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2024 has seen unprecedented violence and turmoil in the Middle East.

Killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese, displacing millions, and wounding many more, Israel's massive military retaliation for Hamas's October 7 attacks leaves open wounds and scars in Palestine and Lebanon, and profoundly destabilizes the region.

A week after the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon on November 27, neighboring Syria saw the historic liberation of Bachar al Assad on December 3, leaving the door open for mourning, development and reconstruction in a country deeply shaken by dictatorship.

Lebanese photographer Myriam Boulos, based in Beirut, witnessed the unfolding events and shared her perspective through the lens of her camera during the months she spent in her homeland and while on assignment in the neighboring country.

2024 by Myriam Boulos

Nowruz, the Iranian or Persian New Year, has been celebrated for centuries by communities across Southwest Asia during the Spring Equinox. Magnum photographers have documented these vibrant celebrations by various ethnicities, capturing moments where, amid conflict, the light of a new year and new life shines through.

Nowruz

On assignment for The Washington Post, photographer Emin Ozmen traveled to Calais with journalist Karla Adam in early February to document the perilous conditions for migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from France to England.

According to the British Home Office, in 2024 nearly 37,000 migrants crossed the channel in small boats. The British government has recently announced that it will step up its response to the border security threat, a move that has raised concerns among experts who fear that migrants will face criminal charges and even worse conditions without more responsibility being placed on smugglers.

Migrants in Calais: The Channel...

The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is a global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The novel virus was first identified in an outbreak in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, before it spread to other areas of Asia, and then worldwide in early 2020. As of 28 May 2024, the pandemic has caused 7,049,376 confirmed deaths, making it the fifth-deadliest pandemic or epidemic in history.

The pandemic caused severe social and economic disruption around the world, including the largest global recession since the Great Depression. Reduced human activity led to an unprecedented temporary decrease in pollution. Educational institutions and public areas were partially or fully closed in many jurisdictions, and many events were cancelled or postponed during 2020 and 2021. Telework became much more common for white-collar workers as the pandemic evolved. The pandemic raised issues of health equity, and the balance between public health imperatives and individual rights.

March 2025: 5 years since covid-19...

The beginning of the Lebanese Civil War is typically dated to April 13th, 1975, when the Phalangists attacked a bus taking Palestinians to a refugee camp. The war is complex, marked by violence between communities (Christians, Druze, Shiites, Sunnis), clashes within communities and multiple foreign interventions - invasions by Syria and Israel, and less direct interventions by notably France, the Arab League, and Iran.

Between 150,000 and 250,000 people were killed during the war and many disappeared or were exiled. In 1989, the Taif Agreement marked the end of the fighting on paper. The after-effects of the conflict were felt over a long period with occasional outbreaks of violence and considerable political instability, continuing in the region today.

April 13th, 2025: 50 years since...

Philip Jones Griffiths

Countries worldwide are feeling the impact of the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid, which eliminated over 90% of contracts and reduced funding by around $60 billion. Many programs in vulnerable nations rely on USAID for health systems and nutrition, while efforts to combat terrorism and trafficking, including fentanyl, will also be affected, according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric. Magnum Photographers have traveled to many of the countries benefiting from or relying on foreign aid, many now shuttered and leaving millions of people without access to life-saving care.

USAID: The Human Cost of Trump's...

In a historic move, imprisoned Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan urged members of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on Thursday to lay down their weapons in order to end a decades-long conflict with the Turkish government. While Turkey, the United States, and other countries classify Mr. Ocalan as a terrorist and the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization, many Kurds view Mr. Ocalan as a powerful symbol of the struggle for Kurdish rights.

If the PKK acts on Ocalan's call for disarmament, it could have far-reaching implications for the entire Middle East, particularly for the millions of ethnic Kurds living in Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Magnum Photographers have been documenting the Kurdish community, their fight for autonomy, independence, statehood, and resistance against state violence across the region for decades.

Kurdistan from the Archives

Singer and songwriter David Johansen has died at the age of 75. Best known as the front-man of the glam band New York Dolls, which had a major influence on the beginning of punk rock, Johansen would go on to have a long solo career. During the 1980s, he achieved general notoriety as his swing/pop alter ego, Buster Poindexter, and began acting in films and in TV programs. Later in his career he focused on the blues with his band, The Harry Smiths.

David Johansen: 1950 - 2025

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.

Russo-Ukrainian War

‘In the morning, we dash along the sidewalks – you on your side, me on mine, watching as people cross the busy street.’ 

In I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours, photographers and longtime partners Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez embark on a collaborative journey along the US–Mexico border, creating an imaginative portrait of life in these borderlands. Traversing towns and waterways together they photographed the same subjects from different perspectives, capturing everyday scenes that appear both staged and ad hoc. The resulting series of uncanny image pairings illuminates the serendipity of human connection while confronting the challenges of relating to one another, finding balance, and defying conventional identities. 

Through this striking sequence, Drake and Gonzalez reflect on their different family histories of migration and identity and the ways their backgrounds both intersect and diverge. Deliberately eschewing the temptation to follow a singular narrative or freeze a fleeting moment in time, their images instead suggest the multifarious nature of existence along the border.

MACK Books, 2024
Paperback with embossed jacket
23 x 29 cm
144 pages
ISBN 978-1-915743-51-0

I’ll let you be in my dreams if...

American singer and songwriter Roberta Flack, best known for her hits "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Killing Me Softly With His Song", has died at the age of 88.

Roberta Flack: 1937 - 2025

On assignment for the New Yorker, Moises Saman documented the search for relatives by Syrian families in the Sednaya prison in December 2024, two days after the fall of the Assad regime.

Over the past twenty years, New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson and Moises Saman have covered a range of conflicts together. After the fall of the dictatorships in Iraq and Libya, they uncovered significant evidence of their brutality. However, Assad's actions appear to have been particularly brutal. In 2012, as Syria descended into violence, Moises and Jon traveled to Aleppo with a group of insurgent rebels and witnessed an early glimpse of the war’s horrors. Twelve years later, the death toll is estimated to be as high as six hundred and twenty thousand, while another fourteen million people—more than half the country’s population—have been forced to flee their homes.

During the decades of Assad rule, any form of resistance was ruthlessly suppressed, with those involved being arrested and tortured in a network of facilities scattered across the country. Sednaya became the most notorious of these. Established in the late 1980s on a desolate limestone hilltop just forty minutes from downtown Damascus, it earned a terrifying reputation of torture and atrocity.

Sednaya Prison

On assignment for the New Yorker, Paolo Pellegrin covered President Trump's inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2025. Pellegrin captured the faces of the American people attending the event, as well as some of the key moments of the ceremony, with President Trump surrounded by members of his team, including vice-president JD Vance and Elon Musk.

Trump's Inauguration Day

In 2024, Larry Towell travelled to Guererro, one of the poorest and most violent provinces in Mexico where villages are under the control of organized crime. Of the estimated 200 cartels and sub-groups now operating in Mexico, sixteen are in Guererro, including Los Ardillos (The Squirrels), which controls the region around Ayahualtempa where local poppy production for opium has been replaced by fentanyl.

“In 2015, the cartels started coming,” said Luis Morales Rojas, a local town leader. “In 2016, they became more visible. In 2017, they visited and offered me a bag of money. I told them we will give them nothing. They said they would kill me and my whole family…. We either had to join them, or resist them.”

Villages that organize self-defense units (auto defensas) and fight organized crime live under constant intimidation. This small Nahua community of 686 persons, where 70% of the population speaks an indigenous language, has no hotels, restaurants, grocery stores nor gas stations. Since there is no high school, children cannot attend beyond primary education. Leaving town would endanger their lives, including entering Hueicantenango, which physically touches Ayalhualtempa’s perimeter. In May 2024, 60-year-old Rayes Bolando Domingo was shot dead near his cattle at the town’s edge.

Local residents have been be kidnapped, tortured and mutilated. On January 2, three local members, plus one civilian woman, disappeared. All four were found decapitated. A year ago, Pablo Morales, brother on one auto defensa member was taken and later found mutilated. Thirty-five villagers from Ayahualtempa have been murdered since 2015.

All men must serve in the auto defense units for a year, rotating on 12 hour shifts with .22 caliber rifles and 16, 20 and .410 gauge single shot shotguns. When asked how they were able to resist cartel machine guns with such small firearms, Luis said “We’re good shots. The cartels with their machine guns make a lot of noise, shoot wildly, and miss their targets….”

Auto Defensas: Fending Off Mexican...

On assignment for Harper's Magazine in July 2024, Rafal Milach documented several Holocaust memorials in Poland, such as the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewry in Warsaw and the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, with a special emphasis on Oświęcim (Auschwitz in Polish). At the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, tourists with headset guides flock to the infamous site every day. The site includes the main concentration camp at Auschwitz I and the remains of the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

From following the tour to visiting Jewish neighbourhoods and specific places such as the remains of the set design for the 1993 film Schindler's List, produced by Steven Spielberg, next to Krakow-Płaszów - a Nazi concentration camp operated by the SS in Płaszów, a southern suburb of Krakow, in the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland - Milach and Harper's contributing editor Tanya Gold paint a complex picture of the Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

Holocaust Memorials

Groundbreaking American filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. Best known for his blend of surreal movies, "Eraserhead" (1977), "The Elephant Man" (1980), "Dune" (1984), "Blue Velvet" (1986), "Lost Highway" (1997), and "Mulholland Drive" (1999), Lynch also changed the face of television with the broadcast of "Twin Peaks" (1989-1991). He was nominated for four Oscars and received an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2020.
In addition to his film work, Lynch explored a variety of other creative outlets: writing, acting, music, painting and other visual arts.

David Lynch: 1946 - 2025

At the start of 2025, Emin Özmen documented the living conditions of children in Damascus for the Washington Post during a period of change following the fall of the Assad regime. Many children are traumatized by the long-lasting war they endured.

The photographer traveled to Damascus' southern suburbs of Douma and Daraya, areas of Goutha where a chemical massacre took place in 2013, destroying many schools and causing overcrowding in those that remained viable. Children play on soccer fields as barrel bombs from the Assad regime's chemical attacks on the Syrian people are still visible, while NGOs are helping them cope with trauma and physical injuries caused by the war.

Ozmen also documented the struggling health care system, reliant on outdated equipment due to international sanctions imposed as a result of Assad's rule. "Before the start of the conflict, the local pharmaceutical industry covered up to 90 percent of the needs of the local market. Since 2011, the various sanctions packages have made it very difficult for those who produce or import medicines," Samir Kattan, a 65 year-old Damascus-based pharmaceutical worker, told the photographer.

Children in Damascus

The war in Gaza is a conflict with little chance of escape — even for the thousands of Palestinians who have been grievously wounded in Israel’s attacks. But a small number of the sick and injured make it onto a list of critical cases to be treated by doctors abroad. The price to leave can be high: a missing leg, a lost arm. But for these few, there is a way out. More than 8,000 Gazans have been brought to a floating hospital off the coast of Egypt run by the United Arab Emirates for treatment since the start of the war in October 2023.
In May, Israel entered Rafah, and the border was closed, blocking access to the hospital there. By the end of the summer, the U.A.E. had found a new way out for the wounded -- a humanitarian flight aboard a converted passenger jet to a housing complex in Abu Dhabi.
Every few weeks now, desperate families depart Gaza in the early morning hours, making their way on buses to an airport just across the border in Israel. Their destination was the Emirates Humanitarian City, a custom-built housing complex. If there is a place to return to a normal life after Gaza, it is here.

Escape from Gaza: UAE Evacuations...

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.

Israel and Palestine from the Archives...

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