I'm boarding an Airbus A-300 in Delhi. The plane's destination is Mumbai, but with only one wing and a third of the fuselage missing, I know this flight will not take off. Captain Gupta's bought the Airbus from Indian Airlines in 2003 then spent many years re-assembling it in his garden which is about 5 miles from Delhi International Airport. Captain Gupta, an ex airline engineer, has a passion for aeroplanes and wants to share this with as many people as possible.

© Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Despite the fact that the domestic Indian airline industry has boomed in the last few years, it is worth remembering the great majority of India's population- 96%- has never flown, nor stepped inside an aeroplane. Captain Gupta's mission is to give Indians a chance to experience the inside of a plane and to learn a little about how aircraft operate.
The day I visit, a group of very excited young children is lining up ready to board, accompanied by keen helpers.

© Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

After boarding the aircraft, they watch the safety routine conducted by the chief air hostess, Mrs Gupta, who is also a professor of International Studies at Delhi University, but doubles up in this role, whenever she can. Two other hostesses are also on duty.

© Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Boarding passes are inspected as the kids enter the plane, and it is explained how essential these are in ensuring the right person boards the right flight. The doors are shut. Seat belts are firmly fastened. The safety briefing is very familiar: oxygen masks and the emergency lifebelts are demonstrated. The children are asked the names of various items and they shout these out with great relish. Then refreshment trolleys are pushed up the aisle and everyone is served with biscuits and toffees. Then some music is played over the intercom and some of the kids are encouraged to get up and start dancing around the aisle. Quite what this has to do with flying is beyond me, but everyone is having a great time. Groups of five or so kids at a time are then invited into the cockpit and Mrs Gupta explains that although trains and buses have one driver, a plane has three: the pilot, the co-pilot and the auto-pilot.

The climax to the visit involves sliding down the emergency chute. This resembles a fairground ride, and goes down very well with the children. Snacks and drinks are then served, and they all sit down and watch a few videos. I imagine that this party of children will never forget this day out, and Captain Gupta has converted another fifty people on his mission to educate the public and to de-mystify the business of flying.

Links
» Martin Parr's Magnum Portfolio
» Martin Parr's Books (Signed from the Magnum Store)

Since today is Eid, I just wanted to share this picture that I took in the summer in a small mosque in south London.

The picture is part of a new series I am working on called Second Generation, looking at the cultural conflicts for young people growing up in British-Asian communities in the UK.

I had been spending some time with an Afghan family in this part of London, who have been immensely open and generous to me. The eldest daughter Mojda is 13, she speaks perfect english and is just like any other British teenager, asking questions about which subjects to study at school and about what to wear to a party with her friends.
In contrast, her mother, who is just a year older than me, struggles with her english and is visibly frustrated that we can't be closer because of it.

After school every day the older children go along to the mosque for a Koran study class and they took me along with them. I took this picture while they showed me around after the class.

Links
» Olivia Arthur's Magnum Portfolio
» Olivia Arthur's Website

Sumo intrigued me more and more as I started to come to Japan. Before I had seen a live tournament, and had begun to appreciate it as skilled and strangely graceful, I knew about it as all westerners do: fat people wearing a sort of nappy and fighting. It intrigued me because it evolved uniquely in Japanese culture to become the form that it is. It is only practiced professionally in Japan, though it has a developing amateur following around the world.

The aim is simple: to force the opponent to step out of the ring (doho) or make them touch part of their body, other than the feet, on the ground. Bulk is important to resist being thrown or pushed and so is strength. Under the fat there is a lot of muscle, and, technique is essential.

It interested me too because it is unusual for a combat sport not to involve the subugation of one by the other: being beaten unconscious, submitting in pain, being pinned to the ground, and it is unusual for the combat not to be broken into rest periods and to involve some kind of scoring system, but in sumo its over when its over. One slip, one small loss of balance, one mistimed thrust and it can be lost. Normally an individual contest will last less than a minute. Add to that the elaborate rituals performed by judges, cleaners, and the sumotori themselves, which take far longer than the bout itself, and it is like no other sport.

This is a picture of sumo, but not of the obvious kind. My caption in my book is minimal - Retirement ceremony for sumotori Sentoryu. The red and the gold screen indicate it is Japan, but that is it. Sentoryu is in a suit and coming to the end of a long ceremony where his peers pay their respects to him and each snips a small piece of his hair from his head. This was also done by members of his family. The final cut that takes off the distinctive top-knot worn by sumotori is made by the oyakata, the owner of Sentoryu's fighting stable. It is the offical end of his career.

In the photograph this ritual is over and he has come back to the stage after having his head shaved and changing into a western suit. He wipes his head and his eyes, it has been an emotional experience. He is no longer Sentoryu (fighting war dragon) but Henry Miller, a black american from St Louis who had spent 15 years wrestling in Japan.

Links:
» Chris Steele-Perkins Website
» Chris Steele-Perkins' Magnum Portfolio
» Chris Steele-Perkins' Books (Signed from the Magnum Store)

I took the picture of these two Yakuza in a Ginza coffeeshop. I had a hard time not to find them but to keep an interpreter. I went through at least four, all women, because each time they agreed to do it but then gave it second thoughts and retracted for fear of the Yakuza! What I was thinking and saying: Can you please light up the cigarette again, again, again... Three times! And then I kept saying: "Hold it! Hold it!"

Links
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum Portfolio
» Bruce Gilden's Books (Signed from the Magnum Store)
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Coney Island"
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "The Rat Story"
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Fashion Magazine"
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Foreclosure"

These photographs are not recent and they are not my best, but they live with me in a way that makes them more current than anything I could have done yesterday.
They are a handful of the very many photographs I made of my grandfather, Salvator Altchek. He was a doctor, a general physician in Brooklyn, practicing in the same office since 1936 until 2002, when he died. He was my hero, my favorite person in the world. You couldn't walk down the street with him without people stopping and hugging him. People I would have never glanced at or paid attention to suddenly came alive. When someone gave him a handshake he grasped them by their wrist and took their pulse. He would accept $10, cookies, or nothing at all if a patient couldn't pay. He knew everything about everyone in the neighborhood - all the deep dark secrets- because patients would feel better just talking to him. He could detect what was going on with someone by their smell, their skin, and their disposition.
He would often send patients home prescribing a nice warm meal , and someone to talk to. He would also stay up at night worrying about them. When I lived with him in 1992 while I was studying at ICP, being a hypochondriac I also couldn't sleep sometimes, and we would sit side by side watching late late news on his blurry tiny black and white no-cable tv, and I would feel so safe and right. New York was fun with him. He wasn't wise in a solemn way; he just enjoyed people, and he cared about them.
I moved to New York a few years ago, and we are for the time being living in what used to be his office. His waiting room is our living room; my daughter sleeps in what was his examination room, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of him to make me smile.
My move to New York coincided with the worsening of a chronic condition for which I constantly visit many kinds of doctors and have to deal with the health care system here in the US. I came from Argentina with this clueless notion that things worked better in the US, especially medical care, and I soon realized why my grandfathers patients loved him so much. I am jealous of them, that they had him as their doctor, and I also understand now how unique he was during the 80's and 90's. He was the last of a kind, most had already retired while he was still making house calls.

Links
» Alessandra Sanguinetti's Magnum Portfolio
» Buy a signed version of Sanguinetti's book "On the Sixth Day" (from the Magnum Store)

"What I witnessed in Mali is such a giant leap forward that only a few years ago it was just unthinkable. Working in this human landscape it’s a lot about feeling for these people and what they go through. These emotional aspects were even stronger in Kassi’s case because he was such a small and cute little kid. As it sometimes happens in life there is a strange immediate connection to somebody and in my case, of all the people in Mali that I met, it was with him and his mother. Despite the fact that we couldn’t really communicate that well - at least verbally - but I just had a great immediate sense of emotion and pathos for this young child, this young man."
Paolo Pellegrin on his experience working with Kassi Keita and Mariam Dembele.

Links
» Access To Life / Mali
» Access To Life Website
» The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

It was my birthday and Henri asked me what I would like as a present and I told him that I would be so happy if he would make an autoportrait of himself in drawing. He went straight to work. He sat on our bed with a mirror posed in front of himself, I was literally lying back watching him when all of a sudden I saw the triple image that ensued. I slipped away to grab my Leica M3 with a 35mm lens, he was so concentrated and focused on what he was doing that I don't think he even realised that I had photographed him.

I did not publish the photograph until his 90th birthday when Ferdinando Scianna persuaded him to allow me to publish a selection of "snapshots" I had made of him over the years.

Even I was wary of photographing Henri as I knew he did not really like it. Then one day he asked me to make a passport photograph of himself and from then on it was a joke between us: "Just a passport photo."

Links:
» Album Henri Cartier-Bresson by Martine Franck
» Book Martine Franck: Photo Poche by Actes Sud (Signed at the Magnum Store)
» Book Martine Franck by Phaidon (Signed at the Magnum Store)
» Book Martine Franck: One Day To The Next (Aperture Monograph) (From Amazon)
» Book More signed books by Martine Franck (From the Magnum Store)
» Martine Franck's Magnum Portfolio

My first direct experience of Magnum was on June 24 1982, when I turned up in Paris for my first photographer's meeting, (once a year all the members get together, alternating between New York, Paris and London to decide policy for the year ahead, and look at new portfolios presented to the group). I had been voted as a Nominee, the summer before, on the first rung of the Magnum membership ladder.

Round the table were some most well known photojournalists of the twentieth century, but on the table was basically a carpet of Leicas and other assorted cameras, and as the meeting went on people began photographing each other.

I felt more than uneasy when I finally had the nerve to join in, but it is something that I have done ever since at subsequent meetings over the years. Rene Burri has traditionally been the one to shoot a group portrait each year, an event that is always full of fun as Rene tries to dash into the shot as the delayed action setting ticks away.

I was always rather frustrated by the lighting conditions, which are normally difficult, and in my first meeting as President in London 1991, I set up two large film lights across the large table determined that this was going to be the best-lit Magnum meeting ever. It all went well until on the third day Philip Jones Griffiths started fiddling with one of the lighting stands and it came crashing down fusing the whole system.

The pictures here were all taken this year in June 2007, at Milk Studios in New York, and were my way of passing some of the time during four days of intensive and sometimes difficult discussions. They are all shot on real film, using a 6x6 Mamiya camera, and with the occasional help of a chair for the camera to rest on for long exposures.

Links:
» Peter Marlow's Website
» Peter Marlow's Magnum Portfolio
» Peter Marlow's story USA. Magnum AGM 2007

The above image was taken at the Parthenon in Greece in 1991 and was part of my project about global tourism.

Up until last week I had always thought that the tour group was Japanese. However, when I was recently in Seoul and this image was used as a poster, one reason cited was the fact that the party of tourists was Korean.

So I feel it only correct that I apologise for this misrepresentation. All those times I have given talks and mentioned how the Japanese travel the world in groups… Canadian readers will understand the gravity of this, when you are accused of being American.

I spent a good few days in Korea shooting tourist activities. These days, people photograph one another so prolifically and with such enthusiasm that I often wonder whether they actually look at any of the things they are visiting.

Nearly 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, evidence of their brutal rule is still being discovered. On May 5, villagers of Koh Sla, while digging the soil, stumbled upon a burial site dating from the regime. Some people started exploring the site, looking for jewelry which would have been left in the graves. About 120 corpses were unearthed.

On a small hilltop nearby, the remains of a separate body were found, wrapped in olive coloured plastic sheeting, which indicates this was not a civilian victim but more probably a Vietnamese soldier who died during the 1979 campaign by the Vietnamese army to push back the Khmer Rouge to the strongholds from where they would remain active until 1998. The bones were recovered by the Vietnamese on May 10th and repatriated.

In the 1983 movie "Under Fire," an American weekly news magazine publishes a photo of an African conflict with the headline "The Forgotten War." In response, the writer jokes to the photographer that the headline is a way for the editors back home to feel less guilty about not knowing about the war themselves.

With neighbors such as Chad, Sudan and the DRC, the tiny Central African Republic has not received intense media coverage, as Thomas Dworzak commented on his return from the country.

Posters of Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears and Shakira are tacked to Samir's bedroom wall in Baghdad, Iraq in this family photograph.

Samir never leaves his parents’ house; he always stays in, most of the time in his room. No one leaves their house in Iraq, unless it is really necessary. Abduction, roadside- or suicide bombs, car accidents, robbery, torture and murder are daily occurrences. The kidnapping business is booming. A year ago, a ransom of between $8,000 and $180,000 was good enough to get your son or father back alive. Today, people pay that amount of money just to collect the body. Areas, villages and regions are ethnically cleansed, a term politicians do not like to use. Showing sympathy for Shakira will not be appreciated by any radical sectarian militia, the mujahedeen or al-Qaeda. Anyone who shows sympathy for America is a target of their rage.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2006. Terrorism suspects. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

Immediately as you set your foot on the ground, you start going through the bureaucracy of the place. This military person welcomes you, you go through the X-ray machines, there’s a press person that is assigned to a particular journalist or a team, as we were, [Pellegrin was on a New York Times Magazine assignment with writer Tim Golden] that’s there to greet us. So you’re immediately in the machine.

It’s not particularly difficult to go to Guantanamo, very many journalists do, the problem is that the tour, the press tour as it’s called, is extremely controlled, obviously, by the military. So you go through the motions of this staged mechanism which normally lasts 2-3 days and basically you are shown what they want to show you.

There’s pretty strict instructions especially in a situation or place where you’re close to detainees. You’re absolutely not allowed to talk to them and obviously not hand over anything. There has to be a complete distance….