With an unflinching eye and depth of vision, Thomas Dworzak has documented many of this century’s most important news stories since the 1990s. Dworzak started travelling aged 16 to photograph conflicts in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and the disintegrating Yugoslavia. Since then, he has gone on to photograph wars in Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11, the revolutions in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.
During the Nineties, Dworzak lived in Georgia, exploring the people, culture and conflicts in the Caucasus, which resulted in the book, Kavkaz in 2010. In his most recent project, Feldpost (2013 – 2018), he photographed the ‘memory’ of WWI in more than 80 countries, producing 1568 ‘postcards’ (one for every day of the war). It was completed on 11/11/2018, 100 years after the end of the conflict.
Dworzak is also a keen curator, with a particular interest in digital culture. His work mining Instagram memes under various hashtags—ranging from animals dressed as the pope to the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing‚—has resulted in 20 sketchbooks compiled of his findings. Dworzak became a Magnum nominee in 2000 and a full member in 2004.
Jonas Bendiksen’s sharply evocative images explore themes of community, faith and technology.
Bendiksen began his career at the age of 19 as an intern at Magnum’s London office before leaving for Russia to pursue his own work as a photojournalist. Throughout the several years he spent there, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former USSR, a project that was published as the book Satellites (Aperture, 2006). Following this he experimented with 360° photography in his book and 16-projector installation, The Places We Live (Aperture, 2008), about daily life in four urban slums. In 2017 he published The Last Testament (Aperture), which told the story of seven men who all claimed to be the biblical Messiah returned to earth. The Book of Veles (Gost, 2021) probed the vulnerabilities of our perceptions, and became hotly debated after Bendiksen revealed that what had appeared to be a classical piece of photojournalism was in large part synthetic computer-generated renderings.
Bendiksen became a nominee of Magnum Photos in 2004, and a member in 2008. He lives with his wife and children outside Oslo, Norway.