Magnum Editions Poster Collection
Magnum Editions
Magnum Editions posters features contemporary works from 33 Magnum Photographers, including all five of the collective’s 2020 nominees. The works demonstrate the diverse visual language of the photographers working both in traditional photojournalism and a more art-based practice.
Available in limited editions of 100 unsigned and 50 signed, the 18×24” posters are individually numbered with a unique Magnum Editions label that is supplied separately. Printed on a luxurious 150gsm premium paper using a digital print process, these new Magnum Editions posters are minimally designed, uncluttered by branding or additional design elements, these posters feature nothing that will detract from the image. These images will never be available in this size and price again.
Raymond Depardon
Having photographed the construction of the Berlin Wall at 19 years old, Raymond Depardon found himself back in the city – on assignment for the newspaper Libération – covering the Wall’s fall, in late 1989. Of this image’s subject, Depardon has said: “He was a punk from the West, and he suddenly screamed very loudly. That’s how he got my attention. He screamed and I grabbed my Leica and I shot. The power of the image is made by this rebel yell. It’s a cry of freedom, anger and pleasure. The scream symbolized the fall of the wall at the time. The picture appeared on the front page of the Financial Times and Le Monde, but it took a while before it became known as a good picture. I think it’s getting even more symbolic with time.”
Yael Martinez
After six years spent meeting and photographing the families of people lost to Mexico’s drug wars, Yael Martinez started work on a new project, Firefly. In 2019, the photographer was invited to take part in an exhibition about the concept of night in Latin America, and suggested an idea around humanity’s ability to “transform black energy into a positive energy”. To illustrate this concept, Martinez altered his photographs with pin pricks, allowing strands of light to bleed through the darkness.
Alec Soth
Using a large-format camera, Alec Soth captures offbeat, intimate images of American life. In his book “I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating”, Soth returns to a quieter, more intimate form of portraiture, shooting his subjects in their own spaces. People are key to Soth’s practice; indeed, he describes them as “the gasoline” for all his work. Even in images where no people are seen, their presence can be felt in the spaces and objects photographed. Pictured here, Los Angeles inhabitant Nick lounges on a bed.
David Hurn
David Hurn began his career as a self-taught freelance photographer and gained an early reputation with his reportage of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Hurn eventually turned away from coverage of current affairs, preferring to take a more personal approach to photography. Pictured here, Arizona residents take to Salt River for their favorite summer pastime: tubing. Enjoyed particularly by the local youth, the activity consists of gently drifting down the river for many miles and spending up to six hours in the sun.
Nanna Heitmann
A Russian nature reserve, Utrish is located on a half-island on the Black Sea. Since the 1960s, its lagoons have been a hotspot for nudists and hippies who come to stay over the summer. While the tourists leave as it becomes colder, a handful of people live in the forests and mountains throughout the year:
Mark Power
For centuries, Poland has been a bridge between the East and West. Set in the heart of Europe, Poland is a multifaceted country and is by far the largest of the new ten European countries.
Over the past decade, Poland has developed into a modern, vibrant and progressive state, yet at the same time the remnants of communist era are still very visible. Its economy has slowly divided the country between nouveaux riches and the poor as seen through Mark Power's series of portraits.
Newsha Tavakolian
Newsha Tavakolian has been photographing her home country of Iran for more than two decades, her nuanced work in the country culminating to provide a broad, authored perspective on everyday life. In a series of images featured by National Geographic, Tavakolian documents the vanishing waters of Lake Urmia, once the largest lake in the Middle East. Historically a haven for birds and bathers alike, the lake has lost 80% of its volume since the 1980s and is tinged a deep red by Dunaliella algae, one of the few species that can survive in such salty water. Pictured here, people enter the crimson waters to swim and ride pedal boats.
Jerome Sessini
For almost 50 years the Republic of Cuba was led by Fidel Castro, starting when he took position as the head of the revolutionary army on January 1, 1959.
Jerome Sessini's image of a car stationed on The Malecon in Havana, was taken in June 2008; four months after Raúl Castro took over from his brother Fidel. Upon taking office, Raúl said he would continue to consult his brother on pivotal state issues. During his first few months as the leader of Cuba, Raúl implemented various reforms, most notably the removal of wage restraints that had been in place in Cuba since the early 1960s. Other reforms included allowing Cubans to purchase cellular phones and personal computers, as well as to stay at hotels formerly reserved for foreigners.
Yael Martínez
Magnum photographer Yael Martínez has been documenting fractured communities in his native Mexico, focusing on the consequences of the many missing persons on their families. Across Mexico, more than 37,400 people have been categorized as ‘missing’ by official sources. The vast majority of those are believed to be dead—victims of ongoing violence that has claimed more than 250,000 lives since 2006. These disappearances are the source of lasting psychological trauma for families left behind.
Cristina de Middel
“This is what hatred did” is the final phrase found in Amos Tutuola’s novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. When published in 1954, the novel provoked such violent reactions that Tutuola had to flee Nigeria. Its concluding sentence here provides the starting point for Cristina de Middel‘s interpretation of the tenebrous story set in the streets of Makoko, a slum in the city of Lagos.
Bruce Gilden
The Black Country—an area in the West Midlands, England—gained its name in the mid nineteenth century due to the smoke and black soot from the steel, coal, brick and iron produced in its many factories, forges and foundries. The 30-foot-thick coal seam was also the reasoning behind the name.
In 2013, Bruce Gilden visited the region, where the once thriving heavy industry has now mostly disappeared, and created a series called Black Country Faces, in which he documented ‘the left behind’ and ‘invisible people’ of the area, focusing on close up street portraits of residents of West Bromwich, Dudley and Wolverhampton.
Peter van Agtmael
Peter van Agtmael is known for his deeply affecting, sometimes surreal images, which explore themes of conflict, history, memory, nationalism, militarism, race and class.
Thomas Dworzak
On March 24, 2005, after sporadic opposition protests and minor clashes with government supporters, demonstrators overrann riot police and stormed the Presidential Palace Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, ousting the Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev in what became known as the "Tulip Revolution". Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak covered the events. Though he photographed the dramatic scenes of revolution, the picture that holds most resonance for him was one taken the following day. The photograph shows the smashed window of a beauty parlor in Bishkek; the bullet holes are juxtaposed with a poster underneath that shows pouting red lips.
Colby Deal
"Beautiful, Still." is a series by Magnum photographer Colby Deal, that aims to provide a more practical representation of people of color in urban communities, and preserve cultural characteristics that are rapidly being erased.
Pictured here is a mother and daughter from Houston, Texas, photographed by Deal in 2017. Deal, also from Houston, says: "In the age of imagery and information leading the forefront of altering humanity, the psychological effect of perpetuating practical narratives of a culture fuels my curiosity to search for and present the most accurate one."
Carolyn Drake
For a 2018 edition of National Geographic Magazine, Carolyn Drake photographed Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which gives its name to the state’s capital and is the largest saline lake on earth – currently covering around 1,700 square miles. This is one of many lakes on earth facing recession and depletion, if not extinction, as a result of climate change and human interference. Drake’s images from the series show the lake as a place that is integral to local human activity, as people make use of the water to swim, watch for birds, collect salt and irrigate nearby land.
Sabiha Çimen
In Turkey, many teenage Muslims are sent by their families to religious schools where they are taught to memorize the Qur’an. In these single-sex, largely residential schools, young girls spend an intensive period of three or four years on their religious education. It was on her return to such a school, with her Hasselblad camera in hand, that Sabiha Çimen discovered her artistic voice.
Matt Black
For six years Matt Black has been photographing communities and lands in the U.S where at least 20% of the population live in poverty. Travelling 100,000 miles through the U.S, Black has set out to explore whether the American dream is still viable, debunking the myth of America as a land of opportunity.
Jonas Bendiksen
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway acts as an insurer to other seed collections. The arrangement with depositing organizations is akin to a safety deposit scheme. The free global service allows organizations to store their seeds once they are already placed in both their own collections and another seed bank, as a final back up.
In May 2016, Magnum’s Jonas Bendiksen witnessed the deposit of more than 8,000 varieties of crops – from sheep food to chilli peppers – from Germany, Thailand, New Zealand, and the World Vegetable Center into the Seed Vault, which only opens 2-3 times a year.
Zied Ben Romdhane
While Zied Ben Romdhane started his career as a commercial photographer, the changes he witnessed in his home country of Tunisia and in the media at large during the Arab Spring saw him increase his focus on making documentary work. His slow approach to documenting both communities and individuals, creates a visual unity across his diverse work, and redresses the imbalance of media coverage in his homeland.
Christopher Anderson
Christopher Anderson is known for his emotionally charged, artfully drawn images that explore themes of truth and subjectivity. He is one of today’s most influential photographers, whose origins began in war reporting and later transformed into something more intimate, blending the worlds of commercial, art and fashion work, but always with a foundation in documentary.
Here, the Eiffel Tower seen from the Pompidou Center, photographed in Anderson’s current home city of Paris. 2020.
Antoine d'Agata
From the first day of confinement following the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, Antoine d’Agata roamed the streets of Paris with a thermal camera recording the viral epidemic that turned the city into a strange theatre of wandering souls, bowed heads and fleeing bodies.
Trent Parke
An ongoing project made possible by Trent Parke’s new daily routine in the wake of lockdown, “The Crimson Line” is a meditation on the adverse effects of industry and climate change through an exploration of the colors found in the sky during the first and last minutes of sunlight each day.
Emin Özmen
Turkish Magnum photographer Emin Özmen travelled through South East Anatolia, glimpsing the remains of villages submerged by the region's monumental GAP dam programme, and visiting those next on the list for eviction for the last time.
Pictured here is the picturesque village of Halfeti (only accessible by boat), which attracts more than 200,000 visitors every year, who come to admire the minaret (mosque tower) that is visible above the water. The rest of the city disappeared after Birecik dam's construction.
Trent Parke
This 2019 photograph is from the project The Crimson Line, a meditation on the way industry is affecting the environment.
Like much of Parke’s earlier work, The Crimson Line uses light and framing to turn the everyday into the otherworldly. Photographing throughout the year - only in the first and last minutes of daylight - in his native Adelaide, the photographer plays with the reds and yellows that appear during these fleeting moments. Parke’s crimson-lit images of factories, steam clouds, and industrial machinery transform commonplace scenes into something alien and dystopian.
Alessandra Sanguinetti
“The Adventures of Guille and Belinda” is the story or, more accurately, part of the story, of two young cousins named Guille and Belinda. In 1999, when they were 10 and 9 years old respectively and living in a rural province of Buenos Aires, their paths crossed with photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. Drawn to the girls, whose evident affection for each other is somehow magnified by their differing physiques, Sanguinetti took pictures to “crystallize their rich yet fragile and unattended world”.
Christopher Anderson
This photograph is from Anderson’s series Approximate Joy, a study of modern China as it continues to rapidly develop and evolve. Traveling through the country, Anderson was “struck by the way that so many places in China’s cities are lit” at night – an observation seen in this portrait of a street in Shenzhen, a former fishing village and now China’s fifth-largest city.
Khalik Allah
The corner of 125th and Lexington, Harlem, is a spot Khalik Allah has returned to throughout his career. This photograph from 2020 was also taken there, and is reminiscent of his work in Souls Against Concrete, a collection of intimate portraits taken after sunset, using only available light. “I am shooting at nighttime in a black neighbourhood,” Allah has said. “Those are two things people are afraid of. I’m trying to turn that on its head and show that there is nothing to fear.”
Antoine d'Agata
Antoine d’Agata’s work is often viscerally corporeal, centering the nude human body and all of its imperfections. However, in some of his photographs he manages to make his subjects look almost ghostly, and at times utterly extraterrestrial. This photograph, taken in Vilnius, Lithuania, is an example of the latter, a skeletal human body distorted to the point that it becomes something else entirely.
Gregory Halpern
This photograph is taken from the 2016 book ZZYZX, a blend of landscape photography and street portraits taken in and around Los Angeles, which won PhotoBook of the Year at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Initially drawn to the city by “the light, the colours [and] the extremes”, Halpern wanted to focus on a location for his next body of material and chose LA, he has said, because “it felt like it defied description.”
Carolyn Drake
This 2009 photograph, from Drake’s book Two Rivers , is of Turkmenistan’s Darvaza gas crater. Nicknamed "The Door To Hell”, it has been burning since 1971, when Soviet geologists set it alight while trying to burn off gas in an underground cavern to prevent workers from being poisoned.
Cristina de Middel
This 2011 photograph is from The Afronauts, a surreal staging of one of the training missions at Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Astronomical Research.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as the US and the former Soviet Union worked to achieve various firsts in space-flight capability a Zambian science teacher named Edward Makuka decided he too would join the international “space race” in 1964. De Middel’s project re-visualises this little-known interplanetary mission, using costume and staging in order to explore and question representations of Africa while challenging ideas around diaspora, race, and societal power structures.
Jim Goldberg
Chorus is a collage created by Jim Goldberg in 2018. The photographs were originally taken in 2017 while Goldberg was on commission in Beijing. The work consists of portraits made of the people he met randomly in the city as well as snapshots found at local flea markets, and markings made with a variety of mediums. Goldberg’s multifaceted process of working with images and his hands on approach pastes together individual lives to create a raw portrait of everyday life on the streets of the country’s capital city.
Sohrab Hura
Sohrab Hura’s vivid, sometimes surreal photography explores the position in the world that he finds himself in. Though Hura initially worked through the prism of social documentary, he soon turned his strong vision inward, creating visual journals of his life and personal relationships as a means to “find [his] own logic”.
Mark Power
In 2012, Power commenced his most ambitious project yet, a ten-year study of the United States. Having devoured American media – particularly television – as a child, he had always wanted to explore the country from behind his camera, and in Good Morning, America has finally realised that dream.
This photograph, taken in 2019, is of a snow-strewn gas station in Touchet, a tiny settlement in the south of Washington state--a quintessentially American scene, with vivid splashes of colour offset by a distinct lack of colour in the rest of the frame.
Matt Black
This 2014 photograph is from Black’s series American Geography. For the ongoing project, Black has travelled to poor areas in 44 US states, documenting communities whose poverty rates are above 20 percent to highlight the increasing levels of inequality in one of the richest countries on Earth. This image was taken in Tulare County, California, the wealthiest state in America. However, in Tulare itself, 27 percent of people live below the poverty line, a markedly higher number than the national average of 13 percent.
Bieke Depoorter
Together with Agata, Bieke Depoorter explores the complexities of the photographic enterprise, grappling with the relationship between photographer and subject. By diving deep into a collaborative working dynamic with a Polish woman she met in a strip club in Paris, she creates a small alternate universe that raises more questions than it offers answers: Who made these images? Who is the subject? Who is Agata? This project is both the story of a young woman searching for identity by playing with it as if it were a toy and the story of Depoorter experimenting with the fragility of photographic authorship. Most of all, it’s the product of a photographer and a subject consciously agreeing to, as both Agata and Depoorter have put it, “use each other.” This photograph is taken from a trip they made to Beirut in August, 2018.
Olivia Arthur
Olivia Arthur is known for her in-depth photography examining people and their personal and cultural identities. Much of her work has illuminated the daily lives of women living in places as varied as Saudi Arabia, India and much of Europe. “For me, part of the power of still photography is the ambiguousness of pictures, the ability to give a hint about a scene or event without being too absolute,” says the photographer of her work.
Hannah Price
This 2013 photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge is from Price’s series Cursed By Night, a project exploring “a world of darkness to which black males are unfortunately tied”. An exploration of race and the way black men are often unfairly perceived, Price began the series after starting her MFA programme at Yale in 2012. The idea came to her after witnessing friends cross the road to avoid passing groups of black men, or refusing to travel to certain areas after dark. The photographs in Cursed By Night were taken over the course of a year, along America’s east coast, in Harlem, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Hartford, Connecticut.
Moises Saman
Moises Saman blends traditional conflict photography with a deeply personal point of view. For more than ten years, he has been concerned with the humanitarian impact of war in the Middle East, documenting both the front line of daily suffering and the ‘fleeting moments on the periphery of the more dramatic events’. Pictured here, residents and armed rebels search for survivors among the rubble of a residential building targeted by a Syrian airstrike in Aleppo, Syria.
Nanna Heitmann
This 2018 image depicts an annual horse race that takes place during Naadym, the national festival of the Siberian region, Tuva. Every year, young men in the area race each other across a distance of 30km, on horses without saddles. The race usually takes place in August, when the high temperatures of summer have dropped, but in 2018 it was held in July. At 10AM, when Heitmann took this photograph, the mercury registered at 45 degrees.
Peter van Agtmael
This picture was taken on van Agtmael’s first trip back to Chile after he’d lived there for six months in 2002. “Those months were deeply formative for me,” he has written of the experience. “I was obsessed with photography but had no real outlet in college. I took the semester off from school and got an internship at a tabloid in Valparaiso. They gave me a loose leash to explore the city and make little features. I started to learn the freedom to be myself. I had my first experience with conflict during a massive rally that turned suddenly violent. I was scared and strangely liberated. And I fell in love. Although this picture is a departure from most of my work, it was in that place I discovered who I was supposed to be.”
Lorenzo Meloni
This photograph was taken in Libya’s Murzuq desert in December of 2015, near El Sharana, the country’s largest oil field. Pictured is a member of the Third Force, a militia that established significant control in southwestern Libya during the country’s civil war. Operating under the Tripoli government of the time, the Third Force secured oil fields, acted to enforce law and order, and maintained a level of peace in the region.
Newsha Tavakolian
This photograph is taken from Tavakolian’s 2011 project Listen, which highlights the fact that women singers have not been allowed to produce their own CDs or perform as solo acts in Iran since the 1979 revolution. Tavakolian asked a number of women singers to close their eyes and imagine they were performing in front of a large audience, then took their portraits. She also created an imaginary CD cover for each artist, all of which “will for now remain empty”. This image – a dream CD cover for its subject, Sahar – was taken in the Caspian Sea, off the coast of Mahmudabad, a city in the north of Iran.
Rafal Milach
In The First March of Gentlemen, the 2017 book from which this image is taken, Rafal Milach creates a fictitious narrative composed of authentic stories. He retells the historical childrens’ strike in Września in Poland from the early 20th Century, through collaged archive photographs from the 1950s and 1960. By blending these elements, he has created a new narrative, to be read as a playful metaphor for the political situation of the present.
Alec Soth
This photograph, “Cry Baby”, was taken in 2005, as part of the book project Niagara which saw Soth making images either side of the famed falls, in Canada and the USA. A long established popular location for honeymoons and romantic getaways, Niagara explored the somewhat less cheery reality of the region. “Niagara is part of American mythology. It’s a place of romance, where people go to get married,” explains Soth. “But when I got there my view of the place totally changed. The American side is economically devastated. It’s bleak.”
Sim Chi Yin
Sim Chi Yin’s work combines deep research with intimate storytelling. She explores history, memory, conflict and migration using photography, film, sound, text and archival material, in a multidisciplinary practice. Speaking of this practice, Yin says “The magic in the intersection of time, light, life — and fate — still fascinates me, but I’m asking myself: whose truth is it, whose reality, whose fragile memories?”
Jacob Aue Sobol
In the spring of 2008, Jacob Aue Sobol travelled to Thailand's capital city to document the increasing gap between the rich and poor. In his own words: “I found my interest in the sois, the narrow streets, which surround the muddy river of Chao Phraya, the street kids in Sukhumvit and the families who live by the old train track that runs through the slum of Klong Toey. [...] However, I could also often feel the distance between us, and so I often found myself in the role of the spectator, photographing the constantly changing scenarios in the city. Underlined by the difference in language, race, and social status, it was a continuous struggle to create an equal meeting, but when this succeeded... it was often on a one-to-one basis that I got the feeling of the closeness and intimacy I was searching for.”
Raghu Rai
Henri Cartier-Bresson nominated Raghu Rai to join Magnum Photos in 1977. For the last couple of decades, Rai has focused almost exclusively on his homecountry of India, producing distinctive and richly-composed images on subjects as varied as the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, the Dalai Lama and the turmoil surrounding the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. Pictured here, local commuters crowd a platform at the Church Gate railway station in Mumbai.
