Magnum Blog

Battle Of Strasbourg

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:17:30 -0500

France. Strasbourg. Council of Europe. Plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe debate under urgent procedure: The consequences of the war between Georgia and Russia. © Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos

I attended the plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe debate, under urgent procedure, on the consequences of the war between Georgia and Russia. As I crossed the debating chamber I realized that the verbal battle was going to be less photogenic than a cannon battle, I took a seat, placed my Canon onto my lap, put on the simultaneous translation headphones and started to listen to the debate. The mouths moved out of line with the words being heard in my ears - the debate enthralled me. My concentration was broken by a security guard, who informed me that I was sitting in a place reserved for a delegate and the area for photographers was opposite. A man of arms, he could not hide his interest in my "cannon", I passed it to him and he examined it with childish curiosity. I gave him permission to fire the first shot at the assembly with it, which he did without thinking of the consequences. That haphazard photo was the key to my understanding of the contretemps needed to photograph anything in the building. Within this Babylonian tower of Europe I made ambiguous images corresponding to the essence of the debate, unsynchronized swimming in murky waters. The politicians spoke with the authority of high mammals and whilst they slept the Canon smoked.

Links
» Gueorgui Pinkhassov's Magnum Portfolio
» View all images of "Battle Of Strasbourg"

The Christmas Tree Bucket - Trent Parkes Family Album

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:48:03 -0500

AUSTRALIA. South Australia. Adelaide. 2008. © Trent Parke/Magnum Photos

In 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.

In 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"

Environmental photography

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:49:32 -0500

"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.

Beaufort West by Mikhael Subotzky

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:02:29 -0500

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)

Invasion 68: Prague

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:01:10 -0500

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)

The Khmer Chronicles / Issue Nr 11: A window of opportunity

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:13:31 -0500

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...

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.

Fashion Magazine: Paris Minnesota

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:08:06 -0500

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

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:48:51 -0500

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

The Khmer Chronicles / Issue Nr 10: Maybe it is a dangerous place after all...

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:28:37 -0500

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...

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.

A short conversation with the new Magnum nominees Olivia Arthur and Peter van Agtmael

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:38:52 -0500

A week ago, during the 61st Annual General Meeting of Magnum, two new nominees were welcomed into the circle of Magnum Photographers. Once a year, the photographers from Magnum travel to Paris, London or New York for their Annual General Meeting (AGM). The 2008 AGM took place at the end of June in Paris. One day of the AGM is reserved to look at submitted portfolios and to decide upon new nominees, associates and members.

English photographer Olivia Arthur (28) and American-Dutch photographer Peter van Agtmael (27) are the new nominees for 2008.

I briefly e-mailed with them to find out about their motivation to join Magnum and how it felt to be notified of their acceptance. Please post your comments or questions and we will try to find responses and answers to them by our nominees.

Olivia Arthur

For the past two years I have been working on a long-term project about women and the east-west cultural divide. This has been mainly funded though scholarships and grants and I have done relatively little commissioned work.

The motivation for the project is very personal and because of the way I have been working on it, I have had very few guidelines and conditions to follow. This freedom has been amazing for me because it has meant that I have been able to get right into it and let the work unfold as it goes along. It also means that it doesn't necessarily fit into the regular format of photojournalistic stories, and it has not always been easy for me to get it seen.

I see Magnum as a place that thrives on the kind of personal approach and subtle story that I am trying to achieve. I felt that the agency has made a big move in recent years to encourage younger, lesser-known photographers, who have a strong idea of what they want to show, and that really appealed to me. I am still growing and finding my way with my photography and the idea that I can do that under the guidance of an agency like Magnum and its photographers is very special.

Of course I was also encouraged by the fact that I won the Inge Morath Award last year. That gave me the confidence that the photographers liked my work and I was keen to show them what I had done with the grant over the year since they gave it to me. It also meant that I had been in contact with a few of the photographers and was perhaps less intimidated by it than I would have been a few years ago.

The day that they had the meeting in Paris I was at home working. Thomas Dwozak sent me an sms to say congratulations and I was quite stunned, then Paolo Pellegrin called me and it eventually seemed more real. I called my boyfriend and my parents - all of whom knew what this really meant to me - and then I went out to celebrate.

» Olivia Arthur's Website
» Olivia Arthur on the World Press Photo Site
» Olivia Arthur on Photobetty

Peter van Agtmael

I felt compelled to pick up a camera because of Magnum, and that discovery has brought great meaning and purpose to my life. I love a huge range of photography, but because of that early and continuing influence, I have always wanted to be a part of the agency. I studied history in college, and Magnum is a historical archive of incredible meaning. I feel honored to have the opportunity to begin contributing my own testimony of our troubled species. As for applying, I'm not really sure why I decided to submit at this particular moment. I felt a really strong impulse, and figured I had nothing to lose. It's hard to describe what I felt when I got the news, it was like a surge of hundreds of feelings at once, but my first articulate feeling was an understanding that my life was entering a really important new phase.

I was with my family at my aunt Marie-Louise's house in Holland when Thomas Dworzak messaged me with the news. She had died the previous week after a long battle with breast cancer, and her funeral had been the previous day. I got the news as I was photographing her son sleeping on her living room couch, while in the background my dad and uncle went through the details of her life, silhouetted by the sharp light of the setting sun. Marie-Louise was really important to me. She had been married to a very active war cameraman, and thus was intimately familiar with the toll that going to war can take on family and oneself.

She was there the day I first told my parents I was going to Iraq, a decision that has changed my life dramatically. A few hours after I broke the news, the two of us went grocery shopping. As we walked and talked, she listened to my reasons intensely, and offered short and loaded answers. She had always really understood me, and on a certain level knew that my mind was made up. Still, she stormed away a few times, condemning me for my selfishness and cursing at me in Dutch. Dutch cursing is always very impressive and intimidating. Ultimately, she supported me, and I often stay with her son Sander before or after I go to wars. The last time I saw her was after leaving Afghanistan last month. I showed her my pictures from the previous two years. She offered a stern critique, but was also very proud. She was a truly wonderful person, and it meant a lot to get the news in her house.

» Peter van Agtmael's Website
» Video: Five Years in Iraq by Peter van Agtmael
» Interview with Peter van Agtmael on Conscientious
» Interview with Peter van Agtmael on Smithsonian
» Photographer's Notebook by Peter van Agtmael on abc News

Access To Life: Kassi Keita and Mariam Dembele

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:23:12 -0500

"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

The Access to Life Campaign

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:53:54 -0500

For 25 years, AIDS has ravaged the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Since the early 1980s, nearly 30 million people have died from AIDS. But over the past few years, a quiet global revolution has enabled millions of people infected by HIV to live healthy lives.

In the early 1990s, when antiretroviral drugs became available, AIDS was transformed from a certain death sentence to a manageable chronic disease–but only for some. The expense of the drugs and their distribution prevented 95 percent of those living with HIV from getting access to them. International outrage that millions were dying because of economic disparity helped reduce drug prices and to create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002. Doctors and healthcare workers around the world have adapted procedures to settings where people often could not access even the most basic care. Already, millions of lives which otherwise might have been lost are being saved.

In Access to Life, eight Magnum photographers portray people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Paolo Pellegrin in Mali, Alex Majoli in Russia, Larry Towell in Swaziland and South Africa, Jim Goldberg in India, Gilles Peress in Rwanda, Jonas Bendiksen in Haiti, Steve McCurry in Vietnam and Eli Reed in Peru. Here are faces, voices, and stories representing those millions of people who by now would be dead if not for access to free antiretroviral drugs–people who are living with HIV, working, caring for their children, and experiencing the joys and struggles of being alive. But there are also the stories of those for whom treatment came too late or where tuberculosis or other diseases brought their lives to an end – showing how the fight to bring access to AIDS treatment is a difficult one, often filled with setbacks as well as success.

Please visit the Access To Life website to view and listen to all stories. We very much hope you'll find this presentation interesting as well as insightful. Please help to spread the word by telling your friends about it, e-mailing them the link to the Access To Life website or by using one of our press images together with a link to the site on your website or blog.

And as always, your feedback and thoughts are very much appreciated!

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

Cornell Capa 1918-2008

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:01:34 -0500

Accomplished Magnum photographer Cornell Capa passed away early on the morning of May 23rd at home in New York.

Cornell Capa was born Cornell Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest. In 1936 he moved to Paris, where his brother Andre (Robert Capa) was working as a photojournalist. He worked as his brother's printer until 1937, then moved to New York to join the new Pix photo agency. In 1938 he began working in the Life darkroom. Soon his first photo-story - on the New York World's Fair - was published in Picture Post.

In 1946, after serving in the US Air Force, Cornell became a Life staff photographer. After his brother's death in 1954, he joined Magnum, and when David 'Chim' Seymour died in Suez in 1956 Capa took over as president of Magnum, a post he held until 1960.

Capa made an empathetic, pioneering study of mentally retarded children in 1954, and covered other social issues, such as old age in America. He also explored his own religious tradition. While working for Life, Capa made the first of several Latin American trips. These continued through the 1970s and culminated in three books, among them Farewell to Eden (1964), a study of the destruction of indigenous Amazon cultures.

Capa covered the electoral campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller, among others. His 1969 book, New Breed on Wall Street, was a landmark study of a generation of ruthless young entrepreneurs keen on making money and spending it fast.
In 1974 Capa founded New York City's influential International Center of Photography, to which for many years he dedicated much of his considerable energy as its director.

» Cornell Capa's Magnum Portfolio
» International Center of Photography
» New York Times Obituary
» PDN Obituary

The Khmer Chronicles / Issue Nr 9: About ethics and corruption rankings

Mon, 19 May 2008 20:48:58 -0500

There was a time when Cambodia was not even listed on Transparency International's Corruption Perception index.

But Cambodia is more and more part of the world... In 2007 it was listed nr 162 out of 179 (the last position being shared by Somalia and Myanmar). In 2006 it was in 151st place with 163 countries listed (Haiti was last). In 2005 Cambodia was 130th out of 158 countries. In 2004 it wasn't listed (which doesn't mean there was no corruption). So I guess one can say that the situation is not really brilliant on the corruption front in Faraway Kingdom.

One of the first things a cambodian child learns at school is corruption: every day the kids have to give 500 or 1000 Riel (0,25$) to their teacher to attend class (in a school system where education officially is for free), and supplementary private lessons are mandatory to pass examinations at the end of the year. But a teacher's salary is between 40 and 60 dollars a month. This could explain that. Should it?

If there is corruption at the lowest level there must be higher up? Sure, but the higher you go the more difficult and risky it gets to prove. And if as a journalist you find something juicy, does the amount of press freedom available allow you to expose the scheme? Well not necessarily, and that's the trouble with countries where corruption is institutionalised: usually press freedom can be bought as well. If silence can't be bought with some, thugs can be bought to put physical pressure on the journalist. If the journalist escapes the thugs (although 9 journalists died since 1993) there are ways to bring him to court. Etc.. That beast eats you from within... It's all over the place: journalists get a free meal and an envelope with "compensation money" at press conferences or have to pay money to get an interview. Or journalists blackmail people they have sensitive information about.

Larry Towell's Indecisive Moments Documentary

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:57:33 -0500

Larry Towell is a photojournalist who travels reluctantly and only when the subject really matters. But if he travels he does so to really follow his subjects around for a long time, he tells a story from a very humanistic point of view adding his own unique perspective. From 1993 to 2006 he photographed in Israel and Palestine, producing an immense body of work. Two amazing books, "Then Palestine" and "No Man's Land", arose out of this work.

Initially he wished to document the birth of a nation, following the Oslo-Agreement. Instead he ended up documenting what he would later refer to as "the World's largest open-air prison". In 2001 he was given a small video camera and began to maintain a video diary while working in Israel and Palestine. In his 40 minute documentary "Indecisive Moments" - which won the "Achievement in Filmmaking for a Documentary" award at the 2007 New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, also known as "the voice of indie film" - Larry Towell documents events and perspectives of those caught up in violence. The result is a highly personal documentary from the perspective of one of the world’s most acclaimed photojournalists. "Indecisive Moments" bridges the gap between artist and reporter bringing the viewer inside Towell's highly stylized world.

Ordering Discount
We are offering a 10% discount on the DVD's price from the Magnum Store for the first ten readers who order the DVD. With this discount you only pay $ 27 instead of $ 30 plus shipping. If you are in New York you could even pick up your copy of the DVD 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 send me an e-mail. If you are one of the first ten you'll get a coupon code from us that you need to use in order to receive the discount. If you do not use this code we can not give a discount anymore once the ordering process is completed.

Links
» Larry Towell's Magnum Portfolio
» Larry Towell's Magnum In Motion Essay "Land And Identity"
» Larry Towell's Magnum In Motion Essay "Katrina"
» Larry Towell's Magnum In Motion Essay "The World From My Front Porch"
» CBC Interview with Larry Towell
» Signed books and DVD's by Larry Towell (From the Magnum Store)