Peter van Agtmael
“I took this photograph a few days before New York City locked down in March 2020. The world was about to change, but you’d never have known it from the relaxed scene in the park. It was all just a bit too abstract to get your head around. The next few months I’d mostly photographed death, empty streets and civil unrest.
“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from photography is that even in the worst moments, you’ve got to find beauty.”
Lúa Ribeira
“This photograph is part of a series titled Agony in the Garden. It was taken in Almería, in the south of Spain. It is Mara on Alba’s rooftop terrace, where we were trying to make images with some of the outfits they use to dance as professional stripers.
“In 2021, inspired mostly by the music I was listening to, I decided to start working around youth culture and the ways in which generations born after the late nineties are expressing themselves through music, fashion, gestures, images….
“For me it was important to go beyond the idea of subculture, to try to find common ground with a generation that has grown up in a climate of precarity and constant crises — financial and environmental, as well as the pandemic.
“In this shoot with Mara and Alba, I realized how interesting it was to work with people who also use photography and images themselves to project their dreams, fears and experiences.”
David Seymour
“David ‘Chim’ Seymour photographed Bergman during her films, and at home with her children and second husband, the Italian director Roberto Rossellini,” Ben Shneiderman, Chim’s nephew, writes. “She wrote to Chim on October 11, 1952, saying, ‘You are a marvelous photographer, and I am a marvelous baby maker,’ requesting more copies of the photos he had taken of her family. She regularly invited him to photograph her with her children.
“This photo was taken in 1953 in Italy, showing Bergman in a reflective mood. Chim’s photos of the actress remained popular. The most visible showing was at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where her portrait was featured on the official poster and on an 85ft-high white cloth that hung over the festival entrance.”
Mikhael Subotzky
“Tokai Forest is part of the greater Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town and is close to where I was born and grew up. I remember walking in those woods as a toddler and something about the quality of light when I took this shot reminded me of that time.
“Public Encounters (2003–2005) is a project that formed a sort of ‘antidote’ to the intensive engagement of my first two bodies of work on prisons and ex-prisoners, a space where I would explore another way of engaging. Each work is a portrait of a brief and random encounter, either with an individual or in some cases with a landscape.”
Newsha Tavakolian
“Deep in central Iran, where nomads have roamed for millennia, I found these two boys holding baby goats. Their parents sat in a black-colored tent, trekking across the Zagros Mountains looking for pasture for their flock. The likelihood that the boys, with their expressive faces, will follow in the footsteps of their parents is extremely slim as the nomads are rapidly dying out, a testament to the radically fast-changing times we are living in.”
Jonas Kakó
“I stumbled upon the scene in the photograph while driving down to Phoenix, when I was working on an essay about the Colorado River drought.
“I saw three men in white suits, walking in the desert. Amazed by the scene, I took the next exit to find out what was happening. The men were taking care of beehives in the middle of nowhere. In the unforgiving heat and harsh sunlight of the Arizona Desert, it looked like a scene from a moon expedition.
“I photographed them during their work providing water and checking for parasite infestation. I asked them to pose for a photograph together, to capture my initial impression of a lunar expedition and find their resemblance to pictures of astronauts.”
Hannah Reyes Morales
“On weekdays in Manila, Al Enriquez, 86, pushes a rickety wooden cart with a rainbow umbrella perched on the dilapidated wood. In these dense, chaotic streets, Al is often overlooked by the crowd. But on weekends, Al is a glorious Manila showgirl.
“Al is part of the Golden Gays, a community of older LGBTQI+ people from the Philippines who have lived together for decades, sharing a home, caring for each other as they age, and staging shows and pageants to make ends meet.
“As documentary photographers we often have to photograph disenfranchised communities. I’ve come to understand that what I hope is for viewers to look at people in the margins and truly see eye to eye with them. People like the Golden Gays have something to teach us — a way of living, and wisdom that’s valuable for us in navigating what it means to be a person in the world. A photograph is an object written by light — beyond the literal, this image to me is written by the light I find from those in front of me, showing me grace and strength.”
Finbarr O’Reilly
“I moved to Dakar in 2005 and spent nearly a decade based there as a newswire photographer covering stories across Africa. The role often meant documenting wars, coups, and disasters, but Senegal always remained a haven of peace and relative tranquility in an often tumultuous region. Alongside its golden beaches, glitzy nightclubs, and vibrant music scene, Senegal’s capital is a key African fashion hub.
“My work still revolves around conflict. Most recently, I’ve covered wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia, but I often return to Dakar, where war’s ugly scenes of death and destruction are replaced by beauty, life, and creativity.
“In this image, I was photographing Senegalese designer and Dakar Fashion Week founder Adama Paris’s new fashion line in a compound in the busy Medina neighborhood. The boys were playing ball in an alleyway and a vendor wandered in off the street, calling to the women sitting in an adjacent room. As I was photographing the models, my orchestrated shoot took on a more spontaneous character, bringing the scene to life in a way I could never have planned.”
All images in this article, and many more, are now available as exclusive 6×6″ square prints from the Magnum Shop. Priced at $110/£110/€120, prints will be shipped and delivered worldwide in time for the holidays. View the full collection here.
