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The Russo-Ukrainian War is an ongoing conflict between Russia and pro-Russia forces on one side and Ukraine on the other.

Ukrainian President Vicktor Yanukovych’s cabinet abandoned an agreement on closer trade ties in the EU, favoring closer cooperation with Russia. What began as small protests escalated to the Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Maidan Revolution, a violent protest with at least 88 deaths. Following the Euromaidan protests and removal of Yanukovych, partnered with pro-Russia unrest in Ukraine, Russian annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.

Demonstrations in the Donbas area of Ukraine escalated into a war between the Ukrainian Government and Russian-backed separatist forces. Russian military vehicles crossed the border in several locations of Donetsk Oblast, which is believed to be responsible for the defeat of Ukrainian forces in early September of 2014. In November, Ukrainian military reported intensive movement of Russian combat troops into separatist-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is ongoing. Irregular episodes of fighting continue to occur. In October 2021, Russia reignited concerns of a potential invasian after moving troops and military equipment to the shared border with Ukraine.

Russo-Ukrainian Conflict

A Pound of Pictures is a stream-of-consciousness celebration of the photographic medium, bringing together an entirely new collection of work by Alec Soth made between 2018 and 2021. Depicting a sprawling array of subjects — from Buddhist statues and birdwatchers to sun-seekers and busts of Abe Lincoln — this book reflects on the photographic desire to pin down and crystallise experience, especially as it is represented and recollected by printed images. Throughout this eclectic sequence are the recurring presences of iconography, of souvenirs and mementos, and of the image-makers that surround us day to day. Forming a winding, ruminative road trip, Soth’s photographs are followed by his own notes and reflections in an extended afterword. ‘If the pictures in this book are about anything other than their shimmering surfaces,’ he writes, ‘they are about the process of their own making. They are about going into the ecstatically specific world and creating a connection between the ephemeral (light, time) and the physical (eyeballs, film).’

Each book contains five randomised replica vernacular photographs loosely inserted within the pages.

Coincides with solo exhibitions at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York (opening 13 January), Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis (28 January), and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (3 February).

Mack Publishing, 2022.

Embossed linen hardcover with front and back tip-in
Three different papers, including a marbled Japanese stock and five randomised replica vernacular photographs.
25.3 x 31 cm, 156 pages.
ISBN 978-1-913620-11-0.

A Pound of Pictures

Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee marks 70 years since she first took the throne, making her the longest serving British monarch and longest-serving female head of state in history. Queen Elizabeth II succeeded the throne on February 6th, 1952, and was coronated on June 2nd, 1953.

February 6 2022, Queen Elizabeth...

Patrick Zachmann

In August 2021, more than 50,000 hectares of the Greek island of Evia were wiped out by wildfires. On the North of the island, more than 300 houses, 300 animals and a thousand beehives burned. The 2000-inhabitants island was mostly dependent on tourism, breeding and the culture of pine and olive trees. Saddened but far from being resigned, if some had to change career paths, most have no doubt that their land will become green again. However, for now, most of the aid promised by the Greek government is still pending, weakening hopes for reconstruction.
Enri Canaj revisited the residents months after he met them during the fires.

Evia Island: After the Fires

American actor and director Sidney Poitier died at age 94 on January 6, 2022. Poitier was the first black actor to be awarded a Best Actor Academy Award in 1964, for his role in "Lillies of the Field". Son of a farmer, the Bahamian-American made his way up through the Hollywood of the 50s and 60s where people of colour were mostly invisible. Sidney Poitier was a fervent civil rights activist involved in many humanitarian activities and considered one of the greatest and most iconic actors of the American movie industry.

Sidney Poitier: 1927-2022

Since 2014, Martin Parr, one of Britain's best-loved photographers, has been granted exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the most prestigious Grand Slam tennis tournaments - followed by over 3 million fans each year - from the Australian and French Opens to Wimbledon and the US Open.

Parr's vivid shots, sometimes poignant, often hilarious, provide a unique overview of life on and off the court, from players to picnickers, sun-hats, and visors to rain-stopped-play.

Publisher: Phaidon
Format: Hardback
Size: 290 x 250 mm (11 3/8 x 9 7/8 in)
Pages: 144 pp
Illustrations: 85 illustrations
ISBN: 9781838663162

Match Point: Tennis by Martin Parr...

A new-born baby is carefully checked over at a hospital in Jaipur, a small girl grins from a bench on Rome’s Piazza Navona and young boys jostle in front of the camera in Havana – over his long career and on his many travels Steve McCurry has taken an incredible selection of photographs of children, each one managing to hint at an epic story. Stories and Dreams brings a unique selection of these images together for the first time. With an introduction from Ziauddin Yousufzai, father of Malala, this is a colourful portrayal of the challenges, hopes and adventures of children from across the world.

Laurence King Publisher, 2021.

Hardback
208 Pages
283 x 293mm
ISBN: 9781399600217

Stories & Dreams: Portraits of...

On January 6th, 2021 a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building in an attempt to disrupt a joint session of Congress which had met to formalize Joe Biden's election as President.

As part of his continuing attempt to discredit the 2020 election with false claims that it had been "stolen" from him, Trump organized a "Save America" rally on the National Mall scheduled to coincide with Congressional proceedings to formally count electoral votes. During this rally, Trump and other speakers riled up the crowd of thousands by criticizing the election, the media and members of Congress, and urged his supporters to march down to the Capitol to demonstrate their disapproval of the election.

By 12:30PM a crowd of Trump supporters, including had began to assemble in front of the Capitol and at 1:00, the mob, which included members of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers - who were prepared and equipped for violent confrontation - attacked thinly-manned police barricades. Shortly after, the Capitol Police requested the support of the DC Metro Police and law enforcement on the ground asked for permission to declare an emergency and call in National Guard troops. At 2:00, rioters broke into the Capitol and began roaming and vandalizing its halls and offices as Vice President Pence was rushed away and members of Congress barricaded themselves in the House and Senate Chambers and nearby offices. It would take three hours for the police to retake the Capitol and five more to completely clear the building and its immediate grounds of rioters. At 8:00 Congress reassembled to complete the electoral college count.

Intensive investigations into the inability for law enforcement to properly defend Capitol grounds, and the identification and prosecution of rioters began immediately. On January 11th, US Representatives introduced an article of impeachment against Trump who they accused of inciting insurrection, but the trial resulted in his acquittal on February 13th.

With an enormous security presence in place on January 21st, Joe Biden was inaugurated the 46th President of the United States on the steps of the Capitol. Rejecting tradition, the outgoing President refused to attend and the former administration was instead represented by Vice President Pence.

One police officer and four rioters died from injuries received on January 6th. The incident was the first time that the Capitol had been so brazenly attacked since the British Army seized Washington, DC during the War of 1812.

Storming of the US Capitol

2021 has proven to be another busy year for Magnum Photographers, with dozens covering stories in all corners of the globe.
As the year comes to an end, we present this series of albums highlighting some of the images and feature stories produced during the past 12 months.

End of Year 2021

South African religious leader and activist Desmond Tutu has died at the age of 90.
An Anglican minister, Tutu was the first black African to become Bishop of Johannesburg and Archbishop of Cape Town, and dedicated himself to confronting apartheid and white minority rule in South Africa. Following the fall of apartheid and the formation of a new government, Tutu went on to support gay rights, anti-war movements, and human rights efforts around the world.

Desmond Tutu: 1931 - 2021

On November 24th 2021, a small boat attempting to cross the English Channel to the UK sank off the coast of Calais, resulting in the death of 27 migrants, including a little girl. This is one of the worst migrant-related disasters which has occurred in the region during the ongoing crisis. Following the event, President Macron, who declared he wouldn’t "let the Channel become a cemetery", announced a reinforcement of the European border and coast guard agency, Frontex.
On November 19th, Philippe Dutrieux, Maritime Prefect for the Channel and the North Sea, stated that attempts to cross the Channel in small boats have doubled in the previous three months. As of November 20, 31,500 migrants had left the coast since the beginning of the year. 6 died during attempts in 2020, and 4 in 2019. Activists have warned that the threat of death is not limited to sea crossings since migrants live in difficult contidions within their camps.
Following the French government "zero point of fixation" policy, the police have been regularly dismantling vast migrant camps. In November 2021, 400 people were evacuated from Grande-Synthe and transported to different reception centers in the region, sometimes with their possessions bring destroyed or seized.
Photographer William Keo was in Grande-Synthe and Calais the night after the tragedy at sea. He met and photographed migrants and asylum seekers in the forest and in the city.

Continuing Migrant Crisis in Calais...

Thirty years ago, on the evening of December 25th 1991 after Gorbachev's departure from the Kremlin, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, marking the end of the Soviet Union, and the Russian tricolour flag raised in its place marking the rebirth of the Russian nation.

A few months earlier in August, conservative leaders attempted a coup in Moscow while the President of the USSR Mikhaïl Gorbachev was away in his Crimean dacha of Foros. Gorbachev was held there while Boris Yeltsin defied the coup and famously gave a speech atop a tank. After three days, the rebels were finally arrested but the episode exposed the fragility of the soviet government and in the following months more socialist states claimed their independence.The Soviet Union lasted 69 years and its collapse gave birth to fifteen Republics. Through features and in depth across book projects, Magnum Photographers explore the former « satellites » and the last months of the USSR.

30 Years Since the Collapse of...

November 2021, heavy rains descended on British Columbia, Canada, flooding vast areas in the southern part of the province and forcing 17,000 people to flee their homes. Every year during this same period, storms hit the North Pacific Coast but this time the "atmospheric river" went deeper inland. Rainfalls reached all time records in several B.C. areas, including in Abbotsford, an agricultural community on the US border. The storms brought floods that destroyed roads, bridges and houses, hindering access to Canada’s biggest port, in Vancouver, and leaving thousands of people in emergency shelters. The declaration of a state of emergency prompted military units to evacuate residents while hundreds of people had to cross the US border to get essential supplies.
A few months earlier, the region was ravaged by dramatic wildfires that altered the soil's ability to absorb water, therefore contributing to a higher risk of floods. Several environmental experts are seeing this as a clear sign of the impact of climate change.

Floods in British Columbia

Since the spring of 2021, when blockades began, the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) have arrested more than 1,100 persons in the largest nonviolent, direct-action protest in Canadian history. The dissent is directed against old growth logging in the Fairy Creek water basin of southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Campaigners use their bodies with arms locked inside of “sleeping dragons” encased in cement and often buried, to close roads to logging trucks before police “extract” them, which can often take four hours or more. The blockaders include environmental activists and some First Nation members against logging company Teal-Jones. They also see current logging practises, including clear cutting, as non-sustainable and a contributing factor to global warming, landslides, and the flooding of the region.
 When the logging company asked a judge to extend an injunction against the blockaders, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge refused the request citing the reason as extreme RCMP enforcement practices in handling protesters. A short time later, a second judge re-installed the injunction.  In October-November, their number had decreased from a summer high of 1,000 to approximately 100. They are joined by local elder Bill Jones of the Pacheedaht First Nation whose tribal members have largely not joined the protests, as the 280-member Pacheedaht community has a revenue agreement with Teal Jones. Other Canadian First nations elders and traditional chiefs have however, shown support by attendance and my holding sacred ceremonies.

Tensions have also increasingly risen between loggers and conservationists who want further commitment from the province to protect biodiversity endangered by clear cutting. They want the province to change its forestry management policies to better protect ancient ecosystems which in the long term, they believe, will support sustainable forestry.

The Sierra Club B.C. estimates that more than 140,000 hectares of old-growth forests are logged each year along the B.C. coast in the interior. The forestry sector accounts for more than a quarter of the provinces total exports employing more than 50,000 British Columbians. (1)

(1) Report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 19, 2019

The Last Stand: Fairy Creek Old-growth...

During the transition of power between President Trump and President elect Biden, from November 2020 to January 2021, I decided to take my first road trip through the United States.
In an extremely polarized and divided country, I documented some of the main events that defined the history of the United States and looked for points of conjunction with those that marked the Trump presidency, thus creating a narrative that intertwines the present and the past.

The difficulty of saying goodbye...

In 1983, Patrick Zachmann, as part of an introspective project, photographed a community of Ashkenazi people at the Buttes-Chaumont, a park in the North-East neighborhood of Paris which hosts a large population of Jews.

Now, more than 30 years later, on the occasion of his retrospective at the Museum of Jewish Art and History, Patrick Zachmann is trying to find out what happened to the walkers of the Buttes-Chaumont.

Suspicious at the beginning towards this photographer who was coming almost every day, little by little he won their confidence and took their portraits as they interacted in Yiddish with each other like old friends. At the time, he had not asked many questions about their stories or even their names but now the search has begun and he hopes the public exhibition at the MAHJ (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme) will help locate them.

Zachmann's father, an Ashkenhazy with Polish origins, didn't or couldn't tell his painful family story to his son. This put the photographer in such a position that he was not able to answer precise questions of these people about his Polish grand-parents. He knew only that they came from Warsaw to France and had been deported back to Auschwitz where they were assassinated.

In April 2021, the MAHJ issued an open call for testimonies in order to find them, and 19 names and their descendants out of the 35 have so far been identified. These relatives are still an opportunity to complete the puzzle, and to hear the moving stories of these people belonging to a vanished Yiddish world.

In Search of an Identity

Bruce Gilden first set foot in Japan in 1995. On this trip, the first of several, he explored a hidden side of a country that had long fascinated him; from Tokyo to Osaka, he uncovered a Japan that is little-known to Westerners and captured it in his own inimitable photographic style.

In Bruce Gilden: Cherry Blossom, Gilden tells the story of these travels and the ties he maintains with Japan in a rare introductory text. Every photograph portrays a close and powerful encounter. There are no cherry blossom trees or geishas on these pages; Gilden’s camera points toward the darker sides of Japanese life—the gangsters, the dispossessed, and people experiencing homelessness. As ever, the Magnum photographer’s work is tough and unflinching, his portrait of Japanese society unconventional and compelling.

The stories told alongside these photographs—thirty-four of which are published here for the first time—create a book that’s hard to forget.

-Thames & Hudson, 2021

Cherry Blossom

February 19, 2014, Kiev, the demonstrations on Maidan Square (Independence Square) have taken a new turn. It appears like the relative peaceful period have ended to give way to what looks like a war. On site by the time, Jerome Sessini witnessed the first confrontations between the government forces and the pro-European protesters, better known now as the Euromaidans. Over the next few days dozens of people were killed or injured and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to step down and flee to his allies in Moscow.

Inner Disorder is a the result of a three-years work made in Ukraine, which traces the uprising from the violent protests in early 2014, to growing Russian nationalistic sentiment in unexpected areas of the country, like the west, known to be European-friendly. As two republics emerged in the Donbas region, Sessini was back in Ukraine and he portrayed the fighting that broke out between separatists and militias supporting Ukraine. Eager to understand what lies between what he calls “instinctive perception and rational understanding” his journey led him to the industrial cities of the east. On his way he took the time to document empty landscapes, and the everyday life of civilians amid war.

Inner Disorder gathers photographs and text of both harshest moments and low times of a war paced by life, death boredom and silence. Part of Sessini’s work was to question the definition of the “enemy”, which often leads to a breakdown within society. As so, the photographer manages to share his reflection of this perpetual question; how do people manage to hate each other to the point of killing one another?

The book, available now from Editorial RM, combines Sessini’s photographs, video stills — including from an original film made at Maidan Square, and his diary notes from 2014 to 2017. The result is a decidedly non-partisan portrait of a country devastatingly divided.

May 2021
Published by RM
244 pages/135 images
16 x 21 cm

Inner Disorder

When Magnum photographer Matt Black began exploring his hometown in California’s rural Central Valley—dubbed “the other California,” where one-third of the population lives in poverty—he knew what his next project had to be. Black was inspired to create a vivid portrait of an unknown America, to photograph some of the poorest communities across the US. Traveling across forty-six states and Puerto Rico, Black visited designated “poverty areas,” places with a poverty rate above 20 percent, and found that poverty areas are so numerous that they’re never more than a two-hour’s drive apart, woven through the fabric of the country but cut off from “the land of opportunity.” American Geography is a visual record of this five-year, 100,000-mile road trip, which chronicles the vulnerable conditions faced by America’s poor.

This compelling compilation of black-and-white photographs is accompanied by Black’s own travelogue—a collection of observations, overheard conversations in cafe´s and public transportation, diner menus, bus timetables, historical facts, and snippets from daily news reports. A future classic of photography, this monograph is supported by an international touring exhibition and is a must-have for anyone with an interest in witnessing the reality of an America that’s been excluded from the American Dream.

-Thames & Hudson, 2021

American Geography

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