Magnum Photos's Notes
The Events pages will highlight many types of events. Whether you're looking for an exhibition or a workshop or a book signing, now all the information is one place. You will be able to find any event in the world by a Magnum photographer using the dynamic search function. The site is very user-friendly and features greater functionality, for example you can download a PDF of an event or email an event to a friend or subscribe via RSS, you can even add it directly to social networking sites such as Facebook or Digg. Take a moment to check out some events near you and become a part of the Magnum community.
Visit the Events pages: http://events.magnumphotos
AUSTRALIA. South Australia. Adelaide. 2008. © Trent Parke/Magnum Photos
On the 28th of November 2004, our first son Jem was born.
At the time my partner Narelle and I lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Sydney.
Apart from two years living in a tent, I had spent the last 15 years of my life living in apartment blocks.
On the 16th of October 2006 our second son Dash was born.
Our small two-bedroom apartment became even smaller.
Things had to change. Wanting more space, family support and a change of scenery we moved to the city of Adelaide, Narelle's place of birth.
On arriving in Adelaide, with our life in storage, we bunkered down with Narelle's folks while we tried to find a place to live.
Like my parents in Newcastle, they live in the suburbs.
One afternoon I decided to venture to the local mega mall, specifically to the hairdresser. After removing all of my very long hair the very young hairdresser said 'There you go, a new hair cut for a new start'.
I thought, that's nice and what a great thing it was to be able to see again.
On returning to the in-laws that evening I started to feel very odd and a little queasy.
As day turned to night I lay down on the freshly mown back lawn and watched
clouds drift past a nearly full moon. I expected to hear a dog howl or a cat wail.
I started vomiting, violently, and uncontrollably.
I grabbed the nearest thing I could throw up into.
Narelle and her parents, Laurie and Ann were sitting in the back room watching the TV.
'Narelle' I yelled out, again throwing up.
'What' she said, 'You want me to come out and photograph you?'.
'Yeah' I yelled back.
'Ohh you've got to be joking' Laurie gasped, as he rose from his chair.
Narelle came out and climbed on to a table. The sudden blast of the flash lit up what I could smell, but couldn't see.
Bright, brilliant, red.
Ann joined the crowd gathering to see the show.
Another flash. Bright, brilliant, red.
Ann yells, 'Ohhh Laurie he's vomiting into the Christmas tree bucket!'
Another flash.
And it was there, while staring into that bright red bucket, vomiting every hour on the hour, for fifteen hours straight, that I started to think how strange, families, suburbia, life, vomit and in particular, Christmas…. really was.
Trent Parkes new exhibition "The Christmas Tree Bucket - Trent Parkes family album" will be shown at the Australian Centre for Photography from 21st November 2008 to 21 January 2009.
Links
» Trent Parkes Magnum Portfolio
» View Trent Parkes Magnum In Motion essay "Minutes to Midnight"
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Please click here to install Flash.© Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos
"Nature", wrote Raymond Williams, "is perhaps the most complicated word in the English language". Nature photography, however, is simple - or at least unchallenging. The wonder of the natural world is the usual refrain, gasped between shots of galloping zebras, prowling snow leopards or displays of exotic snakes, birds, insects and so forth.
Photography inherited many of its genres from painting - portraiture, nudes, still life, and a particular kind of un-peopled landscape which has become attached to "nature". By abstraction, nature photography obscures our view of what's really going on in tropical forests or the African savannah. Nature photography commodifies the environment for its own ends.
Tourism promoters use nature photography to mask the fact that other people also live in the destinations they wish to market. Look at any holiday brochure advertising the Galapagos Islands. You won't spot any of the twenty thousand inhabitants, or their homes, or their economic activity. In safari brochures it's more or less the same, although some exotic tribespeople are included, almost as another natural feature.
Although the boundaries are not always obvious, environmental photography differs from nature photography in its approach. By attending to the human presence as a part of, and impacting upon, the natural world it sets out to present a more realistic view of Planet Earth dominated, as it is, by us.
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Please click here to install Flash.Photographs from the book "Beaufort West ". © Mikhael Subotzky/Magnum Photos
At the halfway point along South Africa's great highway-the N1, running from Cape Town to Johannesburg-lies the small town of Beaufort West. With a prison in the middle of town on an island in the highway, it's a surreal road stop that offers everything a traveler might want: food, gas, a place to stay, an hour of sex. Its vivid characters and poignant social landscapes are the subject of Mikhael Subotzky's first photobook. Exquisitely designed and produced on a large portfolio scale, Beaufort West features thirty-six plates and an introduction by leading South African writer Jonny Steinberg. The book is both an important social document and the visual manifesto of the best of the new wave of South African art photographers.
In describing his Beaufort West series, Subotzky says: "Despite being originally established to bring law and order to the central Karoo, Beaufort West is now a transit town. Situated at the intersection of two of the busiest national roadways, it serves as a food and overnight stop for travelers of all kinds. Every day, the town's population doubles with those who pass through it. Beaufort West has recently been described by the South African Human Rights Commission as 'an isolated town that has not broken away from the shackles of South Africa's apartheid past, [where] economic and social integration is severely limited.' "
Subotzky continues: "I was drawn to Beaufort West when I came across its prison. It is bizarrely situated in a traffic circle in the centre of the town in the middle of the N1 highway. Most South African prisons are hidden from view on the outskirts of our towns and cities. I was interested in this image of the prison at the centre of the town and the irony that it is still hidden as most of those who drive around the traffic circle don't realize that they are passing the prison. This image thus became a locus by which to explore the town and its margins."
Beaufort West is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until January 5, 2009. For more information visit the MOMA website.
Links
» Mikhael Subotzky's Magnum Portfolio
» More photographs from "Beaufort West"
» Buy a signed copy of "Beaufort West" (From the Magnum Store)
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Please click here to install Flash.© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos
In 1968 Josef Koudelka was thirty years old. He had committed himself to photography as a full-time career only recently, and had been chronicling the theater, and the lives of gypsies, but he had never photographed a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21 when the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia along with troops from four other Warsaw Pact countries in the morning hours. The occupation was the beginning of the end for the Czechoslovak reform movement known as the Prague Spring. That day, Koudelka was at the hub of the action, risking his life to capture the photographs now presented in a new book by Aperture. They have been rated among the most important in 21st-century photojournalism. A year after the invasion, Josef Koudelka’s negatives were smuggled out of Prague into the hands of Magnum, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P P – Prague Photographer.
Koudelka crouched on the roof of a building in Wenceslas Square, Prague, his camera lens trained on the street below. Thousands of Soviet troops rumbled past in tanks – the city was being invaded. Below him, houses and buses were ablaze, bullets were flying and the wounded cried out. Protesters chanted the name of their hero, the Czech president Alexander Dubcek. Some threw stones at the troops. Others pleaded with the soldiers, begging them to go home. One man simply stood before a tank, silently opened his jacket and defied the soldiers to shoot him in the chest.
Snapping away, Koudelka almost didn’t notice the people waving and pointing at him, or the Russian soldiers shouting, assuming he was a sniper. Suddenly a group of Soviet soldiers charged into the building he was perching on and gave chase. He fled, his Leica swinging round his neck, scrambling and ducking over rooftops, through a window and down into the throng on the street.
In 1969 the "anonymous Czech photographer" was presented with the Robert Capa gold medal for photographs requiring exceptional courage. It was feared that publishing Koudelka’s name could endanger his life. With Magnum to recommend him to the British authorities, he applied for a three-month working visa and fled to England in 1970, where he stayed for more than a decade. Since then he has traveled the world with his camera and little else.
Book Discount
There is a beautiful new book with this body of work out now. We are offering a 10% discount on the book's price from the Magnum Store for each and every reader of the blog who orders the book. With this discount you only pay $ 54 instead of $ 60 plus shipping. If you are in New York you could even pick up your copy of the book after ordering at the Magnum office and you'd save the shipping cost.
If you want to order and would like to take advantage of the discount please use KOUDELKA as the Redemption Code during the checkout process. If you do not use this code we can not give a discount anymore once the ordering process is completed!
Links
» Josef Koudelka's Magnum Portfolio
» Josef Koudelka's Magnum In Motion Essay "Invasion - Prague 1968"
» More photographs from "Invasion 68: Prague"
» Signed and unsigned books by Josef Koudelka (From the Magnum Store)
Nothing much happening in the Middle East? No major earthquake around? Paris Hilton is flying below the radar? The Olympics have not started yet? THIS is the right time then!!! On July 15th, two weeks before parliamentary elections in Cambodia, Thai soldiers show up at Preah Vihear, an 11th century temple, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site a few days before, and located smack on a disputed border. Friction, soldiers, guns, an incredibly spectacular setting, historic tensions flaring up to extremes and possibly degenerating into a full-scale war. A conjunction of history, nationalism and interior politics looking for the outside enemy: the perfect scenario to wake up dozing news freaks and give them something to stay alert during their holidays. The eyes of the world will focus on Cambodia, on my backyard. An opportunity not to be missed...
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Please click here to install Flash.© John Vink/Magnum Photos
Right... It takes between ten and 12 hours by various taxis and motorbikes to cover the 250 km or so from Phnom Penh, which says a lot about how to get fresh troops up there (there is a neatly drawn tarmac road on the thai side of the border)... Once at the temple the situation looks like anything but a potential battlefield: for sure there are lots of guns and close to 2000 military around, but Thai and Khmer soldiers are just meters apart, talking or just staring at each other. Because they know each other since a long time. 70% of the cambodian soldiers there are former Khmer Rouge who protected Ta Mok in this same area until ten years ago, before being integrated in the RCAF (Royal Cambodian Armed Forces), and they had many contacts with the thai border units which today have set up camp in the bushes around the temple. Many of the thai soldiers are Khmer Surin and speak cambodian.
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Please click here to install Flash.Fashion Magazine: Paris Minnesota. © Alec Soth/Magnum Photos
"While Fashion Magazine has a single photographer-author, it's still a magazine, not a book. So it doesn't follow my usual mode of slow, solitary production. It's collaboration. The ideas for the collaboration were formulated very quickly. I was approached by the folks at the Paris office of Magnum to work on this issue late last year. I immediately said yes. I was a huge fan of the previous two editions (by Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) and was looking for an excuse to play with fashion . I often say that when I am making a portrait, I'm not "capturing" the other person. If the photograph documents anything, it is the space between the subject and myself. Something similar is at work with Fashion Magazine. I'm not really comfortable saying I know anything about Paris or its fashion world. And I suspect that most fashionable Parisians know just as little about Minnesota. What is interesting is the space between us. My favorite example of this involves Chanel. In Paris, I photographed Karl Lagerfeld at the Grand Palais. In Minnesota, I photographed a girl with a Chanel shopping bag in front of Sally's Beauty Shop. With this magazine, I'm trying to explore the distance between those two places." Alec Soth
Links:
» View more photographs from Fashion Magazine: Paris Minnesota
» Buy Fashion Magazine: Paris Minnesota in the Magnum Store (Signed Copy)
Access To Life/Swaziland © Larry Towell/Magnum Photos
Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world, with more than one quarter of its population infected. Some 130,000 children have been orphaned or made vulnerable by the death of one or both of their parents. With so many infected, AIDS is impacting every aspect of life in Swaziland.
Links
» Access To Life / Swaziland
» Access To Life Website
» The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
I'm sorry if I missed out on last month's rendez-vous but first of all I was not in Cambodia and second, one of the paradoxes of Digital Divide made access to the Internet more difficult in Belgium than in Cambodia... In Cambodia connections are (very) expensive and slow but there are Internet cafés on many streetcorners. In Belgium connections are fast (and expensive also) but there are few Internet cafés.
Now that I'm back in Phnom Penh I'll catch up on events here. But as a follow-up on the previous issue of the Khmer Chronicles I'd rather have had something else to talk about than this...
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Please click here to install Flash.Cambodia. Phnom Penh. 13/07/2008. The cremation ceremony of Khem Sambo took place at the Toul Tompoung pagoda. © John Vink/Magnum Photos
Khem Sambo, 47 yrs, a journalist at the pro-opposition daily Moneaksekar Khmer (Khmer Conscience), was killed, together with his 21 yr old son, by five bullets fired in the middle of a busy street by a lone gunner on a motorbike near the Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh on July 11th.
The reasons for this killing are not clear yet, and considering the previous murders of journalists (12 since 1993), they will probably remain obscure. It is too early and one can only speculate. Has it to do with the elections (we are two weeks away from the polling date)? Did Sambo know things he shouldn't have known about government involvement in casino gambling? But for sure Sambo's director, Dam Seth, who happens to be on the Sam Rainsy Party list (opposition) for the coming elections, is involved in a legal struggle with Foreign Minister Hor Namhong on issues about the Minister's alleged participation as a cadre in the Boeung Trabek reeducation camp during the Khmer Rouge regime. So was it to intimidate his boss that a good journalist and his innocent son were killed in cold blood on a busy street?
Whatever the reason, a journalist's assassination is always a serious matter. Especially so in a country where separations of the powers are not yet fully perceived by all as being essential to a workable democracy. Once the watchdogs will have stopped barking there will be few limits for abuse...
I bear with the suffering of Khem Sambo's family.
I bear with my Cambodian colleagues and hope they will not give in to fear.
There is a multimedia slideshow of the funeral on the Ka-set website.
