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Luciérnaga

Custodians of a Desire: Herbert List’s Couples at the Beach

Herbert List’s archivist on the German artist’s photographs of love, desire, and friendship made in a restrictive political climate.

Written by Peer-Olaf Richter

During the 1930s, Herbert List spent time on the Italian, German and Greek beaches, and by the serene Swiss Lake Lucerne. Produced during a politically turbulent moment in European history, the work shows an escapist and idealist state of mind, where the power of youth and romance perseveres. But beneath the playful surface of List’s compositions lies deeper explorations of sexuality, framed within the context of a culture where, in many countries, homosexuality was illegal.

As a gay artist, List did not only capture moments that were connected to a glance of erotic desire directly, but also developed a visual language to symbolize love and friendship in same-sex couples.

As part of Magnum’s summer season, exploring beaches in Magnum photographers’ work, Herbert List’s archivist Peer-Olaf Richter has curated a collection of List’s beach images. Presented here along with a text by Richter, this underexplored body of work juxtaposes symbolic marriages of objects with some real life beach couples.

Images aiming to symbolize friendship, love or intimacy between two people can be found throughout the work of Herbert List. ‘Le Couple’ is one of the earlier stills that List shot at the Baltic Sea in 1933. It shows two identical pins on a sandy beach. It was the same year and at the same beach that he photographed two boys wrestling in the sand; an image with a homoerotic undertone. As a gay artist, List did not only capture moments that were connected to a glance of erotic desire directly, but also developed a visual language to symbolize love and friendship in same-sex couples.

The symbolic couple fascinates List, not just because it is a chiffre for something that List could not openly portray in the political climate of his times; it fascinates him, because it allows him to portray elusive subjects like love, intimacy, or friendship. In the careful arrangement and framing of objects, he charges these stills with meaning and emotions. His images of young men (and women) are playful, full of eros and lust for life. Capturing underlying emotions that do not appear through facial or physical expressions, though, is hard. Transferring this artistic dilemma to the world of objects allows him not only to find a chiffre for socially unaccepted emotions, but also to express something beneath the surface.

Reducing his search for those symbols to the gay context, however, might be a little too limiting. A few years before ‘Le Couple’, List took a picture of two bicycles leaning against each other on the same beach. The careful viewer can see that it is a male and a female bike. Additionally, in the background, we can make out two men in a rowing boat.

The political dimension of these images, though, is rather subtle: parked bicycles, put down glasses or vacant deck chairs all refer to the absent couple that left them behind. It might not be accidental that the gay theorist, critic and contemporary of List, Egon Vietta, pointed out a metaphysical aspect in List’s images through the presence of absence. This conspicuous invisibility of owners of glasses, bicycles and chairs might refer to the forced cultural invisibility of same-sex couples and homosexual life in the society of List’s time.

Custodians of Desire

"On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, marking the start of the Korean War. What followed was a savage conflict that claimed the lives of millions. The invasion followed the intensification of low-level fighting, which had been taking place along the two countries’ temporary border for years. Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel following the end of World War II; the Soviet Army took hold of the North, while US forces established control in the South with a view to eventually unifying the country. Both occupying powers established civilian regimes. However, ongoing resistance from the Soviet Union and North Korea’s new leaders towards attempts at forming one government ensured that Korea remained split.

One year into the fighting, Werner Bischof journeyed to the region to investigate the human cost of the conflict, having just completed an assignment for Magnum in India."

On the 75th anniversary of the start of the war, we look back at Bischof’s historic coverage.

Bischof had been invited to join Magnum in 1948, following his extensive documentation of life across Europe in the aftermath of World War II. This was a transitional moment for the photographer who had received an art school training and originally intended to become a painter. Although he did not pursue this route, Bischof began his photographic career working in a studio, creating beautiful images dominated by natural forms and abstract shapes.

However, the experience of documenting post-war Europe made him question his role as a photographer and he became committed to using the medium as a tool for social change. He officially joined the agency in 1949, alongside its four founding members. Moving away from his fine art roots, Bischof continued to embrace a more photojournalistic approach and, from 1951 to 1952, dedicated himself to documenting social and political issues across Asia.

The photographer’s first stop was India, where he worked on a number of projects including his renowned photo-essay Famine Story, which shed light on the severe famine ravaging the country. Bischof soon became set on traveling to Korea, determined to expose the suffering of civilians caught up in the war.

On the morning of July 5, 1951, he joined ten other correspondents from around the world on a flight to Seoul. “I just had to see for myself how this war was being conducted. (Something else was at play too: I found it important to show the human, the civilian side of the story. The Koreans who were chased out of their homes,)” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Rosellina Bischof, sent from Tokyo on July 11, 1951.

Despite making the transition to photojournalism, Bischof’s relationship with photography remained complex. He particularly struggled with the realities of being a photojournalist and was angered by the prevalence of, what he regarded as, sensationalistic and careless reporting. In the same letter to Rosellina he described his first impressions of Seoul: “Among these ruins, the press center shone as the sole lit block, hundreds of journalists. It seemed to me as if we were vultures on the battlefield, always out for the sensationalistic …” However, it was a desire to go beyond the shocking images strewn across newspapers’ front pages that drove him on. So, as he had done in India, and post-war Europe before, Bischof looked beyond the immediate and produced a poignant documentation of those behind the battlefront.

This deeper and more considered approach to reporting is a defining characteristic of Magnum photographers, but one that was shaped by Bischof’s artistic background too. “I always and in every way go too deep into the subject matter, and that is not journalistic,” he wrote in a letter to Robert Capa, sent from Tokyo on September 9, 1951.

His artistic roots had also equipped him with an appreciation of beauty, which Bischof translated from his studio work into his documentary practice, including the work he produced in Korea. “His photographs had a tendency towards the absolute — a combination of beauty with truth: a stone became a world, a child was all children, a war was all wars,” observed the photojournalist Ernst Haas, an early Magnum colleague.

After investigating war-torn Seoul, Bischof traveled to Sanyang-ri, a small village nestled in one of the many valleys of central Korea; an area that had become a no man’s land for troops in battle. “Not a single native Korean male is tolerated in this war zone, not a woman, not a child, only soldiers,” observed Bischof in the report for Magnum Photos, dated July 8, 1951, which he wrote to accompany his images. Bischof accompanied a small Civil Assistance group as they evacuated the inhabitants of this forgotten village. As was the photographer’s intention, the resulting photo story sheds light on the harsh realities for civilians caught up in the conflict.

In his report, Bischof described the desperate scenes he encountered: starving and ill civilians, many of whom were reluctant to leave their homes. The Civil Assistance group moved from house to house, providing clothes, food and medical help. Bischof followed, photographing and making notes as the team evacuated the village and brought its inhabitants to a nearby rendezvous, where they received further assistance.

“In front of another house, a small skeletal body sits in the dazzling sunlight, crouches naked on the floor, absolutely covered in flies. Near to her, her sixteen-year-old brother is unable to use his limbs. A shaven-headed figure in the hut takes no notice. We think it is a child, but the interpreter says it is a thirty-year-old woman,” reads an excerpt from the report.

In January 1952 Bischof reluctantly traveled to Koje-Do Island in South Korea to document a United Nations re-education camp for Chinese and North Korean prisoners. On hearing the news that a number of prisoners had been shot, a colleague he was traveling with urged him to go. “I was against it, but John thought it very important — so we flew off, as if it were a Sunday excursion, journalists from around the world, joking cheerful,” he wrote.

The camp was spread over a large area spanning two valleys and was home to around 160,000 North Korean and Chinese prisoners at its height. Journalists were able to explore relatively freely, but were prohibited from talking to inmates.

Bischof characteristically focused on the prisoners, creating a series of images documenting their everyday lives and the United Nations attempts at reeducating them. His writing from the trip sheds light on his critical views of the situation: “We cannot deny that what we are doing here is political manipulation and an attempt to make these people grasp the ideas behind our own view of life.”

The photo story was subsequently published in LIFE in March 1952. Bischof’s negative reception of the editors’ selection of images reflected his issues with photojournalism more broadly: “It is difficult to take photographs in a prison camp, to hold onto your humanity, and subsequently to have the best pictures discarded by the censors. I sometimes ask myself whether I have become just another “reporter,” a word that I have always hated so much.”

Bischof was deeply affected by the suffering he witnessed in Korea. His images stand as a powerful testament to the massive civilian cost of the war, which remains unresolved to this day. Following his work in Korea, Bischof went on to spend five months in Japan, before traveling to Hong Kong, and then on to Indochina. He remained committed to photography until his untimely death in a road accident in the Andes on the May 16, 1954."

- Written by Hannah Abel-Hirsch · Jul 27, 2018

The Korean War: Behind the Battlefront...

At the very beginning of his photographic career, Rafal Milach began to document the area of Polish Upper Silesia where he grew up. Stretching from southern Poland into areas of Czechia, the region is predominantly known for its heavy industry. More than twenty years later, he returned, this time on the Czech side of the border, to reflect on the search of identity of an area that has undergone radical political and economic transformation.

This documentation is the first commission of the “A World in Color” series in collaboration with Fujifilm, in which a Magnum photographer responds to a selection of unseen color images found in the Magnum color library archive in Paris. Rafal Milach shoot a series of images in Ostrava, Czechia, in response to images taken by Magnum photographers documenting Czechoslovakia's liberation from the Soviet Union, the fall of communism, and the accompanying euphoria.

"More than 35 years have passed since The Velvet Revolution, but the consequences are still felt in many places today," Milach said, reffering to Upper Silesia.

While digging through the archives, Milach discovered a lack of documentation on the industrial character of the region, except from Eliott Erwitt's picture from Brno. This prompted the photographer to focus on post-industrial Czech Silesia, an area greatly affected by economic transformation.

Post-industrial Czechia

Migrant Workers in Lebanon

Hiroji Kubota

Olivia Arthur Cover Story for CAP...

In May 2025, Nanna Heitmann traveled with New York Times reporters to document the reaction of Syrians to the increase in sectarian tensions and violence in their country. Since the fall of Assad's dictatorship, violence against religious minorities is rising, coinciding with the country's reform process under a Sunni Muslim majority government. Starting with the massacre of Alawites — a religious minority to which Bashar al-Assad belonged — in March of this year, attacks on the Druze community followed.

A religious minority belonging to a branch of Shi'ite Islam, the Druze primarily reside in Lebanon, Israel, and Syria's southern Sweida province, as well as in some suburbs of Damascus.

Heitmann, Bureau Chief Vivian Yee and journalist Reham Mourshed traveled to the southern Damascus suburbs of Jamarana and Ashrafieh Sahnaya to attend the funeral of seven men killed in an attack suspected to have been carried out by Islamic extremists on April 29, after an audio clip that was attributed to a Druze cleric who was criticizing the Prophet Muhammad circulated on social networks. As internal clashes destabilize the country, the latest surge in violence against the Shiite minority has also prompted the Netanyahu government in Israel — which has close ties to the Israeli Druze community — to launch airstrikes against Syrian government targets in retaliation. The photographer documented the ensuing protests.

Sectarian Violence in Syria

In 2023, the Biden administration made the CBP One app mandatory for asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border, leaving many stranded in Mexican cities without access to basic services while waiting for appointments. In January 2025, the Trump administration disabled the app’s scheduling feature, effectively shutting down the only official asylum pathway and further limiting options for those already at risk. On assignment with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Yael Martinez documented migrant camps in Mexico City, where many people from Venezuela and Central America have settled in search of safety, stability, and a chance to rebuild their lives.

Migrant Camps in Mexico City

When he was 21, Lyon’s father passed on to him a 1953 Oldsmobile. He discovered the ecstasy of speeding along Georgia highways during the civil rights movement, with red dirt fields of peanuts and cotton flying by. In the excitement of driving, he realized his own mortality. Lyon’s ‘Junk: America in Ruins’ is a book of pictures of 86 American cars, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, made in the junkyards of the western United States. The pictures were taken in Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma. This is a work of pure visual photography. The premise behind the work is that many things—sculptures, monuments, buildings—take on a new and added beauty as they deteriorate and become ruins: a certain pathos is added to their original beauty. This is true of the automobiles in this series: once the beloved machines of people and families who owned and drove them, they now evoke a terrible beauty and sadness.

Damiani, Spring 2025
Hardbound
120 pages, 86 illustrations
ISBN: 9788862088329

Junk: America in Ruins.

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Catholic Church, known globally for his humility and deep compassion for the poor, has passed away at the age of 88, according to an announcement by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the Vatican camerlengo.

Pope Francis: 1936 - 2025

$Sabiha Çimen has been photographically documenting the USA since 2019, capturing images of the country and its people through the lens of a Turkish immigrant. Sabiha Çimen’s “Blueberries in Turkey” is a visual love letter and a gentle provocation—an unfolding photographic meditation on displacement, perception, and the delicate friction of cultural encounter. Over six years, Çimen has journeyed through the vast and fractured landscapes of the United States, photographing not just places, but the echoes, textures, and temperatures of belonging and otherness. As a Turkish Muslim woman newly woven into the American fabric through marriage, Çimen does not simply document what she sees—she listens with her lens. Her medium-format color photographs are intimate and cinematic, saturated with curiosity and restraint. They move like quiet poems across interiors and highways, grocery aisles and kitchens, desert plains and suburban thresholds. Through her eyes, America is both strange and achingly familiar: full of contradictions, tenderness, excess, silence. The project is deeply personal. Çimen photographs her own process of becoming—learning the rituals of a new life, contending with a slow-burning culture shock that resides not in grand gestures, but in the mundane: the way onion and fruit is pre-sliced in supermarkets “to save time”, also a recurring theme in her encounters is the projection of exoticism and ignorance onto her Turkish identity. Innocent yet telling questions—“Do you have blueberries in Turkey?” “Donuts?” “Washing machines?”—reflect a deeper narrative of cultural misrecognition and geopolitical distance. These encounters are not simply humorous or absurd—they are profound. They reveal the quiet violence of assumption, and the distance between imagination and reality. But this is not just a story of how the immigrant sees America. It is also about how America sees the immigrant—how a woman wrapped in unfamiliar vowels and gestures is received, categorized, misunderstood, or celebrated. Çimen turns this gaze inside out, offering an inversion of the ethnographic eye. Her work collapses the traditional divide between documentarian and subject, replacing it with a fluid, reciprocal gaze—one that is deeply felt, politically aware, and rich with artistic intuition. From portraits to still lifes, from fleeting roadside moments to the layered intimacy of domestic space, “Blueberries in Turkey” composes a dreamlike atlas of Çimen’s American experience. It is both tender and sharp—a lyrical exploration of hybridity, alienation, and the surreal beauty of everyday life seen through the eyes of an outsider who is slowly becoming, yet never quite belonging. This ongoing body of work, tentatively titled “Blueberries in Turkey”, is envisioned as a photographic book. Far from a traditional travelogue, the project is an anthropological and phenomenological meditation on displacement, perception, and the aesthetics of difference. Çimen’s medium-format color photographs, marked by their quiet intensity and attention to detail, move fluidly between portraiture, landscape, interior, and still life—offering a polyphonic and richly textured account of contemporary America. Rather than seek definitive answers, Çimen’s project asks vital questions: What does it mean to belong? How does space transform identity? How does one navigate the beauty, absurdity, and violence of cultural translation? In documenting the subtle and the surreal, she creates a cartography of emotional and existential encounters—a visual essay on the meaning of home, hospitality, and the unseen labor of adaptation.$