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ZERO LINE At the edge of silence and survival on a shifting front. By Chien-Chi Chang At 3:47 a.m. near the Dnipro River in Kherson, our BMP-2 jolted to a stop inside the zero line. Moments later, the thunder of 30mm autocannon fire erupted in rapid succession, each muzzle flash briefly illuminating the darkness like a lightning tracer. The blasts rang like a steel drum in my skull. The recoil rocked the vehicle. Just meters away, my fixer and I crouched in the dark, exposed, flinching with each concussion. It lasted less than a minute. "Back in, now—move!" a soldier barked, and we lurched into motion, speeding away at 90 kilometers per hour through pitch-black, mined terrain. The engine roared. Metal clanged. Each jolt slammed through our spines, the hull a drumbeat of violence. We were sitting atop nearly 300 gallons of diesel and crates of unfired 30mm cannon rounds. The sense of vulnerability was suffocating. One rocket and everything would have gone up in flames. Hours later, back at the base, the gunner told me we had been pursued by a Russian suicide drone. If we had been hit, the drone's explosive payload would have ruptured the tank. Such a strike would have jolted the diesel violently. Had we been hit, this story would have ended there. The gunner just grinned as if it were nothing unusual—a shrug toward fate more than fear. I didn't hear the drone. I only felt the speed, the urgency, the silence of men trained to survive. The blast of the cannon still reverberated in my ears. And after I was told what could have happened, a cold chill shot through my spine. In March 2025, I embedded with the first battalion of Ukraine's 40th Brigade for multiple missions into the zero line, including two deployments to the Dnipro River. In each, four marines in ghillie suits, rifles slung, boarded a rubber boat with supplies to last a month. The river separates not just territories but worlds, both sides lined with death. But while the frontline remained volatile, global focus began to shift. In recent months, international attention has drifted elsewhere. The escalating conflict between Israel and Iran—marked by missile exchanges and retaliatory airstrikes—has drawn headlines and global political focus. The crisis threatens to ignite a broader regional war and drag in global powers, while monopolizing diplomatic bandwidth. This shift has deepened a sense of "Ukraine fatigue" in the international arena. Resources, media coverage, and political will have been diverted, even as the war in Ukraine has grown more deadly. Since early 2025, Russia has steadily reinforced its positions, escalating drone warfare and artillery strikes across multiple fronts, including civilian targets. These attacks are often silent until they have an impact, devastating in effect and corrosive to morale. The obligation of the press remains: to bear witness and to remind the world that this war is far from over. And so, the zero line continues to evolve. The zero line is not a single place—it's a shifting concept shaped by unit and terrain. For infantry, it might be the trench just beyond the tree line. For artillery, it's the edge of effective range. For special forces, it's deep inside enemy territory. In Zaporizhzhia, it looks different than in Donbas. Along the Dnipro in Kherson, it's the riverbanks and islands—thick with mud, mines, and motion—where both sides operate within artillery range. There is no fixed map for the zero line. It moves like the war itself—and with it, the danger: sudden, relentless, and often unseen. To cross it is to enter a space where hesitation can kill. There's no warning, no second chances. Just darkness, orders, and the sound of your breath as the vehicle lurches forward. Operations like these only happen at night. No headlights, no flashlights—only dim tail lights on the Humvee pulling the rubber boat. The Humvee, equipped with drone jammers and driven by a soldier using night vision goggles, moves fast over treacherous terrain. These are moments when everything feels exposed: the soldiers, the machines, the terrain itself. You don't see the threat. You feel it moving somewhere beyond the reeds. Even in total darkness, the risk is palpable. The danger never fades. During the day, the same soldiers train relentlessly. I watched them hammer river crossings, sprint through drills, and plant booby traps. They fired rocket-propelled grenades, launched mortars, and drilled for chaos. They studied digital maps and coordinates inside shattered buildings—preparing for missions that would unfold in darkness. Between missions, they called family, checked Telegram, and washed clothes in makeshift bases. But mostly, they waited. Waited for the next mission. Waited for coordinates. Listened to orders. The rhythm of war is not constant fire. It's long stretches of silence broken by sudden movement. It's waiting, watching, and preparing. And in those long pauses, stories surfaced—some spoken, others carried in silence. Khatab, a 42-year-old company commander, shared his story from the 2022 Kherson counter-offensive. His call sign, like many here, is all that can be used. Ordered to hold a strategic position with 100 men, he and his unit endured waves of brutal onslaught—shells whistling overhead, rifle and machine gun fire shredding the tree line, smoke choking the trenches. Reinforcements arrived two hours late. Before that, a radio message warned, "Two Russian tanks are moving toward you." Khatab is a big man—190 centimeters tall, about 90 kilograms—with a big heart. Shrouded in smoke, his uniform soaked with sweat and dirt, he gave away two of his three remaining magazines to fellow soldiers. The air was thick with the metallic stench of blood and cordite. At one point, he was shot in the leg. He readied a grenade to kill any Russians who breached their lines. But rescue came. As he limped out, he stepped over the mangled bodies of comrades, the mud sticky with blood and ash. Of 100 men, only nine survived. Mid-sentence, his voice stuttered. His eyes welled. He stepped outside for a smoke. The lighter's flick was barely audible over the silence that followed. Bushido, a call sign, a weapon specialist trained by French and Estonian instructors in Poland, told me: "Two is one. One is none." When he's on a mission, he carries at least eight magazines, four tourniquets, a radio, IFAKs, grenades, water, drone jammers, and three flashlights. His kit is heavy, worn, and purposeful. When asked about preferred weapons, he shrugged. "The one in your hand is the best." In the safe warehouse before each deployment, we waited in total darkness. Phones cast faint glows on tired faces—the hum of generators outside mixed with the distant thud of incoming and outgoing artillery. Inside, stillness reigned—shallow breaths, occasional coughs, the rustle of ghillie suits, the mewl of stray cats threading through shadows. Radio static crackled with updates from the command center. The sense of abandonment is real. Trump floated ceasefire plans but slowly backtracked, leaving troops with nothing but commanders they trust. To them, politics is noise. Washington's mood swings—whether Trump's erratic promises or Europe's cautious diplomacy—feel distant. The only voice that matters is their commander's. Outside, a Pathfinder sat ready. A drone scanner and walkie-talkie lay on the dash. But even these have limits. Many drones fly on undetectable frequencies, and fiber-optic suicide drones offer no warning. Unmanned warfare—drones in the air, on land, and at sea—has redefined this war. They scout, strike, and kill. Drone jammers are mounted on vehicles. Soldiers rebuild battery packs, craft bomb casings with 3D printers, and repurpose commercial gear. Ukraine produced approximately 2 million combat drones in 2024, making it one of the world's most prolific manufacturers of drones. That number is expected to rise to 4.5 million in 2025 as the country ramps up domestic production to meet battlefield demand. On June 1, 2025, the Ukrainian military launched a meticulously planned operation that had been in the making for 18 months. Codenamed "Spider Web," the strike used concealed shipping containers to deliver 117 drones deep into Russian territory, targeting five airbases. At least 13 Russian warplanes were damaged, dealing a significant blow to Russia's air power. On this battlefield, the enemy may be a signal, a shadow, a whirring sound above. The war is no longer fought solely by those holding rifles, but also by machines watching from the sky. Before each mission, soldiers tested drone jammers, prepped 30mm belts for the BMP-2, and readied 57mm shells for the AZP S-60 anti-aircraft gun. Elsewhere, improvised aerial munitions—fire-starting, thermal, high-explosive—lay ready. Batteries were repacked for an extended range. Drone warfare is not a sideline. It is the war. Yet despite the high-tech drone warfare, older Soviet-era weapons remain crucial on the battlefield. Ukraine makes use of everything it can get—repaired, repurposed, and fired. The AZP S-60 is a Soviet towed, road-transportable, anti-aircraft gun from the 1950s, once widely used across Warsaw Pact countries. In Kherson today, it has been repurposed—mounted on trucks to fire across the Dnipro River. Designed to defend the skies, it now strikes ground targets. War adapts. So do the people. On one mission, two AZP S-60s were set deep inside the zero line, locked in and ready to strike across the river. Then came the command: Abort! Abort! We scrambled back to the vehicle. Flashes burst across the distance. Seconds later, we heard rockets whoosh overhead and explode farther away. We tore away at full speed. The escape was as fast and chaotic as the setup had been meticulous. A reminder: the zero line bends to its rhythm. Plans shift in seconds. Even the most carefully positioned weapons can be silenced by an incoming barrage. And then, just as quickly, another mission begins. On the way to the zero line, we passed ruins: tangled irrigation pipes, collapsed homes, and smoke on the horizon. I thought it was a rocket. It was just a burning truck. But we knew the signs. A flash on the horizon means an incoming rocket. Light travels faster than sound. In a few seconds, a flying, buzzing, whirling lawnmower—an FPV drone—could smash into the field, followed by a bang-like sound as steel tears apart inside a furnace, echoing across the open terrain. But we kept moving. Faster. Lower. Once, inside a rubber boat towed ashore, I saw soldiers scan the tree line while others covered them with rifles. They knew every crossing could be deadly. After returning to the safe warehouse, in total darkness lit only by dim red headlamps, they chain-smoked and drank water, pouring it over their heads. A ritual. A release. Zero line is not just a title. It's what I saw, what I lived. It is the line between light and dark, between promises made and help withheld. Ukraine isn't fighting for symbolism. It's fighting to exist. It's the crunch of boots through ruined fields. It's the glow of a phone screen in a blackout safe house. It's the silence that precedes the launch of the rocket. Its memory is scraped raw by reality. And memory alone is not enough. It must be brought to awareness, then to action. The next front is not just physical. It's personal. It begins with what we choose to see, remember, and resist. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I've made ten self-funded trips to the frontlines. What I witnessed there may well foreshadow Taiwan's future. Kherson and Taipei—strategically and existentially—are closer than they appear. That sense sharpened on July 4, 2025, Russia launched its largest drone-and-missile assault since the war began: 539 drones and 11 missiles struck across Ukraine in a single day. The attack came just hours after a phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. While no direct link is confirmed, several outlets noted the timing. In Taiwan, the news barely registered. War fatigue has set in; few seemed to notice, or care. But as someone who has stood on the zero line—who has returned from the edge of life and death—that morning hit hard. The memories rushed back: the hum of drones, the trembling ground, the unbearable waiting. Fearing Taiwan could meet the same fate, I returned to Austria and filed a petition to recall our legislators. This, too, is the burden—and duty—of being citizen Chang.

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Zero Line 

Thirty years ago, 8,000 Bosnian Muslims lost their lives and thousands more were displaced in the Srebrenica massacre at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs. The event marked one of the darkest chapters of the Bosnian War (1992–1995) and was the first genocide recognized by the international community since the Holocaust. While the ethnic conflict resulted in around 100,000 deaths, the genocide left deep emotional scars on survivors, the families of victims, and Bosnian and Herzegovinian society in general. These scars created enduring obstacles to reconciliation among the country’s different ethnic groups. Following the United Nations General Assembly's adoption of a resolution last year, July 11 officially became the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. Magnum photographers Gilles Peress and Abbas documented the ethnic cleansing in Sarajevo in 1993, and Paolo Pellegrin photographed the scars left on the Bosnian population at a remembrance event in 2012.

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30th Anniversary of the Srebrenica... 

I AM STILL HERE - My Lens, is an online exhibition by Magnum photographer Newsha Tavakolian, in collaboration with The Salvation Army, Stop Trafficking Africa and the Hope Education Project, shedding light on the current human trafficking crisis through healing stories of West African women who have survived modern slavery. Human trafficking remains an unresolved issue worldwide. According to the UNODC 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, the number of victims of human trafficking increased by 25% to 74,785 in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, compared with the pre-pandemic levels. Of these cases, 61% involved women, most of whom were trafficked for sexual purposes. I AM STILL HERE - My Lens, aims to shine a light on a worldwide phenomenon that is often overlooked. The largest proportion of trafficking originates from Africa, according to the same report. And around 15, 000 victims from Africa were in Europe and the Middle East between 2019 and 2024, but also in East Asia and North America. While displacement, insecurity and climate change are increasing the vulnerability of people from the continent, poverty and economic inequality, coupled with weak institutional responses, push them to seek a better future elsewhere, engaging in labour migration. Meanwhile traffickers prosper — sometimes even within the victim's own family thanks to the same factors. I AM STILL HERE - My lens, brings together the stories of survivors of human trafficking and modern slavery — from those who were promised a nursing education in the UK, to those who were lured to Dubai with false employment offers — who share their journeys from exploitation to recovery and empowerment. The project uses photography to share the testimonies of Theresa, Joy, Elizabeth , Grace, Wendy, Maryam, Jennifer, Lima and Layla. Through first-person accounts, the exhibition highlights their journeys to healing and empowerment after oppression, ensuring their dignity and agency are preserved throughout.

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I AM STILL HERE - My Lens 

This month around the world, cities will be celebrating Pride Month. One of the oldest and most well known, NYC's Pride celebration is marked by a parade in downtown Manhattan, which Bruce Gilden photographed on Sunday. He captured the festive spirit of the day and the celebration and energy that enveloped the cityOn Sunday, June 29, people paraded through the streets of New York City to celebrate Pride Month. Bruce Gilden photographed the participants in Manhattan, capturing their various personalities.

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Pride Parade in Manhattan 

Biography 

Constantine Manos 

American actor Michael Madsen has died at the age of 67. With a film career spanning 40 years, Madsen was best known for his collaborations with director Quentin Tarantino.

Archive 

Michael Madsen: 1957 - 2025 

"Telex: Iran" is an extraordinarily personal document of a public event. The photographs Gilles Peress took over a five-week period during 1979-1980 focus on the seizure of the American embassy and a number of hostages in Teheran by student proxy groups of the new Iranian regime. However, the book forms neither a study nor an analysis of that singular event. Peress' photographs do not purport to tell the story - any story - but are the nearly seismographic record of the photojournalist's perceptions, encounters, and not least, his emotions as he moves through the city and the countryside of a nation in upheaval. Involved one day, alienated the next; insightful in Tabriz, at sea in Qom; attracted to one subject, repelled by another, "Telex: Iran" beats out the raw rhythms of Iran's dislocations, both historical and individual. First published in 1984, this exceptionally designed book established Gilles Peress' reputation as a photojournalist. The reissue of "Telex Iran" in 1997 shows that these photos only gain impact with Iran's continuing role as a key player in the Middle East.

Book 

Telex Iran 

On August 6th and 9th​, 1945 the ​US dropp​e​d two atomic bombs on Japan: the only instances of nuclear weapons having been used in warfare​. The combined death toll was estimated to be between 129,000 to 250,000 with half of the victims perishing during the months following the attacks. ​​This year's 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki comes during a time of geopolitical tension, with people looking to the past as proof of the horrors of nuclear warfare.

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80th Anniversary of the Hiroshima... 

In response to the current humanitarian crisis' endeavours,​ and to mark the Global Summit: Health and Prosperity through Immunisation, Magnum Photos and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance​ collaborated on a project to showcase the impact Gavi-supported vaccines are having around the world. The resulting visual essays highlight the results achieved in the last 25 years, from the wholesome youth of today who have grown up free from disease to health workers braving conflict, from the excitement surrounding the rollout of malaria vaccines to the freedom celebrated by girls receiving a HPV vaccine. Magnum storytellers shine a light on the human stories​ the humanitarian system helps create every single day, all around the world, helping to build a healthier, safer and more prosperous future.

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Health and Prosperity through Immunisation... 

As demonstrations continue in Los Angeles following a series of coordinated city-wide federal immigration raids on June 6, Carolyn Drake took to the city’s streets photographing protesters at and around the Los Angeles City Hall in its Civic Center district. The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) led a series of raids across Los Angeles, resulting in thousands of arrests, receiving widespread criticism from local officials, advocacy groups and activists for what is seen as the indiscriminate targeting of immigrant communities. Large-scale demonstrations in Los Angeles and other cities in the USA followed, seeing violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement, including 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines deployed by the Trump administration to curb unrest — an act condemned as federal overreach by California state officials.

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L.A protests against I.C.E. 

Former Nicaraguan President Violeta Barrios Torres de Chamorro has died at the age of 95. Chamorro became an important figure in the opposition of Anastasio Somoza Debayle's government following the assassination of her husband, journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal in 1978; an event which helped spark the Nicaraguan Revolution. Though a member of the junta which ruled the country following the Sandinistas' victory Over Somoza's regime, the establishment of a Marxist, pro-Soviet regime which began implementing censorship and police-state policies resulted in Chamorro's resignation. She resumed her role as editor of her deceased husband's newspaper, La Prensa, and became a vocal proponent of free speech and democracy. She was chosen as the opposition's candidate for President in the 1990 election and unexpectedly defeated incumbent Daniel Ortega. Violeta Chamorro was the first woman elected as a head of state in the Americas.

Archive 

Violeta Chamorro: 1929 - 2025 

Luciérnagas is in many ways a ritual. An attempt to exorcise the unresolved traumas in the spectral landscape of Magnum Photographer Yael Martinez’s homeland in Guerrero, México. The work began in 2013 after three members of the artist's family disappeared. This tragedy began an investigation into the pervasive violence of organized crime in the region, how it infiltrates daily life and transforms the spirit of a place. He later spent time alongside other families with missing loved ones. Through these encounters, dots were connected beyond the artist's immediate family and across borders into Honduras, Brazil, and the US, forming a constellation imbued with the shared experience of endemic violence. Throughout the work, images are threaded together by diaristic notes from the field. They were written by Martinez as he grappled with the range of emotions presented in the aftermath of loss and the process of navigating bereavement with families who were never given a chance to mourn. We don’t see death in Luciérnaga, but its omnipresence is felt throughout, lingering in the shadows of each photograph. Each image painfully underwritten by the result of a calculated violence that visited unseen and undetected, leaving behind the immense void of a vanished loved one. And yet there is always a sense of hope that informs the making of this work. Between 2019 to 2023, Martinez began a series of interventions into his photographs, piercing holes through the prints and then backlighting them. Bright rays emanate through the pictures in free flowing shapes, throwing light against a dark backdrop. In this process the light metamorphosizes with the scenes depicted and conjures an alchemy where something restorative, tentatively optimistic and resilient occurs. It is in Luciérnaga's blend of fantasy and reality that the well-covered topics of violence in the Latin American context are re-examined. Feelings are expressed rather than evoked, and via the ordinary characters who guide us through this book, scope is given to the humanity of those enduring a difficult territory, whilst confronting the personal cost of violence. Now brought together in book form for the first time, the disappearances at the hands of organized crime and state violence are given a new representation, one where light illuminates the darkness as the firefly leads us into new possible realms. Details Size: 18 x 24.5 x 2 cm

Book 

Luciérnagas 

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.

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Post-industrial Czechia 

Migrant workers in Lebanon live in precarious conditions. Under the kafala system, also known as "sponsorship," each of them must have a Lebanese sponsor in order to be allowed to work in the country. Their fate hinges on the ethical compass of the latter, who usually controls their lives. Often, sponsors overwork and underpay migrant workers, isolating them from the outside world, and denying them access to healthcare. An estimated 176,500 migrants live in Lebanon as of 2025, about 70 per cent of whom are women. 50% are domestic workers, meaning they live with their employees, usually under harsh conditions. Stories of racism and discrimination are common among migrant workers in Lebanon, and their mistreatment and exploitation has become so normalised that even the most shocking stories no longer raise eyebrows. The recent Israeli war in Lebanon exacerbated their socio-economic situation, with many being abandoned by their employers and left on their own in the streets or locked in their houses in war-affected areas. Photographer Myriam Boulos was assigned by Médecins Sans Frontières to portray some of the female migrant workers living in shelters provided by the organisation, as well as the daily activities of MSF's workers at their clinic in the northern Beirut suburb of Burj Hammoud. There, MSF teams respond to migrants’ medical needs by offering basic consultations, sexual and reproductive health services, and mental health services including psychiatric consultations. During the intensive wartime period, migrant community leaders helped MSF teams reach migrants in the greatest need of assistance in overcrowded shelters and apartments. There, essential relief items were donated and medical care was delivered through a mobile clinic.

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Migrant Workers in Lebanon 

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.

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Migrant Camps in Mexico City 

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.

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“Blueberries in Turkey”. Viewing... 

The Volksbund organization's mission is to find the graves of every German who died in the country's wars, and to give each one a decent burial. The organization works to determine the identity of the people whose remains are found through objects: dog tags, letters from relatives, etc. Every year, they uncover war graves of 8000 to 12,000 former soldiers or victims. But in a Germany driven by the duty of remembering the atrocities committed by the Nazis during WWII, the group has been the subject of much controversy, stemming from its commitment to giving every body uncover a decent burial, making no distinction between victims and perpetrators. In 2020, anti-fascist leaders filed a complaint when they heard that some German politicians had attended a funeral ceremony with the organization, honoring the remains of prominent Nazis such as Julius Dettman, who had imprisoned Ann Frank, among others. Founded in 1919 as the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the private group used to receive donations from relatives of the dead, but with fewer living today, there is also some suspicion about where the funding comes from, especially at a time when the Afd is gaining strength. On assignment for the NYT Magazine, Antoine d'Agata traveled with journalist Nick Casey to follow the organization's activities. Starting from a house in the garden of the Van Beuningen family, which turned out to be a mass grave with more than 300 skeletons, the duo followed the search for the dead and delved into the cogs of the organization. They visited the headquarters, where they met Dirck Backen, the director of the Volksbund, and where they saw the methods used to uncover the identities of the bodies found. They also met Réveil, a 98-year-old man who decided to reveal a war crime he'd committed with his Maquis brigade at the end of the war: the killing of 47 Nazi soldiers. With his guerrilla group, they made the soldiers dig their own graves, then killed them all and left them there, and nobody knew about it until now. Casey and d'Agata also went to Hungary to witness the exhumation of the bones of many Hungarian and German soldiers who, according to Casey's report, died of typhus.

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Unearthing the Third Reich 

Since 2023, Thomas Dworzak has been traveling along the Russian border, from Finland to eastern Kazakhstan, to assess the impact of the war in Ukraine on neighboring countries: their perceptions of and relations with Russia, the influence of the United States, and the evolution of their own national security policies after the invasion. Since Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, the term has come to define the separation between Russia and the West, a way to examine the shifting ideological and geopolitical boundary between Russia and its influence on Eastern Europe, and these longstanding tensions with the West. Covering military training, landscapes, museums, and ordinary moments of life, Dworzak explores each place with a specific geographical angle, linking each to its historical significance. Each of these countries has its specific complex history with Russia, and the war in Ukraine has moved people with a particular sentiment, whether it be independence or aggressivity towards Russia, like in the Baltics where volunteer military training is expanding, or a more tempered sentiment and assimilation of Russian culture such as in Kazakhstan.The photographer explores the tensions linked to a painful past, stretching back to Imperial Russia, and awakened again by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

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The New Iron Curtain - Ongoing... 

On Saturday, October 7th, Israel was taken by surprise in an unexpected and severe cross-border assault by Hamas from Gaza, resulting in the initial deaths of 900 people. The BBC reported that included in this number were 260 individuals attending a music festival. With many still missing or abducted by Hamas in Israel, families are left desperately seeking information as the conflict unfolds. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared war on Hamas, vowing to use “enormous force” by launching strikes in Gaza and imposing a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, freezing the flow of essential supplies. According to the BBC, as of October 9th approximately 690 people in Gaza had lost their lives and more than 120,000 had been displaced from their homes. The result of this has triggered the latest outbreak of fighting in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing in outside powers and echoing across the broader Arab region.

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Israel and Palestine from the Archives... 

The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014, triggered by Ukraine's Maidan Revolution. Over the following eight years, the conflict escalated with naval skirmishes, cyberattacks, Russia's annexation of Crimea and support to pro-Russian separatists fighting against Ukraine’s military in the ongoing Donbas War. In February 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine, deepening its occupation and igniting the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. The war has caused a massive refugee crisis and led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Magnum Photographers have been documenting the Russo-Ukrainian War since 2014, capturing scenes from the front lines and inside both countries, illustrating the impact of the war on people's daily lives. The selection below showcases our ongoing coverage in the region, which has spanned over a decade.

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Russo-Ukrainian War