One-to-one Sessions

Spend one-to-one personal photographic coaching sessions with your selected Magnum Photographer over 4 months.

Group Workshop

Participate in an introduction workshop between December and January and a final group workshop and pitching panel in June.

Platform for your work

Your work will be showcased on the Magnum Learn channels upon completion of the mentorship.

How does it work?

Take the next step in your career development by preparing for a pitching panel at the end of the mentorship in June, 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. Join our first-ever Magnum Learn Open Day to hear whether this programme is right for you.

Booking your mentorship

To book, please fill in the application form by clicking the button below. If your application is accepted, you will participate in a brief interview to determine eligibility and will be notified shortly thereafter. The price of the mentorship is $8500 (incl. tax) to be paid on acceptance of the application. We are happy to take payment in two installments if required, one on acceptance of your application and the other in April 2021.

This mentorship offers:

  • 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.
  • 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 Alessandra Sanguinetti and Gregory Halpern and six 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.
  • 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.

Biographies

Alessandra Sanguinetti is known for her lyrical, softly-drawn photography that explores themes of memory, place, and the psychological transitions of youth.
Sanguinetti was born in New York in 1968, and brought up in Argentina where she lived from 1970 until 2003. Her interest in photography began aged 9 when she poured over her mother’s collection of books by Michael Lesy, Dorothea Lange and others. She studied Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires and General Studies at the International Center of Photography.

In 1996 she began working on a series eventually titled, On the Sixth Day, which explored the complex relationship between man and domesticated animals in the countryside in Argentina. Three years into this project, she turned her attention to two nine-year-old cousins, Belinda and Guille, whose grandmother’s farm had been the subject of Sixth Day. Sanguinetti followed the two girls’ for five years, taking pictures embarked on a life long project, collaboratively photographing the two girls as they grew up and presently as adult women. The first five years culminated in a much-acclaimed monograph, The Adventures of Belinda and Guille and the Meaning of their Enigmatic Dreams (2010).

Gregory Halpern is known for his intuitively rich colour photography that draws attention to harsh social realities as well as the unerring strangeness of everyday life. His work is rooted in both the real and the sublime and this approach has lead him to photograph life in post-industrial towns of the American Rust Belt, the people and places of Los Angeles and the uniquely unifying experience of a total solar eclipse. “What’s interesting to me about the world is its chaos and contradictions, the way opposites can be so beautiful in relation to each other,” says Halpern of his practice.

Though Halpern says he is primarily motivated by the desire to “create” rather than “document”, his work is powerfully affecting. A study of working conditions for janitorial staff at Harvard, created while he was a student there, resulted in a successful bid for the minimum wage and was published as a book, Harvard Works Because We Do (2003). While his images of life in post-industrial towns of the American Rust Belt were published to critical acclaim in A (2011), and show resilience in the face of harsh social and economic realities. Selected clients include The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, M Le Monde, Bloomberg Businessweek, Sports Illustrated and VICE.

Biographies:

Cristina de Middel investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to build a more layered understanding of the subjects she approaches. Working from the premise that mass media is reducing our real understanding of the world we live in, De Middel responds to an urgency to re-imagine tired aesthetic tropes and insert opinion in place of facts.

Her impulse for an unconventional angle developed after a 10-year career as a photojournalist when De Middel stepped outside of straight documentary and produced the acclaimed series The Afronauts (2012). It explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s through staged reenactments of obscure narratives, challenging the traditional depiction of the African continent.

Michael Mack is the founder of MACK, a leading publishing house that specializes in the visual arts, including fine art, photography, literature and critical studies. In addition to working with internationally renowned artists, Michael established, in 2012, the First Book Award, which supports emerging photographers in publishing their first photobooks.

Alec Soth’s work is rooted in the American photographic tradition that Walker Evans famously termed “documentary Style.” Concerned with the mythologies and oddities that proliferate America’s disconnected communities, Soth has an instinct for the relationship between narrative and metaphor. His clarity of voice has drawn many comparisons to literature, but he believes photography to be more fragmented; “It’s more like poetry than writing a novel.”

Aside from his many critically acclaimed personal projects, selected clients include The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W Magazine, Vogue, GQ, Wall Street Journal Magazine.

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