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50 Years Since the Lebanese Civil War

Fifty years have passed since the Lebanese Civil War commenced on April 13, 1975. Driven by sectarian violence, class struggles, and foreign interference and invasions, the 15-year armed conflict left hundreds of thousands killed, displaced, or injured before officially ending with the 1989 Taif Agreement. Magnum photographers extensively documented Lebanon during this time, and the consequences of the war continue to affect the country today.

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The beginning of the Lebanese Civil War is typically dated to April 13th, 1975, when the Phalangists attacked a bus taking Palestinians to a refugee camp. The war is complex, marked by violence between communities (Christians, Druze, Shiites, Sunnis), clashes within communities and multiple foreign interventions - invasions by Syria and Israel, and less direct interventions by notably France, the Arab League, and Iran.

Between 150,000 and 250,000 people were killed during the war and many disappeared or were exiled. In 1989, the Taif Agreement marked the end of the fighting on paper. The after-effects of the conflict were felt over a long period with occasional outbreaks of violence and considerable political instability, continuing in the region today.

April 13th, 2025 : 50 years since...

Countries worldwide are feeling the impact of the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid, which eliminated over 90% of contracts and reduced funding by around $60 billion. Many programs in vulnerable nations rely on USAID for health systems and nutrition, while efforts to combat terrorism and trafficking, including fentanyl, will also be affected, according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric. Magnum Photographers have traveled to many of the countries benefiting from or relying on foreign aid, many now shuttered and leaving millions of people without access to life-saving care.

USAID: The Human Cost of Trump's...

In a historic move, imprisoned Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan urged members of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on Thursday to lay down their weapons in order to end a decades-long conflict with the Turkish government. While Turkey, the United States, and other countries classify Mr. Ocalan as a terrorist and the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization, many Kurds view Mr. Ocalan as a powerful symbol of the struggle for Kurdish rights.

If the PKK acts on Ocalan's call for disarmament, it could have far-reaching implications for the entire Middle East, particularly for the millions of ethnic Kurds living in Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Magnum Photographers have been documenting the Kurdish community, their fight for autonomy, independence, statehood, and resistance against state violence across the region for decades.

Kurdistan from the Archives

Singer and songwriter David Johansen has died at the age of 75. Best known as the front-man of the glam band New York Dolls, which had a major influence on the beginning of punk rock, Johansen would go on to have a long solo career. During the 1980s, he achieved general notoriety as his swing/pop alter ego, Buster Poindexter, and began acting in films and in TV programs. Later in his career he focused on the blues with his band, The Harry Smiths.

David Johansen: 1950 - 2025

Jim Goldberg

The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014, triggered by Ukraine's Maidan Revolution. Over the following eight years, the conflict escalated with naval skirmishes, cyberattacks, Russia's annexation of Crimea and support to pro-Russian separatists fighting against Ukraine’s military in the ongoing Donbas War. In February 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine, deepening its occupation and igniting the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. The war has caused a massive refugee crisis and led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives.

Magnum Photographers have been documenting the Russo-Ukrainian War since 2014, capturing scenes from the front lines and inside both countries, illustrating the impact of the war on people's daily lives. The selection below showcases our ongoing coverage in the region, which has spanned over a decade.

Russo-Ukrainian War

American actor Gene Hackman died on February 27th, 2025, at age 95. Best known for his roles in “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The French Connection,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Mississippi Burning,” “Unforgiven,” “Superman,” “Hoosiers” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” his career spanned four decades and earned him two Academy Awards, four Golden Globes, and two British Academy Films Awards.

Gene Hackman: 1930 - 2025

‘In the morning, we dash along the sidewalks – you on your side, me on mine, watching as people cross the busy street.’ 

In I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours, photographers and longtime partners Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez embark on a collaborative journey along the US–Mexico border, creating an imaginative portrait of life in these borderlands. Traversing towns and waterways together they photographed the same subjects from different perspectives, capturing everyday scenes that appear both staged and ad hoc. The resulting series of uncanny image pairings illuminates the serendipity of human connection while confronting the challenges of relating to one another, finding balance, and defying conventional identities. 

Through this striking sequence, Drake and Gonzalez reflect on their different family histories of migration and identity and the ways their backgrounds both intersect and diverge. Deliberately eschewing the temptation to follow a singular narrative or freeze a fleeting moment in time, their images instead suggest the multifarious nature of existence along the border.

MACK Books, 2024
Paperback with embossed jacket
23 x 29 cm
144 pages
ISBN 978-1-915743-51-0

I’ll let you be in my dreams if...

American singer and songwriter Roberta Flack, best known for her hits "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Killing Me Softly With His Song", has died at the age of 88.

Roberta Flack: 1937 - 2025

On assignment for the New Yorker, Moises Saman documented the search for relatives by Syrian families in the Sednaya prison in December 2024, two days after the fall of the Assad regime.

Over the past twenty years, New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson and Moises Saman have covered a range of conflicts together. After the fall of the dictatorships in Iraq and Libya, they uncovered significant evidence of their brutality. However, Assad's actions appear to have been particularly brutal. In 2012, as Syria descended into violence, Moises and Jon traveled to Aleppo with a group of insurgent rebels and witnessed an early glimpse of the war’s horrors. Twelve years later, the death toll is estimated to be as high as six hundred and twenty thousand, while another fourteen million people—more than half the country’s population—have been forced to flee their homes.

During the decades of Assad rule, any form of resistance was ruthlessly suppressed, with those involved being arrested and tortured in a network of facilities scattered across the country. Sednaya became the most notorious of these. Established in the late 1980s on a desolate limestone hilltop just forty minutes from downtown Damascus, it earned a terrifying reputation of torture and atrocity.

Sednaya Prison

On assignment for the New Yorker, Paolo Pellegrin covered President Trump's inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2025. Pellegrin captured the faces of the American people attending the event, as well as some of the key moments of the ceremony, with President Trump surrounded by members of his team, including vice-president JD Vance and Elon Musk.

Trump's Inauguration Day

In recognition of Black History Month in the United States, Magnum looks back through its archives to spotlight the Black American community, featuring its leaders, activists, artists, and scholars, while celebrating their achievements, resilience, joy, and love.

February 2025: Black History Month....

In 2024, Larry Towell travelled to Guererro, one of the poorest and most violent provinces in Mexico where villages are under the control of organized crime. Of the estimated 200 cartels and sub-groups now operating in Mexico, sixteen are in Guererro, including Los Ardillos (The Squirrels), which controls the region around Ayahualtempa where local poppy production for opium has been replaced by fentanyl.

“In 2015, the cartels started coming,” said Luis Morales Rojas, a local town leader. “In 2016, they became more visible. In 2017, they visited and offered me a bag of money. I told them we will give them nothing. They said they would kill me and my whole family…. We either had to join them, or resist them.”

Villages that organize self-defense units (auto defensas) and fight organized crime live under constant intimidation. This small Nahua community of 686 persons, where 70% of the population speaks an indigenous language, has no hotels, restaurants, grocery stores nor gas stations. Since there is no high school, children cannot attend beyond primary education. Leaving town would endanger their lives, including entering Hueicantenango, which physically touches Ayalhualtempa’s perimeter. In May 2024, 60-year-old Rayes Bolando Domingo was shot dead near his cattle at the town’s edge.

Local residents have been be kidnapped, tortured and mutilated. On January 2, three local members, plus one civilian woman, disappeared. All four were found decapitated. A year ago, Pablo Morales, brother on one auto defensa member was taken and later found mutilated. Thirty-five villagers from Ayahualtempa have been murdered since 2015.

All men must serve in the auto defense units for a year, rotating on 12 hour shifts with .22 caliber rifles and 16, 20 and .410 gauge single shot shotguns. When asked how they were able to resist cartel machine guns with such small firearms, Luis said “We’re good shots. The cartels with their machine guns make a lot of noise, shoot wildly, and miss their targets….”

Auto Defensas: Fending Off Mexican...

On assignment for Harper's Magazine in July 2024, Rafal Milach documented several Holocaust memorials in Poland, such as the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewry in Warsaw and the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, with a special emphasis on Oświęcim (Auschwitz in Polish). At the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, tourists with headset guides flock to the infamous site every day. The site includes the main concentration camp at Auschwitz I and the remains of the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

From following the tour to visiting Jewish neighbourhoods and specific places such as the remains of the set design for the 1993 film Schindler's List, produced by Steven Spielberg, next to Krakow-Płaszów - a Nazi concentration camp operated by the SS in Płaszów, a southern suburb of Krakow, in the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland - Milach and Harper's contributing editor Tanya Gold paint a complex picture of the Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

Holocaust Memorials

Groundbreaking American filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. Best known for his blend of surreal movies, "Eraserhead" (1977), "The Elephant Man" (1980), "Dune" (1984), "Blue Velvet" (1986), "Lost Highway" (1997), and "Mulholland Drive" (1999), Lynch also changed the face of television with the broadcast of "Twin Peaks" (1989-1991). He was nominated for four Oscars and received an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2020.
In addition to his film work, Lynch explored a variety of other creative outlets: writing, acting, music, painting and other visual arts.

David Lynch: 1946 - 2025

At the start of 2025, Emin Özmen documented the living conditions of children in Damascus for the Washington Post during a period of change following the fall of the Assad regime. Many children are traumatized by the long-lasting war they endured.

The photographer traveled to Damascus' southern suburbs of Douma and Daraya, areas of Goutha where a chemical massacre took place in 2013, destroying many schools and causing overcrowding in those that remained viable. Children play on soccer fields as barrel bombs from the Assad regime's chemical attacks on the Syrian people are still visible, while NGOs are helping them cope with trauma and physical injuries caused by the war.

Ozmen also documented the struggling health care system, reliant on outdated equipment due to international sanctions imposed as a result of Assad's rule. "Before the start of the conflict, the local pharmaceutical industry covered up to 90 percent of the needs of the local market. Since 2011, the various sanctions packages have made it very difficult for those who produce or import medicines," Samir Kattan, a 65 year-old Damascus-based pharmaceutical worker, told the photographer.

Children in Damascus

The war in Gaza is a conflict with little chance of escape — even for the thousands of Palestinians who have been grievously wounded in Israel’s attacks. But a small number of the sick and injured make it onto a list of critical cases to be treated by doctors abroad. The price to leave can be high: a missing leg, a lost arm. But for these few, there is a way out. More than 8,000 Gazans have been brought to a floating hospital off the coast of Egypt run by the United Arab Emirates for treatment since the start of the war in October 2023.
In May, Israel entered Rafah, and the border was closed, blocking access to the hospital there. By the end of the summer, the U.A.E. had found a new way out for the wounded -- a humanitarian flight aboard a converted passenger jet to a housing complex in Abu Dhabi.
Every few weeks now, desperate families depart Gaza in the early morning hours, making their way on buses to an airport just across the border in Israel. Their destination was the Emirates Humanitarian City, a custom-built housing complex. If there is a place to return to a normal life after Gaza, it is here.

Escape from Gaza: UAE Evacuations...

Magnum photographer Constantine Manos passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s on January 2, 2025. He was 90 years old.

Constantine “Costa” Manos began his photographic career when he was just 13, joining the school camera club in 1947 — incidentally, the same year Magnum Photos was founded. Within a few years, he was a professional photographer working at his local newspaper, and well on his way to becoming one of the most influential documentary photographers of his generation.

Born in 1934, in Columbia, South Carolina, USA, to Greek immigrant parents, Manos developed his love for photography in his early teens, but it wasn’t until he was 18 that he garnered a more substantial understanding and appreciation for the greater world of photography.

In 1952, he enrolled at the University of South Carolina. While there, he read an article in a magazine about the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, unbeknown to him, would become Manos’s mentor from afar. The young photographer went so far as to acquire the same equipment — a Leica rangefinder and Ilford film. That same year, Cartier-Bresson published Images à la Sauvette, or The Decisive Moment. Around the same time, Manos made his first serious photographs and “began a lifelong search for beautiful and poetic images.”

Manos was led by a concern for the social conditions of people in the American South. He had heard about an island off the coast of South Carolina, between Hilton Head and Savannah, Georgia, that sounded like the right subject matter for the kinds of pictures he wanted to take. Daufuskie Island, was and still is, the home of members of the Gullah Geechee, an African American community whose relative isolation allowed them to preserve some of the culture and language of their enslaved West African ancestors. While a student at his then-segregated university, Manos wrote and published anti-segregation editorials featuring several of these images.
His parents, Dimitri and Aphrodite (Vaporiotou) Manos, were from Avşa Island in the Sea of Marmara in Turkey. After the end of WWI, they were forced to Greece during the 1922-23 population exchange. They then emigrated to Columbia, SC, and eventually ran the Washington Street Cafe, which served only to a Black clientele during segregation. Dimitri was known as “Big Jim” and cooked what is known today as “soul food.”

Together, they encouraged Manos and his siblings to pursue their creative hobbies, from learning instruments to allowing Manos to use the basement of their house as a darkroom. Manos played the flute and his sister and brother played violin and piano. Becoming a lover of classical music, he was hired as the official photographer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at its summer festival in Tanglewood when he was 19. His book, Portrait of a Symphony, about the orchestra, was published eight years later in 1961.

After graduating with a BA in English Literature in 1955, Manos became a Private in the U.S. Army, serving his draft time in Germany as a staff photographer with the Stars & Stripes for two years. Aside from his assignments for the newspaper, Manos found time to make pictures for himself during weekend leaves and longer furlough time. Over the course of a year he shot approximately 60 rolls of film, which were processed and put away. In 2010, Manos pulled the forgotten rolls of film from his files, made contact sheets, and edited the work for the first time. After military service, he moved to New York, where he worked for Esquire, Life and Look. A portrait of a grieving woman at the funeral for a Black soldier killed in Vietnam was one of his most emblematic images, published in Look magazine in 1966.
His parents were Greek refugees, and after hearing stories about life in his father’s home village, Manos obtained a grant to pursue a documentary project in his familial home. From 1961 to 1963 he lived in Greece, where he made the photographs for his book A Greek Portfolio, inspired over the three years by the people he encountered there. A Greek Portfolio was first published in 1972. The book won awards at Arles and at the Leipzig Book Fair, and exhibitions of the work took place at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in 1963, during his time in Greece, that his attempt to join Magnum Photos was finally successful. He became a full member two years later.
Composing his photographs with patience and serenity, Manos always sought to capture the magic of life as it is lived. “I am a people photographer and have always been interested in people,” he said. The Bostonians, his document of the diversity and dynamism of life in the city, was one such project, preoccupied with people. “Going out into the city with a small camera and making hundreds of pictures of people doing hundreds of things is a dizzying odyssey,” he said. “It’s like gathering the bits of an intimate mosaic.” In Boston, where he settled following his Greek travels, assignments for Time-Life books and the 1974 multimedia project Where’s Boston? fed initially into his larger survey of Bostonian people.
Manos was interested in capturing freedom and joy in celebratory moments. His first self-led project after joining Magnum was a survey of color in the United States, ranging from the leisure habits of California’s beach dwellers, to beer-drinking bikers at Daytona Beach, to Mardi Gras and Gay Pride festivals. Though he was from South Carolina, Manos reflected that his life-long fascination with “the Americans” in this project arose from an outsider’s perspective, having been brought up in a Greek family. Images from the work first appeared in his book American Color, published in 1995, and later in American Color 2, published in 2010. Lyricism defines all of his work: “I hope I can create a book of photographic poems, each unique yet all connected,” he said.
The first gay Magnum photographer, Manos closely documented the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993, as well as the 25th Anniversary of Stonewall in 1994. On May 17, 2004, Manos photographed the very first legal same-sex marriages in the US in the small Massachusetts town of Provincetown, a long-time favorite gathering place of artists and LGBTQ+ people.
Since 2008, Manos had lived in Provincetown with his husband and partner of 61 years, Michael Prodanou, a Greek /Canadian architect and painter. Their relationship began in Rome on May 16, 1963 — the same year that Manos joined Magnum. At the time, Prodanou lived across the street from the Pantheon on Via della Minerva and the pair met in a fish restaurant called “Mare Nostrum” around the corner. They married on December 11, 2011 in their Provincetown home.
In the last few years, Manos stopped making new photographs and teaching workshops, but a large body of work remains in his studio. Hundreds of images from the American Color series, all printed by Manos himself, remain unseen.
Manos is survived by his husband, Michael Prodanou; his sister, Irene Constantinides of Atlanta, GA; his brother, Theofanis Manos of Greenville, SC; as well as three nephews and a niece.
Manos’s photographs are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Benaki Museum, Athens; and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, which presented a retrospective exhibition of his work in 2013. In 2003, Manos was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for his pictures from American Color.
In 2022, in a reception in Washington, DC, the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, on behalf of the Hellenic Republic of Greece, awarded Manos the Knight of the Order of the Phoenix. This honor is bestowed to Greeks who have excelled and who have helped raise Greece’s international prestige. Of the 10 people awarded this honor, Manos was the only one in the arts and letters.
“It is with deep sadness that I reflect on the passing of Costa Manos, an extraordinary photographer and a cherished member of Magnum Photos,” writes Magnum President Cristina de Middel. “Costa belonged to an earlier generation of Magnum, yet his work continues to inspire many of us who never had the chance to meet him personally. His ability to capture the poetry of everyday life with unmatched sensitivity and a keen eye for light and color has left an indelible mark on the history of photography.”
“As president of Magnum, I feel we have lost not just a remarkable artist but also a fundamental part of what makes our collective unique. Costa’s unwavering dedication to photography and to Magnum’s mission will remain an enduring example for us all. My heartfelt condolences go out to his friends and family. His legacy will live on in his images and in the inspiration he has provided to so many.”

Constantine Manos: 1934 - 2025

Patrick Zachmann has been documenting the reconstruction of Notre Dame's Cathedral for the last five years.
Find here a selection of the last chapter of the reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral, capturing the meticulous efforts to finalize the restoration of this iconic Parisian monument, until its first religious mass.

Rebirth of Notre Dame de Paris....

On Saturday, October 7th, Israel was taken by surprise in an unexpected and severe cross-border assault by Hamas from Gaza, resulting in the initial deaths of 900 people. The BBC reported that included in this number were 260 individuals attending a music festival. With many still missing or abducted by Hamas in Israel, families are left desperately seeking information as the conflict unfolds.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared war on Hamas, vowing to use “enormous force” by launching strikes in Gaza and imposing a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, freezing the flow of essential supplies. According to the BBC, as of October 9th approximately 690 people in Gaza had lost their lives and more than 120,000 had been displaced from their homes.

The result of this has triggered the latest outbreak of fighting in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing in outside powers and echoing across the broader Arab region.

Israel and Palestine from the Archives...

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