Magnum Editions Posters

In June 2020, we introduced Magnum Editions, a new range of limited editions, launching with a collection of 8×10” prints in an edition of just 100 each, featuring striking and recognizable photographs from Elliot Erwitt, Stuart Franklin, Eve Arnold and many more.

We are happy to introduce the latest addition to this range — Magnum Editions Posters — a new collection of contemporary works from 23 Magnum photographers, including three of the collective’s 2020 nominees.

Collectively, 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 priced at $100  and $150 respectively, the 18×24” posters are individually numbered with a unique Magnum Editions label that is supplied separately. Printed on a luxurious 150gsm tatami paper using a digital print process, these new Magnum Editions posters are minimally designed, and the images will never be available in this size, design and price again.

All images in the selection can be seen in the slideshow above, or on the Magnum Shop, where more information and product shots are also available.

A number of the images in the collection originate in long-term projects exploring contemporary America and its society through land and cityscapes. Mark Power‘s five-book project, Good Morning America, started in 2010 and has since seen him traversing the United States, reflecting upon the at times harsh or banal realities of a nation he grew up knowing through the decidedly more fantastic depictions in British children’s TV.

Matt Black‘s project, American Geography, set him on a 100,000 mile journey across 46 states documenting the communities and areas excluded from the country’s national conversation. Informed in part by his experiences growing up and living in California’s agricultural Central Valley – the work creates a picture of a country where poverty and exclusion are a unifying norm, rather than the exception.

Gregory Halpern explored Los Angeles and its environs in his book ZZYZX – from which his poster image is taken. The book wove together the contradictions, cliches, and ironies of the region – creating a sun-crazed portrait of the city and its inhabitants. Olivia Arthur‘s image, made near Otay Mountain to the east of San Diego, near the US-Mexican border, was created as part of a multi-photographer Magnum project making work either side of that border. Arthur’s work collected and recorded rare flora of the area.

These varied visions of America and its societal challenges continue in the collection. Alec Soth‘s 2006 book project Niagara explored the romantic getaways and lovers’ vacation spots either side of the US-Canadian border near the famous falls – the realities of the economically depressed region and some of those he met and photographed there running contrary to its place in American pop-cultural lore.

2020 nominee Hannah Price‘s 2013 photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge is taken from the series, Cursed By Night, a project which explores “a world of darkness to which black males are unfortunately tied”. An exploration of the way black men are often unfairly perceived in America, Price began the series 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.

Another newly announced nominee, Khalik Allah, features an image from his work made at 125th Street and Lexington, in Harlem, New York. These portraits – lit by street lights, neon signs and passing traffic – focus upon the universal qualities humans share, as he has explained: “We’re living in a world of racism, projection, hatred, and fear. Fear binds the world and forgiveness sets it free. My work is all about forgiveness. I’m going into a neighborhood where there’s a lot of homelessness and drug addiction. The circumstance is like a veil that is obscuring the deeper light a person has.”

Depictions of landscapes by Magnum’s members are – unsurprisingly – not restricted to the United States. Carloyn Drake’s otherworldly image, which was included in her book Two Rivers, is of Turkmenistan’s Darvaza gas crater. Nicknamed “The Door To Hell”. The crater, which has been blazing since 1971 when Soviet geologists set it alight while trying to burn off gas in a cavern, is stripped in Drake’s image of scale – creating a view of a feature that could be miles or mere feet across.

Peter van Agtmael’s Chilean mountain-scape reveals more about his working processes than it does perhaps about its location. Made on his first trip back to Chile after living there in 2002. This period the photographer found “deeply formative.” It was there that his route into photography became established via an internship at a newspaper in Valparaiso. As he explains, “Though 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‘s photograph was taken in Libya’s as part of the photographer’s extended reporting on the nation’s civil war. Made in the Murzuq desert in 2015, it depicts a member of the Third Force, a militia that had established significant control in southwestern Libya. Similarly dwarfed by his surroundings, Nanna Heitmann‘s horseman – in an image originating in her Baba Yaga project – is taking part in an annual race that takes place during Naadym – the national festival of the Tuva region. The wider work explored the small communities and isolated individuals who have hewn out lives in some of Russia’s more isolated stretches of land.

Christopher Anderson‘s book project Approximate Joy looked at contemporary China, and its rapid economic and technological growth. His above image, taken from the wider series, was made in Shenzhen – a former fishing village and now China’s fifth-largest city. Like the portraits in the book, this image focuses upon lighting, whether the ambient light emanating from smartphones to illuminate intent faces, or cityscapes bathed in color: “I was struck by the way that so many places in China’s cities are lit,” the photographer explained.

Trent Parke‘s project – and soon to be released book – The Crimson Line, saw the him making work in his native Adelaide during the very first and very last moments of each day, creating images that drew on the unique quality of light to question industry’s deleterious effects upon the environment. The resulting images are beautiful yet unsettling, familiar yet alien.

Many of the images within the new poster selection reveal as much about a photographer’s working practice as they do about the images subjects. The third new nominee in the curation: Yeal Martinez‘s image – from his Firefly project – is created by his pricking an image with a pin, allowing light to pass through and thus illustrate the photograph. Martinez, much of whose work explores the toll of organized crime in his native Mexico, described the thinking behind the project, “I started working with the concept of resilience and how we as human beings can transform a black energy into a positive energy. A light in the darkness. That’s when Firefly came about.”

Alessandra Sanguinetti‘s photograph of two ‘Ophelias’ is taken from her work charting the lives of two women she first met as children in Argentina. Guille and Belinda – now grown with their own children – have been working with the photographer over the course of two books, in a collaborative effort to chart the transition from childhood to adulthood. Bieke Depoorter‘s work with Agata also employed a deeply collaborative approach, with Depoorter  allowing  her muse to steer the work, edit, caption and annotate the resulting images in order to explore the complexities of the photographic enterprise, grappling with the relationship between photographer and subject. The work allowed both parties to reflect upon image making, truth, authorship, and their own developing self-images.

Cristina de Middel‘s project, The Afronauts, is just one of the photographer’s works that explore the genre’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Utilizing costume and staging, fantastical scenes from a fictional, yet simultaneously historical Zambian space program. The work explores and challenges representations of Africa by re-imagining 1950s and 60s efforts by a Zambian science teacher named Edward Makuka to join the international space race.

Listen, Newsha Tavakolian’s 2011 project, created album artwork for women singers who have not been allowed to produce their own CDs or perform as solo acts in Iran since the 1979 revolution. The series of portraits were at once ethereal, destined to never be used, yet also very real depictions of the artists – who Tavakolian asked to pose imagining they were before large audiences in various settings.

Sohrab Hura‘s 2019 book The Coast, was a continuation and distinct iteration of his long-term work The Lost Head and the Bird. The project which also incorporated film, found imagery, and a morphing short story that the photographer wove through his images explored undercurrents of violence – religious, sexual, and caste related – in contemporary India through photos taken along the country’s coastline.

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.

Rafal Milach‘s work makes use of photographs, sculpture, and collage to create images that explore and deconstruct state power, history, and the integral structures of the former Eastern Bloc nations, particularly his native Poland. In his 2017 book, The First March of Gentlemen, Milach retells the historical children’s strike in Września, Poland, which took place in the early 20th Century, through collaged archive photographs in so doing creating a new narrative, a playful metaphor for the nation’s present political situation.

In his work Moises Saman often imbues his current affairs and conflict photography with a deeply personal point of view. For more than ten years Saman has – among other work – recorded 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’ – evidenced in his chosen image for this curation.

Much of Antoine d’Agata’s work, often viscerally corporeal, centers the human body and all of its imperfections. This photograph, taken in Vilnius, Lithuania, is an example of his work that distorts and renders humanoid forms and subjects almost alien.

All images in the selection can be seen in the slideshow above, or on the Magnum Shop, where more information and product shots are also available.