1979 which was reprinted by Aperture, fall 2008.
Meiselas served as an editor and contributor to the book El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers (Writers & Readers, 1983) and edited Chile from within (W.W. Norton, 1991) featuring work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime. She has co-directed two films: Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1997, she completed a six-year project curating a 100-year photographic history of Kurdistan, and integrating her own work into the book entitled Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (Random House, 1997; reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, 2008). Meiselas then created the website, www.akaKURDISTAN.com, an online archive of collective memory; as well as an exhibition that launched at the Menil Collection in Houston, and traveled for eight years to several venues in the United States and Europe Her 2001 monograph, Pandora’s Box (Magnum Editions/Trebruk) which explores a New York S & M club, has been exhibited both at home and abroad. In 2003, Encounters with the Dani was featured as an installation in the International Center of Photography’s Triennial Strangers and co-published by ICP/Steidl Verlag. The book explores a 60-year history of outsiders’ discovery and interactions with the Dani, an indigenous people of the highlands of Papua in Indonesia. Meiselas has had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Her work is included in American and international collections. Honorary awards of recognition include: the Robert Capa Gold Medal for “outstanding courage and reporting” by the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua (1979); the Leica Award for Excellence (1982); the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art (1985); the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America (1994); the Hasselblad Foundation Photography prize (1994) and most recently, the Cornell Capa Infinity Award (2005). In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
 
Matt Black is from California’s Central Valley, a rural, agricultural area in the heart of the state. He started photography working at his hometown newspaper.
He was nominated to Magnum Photos in 2015.  Since 2015, he has travelled over 100,000 miles across 46 states for his project American Geography.  Other works include The Dry Land, about the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities, and The Monster in the Mountains, about the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Both these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New Yorker.
His work has appeared regularly in TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, The California Sunday Magazine, and other publications.  He has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize, including their top honor for journalism. In 2015, he received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award for Humanistic Photography, and was named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective. He lives in Exeter, a small town in the Central Valley.

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